Patient name: Izuna Uchiha

Date of birth: 13/09/1985

Journal entry: 25/11/2022

Currently: Patient who has been in the acute psychiatric ward since 5/5/2022. Home staff found him trying to hang himself with a towel on a hook in his bathroom 24/4/2022. When found also severe rashes on wrists that caused septic shock, treated in intensive care and then medicine ward before admittance to the acute psychiatric ward under the Compulsory Psychiatric Care Act. Currently affirms suicidal thoughts daily with plan. Does not want to communicate plan. Self-harm in the form of head-banging. Currently very agitated due to co-patient taken in under the Compulsory Psychiatric Care Act two days ago. Refuses food for the last two days. Compulsory Psychiatric Care deemed necessary for patient as he affirms he will try to end his life if he is released from the ward. No admittance outside even with staff due to high risk of deviation.

Psychological examination: Lacking formal, no emotional contact. Patient answers questions accordingly, sometimes with latency. No eye contact. Patient picks his nail polish and jumps his leg up and down during conversation. Confirms suicidal thoughts.

Planning: Every meal with member of staff. Consult medicine doctor. If patient doesn't eat for three days requirement of nasogastric tube. Belting if necessary.

It was years ago anyone touched me.

I couldn't even remember when the last time was.

Even when I had screamed after the moon-man, I hadn't allowed anyone to touch me. The staff knew how much I hated physical contact of any form, and so had just stood in front of me with their arms out to prevent me from intervening. I was ashamed to admit it worked to prevent me from helping the moon-man.

Not counting the times I'd been belted and force-fed, I believe the last time anyone touched me was the last time my father had fucked me. I had been sixteen. It was twenty-one years ago. I hadn't even touched anyone on accident. Not even myself; all sexual desires had evaporated in my teens. If it was because of what my father did or my own personality, I could never know. It didn't matter. It didn't bother me that much. It was just the way things were.

So it was with great surprise I woke up in the middle of the night, two weeks after the moon-man's arrival, in a cold sweat, panting.

I didn't know what was wrong with me. I didn't feel the cold dread of having woken up from a bad dream. I didn't feel out of breath the way you did when you'd held your breath in your sleep. Instead, I felt a sensation that was terribly unfamiliar to me, yet so familiar it was like a punch to the face.

Desire.

I was a dressed sleeper, hating the sensation of sheets against my bare skin, preferring to wear loose trousers and big T-shirts. My T-shirt was now drenched in sweat, my trousers drenched in something sticky sweet.

I leaned my head back, moaned, shoved my hair out of my face; night-time was the only time I allowed it to be loose. I snaked my hand down, bit my other hand to prevent any sounds from being emitted through my lips; it was a long time ago so I didn't know how well I could handle it. As I grabbed myself, I gasped, bit down hard on my hand. The sensation was cold, sickly, exciting. I moved my hand, let it slide over my wet skin as I imagined, imagined him, imagined us. I didn't know why it was him. I hadn't had any thoughts like that about him but in the moment, his imaginary arms around me felt good, so good. He just lay in bed next to me, held me, his muscles playing beneath his skin as he tried to restrain from hurting me in pure desire. I saw him watch me with intent as I gave myself pleasure, not demanding eye contact from me, just accepting me the way I was, telling me to carry on with his body language in a way I could understand.

My hand moved faster and faster without me having to tell it to, as if my soul was possessed by a demon that had far more knowledge about the situation than I had and thus could control my muscles far better to obtain the desired outcome. The imaginary moon-man leaned his forehead against the side of my head, egging me on with whispers in my ear. Then, tired of waiting, he slid his hand over my thigh, grabbed me himself.

And with that, the real me came, and I threw my head back, opened my mouth in a silent scream, my hand I had been biting on momentarily forgotten. I shook and whined until I came crashing down, landing in my sheets, wet of sweat and lust and that desire.

The imaginary moon-man praised me softly until I fell back into a deep, heavy sleep that was just as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to me as touching myself was. 

