“Jayden, I can’t, please, I can’t,” Darren repeated, and he knew he was begging, but he didn’t care, clinging as though Jayden could somehow free him. “I’m…Jayden, this is too much, this is taking over, and if I can’t get out I’m going to do something really bad, I’m going to…I’ll hurt myself, Jayden, I’ll kill myself, it’s coming and I can feel it.”
Jayden made a pained sound, deep in his chest, and Darren felt the savage tear of more tears in the back of his throat. He buried his face in Jayden’s shoulder, and cried. Hard.
“Ssh,” Jayden whispered. “I won’t let you, Darren, you know I won’t. We can fix this, we can, and I’m not going let you hurt yourself, I promise, I won’t…”
“Shut up,” Darren whispered and felt Jayden kiss his hair. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want it to fucking stop.”
“Maybe Dr. Zielinski will stop the pills, or cut the dosage, or…”
Most likely, Darren thought bitterly, he’d switch him onto something even worse. A tri-cyclical antidepressant, or something like that. The ones on which people killed themselves left, right and centre. He would be switched on to something worse, and then one day…one day…
Darren didn’t want to die—but he did. In his maddest moments, he did, and that was what he was so horribly afraid of. This was coming. It was coming.
“Come home,” Jayden whispered. “Rachel’s sorted out the kitchen and I’ve spoken to the doctor, so let’s just go home, get some food into you, and go to bed. Just you and me. You’ll feel a bit less wrung-out once you sleep, that’ll have taken it out of you, and I’ll keep watch.”
“I never don’t feel wrung out anymore.”
Jayden murmured soothingly and rubbed smooth fingers through his hair and over his scalp. It should have felt nice. Darren usually liked that treatment, but now he felt nothing but the exhausted pain in his face and throat from the tears. “Come home,” Jayden repeated, and Darren felt suddenly shattered, as though he were so exhausted he could literally, physically die where he stood. And the fact that it wasn’t such a bad thought was…was…
Was nothing. Which was in itself a bad sign.
“I’m sorry about the kitchen,” he said eventually, for a sheer lack of anything else he could say, and Jayden snorted quietly, stepping back and pressing his forehead to Darren’s briefly.
“I love you,” he said firmly, and Darren took a shaky breath, trying to cling to the words. Suddenly, they weren’t just something Jayden said and Darren tolerated, they were something Darren needed. He needed Jayden to love him suddenly, because without it, there was no way…no way of surviving this. No way out of this. “I love you, and I’m trying right here with you, and that’s not changing, okay?”
“…Okay.”
“Rachel’s a bit pissed at you, though,” Jayden added with a small smile, but Darren couldn’t even touch the levity. It was out of reach and out of focus, just like everything else these days.
“I need you,” Darren whispered eventually, his voice sounding raw even to himself—but he didn’t care.
He was approaching a breaking point, and he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to hang on this time.
Chapter 15
Jayden woke suddenly, heart pounding in his chest, and was listening before he was aware of what he was listening for in the first place. Something was wrong. After a moment, his higher mental faculties caught up to him, and he tried to catalogue the sharp start: the house was quiet, there was nothing loud outside, and he didn’t feel as though he’d had a nightmare, or…
Or perhaps he had, because the thumping was still going. Not in his chest, but somewhere in the house. Thud, thud, thud. Very precise and rhythmic, perfectly in time with…with something.
And where was Darren?
His heart picked up again and Jayden swung his legs out of bed, peering almost hopefully around the bedroom as though Darren had fallen out and dozed off on the floor again. But he wasn’t there, and a nauseous feeling began to claw at Jayden’s stomach as he shrugged on his dressing gown and slipped silently down the stairs.
The thumping got louder on the first floor, and louder still as Jayden inched warily down the stairs into the living room. The sick feeling got worse when he saw the open kitchen door and the blazing overhead light.
“Darren?” he whispered, hovering momentarily in the doorway. Then he saw the blood. “Darren!”
