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Scaramouche wakes up to an incessant ringing in his ears.
Ring! Ring!
Ring! Ring!
He frowns, rubbing his eyelids as he picks up his phone. The screen illuminates the dark room, fluorescent light indicating the name “Ajax”.
“Fucking hell,” Scaramouche mumbles under his breath. I swear if he drunk-dialed me, I’m going to mute his contact for the next week.
Groggily, he presses the green “Accept Call” button and puts the phone to his ear.
He groans, “What do you wa-“
“S-scaramouche.”
Immediately, a piercing jolt runs down Scaramouche's spine and he sits up, the sleep coating his thoughts evaporating.
“Ajax?” he whispers. He hasn’t drank water in the past couple of hours. His voice is far too hoarse and rough to properly cup Ajax’s fragile, glass-like voice in his hands.
“Scara, I-” Ajax’s breath hitches. “There was a knife- There’s blood- I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-“
“Ajax,” Scaramouche says as evenly as he can make his voice out to be, swallowing every panicked scream building up in his throat. “Ajax, listen to me.”
A quiet sniffle and Scaramouche feels his heart spill all over the floor. “Y-yeah?”
“Where did- Where is it?”
“Forearm. Near the elbow. Not the wrist. It wasn’t supposed to- I didn’t mean for-“
He can’t hear Ajax say what he thinks he’s going to say, so he cuts him off. “I’m coming over right now, okay? Right now.”
“Mhm.”
“Don’t hang up. Keep the line open, okay? I’m here.”
“Mhm.”
His fingers fly across the screen as he frantically scrolls through his contacts on his phone to find who lives close to Ajax while he grabs his wallet and dashes out the door as fast as he can, pajamas be damned.
“Okay, okay,” Scaramouche’s head is spinning with a million thoughts, but his tongue falls limp when trying to form them into words. He does his best to conjure up what helped him in his own panicked episodes of hyperventilation and endless tears, but his mind draws a blank, “is it, uh, the wound-”
Ajax’s erratic breaths stop momentarily.
“It’s bleeding- I can’t-”
“Does it hurt?” Scaramouche asks while running. He doesn’t bother waiting for the elevator, and instead chooses to dash down the stairs two at a time.
“Yes, but...I- is it bad that- that I sort of…like it?”
Scaramouche trips over his own foot, nearly losing his balance.
“Fuck,” he reflexively hisses under his breath, wincing at the pain, but he immediately regrets it when he hears Ajax’s breath catch.
“...Scara? Is everything okay?”
“No, I just, uh- Fuck, don’t ask me. Worry about yourself right now, okay?” Scaramouche tries, “Shit, is there anything nearby to stop it?”
He’s at the bottom of the stairwell, right outside of his apartment complex. His head darts back and forth, looking for any sign of a vehicle that will let him get in. He knows it’s deep into the night and he looks like a lunatic in his sleepwear, trying to haul a cab. He’s never been a religious man, but he prays to whatever god is up there for any sort of vehicular transportation to appear in front of him right then and there.
“Scaramouche,” Ajax breathes, cutting through the whirring gears of his mind and it bleeds.
Scaramouche nearly drops his phone. The voice is so visceral, so raw in its vulnerability, as if it was completely stripped bare to its purest form like a human without skin.
Ajax had cut into skin.
Scaramouche nearly pukes right then and there.
“Is there anything to stop the bleeding?” Scaramouche repeats, swallowing the bile rising in his throat. He doesn’t have a right to care about his own feelings right now, not when Ajax is-
Ajax is-
“Uh, I covered it with a towel from the bathroom. The wound, uh, it isn’t deep.”
“Good, good,” Scaramouche drums his fingers against his thigh impatiently, bouncing on his toes.
Stupid fucking taxi drivers, he yells internally, the frustration bubbling up in him like a pot of water boiled under gulping flames from below.
“Do you have bandages at home?” He asks Ajax.
