Losing Control : His Madness, His Cure Chapter 95

I normally like to see the world through a softer lens, like if I search hard enough, I’ll always find a glimmer of good...something small, something kind that makes the ugliness a little easier to carry. It’s how I survive the noise, how I make sense of all the chaos. But right now, listening to Jax’s voice roughen as he talks about that orphanage, I can’t find any of that good. Not even a trace.

All I feel is this sharp, twisting pain in my chest, like a blade turning with every word he lets slip. It makes it hard to breathe, hard to lie still, and I feel this unfamiliar rage at a world that could carve someone down the way it carved him.

How dare the world? How dare it take his child-self and strip him of the warmth every kid deserves, leave scars he still carries in his silence. My heart’s breaking for him, and all I want to do is tell him I’m sorry, even though I know he’ll despise the word, despise the pity he’ll think it carries. But it’s there, burning at the back of my throat, seconds from spilling out, because I can’t believe he had to endure that kind of loneliness and survive it after surviving his parents. It’s raw, it’s brutal, and it makes me want to tear the whole world apart for what it did to him.

But I can't, so I shift closer instead, sliding up until my face is tucked into the curve of his neck. His skin is warm against my cheek, steady like he’s letting me anchor myself there without saying it. His voice cuts through again, low and almost flat. “I’ve never told anyone that.” It comes out detached, like he’s trying to step away from it even as the words hang between us.

My mind spins a thousand different ways to respond. A thousand empty reassurances, a thousand apologies he’d only spit back at me. None of them feel right. None of them even come close. So what slips out instead is the truth. “I don’t know what to say.”

He exhales, something close to a scoff. “I don’t want you to say anything. It’s not a big deal—”

That phrase again. That deflection that bruises me with a sharp, furious grief. I can’t hold back this time. “Stop saying that.” My voice comes out choked with more emotion than I want him to hear, but I don’t care. “It is a big deal. It’s a big fucking deal, Jax. And it kills me to imagine you as that kid.”

The words scrape up my throat like they’re made of blood and glass. I reach for his hand, find it, and thread my fingers through his like I’m trying to fuse us together. My grip is tight, maybe too tight, but I need him to feel it, need him to know that I’m here, holding what he’s trying so hard to keep hidden.

“And it kills me even more,” I whisper against his skin, my lips brushing his neck, “that I can’t change it for you.”

I press a kiss there, slow and aching, like it’s the only language I have left. Because nothing I say will be enough, but maybe he’ll understand it in the way I hold him, the way I’m breaking quietly inside for the boy he was and the man lying next to me now.

“Shit happens,” he says, like he’s already rehearsed that line a thousand times until it stopped hurting. “That’s just life. No divine reason. No bigger plan.” The words hit with the kind of finality that both hurts and pisses me off, like he’s carved out every possibility of hope before it can even reach him.

It guts me because I know it’s not just the orphanage. I know it in my bones. There’s more, there has to be something that left scars even silence can’t hide. Something darker and sharper hidden behind the steel of his voice. And I wonder how much worse it is than what he’s just shared, what could've left fractures he refuses to name. And it kills me not knowing, not being able to peel those layers back without cutting him deeper.

He’s lying here, skin warm against mine, and all I can feel is the distance he’s built brick by brick just to survive.

My voice is low and heavy when I whisper, “I want you to be happy.” It’s the kind of truth that could ruin me, because I mean it more than anything I’ve ever said. I want happiness for him more fiercely than I want air. Even more than I want it for myself.

There’s a long, heavy silence where my pulse beats loud in my ears and I swear he can feel it against his chest. I’m bracing for him to deflect, to pull away, but then he laces our fingers even tighter. He lifts our hands, presses his lips to mine, soft and reverent, and says, “I am. Right now, I am.”

Something inside me comes undone until I can barely hold myself steady. “Thanks,” I whisper, and my voice is wrecked. “For trusting me with that.” But even as I say it, I hate how small it feels, how words will never be enough to match what this means.

“You’re not scared?”

I blink, frowning slightly. “Scared of what?”

He doesn’t hesitate. “I just told you I wanted to kill him. Really wanted to.”

For a second, I swear the room shrinks, the weight of those words pressing down heavy. But then I breathe, forcing my heartbeat to calm. “That’s a natural reaction,” I say, “Anyone would’ve felt the same in your place.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” I turn to look at him even though I can't actually see him.“You didn’t act on it. And you were a kid. Wanting something and doing it are two different things.”

I can tell his eyes are on me. Can feel him watching me, shadowed in the dark. His thumb brushes mine where our hands are still tangled, and then he says, almost like he’s testing me, “What if I would’ve? Acted on it?”

The question hangs between us, I don’t pull back. “You didn’t. And that’s what matters.”

He steadies himself first, his voice smoothing over mine. “You should sleep now. You’ve still got work tomorrow.”

I don’t answer. I can’t. Instead, I wrap myself around him, holding him like I can keep him here, like if I squeeze tightly enough he won’t ever vanish into the shadows that still own him. My heart breaks with everything I can’t say, with how badly I want to give him every scrap of happiness the world has ever denied him.

And as sleep finally claims me, one thought digs into me, sharp and unrelenting. if he lets me, if he keeps letting me in, I’ll fight like hell to never let him go.