(no subject)
Letters To Xenia (Ryan/Brendon)
NC-17; 8,643 words
AN:god. this thing is finally finished. halle-fucking-lujah. This prompt was harsh to delve into, and i spent about a month just collecting information and stewing, and i want to thank kylefuckingfosse for providing me with the skinny on my inquiries of all things chemical. also, crab_apple_kid who read the first part of this and said nice things, which boosted my esteem at that point by like twelve gazillion percent. pavementcamping: i really hope this works for you, because i definitely read the prompt after i started this, and realized that mabe this wasn't quite what you were aiming for, and i was really freaking until i just got to this point where i just fell in love with the ideas that i had and--yeah.
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Ryan is not a color, not like cyan or ginger or cadmium. Ryan cannot lift the lid to his paint case and find himself inside, hidden perpetually, underneath the pigments of yellow, green, violet.
In that sense, Ryan is decidedly more like ash, blank and unfeeling, or, more so, the empty beauty of recycled, hot press illustration board, the color of smoke, the absence of air. For, in himself, he finds nothing, his skin pallid and lifeless, eyes flat, hair coarse and curled against the slope of his forehead, he is nothing.
And he feels nothing, looks out his town grade window and sees empty fucking space, empty sidewalks and houses and streets, empty people; smokes a cigarette on the front step and can’t even feel the nicotine dripping down the pool of his throat, doesn’t see the cars slip past, doesn’t notice them at all.
;;
Ryan paints a picture, and the only tubes he opens are white and gray.
He spends the better half of a day in his makeshift studio, steps out twice to use the bathroom, and smokes enough cigarettes to last him a week. His legs are caged in by boxes of books brought from Jane’s former residence, and he tries to make his body pang with guilt every time he mistakenly steps on one of the torn paperbacks, but he can’t.
Jane’s hair is unmistakably raven. This is the first thing Ryan notices about her the night that they are informally introduced over breakfast in the den.
It is half past three, and Ryan is sipping his Chai out of a plastic mug against one of the couches, when she walks through the doorframe and sits down across from him, joint hanging precariously from her small lips. Ryan sets his cup down and she extends a hand, now holding the joint, towards him. Letting a small quirk of his lip slip through, he takes it, wordlessly, bringing it up toward his lips and dragging hard.
Jane reaches over, picking up his mug and quickly downing the whole thing as she watches Ryan breathe in a few thousand more times. Ryan wakes up in the morning, drool cementing his hair to the floor, and naked body covered in paint.
He feigns supposition that he might have to get used to this.
;;
Some amount of months later, Ryan wakes up and the room is black. His head is spinning in every minute impossible direction and he can’t see a fucking thing.
Listlessly, he rubs at his eyes to relieve the tension, and then the walls are white and his bed is white and his ceiling is white except they’re still spinning, they’re always spinning.
Ryan throws the sheets off of his body with a dizzy whirl, revealing a litter of flecks and two strips of cracked black paint across the mattress, which, he realizes a moment later, are his legs.
“What the hell?!” his voice is shaking, the room is blurring. From somewhere to his far left, he hears a laugh.
“It’s your color today, Ryan, of course.” She laughs again, and Ryan narrows his focus to her mop of silky hair, watching it sway as she etches a piece of red charcoal across one corner of his wall. The patterns she has completed, so far, only amount to a skeletal outline, some slight muscle mass, and a shock of carmine hair.
Ryan can’t even tell.
“Jane…” The awkward tension pools in his barren stomach. She turns her head just the slightest amount, though her hand never stills.
“Hmm?”
“Who is that?” The tension bubbles and slides against the walls of his insides, threatens entrance to his esophagus. And he may not be sure, but he has definitely seen the up-turn of the figure’s eyelashes, knows it is one of them.
“Patrick, twenty-one, orphan from south Jersey” Her voice is factual, and Ryan almost thinks that she sounds a little too detached.
“How did…?” He’s not quite sure that he really wants to know; she cuts him off anyway.
“Overdose, ecstasy, James found him this morning.” At least he was happy, Ryan wants to say, but he can almost slip into the cracks in her monotone. He lays back down, uncaring of his acrylic covered body, and it hurts less, because he can’t feel bad for not crying.
Because he knew him
;;
Ryan awakens the next night to a chalky version of Patrick staring at him openly from near the door. The boy’s electric green eyes threaten to burn crusting holes into Ryan’s heated skull, though Ryan doesn’t notice, too preoccupied, most likely, with peeling the now sticky paint from the insides of his thighs.
Suspicious of his inability to hear the hustle and bustle of the morning, he pads to the door, averting his eyes towards Patrick's earthreal face. You had to, you had to. As he does, the air in the room chills, and his bare arms are tingling, goose pimples developing in frozen patterns against his skin.
Tentatively (hurriedly, carefully), his fingers press the cooled metal of the door frame, eyes peering around the corner and purposely not meeting with those of the few boarders gathered on the icy kitchen floor. Each of them lowers their head, bangs and nose tips and eyelashes brushing the floor in succession and Ryan can’t think, the four figures stretched languidly inward of themselves, graceful almost, and then it catches.
The boy sits quietly in one corner, barefooted and pale, his body all hairless, colorless skin, save the dark, near black mop of fluffy hair hanging into his eyes in strands, and Ryan just stops. He feels full, he feels empty, and he stops.
Can’t.
Jane’s hair is noticeable, long and stringy, even from his doorway, as she runs her slender nose along the tiling, snorting up every last fucking grain because she can’t afford the waste, her hand clenched lovingly against the boy’s slender knee. The boy shakes visibly in his seat, looks ragged and empty, looks how Ryan feels, and Ryan’s head starts to spin.
It swirls mercilessly, with little effort, cloudy and gray, as the boy stumbles from his chair, Jane’s hand, now immersed in his mop-like hair, guiding his head down, down, down.
Ryan’s feet slide in from under his small weight, and he collapses against his doorframe, the molecules about his wrists tightening with each monotonous flip of the minute hand, tick, beat, tick, beat, and the room is dark and lamp lit at the same time.
Daggers of light cut through the blinds at the same pace that the frozen boy snorts his head painfully, messily forward, and Ryan can almost feel the burn.
;;
The rain catches against the dips in his skin, and Ryan figures that he is, probably, the only one awake. He’s always awake. Perpetually on and doing, working. And this morning when he rolled over against the living room wall, brains a dripping mess of fiery and gray, he figured that, as long as he was forced out of sleep, he might as well stay that way.
The tendons in his hands clench, angrily against the brunt of his fists, vision smoky and cold, as his own voice screams against the skin of his forehead.
The ache throbs and he feels fucking fifteen, skinny and wet and pissed the fuck off on his own front porch. Jane appears from the door within seconds, sits down carelessly and Ryan averts his head. Ryan hopes that the tension would just come up and slit her throat.
“What the shit Ryan, you could at least fucking talk to me you know.” Her words hit his cheek like ice, even with the weather as cold as it is, and he shudders.
“I fucking told you to stop Jane, I fucking told you…” Ryan shakes his hair off of his face and Jane stops, looks at him like god, what a fucking hypocrite.
“I never said I WOULD, Ryan.” She’s spitting words by now. “It’s their fucking decision.”
“It doesn’t have to be!” Ryan slams his hand against the pavement, Jane sighs. “You bring them into this house, bruised and fucking battered, and you offer them that shit, your shit, Con’s shit, it doesn’t fucking matter, and you expect them to say no?” her head is spinning.
“I-“
“Godammit Jane. You’re not the fucking mother Teresa.” Ryan runs a bony hand through his messy hair, rubs at his eyelids. “God, I’m such a fucking hypocrite.” He says, breathy and exasperated at this early hour. “But I’m done. I’m on and I know that, but I…”
“Ry, you could quit-“Jane’s hand reaches for his, but Ryan recoils softly.
“did you?” The question is rhetorical, but he asks it none the less, knows that the pang hurts somewhere low in Jane’s gut. The silence holds, awkward, for an infinite amount of seconds.
“He’s young, He, I…He was there with this beat up old guitar and he played the most beautiful--, but he never smiled, you know?” she runs her dainty chilled hands up and down against Ryan’s thigh. “God, he just, he just kept on playing.” Ryan takes a breath, and, yeah, he remembers it that way, before, before he came. The way that he couldn’t.
“It was different with me though.” He says it as if it explains something to her, something set into place before she even stepped a small into his air. Something-
“I know.” Her statement is bold, off kilter, but he quirks his eyebrow as if she couldn’t possibly… “I wanted, when I came, I wanted to know what your story was and you, you’re right, it was, it is different.” Ryan can’t even remember what to say; he rubs torturously at his eyelids instead. “I mean, it’s-you were fine, you were,”
Jane takes a small, unneeded breath, pauses in time for her throat to form the words. “…you were normal, he said you had these, these terrible, blinding emotions, fiery and dangerous,”
Ryan barely sort of recalls.
“He said that…that you would’ve just gone out, like-like a spent candle.” She sighs out of the side of her lips, like exhaling smoke. “Another fucking dead artist.”
In the next seconds, Ryan feels a bit less gray, hurts like a sharp pang from the inside out, explodes his insides all over Jane’s porcelain white face.
“You know fucking what Jane, I don’t fucking care why he did it, I don’t fucking care. “ The pavement scratches as he rises off of the step. “And you sure as hell shouldn’t either. I know my fucking story alright, I was THERE, I fucking lived it, and I fucking drowned in it.” Jane’s hair is flame, shimmering and hot to the touch as Ryan’s anger swirls in a pool at her feet. “And you know what, if you’re lucky, you fucking will too.”
Ryan doesn’t even bother to shut the door on his way back inside, and Jane’s not entirely sure if she should consider his screams so beautiful.
;;
The next night turns into the next few weeks, sullen and sad, and Ryan slowly falls back into his monotonous routine, stock shelves his anger at Jane and the boy, and trips back onto the bench in the back corner of the park, forgets to finish a painting, cigarette pushed precariously, once again, between his index and middle fingers.
He forgets to smile.
;;
The boy shows up, sprawled at the corner entrance to the park, at the very worst time of the year. Ryan’s color today is green, which means envy, means coldness, means earth and aggression and youth.
And Ryan can certainly feel it, can feel the paint seeping into his pores, liquid and chilled as death, rolling, harsh and spiking, down the walls of his insides.
The boy barely looks up, continues mashing the melody up and down with his fingers, fluffy hair shifting from side to side. Ryan folds his own tenuous limbs underneath his small body and sits down, cold and dry, directly across from him.
He watches the boy, his angled fingers flying across the strings with an ease and a fire that he has not seen in the longest of whiles, hasn’t dared to imagine.
The boy’s arms stay taught, pale and cold under his ratty thermal and pea coat, as he sings some unknown and far off melody to himself, so soft that only the two of them can even dream of hearing.
