Heart - 12. The Decision

The shower in the AIU was a somewhat pathetic effort. The tiny showerhead jutted out from the wall and gave a weak spray of warm water, never hot. Tyson almost had to put his back to the cold tiles if he wanted to get himself fully in the stream. Another reason he wanted to go home - his shower had several jets and it was hot enough to nearly poach him in his skin. He fantasised a little bit about what Vladimir might look like in the shower. That gorgeous alabaster skin turning pink, water trickling from his black hair and raining down on his collarbones. He briefly thought about maybe trying to masturbate, but it was too weird to do such a thing in this place.

No. When I get home.

He thought of the pencil sharpener he'd swindled from the education unit - and how easy it had been. Inside the sharpener was a blade. A small one, but it was sharp. Sharp enough to cut skin, at least. With his foot gradually getting better, Tyson wasn't able to use it to hurt himself as effectively as he once did. He desired the pain. He craved harming himself. The blade from the sharpener would be able to help him with that. He could cut himself on his thigh. Nobody needed to know. It would keep him sane. Keep him satisfied.

With the implement safely hidden away where he doubted anybody would find it, Tyson finished up his shower, dried himself off and put on some nicer clothes. Some plum coloured jeans and a white shirt, leaving his feet bare. Edith insisted he wore shoes and socks inside at all times unless he was showering or sleeping, so it was nice to feel carpet, tiles and grass under his toes. On his way down the corridor to the dining hall, Petra apprehended him. Uh oh.

"Tyson, did you take the pencil sharpener with you?" She asked him immediately, her keen green eyes observing him.

"No," Tyson lied to her, maintaining eye contact. "I left it on the table, I'm pretty sure."

"Okay, well we are missing one," Petra wasn't so friendly and nonchalant right now. She was in trouble. He could see that she was stressed and frightened, but he didn't particularly care. She was worried about herself and the consequences of screwing up. Not him. "The one I gave you to use for the lesson. Are you sure you didn't take it out of the room?"

"Yes, I'm sure!" He replied testily, leaning harder on his crutch. "What's the big deal, anyway? We're not allowed to have pencils outside the education unit."

Petra's eyes softened when she realised - incorrectly - that Tyson had completely missed the point of the significance of a missing sharpener. She believed that he thought somebody might have stolen it to sharpen up a pencil to hurt themselves with. Excellent, he thought. Talked my way out of that one.

She was nervously scratching at her arms. "It's just... you never come to the education unit, and the one time you did, a sharpener's gone missing. So if you didn't take it, then somebody else did, and if they hurt themselves or someone else, I can lose my job. Do you have any idea who it might have been? Charlie or Vladimir, maybe?"

"Are you accusing me or not?" Tyson demanded of her, a frown crossing his angry face. "Make up your mind! If you want to search me or my room, go for your life! I don't know what happened to the fucking sharpener! And I don't care!"

"Alright, I'm sorry," she decided to leave him alone, which was a relief. "Will you be back after lunch, then? You were getting quite busy with Charlie, weren't you?"

"Yeah, well I was bored," Tyson lied, mostly to himself. "I don't know. Maybe." He would, he decided. It would be all too damning if he didn't return to the classes after he stole the sharpener.

"Charlie likes you a lot," Petra smiled, the incident now forgotten between them. "He doesn't make friends very easily, so I'm so happy to see you getting along with him. Maybe when you leave, you could come back and visit him."

"Maybe," Tyson replied glumly. He wouldn't. Not because he didn't genuinely like Charlie - or pity him, more accurately - but because Edith would never let him.

"Now, while I've got you here, we need to talk about setting up some family therapy for you," Petra paused him again when he was about to walk again. "You and your parents, and maybe your sister if you like."

"You know it's pointless, don't you?" Tyson snorted at her.

"I don't know about that. How do we know if we don't try? If we don't try to make some meaningful changes, then it's tough to make progress, isn't it?" Petra tried to move him with her relentless optimism bullshit, but Tyson wasn't in the mood.

