#but phew! this was cathartic. maybe a little ooc but hella cathartic

[peaches2217]

Useless

TW: Dissociation, Implication of Trauma/PTSD

EDIT: AO3 link!

~~~

“Come back to me.”

This was the second time he was hearing it, Mario realized, that exact combination of sounds. He hadn’t understood it the first time. Heard it, but couldn’t process it. That was Peach’s voice, right? So those sounds were probably directed at him. Maybe?

“Come on,” she spoke again, “come back to me, darling.” Her voice conveyed urgency, yet it was soft all the same. Was she in distress? Where was she? He hoped she would say it again. Something in his chest fluttered at the sound of her voice. It tickled, come to think of it. Was that good or bad?

He tried to breathe, and he did a bit too well at it; it came in a deep, audible gasp, strong enough to drown that fluttery feeling. It kind of hurt, actually. He forced the air back out as quickly as he could and that almost made it better, but now his eyes were watering.

Bad, he decided. Definitely bad.

He blinked. Pink. His hands hovered over pink fabric, partially obscured. They looked strange. They were undoubtedly his hands, callused and hairy, but what was that attached to them? Peach whispered a few more sounds, but he couldn’t quite process them, and the attachments on his hands moved. The sensation was familiar enough, ingrained enough, that he recognized them as another set of hands. Peach’s hands, slender and soft.

Where were his gloves? He had been staring at his own hands for what must have been hours. He remembered, or at least he thought he remembered, her hands peeling back the upper layer of his skin. She had taken them off. She wasn’t wearing gloves either. It had always amazed him, how soft her skin was, how cool her hands felt within his. But now they felt oddly warm.

His right thumb stroked the back of her left hand. Some dull thought permeated the back of his skull, some mix of dread and surprise. His thumb barely moved, tracing an aimless line back and forth across her skin, yet his hand tensed and shook from the effort of moving it.

“Good,” Peach said, and her hands tightened around his fingers. “Squeeze back?”

He worried sometimes, worried that he might hurt her, worried he might forget his own strength at the worst times in the worst ways. So he did his best to follow her request as gently as possible. His fingers twitched. His thumbs pressed into her hands. A tingling sensation crawled up his arms and into his shoulders; the discomfort made him tighten his grasp, which made the unpleasant sensation spread.

“Good!” she repeated. The pink fabric shifted and her voice came nearer. “Very good. There you are.”

He pulled air in too quickly again, and all at once he was slammed back into his own body.

The weight of it was crushing, the numbness in his legs, the tingling in his arms, the ringing in his ears. He relaxed his grip on Peach’s hands and hunched over, shutting his eyes tightly. Dizzy. He was dizzy. The world was spinning around them, as though trying with all of its might to fling them apart, and the very thought of losing her made him groan with terror and grip onto her even harder.

She shushed him, a lone source of calm in the chaos that ensnared him. “Can you speak?” she asked. He could feel her now, her nose pressed into the top of his head, and he wanted nothing more than to kiss her, kiss her deeply and endlessly until his feet felt solid on the ground again. 

But he couldn’t find the energy. He couldn’t lift his head, and he couldn’t pull her any closer, and he wasn’t even on his feet to begin with. He was sitting on his knees in some dark room not far from the meeting hall. She had pulled him in here and urged him into this position; the memory was hazy, but he remembered all the same.

What happened? he wanted to say. He knew what happened. Thinking about it just made the world spin faster. Maybe if he could hear it again from a voice that brought him nothing but comfort, it would stop, it would all go away. Maybe he would realize definitively just how stupid it was, how inconsequential the trigger for this episode, and that would snap him back to normal.

No sound came out when he opened his mouth. His eyes stung, and he grit his teeth against the unshed tears.

She let go of his hands and drew him in closer, and Mario couldn’t help but sigh in both shame and relief. Her sweet perfume washed over his senses and wrapped him in another layer of familiarity. 

“That’s okay,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his hair. “It’s okay. We’re safe. Everything is alright.”

If everything was alright, then the great hero of the Mushroom Kingdom wouldn’t be crumpled in a quivering heap on the floor, unable to speak or even raise his chin. He couldn’t express his frustration properly, in words. All he could do was huff.

Peach shushed him again. Another kiss. “Here, lie down. You’ll feel better if you lie down.”

Mario wanted to protest. They had been in the middle of— they needed to get back to— there were people waiting on them, on her, because she had— because he was too weak to even open his eyes.

He nodded instead.

Letting her hands guide his motions, he collapsed heavily to the floor, curling into himself on instinct. Carpet. Not as plush as the carpets in the private chambers, a bit scratchy against his cheek. Peach’s fingers cupped the side of his head, lightly pressing upward; he somehow found the strength to lift his head and keep it there, just long enough for her to make whatever adjustments she needed.

A sound like a whimper escaped his throat as his cheek met silk. He was so disoriented he felt it in the pit of his stomach. He gulped and made a few more pathetic sounds, because he was almost certain he would vomit otherwise.

Fingers in his hair brought him back. He focused all of his attention on them: the gentle scrape of nails against his scalp, his curls bouncing back into place with each pass, the sweat dripping down the back of his neck. He was clammy, he realized for the first time. He was cold. 

His guardian angel’s voice cut through his shivering. She was giving more instructions, and he held to them like a lifeline — “…without us. Just take good notes and I’ll review them later. If you could bring us some water first? Thank you.”

These weren’t instructions for him. There was a world beyond these few square feet around them. She was willfully shunning that world for his sake. He willed himself to open his eyes, get himself together, go on about his day so she could go about hers because he wasn’t supposed to be dragging her down with him. He wasn’t supposed to be like this in the first place.

All he could see was pink. His head was in her lap. That knowledge sent a wave of solace crashing over him, intense enough that his breath caught in his throat and he began trembling uncontrollably once more. Or maybe he hadn't stopped trembling in the first place.

Pathetic. He was supposed to make her feel safe. He was truly pathetic.

“Stay with me,” Peach said, her urgency replaced with quiet tenderness. “Take your time. Rest. But stay with me.”

Gulping again, Mario nodded. This wasn’t right. His burdens shouldn’t be hers to bear. He shouldn’t be a burden, much less her burden. But for now, he was, and she had ordered him to stay. So he closed his eyes and focused on her fingers in his hair, steadying his breath and coming back little by little, back into full awareness of the world outside of him and her and all of his uselessness.

“You’re alright, Mario,” she soothed, and just for now, just until he was strong enough to cram his weaknesses back down so that they'd never bother anyone again, he let himself believe her.