TW: description of self harm. please do not read this chapter if you are disturbed or triggered by this content - i will have another chapter out this Tuesday that is better for everyone to read.
disclaimer: I dislike this chapter, I had it written at the end of January and I just couldn't make it work and it's so hard to get this right so that's why we're here in March and I still feel bleh as all hell about it. Please forgive me for offensive/insensitive characterization and also please give me constructive criticism as I'm inexperienced but that is not an excuse to be writing insensitive things. If you don't want to publicly comment you can also message me. I will do my best to edit accordingly.
OLIVIA
Olivia always had nightmares. After Logan told her he was counting the number of times she woke him up at night because of a nightmare, she told herself she wasn't going to go to his room again so she wouldn't stress him out more than he already was.
But then she had another horrible dream that someone made her watch while they hurt Logan badly, and she woke up breathless and disoriented.
She knew that rationally, nothing could have happened while she was sleeping, but she got out of bed and walked down the hall to his door, just in case.
But on her way there, she stopped at the bathroom door, where the light was on inside, glowing under the crack at the bottom of the door.
Olivia leaned against the wall opposite the door. The last time she had found Logan in the bathroom at this time of night, he'd been in a horrible state.
What was he doing in there?
She sat silently for a few minutes, chewing on her fingernails, counting the scratch marks in the bathroom door. It was silent behind the door.
Finally, she couldn't take it anymore in that creepy dark hallway by herself imagining and reimagining her nightmare coming true just inches away from her behind the closed door.
"Logan?" she said, her voice loud and scratchy in the silence.
She heard a low fuck, and a clatter of something in the sink, and another muttered fuck.
"Logan?"
She got down on her hands and knees and put her cheek against the floor to look through the crack under the door so she could maybe see what on earth was making him swear like that.
She couldn't see much but what she did see was that there was something red on the white bathroom tiles.
Panic squeezed her chest.
"Logan? Are you okay? Is that blood?"
There was still no response.
Was he passed out? Is that why he wasn't answering? But hadn't he just murmured something? Couldn't people pass out from blood loss? What if, while she stood there frozen, he was on the other side, passed out, the life seeping out of him onto the floor?
Her thoughts got worse and worse. Her mind began to conjure ghastly images. Goosebumps crept into her skin. Her nightmare was going to come true, three inches away from her, and she wasn't doing one. Single. Thing.
Olivia ran down the hall into the kitchen, took out two toothpicks from the cabinet, and went back to the bathroom.
The bathroom lock was a basic, everyday push lock and when she pushed both toothpicks into the small hole, the lock clicked open.
She shoved the door.
"What the fuck - get out of the fucking bathroom!"
Olivia's mouth went numb.
In a slow horror, she saw that his shirt was off, and there were three bloody cuts on the left side of Logan's stomach, blood in the sink, blood on the tiles, blood dripping from the razor blade onto the counter, dark red splotches coagulating in the bathroom rug.
Logan was white, his face twisted into a furious but desperate scowl. He tried to push the door close but Olivia stuck her foot out in between the door and the frame.
Logan was so mad his lips were trembling. "Get the fuck out right now!"
Olivia was scared. She was more scared than she'd ever been in her life, except the time when she found out her mom had been murdered and the time she came home last year and thought every single one of her brothers was dead.
She stared at the blood running down Logan's abdomen and into the waistband of his pajamas and plop, plop, plop down onto the floor and felt a huge ball of tears engulf her throat and her eyes.
She wanted Elijah. She wanted Blake. She wanted anyone so badly because she wanted someone to come and help Logan and tell him it would be okay and be there for him.
But it was just her.
And she didn't know what to do.
"Um, wait," she rasped, heart pounding with Logan's angry voice and his cussing.
"We're not waiting. I said to get the fuck out of here."
Logan tried to push her out but she slid underneath his arms and to the wall, farther away from the door now.
"No," she said breathlessly, her heartbeat pulsing furiously in her neck. "No, you're bleeding."
"Olivia, you have three seconds to get out of this fucking bathroom or I swear to god it's not going to be pretty. One."
"Logan, wait-"
Her heartbeat rose so fast in her chest her ribs ached.
"Two."
She didn't know what to do. She didn't know what would happen if she made him mad. What did Elijah even tell her to do?
"Stop it, I'm not going to leave-"
"Three."