“...Yeah, I- found the remaining ones I still had ‘cause of my last-” Ajax exhales and Scaramouche can almost hear him sink to the floor in shame, shame Scaramouche despises. “Fuck, I’m so lame.”
“This doesn’t make you lame, Ajax.” But his words feel all too small to reach Ajax right now.
“No, it’s just-” Ajax lets out a dry laugh that rattles Scaramouche to the core, as if someone had grabbed inside of him and shook his ribcage. “God, what’s Lumine going to say? It’s not like I can cancel on Monday either, since I already pre-paid-”
“You are not canceling therapy, Ajax,” Scaramouche growls, the sentence coming a bit too harsh for his own liking, bit too much like a demand—and that’s certainly not what Ajax needs right now.
“I’d be canceling therapy if I-” the line goes silent. “No, fuck, sorry, I should stop.”
Scaramouche knows what he would’ve said if he finished that sentence. He wants to cry.
At that moment, he catches a glimpse of a taxi speeding towards him, snapping him out of his daze and reminding him of what’s really at stake right now. He beckons aggressively at the taxi, phone pressed to his ear.
“Ajax...I-”
“It’s fine, Scara. I’m fine. I won’t try anything drastic, you know? I won’t.”
The taxi halts in front of Scaramouche, beeping as the driver leans out of the window to bark. “Kid, are you getting on or not?”
Scaramouche’s expression morphs to his default murderous glare, and he quickly covers the bottom of his phone before snarking back. “Can’t you wait for a second, you impatient fuckwad?”
The driver narrows his eyes, but Scaramouche slips into the taxi before he can drive away, and gives him Ajax’s address.
He removes his hand from his phone. “Sorry, Ajax. I’m just coming over right now.”
“Oh, Scara, don’t,” Ajax chokes, “Don’t come over. I don’t want you to-”
“I’m coming over,” Scaramouche says with a tone of finality that leaves no room for argument. “Where’s your roommate?”
“Kaeya’s probably out at some party, or at Albedo’s. He’s not here half the time anyway.”
Scaramouche knows that in no way is this Kaeya’s fault, but he, pettily, feels the urge to strangle that man until he turns as blue as his hair. If he were here, maybe Ajax wouldn’t have reached this point, maybe Ajax wouldn’t have done this to himself, maybe he wouldn’t have c-
“Fuck, okay, okay,” Scaramouche runs a hand through his hair. “I’m coming over, Ajax. I’m coming. Do you need anything, food or water or-”
“I told you not to come, Scara. Just...turn back. Please, don’t come over. I’m such a fucking mess right now and-”
Scaramouche shakes his head adamantly, despite Ajax not being there to see it. “I'm in a taxi already and I’m coming over. Nothing you say can stop me.”
In truth, Ajax could say a lot to stop Scaramouche, words Scaramouche doesn’t even want to think about, but he crosses his fingers and prays Ajax knows what he means anyway.
After a few seconds, Ajax speaks up again. “...Could you, uh, stay on call though? I’m- I wanna hear your voice.”
Scaramouche’s shoulders relax into the car seat ever-so-slightly. “Of course, of course. Do you, uh, wanna talk about anything? Or talk about…why?”
“I don’t know,” Ajax hums, “Maybe. It just hurts a lot.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to treat me like glass or something, you know. I’m still the same ol’ Tartaglia.”
“You’re…” Hurting? Sad? Depressed? “vulnerable right now.”
Ajax snorts, “‘Vulnerable.’ You never use that word.”
“I’m...You…I’m vulnerable with you,” Scaramouche admits, meek and tentative.
Ajax goes silent.
“I’m vulnerable with you too,” he responds, his voice cracking on the last word.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
They both stay silent for another few seconds, Scaramouche trying to adjust his own breathing down to follow along with Ajax’s breathing pattern.
“...Could you try and wrap...them up for me, Ajax? Stop the bleeding?”
Scaramouche never knew breath could take weight before, but Ajax’s breath feels near-equivalent to the weight of the world. “Okay. Okay, I’ll try.”