Darren was sitting on the kitchen floor in his pyjama bottoms and nothing else, hands buried in his hair and knees pulled to his chest and locked together. He looked alarmingly white in the glare of the bulb, and his breathing was very loud and very harsh, as though he were having an asthma attack, easily audible from the door. The kitchen was a mess—there was a broken glass in the sink, and the locked cupboard was hanging loose in its chain, as though Darren had tried and failed to wrench the door off with his bare hands. There was a fist-sized splintery dent in the wood, and Darren’s knuckles on his right hand were clotted with blood. His left palm was gashed open, likely from the glass, and the floor tiles were wet, the kettle once again on the opposite side of the kitchen.
But the part that really made Jayden’s blood run cold was the source of the noise: Darren was seated against the tins cupboard, and the thumping was the endless, hard slam of his head into the polished finish of the door. The wood was smeared with a thin layer of bright red blood.
“Darren!” Jayden hissed, dropping to his knees and pressing both hands around that damaged scalp, trying to protect it. Darren’s hair was sticky, and Jayden’s knuckles ached as he slammed his head back again. “Darren, stop it, stop it.”
Darren’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking. The gasping was even more alarming at close range, far too fast and far too hard, and Jayden felt a wash of panic flood his veins before he took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. Stay quiet, the voice in his head whispered. You’ll only upset him more if you freak out.
“Darren,” he whispered, trying to force his head to stay still. “Darren, say something. Talk to me, say something, just…stop it, please, just stop, I’m right here, just stop, whatever it is, we can talk about it and fix it, just stop…”
Darren had been crying, and Jayden unglued one hand to rub a thumb at the tears and then try to work one of those large hands out of his sticky hair. That got a spark of a reaction, Darren seamlessly transferring the bone-crushing grip to Jayden’s fingers and taking a shuddering breath, but then he slammed his head back again, harder than ever.
“Talk to me,” Jayden prompted hopefully, squeezing that hand. Darren closed his eyes entirely and hunched further in on himself, stopping the banging for a moment to press his face into his knees and wheeze wordlessly. “Darren? I’m calling the doctor, okay, I’m going to call the doctor…”
In his first year at Bristol, Jayden had taken an extensive first aid course. It had been in the aftermath of Darren’s suicide attempt, and he had been unable to shake the idea of maybe letting himself into the flat one Friday evening after his week at uni and finding Darren…ill, physically ill, and not being able to help him. Of finding him…
Well, like this. Or worse.
And with the way Darren had been the last few days, and the way he had described feeling ever since he started on the pills, and the way he described feeling on a bad day in general, and the tearful begging he had been reduced to in the gym last night…Rachel had been right. Yesterday had been a panic attack—and this was another one. Or the same one extended.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
Jayden called the out-of-hours doctor at the GP surgery. He didn’t want to have to call an ambulance—Darren would only panic more, and he hated hospitals. He’d been even warier of them since Dr. Zielinski had suggested a residential stay, and Jayden desperately didn’t want to have to do that to him. It would break him, Jayden knew it would. It would snap him in half and he’d never come back from it.
Jayden hunkered back down, pushi
ng a hand against the back of Darren’s head again, and wrapping the other arm around his chest to try and anchor him. “I’ve got you,” he said encouragingly when one of Darren’s hands dropped again to squeeze his elbow in a bruising grip. He was reacting, at least, but he didn’t seem better. “You’re all right, I’ve got you.”
A shadow fell in the doorway. “Oh,” Rachel said, and disappeared again, her footsteps padding across the living room almost silently. A moment later, she returned with the throw from the sofa, and when Darren flinched away from her, handed it to Jayden and bit her lip. “Um…is this…you know. Panic attack?”
“I think so,” Jayden murmured, wincing as Darren screwed up his face and smashed his head back into the door. Jayden’s fingers cushioned most of the blow, but it hurt. “I called the doctor.”
