“She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green grass
only when it grew in patches among ruins.” – Flaubert, Madame Bovary
His body was the prison of his dark soul. His skin and blood, the cold steel bars of his confinement. He lived – if one could even call it living – rather bleakly at his home for a few weeks in complete seclusion, away from the sound and the fury of it all. He thought that was what he needed: time to be away, time to think, time to be alone.
He was wrong.
Spike had done a multitude of sordid things in those weeks he was alone. He had done bad things, vicious things, torturous things, to himself. The misery was hollow and the suffering was sad, but Spike would never take pity on himself, he would never show himself mercy. After all, he was the bad guy, he was the thing: there was nothing good or clean in him. He was completely dead inside and he couldn’t feel anything real.
He couldn’t even feel the catastrophic pain that he caused her. He had trouble even forming her name in his mind.
And so he went insane. In this cold, dark, black house, he went insane. He did things to himself that, if he were in his right mind, he would scoff at as “emo” or “nancy boy” or just plain lunatic.
He cut himself repeatedly, his physical pain for her emotional pain, he would rationalize. He yelled at himself in the mirror after talking to his reflection. He didn’t eat and he didn’t work out his body at all. He must have looked horrible: completely scrawny, face hollow and lacking emotion, hair a combination of curly browns and blondes, just completely gone and dead and six feet under.
It was deprivation that he supposedly loved, it was vengeance on himself, he was sieging his own castle. He was the sadistic bastard in this little play, wasn’t he?
So why didn’t his own suffering make him happy? Why didn’t he feel anything?
Spike only felt one thing and it couldn’t even really be described. He felt numb, lifeless, lost, like he just entered some far off place that he didn’t know and couldn’t described. He should be in complete disarray, in complete dismay for himself, in rightful response to the horrendous disaster that he disseminated.
He needed help. If there was one thing Spike knew, it was that he needed help.
Spike called the psychiatrist and set an appointment.
A doorbell ring. A knock. A car honk. It was all the same thing to Spike.
He opened the door for Doctor Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, one of his father’s bought doctors.
“Hello, Spike,” the doctor said, shuffling his briefcase to his left hand so he could shake with his right.
Spike wearily shook the man’s hand; he was afraid his own grip might be too weak and too telling. “Hello, Doc. Come in.”
Spike gestured to the living room. He sat on the couch while Wesley sat on the chair directly across from Spike, a low, overpriced cherry wood coffee table between them.
Wesley struggled to read some papers he got out. “Could you turn on some lights?” he asked. “It’s very dark in here.”
Spike put on some lights. He would have commented that the darkness was the way he liked it, but he didn’t bother.
“Normally I don’t make house visits, but I can make an exception with you,” Wesley said as Spike sat back down.
“Yeah, pop’s has got the whole soddin’ town bought out, including you.”
Wesley stared at Spike, taking in the blonde man’s bluntness. “So what’s the problem?”
“Problem?” Spike feigned innocence. “There is no problem. It’s not that simple.”
Wesley readjusted his seating in the chair. “There has to be a problem of some sort or else you wouldn’t have contacted me and set this appointment.”
Spike looked down, sad eyes overwhelming his face.
“What is it?” Wesley inquired, etching forward in his chair. “Is it about a girl?”
That got some fire back into Spike. He shot up his head and commented, viciousness in his voice, “Yeah, it’s about a girl.” He was trying to mock the naivety of the injection, even though it was in all probability the truth.
Wesley jumped back a little at Spike’s anger. “What happened?”
Spike looked sharply to his left, pain in the wrinkles of his forehead, pain in his frown and pain in his posture. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“But you have to talk about it. That’s the only way we solve our problems.” There was a sincerity, a truthfulness in Wesley’s face and voice that immediately made Spike think of him as not a phony like other people, but even worse than that: innocent and inept.
Spike sighed. He didn’t know why he set this damn appointment. Shrinks were a waste of time to him, all they ever wanted to do was talk about feelings, emotions, all that stupid crap.
