Chapter Text
James
It’s cold and sterile in the small room where James Potter waits. He has been avoiding his mothers eyes for the last thirty minutes, but he can feel her stare, assessing and concerned.
“I’m not going to kill myself right here, you know,” James mumbles.
When was the nurse going to take him? It had to be nearly nine now, and they arrived at the hospital almost four hours ago. One would think that someone bent on killing themselves would earn a little more urgency.
“Don’t say things like that,” his mother hisses but her voice cracks with each word.
James nearly rolls his eyes. He really couldn’t kill himself right here, he had scoped out the room as soon as the handsome technician brought him and his mother in. The chair was bolted to the floor, the picture screwed tightly to the wall, the outlets were covered and there was nothing sharp in sight.
He wasn’t planning on killing himself in this specific room, that would be a little too meta for his taste. But, for a long time now, whenever James enters a room, the first thing that comes to his mind is a glaring question,
If I wanted to, how could I kill myself here?
James supposes he should have seen someone, talked to someone about it. He knew it wasn't normal– not by a long shot– but there was something holding him back from opening up. That something being this place right here. James does not want to be here.
The psychiatric ward is foreign to him. The careful, watchful eyes of the nurses and techs, the soft questions, the apologies for what he’s going through. And fuck, he hasn’t even been admitted yet.
Everyone here can see him in this place. It makes James' skin crawl. They know he’s broken, they know he tried to kill himself.
The second one is much more obvious, given the large white bandages covering his arms hiding (but not really because everyone knows what it is), the large, vertical cuts running from his wrist to his forearms.
Yeah, he went vertical.
The first hospital had taken him to kept him under observation for three whole days before telling his mother, very sternly, that she needed to take him to inpatient therapy– and soon.
Effie had gotten straight in her car and drove James two hours to St. Mungos.
Now they are here, in this tiny room and James is putting on a brave face (it’s what he’s best at) but tapping his fingers quickly on the right side of the bolted down, no-ridges-or-corners chair. He had signed the consent to treatment form what, an hour ago? What was taking so long?
They needed to come back and tell him he was going home, that he wasn’t depressed and had learned his lesson. Of course, neither of these things were true, but James was holding onto a tiny bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, he could go home tonight.
A man walks into the room, not the same technician as before.
“James Potter?”
James nods, still tapping his finger. He feels anxiety and dread crawling up his throat. His chest is empty, a cavernous pit stretched into the bowels of who he is.
The man gives him a soft smile, his green eyes crinkling in the corners.
“Thank you for being patient, Mr. Potter. I just have a few things we need to go over before I take you back.”
“Take me back?” James responds, his voice pitched higher than usual.
The man nods, meeting his eyes, “You’re high risk, meaning to keep yourself safe, you’re going to be committed.”
Shaking his head, James scoots back in the chair, “No, I’m okay, I swear,” He runs a hand through his unruly curls and frowns at the man.
The technician flicks his eyes quickly to James arms, the bandages nearly screaming “I tried to kill myself and failed!”
“You’re not okay James,” Effie speaks softly from beside him. “You need help, you tried to kill yourself,”
James squeezes his eyes shut, trying to force out her words.
Clearing his throat, the tech says to him seriously, “You did also sign a consent to treatment,”
James clenches his fist and grits his teeth. Beside him, he can hear his mother crying softly. Now, this is exactly what he didn’t want to happen. If he would have just been successful, he wouldn’t be having to go through this right now. James silently curses himself for ever giving his mother a key to his apartment.
He doesn’t know how, but she knew something. Possibly it had to do with the fact that James hadn’t been returning anyone's phone calls for days, he had stopped going into work. Basically, no one had heard from James Potter in a concerningly long time, given how social he is.
Or was.
Or pretended to be.
His mother found him bleeding out in his bathroom.
The guilt will never, ever go away.
Just one more thing to add to the growing list.
James doesn’t realize the technician had been speaking to him until he registers what he was saying,
“ – and we do online rounds, so you’ll have to put on this ankle bracelet.”
Oh fuck no. Was he in prison?
