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You sit and compare scars; how they’ve gone dripping like silver from brown and purple to run rivers of molten memories remembered clearer by skin than mind. He’s not delicate; he never has been, but even stone crumbles eventually and life is a merciless river even if it hasn’t drowned you yet in its fury. Your scars sew you back together twisted, broken, and lumpy, but his wear like the finest gemstones and you want to jam your knuckles down your throat for what you can’t make him see.
He broke, he says, he got too angry and stopped thinking and it wasn’t your fault, he amends, which you know, and if he broke then you broke harder, crashed like waves beating rock and boots on eggshells, so you remember for him. You remember purple and bloody bullet holes swiss-cheese-ing up your ribcage and slick ribbons flowing out your face and cracked swollen jaws and lying soggy and disjointed and unwilling unable to quit for your own damn well-being, because who gave less of a shit about you than yourself?
He makes a noise like wet gravel on stone and you open your eyes to see him standing, hands out. His face is pulled tight, pained at your shifting appearance, your pulpy flesh, and if you make those wide white eyes water brown you’ll hate yourself even more. You remember he’s still six. You forget sometimes with how strong he is held up against your tissue paper barriers and it makes you remember blood spilling from your stomach through your loose fangs, and now he’s making these aborted little gestures that make your heart squeeze tight.
“Don’t,” he implores, hoarse and tiny and it’s wrong because he was always so much bigger than you, a universe of stars with the grace to let you admire him.
Your face scrunches discontented at the boy who won’t be what you want him to; won’t be a deity for you to follow mindless and loving but it’s a tiny pinching that expires like a match. It’s your fault again; he’s perfect in his flaws and fears and if he doesn’t hold the secrets to everything in his fingertips it’s alright. He exists and lets you see his too many dying suns while never laughing at your wonderment; always laughing harmonious alongside it. For you to ask more is unthinkable. You’re not fair to him; if he needs to be tiny you can, for a moment, be his sky and wrap him safe under what’s left of your stretched-out tired skin and brittle skeleton.
So you remember when everything fit together alright— or maybe it didn’t and you just never noticed through the hazy green. You remember six and soft and wave-carved sand, still warm in the fading light of evening, and you recall the gentle illumination of your husktop dancing complacent shadows over posters and piles. You’re six sweeps and squishy like him, and his fingers are calloused rough and perfect as they hold your forehead to his, shaking unsettled rhythms through your bones.
“Okay,” breaks free of your throat like cracking ice. His sigh brushes your mouth and cheeks, and you want to leap across the eternity between you; pull him down so he’s no longer kneeling, but holding you to reality with the weight of himself and the pressure of his lips. You can’t breathe. You need to get away from him and smother your emotions where no one can see how your happy façade is shattering around the firm thumbpads of a ghost. Instead, you’re a pliant doll as he cradles your head to his shoulder, sick with the paleness of the situation but at least it’s something.
You feel his bones under your cheek and trace spiraling wings on the back of his jacket, all unsteady jerks and swirls, and when you chance a kiss to the side of his neck he only slumps tired and gives you a small squeeze.
He holds you solid as if to crush the pieces of you back together. You wish he could.