"You guys just don't fucking get it!" He spoke with a clenched jaw. It's okay to be angry, he reminded himself. It's not okay to abuse people. "Do all the therapy and goal setting and self-esteem based shit you want, but if you wanna involve my Mum, then you're out of luck, mate. You should just give up because it will never work."

"Why?" Petra asked him, her brow furrowed in concern.

"If you don't tell her what she wants to hear, she'll just fire you and find someone who will," Tyson rubbed his face, his anger beginning to give way to despair. "Nothing is ever her fault. It's all me. To her, I'm a useless little shit who is having some breakdown to spite her and make her look bad. Doesn't matter what you think you can do for me because I have to go home to her in the end, don't I? So stop trying and leave me alone."

"Are you alright to go to lunch? Or would you like someone with you?" Petra didn't know how to respond to him, so she went for the copout. That's what this whole place was. Fucking copouts.

"I'm good," Tyson hopped away from her. Useless. It would serve her right to lose her job. She's shit at it.

Vladimir was at his table alone, staring off into space as he so often did. He wasn't even looking at his stew, and he was mumbling and whispering to himself. Tyson snapped his fingers in front of him a few times as he sat down. Vladimir didn't respond.

"Oi Vlady," Tyson gently shook him, and Vladimir returned to the land of the living. "You alright?"

"You're in danger," Vladimir whispered to him, his blue eyes wide open and full of terror. "Tys, are you okay? Did you see him yet?"

"I'm in danger? What?" Tyson asked him, a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. Vladimir was not alright. His train of thought had derailed.

"Him, Tyson! He's coming for you and he's the one who took that sharpener," Vladimir gripped Tyson's wrist. Hard. "Please, you have to be careful! He's coming and he's coming! He's... the sharpener!"

"Vlady, if you're talking about the three-headed dude, he's not real," Tyson tried to remind him, wrenching away from his friend, but Vladimir was scared, and he began speaking in whispers. Nonsense, it sounded like.

"Hey, Vlad," nurse Janet made her way through the tables, two small pills in her hand. "Try and take a big breath, sweetie. Nobody's going to hurt you or Tyson."

"But you don't know!" Vladimir scooted back in his chair and stood up, hugging himself with his arms. "He always kills the people I care about!"

Tyson's jaw dropped as he watched poor Vladimir back up until he crashed against the window, and Janet sped up to catch him. He continued to backtrack, eventually landing in the corner.

"Vladimir, can you look at me, please?" Janet asked him firmly, but either he didn't hear her or he didn't want to. "Vladimir. I need you to calm down for me, or we'll need to take you to the quiet room."

"Vlad doesn't go to the quiet room anymore," the big, burly security guy with the beer belly interjected. He'd been on the scene the moment one of the children looked like they were in trouble. "His room or the sensory room. New doctor, new instructions."

"Alright," Janet seemed pleased by that. She even relaxed her frown. Tyson had begun to think it was a permanent fixture on her face. "Do you want to go to your room, Vladimir? Or the sensory room? You can't be in here if you're this agitated, okay? You're scaring the other patients."

"I'm a freak! I'm a freak! I'm a freak!" Vladimir hid his face with his hands as he slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the floor.

"You're not!" Tyson shouted to the other side of the room, ignoring the fish and chips in front of him and letting them go cold.

Vladimir, to his surprise, looked up at him with a trembling jaw and eyes that had seen true horror. It was chilling.

"Will you at least take some medication?"

Janet knelt down so she was not standing over him and offered the pills to the scared young man, who took them and immediately threw them in his mouth. Tyson had seen him dry swallow his tablets many times - it always made him squirm! How could anyone do that? If Vladimir indeed was a freak in any way, it would definitely be his ability to swallow pills of seemingly any size and quantity without choking on them. Not what his brain did. No way. That was never his fault. Tyson was hoping that somehow Cynthia would fix the boy immediately, but that wasn't the truth. Yes, he was doing well, but until he and Cynthia found the correct combination of medications and therapy, Vladimir would keep having hiccups in his recovery, and maybe for the rest of his life.

It was me, Tyson realised suddenly. I did this. I triggered this episode by stealing the sharpener. Vlady clearly thinks the demon he sees all the time is coming for me because the sharpener's gone. Now I feel like total shit. Fuck.