Ryan sits, silent and waiting, listening, for the better part of three minutes before the boy’s speaking voice cuts through the calm at all, and Ryan is so lost in the note structure that it faintly registers.
“You’re from the house.” He speaks as if the words have been at the brunt of his tongue the entire time, and, truth be told, leaves no room for question. Ryan tries halfheartedly to worm his way of this, and he isn’t quite sure what makes him look worse.
“I-I just, sometimes.” He gestures faintly with his hands, but can’t quite force the lie from the bottom of his throat.
“No, I Know it was you, I fucking saw you.” The boy sets his pick down and lets his guitar slump into his lap as he grabs pointedly for Ryan’s left arm. A little invaded at the strange intrusion, Ryan move to recoil, but is caught swiftly in the boy’s palm, his shirt sleeve scrunched up messily to reveal a scratchy line of grassy paint on his forearm. “This.” He rubs against the acrylic with his thumb. “You’re the boy with the colors;” The boy stutters clumsily for his words, his brain scurrying through the memory. “She paints you because it makes you feel.”
Ryan’s stomach flips anxiously at that statement, sees the truth in the lines. He feels small, suddenly, because he never thought about it that way. He just woke up every morning, itching and covered in paint, woke up to Jane confirming his color of the day, and kept the routine. Ryan’s head couldn’t question his decision that she was simply reading him, never even stopped to invest in whether she actually fucking got it, never wondered about the difference; would feel blue on yellow days and black on purple, didn’t fathom the choice as irrelevant to the outcome, slept through the nightly activity and didn’t even dream.
“How did you…?” Ryan can’t help but feel slightly betrayed at this suddenly public information.
“Jane, she told me about,” the boy pauses for what Ryan takes as careful calculation. “, not about the reason, but just that…that she painted you.” He swipes a cold, dark hair from his face and inhales. “And I, I watched you-sometimes, you know, when I was, when I was there, and you looked not as empty as she had said, I just assumed…”
“She said I was…” Ryan feels naked, cut open and lying for dead on the pavement.
“Yeah, once,” He senses Ryan’s apprehension, “she just, she mentioned…” swiping at the air, his hand moves to explain the rest, and though Ryan doesn’t need it, he closes his eyes quietly and lets the cadences of the boy’s voice trickle into his ears, the unsure, fumbling tone oddly soothing.
“Ryan.” The boy ruts a pale hand against Ryan’s shoulder and shakes it a bit. “Ryan.” Ryan barely registers the sound of his own name.
“Hmm.” It comes out muffled as he swings his head up. “Wait, how do you know…?” he then remembers the body in front of him and his throat constricts. The boy blushes floridly, as if he has momentarily forgotten that Ryan’s name is not a piece of information that had been offered yet, cocoa eyes large with the traces of a small child.
“Oh, I- Sorry.” The words rush out of his mouth in a quick tumble and he grabs the handle to his guitar, springing to his feet and making to exit this suddenly embarrassing situation. “Sorry.” He spits again and turns on his heels before Ryan even has time to catch up with the apology.
Ryan stares, stock still, at the barren spot that the boy had occupied just moments before. And he contemplates, wills himself to run off after him, but can’t, opts instead to finger the boy’s small pile of thin leather bracelets into his coat pocket, his legs glued to the spot. But all he can really do, and all he can ever do, is reach into his pocket and light another cigarette, feel the smoke run down the rim of his throat, cough the nicotine back into the dirty city air.
It’s been a long day.
;;
It takes roughly three weeks for Ryan to remember that he actually has a guitar, and then another three days for him to finally muster up the confidence to play.
The leaves outside the window float mercilessly through the air, color dots swirling against the current, and Ryan cycles, red to yellow to orange as he daily reaches a slim fingered hand towards the neck of his acoustic, pulling it wordlessly into his lap.
His rough, smoke stained hands slide gracefully over its surface, a deep cherry lacquer inlayed with scuffs and small nicotine holes, permanent ink splashed carelessly over its curved frame, and his breathing stills to just the slightest degree as he starts up another empty rhythm, thin leather strips still wrapped around his wrist.
;;
The boy shows up on the front step within twenty four hours, hard case over his shoulder and a rat’s nest of loose leaf notation paper held haphazardly under his arm. His cheeks are flushed from the crisp autumn wind, hair unkempt and breath coming in short puffs due to the exertion, when Jane ushers him inside.
“Ryan,” she calls from the hall, knocking sharply against the side wall,“Visitor!”
Then she continues her timed steps on into the kitchen, scooping up a small pile of shirts and presenting them to the boy.
“Here kid, just give these to Ryan.” The boy stands stock still, puzzled briefly on which door to enter at his own risk, but Jane is quick to un-jumble her thoughts for him.
“Oh, sorry hun, Ryan is in his room, third on the left.” She points a small hand in Ryan’s general direction and shifts away.
Insular of the confines of his room, Ryan sits, native at the far corner of his bed, finger lilting angrily over the strings of his guitar, Patrick’s saturated face staring at him from the opposite wall, a sight now comforting.
The boy steps up to find the door shut with little care, and he raps his free hand against it, shuffling his cargo in through the miniscule doorway.
Ryan faces away from him, mind lost in an effortless gap in the rhythms, and he fails to notice the boy slip the case off of his shoulder, papers and Ryan’s pile of shirts floating towards the carpet in the effort. The boy pushes his slight frame onto Ryan’s bed, grunts softly under his breath, and Ryan abruptly stops, head and hair whipping around in surprise.
“Bloody hell!” his left hand comes up to clutch at his chest, grasping for his breath to return. “Christ-do you know how fucking early…” The boy feigns a short chuckle.
“It’s a Thursday; nothing is ever too early for genius Ryan.” At this, Ryan’s face softens, though he tries not to feel the bad for not smiling. It is only then that he notices the boy’s gaze fixated intently on the far wall. “Who-who is that?” the boy’s head quirks lightly to the side. “Did you…?”
“No, Jane did.” Ryan’s stomach flips. “I, I don’t…that’s Patrick.” He nods his head towards the portrait and swallows, roughly, the lump in his throat, as the boy turns to look at him with obvious interest. “He-he was the one who…he was the first.”
“The first,” the boy repeats it to himself, softer. “Where is he now?”
“Dead” Ryan sets his guitar against the wall and lays back, doesn’t feel like elaborating, hurting.
“Oh.” And then he’s silent, the boy, as he lets his head fall next to Ryan’s, eyes trained to the ceiling. They let their shoulders touch and they stay, motionless, for the longest of times, until the boy perches his chin on his hand and speaks. “Who was the last?” It takes Ryan even longer to answer this than the last one, because he’s become so detached that he can scarcely remember.
“Jane…I guess.” He shifts his head to meet the boy’s round, dark eyes. “Or-you, you know, if I knew your name.” The boy almost forgot.
“Brendon.” He says it confidently, as he hasn’t yet said anything else, and brushes a flick of hair from Ryan’s forehead. Ryan then turns back over and Brendon lets himself fall with little precision.
“Brendon…” Ryan whispers it to himself, soft and determined, like a mantra. Brendon’s hand stills as it grasps Ryan’s.
“Thank you.”
;;
The bus ride out of the city, and Brendon leaning his shaggy head against Ryan’s shoulder most of the way, has to be one of the most prominent and drowsy memories that Ryan can muster up lately. Their acoustics share the empty seat in front of them, the angle of their lean somewhat symbolic of the two boys’ similar proclivities, and as they arrive, Ryan grunts low in his throat, nudging a leg against Brendon’s, coaxing him awake. Brendon pulls his head up with a slow snap.
“Mmrmph.” He mutters, and knocks his head against the brunt of the headrest. Ryan drops his hard case against the knob of his knee and swears under his breath.
“C’mon dude, get up.” Another shake is administered to the ball of Brendon’s shoulder and Brendon fails at suppressing a groan. “Man, c’mon, we’re in ‘ledo, get up.” Brendon reaches a hand out to tug on Ryan’s sleeve, like a small child, and then he’s pulling Ryan forward into the seat, determined. “Brendon-what the fuck-“He clamps a cold hand against Ryan’s mouth.
“I’m fucking sleeping, Ross.” Brendon swipes his hand away slowly. “The world can wait.” Except Ryan might have the habit of arguing his point with perseverance.
“But-“Ryan starts and Brendon pushes himself against Ryan’s side, warm and sleep-hazy.
“Sleep, Ryan Ross…” Brendon mumbles against the icy window, breath coming in clouds. Ryan sighs and nudges the edge of his bag back under the seat with his foot as he listens to Brendon muttering near his elbow, his head fuzzy and drifting.
“, Sleep”
;;
Ryan is mashing his fingers against the strings of his old acoustic, back propped up pointedly against the scratchy motel wall, when Brendon sneaks into his line of vision, hips settling down onto the makeshift comforter.
“Dude, Look what I fucking got” It groans out of Brendon’s mouth, excited, and he pulls a dime store bag out in front of him. Ryan sets his guitar aside carefully, flipping the plastic over to release its contents. “, Fucking cigarettes, man.” And Ryan reaches out for the nearest pack, opening it with a messy haste.
“Jesus, I’ve been dying.” Ryan breathes out like he really has, which isn’t too far from the truth. His head has been spinning completely haphazardly for days. Brendon laughs softly and paws at his pack.
“Did you steal them?” Ryan asks, halfway through his second cigarette and his third, blowing a short puff into the stale bedroom air. Brendon stops, suddenly, in the middle of a long drag, and almost chokes.
“W-what?” he stammers with little eloquence. “No, no, of course not, no, I had-“He sighs loudly, rests his face in his palms with resignation, but the sad thing is: Ryan doesn’t even fucking say a thing, just turns his head and takes another swimming drag, hard and choked, and Brendon lays his head back, fingering lightly at the bruising mark on his neck.
;;
Brendon comes back from the store one night, and sees Ryan with his back flush to the chill of the door, the warm flicker of light from inside the motel dancing in unfocused patterns across the plane of his cheeks.
His feet are curled precariously underneath whatever warmth his thighs can offer them in the January cold, his fingers white and shivering, despite the lack of snow.
Brendon thinks that like this, worn and pale and tired, Ryan might be the type of boy that Brendon is never going to fucking meet again, ever.
“I’ve been-” The words crack softly out of Ryan’s lower lip, sore and raw, and Brendon can feel Ryan shiver at his feet. “You-you’re late.” His teeth are chattering.
“I know, god I-I god, I know.” Brendon says, and bends down to scoop Ryan’s tall frame from the frozen pavement, the air around them whistling itself around in a type of mantic dance.
Ryan clamors, unsteadily and with Brendon’s help, to his feet, the two balancing haphazardly on Brendon’s left arm as his other hand busies with clinking the key into the lock and tripping them, rather ungracefully, into the musty bedroom.
Brendon leads them over to one of the hardened chairs at the nearest corner of the room, and Ryan can see his own breath rolling out of his mouth in smoky clouds as he is guided down.
