adam stanheight was not afraid of blood. he never had been, and he never would be.

partially because of his fair share of fights in his youth- and because he’d never won all that many, a scrawny too-short boy without much of a will to do anything, let alone beat another kid’s ass, he just got dragged into a lot of bullshit, alright?- and partially because that scrawny, too-short boy had been born a scrawny, taller-than-average girl.

and with being born a girl, no matter how much you transcend that, came periods. which were- if you weren’t aware- notorious for containing blood!

technically, he was supposed to have stopped bleeding by now. years- years on testosterone would have told you that- but he supposed that his body was just…fucked up. he’d called his doctor- literally called, which was, in his opinion, the most mortifying thing someone could do- when his twelfth period since the shots had begun, just to have been assured that it was normal.

he’d nearly killed himself from the embarrassment.

…maybe jokes like those are why jigsaw kidnapped him.

so, yeah. he wasn’t scared of blood. of all of the bodily fluids, blood was the one he was least squicked out about, even after the red haze that had been that foul bathroom. the only effect it had had, aside from scarring him mentally and physically for life and making him jumpier than the average hunted-for-sport hare, had been fully eradicating his thing for being tied up. had no effect on his indifference towards life’s liquid.

he didn’t love it, though.

it was difficult to get out of sheets and clothes, and it got everywhere, and it turned a gross brown colour when dried that people who were under the impression that he was a totally-cis guy one hundred percent mistook for shitstains. no, he was not self conscious, who told you that.

all of this is to say that he was suffering right now.

he was lucky enough to have a mostly regular cycle that had come back the second he’d been cleared and released from the normal-hospital and then psychiatric-hospital as a nice housewarming gift. so he’d been pretty easily predicting, over the past five months, exactly when his cycle was going to hit. the fifteenth through the twenty-first. every time, without fail.

today was the eighth, and he was laying curled in his bed in the fetal position, knees tucked almost to his chest and head turned to bury in a pillow. it was eight in the morning. god was laughing at him.

soft hitches marred his breathing every now and again, not-quite sobs (because he was a real man™, and also had not been able to cry for about four months), but sounds of anguish nonetheless.

the cruelest part was that it wasn’t in his mid-stomach, like he was used to. these were hitting his lower back. his heating-sack-of-decade-old-rice didn’t drape its warm weight over his back- that wasn’t its purpose. it lived to sit cozily on the soft patch of fat that resided over his useless reproductive organs.

he could feel the blood running down the back of his thigh and soaking into his sweats, for he couldn’t be bothered to get up, and even if he could have been- he wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk more than six feet before collapsing via muscle spasms.

he was also fairly certain the amount of tampons that you had could be represented by a goose egg.

speaking of you- god, wonderful you. even in his pain-addled state he could recognize the absolute saint that was his boyfriend.

he’d woken up in terrible pain, head-spinningly nauseous, and bleeding all over your thigh that he had instinctively wrapped his legs around in his sleep.

any normal, perfectly kind and well meaning person would have jumped back at the red staining their sweatpants, but you’d just- groaned groggily and rolled out of bed to change. he hadn’t bothered to get up, and you weren’t even mad that he was getting blood all over the sheets just because he hadn’t risen to get a tampon.

his breath caught again as a particularly cruel cramp hit him, and he exhaled it in a slow, pained ‘jesus’, closing his eyes.