"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 63

Taking a quick detour once he hit the top landing, Josh closed himself in the bathroom, locking the door behind him before cautiously stepping up to the sink. He turned on the water as cold as he could get it and leaned down, cupping it in his hands and splashing it across his face several times. He needed the coolness to help to settle him again. It worked well enough after three or four minutes, but he still couldn't get the phone call out of his head. With water still dripping from his lashes, the blond turned off the spigot and pulled himself upright, staring into the mirror.  

"The cops couldn't find him," the blond mumbled. "He could still fucking kill me. I really could be dead. They couldn't find him and he's still out there." Each time he spoke, the syllables sharpened, slipping between his ribs with very little resistance and piercing their way into his heart. Each time he opened his mouth, the words hurt a bit more until he was gripping the edge of the sink for all he was worth. "He wasn't found, but I'm okay. I'm okay." Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

Josh inhaled roughly and bent over the sink once more when the pain in his chest got a bit too unbearable. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," he continued to chant until the words lost all meaning. They didn't make sense anymore. 'I'm okay'...what did that mean? Matt was right. He needed help. Josh needed him. 

Taking another deep breath and righting himself again, Josh forced his gaze back to his mirror image. The bruises he'd been inspecting daily for weeks had finally completely faded, no longer staining his skin with darker hues. The only colours left across his face were a slight natural blush to his cheeks and nose, the pinkness of his lips and the smudged purple streaks below his eyes that always seemed to be there. He was outwardly physically back to himself again, for whatever that was worth. But in his mind's eye, he could still see the discolouration, could still feel the tightness in his muscles that came from fighting for his life, could still feel his ribs shifting beneath his skin each time he twisted ever-so-slightly, could still feel the blood as it dripped down his upper lip and smeared across his cheeks. He would never be free from all of that, but he could learn to live with it and move past it. He didn't have a choice. 

The blond slowly let go of the sink and took a step back, lifting the hem of his shirt up to his throat. He peeked down over it, running his hand over smooth skin that held no remnants of ever being injured. His ribs still ached a bit if he did too much, but even that original constant minute-to-minute caveat he'd come away with was gone, replaced by only an occasional reminder that would soon be gone as well, leaving him with just a series of mental images to be played out like some silent movie in his head. Josh pressed a hand lightly to the center of his chest, fingers spanning the area where the darkest bruise had once been.  

Shaking his head, he let go of his shirt, smoothing it down as he stepped back up to the mirror over the counter. "You're okay. You're okay, you're okay, you're fucking okay," Josh said, hoping that the slight change in phrasing would make a bit of a difference as he stared directly into the reflection of his eyes. "Gotta move on." He swallowed hard, dried his face on the towel beside the door and left the bathroom behind in an effort to do exactly what he was demanding of himself. 

Back in his bedroom, Josh quietly closed the door behind him, stepped up to the foot of the bed and sat, feeling a little winded by the conversation he'd just had with himself. It was only mid-afternoon and it already felt like it had been an incredibly long day. In retrospect, that may have been because it had been going on since the afternoon before. Twenty-four hours. That's how long he'd been a prisoner of those voices and their words. Though he'd long since stopped hearing them, they were still ever-present because he couldn't stop thinking about them. Twenty-four hours was all it had been since he'd turned into a raving lunatic and had been pulled back to normalcy, yet it felt like much longer. The singer still didn't feel like he was a hundred percent after all of that, but his head was clear enough to feel the impact of the phone call from the cop and the fact that Matt had been right about so much through all of this. Josh had spent so long trying to deal with it all in his head that the aural conversations, the admittance of everything, the call from the police, the bad news he'd received, and the fact that he was quite literally cleaning up pieces of his life made the ceiling feel like it was caving in right over his head.