[r]estart my heart.

[&Ismirshalen]

Ismirshalen had been living away from the therapist for two weeks. The time that had passed he now considered to be the most miserable, agonizing days of his life. This is a summary of what had happened.

The morning after he had left Dr. DeVrais's apartment, and after he had left the Quattrocchi Site for what at the time he had considered to be his last, he had gone hunting for an affordable hotel to live in for a while. He literally did not have any game plan whatsoever after that. The little money he had was pitiful. He was going to need to get himself a job. But at the time he was too blinded by his immensely crowded and muddied thoughts to even bother attempting to think things out. The old Ismirshalen kept telling him that he would be perfectly fine. That these arrangements were only temporary. He had to go through some pain to gain anything worthwhile.

The hotel room he ended up with was small and cramped. A thousand different species of malicious insect were inhabiting the area. A week ago he would never have been able to dream up such a despicable place in his mind. Now he couldn’t bring himself to care. He wouldn’t have cared if instead of a bed there was a pile of hay. But at least the hotel took some niceties into consideration. Even if the mattress was the equivalent of sleeping on a slab of rock. But this was okay. This was only temporary, he reminded himself. Only temporary. And forget about the therapist. He doesn't matter anymore. He's no longer a part of your life.

His personal hygiene also took a dive that was previously unimaginable to him. It matched the condition of his room. He could no longer work up the motivation to spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror and apply the layers of makeup he wore. Which was good. Because he didn’t have a bathroom mirror. He also couldn’t motivate himself to shower. Which was also good. Because the water system of the hotel was currently rendered out of order. It had been pending on repairs for months. The hotel hadn't been able to spend money to get it fixed. The small sum that the former guard had to pay for his room was extremely unlikely to get them there anytime soon. But when he started having doubts about this turn for the worse, this strange and abnormal lack of caring about his appearance, the old Ismirshalen was always happy to pipe up. Always happy to remind him about how much better off he was going to be.

He spent the better part of the first week sitting in his room, staring at the peeling walls, and warding the insects from his coffee. Which was terrible tasting. He no longer had the cash to go out and buy his own, and he had run out of his packed supply. So now he relied on the hotel's coffee and 'breakfast' to survive. Although most of the time he only got to the point of getting out a plate before he lost interest in the idea of eating.

Eating wasn’t the only thing he'd lost interest in. He'd also lost interest in living.

He brooded nonstop in his self-made cage, his cubic prison. Every so often a voice in his head would ask what he was doing there. It would ask what had happened to his big idea that life away from the therapist would be better? He'd batted it away like an annoying fly. Stupid thoughts. Don't listen to the new Ismirshalen… there were a lot of flies in his room.

At some point he started having conversations with them.

Near the end of the first week he finally managed to convince himself to get a job. He tried something slightly upscale at first. A filer for a small business. But the moment he arrived for the interview and the moment they had seen him in his filthy clothes, the whole deal had been canceled. He himself couldn’t understand why they had turned him away. He hardly noticed his appearance anymore. Things like that didn’t matter. Unimportant.

He ended up getting hired at a rundown fast food joint. Taking orders. He worked the night shift. During the day he sat around in his hotel room and sipped at coffee while making conversation with the insects. His new friends.

By the second week, he'd stopped talking to the bugs as often. Instead he curled into a ball and cried himself to sleep. He desperately needed sleep. Huge bags were making themselves known under his eyes. Sometimes when he cried he didn’t know what he was even crying about. Other times he knew.

Vincent DeVrais. It hurt for him to think the man's name. Each time he did it was like he was stabbing himself in the heart with a burning stake. Each time he did he would bludgeon himself afterwards for thinking about the man, because he was supposed to forget about him and live a happier life. But happiness was such a foreign word to him. He was no longer sure he knew what it meant. He tried to tell himself he was happy when he talked to the insects. They adored him. They landed in his hair. They buzzed happily around him. It was all part of the plan. What plan? The plan.

Finally, he realized what he had been talking about to the insects the whole time. He'd been talking about the therapist with them. He'd been deluding himself the entire time. He wasn’t living anymore. He was dead. He hadn't gone to his job in over two days. In fact, he'd only gone for the beginning of the week. He'd stopped going and he hadn't even brought himself to acknowledge that fact until now. He had probably been fired. He was truly penniless. He was such a master of self-delusion. That night he tried killing himself with pills. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take any more than the first two before he'd simply dissolved into tears and cried until they sent him into a deep unnatural slumber.

***

Now it was early morning, about an hour after midnight. He was back in the Quattrocchi Site. Everything he was doing seemed like a haze to him. He felt so dead. He wasn’t even sure if his heart was beating anymore. Ismirshalen managed to make it to the therapist's door. But he never got to knock. The battered form ended up collapsing on the floor. He didn’t get back up.

