Archive of Our Own

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On reflection, it isn’t a house you’d chose. To put it in the meekest, mildest, Brand New Murdoc way that you can think of.
The meeker, milder Murdoc says nothing as he ascends unfamiliar stairs. Steeper than you’d like, thinks Same Old Murdoc, who apparently has the sensibilities of a man pushing eighty.
But in your present— your Now Now, even— all you can do is what your body tells you. Grip the banister.
Onwards. Upwards.
Russel’s footfalls are heavier than you remember.
A jibe forms itself inside your head. Rolls lazily towards your tongue.
You stop.
Swallow.
Unsaid. Unspent, it swills stickily around your mouth as you climb higher. Cloys like a bite of cheap chocolate.
You feel your face twist with the effort to force it back down.
Russel locks eyes with you on the upstairs landing. You almost feel him peer through skin and wet flesh to scrutinise the tongue you’ve built a vice grip trying to hold.
‘Everything okay?’
It isn’t the sound of his voice that startles you, more so the way it feels. The first direct address you’ve received since inane pleasantries were exchanged in the shadow of The Scrubs, and you embarked on the longest car journey of your entire fifty-two years on Satan’s green Earth.
There was something about it. The silence. A taunt that kept your body locked in place and your mouth clamped shut, even as the old familiar fire meandered its way around itching, aching muscles and begged you for bliss, if only for a moment.
But no, you said. A habit that was once the only way you knew. Broken by the lull of ease. By complacency that left you soft and weak.
That can’t happen now. Soft and weak does not befit a man hardened, by prison and by life itself. Forged first in the bottle oven and then sent back inside for the glaze to fuse solid on his skin.
Brand New Murdoc takes the reins. Paints on a face that feels warped by the chafe of Same Old Murdoc’s bones inside him.
‘Yeah.’ Comes the reply to a question already half forgotten. A brand-new voice for Brand New Murdoc. Positively breezy to your Same Old ears.
Those Same Old ears twitch this way and that, in search of some familiar homely sound. A floor that squeaks in all the right places. The comfort of a raised voice, perhaps, or the blare of passing traffic.
But there is no such noise. The quiet from the car seems to have followed you inside and made itself quite comfortable in your stead. As Russel pushes open a nondescript door, you half expect it to be there, cosied up beneath the bedclothes.
‘Kinda lacking in the mod-con department,’ says Russ, with a sheepish look over at you. ‘But we sorta had to improvise, on account of things being so last-minute and all.’
‘Right.’ The word falls out as you train your gaze on a featureless wall.
Russel stands for just a beat too long before he mumbles something about letting you get settled and backs out of the room with the mechanical precision of a man who’s spent his summer watching Four in a Bed repeats.
Even as he leaves, you find yourself hovering, with an idle swing of the overnight bag at your side.
Just you again.
Just Murdoc.
Old and new, stapled together.
Boots not quite ready to clutter up the rack your eyes ghosted over downstairs.
You’ve been ghosting over a lot of things. For a long time.
Safe inside your shoes, you flex your toes in warmed, softened leather. Still fit to the shape of you, despite all the time that’s passed.
In silence, you survey the space. Magnolia walls. Greige carpet. Mattress on an iron bedframe. Crisp white sheets. Untouched. The solvent smell still lingering. A most unwelcome invitation back into another room that wasn’t yours.
You reach for the window, suddenly stifled by scent and stillness, and wrestle with the casement as much as with the sudden urge to defenestrate that screeches its way into your head.
A warm breeze pushes you back. Holds you away from the edge, for the precise number of moments it takes for you to come down from the heights of sparking telephone wires and sink back into the soles of your old boots.
You sit yourself down on the spotless bed, a pulse throbbing in your temple. Your breath sounds strange. Loud and staccato inside your head.
Still fully clothed, you lie back. Close your eyes against the mid-afternoon light.
Murdoc is back.
He should be back.
There should be more of a fanfare than this. The silence, and stillness, and calm, pleasant voices.
The settling.
You are not settled. You know that.
You feel so…so unsettled.
There hasn’t been shouting. Hasn’t been fighting.
In your bones, Same Old Murdoc is itching and twitching to shout. To fight.
Same Old Murdoc curls your fingers into fists, and pounds on the freshly unboxed mattress. All evidence of wrongdoing thrown away.
All evidence of him thrown away.
Cast off. Like putrid, stinking rubbish.
And what now? Dragged back?
To be swept into the fucking guest bedroom?
You haul yourself to stand, chest heaving. Your head spins with the scent of paint.
Dents in things show that they belong to someone.
You aim a kick at the nightstand.
Another.
Another.
You keep kicking until it’s too loud to think, and there’s a new pattern of bumps and scuffs and score marks decorating wood and plaster.
Better, thinks Same Old Murdoc, who finds comfort in the familiar. The safe.
Better, you agree. Much better. Your feet ache and your back aches and your shoulders ache, and inside you, every bone aches.
What are you, without that feeling? Without that constant ache to show you are alive, and continue to fight and breathe and be, despite everything?
Same Old Murdoc doesn’t know the answer to that question. And Brand New Murdoc is so new that he surely isn’t ready to find it yet.
And that just leaves you.
Just Murdoc. Here in the Now Now present, with a sore foot and a headache.

*
Just Murdoc wakes up to the Dawn Chorus, and also to the dawning realisation that this is his first full, proper day as a free man.
The first Free thought you have is that this mattress isn’t built for you. A Free Murdoc is also, by necessity, a Murdoc who is Free to flail and twist around in the night. The one that you’ve just spent the night on seems to have been designed for bigger, more Russel-ish people who sleep like logs, and wouldn’t know a tic even if it burrowed its way right into their brain, full of a premonitory urge to shout, ‘I’m a tic!’
You wonder if they even thought about that while they were off on their little jolly to Bensons for bloody Beds. If they even thought of you at all.
Rising grimly from the bed—which is not and may well never be yours—you make a lunge for your bag, rootling around until you finally find both fag and lighter, unceremoniously returned to you at the prison gates.
It should help.
At the very least, it should obscure this…thing.
You can’t even give it a name beyond wrongness. But things don’t feel good with the wrongness around. You don’t feel good. You don’t even feel Free, even though you should be. That’s the whole point of you. Free Murdoc. You blasted that all over the internet, and for what?
You’re dimly aware of your bag being slipped over your shoulder. The turn of the doorknob is faint in your ears.
Darkness in the hallway. More of the awful, crushing silence.
You can’t bear it anymore.
The stairs turn you into a groping, fumbling mess, but you’ll forgive yourself, being in unfamiliar territory. You clutch the banister for dear life, and hope that 2D hasn’t left out any stray Crazy Bones or Beyblade death traps.
Everything’s clear, save for a squeak halfway down that you’re able to stifle with a well-practiced shift of your centre of gravity. That confidence carries you down to the bottom, and within moments, you’re at the front door.
Your head pounds as you finger the latch, barely drawing breath.
Want whispers to you in the dark. It could be so easy. Cut yourself loose from everything. Step out of this ill-fitting skin.
Your chest aches with it. With the urge, beating its fists from where it’s trapped in your ribcage. Hard enough that you feel your body coil with the effort to stay upright.
To stay.
Even as the silence rolls in.
It’s in that silence that you hear the faintest of footfalls from behind.
You pivot in an instant, eyes raking across everything to see…
Nothing?
Your skin prickles. In as swift a motion as you can, you retrieve your phone from where you stowed it in the pocket of yesterday's clothes that have become today’s clothes.
Mercifully silent, the torch comes on, and you shoot a beam of cold white light towards the stairs.
You’re met by a flash of green.
Noodle’s bloody cat.
‘What?’ you hiss.
The cat says nothing. You feel it stare at you for a long time, before it slinks down from where it’s perched, and prowls towards a doorway you can just make out in the torchlight.
You cast a glare at its retreating form, concentration broken.
Alone in the hall, you look yourself up and down and then turn back to the door.
In that very same moment, something creeps over you. A sudden surge of coldness that has you shuddering. A hand, gripping your shoulder.
You whip round to where the cat disappeared, and spot its eyes, still fixed on you.
Sagging, you pad your way over, letting loose a long sigh before scrabbling for a light switch. Your nails scrape over plaster and paint, and the hairs on your arms stand on end.
What’s the matter with this place?
This is the last time you’re going to allow 2D to have a go at interior decorating. Make no mistake.
It must’ve been his fault. Must’ve been.
No normal person would choose this. You certainly wouldn’t.
Lights on. You’re met with more unfamiliar things. New telly. New sofa tastefully designed to look like an old sofa. Chintzy tat covering the mantelpiece. Probably isn’t new, but new to you.
Looks like you’ve found the sitting room.
It’s an odd thing. Sitting. Being in a space without the anticipation that you’ll be doing much else. Having time to do that. Space to do that.
And they might not have said anything, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still feel it. That feeling of expectation that you will sit as well. Murdoc must want to sit, mustn’t he?
Well…well, what if he doesn’t? What if Brand New Murdoc has decided that he has better things to do than just sit, and stare at the telly without taking anything in, and make clipped little comments every now and then? The world is his oyster, after all. He can do whatever he likes.
He can.
Noodle’s cat is perched on one of the arms of the New Old Sofa, with the very same expectation in its eyes. Murdoc must want to sit. He must.
He has to sit down. Or Else.
‘Fuck off!’ you snap at the cat, who has said nothing. It barely flinches at the swat of your hand through the air, or the tic that gets caught in your shoulder, too fast for you to yank back.
You huff out air from between bared teeth.
Unfazed, the cat begins to knead the sofa cushions.
You grimace, pulling your bag, your familiar Same Old things, closer to your chest. The weight is a constant. Warmed, like a stone held in your hand.
Still standing, you trace invisible patterns in the fabric. Follow the stitching with your finger.
For a moment, you imagine yourself, small enough to crawl inside and nestle amongst things you know. Laying your head against a pillow of pants and socks that smell right.
Perhaps the wrongness would go away then. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel the way that you do. So strange and small and…just…sick. Of everything. Of the whole thought of living here. Of being Free.
You clamber up onto the New Old sofa, and it feels like sitting on a bag of rocks.
You don’t fit at all.
Free Murdoc, the Brand New man, doesn’t feel fun to be. He isn’t the Same Old man as when he went in.
The feelings that come to him, Freely, are that he feels Lost. And Alone.
And Scared.
Those feelings are so Free that they roar up around him like a raging ocean.
Body soaked, he clings and clings to the splintered log that came with him. The only reminder of what things were like before.
What he was like.
All the while, the horrible, awful cat pits and pats around you on the horrible, awful sofa, like you’re invisible. A faded, failing ghost of a man.
You lie still and press your cheek against your bag until the ocean pulls you under.

*
When you wake up, there’s a fabric imprint on your face. And a cushion under you.
Your bag is gone.
You’re up in an instant. The sound of distant, muffled voices floods your ears.
In a daze, you stagger down a corridor that twists, and winds, and swirls around you towards the noise. All low and hushed and shushed so you can’t hear. You can’t be a part of this. Shush everybody, he’s coming. Stop giggling, 2D. It’s not funny. Let’s lock him in his room so we can bitch about him in peace. Let’s—
You burst in. The sound fades to a high-pitched whine in your ears. Ringing and ringing, incessant.
They all turn. They all stare. They always stare. They’re always staring at you, never talking to you. Just staring. Like you’re a huge, clumsy thing that can’t talk and can only be stared at.
You feel huge. You feel yourself fill the space with your hugeness, until you can’t see anything. You can’t even see them. You just feel them staring and staring and staring.
The Expectation is back. Three times as hot. Three times as piercing. The Good and Nice. The Learned Your Lesson. The Do Better. The Be Better. Be Perfect. Be Perfect Or Else.
You can’t you can’t you can’t do it you can’t.
Instead, you roar.
‘Where is it?’
‘…Where’s what?’ Noodle. Noodle is there. You think. You can’t see her. You can see…fire. Explosions and fire.
‘My bag! The bag I had!’