Scaramouche hears Ajax inhaling and exhaling steadily, softly, slowly; and he closes his mouth. One breath after another, and another, and another. Eventually, Scaramouche’s speeding heart rate slows back down as well and soon enough, the taxi pulls up in front of Ajax’s apartment.
With a muttered “thanks” and leaving behind a few dollar bills, Scaramouche steps out of the taxi, gets on the elevator. Soon enough, he arrives in front of his apartment and since he doesn’t have a key, he raps on the door and hangs up the phone, talking to Ajax directly through the door.
“Hey, I’m here now, Ajax. Can you open up right now?”
Scaramouche hears shuffling from the other side of the door and after a few agonizing seconds, he sees Ajax.
He sees Ajax and he wants to break.
Ajax is wearing a midnight blue hoodie, one of the only long-sleeved items he really has that isn’t some form of fur coat, and his hands are fully shoved into his pocket. Along with his hunched posture, it makes it look like he’s drowning in fabric. His eyes are empty, like an abyssal sea that only the corpses of fish inhabit, and his lips are pressed into a smile so thin, it could snap with a gust of wind.
Despite it all, Scaramouche forces himself to look straight at Ajax and his empty eyes, because no matter how hollow they are, he doesn’t want to look down at the drops of blood that he knows are staining Ajax's sweatpants.
“Ajax,” Scaramouche starts. He takes a step closer. Ajax doesn’t shrink away. That’s not bad, Scaramouche tells himself. Not the best, but not bad.
“Scaramouche,” Ajax says, his voice barely audible.
“Hi, baby,” Scaramouche takes another step forward and closes the door behind him. He doesn’t usually use any pet names, much less a word like “baby”, but Ajax loves it for him so it feels apt to use it now.
Nevertheless, Ajax doesn’t move and gives him an attempt at a coy smile. “Sorry.”
Scaramouche takes Ajax’s left hand in his own cautiously, like he’s caring for the bleeding paw from a frightened lion. Ajax doesn’t brush him off, but the invisible pressure looming over him seems to increase in weight, as his shoulders tense up at the touch.
“Is this okay?” Scaramouche asks, rubbing his thumb over Ajax’s and ignoring how much the other man’s flinch stings.
Ajax shrugs, looking away to the side. “I guess.”
“...I love you so much, you know that?” Scaramouche tries to soothe. Ajax’s hands are so much bigger than his so Scaramouche’s right one joins the left, rubbing both thumbs over Ajax’s palm in a motion he hopes is calming. “You’re the love of my life.“ Under normal circumstances, those words would’ve been dragged kicking and screaming out of him, but now, they flow out like second nature.
Ajax tenses up even more, but all the weight on his shoulders is released the very next second. His gaze is still focused on the walls to his right instead of Scaramouche’s face. “Yeah.”
“Do you believe me when I say it?”
Ajax looks back to Scaramouche, his gaze shifting into something much more artificial. “Yeah.”
Scaramouche keeps his gaze firm and insistent. “I can tell when you’re lying to me, Ajax.”
“Do you know why I cut myself?” Ajax asks abruptly.
Scaramouche bites his lip, the bile from before churning in his gut. “...No.”
“It wasn’t supposed to…cut into skin. It was supposed to stay there, just pressing down forever, but never bleeding, so I could, you know,” Ajax gives a shrug, too nonchalant to be natural, “feel something.”
It sends chills down Scaramouche’s spine: how easily a confession like that rolls off Ajax’s tongue, as if he was simply talking about the weather.
“Feel something,” Scaramouche can only repeat, too stunned to conjure anything up back.
“Yeah, I-” Ajax looks straight at Scaramouche. “I don’t feel like you love me. It’s weird. I don’t feel like anyone does.”
He shrugs again, the movement coming off even more forced the second time around. “I cut and I felt something, so even if it wasn’t supposed to happen, it still worked.” His brow furrows, but his smile is still perfectly in place and he looks as if he’s trying to make himself cry. “I’ve been clean for so long I was scared to relapse, Scara, but now, I kinda…want to do it again.”