[VinnNAY]

Vincent hadn’t cried since Ismirshalen left.

He knew it wasn’t healthy but he promised himself he wouldn’t.

Yes, it was a mighty shame. He was getting to know him so well (Clearly too well). He could have diagnosed him in less than a day if he hadn‘t walked away on him.

But life went on. It went on as well as it could knowing that you lost something so special that you would never be able to it find again. You could say Vincent’s metaphorical videogame in his heart was turned off before he could save.

His life now was going to work. Living at work. And not sleeping because «There was work to be done». The Quattrocchi Site didn’t overwork him. He overworked himself. As if he didn’t overwork himself before. Those darling bags under his eyes became darker and he became thinner. Thinner and cleaner. Ever since the tragic piano lesson with Izzy Vincent had been “bathing“. It was a process full of melancholy metaphors and stress buildup where he tried hopelessly to drown himself. Because even though the drowning was hopeless he still had hope for other… Things.

Occasionally on his free time he would remove Ismirshalen’s shirt from the empty trashcan in his room that the guard had tossed it in and just hold it. But he always put it back thinking «It was for the best». If that was true wouldn’t he have gotten a new girlfriend by now? There was hope he would get enough desire for life to empty out the stupid can someday. But would the shirt still be in it when he did?

But now he was walking off to work. Like usual. It was a cycle of nervous nothingness.

«There was nothing to do really» Vincent thought in the back of his shattered mind.

«But there’s always something to do» the front lied to him.

«There is something to do, Vincent, and it’s certainty not what you’re doing.» His heart told him.

Ignore your heart, Vincent told himself nearly bawling at the fact that he had changed so much from what he once believed in. But he figured sourly that it’s what got him into this terribly confusing mess in the first place. However those thoughts were shattered like his mind when he stepped on something very pitiful after opening his office’s door.

«Is-…» Vincent didn’t even finish the lump's name because all of the pressure of these two weeks that were building up in the back of his eyes finally cascaded down and muted him to nothing but sobbing into the other man’s smelly chest while he tried desperately to see if he was still alive.

[&Ismirshalen]

A sharp pain pierced his stomach, knocking the breath from the guard. He could feel his shrunken stomach knock up against his spine. It was sort of uncomfortable. He lost consciousness from the shock of it.

Muffled noises made their way through Ismirshalen's hazy conscious. He opened his bleary blue eyes, which had sunk considerably further into his skull since he had left. Or at least that's what it looked like. In reality it was probably that the bags had grown so dark that they gave the appearance of a shadow. His cheekbones had also grown more pronounced. And he was dirty. So dirty. Like a dog that had been left out in the rain for two weeks. Except this was inexcusable because it was Ismirshalen who was this filthy and he had never ever let himself get this bad before.

A blurred black shape swam into view above him. Something nice-smelling was on his chest. The sounds were coming from there. The thing that was shaking on him also shook the guard. He was starting to get a headache from it. He wished things would become clearer. So he waited until they did. After a few minutes the noise became defined, and he realized that someone was crying on him. Who.. and where was he again.. ah, right… the Quack Shack… And the man on him was Vincent.. Vincent.

Suddenly seized by motion, Ismirshalen gripped the therapist's arm and buried his face in it. He was clinging to it with such mad ferocity, as if he thought letting any slack would cause the man to dissolve right in front of him. Sobs of his own shook his wretchedly long and bony body to the point where it was questionable if his muscle was enough to hold himself together. He was such a shell of his former self it was pitiful. His wrinkled smelly clothes were the same ones he had left two weeks ago in.

"Please please please," he babbled almost incoherently. Speaking with maniac speed. "Take me back. Please take me back. I'll do bloody anything. P-please!" He started sobbing even harder. He felt out of his mind with terror at the moment. Terrified that the other man wouldn’t let him back. Memories of his hotel room invaded his thoughts. The flies. The cockroaches. The peeling walls. He was terrified.

[VinnNAY]

Why did he miss this smelly sack so much? He was crying all over him. He never cried in front of people. Rarely even his girlfriends (Do you really blame him, they last at the most a week). But this guy came back
to him after he went as far as to kiss him. Someone needed him and admitted it! And that made him smile.

He couldn’t smile for long, though, because something was tugging on his arm. Actually it was tugging only at first. It turned into hysterics. Vincent could barely understand what the ex-guard was saying he was taking too fast. Didn’t he know Vincent’s English was bad?

«Shut your mouth you gorgeous idiot» Vincent crooned to the ranting slob as he tried his best to lift him up onto his good side. He was just recently able to walk (almost) properly without using that haunting cane but his right leg was still significantly weaker than his other one so this proved quite difficult (If not extremely painful).