Unable to watch the scene he had inadvertently and indirectly caused, Tyson, feeling sick, got up and abandoned his food. He needed to be alone. He left the dining hall to return to his room, and once there, he immediately entered the bathroom and sat down on the toilet lid, hiding his face in his hands. He saw the enormous, ugly scars on his wrist, and he traced them with his fingers. Tyson never mucked around with suicide. He went for broke every time. Three attempts, three near deaths. He wanted to die. He wasn't looking for attention or help. It was death he wanted. He craved it. He needed it. His ached for it, and no amount of intervention would ultimately change his mind, he decided. He remembered the first time he nearly died.

Four months ago

Getting doctors who would do as she asked was a speciality of Edith's. She only paid for the best, so she said, and somehow the best was always some quack who shrugged and filled out her prescriptions. Valium, Xanax, antidepressants, just about everything. Ironic, Tyson thought to himself as he filled a glass with salt the day before the dinner party, that she's so quick to judge anyone who actually needs medications to function yet she scoffed them as though they were a fashion statement. At least it made it all so convenient for him. Mix enough of them up with some alcohol, and bam. The respiratory system would slow until it stopped, and Tyson would die in his sleep. He knew it would work. He'd done a lot of research on his phone. Xanax, Valium, alcohol. Since he'd never had any of those in his system before, they would be potent. He'd die. He'd be free of this hell. He'd be... just free. And his mother would never live it down. Two birds with one stone. Knowing a cup of salt would be easy to find and cause questions, he tipped it into a small sandwich bag and hid it inside his mattress.

He knew where his father kept the key to the locked bar room and the key to the liquor cabinet, so that night while the house slept, he snuck his way downstairs and opened both of them. He poured a huge amount of Grey Goose vodka into a water bottle, then he squirted water from the other bottle to replace the vodka he'd stolen. Easy. He was tempted to take a swig of something while he was here, just to see what it was like, but his conviction won out. He needed his body to be as unprepared for the overdose as it possibly could be. Now to get the pills from his parents' room - that was the challenge. He was supervised continuously all day, only ever having time to himself at night, when his parents were in bed.

Twenty minutes before the guests began to arrive, Tyson fished the bag of salt from his mattress and tipped the contents into a tall glass of water he kept handy. After he fixed his hair and straightened his tie in his full body mirror, he stirred the salt water mix with a pen, then he steeled himself and drank it all in one go. It worked. Probably a little too well. He vomited. And he vomited. On his expensive clothes, on the floor, on the wall. The noise attracted Miss Vaughn, his nanny, and she quickly told Edith that Tyson was too sick to attend the party and put him to bed with a bucket in one of the lavish spare rooms. She would check up on him every twenty minutes or so, giving Tyson the unsupervised time he needed to sneak into his parents' room while everybody was on the ground floor and take several packets of his parents' medications. The vodka was so bloody ghastly that it alone almost made Tyson think life was worth living after all, but he persevered. He woke up thirty-seven hours later in the hospital.

Two months ago

Tyson, thanks to his parents preferring to stick their heads in the sand and ignoring their son's incredibly dangerous intentions, decided to break the glass of water he often had in his room and use it to attack his wrist. He went to the hospital in an ambulance and almost needed a transfusion. Edith slapped her son four times in the face for having the nerve to make her look like a terrible mother and fired Miss Vaughn for her gross negligence.

One month ago

Edith's answer to Tyson's obvious distress and pain was to crack down on him. Stricter schedules and near-absolute supervision. No more treats, free time or privacy until he learned how to behave himself and to stop being a petulant little brat. But she wasn't as clever as she thought she was. By trying to trap him, she only ever made him craftier and more determined to break the rules. Yes, it was nearly impossible to hurt himself now, but it wasn't as though Tyson was ill-prepared. He had one more trick up his sleeve - several months ago when he was first looking into methods of suicide, he ordered a bottle of liquid nicotine. It was for use in those stupid vape cigarettes - but Tyson knew it was poison. He knew what a nicotine overdose would do. It wasn't going to be pleasant, so he kept it as a last resort.