“Why?” Brendon’s eyes are as wide as saucers and he lifts a hand to the side of his head. “Why would you-?”
“I just-I just feel so empty.” Ryan deadpans, eyes open and glazed, looking anywhere but at the boy in front of him. “God, I can’t even-it’s like, lately, I don’t even know what I am anymore.” Brendon says nothing. “I could, for a while I could…after, but-“
“I can’t.” I can’t fix it, Brendon wants to say, but doesn’t know how. He almost wants to be angry, too, because he planned it, god, he has the shit just across the room in his jacket, he fucking worked for it, but he can’t. Instead, he reaches his hands out to take Ryan’s colder ones into his own, rubs mercilessly with his fingers, desperate for some semblance of heat, and sighs, quiet and muted. “, but you could, you could.”
;;
They don’t talk about it the next morning, and Brendon thinks that maybe, just maybe, he won’t have to face the swirling intrigue of today, as he lays face down on the carpet, hair wet with drool and cemented to its fibers like glue, but thinks better of it.
;;
Ryan wakes up later that day, and his entire body is thrumming with heat. There is a fire in his stomach, his head, his thighs, his fucking groin, and everything aches as if he’d slept through the night on a bed of nails, even though he didn’t.
He raises the mess of his head out of the chair, feeling his neck crick in the process, and spots Brendon on the other side of the room, pale fingers pushing around something on the makeshift table with a shard of plastic-glass, his hair, matted and thick, hanging in loose strands against his forehead.
Tentatively, cautiously, it is at that moment that the room swells, feels full and open and suffocating. Ryan scratches at his ankles like he’s mad and he watches as Brendon ducks his head and snorts a painful stripe up the tabletop, throwing his head back with an easy grace and just faintly noticing Ryan gaping at him from across the room.
But Ryan just continues to hold the stare, sees Brendon’s face twist up with what Ryan would peg as laughter under his breath, sarcastic and dry.
“Come on Ryan, jump.” He hears Brendon say, but never once sees his lips move a single millimeter, which kind of leaves him at certifiably out of his fucking mind. The time for Ryan to have gotten to this point is long overdue.
Brendon keeps staring, empty and fucking mindless underneath the white hot slits of light from the window, and Ryan slides from the chair, knocking his left knee against Brendon’s acoustic with a loud thump in the hasty process of climbing over to seat himself next to Brendon. Brendon looks at him with some type of stinging hanging in the back of his eyes.
“Back so soon?” he asks, fingers neatly busying themselves with using his botched plastic sheet to cut another few lines as he speaks. Back from what, Ryan thinks, where was I, and then decides that, at three in the afternoon, Brendon’s haunting tones are just a tad too cryptic for his liking.
Brendon snorts out another thin line and Ryan resorts to pushing against Brendon’s arm with the joints of his fingertips, insistent and wanting, because, god, it’s so fucking tempting and it’s right fucking there, and he just, he just wants.
Then Brendon finishes, slicing his fingers across his nose in faint irritation, and scoots the seat of his jeans across the carpet, making space for Ryan as he threads his unoccupied hand into the mess of ruddy hair at the base of Ryan’s neck.
Ryan just sits, still and frozen, staring with frightened eyes at the ungodly mess in front of him, because, oh god, he going to, but Brendon can feel the apprehension, and he sidles up against Ryan’s thighs, leaning in to whisper pointedly into his ear.
“Take the plunge with me.” He says; even though it sounds like he’s saying take me, voice folding itself all over Ryan’s organs, wanting inside of him.
Brendon pulls back with a devilish chuckle, and Ryan gulps, heavy, swallowing a few unneeded breaths before leaning his head down and snorting long and hard, Brendon’s hand reassuring on his back. He can feel the grains, sharp and caustic, ripping through his system like they never left, can feel them slice and dice at his airways, the snowy white crystals just drifting around inside of his body like a fucking phantom limb, and his brain just starts to fucking spin.
It swirls and twists so intricately, even, that he can barely register when Brendon’s hand on his shoulder blade pulls him back, roughly, leaving him laving his tongue and teeth somewhere in the crook of Brendon’s neck, eyelids blinking open and closed dramatically against the stone cold skin.
“Welcome home, baby boy.” Brendon mutters, relieved, as he strokes his fingers against Ryan’s sweat soaked hair.
“Welcome home.”
;;
The various substances lining their motel room, seeping out from countertops and showerheads, and from underneath the floorboards, is really becoming less about the drugs and more about trying to fucking live, Ryan thinks, hovering somewhere between on and not and staring emptily at the knackered pile of blotters on the bathroom counter.
He rinses the cheap soap out of his scalp, the water set permanently to a scalding degree, and feels the burn as the mixture of hair and suds and fucking whatever the fuck he ingested last night seeping out of his pores and down towards the drain.
Subsequently, he watches this, the mixing of patterns and chemicals that are created on both his pallid skin and the yellowed tiling, watches it until the water runs in icy rivulets down his spine, electro-shocking the ions to his brain.
“Fuck.” He hisses as the icy chill pools in one of the track marks on his arms, the open wound still stinging from the frozen pressure, and shuts off the stream, stepping out and drying himself with the only bath towel that they ever bothered to wash.
The bright squares still sit on the counter, a few of them partially dissolved in a puddle of spilt tap water, and Ryan grabs the salvageable handful, stuffing them into his pocket as he zips up his jeans.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s still shivering, sprawled on the broken loveseat, a joint that he found the shit in Brendon’s knapsack for dangling from his lips.
The rain just outside of the window is startling, strange in such early March, but he can taste its glow as it drips and pools down against the contrast of a dark sky.
He sighs, inward of himself, and exhales leafy smoke, because it’s four in the fucking morning and he hasn’t seen Brendon since ass o’clock yesterday, since the last two blue pills and Brendon tonguing his lower back, warm and wet and, god he needs.
He needs something that he can’t even fathom, not all the way through his first joint, nor when he drifts out of consciousness, legs hanging off of the chair ridge and hair soaked all the way through the cushions.
;;
When Ryan wakes up, it’s to a decidedly different weight resting on his body.
He can still hear the faint rumblings of a storm, as he comes to, but his body, hazy with the thick smoke that fills his lungs, barely registers the insistent press of a hot tongue to the skin of his belly, lapping up and down lazily.
The temperature in the room pushes up a notch, and Brendon’s dripping wet head slides up to Ryan’s jaw, licking quickly at the skin there before sliding back down and away, chuckling. Ryan watches, entranced, as Brendon tries furiously to lap the crushed remains of some pill or another, blue, yellow, orange, Ryan can’t tell, from where he has it sprinkled across Ryan’s ribcage.
Brendon laughs, licks another long stripe, and Jesus-
“What are you on?” Ryan asks, because, god, he’s seen Brendon high more often than not, but it’s never been like this, never so intense and out of his fucking control. Brendon moans against the skin just inches below Ryan’s belly button.
“God, everything.” He mutters against Ryan’s skin. “I was at this party, and fuck, I mean, they had everything, pills and blotters and needles for every fucking time of day.” Ryan can feel the vibrations as Brendon speaks and licks hastily at the same time. “Mmm, and there was this boy,” the words slip out like small moans. “…he was so fucking pretty, Ry.” Ryan’s throat constricts as he swallows nervously. “Messy honey hair and these huge almond eyes and just, fuck, he sucked me off and I was so fucking high, I was a mess, Ry,”
His tongue brushes the waist of Ryan’s jeans as he speaks.
“But it felt so fucking good…” Ryan lets out a trapped moan at that last warbled confession, low and throaty already, and he feels his dick throb at the feeling.
“Fuck.” The words break against Brendon’s lips as the boy moves to mash his swollen lips against Ryan’s in reaction from the chemicals.
Ryan pushes back just as harshly, their tongues passing small crumbs of substance back and forth, and within seconds the secondhand high is kicking in and he’s fucking gone.
They kiss like they’re fighting, grappling at each others skin and Brendon imprinting Ryan into the makeshift couch as Ryan’s hips and his wet belly crash up against Brendon soaked limbs, icy and dripping.
Then, with a swift upward push, Brendon is off of Ryan and over near the bed, his body hunched over a small pile of coke that he neatly forms into lines, Ryan’s a tad larger than his own, but only because he’s pretty sure that, in the past twenty-four hours, he’s had enough shit to last both of them a week, can’t feel a fucking thing.
Ryan raises his head in confusion for a moment, after Brendon vacates his lap, his brain still not quite caught up, but then sees him over at the bed and stumbles over shakily, kicking a used needle underneath the bed as he sits down.
Brendon smiles with his teeth, blinding and large, and, in this moment, Ryan can’t do anything but lean his head down, cover his left nostril, and snort against the makeshift mirror, leaning back to lave at Brendon’s mouth in between lines, blood seeping slowly from Ryan’s nose, a crimson, shimmering mess, though neither of them bother to notice nor care.
The ions in the room, electrostatic as they bounce mercilessly from wall to wall, charge and swirl around Ryan’s head as he finishes, pushing himself roughly against Brendon before pressing the other boy smack against the table, biting harshly at his lips as blood runs down between them.
When Ryan’s lungs absolutely beg for some form of sustenance, he breaks away, Brendon using this opportunity to both catch his breath and snort another painful line, his body convulsing a bit at the sensation.
He gets halfway through his second line, nose bloody and raw, and in yanked upwards by Ryan, both boys stumbling to their feet as Ryan flips and backs Brendon, harsh, into the wall.
“Hey, I wasn’t-“ Is all Brendon has time protest before Ryan’s tongue is in his mouth and his hands are tangled in his ratty hair. Ryan pushes his wrists into the plaster and smirks.
“You’ve had enough to last a lifetime.” The words hit, caustic, right at Brendon’s throat and Ryan mouths there, the blood from his lips smearing slightly on the pale surface.
Brendon lets a loose moan choke past his lower lip, heated, and he turns so that Ryan has his back to the wall, dropping down to lap at the dusty cocaine on his lower abdomen.
Ryan watches with nebulous fascination as Brendon sucks at the skin there, and he’s possibly never wanted so much in his entire life.
Brendon reaches with his hands, then, though he never ceases his mouth’s wet contact with Ryan’s stomach, and undoes the fastenings of Ryan’s pants, his nimble, calloused fingers pulling at the zip and reaching into his waistband, tugging down hard so that the material pools at Ryan’s clammy ankles.
The room is spinning.
Brendon’s breath is coming in shorter and shorter spasms as he mouths lethargically at Ryan, a heated ridge against the chapped sweetness of his mouth, through the thin cotton of his underwear, coppery mouth leaving small, bloody stains in little o shapes all across the front, messy trails of substance and dna for no one in particular to find.