Their harsh journey took him back to the room which he had come from. He set the pile of fail down onto his mismatched bed and ran into the bathroom to wash his hands get a washcloth. He felt like he was caring for an infant. It wasn’t exactly a favorable synonym but it was still a synonym. Once the cloth was found and soaped he rushed out to come back to Ismirshalen.

He probably was going to get some sort of unknown physical disease that Vincent couldn’t diagnose (Because he spent ten years in college but he’s not even a neurologist) if he kept those disgusting clothes on any longer. He took off the man’s sorry excuse for a shirt and ran his hand through Ismirshalen’s hair until it was completely out of his face. He thought he felt insects and could only hope they weren’t hopping onto his bed. He shivered at the previous thought then took the other man’s face in his hands and looked at his new age long and hard while taking out the wet cloth he received from the bathroom and pressed it on the other‘s sad face gently.

«Did you stay at a zoo?» Vincent inquired.


VINCENT OWNS YOUR ASS IZZY.

[&Ismirshalen]

As they made their way into the therapist's apartment Ismirshalen tried to get a hold on his growing terror of being kicked back out on the streets. Feverishly he managed to convince himself that because he was being let inside the room that wouldn’t happen. If the guy was going to kick him out he'd have done so already. Right? Right. What the doctor had said to him had completely flown over his head but it had been soothing. The filthy heap trembled on the bed. He was almost unable to let go when Dr. DeVrais left for the bathroom. What was wrong with him? Two weeks ago he'd been ready to leave the guy forever. Wait. No he hadn't. No he hadn't. He couldn’t understand why he had ever wanted to leave. He hated himself for doing it. The guy had gotten shot for him. But that was hardly the point. He cared about him.

"Go away, you stupid bugs," he muttered through chattering teeth, hugging himself and rocking back and forth numbly. He felt so out of his mind that when he looked at his hands it took him a few moments to recognize they were his own. And even then they still seemed so alien. His head burned. He felt like he was on the brink of either spiraling upwards on the current of a caffeine high or being sick.

A shaky sigh of relief escaped him when the therapist returned to strip him of his shirt. He didn’t see what the problem with it was, though. It was a fine shirt. He liked that shirt. He almost asked why it was being taken away from him, but it was colder now and he couldn’t stop shaking. Not to mention for some reason the piece of clothing looked a lot dirtier than he'd thought it had been. How long had he been wearing it…

The moisture from the washcloth on Ismirshalen's face soothed the burning that he felt within his skull. The disturbed man tried desperately to reorganize his thoughts. But there were too many of them to sort through right now and he was being asked a question. Just the sound of the therapist's voice was keeping him from going completely over the edge.

"No," he replied, still sounding frantic but speaking at a much more understandable pace. "A hotel. It was… full of bugs and… walls were peeled… no water…" He had to bite his lip for a moment to keep from bursting out in tears again. "It was terrible. Lonely. I h-had conversations with the f-flies… and… and… I couldn't take it anymore… I tried taking pills but… too scared…"

"You're not going to make me leave, right?" he begged, staring at the man in front of him with a haunted look. He couldn't remember if his question from before had been answered or not and he had to make sure. "I'll be your secretary. I'll do all the therapy you want. Anything!"

VINCENT OWNS IZZY'S ASS FOR LONG LONG TIME.

[VinnNAY]

«You tried killing yourself?» Vincent said quietly. It took him awhile to figure out what «I tried taking pills» meant. He latched his hands onto the man’s face again and stared directly into those eyes he was intrigued by so much. He couldn’t think about what he would do if they were closed for all eternity.

He sighed while resting his head on the other man’s still beating ribs. He was so stressed. Would he need to install a baby monitor onto Izzy just to keep him from committing suicide? A padded cell? A straight jacket?

«Never…» Vincent answered Ismirshalen’s pleading question.

«Will you get better for me?» Vincent asked, «That’s all I want»

[&Ismirshalen]

"Y-yes," he whispered. "...I'm so sorry."

Ismirshalen hadn't realized the enormity and utter finality of what he had tried to do to himself until the words came out of the other's mouth in plain English. He stared back into the therapist's dark eyes almost detachedly. Trying to imagine what would have happened if he had actually gotten himself to overdose on sleeping medication. He would never have even had the chance to come back here again. He would never have had the chance to try. He would have thrown it all away. He started to tremble violently under the therapist's touch.

Suicide. He had tried committing suicide.

He wrapped his bony arms tightly around Dr. DeVrais as the stressed out man leaned his damaged head against his chest. Staring straight ahead at the wall without seeing it. Tears blurred his vision. Dead. He could have been dead right now, in that hotel room. Limp, unresponsive, dead. Très morte. And what would have been waiting for him, then? He didn't believe in God, but if it was actually true, he would have ended up in Hell.