When the house slept, Tyson crept over to the big green curtains on his wall and pulled the small bottle out from the hollow hem of the curtain. He didn't feel fear. Or regret. No desire to back out. This wasn't something he decided to do in the spur of the moment. There was no impulsivity to this decision. He'd been planning it for nearly half a year. It smelled putrid and it tasted like fire, and when he drank it in one gulp, it burned everything inside him.

He was barely awake at all during the next four days in intensive care. His body went through respiratory failure and very narrowly avoided a massive heart attack, and when Tyson realised he wasn't dead, he wasn't happy. Even after the last three months, when the doctors asked if it was a suicide attempt, Edith shook her head. Why would her perfect child want to kill himself? It was just an accident.

Present

Tyson looked down at where he'd stashed the sharpener - the same place as the liquid nicotine. The hollow hem of the shower curtain. It was invisible to the naked eye. Someone would have to actively feel for it to find it, and he wasn't in prison. He had the right to privacy, and unless he was in immediate crisis, the hospital staff had no authority to search his room. He wondered if now was the time to break it and get that sharp blade inside.

"Hey, Tyson?" Someone knocked on the door to his room. The nurse doing the check. Okay. Once they came and went, he would have opportunity.

"I'm here," Tyson shouted from the bathroom, and he heard the door open and someone walking in. "What? Dude, I'm here!"

"You are," it was Neil's voice he realised, and the darkness in his heart subsided somewhat. "Can we have a talk? Are you busy?"

"I'm about to have a shower," Tyson replied through the door that separated them, but the door did not reach the floor or the top of the door frame. They could hear each other perfectly.

"Is there something you want to tell me first?" Neil asked, and Tyson gulped. Petra was an easy mark. He could talk rings around her. But Neil knew him. The young nurse came from the same place Tyson did.

"Are you accusing me of something?" Tyson snapped, looking again to the sharpener he'd concealed. Damn. With Neil on duty, he'd never get a proper chance to use it.

"No," Neil sighed, and Tyson heard him sit down on the squeaky chair. "But since a potential weapon has gone missing from the education unit, I do have to look out for my patients. You understand?"

"You don't actually care, though. You're just covering your arse so you don't get fired."

Tyson rubbed his leaky eyes with the back of his hand and spoke with a shaky voice. Shit. I'm incriminating myself. What does it matter, though? He knows it was me. He turned on the shower, hoping that would make Neil go away, but it didn't.

"It's true that I don't want to lose my job," Neil admitted, speaking with a shaky voice of his own. That gave Tyson pause. He wasn't expecting that. It was easy to forget that the staff in the unit were people. If he didn't know better, he'd say Neil was fighting tears of his own. "I love my job, Tyson. I do. I get to come in and help young men and women through the worst time of their lives. But you're wrong. I do care. Every day I'm excited to come in and spend time with you! I love you guys. I'll go to the end of the world and back to make sure you're safe. I'll do whatever I can to make sure you're happy. The last thing I want is to lose you, Tys. Or any of my patients."

Beginning to cry in earnest, Tyson slid on the floor until he was sitting fully clothed in the water puddle, under the warm stream of water, and he rubbed his ugly scars. Neil's words were overwhelming. All the lies Tyson told himself weren't able to keep his guard up forever. Neil cared. Evan, Sue, Alice and Petra cared. Hell, even dickhead Ron probably cared. He just wished his Mum cared. He sobbed and cried into the crook of his elbow, the sounds of his misery and distress drowned out by the shower.

"If someone happened to steal a pencil sharpener from the education unit and used it to hurt themselves, that person would find themselves instantly transferred to the high-dependency unit. If that person were deemed a danger to other people or had a record of violence, then they might be sent to a hospital that is equipped to deal with dangerous patients, and they will be far less forgiving than we are. I don't ever want my patients going to a place like that. You mean the world to me. The only way I want to lose a patient from my care is by discharge - by waving goodbye as they walk out the front door. I never, ever want to see them transferred to a high-security ward, and I especially don't want to see them dead.