‘Oh,’ says Russel’s disembodied voice. ‘Figured you might want that stuff cleaned, so I stuck it in the washer for you a while back.’ There’s a pause. ‘Just the clothes, mind. Didn’t touch the…uh…other stuff.’
What.
No. No. He- No. He can’t.
You feel your legs trembling. Good and Nice, whispers Brand New Murdoc, but you can hardly hear him. You only hear Bad and Nasty. Mean and Roar and Explode.
You feel like you’re exploding. You feel like everything is on fire, and it’s so loud that you can’t even hear what you’re saying, even though you’re roaring, and you know you’re roaring, because the feeling comes right up through your chest and burns your throat.
‘Shall I come and show you where it is?’
You whirl round to where 2D’s voice is emanating. It’s the most he’s spoken to you since the meeting outside The Scrubs that feels like a lifetime ago.
You blink hard to try and chase away the haze. He surfaces in wisps, through a fog of blue and the buzz of a floating fridge.
One of you nods. Every Murdoc that you are feels wordless and shaky. With no bag to hold, you twist your hands into the shirt that may as well be an extension of your body at this point. You doubt even Russel would try to rip it straight off you.
2D lopes easily across the room in a few strides. You watch him playing with this new, seamless grace as he leads you back through the hallway, and round another corner.
There’s a strange feeling washing over you. A twist of your guts when you look at him. When he stretches to tug a pull cord light, and a dehumidifier rattles to life.
He feels taller. Or you feel yourself shrink in front of him. You can’t be sure which, but either way, it leaves you with a sense of unease.
‘I do my own washing now,’ Stuart announces. ‘It didn’t go great the first few times, but I kept at it, and it almost never shrinks. I can show you the settings I use, if you want. Then you can do yours too, and you won’t need to stress about Russ not doing it how you like.’
You say nothing.
He takes this as an invitation to burble on about Hot Wash Cold Wash Just Right Wash Wool Wash Three Bags Full Wash until his voice becomes part of the drone of the machine. You stare at your Same Old clothes as they revolve in the drum. The scent. The safety, washing away inch by inch.
You don’t remember when you sat down, but you press your head against your knees, holding yourself tightly.
‘Oh.’ 2D resurfaces from his sermon, staring back down at you in brilliant white confusion. ‘Um. Murdoc?’
You don’t reply. This is too much. Far too much. None of the Murdocs know what to do anymore.
2D is making a noise. You screw your eyes shut on instinct, gritting your teeth hard enough that they might crumble.
‘We didn’t change the washing gel stuff, look.’
You crack open one eye.
2D wafts the detergent bottle around in your face. ‘See? It’s just the same as the one we had…you know...before.’
You chance the smallest sniff.
Hm. Smells a lot like Fairy Platinum.
But still. So what if he’s right? So what? It’s not the same. It’s nothing he could ever understand. Nothing you want him to ever understand. Especially not now.
You scowl up at his nasty, milky eyes.
He offers you a hand.
You don’t take it.
Any moment now, his face will fall. Same Old Murdoc is counting on it. Counting on the satisfaction he will get from this well-practiced routine.
You wait. And you wait.
His expression doesn’t change. Still blithe. Benign.
You feel your own face knot as you’re hauling yourself up from the ground.
Same Old Murdoc doesn’t like this.
Same Old Murdoc feels unsteady. Unsure.
He feels his chest tighten. Gnaws at his nails.
You turn quickly away from 2D, so that he doesn’t catch a glimpse of Same Old Murdoc flashing his confusion across your face.
2D himself pays this no mind, trotting out of the utility room without a care in the world.
It must be nice. Not having a care in the world. Not allowing yourself all that space to care. To think, and think, and think again, and spin those thoughts around your head until they become a veritable solar system. A swirling galaxy inside your skull, complete with gaping black holes that you feel, even here in the quiet, leering hungrily at each passing cluster of stars.
You stand with yourself, once again out of sorts. Out of place with all these things that keep spinning and turning without you.
If you were here, then you would’ve put a stop to that. Same Old Murdoc would’ve known to put his foot down. He would have said…
Something, at least. Some combination of ‘No.’, and ‘Wait.’ and ‘Stop.’ And probably finished it up with ‘It’s my band.’ for good measure.
And perhaps they wouldn’t have listened to him in the long run, but at least his voice would’ve been heard.
Here, Same Old Murdoc’s voice feels weak. Drowned out by thunking, thudding appliances, and new doors being slammed in his face.
You wonder if 2D’s gone back to the others yet. If they’ve jumped right back to their bitching session after Same Old Murdoc stumbled in and fell apart at the seams.
For all you know, they’re doing this on purpose. The constant quiet is some sort of test. See how long it takes before you’re driven into a decline, and they have all the more reason to cut you out for good. Because if there’s one thing you simply cannot be, it’s quiet.
They should know that. They should understand that. You always thought—or, at least, Same Old Murdoc always thought that they did. That it was the least of their problems with him.
But now in this small and doubtful state, Same Old Murdoc cannot be sure of anything.
There’s something about the house. At once echoingly, fearfully huge to an imprisoned man at home in his own containment, and crushingly small to the Free Murdoc who needs to lie flat on his back and feel space stretch and stretch beyond his reach. Somehow, you toe-walk in-between. Slip through unoccupied rooms where it doesn’t feel right to sit, or even stand. Just float in for a moment, caught on a draught that chases you in aimless trails around the too big too small space. Spirits doors away.
You turn and see a flash of someone in a bathroom mirror.
Gone.
You shiver, and you do not stop.
It's so cold in here. It’s so cold everywhere. Why haven’t they done anything about that? Fucking fix your horrible cold house.
A tremor takes you over.
You can’t bear this.
You want to shout. Or scream. Or punch some walls. But Brand New Murdoc is stuck. He is trapped in Good and Nice. And if he isn’t Good or Nice, then he will be a failure of a Murdoc who had everything pinned on him. A failure of a man who should’ve kept his head down. Should’ve learned his lesson.
You can’t. You can’t say anything. You can’t say how strange and sick this place makes you feel. You’ve seen the way they look at you already. It’s the way that everyone will look. Everyone will see you. Lay you bare to pick apart if your mouth opens at the wrong time. In the wrong place.
They were good at that. In prison. Better than you were ready for. Even Same Old Murdoc, with all his wits about him. His fight and fire were no match for corridors, or canteens, or showers, or shit.
You can’t help but wonder, sometimes, if the smell’s still there.
You inhale as best you can, straining every deadened, useless olfactory passage and nerve to try, and try to catch a hint of something lingering.
Your eyes sting. Your vision blurs.
You just...
You just can’t. Can’t be certain.
Wouldn’t be a problem, for Same Old Murdoc. He’d be marching right up to someone—probably 2D—in a heartbeat, and asking—no, demanding, that they take a sniff for themselves.
He can’t do that. You can’t do that.
Not now.
Things are different.
Brand New Murdoc has to take charge. Even though he doesn’t know what to do. How to be.
He can’t even ask where the shower is. You dwell on that thought for only a moment, and feel yourself, and him, and every other Murdoc seize up in a glurge of feeling. A hot flush. A tremble. A sweat.
Feelings that Same Old Murdoc would’ve had no trouble bashing on the head in double-quick time.
You wish you were him, and not you.
Just Murdoc. The carapace. You pick his body up and trundle it around in a pretence of being and feeling. Act out the comfortability of settling in. Knowing where you’re going. What you’re doing with yourself. Even when this house still feels so much like a breakable dream that you mustn’t touch. Mustn’t breathe too loudly, or you’ll start to see things shudder. Sway. Shatter.
The banister is cool in your hand as you grip it. Your knuckles tighten. Veins pulse.
You hoist yourself up.
Climb and climb for what feels like hours.
Russel passes you.
He says something. His lips move.
You don’t hear.
You’re busy with this. Busy climbing.
Look how busy you are. Look how much of a contribution you’re making.
Look how much value you have.
Look.
Please. Please look.
Please.
Your chest hurts, but you need to ignore it. Everyone needs to ignore your chest hurting because it doesn’t matter, and it says nothing about you. Everyone’s chest must explode from time to time. You think. In fact, you’re certain. Yes.
You don’t need to stop. You just need to…to do…something.
Something else.
You drive yourself into the bathroom, and your bones and blood and body bits all get pushed along, even when they don’t want to go. Just carry on. Wrench yourself through every little step until they stop shouting at you. They have to stop shouting eventually.
Bathroom. Okay. Bathroom.
What was it you wanted?
You…
You were going to do something.
A shower. Was that what you wanted?
Right.
You remember this.
You think.
Um.
You think. You spend a long time standing, and just…just blinking at the shower. Your head feels a bit fuzzy. A bit strange. But. But maybe a shower will help you.
Somehow.
You start to peel your clothes off. Slowly. Carefully.
Um. Wait.
Better…better do it against the wall. You think. So you can see. So you can see everything. So that nobody…
Um.
Your legs are shaking.
You feel. A bit hot.
All over.
Even though. Even though your clothes are all off.
Your legs. Your legs won’t stop shaking.
But you need to put the water on.
The water is. The water is a long way away.
You blink. It doesn’t get closer.
Oh.
Your feet don’t want to move. Your body doesn’t want to move.
Your body likes the wall.
You blink. You blink a lot, and you feel wet.
Wet trickles down your face, but it’s not enough.
Not wet enough to be clean.
You stare, and stare. The shower blurs, and blurs, but never moves.
You can’t reach it.
You can’t stop shaking.
You feel so hot.
So…
Dirty.
You.
You can’t.
You can’t.
You hear. Something.
A knock.
A knock that sounds like a hammer.
A hammering knock.
The air leaves your lungs.
Hammers and hammers and hammers.
‘Murdoc? You’re in there, right?’
A voice comes out that doesn’t sound like a voice. Barely a whisper. Barely an anything. ‘No.’
You count the quiet. Long, dripping moments
‘D’you want some help, man?’
‘No.’ The voice is even smaller. Even whispery-er.
The quiet is longer this time.
‘Hey, Mudz? You’ve left the door unlocked. Can I step inside for a sec?’
The voice is gone. It can only gasp and shake.
There’s a click. A creak. A cold, cold draught.
And Russel. In the doorway.
He looks at the shower.
He doesn’t look at you.
‘How d’you like it?’
You blink. You feel stuck blinking. Blinking and. Blinking and. Not saying. Not making any words.
You can’t.
You don’t.
You don’t know.
You don’t know. How to. How to say. What words to say.
‘Cold?’ asks Russel.
‘No.’ quivers the voice, quieter than ever. It knows that. It can say that, even when all the other words are gone.
‘Good shout,’ Russel nods, but still doesn’t look your way. ‘Nuts how some folks like it that way, huh?’
He leaves some space for words, but none come out. You watch him turn and twist and press a lot of buttons, and you try, and try to get yourself to remember which ones. To be a part of this, like he expects. Like everyone expects.
‘It’s a little warm,’ he says. ‘But not too hot.’
You think about that. It sounds okay. Like the sort of thing you might’ve wanted to do, before you forgot all of it for no reason.
Everything feels stuck. In your head. How to speak. How to move. How to stop your legs from shaking and your lungs from gasping.
Water hisses. Trickles down in quiet rivulets against the frosted glass.
No squeaking tiles. No shouting.
No shouting.
You close your eyes for just a moment. Just to let yourself feel that.
‘Need a hand getting in?’
Your feet are still rooted to the spot. Your body still pressed to the back wall.
Russel’s palm lies open.
You nod, eyes darting away from him, and the faint smile that crosses his face as you take hold of his forearm.
Your feet slide beneath you, legs leaden and buckling with every half-dragged step that Russel coaxes out. Away from the wall, heat and cold roll off your body in waves.
You stop. You stand. You stare around to glimpse yourself. Your body in a yawning, gaping space. Exposed.
Your breath grows ragged.
Russel looks at you for barely a moment, and steps away. He holds his hands out for you to see, and you follow them. You follow them away from you, and all the way down to his sides.
‘Take a second.’
And whilst your lungs are humming, huffing breath, you take a second.