Ryan gasps, surprise and feeling bubbling up in his throat, as Brendon’s hands curl in the rim of Ryan’s underwear and pull them down, Brendon sucking harshly on Ryan’s hip before moving his swollen lips down to envelope the head, sucking tentatively, lightly, before he moves his mouth down, takes in as much of Ryan as he possibly can, and, in a moment of sobriety, he thinks that this might, in practice, be a lot more difficult than he originally thought, but continues anyway, his damp, coal hair tickling against Ryan’s thighs as he grabs possessively, unknowingly, at Ryan’s knees, tongue running, smooth, along the underside.
Ryan grips at the wall, frantically, as he comes, attacking the cavern of Brendon’s mouth from all angles, and he starts to float down; thinks about Jane, thinks about home and his paintings and god, he just blacks the fuck out.
He slides down the wall, pants around his ankles and worn, and Brendon falls right with him, his lethargic high sitting down to see him spiraling neatly into Ryan’s side, and the feeling slips.
He just can’t hold on.
;;
It hurts worse, progressively, as Brendon gets worse, the substance flowing in and out of his system like air. And it’s not like Ryan hasn’t done it, not like he doesn’t still do it, nose held tight to mirrors and pieces of art that dissolve in his mouth, but it’s maybe just a transitory thing, he’s only living. But that’s for him to believe.
;;
It’s warmer, mostly, teetering on the brink of summer, when the insanity hits.
Ryan comes back one morning, legs hurting after a short cigarette run, and finds Brendon curled up on the far corner of the bed, the covers torn off and lying in tatters on the ashen floor, shaking with lack of sustenance. His face is pallid, sallow and clammy to Ryan’s touch, and with just one bare press to his ribs, he dry heaves onto the floor, his body coming up with nothing but air.
Ryan takes out his Zippo, lights a Menthol, and holds it up to Brendon’s lips.
“Suck.” He deadpans it, watching as the smoke billows from the lit end, and he thinks that, under any other circumstances, Brendon might’ve laughed. Instead he just tilts his head towards the cigarette, capturing it between his plump but paled lips and dragging deep and shakily.
Ryan shifts, rubbing a warm hand along Brendon’s naked back, the skin cold and sweaty to the touch, and Brendon instantly recoils, curling up into some twisted fetal position, cigarette hanging thoughtfully from his lips.
His breathing begins to settle, slightly, the tone of it evening with the settled atmosphere, and Ryan reaches out and takes it, pulling deeply on the last spent embers before he tosses it towards the south wall, rolling to the other end of the bed and drifting.
;;
“Don’t wait for it to change.” Ryan tells him one night, as Brendon reaches into his backpack and pulls out a handful of blotters, sliding one into his mouth and waiting, always waiting.
He holds one out to Ryan and he takes it, unusual lately, but he’s desperate for something, god anything, and the way that the synthetic dots pull at his head, blind and profound, is so fucking tempting. “Because it’s going to,” his tone is flat. “If you don’t, it will.”
Brendon drums his fingers against his thighs like he’s playing the piano, sighs into the air as he stares at the ceiling.
“I want change, Ryan.” He speaks with insistence, as if Ryan is some sophomoric child. “I’m just trying to live.” Ryan think that he says live like he hasn’t a clue what it means. He shakes his head through the cloud of colors.
“This shit isn’t helping you live, Brendon.” Ryan throws a spent hand against the wall. “It is your life; it’s all you fucking are anymore.” A broken, desolate corpse, Ryan wants to add, because it’s true.
All there is, lately, is Brendon on and doing and taking, becoming a chemical Pluto, pointless and empty and not even real. Brendon notes that the sheets on the bed are yellow, orange and swirling in the lamplight.
“Ryan?” Brendon asks; doesn’t look up from his lap. “What would happen if we died?” It’s the most honest thing he’s said in months. Ryan shrugs his shoulders because he hasn’t really thought that far.
“Nothing, I guess.” He feels the phantom joint just sagging from his lips. “We’re dead, Jane paints our picture, life goes on.” It’s a mild case of indifference. “I don’t think anyone really matters, in the long run.” Brendon looks at him through the haze of the drugs, his brown eyes dull, but large and sad.
“I sort of used to wish that they did, you know?” Brendon mumbles it so softly that he is not even sure that Ryan will hear. “I just, I wanted to matter.” He is trembling visibly, though the air is saturated with heat. “I wanted to feel.”
He looks at Ryan, then, his face empty, though so pleading, and Ryan just tries so hard. Fighting, angrily, his guts twisted into five different complicated patterns, Ryan leans over and kisses him.
The kiss is loose, Ryan’s head seeping through his mouth and swirling around inside Brendon’s, the both of them tasting each angry fear as it spreads across their tongues, intertwined somewhere in the midst of it all, but it feels cleaner.
It’s just a small gesture, really, a continuation of something that Ryan can’t quite pinpoint with his head so muddled, and he pulls away, wetly, as Brendon just fucking stares at the patterns developing across Ryan’s cheeks, a morphing pattern of purples and whites, and god, he is so fucked.
They sit like that, silent with their heads against the edge of the mattress, for the longest of times before anyone speaks.
“What do you think it would look like?” Brendon asks out of the silence.
“What would what look-“Ryan can’t quite understand the cryptic musing of his question.
“Us,” Brendon look over at the south wall as he explains. “You know, if she drew us.” His throat constricts. “…If we died.” Ryan shrugs because he is not quite sure.
“She would-she would probably do it as how we looked, you know, when we first came to the house…” the air in the room shrinks in amount. “, since she, since she didn’t know us at our most prominent.”
“And if she did?” and, god, Brendon is just full of fucking questions, cold and high off of his fucking ass.
“If she did…” Ryan trails off, unsure. “If she was there, the night it rained, I think, I think that would be it.”
He turns back to look straight ahead, and Brendon can’t even argue, not with his mind so completely taken by the swirling dots of color that keep dancing across the front wall. Brendon watches them with ease, watches as they twirl like water droplets, and Ryan slumps, sated, against his shoulder, and Brendon doesn’t even notice.
;;
The next few weeks, thanklessly, get neither better nor worse.
Ryan gets up every morning and Brendon wakes up every night, and they snort a line and go back to bed, sleeping through the week days and never talking about anything of much importance.
But it’s July, or it must be, Ryan thinks, because it is so hot that he can’t see, when he wakes up, and Brendon is nowhere in the bed to be found.
He lilts out of bed, rubbing at his sleep sore eyes and makes his way to the bathroom, only to find Brendon perched precariously inside of the shower, his naked ass and thighs resting against the heels of his feet as the harsh spray of the water splashes across the span of creamy skin on his back.
Ryan stops then, entrenched in the way that Brendon’s spine curves over his back as he pours small baggies of crushed powder down into the drain, his hair dripping like a rainstorm against his eyes. He leans against the sink, quietly, and watches as small tablets and squares of paper dissolve under the spray like rapid fire, watches the life that they have built slowly ebb away into the pipelines, until Ryan can’t fucking take it. Noticeably, he lets a cough slip out of his throat, and Brendon flips his head, his hair pouring all over the tile as he pulls back the slightly see through slide door and sticks his head out.
“Ryan?” he asks, “what are you…” But Ryan has already beat him to it, his hand cupped around the nape of Brendon’s neck and his frosted mouth pressed against Brendon’s wet lips.
Brendon, shocked, but moved into an ease, fits his mouth just as sharply over Ryan’s, pulling the partially clothed boy up against his dripping and unashamedly nude body and pushing him smartly against the small shower wall.
His lips fall to Ryan’s jaw, thick tongue slipping out to lap at the skin there, catching the rivulets as they slide down the cool expanse of Ryan’s neck, each particularly cavernous area becoming purple and tender bruises that Ryan is sure to see in the mirror the next day.
Brendon lowers his hands, then, slipping them along the outline of Ryan’s ribs and they fall to the belt loops on his pants, sliding them to the shower floor with a wet smack. Ryan then finds himself chilled, naked and exposed against Brendon’s skin, rubbing himself shamelessly against the raw cuts on Brendon’s hip, hard and throbbing.
“Do you want…?” Brendon asks, trails off at the end because he just can’t say. Ryan keens against the tremors of his voice, fingers leaving prints in the knotted flesh of Brendon’s ass.
“I-god, just…” and if Ryan was at all apprehensive of this, before, then the heat of this situation isn’t making it any better, but god just- “You’re throwing it all away.” Though he isn’t quite sure what he means.
“I know.” Brendon says, lifting his hands behind each of Ryan’s thighs and hoisting him up. “I’m sorry.” And then he thrusts in, no fucking warning, and Ryan feels like he’s numb from his fingers to his toes, the sensation spiking from inside of his ass, white, hot heat, and spreading.
Brendon feels his dick twitch, furiously, and it feels like Ryan’s ass is choking him, sliding in and out between his cheeks in a pounding rhythm. Ryan bounces once, clinging to Brendon’s neck with slight apprehension, and it changes the angle, Brendon’s cock grating against Ryan’s fucking spot on the next thrust and-
“Bren,” is all that he lets float past his lips, pushing its way into Brendon’s mouth as they kiss, and then Brendon is coming, slicing through the sores on his insides, because, god, he’s not on fucking anything, and that usually helps him out.
Ryan drops his head back, then, against the hardness of the wall, and he comes all over the skin of his ribs, rubbing it off and into Brendon’s sopping wet hair as they crash to the ground, Brendon not even bothering to pull out, even though Ryan’s ass fucking burns.
Ryan spends the rest of the day, and most of the night, watching the mixture of substance and come run down the tiled drain, Brendon still like a fucking ghost inside.
;;
Brendon wakes up the next morning, and he’s covered in paint. The colors have mixed, the shade now close to some shade of every fucking color ever, and he’s naked, come still caked in the front of the scalp of his hair. Ryan isn’t anywhere and he didn’t leave his fucking bag, so Brendon lights his last cigarette as he sits on the step, smoke curling out of the side of his mouth.
He screams
;;
Ryan catches the bus to the next city, his bag small and not very comfortable company, and when he finally ends up at the house and knocks on the corner door, his room has been occupied and Jane is nowhere to be found.
But he can faintly see the shadows if he looks at the back wall
;;
It’s October, somewhere bordering on three months since he’s been-back, and Ryan watches her, the girl’s fingers, delicate and pale, flying across the white brick spanned in front of her.
The seat of her jeans rests solely on the heels of her feet, and her hair is loose and short, though colored a striking, familiar raven.
She perches the hilt of a cigarette in her left hand, her right hand busying itself with finishing the lines in the figure’s face, and as she pulls back to take a drag, Ryan clears his throat with an awkward ease.
“He’s beautiful.” Ryan notes, fixing the collar of his pea coat and stepping up beside her.
And he is, god, because Ryan would know him anywhere: his coal black hair dripping mercilessly into dull sad brown eyes, the smooth tilt of his nose, the rose of his swollen lips, the girl even got the fucking track marks right, the concave stomach, and fuck, Ryan just wants it to rain because he couldn’t see this any other way.
The girl just looks at the wall, the mural of the boy staring back at them, and she whispers so that only they can hear.
