Chapter Text
“I believe you,” says a voice in the darkness. “and I am here to help you.”
Harry, bound at the wrist and clumsy with pain and hunger, tries to turn toward the voice. He can’t even summon the strength to turn onto his side—when he tries, heaving his shoulders forward and digging up with his hips, a wave of nausea surges up in him and his very bones sing with pain. He closes his eyes, draws a ragged breath, tastes bile.
His eyes are weak in the dark, weaker even than ordinary human eyes, but he can hear the breath of the man by his bed. His breathing is measured and careful but each inhalation is bracketed by a tight halt: a man who is nervous, but trying very hard to calm himself. Listening to his own breath like the tick of a clock. Harry imagines the lungs spanning open, slacking shut. Again, again. He waits for the man to speak again, only because all the little bitter tablets they’ve given him make him babble each time he opens his mouth like the lunatic they believe him to be.
“Are you awake?” A gentle voice, honest.
“Yes,” Harry risks.
“You must let me help you.”
Harry just groans as the thought of moving sweeps through his body with the force of actual pain.
“You can’t actually starve, can you?”
He shakes his head. Then, remembering the man can’t see him, says, “no. I don’t know. I have never before attempted it.” In another universe there’s something drily humorous here, but Harry doesn’t laugh; nor does the man from—“Sussex?” He hears himself ask.
“Yes.” Surprised but not impressed. “Will you come with me?”
“What would you do with me?” For Harry recognizes the man now; he can summon his face in his mind’s eye. He’s an orderly in this ward, a broad-built man with a heavy, shaggy head. His eyes, if he recalls, are dark and thoughtful, and with as few syllables as possible he has always managed to convey a quiet bonhomie. He’d neither mocked him like some of the nurses and orderlies did, nor fussed in that dulcet, condescending way like the rest, and for that Harry was fond of him. But fondness is not trust.
“I will take you somewhere safe.”
“You will have to feed me. Rats, I mean, or dogs. Naturally. Not—you know, you. Though dogs’ blood is repulsive, you know. Has a rancid taint to it, and I do so hate to harm such amiable creatures—”
“You’ll not go hungry. Will you come with me?”
Harry considers a moment. He has neither the strength nor clarity of mind to come up with any other solution, and he certainly doesn’t wish to stay here. “All right,” he says weakly.
Suddenly Harry is being gathered up into the orderly’s arms. Though Harry is emaciated, the man’s strength is astonishing. He hoists him up lightly, easily, the warmth and strength of his body enveloping him. He can smell his blood, a heady tartness folded into the salt of his sweat and the acerbic sparkle of his soap, and can hear it too—a hushed, rhythmic thud against his ear.
Harry whines as his fangs prick through his withered gums and saliva floods his mouth, thin and hot. He actually trembles with hunger, shudders so hard he swears he can feel his bones clack together. An anguished sob escapes his mouth—he can’t stop it—and the orderly presses his hand over his mouth.
“You’ll be all right,” he whispers. “But right now you must be quiet.”
He is carrying him now through a maze of cool gray corridors, candy-striped toothpaste green. He tries to orient himself but he’s so weak, so confused. He couldn’t even bite his rescuer if he wished to, which he does not. It has been years since he’s tasted human blood. He simply doesn’t believe it necessary for survival, and that those who actually kill do it not for sustenance at all but because they are barbaric animals. But when he’d explained all of this to the doctors at the asylum, it had only deepened their conviction that he was delusional. And the more earnestly, the more fervently, he tried to convince them, the more dangerous he seemed to become, until, after so many sessions of brilliantly—lucidly—forthrightly—explaining himself to his doctors, making it clear he would not yield to their misunderstanding, they simply sedated him, restrained him, and shuffled him off to the ward for those who could not be cured.
That was… oh, he’s lost track of the days. But when they step out into the night air it’s cold and still. He smells woodsmoke, and as his head lolls against his rescuer’s arm he sees stars winking between naked branches. They walk for some time, until the orderly is huffing with the strain. Even though he’s light now. Even though he’s nothing but bone, hunger whistling like wind through the gaps where flesh used to be. But maybe want has weight. Maybe want is heavier than flesh, heavier than stone: maybe he is, at this moment, unendurably heavy; and the man in whose arms he is folded like origami is Atlas.
He knows by the roll of his body that they’re going downhill; he knows by shortened, bouncier stride when they’ve hit concrete. They cross the empty parking lot and just as the wind picks up, bearing on its blade edge granules of precipitation, young snow or old and patient rain, the orderly rousts him into the car and tenderly buckles him in. He slumps against the door, his teeth chattering. His rescuer digs around behind his seat, comes up with one of those scratchy woven blankets with tasseled edges one buys at truck stops, but it’s something. On top of that, he lays his own coat. Harry dully notes the heaviness of the man’s upper arms; he sees the strength coiled in the curve of his shoulder.
“I’m Henry Collins,” he grunts, leaning down to retrieve something from the floorboard. Comes back up with a Swiss Army Knife and a red Dixie cup. “Let’s get you at least a little something.”
He grunts as he draws the blade across his palm, knitting his heavy brow just a little as he holds his hand over the cup. His blood looks black in the sallow glow of the dome light as it trickles down into the cup.
“We’ve gotta keep the restraints on. And I can’t let you bite me just yet, not when you’re this hungry. Make yourself sick. Just taking precautions, you understand.” He pauses; Harry nods. “Ok.” The hand holding the cup trembles as he raises it to Harry’s lips. “Drink up now, before it gets cold.”
Harry sips it slowly. It’s the thick, punchy blood of a man who eats a great deal of meat and fruit. He rolls the scent and sapor of it at the back of his mouth and lets his eyes flutter shut.
“Thank you,” he says weakly. There’s just enough to settle the worst of the withdrawal: the splashing of acid in his chest, the tremors. The nausea that looms constantly at the periphery of his consciousness. He is still hungry, still weak. Still sluggish with want. But what Collins says is true: if Harry, nearly starved as he is, gluts himself he’ll not only become violently ill but (this, he assumes, Collins preferred to leave unspoken) he runs the risk, in his feral thirst, of draining Collins dry.
Open road, low hills. The full moon bobs alongside. Harry watches it until his eyelids grow heavy and he sleeps.