In front of you, that second stretches. For a long time. For as long as you need. You feel it fill the bathroom with space, and air to breathe.
You breathe.
Close your eyes against everything.
For this long, stretching second, there is only darkness.
Only the darkness, and you.
Nothing reaches you here. Your body on the outside feels distant. Numb.
You see and hear and feel nothing.
For just a second.
Just a second.
‘Ready?’ prompts Russel, close again. Your eyes slide open, but things stay blurry.
A sound comes out of you. A very quiet, very fragile sound, but you feel it buzz in your chest enough to be real.
You lean against him and let yourself be guided the rest of the way. Russel keeps an arm braced against your back as you stand, still shuddering, at the side of the bath.
‘Leg up?’
Brand New Murdoc asks your leg very politely to please go up.
Then, just in case, Same Old Murdoc asks your leg very rudely to fucking go up, you piece of shit leg, for fuck’s sake.
Your leg thinks about it. It ums and ahs for a long time.
And then it decides. To not.
‘Okay,’ says Russel, even though you think it probably isn’t. He starts shuffling about and looping your arm around his shoulder. ‘Gotta get a little scientific; You pull over that side, and I’ll push up on this side, and I’m pretty sure we’ll have this leg coming up. All a matter of reflexes.”
Reflexes. Okay. You think you might’ve been good at those, once upon a time.
You pull. Russel pushes. And, inch by inch, you feel your leg begin to leave the floor, until it lands in the water with a paltry splash.
One leg. Then the other. The movement feels immense.
In a rush of heat and rising steam, you stand upright.
Seconds drag.
Your body moves like sludge.
The noise of blood whooshes in your ears.
Your legs give a dangerous wobble beneath you.
You feel a bit.
Sort of.
Faint.
‘You know,’ says Russel, from somewhere behind a cloud. ‘You can always sit, if it’s easier.’
Oh. Right.
Sitting.
That might be. Nicer.
Safer.
You nod weakly at him, folding yourself up into a huddled sort of shape that lets you rest your head against the tiles. Cold seeps into your skin.
‘Mudz?’
‘Mm?’
‘You want me to wait outside? Stop anyone from coming in?’
Through the fog, you feel yourself nod again.
‘Sound. Take all the time you need,’ His heavy footfalls cross the room. ‘Just yell if you want anything, aight?’
Within moments, the door swings shut.
For a while, you lean back and let yourself be doused.
No angry spit. No hiss. No rush.
With your eyes closed, it feels and sounds like gentle rain.
All the time you need. Still feels like a luxury you can’t quite afford.
Unwarranted to be sitting here. Taking up space, even curled up as you are. Your spine bending to the shape of the enamel. Nothing bending to the shape of you.
You glance at the door. Picture Russel posted outside.
Try as you might, you just don’t think you could yell. No matter what you might want, or how urgent it might be. The thought of hearing your own voice, brash and echoing against the tiles…it makes you want to shrivel up and die inside.
No. You need to just…Get on with it. Head down. Eyes to the ground. This is Brand New Murdoc’s lot in life. Shut up. Pipe down. Stop making such a fuss and be happy that they took you back at all.
All the same, you do have a tiny, private wonder to yourself about how long this might last.
How long you might last, before you become so worn and paper-thin that you get yourself blown away with the rest of the crunchy, crusty things in autumn.
You can already see the shrugs. Oh, whoops. Oh well. That one was already old and broken anyway. What did it do, except clutter up our nice clean house with its germs and shit smell?
Nobody’s said anything about the shit smell. But they wouldn’t, would they? Too polite for that. Nobody mentions a shit smell unless they want to kick up a proverbial stink. And this place seems to have been made thoroughly stink-free. Until you came along.
You peer beneath your fingernails. Feel around between your teeth. Scrape against your skin to try and find something. Anything. A film. An ooze. A thick green cloud, caught in summer sunlight.
You splash water on yourself, and start scrubbing at your face. Hard. Harder. Until the whole thing feels raw beneath your hands.
In desperation, you sniff, and sniff, and sniff. It begins to feel like a tic. You keep sniffing and sniffing and you’re so busy sniffing that you forget to breathe, and things go fuzzy at the edges.
You have to collapse back against the side of the bath to take a big gulp of air through your mouth.
And the sniff turns into a sniffle.
On any other day, you’d be ready for this. You’d already be dunking your head under the water to wash away the evidence before it even got the chance to escape.
Today, you’re not fast enough. Your body’s just so heavy.
So weak.
It gives a shudder. A mercifully silent sob, with you and Russel only separated by a few inches of wood.
You can’t think of anything worse than if he was to come galumphing in right now.
…Maybe if he brought 2D with him. And Noodle. Fuck it, let’s invite the whole street to come and have a look at Convicted Felon and Alleged Bassist Murdoc Niccals, 52, having a full-on bawl in the shower he needed extra special help getting into, never even mind getting out again.
You moan in piteous defeat, shielding your eyes as the image you’ve just dreamt up assaults you from all sides in vivid Technicolour. Surround Sound. The whole works.
From somewhere you can’t see inside the walls, the pipes grumble back at you. Perplexed, you imagine, by the presence of a foreign contaminant who’s woken them up at 2pm on a Saturday.
A row of bottles leer at you from the rim of the bath. You recognise the shapes of only some. The colours of fewer still. Even passing over those that feel familiar, you’re hesitant to pick them up.
It still feels far too much like using somebody else’s things in somebody else’s house. A house where you just can’t shake the feeling of being a perpetual guest. No matter what they might say, or how many times they might say it.
Listen. Even the plumbing doesn’t want you here.
Perhaps…perhaps if worst comes to worst, you could find yourself a few of those little hotel toiletries. Just keep them in your bag for you to have, and use. Sparingly.
You grind your teeth, eyes flitting back and forth along the row of bottles. They take nothing in.
…Why is this too much?
Why can’t you do this? Just make a choice?
Fucking hell, just pick one.
For fuck’s sake. Come on.
Come on!
You forget all about taking all the time you need. The words leak out of your head, replaced by the thunderous, monstrous sound of a voice that sounds like several voices, all screaming at you at once.
Your body spasms. Your arm flies out to sweep aside the bottles in a calamitous crash that rings out for moment after endless moment.
Deep in the midst of the din, there’s another creak. Far, far away, you spot a slice of Russel through the door. He looks at you. Expectantly.
‘Which one?’ Those are the only words that come out. There should be more. You know there should be more, but you just can’t manage.
‘You can help yourself to any that you want, man.’ That’s Russel’s Patient With Murdoc voice.
But. But he doesn’t understand.
‘No!’ you snap. Loudly. You don’t! You don’t want! You can’t want! You just need to…do!
‘Okay,’ says Russel, even though it’s even less okay than it was before. ‘You wanna talk it through?’
Your mouth moves in garbled, guttural shapes, but for a long time, no sound comes out.
Russel waits, and he waits. He steps inside to clear some of the bottles off the floor, but he doesn’t talk. He doesn’t interrupt your mouth trying to make the right words, even when he sees it struggling.
‘I can’t!’ it bursts out. Finally. But it can’t say anything more.
Russel pauses. You feel him looking at you for a long time. His eyes sweep over the bathroom. Over everything.
‘You think it would help if I did it for you?’
You blink. Several times.
‘Sure, I’m no stylist, but it’d be a lot off your plate.’ He starts to line the bottles back up again. You don’t pay attention to the order.
Somehow, that feels better.
Hm.
You give Russel a terse nod, not quite able to meet his eye.
Instead, you fall very quiet. Very still, as you listen to him squeeze a loud and liberal dollop of shampoo into his hand. Probably more than you’ve ever thought to use in your life. You catch the faintest aroma of something sort of…herbal-y.
‘Scooch forward a bit there, Mudz.’
You dutifully shuffle out from beneath the showerhead. Knees to chin, with your arms wrapped around yourself.
Russel starts to massage the shampoo into your scalp, hands moving in slow circles.
You drop your gaze, and watch your toes flex and curl in the shallow water pooling around your body. For a while, the only sound comes from the lather being worked through your hair.
You don’t look at Russel.
You don’t make a sound.
There’s no pulling. No tugging.
Russel might talk to you, but you don’t talk back.
No need for direction. He knows what he’s doing.
Seems like everyone knows what they’re doing these days.
Everyone would do just fine without you.
You’ve seen that for yourself.
Heard it stamped through every moment of that Satan-forsaken album. A message for you in the vinyl’s grooves.
You feel it hiding here. Eyeing you up from the tap end as Russel shifts you back beneath the water and your body sits inert. Forgets to close its eyes and mouth, and just keeps swallowing.
Swallowing.
Sinking.
You gasp.
Gulp.
Gag.
Your body thrashes.
Water pours from your nose. Your eyes. Your ears.
Russel’s voice floats over from somewhere you can’t see. He makes a lot of noises that go ‘Hey’, and ‘Whoa’, like he’s calming a frightened horse.
You don’t see a frightened horse anywhere, but you feel a sound vibrating in the air. A long, low groaning sound that you don’t remember telling yourself to make.
Your body feels far away. You sit and you watch it do things you haven’t thought, and everything is slow to reach you. Sound and feeling come in pieces, swinging in and out of sight that only reaches to your toes.
You do some blinks that feel slow, and try your best to remind your body that it doesn’t need to make that sound anymore.
The thought pushes against a swampy sludge of other thoughts that you feel all trying to get inside at once. Everything is slow. You feel them pile up into a lazy traffic jam.
‘Okay?’ asks Russel, in the same Frightened Horse voice. His hands keep going. Keep smoothing you out.
You take a long, long moment to squeeze out some more blinks, and try to shape your mouth into something that can make a sound that isn’t the long, low groaning one that tells him nothing.
‘Oh.’ Your mouth begins, and then forgets to do the rest.
Russel nods. When he leans in to pass more water over your hair, you spot splashes going up his sleeves. His shirt is soaked through.
You look away. Stare back into your lap as heat begins pooling in your face.
‘Hey.’ He nudges you. ‘No worries, aight? Happens to the best of us.’
But that’s the thing, Russ. No, it doesn’t.
You know it doesn’t.
You feel your brow knitting. The clouds are rolling in. Black. Thunderous.
Russel just keeps on combing his fingers through your hair, where the strands begin to tease and twist. You can’t tell if he notices. He doesn’t comment, either way.
It makes the feeling worse.
Your jaw tightens.
There are so many things you want to say to him. So many things you want to unleash and spill out over the bathroom floor. Let him be flooded with the utter tempest in your head for once.
For once.
You just don’t know what you could say. What fire you could spit that would make him respond with anything other than this whole bland and peaceful nothing of a reaction.
You’ve been to fucking prison, for fuck’s sake. Why Is he doing this? Why is he here, handling you with the very softest of kid gloves? Not even giving into the urge to yank out a lock or two of your hair, which is the very least you deserve, given the circumstances.
It makes you feel sick. Sicker than you already feel, just persisting on the day-to-day.
You’re so sick of everything. Of everybody.
The Same Old Murdoc feeling pushes. Surges up like bile from your throat. No matter what, he is still here. When Brand New Murdoc is lost and confused, his Same Old twin can slip into the driver’s seat. He doesn’t feel those things.
He's never felt them a day in his life.
All he feels is rage. Bright, and burning, hot enough to make the water boil around you.
You bristle. Feel your hackles raise. Your spine juts sharp in your back.
Russel touches and toys around with your hair. Like you’re some sort of little animal. A pet he’s playing with.
You lunge towards his face and snap your teeth. Loud enough to hear.
‘Get out!’
He pulls away. Says nothing for a blissful moment. Unsteady in his footing.
You feel that. You feel that, and you love it.
‘Okay, man. Your call.’
His voice doesn’t even raise. He doesn’t match you. Doesn’t foam and froth in kind.
Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, Same Old Murdoc howls in his horrible, terrible Big Bad Voice. Still doing it. Still refusing to fight back. Fucking coward. Useless fucking coward. Wouldn’t last a day in prison. Not like you.
‘Just let me help you out first, okay?’