Terror blinded her. She wasn't going to let him go-
"Logan-"
In one swift move, he put his hands on her waist, hauled her up off the tiled floor, and swung her over the doorway and out onto the wood outside. Blood beaded up against his skin and streamed faster as his arms strained underneath her weight.
Olivia teetered as he pushed her away from the door and before she could regain her balance to shove her hand against the door to keep it open, Logan was faster than her.
He slammed the door shut so hard that dust fell from the frame and the wall shook, but not before Olivia caught the haunted, hollow look on his face.
And even though the shower water began to come down full blast from the faucet, it could only muffle Logan's sobs.
And Olivia was so afraid of everything in that moment and so unsure of what in the hell she was supposed to do that she stood exactly where she was, unable to move, tears coming hotly down her face.
In the silence, she could hear him crying too, ugly gasping noises like he couldn't breathe.
It was like someone had poured whole gallons of poison into her veins, hot and cold all at the same time, preventing her from moving a single inch, from saying a single word, from thinking of a single thing to do.
Her chest burned. Maybe she was still dreaming. Maybe this was another nightmare. Maybe she would wake up and she would go to Logan's room and she would see him sleeping, unbloodied and unbothered, or sleepily studying for another exam and he would grumble at her to go to sleep.
Please wake up please wake up this isn't real I want to wake up right now
She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath, but the nightmare that was reality didn't fade.
She leaned her forehead against the door.
"Logan," she whispered, the sound no louder than a breath, not even loud enough to pass through the door, where on the other side, the roar of the shower drowned out her voice.
What was going on? Logan had been wearing short sleeves even yesterday. The scars on his arms had remained old scars. He'd been grumpy, but it was his usual devil-may-care mask, not-
Blood dripping from his stomach onto the tiles, grotesque splotches spreading towards his feet-
Not this.
Olivia was so scared she felt nauseous but she raised her voice to a squeak and managed, "If you can't talk then at least come out of the bathroom so I know-"
The end of her sentence, so I know you're okay, died in her throat. Logan was not okay. He had not been okay and he was not going to be okay just by coming out of the bathroom.
Maybe she should call Blake. Andy, even. Or Elijah. No, the prison couldn't take calls this late at night, she couldn't tell him. She couldn't tell anybody. What was she going to say? How was she even going to tell someone?
Her hands hurt. She felt like her lungs were on fire, with the steady fire of love for her brother and the destructive one of rage that he would do this to himself and that tiny almost ember of hope that he would come out of the bathroom. All of it set to work searing her body from the inside, making it hard to breathe.
It hurt.
Love hurt.
Rage hurt.
Hope hurt.
"Please," she rasped.
For the longest while, nothing happened. Five minutes went by in excruciating silence. Ten minutes passed. Olivia chewed her fingernails down to the quick. Fifteen minutes, then twenty. She felt like the world's biggest coward, unable to say anything to her brother. She didn't know what on earth to say and it made her face burn with shame. Weren't they siblings? She should know him enough to know what to tell him at a time like this. She felt worse with every second that passed.
After half an hour, Logan's harsh sobs quieted, as did her own tears.
When the shower finally shut off, she was sitting cross legged on the floor in front of the door, her head in her hands. She jerked to her feet when she heard the bathroom light click off.
The door slowly creaked open, but as soon as she caught sight of Logan's eyes, he slammed the door shut again.
"Go to bed, Olivia," he said through the door.
Logan's voice was thick and raspy. His sobs had ruined his throat. He clearly didn't want to face her but Olivia was also horribly nervous about facing him after being able to do nothing the past half hour. Elijah would be ashamed of her too.
She swallowed. Her throat was dry. Her mouth was dry. When she spoke, it felt like her teeth were coated in sand. "I won't," she said weakly.
What she was trying to accomplish, she had no idea. Logan was trying to come out of the bathroom and she was relieved for that, but she had no idea what on earth she was going to say to him. What could she say to him?
She wished Elijah was here.
"Go to bed so I can get out of the bathroom and go to bed too."
Olivia was tired and her muscles ached from holding in her panic so tight. She wished she could go back one hour and make sure she was sitting in Logan's room at that exact time because now, nothing would make it better. She didn't want to go to bed and she didn't want to leave Logan but she didn't even know what the hell she was supposed to do to stop him.
"Okay," she said, hating herself for it.
She slowly made her way back to her room. When she heard the floor creak outside in the hallway as Logan went back to bed, she did nothing. But when he shut his door, she crept back to the bathroom, dug out every single razor and blade from the cabinet, and took them back to her room to stuff into the bottom of her backpack.
