1After the first time, no one comes to visit Wesley in his hospital room.
Instead he lays in silence, trapped inside himself and wrapped in grief while nurses plug tubes into him and remind him not to speak, the ceiling white overhead and unyielding.
They don't know.
They don't know.
They don't know what he's done.
How wrong he was.
They don't know anything and they shuffle 'round like white ghosts, doing their jobs and knowing nothing.
Eventually they let him go and send him home with medicine and prescriptions and not a fucking clue more.
They don't know and no one is there to pick him up.
If his parents know they haven't been in contact.
If they know he doesn't want them to contact him.
He takes a cab home.
Wesley reaches his own door and stops, door unchanged and horribly, horribly ordinary.
He stands outside it until he can't any more and turns the key.
It's dark inside. Everything the same, nothing the same. . . Things laying where he'd left them. Where he'd left them before. Back when he'd had friends. Back when everything had made sense and there might have been flowers and cards.
Now there's just silence and grief and darkness anf things laying where another man had left them.
He sets his bags down by the door and goes to his bedroom.
He's spent the last few weeks on his back, staring up at the horrible, white, unyielding ceiling and it's cruel flourecent lights. . . feeling the nurses plugging tubes into him and hearing their little reminders not to speak. People coming and going, never faces he recognizes and all of it under that horrible, white, unyielding ceiling.
He toes his shoes off and climbs onto the bed, laying down and trying not to feel anything.
He's feeling too much, he has been this whole time.
Every failure in his life is screaming, echoing between his ears and up his nose, in his eyes. . . every mistake he's ever made and there are so many. . .
He's made so many mistakes and when he opens his eyes and dares to look up he sees white, unyielding ceiling.
But it's his ceiling.
In his home.
In his bedroom.
In his hell.
His own private hell.
Except that's selfish, isn't it? There's a real kid, a baby in a real hell and he's just sweating under a white ceiling, laying in silence, trapped inside himself and wrapped in grief.
Everyone hates him.
Everyone hates him.
Everyone hates him and there's a real baby in a real hell and everyone hates him and it's all his fault.
He wants to punish himself, he think's some kind of pain would be good. He's so familiar with pain now. Everyone is but everyone isn't here. It's just him in his room, with his white ceiling and the lights off.
Shoes off.
The world wrong.
Everything upside down.
He imagines screaming but he can't. Not yet.
He imagines shutting himself in his closet, something like what his father had done to him as a child only he isn't a child anymore. It's okay to do those things to him now, to hurt him because now he deserves it. Now he's fucked up and he can't take it back. He doesn't know where to go from here.
He curles up and doesn't go to the closet, another act of selfishness.
Angel should have finished the job.
He's supposed to be a dead man.
You're a dead man, Pryce!
Dead!
He weeps then, if he can't scream or speak or do anything else he can still do that and the reality of it all crushes him in his hot, dark, little room, killing him under his white, unyielding ceiling.
In his hell.
HIs private hell.
Only Connor is in real hell.
He's topside and walking around.
This isn't how it's supposed to be. Everything had seemed so certain but he's had time in the hospital bed to think these things over, again and again. Weeks to come to terms with what happened only he can't. He just can't yet.
Everything is wrong.
He'd doubled checked everything only it hadn't mattered.
It had all been wrong from the start.
He lays and can't get up, can't move, can't turn on a light.
He lays in silence, trapped inside himself and wrapped in grief while the room grows hotter and the lights stay off.
Everything is wrong.
Everything is so wrong.
Honestly, I learned something horrible about the man I almost loved and wrote this while I was hurting. I needed to share my pain somehow, to suffer with someone and this is about really just a second of pain but I guess it was a form of catharsis. Maybe that's why there isn't much of it. Anyway, thanks for reading.