I was stuck in my own thoughts for the rest of the day. Even Steven the red-headed nurse noticed, deciding to leave me alone for most part. I had, stupidly enough, sort of forgotten that the moon-man was in the ward; the fantasy I'd had had felt so surreal that I seemed to have lost the capacity to even believe he was actually a real person. So I was sitting down with my Rubik's cube, furrowing my brows in concentration as I tried to figure out a shortcut when he caught me completely off guard.

"Hi."

I jerked, looked up.

And there he stood, looking tentative, dressed in a black T-shirt and grey trousers that looked incredibly neat. His hair was wet, letting me know he had just showered. I suddenly felt a bit scruffy in my hoodie, soft trousers and glasses.

I looked down, and to my great mortification I felt myself blush. Again, as when he'd caught me at the pool table. I usually never blushed. I couldn't say I loved the sensation.

He walked into the room, sat down opposite me at the table where I sat with my cube. I braced myself for a question about the cube, but nothing came. He seemed very careful, very timid. Instead, he picked up a newspaper, turned pages to the crosswords, took a pen he'd had behind his ear which I hadn't noticed, and started solving it. It seemed to be a talent of his as he was exceptionally fast, and it was a hard one I saw as it was marked with five owls on the top. His brows were furrowed in deep concentration as he found word after word, and I seized the opportunity to watch him more closely.

His skin was young, and so pale that you could see the venous blood as a blue tint beneath his eyes. His hair was white, not light blonde but actually white. It was as if all of his aging had been concentrated into that hair. I found myself wondering what colour the rest of his body hair was. His hands were large with veins clearly visible, his arms well worked out. I swallowed, remembering my fantasies of the night. I had to look away.

"What?"

Shit. I hadn't noticed he was looking back at me. I saw it now, though, out of the corner of my eye. He was smirking a little.

"Nothing", I said, surprising myself; I would normally have kept silent.

"Okay", was all he said, and went back to his crosswords.

"I think I'll play some pool", I said.

"Aren't you gonna ask me if I want to join you?" he asked.

"Would you like to join me?" I asked. 

"Oh, absolutely not."

He was smiling. It took me a while to understand the joke, but years of studying others had taught me. If I had been normal, I might have smiled.

"Okay", I said.

"See you around."

"See you around."

I was filled with a warm sensation for days after that. As soon as the warmth even began to cool down, I would see him in the corridor, and that fire would bloom right back up. I had trouble initiating my meals; the staff had to tell me over and over again to start. Now, however, the latency wasn't due to the fact that I was unwilling but because my mind was somewhere else entirely where something as normal as food wasn't even a factor.

When we saw each other, he said hi, and I said hi, and that was it. He would come sit down opposite me with his crosswords, and I would be reading or writing or something, and we would just be in each other's company.

The turning point for him, and for me, and for us, came one week after I had woken up with that insatiable desire. I was sitting at the table doing some calculations when suddenly, I heard a voice screaming, and I immediately recognised it as his.

On pure instinct, I stood up, ready to fight but my heart was pounding in fear. I heard a door open, figured it must be the door to the room where the doctors and psychologists usually took us to talk.

"You can't keep me trapped anymore! You can't keep me trapped on the basis of me being fucking insane!" 

"Tobirama..." a voice said, probably the doctor who had been talking to him. 

I walked out into the corridor. I couldn't see him from where I stood as the room was around the corner of the L-shaped ward, but I could hear him more clearly. 

"Wanting to end my life doesn't automatically render me insane! Have you thought about the fact that it might be an informed decision? Have you?! That I'm completely in my mind's fucking right and that I just WANT to die?" Something clenched in my stomach then. Worry. And fear. And sadness. I had no idea what that sadness meant. "There is nothing in this world for me. NOTHING! But you don't get it because at the end of the day, you go home to your house, your family, your bed, your NORMAL life and you can't IMAGINE what it's like to not have all of that! I have nothing! NOTHING!!"

I suddenly realised where the sadness came from. It was sadness that he didn't deem me enough to at least try. I knew, somewhere within me, that it was unreasonable of me. He didn't even know me. I didn't even know him. But it still stung.