Vincent DeVrais wouldn't be there.

"I promise, I'll get better," he replied fervently. "For you." He couldn’t say anything more. He was choked by a sudden rush of emotion. Pain welled in his chest, and he knew his heart hadn't rotted away completely. Something was still there. Not thinking about what he was doing, he gently lifted the doctor's bullet-ravaged face to his lips.

Love is confusing.

He blamed it on the fan.

[VinnNAY]

He didn’t have time to lecture his new secretary for he was now (suddenly) kissing him. That’s one way to get Vincent to forgive you. He was going to give him a long difficult talk but he made him into a pile of recessive mush. He was also about to let go so that he could slap some sense into the guy but his mouth was latched onto the other’s so nicely and it would be a shame so he just took his arms higher around the other’s back and tried to enjoy himself. It was clearly dangerous for them to share space in cold rooms.

He would have continued but when he went to grasp the other’s hair he realized how disgusting it felt and let go. He would have done nasty, nasty, nasty French tongue tricks to him but the guy needed a shower as soon as possible. He couldn’t bring himself to let go of all of him at once though so he stayed hooked on for awhile longer and kissed his neck. He eventually got up.

«Shower» Vincent commanded plainly and pointed to the infamous bathroom before the other man could lose it and run flailing and screaming out of the room again.

[&Ismirshalen]

Ismirshalen felt extremely needy right now and this was all that seemed to be able to satisfy his desires. He hadn't felt this vulnerable in years. Maybe not ever. Although it was hardly a deep animalistic need that drove him. It was more mental. He was so stressed out, and the past two weeks had nearly driven him out of his mind. The Englishman had gotten pretty far actually. Take the therapist's lips, for example. He knew they were pressed against his own, but at the same time it felt like the guy was kissing someone else. Some emptiness that Ismirshalen had left behind in his escape to the edges of his consciousness. A ghostly shell of his former self that was making it impossible for him to judge things properly.

The arms that were wrapped around him provided a nice amount of warmth despite the fact that they were incredibly thin. But that didn’t matter because their mouths against each other was enough to count as a furnace.

When Dr. DeVrais finally removed himself from Ismirshalen he hugged himself, feeling the cold kick back in, and he barely was able to stop himself from reaching out to pull the guy back. However, the word that tumbled off the therapist's lips was received with the force of a slap that impaired him from doing anything of the sort.

Shower. For a moment the ex-guard simply sat there numbly. As if trying to remember what the word meant. In fact that's probably exactly what he was doing. His mind was like a puzzle that had been scattered apart by a furious toddler. Sometimes it was hard for him to recover the missing pieces. This might also explain why he was feeling none of the usual repulsion or disgust after having just kissed the other man. After a few moments, the uncanny empty look passed, and he got up to follow the direction of the doctor's finger. The bathroom.

It took him a while longer than it usually did for him to shower. Everything he did seemed rather alien to him. But he vaguely remembered that he had previously cared a lot about things like this. It would come back to him soon… He hoped. The Brit managed to wash the grease out of his hair and rinse his body of dirt without any serious issues. However when he came out he made no attempt to also apply loads of makeup to his aged face. He really didn’t… feel like it.

What he felt like right now was coffee. A load of caffeine might be just the thing to get him back to normal [of course, he conveniently disregarded the fact that that's what he'd been living off of the past two weeks]. So after he pulled on a collared shirt and a pair of dress pants, he made his way to get himself just that. His legal drug.

[VinnNAY]

«What are you doing?» Vincent yelled to Izzy from his comfortable perch on his bed as he watched his secretary start messing around in his kitchen. He got up and made his way from the small bedroom to the small kitchen.

Of course. Coffee. This man liked brown liquid more than life itself. Maybe that’s why he caught him staring at his eyes once. Coffee black.

«No coffee» He ordered, wrapping his arms slowly around the other man’s waist and trying to lure him away from the coffeemaker.

«Caffeine is to cause for jitteriness, difficulty sleeping, headaches, anxiety, flushed face, nausea, and an accelerated heartbeat» He listed as he played with Ismirshalen’s wet hair and smelling the side of his face dizzily. It made him want to grow his own hair out. Or maybe he could deal with just admiring Izzy’s hair (And eyes). But how is anyone to do that when the other is always jittery?

Sure Vincent used to indulge himself with alcohol but he stopped because he’d probably become black out drunk after one drink. Clearly coffee wasn’t doing Izzy any favors either.

“Talk to me,” Vincent said while gently biting Ismirshalen‘s lip playfully. “No coffee. You can have anything else.”