Only three minutes now, three minutes until the rest of the air in his body leaves him. His hands are tinged in red and his fingernails chipped as he finally starts making lines into the square glass window that separates him and the air he’s desperately searching for. It’s too late now though, his efforts remain futile as his hands fall over the same marks, no more scratching can be done.
The door he’s up against is tinged in red too, red paint yes, but the tinge also comes from the strains of blood that leak off the man’s fingers. If he can use the rest of his energy to bust the door down he would, but even if he can, who could really break through reinforced steel with just their bodies? He can try and pull apart the bolts and hinges that hold the door together, but that would prove pointless. His hands are in no condition to mess with anything else. Not if he wanted to bring them to stubs.
There is truly nothing left he can do. In a matter of minutes, this man would die. Will there be anyone else that can save him? If not, who would truly know if he was dead?
“I wouldn’t want to waste my last breaths against that door, Russo,” Russo whips around. There he is again. His angel. How lovely. “You have about less than three and a half minutes till you fall against that door unconscious. After that I would give maybe four minutes before you’re out cold.”
“Be…be quiet,” Russo sputters out as he slides to the ground, gasping for air. Short breaths close to hyperventilating, he can barely keep his thoughts straight. He can’t sit and face defeat, no. He can’t let it go down like this. Clutching his chest his wheezes, once soft and slow, increase in volume. No, he can’t give up like this. His hands start to search for anything in the small room, something that he hasn’t already seen that could help him out of the mess he’s in. Sifting through papers with his good hand, he forces them aside, items clattering and rolling off the table. Pens, pencils, paperwork, even a stapler, but nothing big enough or good enough to bust the door open.
“Ooo throw a pencil at the door I’d love to see the effect that makes,” The person speaks again, leaned against the wall as he watches Russo struggle. It’s interesting, how appalling it is to watch a person suffer, yet not take a step to intervene or least, give some kind of strength to help them pull through.
It’s almost heartless.
Pushing past the other male’s excessive excuse to bother him, Russo searches through the shelves with shaky hands, and eyes clouded in confusion. His hands run across books that fly off the bottom shelves, nothing of substantial use to him pops out. It could be his double vision, or that by every last second he spends in here, his mind scatters. He can’t remember why he’s here, why the oxygen is failing, or why the person standing at the door now isn’t failing to make his head turn.
“The…least…the least you can do is help…” He gasps again, his hands claw at his throat. Any remaining energy he’s using is centered towards leaning against the bookshelf now and reaching for the air he’s missing. Has it finally sinked in? Has he finally decided to give up? It’s too late to decide now, his fate has already been decided for him.
He gives the room a final look with his failing eyes. A mess. A total destruction in full form. Open books, ripped books, and the papers. The papers that are scattered like a leaf blanket across the white tiles. Words, scrabbles of insanity.
“When are you going to realize that I can never help you?” The man pushes himself off the door, kneeling down in front Russo. He tilts his head to one side, inspecting him. “It’s sad really. Everytime we do this, you beg me to help you, until you realize you’re the only one who can help yourself Ruse.” Russo meets the man’s eyes. Silver, the dark kind, the one with secrets and pupils filled with walls behind them. The rest of him as Russo always describes it is dark too, save ‘the hands that raise him from perdition’. A hollow figure of a man and glowing hands that’s only purpose is to serve as a guide to the way out.
It only takes Russo three minutes to find these things out.
Three minutes for the last breath in his body to succumb him as he wakes up again, the restraints around his wrists struggling against the weight of him.
Another night terror, this one the same but ten times worse than the one before.
As he opens his eyes, the room filled with scattered papers and books flown off shelves are gone. The only papers on the floor are the ones Russo leaves every night before the doctors come in to restrain him. The same writings with the same words written on it. Each one mirrors the other, the only thing signifying that is the yellowing that comes across them as the days roll by.
Books? Those are on the shelf where they belong, untouched, unmoved.
The door remains intact, reinforced steel with glass unscratched.
The morning light snakes into the walls of the room, illuminating the truth, the reality that Russo faces once he truly awakens. Once he wakes up, then he remembers the doctors and the pills, even the therapist that keeps him at bay. Everything he sees when his eyes are shut are nothing but mere imagination. Nothing but a figmentation of his past troubles, as he hears people so lovely put it.
When he’s awake, all of his reality is real.
“Russo…You and I aren’t done.”
When he’s awake, most of his reality is real.