‘Why?’ the word flies out in a spray of spit.
‘Mudz, you’re not in a great spot.’ He says, with a long sigh. ‘Believe it or not, I don’t want you falling and doing more damage.’
Same Old Murdoc doesn’t like all of this…conversating that’s happening. You could be fighting. You should be fighting. Why won’t he fight you come on Russel it would be so easy. Just a punch. A kick. You wouldn’t do anything back, even. You just…
You just want to feel like you again. To understand who Murdoc Niccals is.
Same Old Murdoc is trying. He is trying to help in all the ways he can. Using all the skills he knows to fight through this until it’s over. Until he’s won
‘Arms up?’
Same Old Murdoc growls and grumbles. He stares down at his feet for a long time, and is still. He thinks, and he turns that thought over in his mind. He sands it down until it’s a shape that he likes.
His arms slowly inch up. Only slowly.
The growls and grumbles grow louder as Russel lifts you up. They turn into hisses and snarls, and squirms.
You whip your head around quickly to look at the wall and not at Russel’s face. You don’t rest your chin anywhere. You don’t wrap your arms around anything. You twist, and flail, and kick out, and—
Oh. You’re on the ground. It’s over.
‘Are you leaving now?’
‘Yes, Murdoc.’
‘Good.’ You turn away and grab a towel from the rack, biting your lip at the unfamiliar scent clinging to the fibres.
Maybe…maybe drip-dry’s the best way to go here?
Whilst Russel’s still faffing about making his exit, you make a great pretence of wrapping it around yourself, complete with expertly pantomimed rubbing at your hair.
The moment the door clicks shut you fling it aside. Stand stark, with the shampoo’s botanical notes wreathing around you.
Burying the shit smell, maybe, but it’s with another smell that isn’t yours.
You wrinkle your nose. Touch a hand to your hair, and the curls already sprouting from beneath your fingers.
The mirror shows you a man you don’t know. A man who makes you grimace at the sight of him. The smell of him. A poorly-fitting suit of your own skin, stretched and taut in places you’ve forgotten.
You stare at this deflated, beaten-down mess of a man, and hate him more with every moment. This man, whose skin you’re supposed to happily inhabit now. Brand New Murdoc, who has the weight of the world on his shoulders, without a thought for how it makes his bones bend.
And with Same Old Murdoc pounding at his door, how is he supposed to do it?
You screw your eyes shut, gripping the sink tight enough to rip it clean away from the wall.
It feels like a precipice. A tightrope you’re walking, with everybody underneath just waiting to pelt you with beer bottles for every false step. Every stuttered, quavering note—
Your stomach churns. You clutch a handful of your hair and pull. Rougher, always rougher, on the curls.
Through swimming eyes, Brand New Murdoc’s face contorts with pain. You’re met with the gaze of a frightened child.
At once you stagger back, away from the mirror and lunge for the ground, burying yourself in the pile of your discarded clothes. The Yesterday, Today, Rest of Your Life Clothes.
You lie there. Still. Breathing in the only smell that feels like it belongs to you. Like home.
You can count the homes you’ve had on half a hand. Okay, the Winne was small, but it was a select space. Everything was there for a reason.
Even on those days when getting out of bed was such an impossible ask, you could still look around and see everything. Your things. Every small scrap you’d fought for. Held onto.
In there, you felt safe to close your eyes. Secure in the knowledge that you could open them, and nothing would have disappeared.
You can just picture the merry days spent, hurling every trace of you into unmarked binbags as quickly as they could. Laughter ringing out as hands passed roughly over keepsakes. The second-hand, pocketed sweet wrappers. The snapped strings. The yellowed pages of a signature practiced late into the night. Receipts full of larger numbers than a broken boy somewhere far away from here could ever comprehend.
It falls into a heaping, stinking landfill pile, amidst a thousand other things to be forgotten. Ready for the room that held a life to be hurriedly redressed in unblemished magnolia.
Another place where you were just beginning to stretch out some wary roots. Ripped away in a few cold moments.
With a grumble, you raise your head from the ground and start to tug your shirt on. An old one, threadbare at the neck, and a touch too short in the hem to hide any evidence of a paunch anymore. Not that that’s been much of an issue lately, what with the…disagreement you’ve had with canteen-style prison meals.
The lads on the wing found that a right laugh. Bloke like you, never daring to accept so much as a pissing pea from anyone in a hairnet.
Your efforts to hitch up your jeans prove fruitless; Within moments, they’re slithering down from the precarious perch on your hips until you have no choice but to hold them in place by the belt loops.
You can’t think why you didn’t notice. Or why nobody told you.
Why didn’t they stop you from looking fucking stupid?
Unless…unless that’s what they wanted?
You glower into Brand New Murdoc’s useless, struggling face.
It's easier for them, if he’s like this. Easier to turn around and laugh.
Treat him like a joke. Like he’s nothing.
Well, joke’s on you because he already feels like he’s nothing, so that just worked out fucking fantastic, didn’t it?
With one hand, you wrench the door open, the other clawing desperately at your lopsided trousers.
Without looking, without thinking, you storm your way down the hall. Not checking where you’re going. Just walking walking walking feeling lost and alone in your rage and your fight and your fury unable to scream for help or do anything anything anything—
A brush of air. A hand, light on your shoulder from behind.
‘Hey, Mur—’
An instant. An instant, and something slams. Slams against a wall. Your hand. Tight around something. Knuckles popping right out. Flushed white.
Your hand. Right against his jugular.
2D. Limp, he towers over you.
The looming shape of Russel peers around a distant doorway. Holds you in a silent gaze.
Everything is still.
You can’t speak. You grunt and pant out animal breaths. A shaking, trapped thing.
Your tongue moves. Rolls around inside your mouth in a sound that gurgles. Whines.
2D straightens. Stares you down.
And then, he smiles.
He smiles an old, sad smile.
‘Sorry. I forgot.’
The words are white hot. You break away, skin burning.
Turn, and run.
Doors. Doors. You find a door and push through. Stumble and fumble and fall, and crawl, and cram yourself into a corner.
It comes in a rush. A deafening surge, and you can’t breathe anymore. You can’t breathe you can’t breathe you can’t breathe you’re going to die you’re going to die you can’t breathe you can’t you’re falling apart you can’t breathe oh God—
There’s a sound. What’s the sound? What is it you can’t see, you can’t you’re going to die.
Eyes. Your eyes swivel wildly.
The. The cat. Noodle’s cat. Katsu.
Looking at you. Looking right at you. Big bright green eyes like glass. You see yourself in glass.
No. No, you. You go…go away. Go away, Katsu.
You can’t breathe. You can’t speak to tell it to leave. Can’t tell an arm or a leg to move to shoo it away.
Go away go away go away leave you to die please please please go away.
Katsu gets closer, and. And it makes another sound. Another maybe meowing sound. Maybe. You can’t hear all you can hear is you, and your lungs and your heart and your chest and your breath gasping gulping exploding all at once.
Your skin is on fire. Electric fire. But Katsu comes close, and it. It butts its head against a useless arm, a uselessly shaking arm that can’t stop shaking. It squashes under a useless armpit. Presses. Presses against a side that burns to the touch and drips with sweat.
It stays put.
You’re too weak to move it. Too weak to even say anything. You can’t. You can’t keep your head up. It lolls against your shoulder.
You. You reach out with a single, trembling finger, and start to. Brush. Over Katsu’s fur. Not stroking. Just. Just brushing. Brushing spots, and stripes and big clouds.
Katsu stays. Very still. Doesn’t hiss or scratch or bite. Even though your brushing feels clumsy. Wobbly.
Slowly, slowly, you start to brush with more fingers. Your fingers start to flex. Unflex in a rhythm.
Katsu is soft. Warm. You can feel that now, even through the shaking that’s happening to you.
Against your side, it starts to make a different sort of sound. A rumbling, grumbling sound that makes its body shake.
You wonder. If it’s taking your shaking away.
With another hand, you move to touch your chest, where all the exploding was happening. It still feels tight. But no booming, banging, thundering feeling.
You hear yourself take a breath. It shakes, still. But you can hear. You can hear this single breath that stretches out of your lungs.
You keep brushing Katsu until you feel a sound coming out of you that isn’t just a breath. You make a rumble and a grumble.
Katsu meows back.
This feels like an okay conversation to have. Noises feel okay. Not too big an ask for a body that feels so unsteady.
Using the wall to balance, you coax yourself to stand. Slowly but surely. Katsu winds around your legs
You feel your jeans slip down again.
With no energy left to hike them back up, you let them drop, sighing as they pool around your ankles.
Your fight’s gone.
You stand and stare out across your Brand New Room, allowing your eyes to fall on the chest of drawers that’s stood untouched since you arrived.
Katsu becomes your shadow on the withering walk over. You can’t think what’s compelled you to have a look inside, but something spurs you into pulling on a handle. Perhaps the new layer of sweat sticking your shirt and back together.
Empty, you think, for a moment. Until you notice something, folded neatly in a corner.
A pair of pyjamas, still with tags and fresh from the shop. Upmarket, too. Proper piping and everything.
Not something you’d be seen buying for yourself. But the sort of thing you’d hope for. Quietly, at least.
They look…comfortable, you assess. Perhaps not genuine silk, but close enough that only the most pernickety people could find it in them to complain. In a nice dark purple, too—a very welcome departure from anything resembling fluorescent orange.
You’ve become so used to falling into bed fully-clothed that when you pull the trousers on, you can’t help but let out a quiet little ‘Oh’ to yourself as you remember how it feels. The bliss of an elasticated waist. Being allowed to spend your life in something other than stiff denim.
The Brand New silky smooth you sits down on his Brand New bed to do up the buttons on his Brand New pyjamas. Your hands still feel a trace of the heavy, clumsy, shaky feeling, and you think to yourself that it might be okay to take it slow. Just this once.
There isn’t anybody to watch you fret, and fuss, and struggle with this. Nobody to look and laugh.
Just Murdoc.
When the final button pops into place at last, you give yourself a moment to lie flat. Rest your eyes. Your body.
It feels like it’s been on non-stop. Permanently wired.
There’s been no other choice
No other way for you to be.
The pyjamas are comfy. You admit that to yourself. Maybe you’ll admit that to everyone else, when you feel able.
You don’t right now. You know yourself enough for you to know that.
Whichever self this is. Brand New or Same Old
It's hard to tell, sometimes.
There’s a quiet thud of mattress springs. You open your eyes to see Katsu, pit-patting over to join you.
It curls up in a dip your body leaves, and you pause in an idle stroke along its back to wrestle with a private thought. A private worry you have, about twisting, and turning, and ticcing, and kicking it right off the bed.
You remember having that same worry. A long time ago, when Noodle was still small, and still insisted on squishing up into your bed in the Winne whenever the fancy took her. Even when you tried to get her to at least sleep on the floor, where she’d be safer.
You stare at Katsu.
Katsu stares back.
‘…You’re not gonna move, are you?’
Katsu waves its tail at you.
You exhale through your nose, rolling your eyes towards the ceiling.
For a while, things are quiet enough that you can pick up sounds going on throughout the house. A buzz from a telly somewhere. A flush, and the groan of the pipes. Still feels novel, to be surrounded by a soundtrack that’s so ordinary. So…calm.
Even wrapped in silk and sheets, your skin still itches at the calm.
Then, your door opens.
You expect Russel. Perhaps even 2D.
Not Noodle.
She doesn’t look at you.
You don’t look at her.
‘Oh,’ she says lightly. Brightly. ‘There you are, Katsu.’
Katsu doesn’t jump down. You wonder if she might come in. Scoop the cat up from off you.
…You don’t know what reason she might have to do that. It just feels...plausible. Owing to…things.
But she doesn’t. She just stands for a moment, in the doorway.
You feel the need to say…something. Acknowledge her, somehow.
‘Good colour, that,’ you gesture towards the orange in her hair. Faded now, to a gentle, peachy hue. ‘Suits you.’
‘Actually, I was thinking of changing it.’
‘…Right,’ you bite your lip. ‘What’s next, then?’
