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“...Richas, are you okay?”
Forever feels his hands trembling like the smile on his face. He doesn’t know how he hadn’t noticed, but Richarlyson’s skin has gone a sickly gray beneath his blankets, and when Forever stumbles over to check his temperature he finds it deathly cold.
Forever laughs a little. Everything is gaining a yellow hue, like his retinas are rotting over. There’s a pressure in his skull, an abscess filling up. His hands start to fumble for the pill bottle without him even consciously commanding it. It’s all he can do to tumble some amount of pills out and shove them into his mouth… except his hands are shaking so badly that they rattle off his palms and skitter across the floorboards with little insect legs. Forever laughs harder, but it starts to draw up into a scream when his ears pop with that awful ticking. He clamps his hands over his ears, but the sound is inside him. All it does is make his vision go black around the edges, like roots growing into his eyes.
He falls to his knees at Richarlyson’s bedside, dropping the bottle, allowing the rest of the pills to escape. His boy is so still, not even breathing. Forever tastes hot salt against his teeth.
“Are we playing a game? Is that why you aren’t breathing?” he asks Richarlyson. Forever hopes he can understand him through the tremors wracking his voice. “I’m warning you, I can hold my breath for a while…”
He sucks in a breath and holds it tight, like a starving dog gnawing a bone. It’s fun because the sound of his rabbit-footed heartbeat drowns out the ticking. But the best part is at the end, when he passes out, and he doesn’t have to hear anything at all.