#mhfic

He groans and screws his eyes shut again, raises a hand to shield himself against the blinding daylight. His throat feels raw, as if he’s swallowed glass or sandpaper, and the inside of his mouth tastes like something’s curled up and died on his tongue. His head feels a little better with his arm thrown over his face to block out the light, but if anything his leg feels worse.

Slowly, he turns his head away from the window and opens his eyes.

The motel room looks like it did before he left, clean and white, the duffel bag holding what’s left of his belongings thrown onto the chair by the dresser. For a moment, through the haze in his head, he almost believes it could have been a dream.

Then he looks down at himself.

White sheets, sticky and stiff, stained with red and brown. Blood dried up on his hands, caked under his nails. Dark splatters across his shirt which clings to his chest when he tugs at it. His bed looks like a murder scene, like he’s the one who—

His stomach turns over and he swallows hard, fighting the urge to be sick. Screws his eyes shut again and takes a deep breath.

Okay, he tells himself. Okay.

Alex is dead. And he’s alive. So what now?

How did he get back here? He doesn't remember. He thinks he tried to get up again, after, but he's not sure. It's mostly a blur, at the end.

Maybe the camera knows. Where is the camera? He groans again and turns his head, squinting into the morning light to look over at the bedside table. Pocketknife, light glinting off the handle. Camera, next to it, lying on its side. Gritting his teeth, he reaches for it, only to find the battery’s dead. Of course.

What now? Alex is dead and the pocketknife is still covered in his blood. God, his head is killing him. He has to charge the camera, and he has to get this mess cleaned up, before someone sees. What then? He shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and regrets it.

One thing at a time. Charge the camera. Clean up the blood. What comes next comes next.

He turns over with an effort and tries to get to his feet. Pain shoots up his leg and brings him to the floor with a yelp he can’t quite bite back. Fuck. His vision swims and he can hear his heartbeat in his ears, his ragged breathing. He starts to cough and tastes metal on his tongue.

How the hell did he get himself back here?

When he’s recovered from the coughing fit, he slowly pulls himself upright, using the table for support, careful not to put any weight on his injured leg. It hurts to stand, a dull ache radiating up from the break that never healed quite right to begin with, and he wonders if he’s ever going to walk straight again after this.

Gingerly, he shifts his weight, tests out how much his leg will take. He knows he was walking on it before. Of course, at the time the adrenaline was probably blocking out most of the pain. Now, he doesn’t think he could make it across the room.

Camera, he reminds himself, breathing hard through gritted teeth. Then the blood. One thing at a time.

Very carefully, he makes his way over to the desk where the laptop is sitting, still half open like he’d left it the last night he was here. Every step hurts, and he all but collapses into the chair by the desk when he gets there, but he makes it, and plugs the camera in to charge.

The effort of dragging himself even halfway across the room has made his headache worse again, and he takes a minute to recover, laying his head down on the desk rather than bring his bloody hands close to his face. God, he needs a cigarette, but the pain in his leg aside, he can’t leave the room looking like this. He’s got to get himself cleaned up first.

There’s blood smeared on the tiles of the tiny motel bathroom, and the smell of iron inside is so strong it  makes him choke; he drops to his knees on the cold floor, his stomach churning, but nothing comes up when he gags weakly over the toilet. Fuck, he doesn’t remember the last time he’s eaten. A day ago, now? Before he left to confront Alex. Before he slept the night before, he thinks, but he isn’t sure.

Shaking, he drags himself up onto the edge of the bath to undress. His clothes are stiff where blood’s soaked into the fabric, and he isn’t sure the stains are ever going to come out. He throws them in a crumpled heap on the floor. He’ll worry about them later.

His leg’s not going to hold up if he tries to stand, he thinks, so instead he sits in the bottom of the bathtub with his knees drawn up to his chest, cradling his bad leg gingerly with one arm. The water runs too cold at first, and then too hot; he tries to adjust it for a minute, but gives up and decides he doesn’t care. He just wants the blood off his hands, though he doesn’t think they’ll ever really feel clean again.

He doesn’t know how long he spends with the shower running over him, scrubbing the dried blood off his hands and forearms, and even when he’s gotten it all, still sitting there and watching the water run down the drain. At some point the water cools to lukewarm, and then freezing. By the time he turns it off, he’s shivering.

