Chapter Text
Alex's bathroom is white, John notices as he leans over the glistening toilet bowl and retches. He's empty at this point—he's hollow and he feels like if someone tapped him he'd shatter, fall apart, and there would be nothing inside but a dried out husk of something. John is hollow. He wants to be a vase, wants to be something people fill with water and flowers and call beautiful. He wants something inside him that's solid, something more lovely than anything he could ever imagine.
His fingers curl around the smooth edge of the bowl, and he wonders if he tries hard enough he can shatter it. His stomach spasms once more, muscles rippling and stretching, and he feels like he could tear them apart. Like he's made of tissue paper, and he can shred everything. He wants to rip himself apart. Wants to see the water and the flowers spill out of his vase-like skin, and he wants people to cut themselves on the fragmented pieces of his flesh. He wants to be dangerous.
He wants to have knives for fingers instead of leaves, and he wants to be able to see past the stems crowding his vision, and he wants his veins to be filled with something other than green. In other words, he wants to be like Alex. He wants grenades in his brain and fire instead of blood, and he wants daffodils in his eyes, he wants something soft and something original and something to call his own.
Alex is soft though. Soft, when he presses John into the sheets and tells him he loves him, soft when he pushes into John, soft when he kisses away the blue rimming John's sea-salt eyes. Soft soft soft soft soft, and John wants to melt. Wants too much. (Wants it to stop.)
He doesn't know why, but he's always been obsessed with his wrists. Obsessed with tracing the blue-green-gold veins just below his glass skin, obsessed with the smooth, transparent flesh protecting them. He thinks about how easy it would be to snap them, shatter his porcelain bones and break the glass. Watch the ink spill out of his veins, because he thinks he's made of words. Not his own, but Alex's. (Thinks he's made of Alex.)
His head is filled something hot and heavy, weighing on his curls and dragging him down. He wonders how his neck is strong enough to support something so heavy. Sometimes he traces the fine bones, running his finger over the knobs underneath his skin and wonders why something so delicate was made for him. Why they thought he would be able to resist breaking it. He thinks of knotting ropes and stringing himself up by his wrists. He thinks of singing and tying nooses.
He looks at himself and he sees eyes and freckles and bones and skin. He's real, he tells himself, running his finger over porcelain joints. He wishes he could be seen, wishes he was made of something other than glass and other people's heartbreak.
He's thinking of Alex again, and trying not to throw up. His throat is sore at this point, and there's something like rust coating his tongue. He runs it over the ridges of his teeth and tastes blood. Tastes salt.
But—he thinks of Alex's little sighs and drawn out groans, and the way he'd arched his back and he's sure he can stand it for a bit longer, just for Alex. (Then he remember Alex's hand between his thighs. The gritty drag and unbearable friction of skin on skin, the sweat trickling over the dip of his collar. The salt crusting over his eyes. Decides he hates it.)
And, there's a light. It's bright and sudden and too soon, and John finds his stomach roiling again, finds himself retching into his hand because there's nothing left to expel from his empty, aching stomach.
"Jesus, John—"
Alex seems to be saying that a lot. That is, saying his name like he can't quite believe something, and John's not sure whether to expect praise or criticism to roll off his tongue. Alex can cut him down so easily, he knows it. Like, if Alex pushed him he'd just snap. Of course, it's not Alex's fault—porcelain is so easy to break, after all.
He twists his head, damp curls clinging to his slick skin, and he rakes his blunt nails through the knotted strands. Thumbs at the hollow just beneath his ear, and wonders if he can break skin if he presses hard enough. He wants to see blood under his fingernails. Pick at the rusty red layer of grime for weeks with a thumb and forefinger, just to have something to do. Maybe dig them into Alex's back, leave lines on his skin, stain him too. He hopes it wouldn't hurt, because—Alex shouldn't have to hurt. Pain isn't for people like Alex. Pain is for people like John, people who willingly offer themselves up to the sensation, who throw themselves in front of bullets, who offer their wrists up to silver blades and stand at the edge of buildings and think how easy it would be to just jump.
"John—" A hand presses to his forehead, warm and soft. He almost wants to lean into it. "John, baby, are you sick?"
John kind of wants to laugh at that, because. Yeah, he's sick, you could say. He thinks he's sick, sick in the head.
"Yeah," he croaks, voice cracking. He taps the side of his temple with a finger, and wonders if he can drill into his skull. (Because—maybe if he got inside, he could fix whatever's wrong with him, whatever managed to fuck up along the way. Why he doesn't like things he should, why he can't just use his mouth for kissing like he knows he should.)
Alex is pulling him closer, kissing his temple and twisting his fingers through John's tangled curls, and his other hand is taking John's clammy palm in his own and thumbing small circles over the centre.
"If you're gonna hurl," he murmurs into John's hair, "Aim towards the toilet, ok?"
John let's out a broken kind of half-laugh, and nuzzles into the soft hollow of Alex's neck.
"Not gonna hurl."