"But you know how things are, Tyson. This is a scary place, right? Anyone could have sharpened their pencil and put the sharpener in their pocket and just forgotten about it. Walked out of here and realised what it might look like for someone who has been admitted into our care for self-harm. They might have been freaked out by the consequences and tried to hide it. It's an honest mistake. An understandable mistake, for sure. If it happened to find its way to a member of staff or back into the education unit before someone got hurt, then no harm done.

"But that person needs to understand that their decisions are only making it more difficult for them to get a grip on their life. Even if the patient is here voluntarily, we can't legally release someone from our care unless we're confident they can live safely without it. But the patient needs to decide to make the changes necessary to create this possibility, and not just tell the staff what they want to hear. When the patient keeps going back on their word, when they can't comply with their treatment plan, they'll likely have to stay here for longer and longer. And the longer they stay, the more difficult it can become to adapt to the real world again. Long-term inpatient care changes people, Tyson, and sometimes not for the better. The public system fails them. People can lose their independence and self-esteem, even themselves. I've seen it before. I've lived it. Ahh, but I'm just a messed up nurse in the end. Heh. You probably think I'm wasting your time."

"Neil?"

"Tys? Are you alright?"

"Can you take this away?"

Neil opened the bathroom door and saw Tyson curled up in the corner under a stream of water with his clothes still on, a blue plastic pencil sharpener in his hand. Tyson was physically unscathed - the sharpener was wet, but otherwise, it hadn't been tampered with at all. The blond man's eyes were red and puffy, but he looked relieved. He slowly approached and reached for the tap, turning the water off. He seemed so kind and warm and loving that Tyson wished he was his dad. Or his big brother. An uncle or cousin. Or anyone who could just hug him in their arms and cuddle him better and tell him everything was okay and they loved him and he wasn't a failure. Neil, wearing the gloves he was famous for, gently took the sharpener from Tyson's dark brown fingers and knelt down next to him.

"I'm so sorry," Tyson whined, screwing his eyes shut. "I want to die so bad."

"I know," Neil handed him a dry towel from next to the sink. "You don't need to be sorry for feeling this way. You should never be ashamed of your feelings. In fact, I think you should be proud of yourself. I know I'm proud of you, at least."

"I'm not going to be able to stop," Tyson hit the back of his head against the wall behind him, once, twice, ... Neil's soft hand cushioned the third and stopped him from doing it further. "Never. I can't."

"You just did, though," Neil pointed out, holding the sharpener in his other hand. "This is progress, Tyson. This is you making a decision."

Tyson wasn't sure what clicked in his brain just then. He wasn't sure why he couldn't see it, but Neil was correct. As much as Tyson wanted to use that blade to hurt or even kill himself, and he very well could have if he played his cards correctly, he decided not to in the end. Neil's words did play a role in that choice, he supposed. Cynthia's ongoing support, too. But it was a promise he made to Vladimir that tipped the scaled. As much as Tyson's obsession with harming himself dominated the way he thought and the decisions he made, his affections for his friend shined through the darkness. Seeing how his egocentric actions hurt Vladimir earlier... that sucked. He wanted to do right by him.

"Will I get in trouble for this?" Tyson was starting to shiver - it was cold in the room without the warm water, and he was sodden.

"No. I mean, I have to make a report. Rules are rules," Neil explained softly, helping Tyson to his feet with a strong grip. "But no. You took the sharpener from the education unit by accident, and you were frightened to tell someone. We understand! Isn't that right?"

"Ahh... yeah," Tyson agreed. "How's Vlady? Is he alright?"

"Vladimir's doing fine! I saw him on my way in," Neil reassured him, shaking off the sharpener and drying it on some toilet paper. "He's a bit wiped out from his new meds, so he's watching some TV in the common room rather than going back to the education unit. Now, why don't you switch into your dry clothes and I can get you something that can help settle those thoughts?"

Half an hour later, Tyson was snug as a bug under Vladimir's arm on the couch, listening to his friend's breathing as the older boy slept. His drowsiness caught up with him too, and he began to nap. Even though both boys were too lethargic from their aggressive medication regimes and exhausted from their difficult days to be together while awake, each boy dreamed of the other during their sleep.