What now?  he wonders as he grabs a towel, rubs it over his face and hair quickly before wrapping it around his waist. There are clean clothes in his bag, and then he’ll take a look at what’s on the camera, see if there’s anything he doesn’t remember but needs to know. He’ll figure out what to do next after that. One thing at a time.

He limps across the room to grab his bag, and then sits down at the edge of the bed to get dressed, trying to move his leg as little as he can so he doesn’t make it any worse. He thinks the broken bone hurt less than whatever he’s done this time. If he’s going to keep walking on it, he’s going to need to get a brace, or a splint - something that will keep it in place so it doesn’t give out on him completely like it did when he first stood up.

His head is pounding again, and he wants to just lay down and rest, but he’s got to get back up and look at that footage. He has to know what there is that he doesn’t remember.

When he gets over to the camera and the laptop again, he pulls up the video and skips towards the end, tries to skip past what he does remember. He catches glimpses of it anyways, and feels sick again, his stomach twisting into a tight knot at the sight of Alex's feet kicking helplessly. He tries hard not to think about the way it felt to press the knife against his throat.

On the tape, he watches himself collapse against the wall, then stand back up again. Pick up the camera and turn it on Alex -- Alex, covered in blood and still twitching. He screws his eyes shut and swallows hard, skipping forward again. Meaningless shots of the floor, and the hallway, upside-down. The stairwell. Then, everything spinning as the camera falls and tumbles down the stairs.

When it stops moving, he's lying at the edge of the landing, facedown, still. Unconscious. The knife falls out of his hand with a clatter, and the tape stops - empty or dead, he isn't sure which.

He starts laughing, and doesn't know why. If he'd made it another two steps, he'd have broken his neck on the stairs and be dead now. He was supposed to be dead now anyways. Hadn't he taken most of a month's worth of his pills? Hadn't that been enough?

There's nothing else to see on the tape when he tries to skip forward. No sign of how he got back here, with his leg in the shape it's in, after waking up from another overdose. He can't stop laughing, his breath catching when he tries to inhale. He's in hysterics, he thinks. He's in shock. He's finally lost his damn mind.

He gets up from the chair and looks around for his jacket, finds it thrown on the dresser. Limps over to it, still giggling to himself, and digs the cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket. His head is pounding, and when he turns around too quickly he sees spots, but he manages to keep his balance and shuffle out to the patio to smoke.

He does feel better after a cigarette, more levelheaded, less frayed at the edges. He needs to eat something, he thinks, and he needs to do something about his leg, though he’s not sure yet exactly what. At some point, he needs to decide what to do with that footage, too, whether he’s going to share it or keep it to himself. He wonders if anyone’s even watching the other footage Jay posted. He wonders if anyone would even care if he did share it. It certainly doesn’t seem like anyone’s cared enough to do anything so far.

But before that, before he can worry about what might happen if he shares the footage or if he even wants to, he needs food of some kind before he starts to get faint from hunger.

It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try to go anywhere right now, so he ends up ordering pizza to his room, the only thing he can think of he won’t have to leave to get. After a slice and a half, he realizes he can’t eat any more; he thinks he can feel the grease pooling in the bottom of his empty stomach, and the sensation is making him nauseous again. He shoves the rest in the fridge for later, and sits back down at the table to stare at the laptop again.

His mind still isn't made up about whether he's going to post the footage or not. If anyone sees it -- and he doesn't know whether anyone will -- would they have seen the rest already? Is the rest really enough to exonerate him if so? Should he even be exonerated, when he could have kept running, could have tried to avoid a confrontation entirely instead of taking Alex head-on?

And suppose someone did see it, and did think it was worth it to turn him in for murder. Even if the evidence is on his side -- even if he really did have no better option -- is it worth the risks to share it? Should he even let Jay's footage survive, or should he destroy it entirely, so no one else gets hurt?

Thinking about it is making his head hurt again, so he closes the laptop and rubs his eyes with one hand, sighing heavily.

What he can do now, he decides, is try to stabilize his knee, before he damages it any further. He's no expert, but he sort of remembers how his broken leg was splinted when he woke up then, and he thinks he could probably replicate it if he had something rigid to use. Maybe if he wraps it up well, he can make it to the nearest convenience store and get something there that will work.

He kicks off his jeans and limps over to the bed, stripping the bloodied sheets off before he sits down on the edge of the mattress. He'll probably be charged for them anyways; it's just as well to destroy them so no one sees the state they're in now. With the pocketknife, he starts to methodically cut long strips from them to wrap around his injured leg.