“Yeah, yeah he is.”
NC-17; 8,643 words
AN:god. this thing is finally finished. halle-fucking-lujah. This prompt was harsh to delve into, and i spent about a month just collecting information and stewing, and i want to thank kylefuckingfosse for providing me with the skinny on my inquiries of all things chemical. also, crab_apple_kid who read the first part of this and said nice things, which boosted my esteem at that point by like twelve gazillion percent. pavementcamping: i really hope this works for you, because i definitely read the prompt after i started this, and realized that mabe this wasn't quite what you were aiming for, and i was really freaking until i just got to this point where i just fell in love with the ideas that i had and--yeah.
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Ryan is not a color, not like cyan or ginger or cadmium. Ryan cannot lift the lid to his paint case and find himself inside, hidden perpetually, underneath the pigments of yellow, green, violet.
In that sense, Ryan is decidedly more like ash, blank and unfeeling, or, more so, the empty beauty of recycled, hot press illustration board, the color of smoke, the absence of air. For, in himself, he finds nothing, his skin pallid and lifeless, eyes flat, hair coarse and curled against the slope of his forehead, he is nothing.
And he feels nothing, looks out his town grade window and sees empty fucking space, empty sidewalks and houses and streets, empty people; smokes a cigarette on the front step and can’t even feel the nicotine dripping down the pool of his throat, doesn’t see the cars slip past, doesn’t notice them at all.
;;
Ryan paints a picture, and the only tubes he opens are white and gray.
He spends the better half of a day in his makeshift studio, steps out twice to use the bathroom, and smokes enough cigarettes to last him a week. His legs are caged in by boxes of books brought from Jane’s former residence, and he tries to make his body pang with guilt every time he mistakenly steps on one of the torn paperbacks, but he can’t.
Jane’s hair is unmistakably raven. This is the first thing Ryan notices about her the night that they are informally introduced over breakfast in the den.
It is half past three, and Ryan is sipping his Chai out of a plastic mug against one of the couches, when she walks through the doorframe and sits down across from him, joint hanging precariously from her small lips. Ryan sets his cup down and she extends a hand, now holding the joint, towards him. Letting a small quirk of his lip slip through, he takes it, wordlessly, bringing it up toward his lips and dragging hard.
Jane reaches over, picking up his mug and quickly downing the whole thing as she watches Ryan breathe in a few thousand more times. Ryan wakes up in the morning, drool cementing his hair to the floor, and naked body covered in paint.
He feigns supposition that he might have to get used to this.
;;
Some amount of months later, Ryan wakes up and the room is black. His head is spinning in every minute impossible direction and he can’t see a fucking thing.
Listlessly, he rubs at his eyes to relieve the tension, and then the walls are white and his bed is white and his ceiling is white except they’re still spinning, they’re always spinning.
Ryan throws the sheets off of his body with a dizzy whirl, revealing a litter of flecks and two strips of cracked black paint across the mattress, which, he realizes a moment later, are his legs.
“What the hell?!” his voice is shaking, the room is blurring. From somewhere to his far left, he hears a laugh.
“It’s your color today, Ryan, of course.” She laughs again, and Ryan narrows his focus to her mop of silky hair, watching it sway as she etches a piece of red charcoal across one corner of his wall. The patterns she has completed, so far, only amount to a skeletal outline, some slight muscle mass, and a shock of carmine hair.
Ryan can’t even tell.
“Jane…” The awkward tension pools in his barren stomach. She turns her head just the slightest amount, though her hand never stills.
“Hmm?”
“Who is that?” The tension bubbles and slides against the walls of his insides, threatens entrance to his esophagus. And he may not be sure, but he has definitely seen the up-turn of the figure’s eyelashes, knows it is one of them.
“Patrick, twenty-one, orphan from south Jersey” Her voice is factual, and Ryan almost thinks that she sounds a little too detached.
“How did…?” He’s not quite sure that he really wants to know; she cuts him off anyway.
“Overdose, ecstasy, James found him this morning.” At least he was happy, Ryan wants to say, but he can almost slip into the cracks in her monotone. He lays back down, uncaring of his acrylic covered body, and it hurts less, because he can’t feel bad for not crying.
Because he knew him
;;
Ryan awakens the next night to a chalky version of Patrick staring at him openly from near the door. The boy’s electric green eyes threaten to burn crusting holes into Ryan’s heated skull, though Ryan doesn’t notice, too preoccupied, most likely, with peeling the now sticky paint from the insides of his thighs.
Suspicious of his inability to hear the hustle and bustle of the morning, he pads to the door, averting his eyes towards Patrick's earthreal face. You had to, you had to. As he does, the air in the room chills, and his bare arms are tingling, goose pimples developing in frozen patterns against his skin.
Tentatively (hurriedly, carefully), his fingers press the cooled metal of the door frame, eyes peering around the corner and purposely not meeting with those of the few boarders gathered on the icy kitchen floor. Each of them lowers their head, bangs and nose tips and eyelashes brushing the floor in succession and Ryan can’t think, the four figures stretched languidly inward of themselves, graceful almost, and then it catches.
The boy sits quietly in one corner, barefooted and pale, his body all hairless, colorless skin, save the dark, near black mop of fluffy hair hanging into his eyes in strands, and Ryan just stops. He feels full, he feels empty, and he stops.
Can’t.
Jane’s hair is noticeable, long and stringy, even from his doorway, as she runs her slender nose along the tiling, snorting up every last fucking grain because she can’t afford the waste, her hand clenched lovingly against the boy’s slender knee. The boy shakes visibly in his seat, looks ragged and empty, looks how Ryan feels, and Ryan’s head starts to spin.
It swirls mercilessly, with little effort, cloudy and gray, as the boy stumbles from his chair, Jane’s hand, now immersed in his mop-like hair, guiding his head down, down, down.
Ryan’s feet slide in from under his small weight, and he collapses against his doorframe, the molecules about his wrists tightening with each monotonous flip of the minute hand, tick, beat, tick, beat, and the room is dark and lamp lit at the same time.
Daggers of light cut through the blinds at the same pace that the frozen boy snorts his head painfully, messily forward, and Ryan can almost feel the burn.
;;
The rain catches against the dips in his skin, and Ryan figures that he is, probably, the only one awake. He’s always awake. Perpetually on and doing, working. And this morning when he rolled over against the living room wall, brains a dripping mess of fiery and gray, he figured that, as long as he was forced out of sleep, he might as well stay that way.
The tendons in his hands clench, angrily against the brunt of his fists, vision smoky and cold, as his own voice screams against the skin of his forehead.
The ache throbs and he feels fucking fifteen, skinny and wet and pissed the fuck off on his own front porch. Jane appears from the door within seconds, sits down carelessly and Ryan averts his head. Ryan hopes that the tension would just come up and slit her throat.
“What the shit Ryan, you could at least fucking talk to me you know.” Her words hit his cheek like ice, even with the weather as cold as it is, and he shudders.
“I fucking told you to stop Jane, I fucking told you…” Ryan shakes his hair off of his face and Jane stops, looks at him like god, what a fucking hypocrite.
“I never said I WOULD, Ryan.” She’s spitting words by now. “It’s their fucking decision.”
“It doesn’t have to be!” Ryan slams his hand against the pavement, Jane sighs. “You bring them into this house, bruised and fucking battered, and you offer them that shit, your shit, Con’s shit, it doesn’t fucking matter, and you expect them to say no?” her head is spinning.
“I-“
“Godammit Jane. You’re not the fucking mother Teresa.” Ryan runs a bony hand through his messy hair, rubs at his eyelids. “God, I’m such a fucking hypocrite.” He says, breathy and exasperated at this early hour. “But I’m done. I’m on and I know that, but I…”
“Ry, you could quit-“Jane’s hand reaches for his, but Ryan recoils softly.
“did you?” The question is rhetorical, but he asks it none the less, knows that the pang hurts somewhere low in Jane’s gut. The silence holds, awkward, for an infinite amount of seconds.
“He’s young, He, I…He was there with this beat up old guitar and he played the most beautiful--, but he never smiled, you know?” she runs her dainty chilled hands up and down against Ryan’s thigh. “God, he just, he just kept on playing.” Ryan takes a breath, and, yeah, he remembers it that way, before, before he came. The way that he couldn’t.
“It was different with me though.” He says it as if it explains something to her, something set into place before she even stepped a small into his air. Something-
“I know.” Her statement is bold, off kilter, but he quirks his eyebrow as if she couldn’t possibly… “I wanted, when I came, I wanted to know what your story was and you, you’re right, it was, it is different.” Ryan can’t even remember what to say; he rubs torturously at his eyelids instead. “I mean, it’s-you were fine, you were,”
Jane takes a small, unneeded breath, pauses in time for her throat to form the words. “…you were normal, he said you had these, these terrible, blinding emotions, fiery and dangerous,”
Ryan barely sort of recalls.
“He said that…that you would’ve just gone out, like-like a spent candle.” She sighs out of the side of her lips, like exhaling smoke. “Another fucking dead artist.”
In the next seconds, Ryan feels a bit less gray, hurts like a sharp pang from the inside out, explodes his insides all over Jane’s porcelain white face.
“You know fucking what Jane, I don’t fucking care why he did it, I don’t fucking care. “ The pavement scratches as he rises off of the step. “And you sure as hell shouldn’t either. I know my fucking story alright, I was THERE, I fucking lived it, and I fucking drowned in it.” Jane’s hair is flame, shimmering and hot to the touch as Ryan’s anger swirls in a pool at her feet. “And you know what, if you’re lucky, you fucking will too.”
Ryan doesn’t even bother to shut the door on his way back inside, and Jane’s not entirely sure if she should consider his screams so beautiful.
;;
The next night turns into the next few weeks, sullen and sad, and Ryan slowly falls back into his monotonous routine, stock shelves his anger at Jane and the boy, and trips back onto the bench in the back corner of the park, forgets to finish a painting, cigarette pushed precariously, once again, between his index and middle fingers.
He forgets to smile.
;;
The boy shows up, sprawled at the corner entrance to the park, at the very worst time of the year. Ryan’s color today is green, which means envy, means coldness, means earth and aggression and youth.
And Ryan can certainly feel it, can feel the paint seeping into his pores, liquid and chilled as death, rolling, harsh and spiking, down the walls of his insides.
The boy barely looks up, continues mashing the melody up and down with his fingers, fluffy hair shifting from side to side. Ryan folds his own tenuous limbs underneath his small body and sits down, cold and dry, directly across from him.
He watches the boy, his angled fingers flying across the strings with an ease and a fire that he has not seen in the longest of whiles, hasn’t dared to imagine.
The boy’s arms stay taught, pale and cold under his ratty thermal and pea coat, as he sings some unknown and far off melody to himself, so soft that only the two of them can even dream of hearing.
Ryan sits, silent and waiting, listening, for the better part of three minutes before the boy’s speaking voice cuts through the calm at all, and Ryan is so lost in the note structure that it faintly registers.
