Warm hoodies on cold nights (and all the stars in your eyes)

Chapter 8

When he gets home, he messages Schlatt quickly.

Good luck tomorrow!

Schlatt doesn't respond, which is fine. Wilbur lies on his bed and looks at the ceiling, staring at it until his vision is clouded with green-black pinpricks.

He feels... Detached. He feels like whatever he does won't make any scrap of a difference to the unstoppable force of life and time moving around him, as if he's existing slightly to the left of everyone else.

Nothing feels real. The sun rising and falling in endless cycles, waking and sleeping and eating, everything in some parody of order for a world that's created out of nothing at all and is the victim of random chance and chaos.

The only times he feels real anymore is when he's with Schlatt (and even then, there's blips of what-is-he-doing-there), and when he can feel something external. Sometimes it's an iron tight grip on his blanket, sometimes it's putting his hand on the freezer or wrapping it around a freshly made cup of coffee, and more often nowadays it's a knife bringing a sharpness to his thoughts as fresh cuts gently bubble with bright blood.

"Sorry," he mutters, to no one in particular – or maybe to Schlatt's doll, forlorn on his desk – as he drags the knife again and again over his arms, willing it to really hurt, to ooze blood until the slow droplets trickle down to slide over his wrists and drop to the floor.

"I want to do it right," he huffs slowly, quietly, into the silence of his room. "I want to do everything right but it's always the wrong fucking thing."

His breathing is shaky, and he stands up on wobbling legs to wash his hand, abandoning the knife in his drawer. He shouldn't do that, he thinks. But he's told himself that a lot of times already and if he hasn't stopped by now... It's probably fine to just carry on. It isn't like it matters, anyway. He thinks about it, and decides that since his reasons for cutting himself probably aren't that great (he's not even fucking depressed, he's just a pessimist sometimes, right?) – it's probably just a stupid cry for attention. He can't tell anyone, he resolves. Then it would definitely feel like he was just looking for attention. Just a confirmation of how fucking stupid he was. He can't. And he hates - he hates that he wants to, that he craves someone to hold him and tell him, hey, it's alright, just like Phil did when he was a tiny kid with nightmares and monsters from the past.

The cuts are pretty deep today, and they sting as water washes over them. He's going to have to dip into his stash of bandaids if he doesn't want them to bleed through his sleeves. Carefully, he pats dry his arms with his carefully chosen red towel, and applies the bandaids over the worst of the cuts.

There, done. He feels just as empty as before. Maybe more so.

Is Schlatt avoiding him? Probably. They used to walk to school together, but he hasn't seen Schlatt at the usual time and place. Their classes are different, and he's seen glimpses of Schlatt in the halls, but Schlatt's never noticed him.

The last message he sent Schlatt was a how did the interview go? And it hasn't received a response for a few days now.

He half wants to go to Schlatt's house, but if Schlatt's parents are home, he'd rather not. Wasn't like they could hang out when they were there, anyway. So Wilbur just sits at home and does pretty much nothing.

He's going to book a trip, he decides suddenly, opening his laptop. A few google searches leads him to a shady looking forum section in the depths of the portal website where someone is offering cheap server IP codes for visiting. He books two tickets, getting both him and Schlatt whitelisted, though he doubts Schlatt would turn up.

Hey, Schlatt, he messages him. I'm going on a server visit from tonight til tomorrow, if you wanna join, here's the code, he says, sending him the server codes.