“Oh.” Scaramouche’s voice shakes. Scaramouche knows of Ajax’s history with self-harm, but not intimately. He’s never seen him during an episode, never witnessed the birth of the scars that litter his arms and torso, never been close enough for Ajax to crack open his chest and lay out his insides for Scaramouche to see firsthand.
Scaramouche is…glad, to a certain extent, that Ajax now trusts and loves him enough to contact him, but he squashes that feeling as soon as it rears its ugly head. He can’t twist this into some sort of sick pleasure for himself, especially when the man he loves more than anything is ripped into tatters before him and Scaramouche's hands are frantic in trying to sew him back together.
“I- I won’t, I promise-” Ajax attempts, as if Scaramouche is the one in need of reassurance instead of him. “Tonight was just a fluke.”
“You need to talk about this to Lumine." Scaramouche tries, "I can’t help you like this, but Lumine can.”
“She’s already seconds away from wanting to admit me to a psych ward, because apparently,” he chuckles, “I not only sort of pose a risk to others, I really pose a risk to myself.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Scaramouche asks, trying to phrase it as softly as he can. “Getting help, I mean?”
Ajax’s mouth parts into an “O” shape for a second, but it’s gone a split second later, the wry smile coming back in full force.
“Yeah, you’re right.”
Scaramouche’s eyebrows almost raise in shock. “Am I?”
“I mean, you won’t have to deal with running around to see if I’m going to do something stupid, you know?”
Ajax must’ve seen the way Scaramouche’s heart falls apart into a million pieces, like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle aggressively chucked at the floor from the top of a skyscraper, because he panics as soon as those words leave his mouth.
“Oh, fuck, I realized that- God, I sounded like an asshole, I’m so sorry-”
“No,” Scaramouche shakes his head, hating how delicate his own voice sounds when Ajax is the one hurting, when he’s not the one who should be in pain, when he’s the one who should be shoving his problems aside to help. “No, it’s fine. I know what you mean.”
It’s not fine. Scaramouche is brought back to when he tried to internally justify why his mother could possibly decide that he wasn’t worth her time - because she couldn’t be bothered to deal with his ever-fluctuating emotions, because she agreed with Scaramouche that he was the scum of the earth and didn’t find a reason to correct his self-hatred, because he was always just nothing more than a responsibility forced onto her.
But he shakes it all off. He is not in pain right now. Ajax is. He can’t make this about him.
“Ajax…I love you,” he tries again, for the lack of something better to say. “I do and I’ll say it until somehow, you believe it.”
“I still…I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”
Scaramouche bites his tongue. He hates this so much.
“Okay…I’ll be sleeping here tonight, if that's fine with you.”
“Go back home, Scaramouche. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’ll always worry. There won’t be a time where I can’t fucking worry, so I am staying here with you. I…locked myself out of my own house anyway. I’ll get Signora to use her spare key to go back tomorrow.”
Ajax looks at Scaramouche, hesitant, but starts trudging back to his room and Scaramouche accepts that as good of a sign as he can get.
As Scaramouche follows him in, Ajax abruptly stops in front of the doorway.
“...On second thought, you should go. Sleep somewhere, bother Signora if you have to. Just go.”
Scaramouche frowns and attempts to stand on his tip-toes to peek past Ajax, but Ajax moves accordingly and blocks his view.
“Please…just go.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“...”
“Ajax.”
“There’s blood. Everywhere. I don’t want you to see it.”
Scaramouche stiffens. He’s never been the best with blood. He isn’t squeamish, really. He just has more of a general distaste for its copper-like taste and smell, the knowledge of it being Ajax’s making it so much worse.
But he grits his teeth and pushes past Ajax, because when your boyfriend cuts himself and proceeds to tell you to leave, you do not take that shit lying down and you stay.