Tears prick in the corner of James eyes as the ankle monitor is strapped around his ankle. It was a big, black, ugly thing. Bile rises in the back of James’ throat. He can’t bear to look at his mother.
Calmly, the man who James is kind of starting to hate, says, “I’m going to take you back now. You’re in unit twelve,”
A unit number means nothing to James as he spins around and at the adult age of twenty-five, he grabs onto his mother and starts crying. Heavy, aching sobs, “Please momma….. don’t… don’t let him take me. I’m okay, see?”
James is panicking, his voice high while his hands shake uncontrollably. As he steps back and looks at her with pleading eyes.
Effie only brings a shaking hand of her own to her mouth and chokes on a sob as she looks at him, “I love you so much,” her voice is warbling and tears track down her dark cheeks.
The tech leads a sobbing James toward the door and the last thing he sees is his mother falling to the ground, wrapping her arms around herself as she cries.
___
“Are you serious?” James asks, bewildered. Any color in the whole world and they chose burnt orange?
The technician (a different one, he didn’t see the other man after he led him to this room) sheepishly holds out the cloth scrubs to James as he looks at them, feeling sick to his stomach. First the ankle monitor, now this. Was he in prison? Was this a humiliation ritual? Did James actually die in his bathroom and this is hell?
James grabs the scrubs bitterly and mumbles, "Where's the bathroom?”
“Oh… Um. You’ve never been in a place like this before, have you?”
Shaking his head, he takes a tiny step backwards. For an unknown reason, he suddenly feels self conscious. All of these emotions, spiraling around him.
Nodding, the man looks at him gently, “That’s okay. I’m Michael. I’m going to have to ask you some questions and do some things that might feel a little uncomfortable. Is that okay?”
Well.
What the fuck. He couldn’t just say no.
He shrugs his shoulders and from there begins the most uncomfortable process of his life. From noting down where and what his tattoos are to making him strip down and… well.
James is definitely not hiding any contraband.
When James is finally allowed to put on the scratchy scrubs that smell faintly of cigarette smoke, he is exhausted. He adjusts his glasses, feeling numb, sick and humiliated. He’s wearing a grey pair of grippy socks for gods sake.
It must be nearly ten by now. He hadn’t eaten today. His mother stopped by a drive through on the way and James picked at his food in the car. He just doesn’t feel hungry.
James knows he’s lost weight in the past few months, muscle disappearing before his eyes. He used to be fit, strong. But now he’s just a shell.
The technician leads him through two double doors, scanning a key badge on the way in. They go through several of these doors, hallways that look the same, before they reach Unit 12. The hallway is long and there are initials written on a small whiteboard outside the doors. It looks like there are two people in a room. This does not make James feel any better.
The nurses station is dark, since it's so late in the evening, and the technician tells him to sit in the small chair by the wall. There are some people milling about and James is not surprised that most of the people look to be about his age. There are some younger looking people but also some who look to be in their sixties or seventies.
James pulls his knees to his chest in the chair and waits. As he sits, dread begins to pool in his stomach, more than was already there.
What had he done? This was a mistake. No one knows he’s here except his mother and she promised not to tell a soul. His best friends didn’t even know where he was. James has just been ignoring them for days.
Were they worried? Did they care? He was such a fuck up. He couldn’t even kill himself properly and now he was stuck in this place, surrounded by strangers and other people like him. How the hell is living with depressed people for some ungodly amount of time supposed to make him feel better?
Hugging his knees, James puts his head down and starts to softly cry. The tears just kept coming, he couldn’t stop them. There’s a loud beeping that is making him flinch every time it goes off and he’s just…
Well, James is very overwhelmed.
“Hi, you must be James,” a woman's voice says softly. James looks up to see a blonde woman in front of him, her hair in two braids.
James only nods, wiping the tears from his cheeks.
Mistake, mistake, mistake
The woman, Jess, takes his vitals and shows him his room. He started crying again at some point, he doesn’t know when. The room is dark when he gets in, and James goes to the empty bed, sitting on the strange mattress that felt more like a gym mat. He quickly grabs and hugs the small, flat pillow. James takes a few heaving breaths, trying to force air into his lungs. He was stuck here. For god knows how long.
