this be the verse

It’s quiet in the storeroom. The noise from the laboratory outside is muted, a dull drone in the background as you slide down into a sitting position alongside Joshua. His back is pressed to the wall, his elbows resting on his knees as he takes slow, deep breathes in an attempt to regulate the intake.

“It was my mother.” He finds himself telling you as he tilts his head back and closing his eyes. “I’ve been screening her calls since she got out of prison. I didn’t expect her to turn up.”

His chest tightens once again as he thinks about her standing in reception, her lank hair as falling over her features as she scratched at the scab near the corner of her mouth. She’d been wearing layers today, two jumpers underneath a man’s overcoat despite the fact it was sweltering outside. He knows what it looks like when she’s coming down from whatever she’s on, dilated pupils, the constant lip smacking due to dry mouth. All of them were present as she’d lingered near the glass doors waiting for him. He’d taken her outside, thrust twenty quid into her hands just so she’d go away.

He’d seen the looks from his colleagues when he’d stepped back inside, the judgement. They couldn’t comprehend how the man they know as one of the country’s most successful chemists can be affiliated with a street person. The whispers follow him after that, glances in his direction. It makes his skin itch and his attention waver. It reminds him of those days at school, when the other kids used to taunt him because his mother wasn’t like the others. She was missing teeth, was dirty, unkempt, erratic. She’d stand in the playground at pick up time, talking about fairies that lived in the woods, about a tinman that clambered his way up a tree, silly nonsensical things that mean nothing to a twelve year old boy, whose only focus is to make it through the day.

Her presence in his workplace takes him back to those moments, the ones that made his breathing quicken and his vision blur. That’s why he’s hiding in a supply closet surrounded by beakers, measuring cylinders and God knows what else.

This building, the place he works, it’s his sanctuary. When the world didn’t make sense to him, the science does. It’s why he buries his head in his work, why he spends hours hunched over his workbench staring into a microscope until his eyes go dry and his temples pound. Science has never hurt him the way that people have, it has never left scars on his flesh or beaten him until he could barely see. It has never coerced him, forced him to do things he didn’t want to.

His heart began to sync back into a normal rhythm, his breathing evening out. The proximity to you helping. You’re an anchor back to the present, a reminder of the man he is, not the child he was. He has agency now, control. He doesn’t have to be her victim.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you.” You recount, your hand coming to rest on his. His fingers thread through yours, clasping it tightly before he tips his head towards you.

“Larkin?” he questions. “I thought you were more of a Blake fan.”

“He’s grim as fuck but he had a way with words.” You remark, meeting his gaze.

You know a thing or two about trauma. Your ex-husband was an abusive bastard, you had told Josh over dinner one night, when he’s asked you about the scars that polka dotted your arm. The ones you usually kept hidden with gauzy sleeves that buttoned at the wrist. It’s taken you years to work through what happened to you at the hands of that man but you’ve managed to move past it, you forged a life despite of him. Josh draws strength from that. It gives him hope that maybe one night he won’t have the dreams he does, that he’ll be able to look in the mirror without seeing someone so fundamentally broken, that he’s convinced there isn’t another soul on this earth who’d want him.

“You’re not that person anymore.” You remind him, your thumb chasing over curve of his hand. “Don’t let your mother derail the progress you’ve made, don’t let her have that power over you.”

He swallows hard against the pressure in his chest. It’s lighter now, less like a sandbag crushing his ribcage and more like a Ziploc with only a few grains trapped within the confines.

You’re right, he’s stronger than this. He’s endured some horrible shit at the hands of his mother but he doesn’t have to keep taking it. He doesn’t have to keep falling into the role of a victim, letting her disrupt his life whenever she chooses. He can break the cycle. He’s going to break the cycle.

“Thank you.” He says softly, squeezing your hand. “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.”