He's been offered this lifeline before, back home.
It's funny or... ironic or whatever. Before, he couldn't take Ziggy, talking to him in a thousand different voices, watching him through the TV, peeking back through reflections, frying his neurons until the world around him seemed to fracture into dreams and incoherence--
He couldn't take the noise, and the company, and the way it all became a constant, inescapable unless he was blackout wasted or too high to hate it anymore. Ziggy was sensory overload on every level: physical, mental, spiritual, magical. He never wanted to kill himself, exactly, but he would've been okay with an ending, of a sort. Not death, but the annihilation of everything that made him him.
And now that he's here, and Ziggy isn't, he should be happy. It's what he wanted, right? Freedom. Solitude. Silence. All the noise turned down, and reality shifting back into focus. Except he can't take that, either. Now he's so fucking alone, he can't stand it, and the silence makes him want to scream, and now there's nothing to distract him from the ugly truth: everything wrong with him is just. Him. Jeff. Not Ziggy. It was always Jeff.
And so here he goes, dancing at the edges of cliffs, chasing self-annihilation all over again. And he can't say any of that. He wouldn't even know where to begin, and this feels too precious, and too precarious, to risk by blabbing about what a fucking headcase he is, or revealing that he's such spiritual poison that he even turned a beautiful abstraction into a demon, just by association.
There's one moment, though, where he looks at Bash, and it's all at the tip of his tongue, and the temptation's there and-- he swallows it back and nods.
"I can-- I can try." He can't promise, but he can try. After a beat, he smiles, a little teasingly. "Now can I call you nice?"
cw: passive suicidal ideation, drug use, hallucinations, possession, extreme self loathing
It's funny or... ironic or whatever. Before, he couldn't take Ziggy, talking to him in a thousand different voices, watching him through the TV, peeking back through reflections, frying his neurons until the world around him seemed to fracture into dreams and incoherence--
He couldn't take the noise, and the company, and the way it all became a constant, inescapable unless he was blackout wasted or too high to hate it anymore. Ziggy was sensory overload on every level: physical, mental, spiritual, magical. He never wanted to kill himself, exactly, but he would've been okay with an ending, of a sort. Not death, but the annihilation of everything that made him him.
And now that he's here, and Ziggy isn't, he should be happy. It's what he wanted, right? Freedom. Solitude. Silence. All the noise turned down, and reality shifting back into focus. Except he can't take that, either. Now he's so fucking alone, he can't stand it, and the silence makes him want to scream, and now there's nothing to distract him from the ugly truth: everything wrong with him is just. Him. Jeff. Not Ziggy. It was always Jeff.
And so here he goes, dancing at the edges of cliffs, chasing self-annihilation all over again. And he can't say any of that. He wouldn't even know where to begin, and this feels too precious, and too precarious, to risk by blabbing about what a fucking headcase he is, or revealing that he's such spiritual poison that he even turned a beautiful abstraction into a demon, just by association.
There's one moment, though, where he looks at Bash, and it's all at the tip of his tongue, and the temptation's there and-- he swallows it back and nods.
"I can-- I can try." He can't promise, but he can try. After a beat, he smiles, a little teasingly. "Now can I call you nice?"