“I’ll keep an eye out then,” Rachel said very softly and left them to it. Darren’s breathing was very slowly coming down, but not as fast as Jayden would have liked, and his face was still tight and pinched. He was shaking as though they were knelt in a freezer. Jayden was desperately trying to think if he’d woken up earlier, if he’d noticed Darren leaving the bed, if he knew when he had started this—but nothing came up.
“Darren?” he whispered.
Darren swallowed and licked his lips, but said nothing. His skin was cold and clammy, and Jayden tucked the throw tighter around him, rubbing circles into the fabric.
“It’s all right,” Jayden murmured lowly. “I’ve called the doctor, and you’ll be fine, I promise.” Darren’s fingers tightened in his elbow. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’m staying right here with you until you feel better and I can stuff you back in bed. You and me. Okay?”
He kept talking in a low and steady voice, protecting Darren’s head from the still sporadic fits of…of something, anger or frustration or something, that kept overwhelming him and causing him to smash his head back into the door. He was trembling and wouldn’t speak, but he was at least hearing Jayden now, and by the time Jayden heard a car outside and the click of the front door, Darren’s breathing was still very rapid, but no longer wheezy. Not longer…loud.
“Hello.” A young woman appeared in the doorway, long fair hair framing a round and serene face. She squatted down on the tiles without much of a care, an enormous and heavy bag dropping down beside Jayden’s knee. “I’m Dr. Morris. What’s happened here, then?” she asked softly, slipping on a pair of white latex gloves. She wore a wedding ring and spoke with a heavy Geordie accent.
“Dr. Zielinski put him on antidepressants about six weeks ago,” Jayden said, squeezing Darren’s arm. “He’s been weird the last couple of days, said he felt numb or like he was disappearing. Said he couldn’t feel anything. He destroyed the kitchen yesterday and Rachel said he seemed panicky. He was really detached too, he’s lost interest in everything, and then I woke up tonight and he was down here, I don’t know how long.” It was a rambling explanation, and Jayden paused to inhale deeply and try to get his own panic under control. This was…in a way, this was scarier than the suicide attempt because…
Because Jayden hadn’t seen that, he supposed.
“All right,” Dr. Morris said. “Does he have a history of suicidal behaviour or self-harm?”
“Yes,” Jayden said, his stomach clenching.
“Do you know his reasoning behind self-harm?”
“He…” Jayden’s voice cracked. “He, um. He says that when he’s having a bad day, you know, when he’s really depressed, he can’t feel anything—like, he goes physically numb—and it’s scary, so, you know, it…gets through.”
It clicked, what had triggered the panic attack, and Jayden felt vaguely sick. Darren had wanted to come off the pills, had said they were making him worse, and Jayden had pushed him to stay on them, and…and then Darren had felt so much worse that he’d tried to get into the kitchen cupboard, and had had to hit himself until he bled just to feel…
“Okay,” the doctor said soothingly, touching Jayden’s arm lightly. “Does he have a history of panic attacks?”
“No.”
“All right,” Dr. Morris said and smiled gently. “What’s his name?”
“Darren,” Jayden said, and shifted his arm to wrap over Darren’s chest. Darren pushed into him slightly and tried to return a hand to his hair. “Don’t,” Jayden murmured. “You’ll really hurt yourself.”
“Darren, can you hear me?” Dr. Morris asked loudly.
Darren made a noise that might have been a hum, or might have been a grunt.
“Darren, pet, my name’s Alice Morris, I’m the out-of-hours doctor. I’m concerned about your breathing, pet, it’s a little bit fast.”
Darren gave no response. He was pushing his head back into the cupboard door and Jayden’s hand, neck straining, but no longer trying to hurt himself. He ignored the doctor, and Jayden bit his lip.
“I want you to take a nice deep breath, just the one,” Dr. Morris said, placing her gloved hand firmly on Darren’s bare chest. “Push out against my hand, nice and slow.”
She elongated the last words, and Darren’s chest spasmed under her fingers, inhaling steadily for a couple of seconds before bowing like he’d been punched and reeling in the next too quickly again.