“You’re from the house.” He speaks as if the words have been at the brunt of his tongue the entire time, and, truth be told, leaves no room for question. Ryan tries halfheartedly to worm his way of this, and he isn’t quite sure what makes him look worse.
“I-I just, sometimes.” He gestures faintly with his hands, but can’t quite force the lie from the bottom of his throat.
“No, I Know it was you, I fucking saw you.” The boy sets his pick down and lets his guitar slump into his lap as he grabs pointedly for Ryan’s left arm. A little invaded at the strange intrusion, Ryan move to recoil, but is caught swiftly in the boy’s palm, his shirt sleeve scrunched up messily to reveal a scratchy line of grassy paint on his forearm. “This.” He rubs against the acrylic with his thumb. “You’re the boy with the colors;” The boy stutters clumsily for his words, his brain scurrying through the memory. “She paints you because it makes you feel.”
Ryan’s stomach flips anxiously at that statement, sees the truth in the lines. He feels small, suddenly, because he never thought about it that way. He just woke up every morning, itching and covered in paint, woke up to Jane confirming his color of the day, and kept the routine. Ryan’s head couldn’t question his decision that she was simply reading him, never even stopped to invest in whether she actually fucking got it, never wondered about the difference; would feel blue on yellow days and black on purple, didn’t fathom the choice as irrelevant to the outcome, slept through the nightly activity and didn’t even dream.
“How did you…?” Ryan can’t help but feel slightly betrayed at this suddenly public information.
“Jane, she told me about,” the boy pauses for what Ryan takes as careful calculation. “, not about the reason, but just that…that she painted you.” He swipes a cold, dark hair from his face and inhales. “And I, I watched you-sometimes, you know, when I was, when I was there, and you looked not as empty as she had said, I just assumed…”
“She said I was…” Ryan feels naked, cut open and lying for dead on the pavement.
“Yeah, once,” He senses Ryan’s apprehension, “she just, she mentioned…” swiping at the air, his hand moves to explain the rest, and though Ryan doesn’t need it, he closes his eyes quietly and lets the cadences of the boy’s voice trickle into his ears, the unsure, fumbling tone oddly soothing.
“Ryan.” The boy ruts a pale hand against Ryan’s shoulder and shakes it a bit. “Ryan.” Ryan barely registers the sound of his own name.
“Hmm.” It comes out muffled as he swings his head up. “Wait, how do you know…?” he then remembers the body in front of him and his throat constricts. The boy blushes floridly, as if he has momentarily forgotten that Ryan’s name is not a piece of information that had been offered yet, cocoa eyes large with the traces of a small child.
“Oh, I- Sorry.” The words rush out of his mouth in a quick tumble and he grabs the handle to his guitar, springing to his feet and making to exit this suddenly embarrassing situation. “Sorry.” He spits again and turns on his heels before Ryan even has time to catch up with the apology.
Ryan stares, stock still, at the barren spot that the boy had occupied just moments before. And he contemplates, wills himself to run off after him, but can’t, opts instead to finger the boy’s small pile of thin leather bracelets into his coat pocket, his legs glued to the spot. But all he can really do, and all he can ever do, is reach into his pocket and light another cigarette, feel the smoke run down the rim of his throat, cough the nicotine back into the dirty city air.
It’s been a long day.
;;
It takes roughly three weeks for Ryan to remember that he actually has a guitar, and then another three days for him to finally muster up the confidence to play.
The leaves outside the window float mercilessly through the air, color dots swirling against the current, and Ryan cycles, red to yellow to orange as he daily reaches a slim fingered hand towards the neck of his acoustic, pulling it wordlessly into his lap.
His rough, smoke stained hands slide gracefully over its surface, a deep cherry lacquer inlayed with scuffs and small nicotine holes, permanent ink splashed carelessly over its curved frame, and his breathing stills to just the slightest degree as he starts up another empty rhythm, thin leather strips still wrapped around his wrist.
;;
The boy shows up on the front step within twenty four hours, hard case over his shoulder and a rat’s nest of loose leaf notation paper held haphazardly under his arm. His cheeks are flushed from the crisp autumn wind, hair unkempt and breath coming in short puffs due to the exertion, when Jane ushers him inside.
“Ryan,” she calls from the hall, knocking sharply against the side wall,“Visitor!”
Then she continues her timed steps on into the kitchen, scooping up a small pile of shirts and presenting them to the boy.
“Here kid, just give these to Ryan.” The boy stands stock still, puzzled briefly on which door to enter at his own risk, but Jane is quick to un-jumble her thoughts for him.
“Oh, sorry hun, Ryan is in his room, third on the left.” She points a small hand in Ryan’s general direction and shifts away.
Insular of the confines of his room, Ryan sits, native at the far corner of his bed, finger lilting angrily over the strings of his guitar, Patrick’s saturated face staring at him from the opposite wall, a sight now comforting.
The boy steps up to find the door shut with little care, and he raps his free hand against it, shuffling his cargo in through the miniscule doorway.
Ryan faces away from him, mind lost in an effortless gap in the rhythms, and he fails to notice the boy slip the case off of his shoulder, papers and Ryan’s pile of shirts floating towards the carpet in the effort. The boy pushes his slight frame onto Ryan’s bed, grunts softly under his breath, and Ryan abruptly stops, head and hair whipping around in surprise.
“Bloody hell!” his left hand comes up to clutch at his chest, grasping for his breath to return. “Christ-do you know how fucking early…” The boy feigns a short chuckle.
“It’s a Thursday; nothing is ever too early for genius Ryan.” At this, Ryan’s face softens, though he tries not to feel the bad for not smiling. It is only then that he notices the boy’s gaze fixated intently on the far wall. “Who-who is that?” the boy’s head quirks lightly to the side. “Did you…?”
“No, Jane did.” Ryan’s stomach flips. “I, I don’t…that’s Patrick.” He nods his head towards the portrait and swallows, roughly, the lump in his throat, as the boy turns to look at him with obvious interest. “He-he was the one who…he was the first.”
“The first,” the boy repeats it to himself, softer. “Where is he now?”
“Dead” Ryan sets his guitar against the wall and lays back, doesn’t feel like elaborating, hurting.
“Oh.” And then he’s silent, the boy, as he lets his head fall next to Ryan’s, eyes trained to the ceiling. They let their shoulders touch and they stay, motionless, for the longest of times, until the boy perches his chin on his hand and speaks. “Who was the last?” It takes Ryan even longer to answer this than the last one, because he’s become so detached that he can scarcely remember.
“Jane…I guess.” He shifts his head to meet the boy’s round, dark eyes. “Or-you, you know, if I knew your name.” The boy almost forgot.
“Brendon.” He says it confidently, as he hasn’t yet said anything else, and brushes a flick of hair from Ryan’s forehead. Ryan then turns back over and Brendon lets himself fall with little precision.
“Brendon…” Ryan whispers it to himself, soft and determined, like a mantra. Brendon’s hand stills as it grasps Ryan’s.
“Thank you.”
;;
The bus ride out of the city, and Brendon leaning his shaggy head against Ryan’s shoulder most of the way, has to be one of the most prominent and drowsy memories that Ryan can muster up lately. Their acoustics share the empty seat in front of them, the angle of their lean somewhat symbolic of the two boys’ similar proclivities, and as they arrive, Ryan grunts low in his throat, nudging a leg against Brendon’s, coaxing him awake. Brendon pulls his head up with a slow snap.
“Mmrmph.” He mutters, and knocks his head against the brunt of the headrest. Ryan drops his hard case against the knob of his knee and swears under his breath.
“C’mon dude, get up.” Another shake is administered to the ball of Brendon’s shoulder and Brendon fails at suppressing a groan. “Man, c’mon, we’re in ‘ledo, get up.” Brendon reaches a hand out to tug on Ryan’s sleeve, like a small child, and then he’s pulling Ryan forward into the seat, determined. “Brendon-what the fuck-“He clamps a cold hand against Ryan’s mouth.
“I’m fucking sleeping, Ross.” Brendon swipes his hand away slowly. “The world can wait.” Except Ryan might have the habit of arguing his point with perseverance.
“But-“Ryan starts and Brendon pushes himself against Ryan’s side, warm and sleep-hazy.
“Sleep, Ryan Ross…” Brendon mumbles against the icy window, breath coming in clouds. Ryan sighs and nudges the edge of his bag back under the seat with his foot as he listens to Brendon muttering near his elbow, his head fuzzy and drifting.
“, Sleep”
;;
Ryan is mashing his fingers against the strings of his old acoustic, back propped up pointedly against the scratchy motel wall, when Brendon sneaks into his line of vision, hips settling down onto the makeshift comforter.
“Dude, Look what I fucking got” It groans out of Brendon’s mouth, excited, and he pulls a dime store bag out in front of him. Ryan sets his guitar aside carefully, flipping the plastic over to release its contents. “, Fucking cigarettes, man.” And Ryan reaches out for the nearest pack, opening it with a messy haste.
“Jesus, I’ve been dying.” Ryan breathes out like he really has, which isn’t too far from the truth. His head has been spinning completely haphazardly for days. Brendon laughs softly and paws at his pack.
“Did you steal them?” Ryan asks, halfway through his second cigarette and his third, blowing a short puff into the stale bedroom air. Brendon stops, suddenly, in the middle of a long drag, and almost chokes.
“W-what?” he stammers with little eloquence. “No, no, of course not, no, I had-“He sighs loudly, rests his face in his palms with resignation, but the sad thing is: Ryan doesn’t even fucking say a thing, just turns his head and takes another swimming drag, hard and choked, and Brendon lays his head back, fingering lightly at the bruising mark on his neck.
;;
Brendon comes back from the store one night, and sees Ryan with his back flush to the chill of the door, the warm flicker of light from inside the motel dancing in unfocused patterns across the plane of his cheeks.
His feet are curled precariously underneath whatever warmth his thighs can offer them in the January cold, his fingers white and shivering, despite the lack of snow.
Brendon thinks that like this, worn and pale and tired, Ryan might be the type of boy that Brendon is never going to fucking meet again, ever.
“I’ve been-” The words crack softly out of Ryan’s lower lip, sore and raw, and Brendon can feel Ryan shiver at his feet. “You-you’re late.” His teeth are chattering.
“I know, god I-I god, I know.” Brendon says, and bends down to scoop Ryan’s tall frame from the frozen pavement, the air around them whistling itself around in a type of mantic dance.
Ryan clamors, unsteadily and with Brendon’s help, to his feet, the two balancing haphazardly on Brendon’s left arm as his other hand busies with clinking the key into the lock and tripping them, rather ungracefully, into the musty bedroom.
Brendon leads them over to one of the hardened chairs at the nearest corner of the room, and Ryan can see his own breath rolling out of his mouth in smoky clouds as he is guided down.
