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Tommy's optimism dissipates with the last of the soap bubbles. Outside the warm, soothing privacy of the bathroom, reality starts to hit him in a way it hasn't yet, image after image tumbling through his brain, an unwanted parade of remembered sensation.
Adam's room is huge and mirrored everywhere. Tommy sits on the edge of the bed where Adam's left him and stares straight ahead, into one of those mirrors. He doesn't want to look, not really, but he can't bring himself to turn away. His body tells the story of last night, the events written out across his skin. His lips are an angry red and swollen, the bottom one broken through where he must have unknowingly bit down. They taste slightly tacky, coated in the remnants of lip balm that have outlasted the steam of the bath. He's suddenly hit with the vivid image of Adam pulling the tube from his pocket, uncapping it, painting it gently over Tommy's lips as he slept. It's powerful, that image, and he feels it right down to his core, actually shivers a little with some nameless mix of emotion, affection and revulsion and something he can't define at all, something to do with possession and ownership and care and fuck, why doesn't he have words, feelings like this should have names, something, anything.
Yeah. So not ok.
He raises a hand to swipe at his watering eyes and groans at the pain that shoots through his back and shoulder at the motion. The heat of the water is leaving his body, and every muscle in him is starting to tighten, stiffen. He knows he should move, stretch, but he doesn't, just lets his arm slowly, slowly drift back down to rest at his side. He meets his own eyes in the mirror, and they look dark, sunken, almost. They drift over his face and catch on the line of his jaw, and he cranes his neck slightly to see better, ignoring the dull ache the movement causes. There are bruises there, light, almost light enough to be mistaken for shadows. Tommy knows better, knows that they match perfectly the spread of Adam's fingers. He wants to get closer, wants to crawl right up to the mirror and shine a bright light and stare. There's a quiet crazy voice in his head, and it's whispering to him about Adam's fingerprints, lines and swirls tattooed into his face, and that's impossible but it also feels a little bit right, and who the fuck is he to dismiss anything as impossible after last night anyway?
He forces himself to stay where he is, knows that if he slides off the bed he probably won't be able to get up again. He continues his inspection instead, forces the quietly building rage (fuck that fragile shit, doesn't matter how he looks, he's a fucking adult and can take care of his own fucking self, don't fucking TOUCH ME) inside him down, down, down.
Adam's right – his knees are the worst of it. They must have bled, scraped through in jagged crossing lines, the skin just barely starting to hold itself together again. Tommy reaches forward and runs his fingers gently over the wound, hissing cool air in through his teeth at the stinging pain of the touch. The slight shifting makes the pain he's sitting on too much to ignore, but his attention skitters away from it again, too much, too much.
The water has evaporated off his skin and the heat of the bath with it, and there was a towel around him at some point but it's gone now, goosebumps spreading across his flesh, a deep shiver going through him, making his teeth chatter together, and how dare Adam leave him here, naked and cold and alone, all those fresh, open wounds staring right back at him.
He's frozen in every way, the cold and and his stiff muscles and something inside his head, that something that won't let him stop looking, and when the tears start to slide down his cheeks he halfway expects them to turn to ice.
Adam's voice breaks the silence, and Tommy can see him in the mirror, bustling through the door behind him with his arms full of Tommy's things.
“I wasn't sure what you would want, so I just brought everything I could carry...” Adam says, turning around and closing the door and throwing everything on the sofa and then finally, finally, looking up and seeing Tommy.
The next thing Tommy registers is Adam at his feet, kneeling, babbling nonsense, “ohmygod” and “baby” and “sorry,” and Tommy doesn't mind that Adam's mouth is talking but he really wishes he would make his eyes shut up. They say too much, and Tommy has to look away.
Adam wants a blanket but Tommy's sitting on them and not gonna move, so he grabs the discarded towel instead and wraps himself around Tommy and the slightly damp towel around both of them, and Tommy wants to both pull away and push closer, and that equals nothing, equals sitting and letting himself be held.
He looks up at the mirror again, sees Adam pressing his face into his head, Adam murmuring words and words and words into his ear, Adam rubbing his hands up and down his arms, trying to press warmth back into him.
Adam's voice is desperate, more broken with every word, and Tommy knows he wants to take care, but it's different, hard to be the solution when you were the problem.
“What do you need? Just tell me what you need, baby, anything, anything...”
And Tommy can't think, doesn't know, just goes with the first thing that comes into his head, the obvious surface thing, because he was ok when Adam was there and not when Adam left, and that's simple and easy and he can run with that as long as he doesn't think about it too much. He swallows hard through the dry stickiness of his mouth and forces his head to turn, forces his eyes to meet Adam's, bear up under all that emotion just for a second, just long enough to get through three little words.
“Don't leave again.”
He looks away again too quickly to see the reaction in Adam's eyes, but he can hear it all in Adam's voice anyway, the kind of promise that's more like a vow.
“Never.”
Somehow Adam coaxes him into bed, and he lays there on his back under the covers, Adam's body heat slowly seeping into him, one of Adam's hands resting heavy on his chest. Tommy thinks he won't be able to sleep, but he's hardly able to finish the thought before his eyelids are suddenly too heavy to bear.
He dreams of feathers and thick metal bars and darkness, and hot steam boiling it all away.