Couldn’t the doctor figure out by now that he was more far gone than that? That Spike had no emotions to share and pawn?
Emotion was life, and Spike lacked it. Therefore, Spike lacked life.
He had to get Wesley’s attention, had to make him understand. He had to show him the worst.
“This is why I called you over.” Spike rigidly pulled up the sleeve of his black shirt, showing Wesley the absolute worst.
There were showers of scars on his forearm. Cuts everywhere, some jagged, some sewn up, all tattered about his arm. A few were bleeding, but they weren’t profuse enough to warrant worry.
At least not immediate worry.
Wesley tried to look unafraid and steadfast. “What happened?”
“What’s it look like, doc?” Rage was brimming in his voice, but quickly dissipated as he said what he had done to his own body. “Self-mutilation... I cut myself.”
He looked like he was about to cry as he echoed the words again, very softly this time. “I cut myself.”
Wesley took off his glasses and started polishing them. He was certainly not prepared for derangement of this degree. “When?” was all he could say.
“I don’t know. A little while ago. With broken glass.”
He rolled his sleeve back down and stared at the doctor, who looked beyond perplexed by the last declaration.
“I would have liked it if I was my normal self, you know,” Spike said flippantly. “It was all very Spike Lee.”
Spike looked to the side again, focusing on the color of the couch, pained by his words. “I talked to myself in the mirror that day.”
“That might be considered norm—”
“I told everyone to fuck themselves,” he eviscerated any fake solace Wesley might have given him with the interruption. “All the cliques, the preps, the jocks, the cheerleaders, the greasers. I told authority to fuck themselves too. The teachers, the principles, the police, even the fucking government.”
“It is quite normal for a teenager to be rebellious,” Wesley said blankly.
“This isn’t Rebel Without A Cause, doc,” Spike bit back. “After I was done with that... I told... I told myself to fuck myself. Isn’t that the most fucking stupid you’ve ever heard? I told myself I was a dumb fuck and that I had it all and I threw it all away...”
He stared back at the doctor. Spike’s eyes were ablaze.
“I realized that it was the reflection in the mirror talking, not me. Maybe it was Spike and I was William then, I don’t know. All I knew was that I didn’t like what it was saying, so I punched the mirror. The glass shattered into pieces and there were shards of glass on the ground. They looked alive to me so I took one of the shards and cut myself with it.”
He slowly made the motion, his fingers faux-slicing his right forearm. It was just the way he did it, he didn’t look out of it at all, he looked sane, steadfast, conscious, like he shouldn’t have looked. The whole scene was positively eerie.
“But I made the cuts horizontal, not vertical,” Spike said matter-of-factly.
“You didn’t want to—”
“I didn’t wanna kill myself,” Spike interrupted Wesley’s observation again.
“Then why?” he asked, his voice intense.
Spike looked down again. “I just wanted to feel pain, to feel something... only I didn’t. I sat on the floor in the bathroom for the entire day, staring at my arm bleeding profusely, trying to focus on the pain, to harness the point of feeling, trying to see if I even felt it... I didn’t...”
Wesley let out a much needed breath. “What else have you done these past few weeks?”
Spike shot a look at the bookcases around the room. “I’ve been reading a lot.”
“What have you been reading?” Wesley asked dumbly, more of a primer question than anything.
“Really morbid stuff, like Sylvia Plath morbid.” Spike’s category of morbid was interesting to say the least. “I had to read 1984 for school, bloody heartbreaking book. I also wrote some poetry for class.”
“What else?” Wesley asked, sitting back in his chair and trying his damnest to relax.
“I’ve been watching gritty movies, like Taxi Driver or Deer Hunter or some other Scorsese knockoff... I’ve been listening to music... depressing crap like Alice in Chains or Nirvana or some other shit.”