“Why?” Brendon’s eyes are as wide as saucers and he lifts a hand to the side of his head. “Why would you-?”
“I just-I just feel so empty.” Ryan deadpans, eyes open and glazed, looking anywhere but at the boy in front of him. “God, I can’t even-it’s like, lately, I don’t even know what I am anymore.” Brendon says nothing. “I could, for a while I could…after, but-“
“I can’t.” I can’t fix it, Brendon wants to say, but doesn’t know how. He almost wants to be angry, too, because he planned it, god, he has the shit just across the room in his jacket, he fucking worked for it, but he can’t. Instead, he reaches his hands out to take Ryan’s colder ones into his own, rubs mercilessly with his fingers, desperate for some semblance of heat, and sighs, quiet and muted. “, but you could, you could.”
;;
They don’t talk about it the next morning, and Brendon thinks that maybe, just maybe, he won’t have to face the swirling intrigue of today, as he lays face down on the carpet, hair wet with drool and cemented to its fibers like glue, but thinks better of it.
;;
Ryan wakes up later that day, and his entire body is thrumming with heat. There is a fire in his stomach, his head, his thighs, his fucking groin, and everything aches as if he’d slept through the night on a bed of nails, even though he didn’t.
He raises the mess of his head out of the chair, feeling his neck crick in the process, and spots Brendon on the other side of the room, pale fingers pushing around something on the makeshift table with a shard of plastic-glass, his hair, matted and thick, hanging in loose strands against his forehead.
Tentatively, cautiously, it is at that moment that the room swells, feels full and open and suffocating. Ryan scratches at his ankles like he’s mad and he watches as Brendon ducks his head and snorts a painful stripe up the tabletop, throwing his head back with an easy grace and just faintly noticing Ryan gaping at him from across the room.
But Ryan just continues to hold the stare, sees Brendon’s face twist up with what Ryan would peg as laughter under his breath, sarcastic and dry.
“Come on Ryan, jump.” He hears Brendon say, but never once sees his lips move a single millimeter, which kind of leaves him at certifiably out of his fucking mind. The time for Ryan to have gotten to this point is long overdue.
Brendon keeps staring, empty and fucking mindless underneath the white hot slits of light from the window, and Ryan slides from the chair, knocking his left knee against Brendon’s acoustic with a loud thump in the hasty process of climbing over to seat himself next to Brendon. Brendon looks at him with some type of stinging hanging in the back of his eyes.
“Back so soon?” he asks, fingers neatly busying themselves with using his botched plastic sheet to cut another few lines as he speaks. Back from what, Ryan thinks, where was I, and then decides that, at three in the afternoon, Brendon’s haunting tones are just a tad too cryptic for his liking.
Brendon snorts out another thin line and Ryan resorts to pushing against Brendon’s arm with the joints of his fingertips, insistent and wanting, because, god, it’s so fucking tempting and it’s right fucking there, and he just, he just wants.
Then Brendon finishes, slicing his fingers across his nose in faint irritation, and scoots the seat of his jeans across the carpet, making space for Ryan as he threads his unoccupied hand into the mess of ruddy hair at the base of Ryan’s neck.
Ryan just sits, still and frozen, staring with frightened eyes at the ungodly mess in front of him, because, oh god, he going to, but Brendon can feel the apprehension, and he sidles up against Ryan’s thighs, leaning in to whisper pointedly into his ear.
“Take the plunge with me.” He says; even though it sounds like he’s saying take me, voice folding itself all over Ryan’s organs, wanting inside of him.
Brendon pulls back with a devilish chuckle, and Ryan gulps, heavy, swallowing a few unneeded breaths before leaning his head down and snorting long and hard, Brendon’s hand reassuring on his back. He can feel the grains, sharp and caustic, ripping through his system like they never left, can feel them slice and dice at his airways, the snowy white crystals just drifting around inside of his body like a fucking phantom limb, and his brain just starts to fucking spin.
It swirls and twists so intricately, even, that he can barely register when Brendon’s hand on his shoulder blade pulls him back, roughly, leaving him laving his tongue and teeth somewhere in the crook of Brendon’s neck, eyelids blinking open and closed dramatically against the stone cold skin.
“Welcome home, baby boy.” Brendon mutters, relieved, as he strokes his fingers against Ryan’s sweat soaked hair.
“Welcome home.”
;;
The various substances lining their motel room, seeping out from countertops and showerheads, and from underneath the floorboards, is really becoming less about the drugs and more about trying to fucking live, Ryan thinks, hovering somewhere between on and not and staring emptily at the knackered pile of blotters on the bathroom counter.
He rinses the cheap soap out of his scalp, the water set permanently to a scalding degree, and feels the burn as the mixture of hair and suds and fucking whatever the fuck he ingested last night seeping out of his pores and down towards the drain.
Subsequently, he watches this, the mixing of patterns and chemicals that are created on both his pallid skin and the yellowed tiling, watches it until the water runs in icy rivulets down his spine, electro-shocking the ions to his brain.
“Fuck.” He hisses as the icy chill pools in one of the track marks on his arms, the open wound still stinging from the frozen pressure, and shuts off the stream, stepping out and drying himself with the only bath towel that they ever bothered to wash.
The bright squares still sit on the counter, a few of them partially dissolved in a puddle of spilt tap water, and Ryan grabs the salvageable handful, stuffing them into his pocket as he zips up his jeans.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s still shivering, sprawled on the broken loveseat, a joint that he found the shit in Brendon’s knapsack for dangling from his lips.
The rain just outside of the window is startling, strange in such early March, but he can taste its glow as it drips and pools down against the contrast of a dark sky.
He sighs, inward of himself, and exhales leafy smoke, because it’s four in the fucking morning and he hasn’t seen Brendon since ass o’clock yesterday, since the last two blue pills and Brendon tonguing his lower back, warm and wet and, god he needs.
He needs something that he can’t even fathom, not all the way through his first joint, nor when he drifts out of consciousness, legs hanging off of the chair ridge and hair soaked all the way through the cushions.
;;
When Ryan wakes up, it’s to a decidedly different weight resting on his body.
He can still hear the faint rumblings of a storm, as he comes to, but his body, hazy with the thick smoke that fills his lungs, barely registers the insistent press of a hot tongue to the skin of his belly, lapping up and down lazily.
The temperature in the room pushes up a notch, and Brendon’s dripping wet head slides up to Ryan’s jaw, licking quickly at the skin there before sliding back down and away, chuckling. Ryan watches, entranced, as Brendon tries furiously to lap the crushed remains of some pill or another, blue, yellow, orange, Ryan can’t tell, from where he has it sprinkled across Ryan’s ribcage.
Brendon laughs, licks another long stripe, and Jesus-
“What are you on?” Ryan asks, because, god, he’s seen Brendon high more often than not, but it’s never been like this, never so intense and out of his fucking control. Brendon moans against the skin just inches below Ryan’s belly button.
“God, everything.” He mutters against Ryan’s skin. “I was at this party, and fuck, I mean, they had everything, pills and blotters and needles for every fucking time of day.” Ryan can feel the vibrations as Brendon speaks and licks hastily at the same time. “Mmm, and there was this boy,” the words slip out like small moans. “…he was so fucking pretty, Ry.” Ryan’s throat constricts as he swallows nervously. “Messy honey hair and these huge almond eyes and just, fuck, he sucked me off and I was so fucking high, I was a mess, Ry,”
His tongue brushes the waist of Ryan’s jeans as he speaks.
“But it felt so fucking good…” Ryan lets out a trapped moan at that last warbled confession, low and throaty already, and he feels his dick throb at the feeling.
“Fuck.” The words break against Brendon’s lips as the boy moves to mash his swollen lips against Ryan’s in reaction from the chemicals.
Ryan pushes back just as harshly, their tongues passing small crumbs of substance back and forth, and within seconds the secondhand high is kicking in and he’s fucking gone.
They kiss like they’re fighting, grappling at each others skin and Brendon imprinting Ryan into the makeshift couch as Ryan’s hips and his wet belly crash up against Brendon soaked limbs, icy and dripping.
Then, with a swift upward push, Brendon is off of Ryan and over near the bed, his body hunched over a small pile of coke that he neatly forms into lines, Ryan’s a tad larger than his own, but only because he’s pretty sure that, in the past twenty-four hours, he’s had enough shit to last both of them a week, can’t feel a fucking thing.
Ryan raises his head in confusion for a moment, after Brendon vacates his lap, his brain still not quite caught up, but then sees him over at the bed and stumbles over shakily, kicking a used needle underneath the bed as he sits down.
Brendon smiles with his teeth, blinding and large, and, in this moment, Ryan can’t do anything but lean his head down, cover his left nostril, and snort against the makeshift mirror, leaning back to lave at Brendon’s mouth in between lines, blood seeping slowly from Ryan’s nose, a crimson, shimmering mess, though neither of them bother to notice nor care.
The ions in the room, electrostatic as they bounce mercilessly from wall to wall, charge and swirl around Ryan’s head as he finishes, pushing himself roughly against Brendon before pressing the other boy smack against the table, biting harshly at his lips as blood runs down between them.
When Ryan’s lungs absolutely beg for some form of sustenance, he breaks away, Brendon using this opportunity to both catch his breath and snort another painful line, his body convulsing a bit at the sensation.
He gets halfway through his second line, nose bloody and raw, and in yanked upwards by Ryan, both boys stumbling to their feet as Ryan flips and backs Brendon, harsh, into the wall.
“Hey, I wasn’t-“ Is all Brendon has time protest before Ryan’s tongue is in his mouth and his hands are tangled in his ratty hair. Ryan pushes his wrists into the plaster and smirks.
“You’ve had enough to last a lifetime.” The words hit, caustic, right at Brendon’s throat and Ryan mouths there, the blood from his lips smearing slightly on the pale surface.
Brendon lets a loose moan choke past his lower lip, heated, and he turns so that Ryan has his back to the wall, dropping down to lap at the dusty cocaine on his lower abdomen.
Ryan watches with nebulous fascination as Brendon sucks at the skin there, and he’s possibly never wanted so much in his entire life.
Brendon reaches with his hands, then, though he never ceases his mouth’s wet contact with Ryan’s stomach, and undoes the fastenings of Ryan’s pants, his nimble, calloused fingers pulling at the zip and reaching into his waistband, tugging down hard so that the material pools at Ryan’s clammy ankles.
The room is spinning.
Brendon’s breath is coming in shorter and shorter spasms as he mouths lethargically at Ryan, a heated ridge against the chapped sweetness of his mouth, through the thin cotton of his underwear, coppery mouth leaving small, bloody stains in little o shapes all across the front, messy trails of substance and dna for no one in particular to find.