“Nice and slow,” the doctor repeated calmly. “In. And hold it, lovey. All right, that’s fine, now try again. In. Hold it. That’s right. And nice and steady…out. In. Slowly, pet. And out.”
Her soft voice was soothing, and Jayden found his own anxiety coming down as Darren began to breathe slowly and normally again, the twitching and shivering in his limbs beginning to taper off. He was still cold under the throw, still clammy, and still clung tightly to Jayden’s arm, but the terrifying distance was beginning to close.
“All right, pet, can you answer a few questions for me?”
Darren hummed, his voice cracking again, and Jayden rubbed his hand over those finally slowed ribs, murmuring a soft reassurance.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“…Darren Peace.” His voice was little more than a whisper, but it was a voice, and the tight knot of fear began to unpick itself in Jayden’s gut.
“What medication are you taking, Darren?”
“Antidepressants,” he said. The word was slow and almost slurred. “Box is up there.” He rolled his head back against the cupboard, indicating the counter-top with his eyes. They were wide and strange, the pupils flexing almost madly in the glare of the overhead light.
“When did you last take any?”
“S’morning.”
She glanced at Jayden, who nodded. “We keep the rest locked away,” he said lowly. “He hasn’t…he can’t have overdosed. The cupboard’s still locked and he hasn’t got a key.”
She nodded and turned back to Darren. “Can you open your eyes for me, pet? Look at me for a second.”
He did, and the green was almost obscured by the bloodshot whites. He looked exhausted and upset, worn and terrified, and Jayden hugged him tightly, the fear giving way to a gut-wrenching hatred of his condition. It wasn’t fucking fair. Why did he—why did either of them—have to go through this?
“Ssh,” Jayden murmured softly when the doctor shone a penlight in Darren’s eyes and he flinched, hissing when his head brushed the cupboard again. He pulled him in a little tighter and felt the shift in Darren’s shoulder that said he wanted to burrow in. It was comforting feeling, and Jayden kissed his ear encouragingly.
“What’s the date, Darren?”
“Depends on the time.”
“Well, it’s quarter past one.”
“So the fourteenth.”
“And what’s your job?”
“I’m a crime scene examiner.”
“So what does DS stand for in the police?”
“Detective Sergeant.”
Dr. Morris switched her penlight off and nodded. “Can you sit forward for me, please, pet? I want to have a look at your head.”
Darren was coming back to himse
lf and frowned blearily. His voice was still raspy, but steady. “I’m not going to hospital.”
“I won’t send you unnecessarily, but I do need to make an assessment.”
“I’m not going!”
His voice rose, and his chest heaved twice; Jayden made a hushing sound and dropped his arm around Darren’s shoulders, pulling him forward from the cupboard door. “You won’t have to,” he promised rashly. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
The doctor said nothing, shifting to kneel beside Darren instead of opposite him, and beginning to part his wet curls with her gloved fingers. The blood was stark on the white latex, brilliant and gleaming, and she probed and felt around the crown of his scalp with deft and firm touches. Darren grimaced, pushing his face into his knees, and clutching Jayden’s offered hand tightly.
“All right,” she said eventually. “You’re going to have a headache for a couple of days, pet, but you haven’t damaged your skull, and you’re not concussed. I would recommend a couple of stitches to help this cut heal…”
“No.”
“…but it’s not strictly needed,” she finished, ignoring the vehement interruption. “Can I see the medication box, please? I need to know what he’s been taking.”
Jayden gingerly let go; when Darren simply leaned against the cupboard and closed his eyes, fists clenching and unclenching on his bent knees, Jayden quickly unlocked the cupboard and retrieved the prescription bag, handing it to Dr. Morris before sitting back down and sliding an arm around Darren’s waist again. Darren twitched, but didn’t respond. He appeared to be doing some breathing exercise or other.
“Yes,” Dr. Morris murmured, unfolding the leaflet from the box and scanning it. “And this has been taken for six weeks?”
“Seven,” Darren croaked hoarsely. Jayden squeezed his hand. His skin wasn’t so clammy now.
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