She shrugs. ‘Haven’t decided. Blue, maybe?’
You suck in a tight breath. ‘…Nothing wrong with letting it come back in naturally for a while, is there?’
‘What, like you do?’ she deadpans. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but you’re sure you see a hint of a smile ghosting at the corners of her mouth.
‘I’m a cautionary tale, love, not an example.’
‘In that case, I’m glad I read the small print.’
You smile tightly.
If Noodle notices, she says nothing, nodding a brief farewell before she closes the door once more.
You feel your face dropping like a stone as you collapse back into the pillows.
That precarious, eggshell feeling hasn’t gone away after all. Feels like Noodle popped up at the perfect moment to remind you. Just as you were starting to experiment with feeling comfy again.
You try to feel comfy now. You do try. You promise. You try the whole thing of snuggling down, even in the face of all these new feelings and new smells that are coming out from everywhere.
You don’t remember conversation feeling this difficult. Not for Same Old Murdoc. Words were special tools for him to use, and leap around from thing to thing, and send a thousand little barbs flying out behind him to push everybody back.
But now…now Noodle is so far away that you can barely see her on the horizon. Her features are a blur when you squint through that telescope. Strange, and warped, and too big in some places. In others, much too small.
You did that.
Nobody says you did that, but you know you did that. Even if the pieces of everything feel so jumbled in your head, there’s still that cold, curdled feeling in the pit of your stomach, when you force your gaze to meet hers. Hear Russel’s words in her mouth. See 2D’s blue sheen in her hair.
This. This must be the punishment. The nightmare you can’t wake from. A sentence that you have to serve. For the rest of your life, natural or otherwise. Unspoken, but always there to kick you down.
You feel it. Tightly in your chest, beneath the gift of silk. A cushion for the blow, perhaps.
You slip your hand under piped lapels to find the coarser you; The hair, and metal, and the ancient, whitened scars. A man devoting time to feeling nothing. Who would and could wear that so proudly.
Who would not be seen dead in such poncy pyjamas, for a start.
Your hands curl to claws, and grip the fabric. Ready to rip, in a frenzy of flying buttons.
But your mind harkens back. To that empty drawer. The crispness of the folds. A sign of intent, if ever there was one.
A gift. For you.
When they’ve had all the chances in the world to come in here and take them away. When you’ve been so…Not Good, and Not Brand New.
Your brow creases.
It doesn’t make sense.
You breathe out. Slowly. Rubbing the pad of your finger against your sleeve.
It does feel nice.
Fits well, too.
You can’t remember giving anyone your measurements. Other than…the rise. Sort of. And anyway, it’s hardly as if you’ve ever got on with tailoring, what with the combination of aggravating factors like pins, and your body’s propensity for not doing what it’s told, especially when the thing it’s told is to stand very still and very quietly.
And. Um. Touching.
So…
Hm.
You sit with that. Shift around a bit and feel the material slide over your skin while you hold these thoughts inside your head, and they turn around.
Slowly.
You’re not sure what to make of this.
Gifts are…not easy, to put it simply. Always coming with strings attached. The kind that leave you tangled. Choking, when nobody else can even see them wound around your neck.
Katsu’s eyes follow your finger as you trace along the fibres, in search of a telltale strand. Invisible to everybody, but it doesn’t stop you feeling that tug. Dragging you into motion. Do Something. Do Something, you need to Do Something. Guess what you have to do, because we won’t tell you. Do the exact thing we want. Say the exact words we want. Make the exact choice we want you to make, or else. Or Else. No, we’re not telling you. You should know. You should always know. Why aren’t you doing it? What are you, stupid?
You find yourself clutching your head, where everything has gotten very loud. After all the enforced quiet you’ve been putting up with, the noise is downright deafening.
Until suddenly, with a sound of crinkling bedding, Katsu parks itself right on your knees.
Legs crumpling, you grunt in surprise at the new warmth. New weight.
‘Move.’ You tell it shortly, your lower half pinned to the mattress.
Katsu stands. Circles.
And then sits straight back down again.
You flop into the pillows, firing all your venom into a wordless grumble.
What does it expect you to do? Take an afternoon nap, like an old man?
You’re not even tired.
You mutinously stare up at the ceiling. Not even a spider to divert your attention from the singular nothingness of this Satan-forsaken room.
The cat’s head is laid against you. It’s making that rumbly noise again.
Feels almost like a massage. You think, if you happened to be a bloke with old and rheumy joints, then perhaps it would be the sort of thing you’d enjoy.
But you’re not. And you don’t.
You don’t.
Well. You’ve got nothing else to do. So, you think you could try just resting your eyes again.
Just for a bit.
You’ll be straight up again, if anything happens. Obviously.
Just a short rest. You promise. Just for your eyes. Your eyes are the only bit that’s tired.
Nothing else.
The rest of you could keep going for ages, if it wanted.
You flex your shoulders into the mattress.
See?
Mm.
You roll.
You feel your body curl. It curls, and curls.
Silky. Soft.
And safe.
The sound of the cat fills your ears. Fills your head with a calming, buzzing feeling.
Your chest begins to rise and fall in time with the gentle noise.
The quiet is nice. An okay quiet to be in.
You have missed quiet.
A bit. Only a little bit.
And only this sort of quiet.
The one that isn’t tense, and full of a thousand million things bearing down on you.
In this quiet, you can hear yourself breathe. You can breathe deeply.
Calmly.
You can keep your eyes closed, for moment after moment.
Safe enough to sleep.

*
Your eyes open to darkness. Watering in rancid air.
You hear breath. Your footsteps, splashing.
The walls are slick with thick green gunge. Mottled rusty patches scrape and slice your palms as you pass.
The tunnel closes in around you. Squeezes at your bones.
And then, a distant sound that echoes through the pipes. Beginning only as a whisper. A stifled laugh from high, high above.
You struggle onwards, and it grows and grows with every step, ringing out and filling up the dark until it slows you to a fumbling stagger.
Voices you know, woven into a snare. You hear them. Clear as day, inside your head. Aren’t you glad he’s gone? Isn’t it easier, with him out of the way? Yes. Yes. So much easier. So much nicer. I’m not sure I want him back, are you? I never liked him in the first place. Let him stay gone, I say. Let him rot in a cell for the rest of his life. We’d hardly miss him. Can’t even do his one job right. Hope he gets what he deserves in jail. What a worthless waste of space.
You crouch, open your mouth, and out spews a torrent of shit.
Wracked by shaking, you crawl along the ground with heaving, hauling motions. Your arms quiver. Your fingers scrabble. Water sloshes at your wrists. Drips down onto your head from a place you can’t see.
Your vision dims and dims with every moment. All the while, the water rises.
Your legs become submerged. Your stomach.
You drag your body on and on, a putrid stagnant smell arising from the water as you plunge your arms and legs in one by one. Each waterlogged part of you pulling down. Down.
It laps around your neck. You cough. You choke, eyes rolling in your head.
From behind, a current surges. Your legs quake, and then give out.
In pitch darkness, you feel the water close over your head and pin you to the floor.
It picks you up. It hurls you through endless pressing dark and roaring thunder, and your eardrums shatter from the force of it against your skull.
In the sudden silence, you begin to scream and scream and scream for help you know will never ever come.
But still, you keep screaming, until you don’t know what it’s like to have a chest that’s not on fire and drowning at once.
You feel yourself. Revolving.
Dragged round. And round. And round again.
In slow-motion, your legs flail. Kick and splash in sodden, leaden jerks.
Your body rises, and then falls. The laughter builds and builds to a thunderous crescendo.
And in a swirling instant, you feel a thousand hands. A thousand hooks.
Pulling you at once beneath the water, and into an abyss.

*
You wake up with a gasping heave of breath, mouth wide, and body flapping wildly.
The walls are harsh, and white, and for a few terrifying moments, you wonder if you’ve been transported back.
Your blood freezes in your veins, chest still throbbing as you fight to fill your lungs. You can feel your ribcage shudder with the effort.
Forcing a blink, you lever yourself up to take in the shapes around you. Nightstand. Lampshade. Chest of drawers.
Sunlight.
You’re not there. You’re not there.
You tell yourself that you’re not there until your bones lie flat again, and your chest loosens.
No bars, look. No bars. A nice big window.
You stand, with a momentary twinge of upset as you realise the state of your new pyjamas, now covered with a sheen of sweat from where you’ve doubtless flailed yourself into a frenzy.
Colour rises to your face.
Murdoc Niccals is much too old for this.
You grimly unbutton your shirt, opting for the trousers to remain on when you recall that you have no pants to speak of. Not that that’s ever had much bearing on your state of undress before. But there might be Brand New rules about these things, in a house you’re only staying in but for the grace of everybody else’s sensibilities.
Through the window, you glimpse the sun. Already high in the sky.
A long sleep, then.
In the bright light, your mouth twists, and your teeth clench.
Clearly, nobody was all that bothered to wake you.
Well…what if you had things you’d wanted to get on with today? What then? You’ve half a mind to storm right downstairs and demand some sort of recompense, for all this precious time, your precious time they’ve felt it fit to fucking waste for no good reason.
…You sigh.
Same Old Murdoc might’ve had no issue with that. But Brand New Murdoc is the lowest in the pecking order. All small and unsure, and finding his feet. He can barely raise his voice, let alone demand anything, unless he wants to feel their scolding eyes on him for the rest of the dwindling day.
And just like that, Brand New Murdoc becomes paralysed by indecision. By all the tiny little pieces that he has to keep from tumbling down from hands that sweat and shake.
Here you are again, at a loose end. You stand in the middle of the room, and stare down at yourself. Your feet grip the ground, in sore need of a rug to stand on. Somewhere they can feel firmly planted and stand tall.
Pants, you remind yourself, in a tone you hope feels sharp and authoritative. You need some pants.
When you push open the door, the landing is silent. Strange. You would have at least expected some telltale noise on the stairs. A pattern you’ve spent such a long time spotting that its absence makes you feel just that little bit off-kilter.
You like that noise. You like to know who’s coming and going, even from the top of the house. You’ve always felt better for it.
Safer.
You chew your lip and begin your descent, straining your ears to pick up any hint of sound, or smell. But the air tells you nothing. For all you know, you’ve been left alone in an empty house.
You breathe in. Sharply.
Your legs wobble.
You hold a…thing.
You don’t remember.
You don’t know what you’re holding, but you hold it.
Tight.
Your nails scrape on the thing.
You keep holding.
Keep holding.
You can see the door.
The door is closed and isn’t opening.
Using the. The thing. You pull yourself down, and you sit on the stairs and you stare at the door.
You think. You think you might’ve.
Forgotten.
Forgotten something.
Um.
You don’t know.
You keep staring at the door.
There is no noise.
No sound anywhere.
You make a huddle at the almost bottom, and chew your nails, and keep watching the door.
Your eyes don’t move away.
The door doesn’t open, but it will open soon.
It will.
You know it.
You have to keep looking at the door so you know when it opens.
You are very still.
Very quiet.
And then.
There’s a footstep sound.
The door doesn’t open, but you hear the footstep sound getting closer.
And then.
‘Oh hey, Mudz. Thought you were still asleep.’
You blink up at Russel and find things in your eyes that you didn’t know were there.
‘Noodle and ‘D are out. Thought I’d do a spot of yard work while the weather’s fine.’ He waves with a muddy glove on one hand.
You sit and try to take all of that in. Noodle and 2D are Out. Russel is not Out. He is here.
Okay.
‘You wanna come and join me? I could always use an extra pair of hands.’
‘Pants.’ Your voice comes out, after a long time.
‘Huh?’
‘I need pants.’
You remember now. You were coming downstairs to get your pants.
You clutch the banister and pull yourself back up to stand. Your skin feels strange and prickly, like the air is too heavy.
Russel follows you to the utility room, even though you know the way to go. You find your clothes, stacked on top of the machine in a basket.
He doesn’t watch whilst you change into your fresh pants. You can still feel him there, as you take a moment to stand with yourself, and smell the clean scent. A Same Old smell that feels…okay.