Ryan gasps, surprise and feeling bubbling up in his throat, as Brendon’s hands curl in the rim of Ryan’s underwear and pull them down, Brendon sucking harshly on Ryan’s hip before moving his swollen lips down to envelope the head, sucking tentatively, lightly, before he moves his mouth down, takes in as much of Ryan as he possibly can, and, in a moment of sobriety, he thinks that this might, in practice, be a lot more difficult than he originally thought, but continues anyway, his damp, coal hair tickling against Ryan’s thighs as he grabs possessively, unknowingly, at Ryan’s knees, tongue running, smooth, along the underside.
Ryan grips at the wall, frantically, as he comes, attacking the cavern of Brendon’s mouth from all angles, and he starts to float down; thinks about Jane, thinks about home and his paintings and god, he just blacks the fuck out.
He slides down the wall, pants around his ankles and worn, and Brendon falls right with him, his lethargic high sitting down to see him spiraling neatly into Ryan’s side, and the feeling slips.
He just can’t hold on.
;;
It hurts worse, progressively, as Brendon gets worse, the substance flowing in and out of his system like air. And it’s not like Ryan hasn’t done it, not like he doesn’t still do it, nose held tight to mirrors and pieces of art that dissolve in his mouth, but it’s maybe just a transitory thing, he’s only living. But that’s for him to believe.
;;
It’s warmer, mostly, teetering on the brink of summer, when the insanity hits.
Ryan comes back one morning, legs hurting after a short cigarette run, and finds Brendon curled up on the far corner of the bed, the covers torn off and lying in tatters on the ashen floor, shaking with lack of sustenance. His face is pallid, sallow and clammy to Ryan’s touch, and with just one bare press to his ribs, he dry heaves onto the floor, his body coming up with nothing but air.
Ryan takes out his Zippo, lights a Menthol, and holds it up to Brendon’s lips.
“Suck.” He deadpans it, watching as the smoke billows from the lit end, and he thinks that, under any other circumstances, Brendon might’ve laughed. Instead he just tilts his head towards the cigarette, capturing it between his plump but paled lips and dragging deep and shakily.
Ryan shifts, rubbing a warm hand along Brendon’s naked back, the skin cold and sweaty to the touch, and Brendon instantly recoils, curling up into some twisted fetal position, cigarette hanging thoughtfully from his lips.
His breathing begins to settle, slightly, the tone of it evening with the settled atmosphere, and Ryan reaches out and takes it, pulling deeply on the last spent embers before he tosses it towards the south wall, rolling to the other end of the bed and drifting.
;;
“Don’t wait for it to change.” Ryan tells him one night, as Brendon reaches into his backpack and pulls out a handful of blotters, sliding one into his mouth and waiting, always waiting.
He holds one out to Ryan and he takes it, unusual lately, but he’s desperate for something, god anything, and the way that the synthetic dots pull at his head, blind and profound, is so fucking tempting. “Because it’s going to,” his tone is flat. “If you don’t, it will.”
Brendon drums his fingers against his thighs like he’s playing the piano, sighs into the air as he stares at the ceiling.
“I want change, Ryan.” He speaks with insistence, as if Ryan is some sophomoric child. “I’m just trying to live.” Ryan think that he says live like he hasn’t a clue what it means. He shakes his head through the cloud of colors.
“This shit isn’t helping you live, Brendon.” Ryan throws a spent hand against the wall. “It is your life; it’s all you fucking are anymore.” A broken, desolate corpse, Ryan wants to add, because it’s true.
All there is, lately, is Brendon on and doing and taking, becoming a chemical Pluto, pointless and empty and not even real. Brendon notes that the sheets on the bed are yellow, orange and swirling in the lamplight.
“Ryan?” Brendon asks; doesn’t look up from his lap. “What would happen if we died?” It’s the most honest thing he’s said in months. Ryan shrugs his shoulders because he hasn’t really thought that far.
“Nothing, I guess.” He feels the phantom joint just sagging from his lips. “We’re dead, Jane paints our picture, life goes on.” It’s a mild case of indifference. “I don’t think anyone really matters, in the long run.” Brendon looks at him through the haze of the drugs, his brown eyes dull, but large and sad.
“I sort of used to wish that they did, you know?” Brendon mumbles it so softly that he is not even sure that Ryan will hear. “I just, I wanted to matter.” He is trembling visibly, though the air is saturated with heat. “I wanted to feel.”
He looks at Ryan, then, his face empty, though so pleading, and Ryan just tries so hard. Fighting, angrily, his guts twisted into five different complicated patterns, Ryan leans over and kisses him.
The kiss is loose, Ryan’s head seeping through his mouth and swirling around inside Brendon’s, the both of them tasting each angry fear as it spreads across their tongues, intertwined somewhere in the midst of it all, but it feels cleaner.
It’s just a small gesture, really, a continuation of something that Ryan can’t quite pinpoint with his head so muddled, and he pulls away, wetly, as Brendon just fucking stares at the patterns developing across Ryan’s cheeks, a morphing pattern of purples and whites, and god, he is so fucked.
They sit like that, silent with their heads against the edge of the mattress, for the longest of times before anyone speaks.
“What do you think it would look like?” Brendon asks out of the silence.
“What would what look-“Ryan can’t quite understand the cryptic musing of his question.
“Us,” Brendon look over at the south wall as he explains. “You know, if she drew us.” His throat constricts. “…If we died.” Ryan shrugs because he is not quite sure.
“She would-she would probably do it as how we looked, you know, when we first came to the house…” the air in the room shrinks in amount. “, since she, since she didn’t know us at our most prominent.”
“And if she did?” and, god, Brendon is just full of fucking questions, cold and high off of his fucking ass.
“If she did…” Ryan trails off, unsure. “If she was there, the night it rained, I think, I think that would be it.”
He turns back to look straight ahead, and Brendon can’t even argue, not with his mind so completely taken by the swirling dots of color that keep dancing across the front wall. Brendon watches them with ease, watches as they twirl like water droplets, and Ryan slumps, sated, against his shoulder, and Brendon doesn’t even notice.
;;
The next few weeks, thanklessly, get neither better nor worse.
Ryan gets up every morning and Brendon wakes up every night, and they snort a line and go back to bed, sleeping through the week days and never talking about anything of much importance.
But it’s July, or it must be, Ryan thinks, because it is so hot that he can’t see, when he wakes up, and Brendon is nowhere in the bed to be found.
He lilts out of bed, rubbing at his sleep sore eyes and makes his way to the bathroom, only to find Brendon perched precariously inside of the shower, his naked ass and thighs resting against the heels of his feet as the harsh spray of the water splashes across the span of creamy skin on his back.
Ryan stops then, entrenched in the way that Brendon’s spine curves over his back as he pours small baggies of crushed powder down into the drain, his hair dripping like a rainstorm against his eyes. He leans against the sink, quietly, and watches as small tablets and squares of paper dissolve under the spray like rapid fire, watches the life that they have built slowly ebb away into the pipelines, until Ryan can’t fucking take it. Noticeably, he lets a cough slip out of his throat, and Brendon flips his head, his hair pouring all over the tile as he pulls back the slightly see through slide door and sticks his head out.
“Ryan?” he asks, “what are you…” But Ryan has already beat him to it, his hand cupped around the nape of Brendon’s neck and his frosted mouth pressed against Brendon’s wet lips.
Brendon, shocked, but moved into an ease, fits his mouth just as sharply over Ryan’s, pulling the partially clothed boy up against his dripping and unashamedly nude body and pushing him smartly against the small shower wall.
His lips fall to Ryan’s jaw, thick tongue slipping out to lap at the skin there, catching the rivulets as they slide down the cool expanse of Ryan’s neck, each particularly cavernous area becoming purple and tender bruises that Ryan is sure to see in the mirror the next day.
Brendon lowers his hands, then, slipping them along the outline of Ryan’s ribs and they fall to the belt loops on his pants, sliding them to the shower floor with a wet smack. Ryan then finds himself chilled, naked and exposed against Brendon’s skin, rubbing himself shamelessly against the raw cuts on Brendon’s hip, hard and throbbing.
“Do you want…?” Brendon asks, trails off at the end because he just can’t say. Ryan keens against the tremors of his voice, fingers leaving prints in the knotted flesh of Brendon’s ass.
“I-god, just…” and if Ryan was at all apprehensive of this, before, then the heat of this situation isn’t making it any better, but god just- “You’re throwing it all away.” Though he isn’t quite sure what he means.
“I know.” Brendon says, lifting his hands behind each of Ryan’s thighs and hoisting him up. “I’m sorry.” And then he thrusts in, no fucking warning, and Ryan feels like he’s numb from his fingers to his toes, the sensation spiking from inside of his ass, white, hot heat, and spreading.
Brendon feels his dick twitch, furiously, and it feels like Ryan’s ass is choking him, sliding in and out between his cheeks in a pounding rhythm. Ryan bounces once, clinging to Brendon’s neck with slight apprehension, and it changes the angle, Brendon’s cock grating against Ryan’s fucking spot on the next thrust and-
“Bren,” is all that he lets float past his lips, pushing its way into Brendon’s mouth as they kiss, and then Brendon is coming, slicing through the sores on his insides, because, god, he’s not on fucking anything, and that usually helps him out.
Ryan drops his head back, then, against the hardness of the wall, and he comes all over the skin of his ribs, rubbing it off and into Brendon’s sopping wet hair as they crash to the ground, Brendon not even bothering to pull out, even though Ryan’s ass fucking burns.
Ryan spends the rest of the day, and most of the night, watching the mixture of substance and come run down the tiled drain, Brendon still like a fucking ghost inside.
;;
Brendon wakes up the next morning, and he’s covered in paint. The colors have mixed, the shade now close to some shade of every fucking color ever, and he’s naked, come still caked in the front of the scalp of his hair. Ryan isn’t anywhere and he didn’t leave his fucking bag, so Brendon lights his last cigarette as he sits on the step, smoke curling out of the side of his mouth.
He screams
;;
Ryan catches the bus to the next city, his bag small and not very comfortable company, and when he finally ends up at the house and knocks on the corner door, his room has been occupied and Jane is nowhere to be found.
But he can faintly see the shadows if he looks at the back wall
;;
It’s October, somewhere bordering on three months since he’s been-back, and Ryan watches her, the girl’s fingers, delicate and pale, flying across the white brick spanned in front of her.
The seat of her jeans rests solely on the heels of her feet, and her hair is loose and short, though colored a striking, familiar raven.
She perches the hilt of a cigarette in her left hand, her right hand busying itself with finishing the lines in the figure’s face, and as she pulls back to take a drag, Ryan clears his throat with an awkward ease.
“He’s beautiful.” Ryan notes, fixing the collar of his pea coat and stepping up beside her.
And he is, god, because Ryan would know him anywhere: his coal black hair dripping mercilessly into dull sad brown eyes, the smooth tilt of his nose, the rose of his swollen lips, the girl even got the fucking track marks right, the concave stomach, and fuck, Ryan just wants it to rain because he couldn’t see this any other way.
The girl just looks at the wall, the mural of the boy staring back at them, and she whispers so that only they can hear.
“Yeah, yeah he is.”