I walked over the wooden floor, my steps muffled by my knitted socks as I hated the feeling of wood beneath my feet, and I walked to the other wing of the L-shaped ward. Then, I could hear the familiar banging of the moon-man trying to get out, in a complete panic.

No...

I knew what this meant. I knew that the moon-man trying to get out didn't automatically give the staff permission to inject him, but he was frightfully big and strong, and I'd figured he wasn't afraid of anything in his frenzied state. So the staff would soon have to take him down, and as they would be unable to hold him for long, they would have to inject him.

I didn't want that.

But the staff was, by now, prepared for my engagement. Steven stood in front of the moon-man as staff approached him, prepared to intervene with my interference.

But it wasn't the fact that Steven stood in front of me that stopped me, but the fact that the moon-man was banging his head into the safety glass of the door until it bled in a desperate attempt to get out. I didn't know why, but the sight of him self-harming was so incredibly unfathomable to me, I stood frozen in place.

"What are you doing to yourself?" I whispered pathetically, knowing that he couldn't hear.

The staff didn't have to inject him.

Because the moon-man hit himself unconscious.

And in that moment, I realised exactly how much the man truly desired to die.

Because it was the same amount I had wanted to die not at all long ago. 

I stopped eating.

It wasn't the autistic part of me that started excluding more and more foods until there was nothing left I could eat.

It wasn't the anorexic part of me that wanted nothing more in the world than to fade into nothingness.

I just decided I didn't deserve food because how could I, if the moon-man could harm himself so much to get out of a world where I existed?

On the third day of no food, I fainted. Shortly after that, the doctor took me to the conversation room.

"We will have to feed you via tube."

My heart froze to ice. The thought of having that tube forced down my throat through my nose made me want to die. Not only was it unbearably painful to get it fed through my nose, but the sensation of having food forced into me was like torture to the degree that several of my suicide attempts had been just to avoid it.

"I see it bothers you", the doctor said. "I don't want to threaten you. But we have no choice. You're in danger. Your heart rhythm is affected. You will die."

I sat down at dinner doing my Goddamnest to eat, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. That night, I was so weak it felt as if I fainted to sleep. I still couldn't eat breakfast. As I walked away from the room where I always sat with a member of staff to eat as they wanted to make sure I wasn't sneaking away foods, I started hearing a ringing in my ears. That ringing got a shape in the form of black, fuzzy spots swimming before my eyes and before I knew it, I fell to my hands and knees, and I couldn't see anything.

"God, Izuna..."

"No..." I heard myself whisper through the ringing.

I felt two people grab my arms, one on each side. I hadn't been touched in so long. So long.

"Call medicine. He needs intravenous fluids. Also, we must tube him."

With what little I had left in me, I started struggling, almost as if tentatively feeling if they meant what they said or not, but they did. They definitely did.

And as they started taking me to the belting room, I started screaming. I tried to bite and spit, a pathetic attempt due to my current state of weakness, and all I could think was no no no no no no NO!

They dragged me to the room, opened the door where the bed with the belts lay ominous, as if wanting to eat me. The thought of them pumping sugar into my veins and calories into my stomach awoke the final energy within me, burned it up to make me go berserk. I screamed my throat raw. I bit and clawed. I kicked. Anything, anything to save myself from my worst nightmare.

And then...

"What are you doing to him?"

The moon-man.

Through the tears I hadn't even noticed I had shed, I saw him standing there, tall, strong, his hands clenched into fists.

"Help!!" I croaked.

He stood silent for just a moment longer.

Then, he started to fight.

As opposed to me, this man could fight. He clawed his way through the human barrier, still with a dressing around his head from where he'd hit it into the front door trying to get out, and I reached my hand out to him and in the madness of it all, I could see the fire in his eyes as he reached his hand out towards me.

"Izuna!!"

He knew my name.

"Help me!!" I screamed.

And then the door closed behind me.

"IZUNAAA!!!"

And that feeling of the belt around my chest and thighs, the needle in my arms and the tube down my throat would haunt me forever.