You’re here, and it’s okay.
‘Hey,’ his voice is quiet. ‘Everything alright?’
‘Fine.’ You retort brusquely, without turning around, and grab a t-shirt that looks vaguely size-appropriate enough for you to fling on without inviting any kind of stupid comment.
‘Only, I heard yelling last night.’
‘Get some earplugs, then.’ You snap, barging your way past him and into the hall. It’s a small mercy that he allows you to get out of there at all.
Why is he doing this now? For fuck’s sake, you were just starting to get to grips with this bloody horrible place, and now you can’t even concentrate.
You hear him padding after you.
‘Murdoc—’
Brand New Murdoc does his best to keep his head down and ignore him.
Meanwhile, Same Old Murdoc feels his blood pressure climb into triple digits.
Somewhere along the way, you take a wrong turn and end up stumbling into the kitchen.
Exhaling furiously, you try and spin back round, only to be faced by Russel standing in the doorway. He’s smiling. A sad smile, just like the one 2D wore yesterday.
You wish they’d stop looking at you like that. All of them. Even the bloody cat. Like they know you. Like they understand you. They certainly weren’t acting like it when you were banged up.
It makes you want to punch him in the face. Karma, 20 years in the making.
You surge forward. Russel just stands there, quietly watching you. Doesn’t even put his hands up or anything.
‘I fucking hate you.’ You snarl, swinging at him with an ineffectual fist that only grazes the air.
‘Okay. You gonna come and chill outside, or what?’
You reel back, and your body sags. ‘Why?’
He shrugs. ‘Just figured you might be in need of a little fresh air, is all.’
‘I’ve had plenty, actually.’
‘Is that so?’ Russel folds his arms. ‘You wanna show me where the yard is, then?’
You gnash your teeth. He knows he’s won.
‘C’mon. I’ve got lemonades outside.’
He moseys easily down the hall, scarcely even bothering to check if you’re following. As if he can already see your every move, plotted out on a spreadsheet in front of him.
You hate spreadsheets.
You hate him.
Same Old Murdoc leaves that hatred bubbling away on its own little stove whilst Brand New Murdoc pilots your legs and drags you down the hall after him. Same Old Murdoc feels the need to interject with plenty of growls to make his presence known. Plenty of eye-rolling.
Perhaps a little bit too much eye-rolling, because before long it turns to ticcing. Rubber band snaps behind your eyes.
You lunge, and pull them taut before too many can escape. A silent tic is still a tic, and tics still wave a flag above your head. Red cloth to a bull.
You can’t afford to forget anymore. Prison did a good job re-teaching you a lot of things to take back to the Now Now Rest Of Your Life. Toughened you up, where things were getting a bit loose and flabby in your middle-age.
Russel looks across at you. Eyes refocused, you scowl back at him. Throw him off the scent.
Hold in the feeling. The brewing thunderclap.
You take it in your hands and crush it to a molten ball to force back down your windpipe. No sympathy for any snotty-faced retching. Suck it up. Suck it up Or Else.
With gooseflesh prickling up and down, you walk along in stiff silence, vision fixed to the back of Russel’s neck. He leads you through the living room to some French doors you didn’t notice, half-hidden by a blind which he presently pulls up, sending a blast of sunlight right into your eyes.
You hiss, screwing up your face even further at his low chuckle.
This must be a game to him. Trying to beat the record for how many jabs he can take at the wonky fourth wheel before it falls off.
You bury your head in your hands for a moment, refusing to take in the air that wafts in as he opens the door. Outside looms, whooshing right into Inside with a new sense of cold. An entirely different Bigness.
You’ve been making slow progress on things in the house. And now there’s more to being Free. So much more. The whole of Outside, and everything that comes with that. The stepping out. The sudden, unplanned meetings on the street. The first trip to the corner shop. Standing in cramped, sun-drenched aisles to choose some things. Just small things. A bag of sweets, or a pack of fags. Not things you need, but things you want.
Wanting, again.
Having wants, and whims, and things that you do. Places you go, in your own time.
Free Time.
It's a lot. A lot to think about. A lot you’re not sure you’re ready to think about.
Not yet.
All the same, you raise your head and start with something smaller; The ‘yard space’ Russel was gassing up is barely bigger than a postage stamp. No grass to speak of, either. A lot of mismatched pots and hanging planters strewn around, and full of flowers, and shrubs, and green, smelly sorts of things that he flings over your tea seemingly without rhyme or reason, and you spend a lot of time methodically picking out. You spot a plant full of chillies parked in one corner, and off to another side, a couple of sun-faded deckchairs. A radio burbles quietly from its precarious perch on top of iron railings, shielded a bit more by a bamboo screen encircling the whole thing.
You take an experimental step onto the deck. Feels sturdy. Not the kind of thing that’ll be shrieking and creaking at you. Even 2D would have a difficult time falling through the floor.
‘Want one?’
You try and fail not to jump at the sound of Russel’s voice, blinking at the glass bottle in his outstretched hand. Lemonade, still sweating from the drinks cooler he’s lugged out here.
You take it without a word. The proper yellow stuff. None of that bleach-looking shite.
Cap unscrewed, you sample a sip, letting the acidity dance on your tongue for a quiet moment.
The breeze is gently warm around you.
You close your eyes.
Feels like you’re somewhere else. Far away from here.
You’re not one to believe in that whole ‘oasis of calm’ hippy-dippy bullshit, but...
Well, standing here, you don’t immediately have the urge to fling yourself over the rails, which is an improvement, however slight.
You’ll admit that. Just to yourself.
Nice to get some different air in your lungs.
You can hear Russel pottering around you in your stillness, like you’re a fancy ornament decorating his space.
Your eyes snap open. He's knelt down, both gloves on, and pressing at the plant pots.
‘What d’you want me to do?’ you blurt, before the ungainly feeling takes you over completely.
Russel turns suddenly, as though he’s forgotten you’re there. ‘Gotta pull up and re-pot all of these guys first of all, if you wanna lend a hand?’
‘Why?’
‘Plants outgrow their spaces, just like people,’ He tugs up a small bush in a shower of dirt and trailing roots. ‘Doesn’t seem right to house something where it doesn’t fit.’
You grunt in reply, staring down at your ungloved hands. The ragged nails, shredded and bitten right down. All the pits and thick calluses.
With a strange feeling of apprehension in your gut, you shuffle over to a nearby pot, and inspect the delicate stem sprouting up against the railings.
For a moment, you grip it at the base.
And then.
‘…I’m not gonna break it, am I?’
Russel looks over at you.
You bite your lip.
‘You’ll do fine, man. The movement’s just gotta be smooth.”
You nod.
But you don’t start pulling.
It's a plant.
It shouldn’t matter.
But…
With a sound, you pull back and sit down on the deck.
‘I don’t know.’
Russel takes a moment to respond.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay’, what?’
‘Just okay. It’s okay.’ He repeats.
But.
‘But…no,’ you don’t look at him. ‘No it isn’t.’
‘Why isn’t it?’
You huff, clutching your head.
There are a lot of things that you know aren’t okay, but you can’t say any of them. And you can’t understand why this is okay, and why he’d be okay with this, when he asked you. He asked you to do a thing, and it was such a small and stupid thing, but you can’t do it. And it’s not okay that you can’t do it, but you can’t say why you can’t do it. You don’t know why you can’t. Why it feels so wrong, so…frightening, to pull up a plant while he’s watching, and maybe…maybe have it break. Maybe have it snap right in your hands. Maybe.
Probably.
‘Hey, Murdoc?’
You turn.
‘I trust you.’
Why. Why. Why does he. What. Why. You. You’ve. What.
‘I don’t always trust you, believe me. But right now? I trust that you’re giving this your best shot. Alright?’
You stare into your lap.
This doesn’t feel right.
Heat flames in your face.
You gulp down an emergency sip of lemonade. Try to cool off. Try to feel normal, instead of hot and sticky and horrible.
You don’t think it’s working.
You just want to crawl into a plant pot and bury yourself in the soil. Maybe then you’ll grow into someone different. Someone better.
Someone worthy of that trust.
Worthy of anything.
‘I’ll handle the plants,’ Russel easily lifts the pot in front of you over to where he’s sitting. ‘You can top up the compost for the ones I’ve already re-planted. Sound better?’
You nod mutely. In the privacy of your head, you’re glad that he didn’t say ‘easier.’
Just adding some soil. Feels like a thing you can do. A thing you can’t spoil.
You wander over to where the compost bag lies split open, with a trowel plunged into its insides.
Simple enough.
Don’t overthink it.
You scoop up a trowel-full and dump it into the nearest pot, patting the stuff down like you saw Russel do.
Bit like building a sandcastle, this. Only with no tipping the pot up at the end.
A heavy, earthy smell clings to your fingers as you fill it up to just below the brim. You don’t find yourself hating it.
‘Sure, it’s not much in the way of a garden,’ Russel murmurs, perhaps not entirely to you. ‘But we still thought we oughta have a bit of green space up here. Something to look after.’
‘Mm.’ you respond, at a bit of a loss for words.
‘Y’know, giving yourself just that little something to focus on can help a lot with feeling connected to what’s going on, even if it’s small. Could be a cat. Could be a cactus.’
‘Right.’
‘You’re sorta like a cactus in a lot of ways, Mudz.’ You spot his lip twitching. ‘I know, you’re happy to be left to it, and you might prefer it that way, but there are those times when you might need just that little bit of water to perk you back up a bit.’
‘What’s your point?’
Russel sighs. ‘Look, man. Taking care of yourself can be an uphill battle. I get that. None of us want to see you stuck in the weeds.’
You purse your lips, feeling that Same Old urge to argue froth up. 'But what if I want the weeds to be there?'
'You don't really want to be dealing with a whole mess of weeds, do you?'
‘Um,’ you stammer. 'Y-yes. Cause weeds are...they're good for the environment, y'know? Like bugs, and bees, etcetera. I'm very eco-friendly, actually. I wrote an album about it.'
He puts down a plant with a thud. ‘Mudz, we know you’ve been having a really rough time lately.’
Your grip on the trowel tightens. Absently, you scoop up some extra-large and especially clumsy loads of compost, dumping them haphazardly into the pot in front of you.
‘Do you?’ the words are venomous, hissed beneath your breath.
At once, you feel the gaze he’s had on you drop into his lap.
Shame. Good. Let him feel shame for once. Let it fill him right up until he’s drowning in it in his every waking moment and doesn’t dare look you in the eye.
For a long time, the only noise is the faint crackle of Russel’s radio. You take some sullen sips of lemonade and direct your gaze pointedly away from him.
‘Sure,’ he doesn’t raise his head, addressing the plants for all you know. ‘I might not’ve been in your shoes—
‘You wouldn’t fit, for a start.’
‘—But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to listen.’ He presses. He veritably squashes you down like dirt with the sudden new wave of pressure he’s unloading over you. A horrible cold sweat, seeping through your skin.
You scrub your hands down your face, and your fingers curl to tug at your hair in the quiet, now full to the brim with expectation.
‘…What do you want me to say?’ you’re wracked by a sigh, surrounded by dark.
‘You don’t have to say anything.’ He doesn’t look at you. ‘Not unless you feel like you can.’
‘What if I can’t?’
You’re not sure you even speak the words aloud. Your mouth makes the shapes, but the sound of them vanishes.
‘Then that’s just fine, too.’
You close your eyes tightly, feeling your forehead crease behind your hands. You wish…You wish it wasn’t just fine.
Sometimes, you wish someone would come, and tug the words right out of you. Unfurl your tongue like a fucking Fruit Winder, so that you can vom them up, and be done with this whole disease of dirt and shit and…everything clogging up your throat.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ your voice emerges as a defeated rasp.
‘Like it or not, you need it. Take it from me, a guy who’s got his shit together isn’t screaming in his sleep.’
Mouth dry, you shrink down into your clothes.
‘I said before, I don’t know a whole lot about prison, but I do know how it feels to be alone in a new place, and full of a burden that it never felt right to unload. Sure, you have people around you, but they always seem miles off in the distance from where you’re at.’