Resentment fills his chest, slick and oily. How could his mother put him here? Why had she taken him so far from his home? Why did she have to come into his apartment?
Looking across the room, James sees the outline of another man sleeping, covers tucked up to his chest. The man is faced the opposite way, so James can’t see him. The only thing he can see is soft looking, inky curls tumbling onto the bed.
With luck, the man would be released soon and James would have the room to himself. But he’s not getting his hopes up.
James turns away and covers himself up with his hospital-grade blanket, the rough fabric brushing across his face as he pulls it over his head.
The dread, sorrow, and bone deep agony courses through him. His arms hurt. Burning, bitter pain that only a self-inflicted wound can have. James throat tightens painfully and hot, salty tears fall down his cheeks. He doesn’t want to wake up his roommate, so James bites onto the blanket as he sobs.
He’s just falling asleep when the thought that’s been in the back of his mind all day comes to the surface:
How the hell was this better than being dead?
____
When James wakes up, the sun is shining in through his window. For a moment, he’s confused. First of all, he has blackout curtains for this very reason. Second, he doesn’t have a blanket like this. Much too scratchy. These two thoughts hit him quickly and it takes him no more than three seconds to realize where he is. To remember the past few days.
He sits up and sees the bed next to him empty, the covers thrown haphazardly and a small stack of books sitting next to the bolted down bed.
James is hit with bone-deep dread as he realizes where he is at and the fact that this was definitely not a horrible dream. He has landed himself in the psych ward. His heart begins to pound rapidly and in the bright light of day, he thinks about the things that he needs to do. For example, his job.
He has unfortunately been skirting from his work responsibilities and is sure he will be fired when he returns. That doesn’t matter to James though, honestly he fucking hates his job. He shouldn’t, it pays very well, he has his own office, and it’s the job he was hoping for when he graduated university three years ago.
James realized about a year in that he hated marketing, hated managing, and hated wearing fancy suits and going to meetings with a fake smile. He hated pretending that he cared about his coworkers' sick dog or his employees' fake excuses for calling off work nearly every Friday.
Over the years, James has come to accept the fact that he’s grown bitter and resentful of everything in his miserable life. He really doesn’t know what happened.
Well.
He has an idea, but doesn’t have the mental energy to explore that right now.
So, James does what he has done best for the past several months when things get a little too hard. He falls asleep.
He wakes up an hour later to a nurse asking to take his vitals. He sits up, lets her take what she needs, and falls back asleep.
A few hours later, he’s woken up by a doctor who takes him into a small room to take his blood. Three fucking vials of it. What the hell did they need that much of his blood for? As James walks back to the nurses station, he realizes there’s no one around. He doesn’t want to ask anyone where the other patients are. That would mean talking, interacting. It was too much.
Looking at the clock, he sees that it’s noon.
So most likely it was lunch.
James goes back to sleep.
When he wakes up again, it’s not because someone else woke him. He really needed to go to the bathroom. As humiliating as this whole experience has turned out to be, it only gets worse when he has to ask the girl who is probably younger than him if she could please open the bathroom door so he can piss.
When James emerges from the bathroom, he’s exhausted again. He quickly washes his hands in the sink and looks to the window where the sun is setting. Perfect, if he could just sleep this away he would be just fine. Did it make him feel any better? No. But James is too depressed to do much else.
Laying down in the bed and cocooning himself back into his blanket, he hears another person, his roommate, go into the bathroom and turn on the shower. He drifts asleep to the sound of the running water.
And is woken up five minutes later to the sound of a door slamming shut.
Great, a loud ass roommate. As if I didn’t already want to kill myself as it is.
James scowls and throws back the blankets. As he does, he’s met with a man standing in front of him, freckles dotting his pale skin. He wears his baggy scrub pants rolled a few times at the waist, riding low on his hips. Dark, black curls drip with water and his grey eyes are wide, staring at James.
“No way,” James breathes at the same time as Regulus fucking Black snaps at him,
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
His roommate was Regulus.
Fuck.