Then she sat in her doorway with the door propped open so she could see Logan's door, and she didn't sleep all night long.
*****
In the morning, the eerie, normal facade between them freaked Olivia out.
Logan made sure she was awake like he always did at 6:30, which she was because she hadn't gone to sleep. He told her he'd make lunch like he always did. Then he left her to get ready like he always did.
And every time she tried to talk to him, about anything at all, he immediately blurted, "Not now, Olivia," and found some other place to be.
All of it made Olivia want to grab him by the shirt and scream a bit. Or cry. Or both. Preferably both.
It was eighty-eight degrees by the time they were leaving the house, so Logan was still wearing his short sleeved shirts, but Olivia knew they still hid everything. And the entire ride to her school, Olivia was terrified that she was going to brush her hand or her arm against his left side and hurt him, make something start bleeding that she couldn't stop. She gingerly held the back of his shirt and in doing so slipped on the seat more than usual, but she resolutely refused to cling tighter.
When they got to her school, she slid off the bike, but she stood next to him, fists clenched by her side. The whole charade was making her so furious and heartbroken she was sure she would die. "Logan-"
"Olivia, I'm going to be late, just text me what it is-"
She put up her hands. "Wait, stop, I need to..."
Her voice dropped off when he actually stopped.
What did she even need? She needed him to stop and talk to her but he couldn't, not now twenty minutes before his classes were supposed to start, in the middle of her school parking lot, less than twelve hours after she'd found him in the bathroom.
The silence went on so long that Logan sighed and took his foot off the ground. "I'll see you after school," he said, then gunned the engine and left.
Olivia stood right where he left her, her backpack hanging off one shoulder, her stomach flipping chaotically inside her. It felt like her toast was about to come up her throat. She sat down on one curve of the bicycle stand near her school, her head spinning.
Was he going to pretend nothing ever happened? Was she going to pretend nothing ever happened? Was she going to confront him? Was he going to confront her about finding him? What if someone found out? What if Logan was furious if she told someone? Were they just going to be awkward like this, dancing carefully around each other for the rest of their entire lives?
She clutched her hair and tried to put her thoughts in some sort of order, but no answers were forthcoming. Obviously.
"Hey, Olivia."
Angel came strolling up to her, his car keys jangling in his hands, completely and utterly oblivious to her terrible night and her panicked state of mind. Olivia nodded at him tiredly. Angel took that as an invitation to sit down on the bike stand next to her, and Olivia tried not to collapse on the grass beneath.
"There's a security guard standing at the front door of the school now," Angel whispered conspiratorially. "I saw a gun in his belt."
Olivia knew. Logan had called witness protection the week before and told them about her run in with the Sons of Solomon at the gas station. There were no security cameras in the gas station and the agency couldn't move them without proof, but they agreed after Logan's heated objections to at least send one of their men to watch the school.
"Yes," Olivia said distractedly, pulling out her phone and typing in an address.
Angel leaned in closer. "Did you have something to do with it?" he asked. "From - you know - last Friday?"
"Um, no."
"Is that a lie?"
Olivia was too tired to throw him off the trail. She pulled up the train schedule on her phone. "It's whatever you want it to be," she said blandly.
Angel was quiet for a beat, then asked, "Is the scar on your stomach from this business?"
Olivia found the right schedule, checked the timings for the next train, and stood up. "Yes," she said fiercely, tired of not knowing what to do, tired of being scared, tired of not being enough. She stared at him. "So if you're screwing with me and you actually know what's going on and you're just out to betray me - I swear, I'll give you a matching one."
Angel's dark eyes went wide. His fingers turned white against the bike stand. "Oh," he said tightly. "I didn't mean - I mean, I did mean to ask, but..." He touched the back of his neck and looked away. "Sorry to bring it up."
Olivia didn't reply. She looked back down at her phone. The train station was a forty five minute walk away, but only ten minutes by car. She glanced at Angel.
"Hey," she said. "Will you drive me somewhere?"
Sorry for taking forever to update and not responding to my messages. I've been watching copious amounts of anime and haven't checked my account in a while.
If you didn't read my note at the beginning - I mentioned that I didn't understand how to write this chapter, I'm sorry for any insensitivity, and please leave me constructive feedback if you wish so I can edit this to be more appropriate.
For next time: Olivia is taking a trip. But where? You'll find out TUESDAY. (It'll be a much lighter chapter)