* *
John can taste salt in his mouth as Alex kisses him. Can feel it hardening over his skin in a rough, blue-ish shell, can feel it filling his eyes and his head and his lungs, and he can't breathe and—
He can taste salt. His hands are spread flat over Alex's chest and he can feel fucking everything. Alex's breath beneath his fingers and his heartbeat and the outline of his rib cage. (It doesn't make sense for someone like Alex to have a rib cage, because—well, it's in the name, isn't it? Rib cage.)
There's something building behind his eyes, something like a wave and it's surging over his eyes and it hurts, because salt always stings his eyes. Rubs his skin raw and gives him white, crusted sores when he's submerged for too long. He can feel his skin creasing, can feel himself ageing. His bones are so old.
He whines against Alex's lips, something small and soft, and it melts away into the air and he's sure he never even made a sound. He tries to twist away, because he's not sure he can do this today. He's got a headache and he's tired, and he doesn't feel like pretending right now.
He blinks away the salty film over his pupils, clears his vision. It feels wrong to kiss like this. To kiss another boy with your eyes wide open, to kiss Alex when he knows it's only going to go further and keep looking at his face and thinking how soft he looks in this light. And—he pulls away, because he doesn't trust himself. Because there are beams of sunlight falling in soft patterns across Alex's fine features, and John thinks he's glowing. (John thinks Alex is carved from marble sometimes, that he's art, but—Alex is too soft for that. Too full of fire, as well. Too full.)
Alex pauses, and his breath is coming in short huffs through his reddened lips, and he looks so lost without John's cheek pressed right to his. He flicks out his tongue and swipes it over his lower lip briefly, before catching his breath.
"Why'd you stop?" He whines, eyelids flickering open. His eyes are almost honey in this light. Thick and velvety. Sticky. (He thinks of salt.)
Their face are still just bare inches apart, and Alex leans forwards a bit, bumping their noses together, brushing his chapped lips against John's. (John likes kissing Alex, but—he knows where it leads).
He pulls back even further, taking his hands from the planes of Alex's chest and pushing himself a couple inches away. He ignores the way his fingers feel empty without anything beneath them.
Alex gives him a soft, quizzical look, arching one thick brow.
"John?"
He moves towards John, fingers flexing in the air above John's arm like he's going to touch him and—John can't. Not right now.
He stands up abruptly pushing himself off of the shabby couch with white-knuckled fists, and turns his back. Walks out of the flat with pale crescents pressed into his palms and finger nails that need to be cut, and no coat because it's not that cold, anyway.
He comes back with bruises on his knuckles and blood on his lips and a stranger's fists pressed into his rib cage, but at least it's not salt. Alex doesn't ask any questions. Just patches him up, presses a kiss to his knuckles and brings him to bed. Tells him he loves him, over and over and over and—blood is better than salt.
* *
In the end, John writes it down. Slides it over to Alex in a note, because he can't bear to go on like this anymore. Tells him he hates salt and sweat and kissing with his eyes open. Alex is reading it and he looks like he's about to cry, and John's telling him not to even though he's not yet because boys as pretty as him shouldn't cry. But he does anyway, halfway through the inky words, and clutches the notepaper, crumples it in his too-long fingernails and John tries to reach out for him but Alex tells him not to because—
It feels like he's afraid to touch John now. He apologises, over and over and over and curls into himself and refuses to touch him, and John misses it. Misses his impossible rib cage and his breath and his heartbeat and his honey eyes because it feels like he never opens them anymore.
And at some point, John nuzzles into his neck. Prises his arms apart and folds himself Alex's chest, tells him this is ok, pushes himself beneath Alex's hands and tells him it's ok, it's ok it's ok it's ok.
Alex still apologises, still wrings his wrists and looks at John with soft, wary eyes, holds him like he might break.
At some point, John kisses him and that's it and that's it and that's it. Just presses their lips together and closes his eyes until Alex kisses back, until Alex has three fingers of one hand winding through his hair and all five on the other curling around his waist and thumbing small, soft circles over his skin. He bumps his nose into John's, and—
It's ok.
* *
They're twisted together in the sheets in a tangle of arms and legs and fingers and small laughs and soft kisses.
Alex tastes like peaches now, and his skin is soft when he curls around John. He feels like silk, and John thinks of honey and flowers and fingers curling around his waist. In his hair. It's better now, and John's skin is so much stronger than tissue paper. But—
"I'm sorry," Alex mumbles, and his arms are wound tightly around John's torso. Face hidden in his collar, and John thinks how similar loving another boy is to dying. To actually living. To breathing air instead of smoke and petals.
"I—"
John twists, kisses Alex until the words are lost in lips and honey and freckles. Puts a hand under Alex chin and thumbs along his jawline and feels his pulse. Presses his fingers against it and kisses that, too. (Honey and flowers and impossible rib cages and fingers in his hair—)
"It's ok," he says. Kisses everywhere he can reach, and Alex's skin is silk.
It's ok.