‘…Or too close.’ You mutter, staring down at the soil.
Russel hums, but doesn’t say anything more. You can feel him giving you this silence to break.
But you can’t. Your throat still feels too tight to let anything free.
‘For what it’s worth,’ He finally puts you out of your misery. ‘I bet you any one of us would feel the same in your position.’
‘But you’re not in my position.’ You growl in an instant. Nobody knows what it’s like to be you. Nobody can ever understand the rotten depths of who Murdoc Niccals is, or was, or…just…anything.
‘Maybe not,’ Russel admits, doing that loathsome sad smile again. ‘But I promise you, we’re all doing our best to empathise.’
There it is. The dreaded empathy. The thing that makes them just so sickeningly superior to you, with everything they happily watch you fail to understand.
‘Why?’ you feel your voice splintering. A thousand unsaid words crash in a wave against your clenched teeth. The solitary, crumbling sea wall.
‘Man, you’re as much a part of this house as anyone else. I know it might not feel like it right now but believe me when I say we all want you to feel like you have a place here.’
‘I hate it here!’ you bellow. Your voice echoes in the quiet of the street below.
Russel says nothing. Even his radio is silent.
You feel sick. Not just in a physical, puking sense, but…sicker than that. A losing control of your body and mind kind of sickness that curls you into a ball on the deck whilst the sun shines on, oblivious.
You’re not sure how long you lie there. You can hear Russel carrying on where you left off. Fixing all the mess you made, no doubt.
At some point, his voice floats over.
‘You’ve done a good job with these, Mudz. Thank you.’
‘Liar!’ You scream back.
Russel ignores it. His heavy footfalls vibrate against the wood as he moves...somewhere. Grabs…something.
The something goes on the floor with a clunk nearby.
You don’t want to look. You don’t want to.
You don’t want to do anything.
You just…
You want…
You…
You don’t know what you want anymore.
‘Wanna give these a little spritz for me?’
You don’t.
You stay silent.
‘No worries.’
Worries.
Worries, worries, worries.
You brux until your teeth start to shudder and tingle.
There’s a soft sound of spraying water around you. Like a showerhead.
You curl in tighter.
Russel’s voice still manages to break through. ‘Hey, Murdoc? if there’s anything we can do, to help you feel more comfortable, then all you need to do is ask, aight?’
‘I can’t.’ your voice cracks.
‘Why not, man?’
Your head throbs. You clutch it tightly and try to make words come. ‘I shouldn’t. Ask. For anything. I can’t.’
You can picture him. Frowning. ‘Mudz, what does that mean?’
‘I don’t.’ Your eyes sting from how tight they’re closed. ‘I don’t. Deserve it.’
More quiet. More water spray sounds.
And then, silence
Russel’s footsteps get closer.
He sits down next to you. You don’t move.
‘Hey.’ He speaks softly. ‘Look at me, for a sec?’
You gnaw your lip, and slowly raise your head from where it’s crushed against your chest.
Russel holds your gaze before he speaks again.
‘You don’t have to punish yourself anymore, okay?’
Through narrowed eyes, you watch him stretch his legs out, leaning back on his hands for support where he’s sat. Comfortable in this space.
It feels like something you could never be, even if you copied him. Still a crude impersonation, when you feel so incapable.
‘You’ve paid your dues already. Why build yourself another cage, man?’
‘Just feels…right, I suppose,’ You shrug. And then, at a whisper, you add ‘…Safe.’
Mp<‘No-one here is out to get you, Murdoc.’ Russel puts his hand firmly on your shoulder. ‘I promise, we all want you to succeed. Fact is, you’re dysregulated to hell and back right now, and—’
‘I’m what?’
‘Dysregulated,’ he repeats. ‘It’s the trouble you’re having with keeping yourself in check—and why we’re doing things like we are, even when it feels hard on you. It takes work on everyone’s part to make the right kind of place for somebody to heal.’
‘…How?’ you feel the desperation in your voice as it cracks.
‘That’s not for me to say,’ His smile is apologetic. ‘Success, recovery, it looks different to everybody. Sometimes, you’ve gotta give your body time and space to tell you what it wants.’
You chew on your lip. Right now, your body feels…tight. Tense.
And very, very tired.
Tired of the constant electricity sparking through its veins. The raging fire spewing from its mouth. Tired of Same Old Murdoc, pacing around in his Same Old circles.
It doesn’t want to do that anymore.
But. But it doesn’t know how.
It just doesn’t understand.
It doesn’t have anything it wants to do instead.
This is the only thing it knows. The only thing it feels good at doing. Blasting people with its flames. Shocking people with its electricity.
Scaring them away.
It is a monster, and it knows it is a monster, and it is happy to be a monster, where it fits nice and snug in skin and clothes that are worn and faded, but feel like home.
A monster stares around, at plants it helped to pot.
It helped. It did a good job.
It cradles a leaf in a giant, monstrous hand.
A leaf that lives here now because a monster didn’t burn it to a crisp.
It could’ve done that. But it didn’t.
And now there are things here. Evidence a monster lived and breathed and sat in this space, when it was so afraid.
A tiny vine winds itself around a monster’s finger.
A knot. To tell a monster not to forget.
It did a good job, and it helped.
‘Uh, Mudz…’ Russel’s voice is distant. ‘I’ve been thinking on it, and I owe you an apology.’
You blink, back to feeling the sun on your neck. The scratch of rough wood on your bare legs.
‘What for?’
‘For not giving you time and space like this when it was needed way back when.’ He scratches the back of his neck. ‘When you last got out, I mean.’
Your brow furrows. ‘That was years ago.’
‘Still,’ he shrugs. ‘These sorts of things have a habit of sticking.’
‘Not to me.’ You blurt, on instinct.
Russel looks at you for a long time.
You turn away, clearing your throat until a breezy voice comes out. ‘Apology accepted, whatever.’
You feel the sudden urge to leap up and scramble back inside. Must be the house that’s disorienting you. Fucking weird, growing things on a roof, and not the ground.
‘Thanks again, man,’ His voice comes from miles away as you pull yourself up, dimly aware of a near-empty lemonade bottle pressed into your palm. Barely cold anymore. ‘You’re always welcome out here, if you ever need it.’
‘Yeah.’ You reply weakly, with a vague nod towards where you think he might be.
Then you turn, and dart through the French doors, skittering across the living room floor.
You’re halfway up the stairs when you hear tyres rolling on the driveway. Reflexively, you scramble to the top and hide yourself behind the banister to listen out for the familiar sequence of sounds.
An engine cutting out.
A car door swinging open.
Then closed.
Footsteps growing louder
In the momentary stillness of the house, you release a few tics as they bubble up to sit in your windpipe.
The front door opens, bringing with it a buzz of voices, and a strange thudding, clunking sort of sound.
From the landing, you peer down at the top of 2D’s head. He’s carrying an unmarked box, taped up at the top and impossible to guess as to what could be inside.
Noodle comes through moments later, similarly decked out, although not nearly so loud with the contents of hers.
The both of them drift towards the living room, voices fading.
You take this opportunity to dash into your room, closing the door behind you with enough force that it almost becomes a slam.
…Why have you become this?
You stand in the centre of the blank room, tempted to fall straight into bed. But there’s an itchy, irritable feeling, sitting beneath your skin.
You know you’d be up like a shot, even with all your very best snuggling down.
Perpetually Unsnuggled. That’s what you are.
Russel felt too close, just then. Hovering right over the mark with all his talk of time, and space, and punishment, like you’re the easiest book to read. Baby’s First Trip To Prison.
Time and space are foreign, to this body that needs to survive and earn its keep. That can never afford such luxuries as sitting and chatting about every fucking useless feeling that’s ever entered its stupid head. You’ve got to be up. You’ve got to be going. Firing on all cylinders, and even more besides, just in case. Keep your wits about you. Or Else.
You look down at the sun-warmed lemonade, still clutched in your hand.
The work of a moment would send it sailing into the wall in a shower of glass.
Quite apart from you, your body shudders, breath hitching. A sudden tightness fills your chest, and—
No.
You put the bottle down with a firm and final thud on the bedside table.
Come on. Come on.
Slow, deliberate blinks.
You can see your feet. Your toes, curling against the floor with a scrape of nails.
You dig your fingers into your palms, and feel each crescent cutting in. Sharp enough.
You’re here. Living and breathing.
Still. After all this time.
After everything.
There’s a sudden knock at the door, and you bristle. Prepare a growl.
It opens before you get a chance, pushed in first by a box.
And then, in comes Noodle.
You freeze in place, rooted to the spot by a flash of fear blasting through your chest. Lightning-fast, you rack your brains, for anything you might’ve said or done to warrant her disapproval.
‘Hey.’ Her voice is calm. Casual.
‘Hello.’ It comes out as a gasp. A choke. You spin to look at her, aware at every moment of her eyes on you, sweeping up and down.
‘Alright?’
‘Fine,’ replies the autocue, strained and breathy.
‘Hm.’ You know she’s not convinced. It hangs in the air as silence ticks on.
Her gaze falls to the box she’s holding, and you take the moment to break away. Let out the breath you’ve held.
‘Well, we got this out for you,’ She thrusts it out into the empty air. ‘Your things, from storage.’
‘Right.’
‘There’s not a lot. Just some essentials for the time being. 2D helped as well.’
‘An oxymoron.’ You mutter, regarding the cardboard. Much better-kept than you would’ve expected. No trace of a kick.
You lick your lips, startling yourself as you break another silence. ‘Um. D’you think you could…just pop it on the bed for now?’
Noodle doesn’t question it, even though there’s space in this cavernous conversation. ‘Alright.’ She shrugs, placing the box onto your mattress with a gentleness that feels unearned, even as you see it.
She has every opportunity. Every reason to lob it at your head.
It would be easier than this.
‘I’ll get to it.’ You feel the need to speak aloud. Reassuring her. The ghost of a girl inside your head, who needed that, above anything else.
‘No rush.’
You close your eyes, and in that moment, ache to rush. To be ready, and able, and willing, and everything she expects.
Everything she deserves.
She has always deserved more.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t strain yourself.’
‘Noodle, I—’ you turn sharply, a momentary crackle of that Same Old lightning coursing through your blood, closely followed by half a dozen neck tics.
But she’s smiling. Not the cheesy grin of days long gone by, but a smile nonetheless.
‘I mean it.’ You finish, feeble and pathetic sounding to your ears.
‘I know.’
You nod in acknowledgement. Given the choice, you think you’d quite like to finish talking now, and go to sleep instantly, box on the bed be damned.
‘…I read the note. By the way.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one you sent. To the man we thought was El Mierda.’
‘Oh.’
You train your gaze firmly on the box, and not on her.
‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘I didn’t know what we were dealing with. For all we knew, he was a genuine criminal mastermind.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘…Of course you didn’t.’
If you had a heart, it would be pounding.
As it is, your hands grow clammy, held in tight fists at your sides.
‘You could’ve said anything.’ Even without looking, you can feel her eyes on you. ‘But…I’m glad you said what you did.’
‘I’m…’ you falter. ‘Glad I did, too.’
After a long while, you drag your eyes up to meet hers. In your bare feet, there’s nothing in it between you.
She blinks, slowly.
You blink back.
Noodle smiles, a soft orange light hovering on the edge of your space.
Enough, for now, to warm your hands.
She doesn’t say anything more, excusing herself in a comfortable quiet that you feel fill the room once she’s left.
You turn to the bed. The well-kept box.
Another unexpected gift.
You pick it up. Rotate it in your hands for just a moment.
Your nail finds the tape, and with deliberation, you peel it back in one long strip until the flaps spring upwards.
A waft of Same Old air floats free.
You plunge your hand inside and feel around to discover softness.
Warmth.
With careful tugs, you pull it loose, until it lands in your lap as a mound of velvet.
Your Same Old cape.
With a soft ‘Oh’, you hurriedly put it round your shoulders. Still for a moment, as you feel the familiar fibres drape across your body.
Humming, you wrap yourself tightly and roll on the bed until you feel perfectly secure. The material surrounds you in a gently rippling weight.