He squeezes past the taller man and into the bedroom, and he…sees scarlet droplets staining the white sheets, like splatters of paints scattered across the sheet.
After that, Scaramouches moves on auto-pilot. He grabs the corners of the bed and yanks the sheet off of the mattress, then crumples it up and hangs it over his arm.
He turns to Ajax, barely processing what he's doing when he asks the question. “Where’s your laundry basket and where are your spare sheets?”
Ajax stands there, mouth agape for a second. Blinking quickly, he recovers, “The basket’s in the bathroom, the sheets are in the closet.”
Scaramouche nods and walks to the bathroom briskly, throwing the dirty sheets into the laundry basket, and walks back out right after.
Ajax is right where Scaramouche left him last, still frozen at the doorway but Scaramouche carefully walks past him and rummages through Ajax’s closet. When his hands find the smooth fabric of the sheets, Scaramouche gets to work, pulling it out and onto the bed.
“What are you-”
“What does it look like?” Scaramouche responds, tucking the sheets into the corners of the mattress.
“You’re not…” Ajax’s voice cracks, an egg struck against the side of a bowl, “leaving me?”
Scaramouche opens his mouth to answer but he pauses, feeling the sob at the edge of his throat just waiting to spring up. He closes his eyes and swallows, then turns around to stare Ajax dead-on. “I am not leaving you and I won’t ever be leaving you.”
Ajax chuckles, but his eyes have lost their focus. “Scara…we both know that’s not-”
“Shut up,” Scaramouche’s grip on the sheets tightens and he stops, trying to compose himself before he opens his mouth. “I don’t- I don’t want to ever leave you. I don’t care whatever the fuck happens down the line, but I don’t ever want to to fucking leave you, so I won’t, okay? I’m not just saying some dumb bullshit to make you feel better, and you of all people, should know that.”
“Scara-”
“I am not going to leave you.” He lets go of the sheets and takes a step towards Ajax.
“C’mon, Scaramouche, don’t lie to me-”
Scaramouche isn’t a man of affectionate words, actions, or physical touch, but he throws his arms around Ajax and buries his head into his hoodie.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” he whispers the words he had so desperately craved for his mother, for anyone, to give him when he was younger. He can only hope it helps Ajax the same way.
Ajax goes stiff in his arms, indistinguishable from a statue, if not for his rapidly beating heart indicating otherwise.
It takes him, them, a bit to wind down from that. Ajax’s breathing slowly steadies and his heartbeat follows suit. Scaramouche stays in position best he can, trying not to shift, even when he feels uncomfortable. It’s important that Ajax feels comfortable right now; his needs play second fiddle.
Then, Ajax’s mouth lets out an audible breath. It takes Scaramouche far too long to realize Ajax is sobbing into his shoulder.
The sounds, as muffled and buried as they are, trickle in and fill up the room. Scaramouche stays, stoic and unmoving, because what else can he really do?
“I’m not going to leave you,” he tries again, in the most hushed voice he can. He doesn’t know if Ajax is susceptible to comfort like this. Hell, he doesn’t know if he has it in him to comfort anybody at all, but he tries, for Ajax.
He tells himself it’s repayment for the many times Ajax has picked up his calls in the middle of the night, talking him down from yet another ill-timed anxiety attack. It’s repayment for Ajax taking care of him during the worst of Scaramouche’s depressive episodes, making sure he eats and bathes and isn’t left alone to sink deeper and deeper into dark thoughts. It’s repayment for the little things he does, like buying him jewelry and getting him tickets to concerts he couldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Scaramouche tells himself that, of course, but as desperate as he is to be apathetic, Scaramouche fails every time. And Ajax is his biggest failure yet.
So he’ll stay, even if words of languages he can’t even begin to learn are what Ajax needs right now.
“I’m sorry, love,” He murmurs, grasping onto Ajax tightly. “It’s alright, I’ll be here.”
It’s the least he can give, especially when Ajax has been so good to him, so he can only hope that it’s enough. He hopes all that he can say is enough for now.