Spike’s eyes were impenetrable. “Trying to be... to just be. But I don’t wanna anymore. To try to be, anyway. I’m alive but I’m not here.”
They sat in silence for what like a lifetime before Spike spoke again.
“So what’s up, Doc?” His words were cartoon, but his voice was deep and gruff. “You gonna prescribe me some medicine?”
Wesley looked hard at him. “No... you’ve probably... self-medicated yourself already anyway.”
Spike nodded slowly. “Yeah, I have.”
“What have you taken?” he asked, seriousness in his voice.
“Dirt,” Spike responded after a while. “It was very fitting, considering dirt was what I made her feel like.”
Wesley was at a loss. “What’s dirt?”
“Heroin.” Spike’s response was quick this time.
“Did it work?” Wesley asked, some desperation in his voice.
“Not really... the first time was almost good... after that it didn't work at all.”
“Where did you get it?”
All these questions were starting to annoy Spike, but he answered them diligently anyway. “My mum Jenny was a junkie so I know where to get it and how to inject it and all that crap so you don’t have to worry, doc, ‘cause only idiots get infected.”
Wesley looked relieved that Spike seemed to know, at least partially, how to properly administer the drug so it didn’t kill him. Still, he was taking heroin, and that was one of the worst things someone could do to themselves, besides maybe self-mutilation. “You should stop taking it. It’s no good for you.”
“I did.” Spike’s words seemed truthful and free of deceit. “First I tried to take it off and on, to experience the withdrawal symptoms, but nothing happened, no rage, no craving, nothing at all...” He sounded like he wanted the addiction to have an affect on him, so he could feel. “And so I stopped completely a week ago. I’ll never resort to drugs again.”
Spike had taken the most addicting, dangerous narcotic of them all and it hadn’t fazed him one bit. He didn’t acquire the feeling of being pulled down into the ground, to become like the drug’s namesake, because he was already there. His dirt, his addiction, his hell, was a neverending constant, like the need for air or love. Even the infamous withdrawal symptoms of heroin hadn’t given him any emotion whatsoever.
He was completely lost and dead. They might as well have planned the funeral while he was still breathing.
“What brought on...” The doctor was at a loss of words. “...all of this?”
Spike shot him a glare. “Like you said... a girl.”
A pause. “Is there any chance you can reconcile with—”
“No,” Spike said firmly.
Now it was Wesley’s turn to give him a glare. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss the key to your recovery, Spike.”
Spike shook his head. “No. I ruined her life. It would never happen.”
“Then at least...” Wesley’s voice went from high tone to calm, passive tone. “At least go back to what you were before whatever happened happened. Go back to school. See your friends. Look at potential colleges. Enjoy the new superhero movie out in theaters. Try to live again.”
Spike stared incredulously at Wesley. “That’s my big cure? Try to be normal again?”
Wesley nodded. “Yes.”
Spike scoffed. “If it was that simple, I’d of done it myself...”
Did Spike not approve of the doctor’s remedy? Wesley probably had enough certifications and degrees to make wallpaper for a mansion...
“To live is to die... but I’ll try,” Spike said finally.
And with those words, he escorted Wesley to the door and got ready for school the next day. Spike, being dead inside, knew only one thing: that it was better to be alive.
A lot of stuff to comment on in this chapter, like the self-mutilation, the drugs, the talking to self. Spike will get better, though, trust me, and Spuffy will prevail, which you’ll probably have to put even more faith into me to believe. The story was always written to be this way, I just didn’t think I’d sulk on the bad for so long.
Reviews are greatly appreciated. I’m not trying to be a review whore or anything, but every syllable of feedback goes a long way; I seriously need to know if anyone is still reading, it’s imperative for me to get back on track and update this story frequently again.
And lastly, more and more I feel I need a beta, or at least someone to read over my chapters of this story before I post them. I’m not talking about checking for grammar or anything, I just need someone to read and OK it. If you would like to be one of those people, please tell me in the review box.