there is certainly a good reason why disease doesn’t know how to react when someone touches him.
minor tw for implied drug use/withdrawl
he’s sickly. he is constantly sick, battling some sort of illness. fighting detox. its hard, and although he keeps up with his own personal hygiene he can’t really hide how his face and body looks and with how people are in jail..
it isn’t like he has no friends. he has friends, but he can tell they feel uneasy when they’re too close to him. he can see the discomfort on his fellow inmate’s faces when they accidentally brush against his arm. he made up his own name, hell- but that doesn’t mean its a double edged sword. literally everything in jail is.
anyway, given all of that, its a shock when a new guy shows up and pats his back despite being clearly introduced to him. its also a shock when he doesn’t make a remark about his nose bleeding, but instead grabs him tissues and asks if he’s okay.
especially considering how neat this guy looks. i mean. disease is covered in various marks from a laundry list of different things. he has bad acne everywhere, his nose is always red and runny, his arms are littered in improperly healed scabs from picking at bug bites and needle marks. the list goes on.
meanwhile?
this man looks, well, beautiful for a lack of a better word. his name certainly matched the eloquence the rest of him had as well. Maryln.
even after their prior introduction to eachother, it didn’t seem like he cared for any of the atmosphere the inmates forced on him. he spoke to him regularly, quite gracefully actually. he sat next to him, not putting space between the two of them out of fear or disgust. he was kind. a different sort of kind from the usual “kind” he’d see in prison.
of course he was apprehensive. but then he got used to it. and eventually, he enjoyed it.
it was nice having someone in his little quarantine bubble.