Your body feels calm. Pacified by pressure. Every piece of you is here. Safe in the Same Old comfort.
You peer back in the box, and almost recoil at the second, unexpected thing, crumpled at the bottom.
A very worn and very ragged old stuffed rabbit. Still missing his eye. Still littered with wonky stitching and threadbare patches of fur.
Bunny. The Samest, Oldest thing.
You scoop him up and hold him close, twizzling his ears round your fingers.
Slowly, slowly, the house begins to feel less huge around you. Your room, less echoing and empty.
There are pieces of you here now. Pieces that Noodle thought to keep safe.
She did that for you.
No questions asked. No shouting, no fighting.
Unearned.
You curl up beneath your cape, with Bunny’s ears draped across your face. Shielding your eyes and your body from the phantoms of Learn and Grow and Change that peer out from the nice, clean white walls. Listening in to every conversation you blunder your way through.
But you’ve won space back. Same Old Murdoc radiates out, just that little bit stronger for the soft things keeping him safe.
With your eyes closed, you trace the jagged threads that hold Bunny together. A mirror to your body; The scars he’s earned, proof of his survival.
In the moments when you couldn’t be, he was always brave.
You stare up at his winking eye, and you can’t help but wonder if this is permission. Permission to not be brave. To feel unsure, and lost, and all the things that prison had to crush right out of you.
All of these Brand New Murdoc sorts of feelings that have been spiking, flaring through you ever since you came back, before Same Old Murdoc even has a chance to nip them in the bud.
There’s never been a choice, for Same Old Murdoc. He was only trying to keep you safe.
He would never breathe a word about Bunny. Or about how it feels to sit wrapped up in your cape, and chew on the fastenings.
But Noodle knew. Somehow she could see behind flashing eyes and bristling teeth, even when you weren’t here, to discover what he craved.
Softness. Warmth. Familiar smells.
She would do that.
Even now.
Even after everything.
You wish you understood.
Brow wrinkled, you lie down on the bed, neglecting to change out of your makeshift outfit.
Russel could’ve chided you about that, and the impression you gave, wandering about in your faded pants, and somebody else’s t-shirt. A very scattered, not all there look.
Something must’ve held his tongue.
An odd sort of feeling embeds itself in you, strangely warm. Not the kind of sensation you’re all that used to letting in.
Gratitude. Only a pinprick’s worth, but still enough to make your skin prickle at the realisation.
You think of all the fights you could’ve had, in these short days of being Free. Fights that Same Old Murdoc would’ve run straight into in a heartbeat and got himself bashed and bruised and bloodied along the way.
Then, you look down at your body. Unbashed. Unbruised. Unbloodied.
And the gratitude grows.
You allow yourself to feel that. Relief. Respite, from the ceaseless war that marches through your head.
There’s dirt beneath your fingernails. From helping.
Murdoc Niccals helped.
He didn’t do the best job, but he was here. He was present enough.
He was enough.
Even in the state he’s in now. A transition between Same Old and Brand New, swinging in-between to try and keep up with everything that’s happening to him. All these new things he’s never thought about before.
He's never had time.
Never had space.
It's just felt so…frightening. To sit with yourself. To feel blindly for things that you’ve never had to begin with. To carve out something entirely new, where there was once just dead air and fleeting static. Your whole brain short-circuiting from the effort to imagine something so vast and nebulous. So Free.
Bunny’s Same Old smell keeps you calm. You breathe it in. Older than even the Same Old that’s been your base point. He remembers a time before there was even a Same Old Murdoc to be. When Murdoc was just you and hadn’t fractured off into a million thousand little pieces needing to be re-sculpted from scratch.
He's a constant.
Oh, Satan, you’ve needed a constant. Something that won’t act in ways you don’t understand. Won’t say things that contradict everything you know, and make you feel so…alone.
It's like Russel said. Everyone is far away, and yet, too close at once. But Bunny is just the right distance for you to feel in your arms. To hold, and not be crushed by the weight of this unsaid Learn Grow Change that radiates off everybody in waves when they look at you.
He's never expected anything more than you can be.
You’re always enough for him.
Even if you were only enough for a brief moment to keep a plant alive.
You think of that. The tiny knot of a vine, wound around your finger. Clinging to you for support.
A choice you made.
‘Don’t forget it.’ Bunny whispers in your ear.
You won’t.
You know you won’t.
With Bunny in your arms, you drift into a dreamless sleep. The first you’ve had since before you were inside.
He's beside you as you blink awake to birdsong and light morning traffic. Sounds you’re growing more at ease with by the day.
There’s light chatter coming from downstairs. The smell of coffee.
A slow introduction to things you remember from before. The ordinary days. Things you never really felt inclined to join in with.
‘You could start now.’ Bunny suggests.
You could.
But…
Maybe not yet.
You think…you might need more time.
More space, before that becomes comfortable.
You shake your head.
Bunny doesn’t ask questions. You feel your body loosen in relief. Your shoulders and fists and jaw.
You can’t remember how long they’ve been tensed. Too long.
For a while, you stretch out and listen to the breakfast noise. Sun streaks through the window. Warm on your body, but not sticky summer heat.
Out of habit, you roll over to the bedside table, ready to check your phone for the time in lieu of an alarm clock.
But something new catches your eye.
You blink, and peer closer.
A plant in a pot.
A very small, very green, very spiky little cactus.
Frowning, you turn to your phone.
1 new message. From Russel
Thought I could help you plant some roots.
He's put a little emoji thingy at the end. A cactus. One of those really tall desert ones, not the sort he could pick up at the local garden centre.
You sit and stare from the phone to the tiny specimen on the nightstand. Not inclined to respond just yet.
Privately, you’re glad it isn’t anything more ostentatious.
The idea of Russel…of anyone, spending heaps of money on you feels a bit too much to handle right now.
But still, something about this little plant makes you smile, despite yourself.
It's not big enough to be a giant, looming presence in the room. Another pressure in the back of your mind.
Just a private reminder to yourself.
Something to look after.
From the bed, you look around the room, slowly transforming, piece by piece. There’s balance here, between the Same Old and Brand New.
You never thought of that. These two states have felt so all-consuming that to have them side-by-side didn’t seem like an option.
Learn Grow Change, screamed and shouted to match Same Old Murdoc’s roars of frightened rage.
Same Old is Comfort. It is Safety. It is everything familiar.
But Brand New…
You look at the cactus. Think of your silky soft pyjamas.
Brand New can feel okay, sometimes. In small doses. Little bursts of things to try out, if you choose.
Slow steps. Very slow steps, when choices…choices feel too difficult to make, most days.
It sometimes feels safer if they’re taken away completely.
Less risk of ruining things. Of falling down every step you’ve climbed to reach where you are.
You glance at Bunny. Down at yourself, still using your cape as a cuddle blanket.
…Would they see the steps at all? Or would it just look like you’re crawling up a slide backwards, when such an ordinary thing as breakfast feels like an impossibility.
Not that you’ve ever been a breakfast person, but there’s just something…too communal about it for you, and whichever Murdoc might deign to enter the kitchen. Same Old, who glugs down a coffee in two seconds flat and then makes a break for it before anyone’s even started on toast. Or Brand New, who’d burst a blood vessel trying to focus on eating and talking in the Correct and Polite Ratios so that he can prove that he’s Better and has Made Progress.
You turn to Bunny for advice.
He nods towards the cactus.
Hm.
Looking after every Murdoc at once feels too much to manage.
But even a monster can look after a plant.
Bunny comes with you on the way to the bathroom, gently tucked beneath your arm. He takes in all the Brand New things he sees, and wrinkles his Same Old nose.
‘I don’t like it.’
You don’t like it either, you assure him. As you walk, you think of things that you could change. Just little things. A coat of paint. Some thicker curtains.
You’d like a wardrobe. A place to sit and close yourself inside.
Things that feel more permanent than bags and cases. A place to live, rather than a place to stay.
A home, rather than a house.
A big ask.
Perhaps too big, for now. But still, something to think about, and climb the stairs towards.
When you reach the bathroom, Bunny helpfully diverts your gaze away from the mirror before it catches you. At the sink, you upend a beaker full of toothbrushes and fill it from the cold tap.
Job done, you walk back cautiously. Watch your step, and the meniscus quivering.
A creak on the landing. Your head snaps up.
2D is parked outside your bedroom door.
You grit your teeth.
‘Oh. Hi, Murdoc. I tried knocking, but you weren’t in, and—’
‘What do you want?’ you cut him off wearily, hiding Bunny behind your back in a swift motion.
‘Oh. Well. I just wanted to say. I’m sorry. Again. For…the other day.’
‘Don’t…don’t mention it, okay?’ you stare down at your toes as they dig into the carpet. ‘That was… my fault, really.’
‘I won’t forget again, I promise. I’ve been getting better at that. Sally says I am, anyway—’
‘Who?’
‘My therapist.’ He says, with an easy smile. No hushed voice. No furtive glance away from you.
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. It’s really helpful, actually. I never thought about it before, but, like…having someone to talk to who’s not in the house feels…different, sort of.’
‘Right. Great.’
‘Maybe it’s something you could think about, too.’ He suggests brightly.
‘Maybe.’ You shuffle your feet.
‘Good. Um. Anyway, I made you some tea. Did they have tea in prison?’
‘No, I was living off dry bread and water.’ You roll your eyes. ‘Of course they had tea.’
‘Well, this is the tea that you like. No milk, and seven sugars. I counted.’
You blink at him. ‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t want to get it wrong, and—’
‘No!’ you swat the air. ‘Why…why did you bother? Why did you even…remember that?’
2D’s forehead creases. ‘I don’t know, it just feels like…something anyone would do.’ He looks directly at you. ‘I think you’d do the same. Even if you think you wouldn’t.’
You stiffen, ripping your eyes away from his and onto the mug in his hands. Steam spirals off the dark liquid.
For a moment, your hand feels frozen. Balled into a tight fist.
From behind your back, Bunny whispers his encouragement.
‘Just take the tea.’
That’s all you have to do.
Your fingers unfurl one by one as you reach forward, careful not to brush against his skin. Like a wire maze game.
You hook them around the top of the handle and slowly lift the mug from his grasp.
It sits in your hands for a moment. Comfortably warm.
He looks at you. Perhaps expecting words. But you find there aren’t any.
Instead, you give him a brief dip of your head, and with your back, push open the bedroom door before you can see him respond.
In the crack before it closes between you, you catch a glimpse of a smile.
You place the mug down on the nightstand for a while. Not quite ready for this step.
Bunny climbs onto your lap as you sit back down on the bed. Safer, more supportive than standing.
You stroke him with one hand, and with the other, start to tip the water into the cactus pot. Not a rush, but a gentle stream to wet the soil.
Enough for now.
Just a bit of water to perk it back up. Then it can get on with things by itself. Soak up some sun.
Plant some roots.
You look back at your phone. Russel’s text, still unanswered.
You type. Brief. To the point.
Thanks.
And drop it straight back on the table.
The tea stands firm, in the Clash mug you’ve fought with 2D over for the past twenty years.
Sitting in this room. The beginnings of your room. You wonder. Is it acquiescence? A participation prize?
In any case, you draw it close. A weight in your hands beyond just ceramic.
Once glazed, pottery holds its shape forever. It'll have to be smashed, if it wants to be anything else.
You take a slow, measured sip.
A Same Old taste, after months of shallow, pale imitations. Wars waged over sugar sachets.
At ease, you close your eyes.
No more fighting.
Just for one day.
There’s a faint noise. A buzz from your phone against the nightstand.
Without looking, you reach for it.
Russel’s responded. Not with words.
Just a thumbs-up.
All that there needs to be. A conversation finished.
A weight off.
Space to fill your lungs.
Time to breathe.
And with your first true breath of Brand New air, your Same Old body feels a little lighter.
Just a step closer to being Free. A small step, on uncertain, shaking, Same Old legs.
But a step you feel, nonetheless. Vibrating through the veins of Brand New, molten gold beneath your ancient, weathered skin.