Chapter Text
In the past, when he had gone looking for this, it had been about sex.
Because maybe it was fucked up, and in all likelihood he did need therapy.
It worked for him though. No matter how bad it hurt, how much he sobbed, everyone involved knew it was leading to a happy ending.
Now he couldn’t care less about what came afterwards. He was hard pushed to remember the last time he could get it up in the first place.
Even then he had needed assistance. Conjured up images of soft blond hair and big blue eyes, his pathetic heart aching as he struggled to stay in the moment.
At least now there was no more pretending.
Anyone could see that he was broken beyond repair this time.
Jim had torn him open. Gutted him. Hollowed him out from the inside where Jim had stuck the knife in and just kept twisting and twisting – determined to destroy everything there had ever been between them.
Every remnant of the man he had spent years fighting so very hard to become.
Except maybe, he could concede in these moments, when the press of hands were tightening around his throat, it wasn’t all Jim’s doing.
Perhaps, when it was a struggle just to swallow around the Pyg’s gifted scar tissue, he could admit that he had been the one to willingly hand Jim so much power.
He had dumped it all on Jim’s shoulders – the burden of giving his erstwhile partner something to live for.
Someone to impress. Somebody to care about.
Someone to fall head over heels in love with.
It wasn’t Jim’s fault that he had never wanted it.
Jim had never asked him to make him the star his life revolved around. Jim hadn’t given him any indication that what he felt could ever be reciprocated.
He just hadn’t expected Jim to put so much effort into hurting him.
He had been stupid enough to believe that Jim meant what he said, when he spouted pretty lies about making amends and second chances.
Friendship.
“Don’t stop,” was all he was capable of pleading in the present, gasping for every wretched breath as one of the few girls left willing to do this with him dug the pads of her thumbs in still deeper.
Cindy had told him he needed to get his head straight. Charmagne had made him leave after he finally came round, face ghostly pale beneath her make up, and said that the last thing she needed was his death on her conscience.
Even Fish would have told him he was taking it too far, brow arched sardonically in that way she had.
She was dead now, another tally mark on Jim’s ledger, and he hadn’t even asked the woman strangling him what her name was.
He was paying and she needed a fix.
It wasn’t any more complicated.
“You like that,” she cooed as he gasped and panted, increasing the pressure all over again though the ridge of his badge had to be digging into her leg, and his vision was starting to darken around the edges. “Stop fighting it.”
Jim had accused him of having a death wish. Yelled at him for not following orders, his apologies as distant as his promises, so that Harvey didn’t know where to begin in explaining that wasn’t how it was at all.
Clawed for it now, a single moment of perfect clarity.
It wasn’t that he longed for the nothingness.
He just wanted to feel something – anything – that didn’t have Jim at the center of it.