Chapter Text
‘A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside -’
-Emily Dickonson
---
Song: Calm was the even, and clear was the sky
---
Damien's best friend, turned target, turned lover, used to have an odd obsession with fairy tales, specifically when they were 14. It started with his heavy adoration of Tangled. Every other morning, he’d sit in his room and watch a few minutes of Rapunzel untangling her hair and painting her walls, depicting the brightly lit lanterns of her childhood. Shayne had gotten pretty good at singing “When Will My Life Begin?” even before the hitch-hike journey that made him put down the DVDs for good.
Maybe he stopped watching them because of how many times he had before. You could still give Shayne a notebook and he’d rewrite entire scripts in less than a few hours.
Maybe it was because they were Seniors now. Damien was feeling that wave of sickness like a battalion on their last march; he had never expected to make it this far and Shayne was winded by the realization, too.
Or maybe it was that December of their Junior year that had ended like the crisp pages of some boring fairy tale that Shayne probably had sitting on his bookshelf.
They couldn't hide behind a book anymore.
They had to stay in the real world.
And in the real world, you have to live and breathe as if the events that made you you, never happened.
(And even if you did tell, who would possibly believe you?)
It’s a switch up that Damien is familiar with. If he was a better person, he would have taught that skill to his very best friends. It’s quite the shame they never asked him.
---
It was very early in the morning (night?) as Damien C Haas dumped about five bags of peas into a shopping cart, biting on a gel pen. The wiggly wheels made a high pitched screech as he pulled around the corner.
In his left hand was a list. And when you see a tall, punk, goth rocker in his black pjs, beanie covering his recently dyed hair, you’d assume he was buying groceries. And he was buying groceries, but his list, a very important list, was only half related.
17 points long, 13 completed. A side effect of some of his…ideas are ill informed, ‘mandatory’ tickets to detention every afternoon, half of which Damien finds a way to skip out of, either by an open window or a lie or a dare; anything really. The other half, he just sits there in the middle, leaning back in his chair, thinking of all the things he needs to do for the next point. A lot of work for just one guy. But it was worth it.
He'd anonymously told what he assumed was everybody that went to Willowtown High that the biology teacher had fucked and groomed three girls last spring.
He'd finally, actually, finished the Emily Dickenson book. He could practically taste the dialogue, the fragility of her pieces and Shayne's blue ballpoint pen. And he’d spray painted his favorite stanza on the school bathroom walls.
He'd even egged the principal's car.
And that was just naming a few of the accomplishments he’d managed to score and check off his overloaded list of crimes, this saturated bucket list. It was a good thing, he knew, because the way his school was run made him gag every time he walked through the courtyard.
A waste of his fucking time.
On second thought, Damien retraced his steps and flipped a penny, grinning when he saw the head of Abraham Lincoln. “Score!”
He grabbed a bag of cauliflower. For extra flavor.
Two weeks ago, Shayne had come inside the flashy new diner on the other side of town with a half eaten cheesecake, a brochure for California and tear tracks. Damien had dropped his fork and cleaned his fingers off with a dish towel, offering his service as a past assassin to rid the frown on his face.
Shayne hadn't even berated him over it, just slid into the seat across from him and sighed, that long sigh you get after ruining a clear shot or failing a test.
They’d sat there for hours with two plates out, eating the cheesecake and talking about nothing at all.
Noah had been on the tip of his tongue and Damien doesn't even know what he did but number 15 on his list of things to do before he died of old age at his 12th grade graduation was to fry the brains out of anybody who'd wronged his boyfriend.
Dumping about 14 bags of frozen vegetables in Noah's bathroom tub in the middle of the night would do wonders for his guilty conscience. No doubt about it.
When he paced over to the self checkout, a girl in her late twenties, and maybe she was high, was eyeing his cart, but okay, her having not 1, not 2, but 18 fucking tissue boxes meant she needed to shut the fuck up.
Just like Noah Grossman. Hah. Gross.
He was grabbing his receipt as an alarm rang and he dove, grabbing the closest thing to a weapon-the heaviest bag of peas-and bearing his teeth. An employee raised an eyebrow at him, looking back over at the old man buying cigars with a bag of nickels.
His breathing slowed.
The mundane energy of the grocery store returned. He blinked.
The lady was over by the doors with an officer. They were yelling and if Damien could put one brain cell together, he'd know that she was shoplifting. Was being underlined in pen. Gel pen. He had ink on his lips, he could taste it, did he ever take the pen out?
He grabbed his bag and reminded himself where the guy's house was. Then, he called Olivia. If anybody knew somebody else's shit, it was her.
---
After that intense, horrifying and only five minute call, Damien considered buying lottery tickets for Olivia. And a bomb. Not for Olivia.
The car radio was off because everyone and their mom thought country was a good idea and his phone was dead, so he couldn't play real music. The dashboard had just turned to 3:00am and he sighed, pushing his hair away from his new glasses.
Road, yes, he was driving.
The houses in Noah's neighborhood were big and new, with wide windows and mile long yards and were prone to dying in the winter. Stupid, fucking Willowtown. He got the exact address out of Olivia, and he stuck a sticky note to his windshield.
Damien turned off the engine and flew his head back, pulling out the map of the house in a daze. He had a bottle of elmer's super glue sitting in the passenger seat, thank god, and he uncapped it in a hurry. Olivia, who had only started supporting his list when it favored her, reminded him that Noah was weak when it came to his hair. Good thing he was always locked and loaded.
The full black outfit was a go, and he put on a mask.
Nobody in the house should be awake, but Damien tiptoed around the railing anyhow, careful not to ruin the creepy ass gnomes. The eyes were the worst part.
He opened the window and stepped inside, arms full. The vegetables poured like crackling pop in a can.
Nothing moved.
And Damien smiled.
After that, he started to glue every cleaning product around the edges of the tub, making sure they stayed put, leaving out Noah’s. And finally, Damien recalled that Noah used a 2 in 1 conditioner he got off of Amazon for $13.59. Dude wouldn't shut up about it. He dumped the contents into the trash can, and filled the bottle up with the rest of the glue.
Nobody fucked with Shayne. Nobody but him.
---
He slept in his car that night, knowing his mom was home. When the sun rose, he cleaned his jacket, from where he’d accidentally slipped, in the school gym showers before the start of first period. The room smelled like oil and teenage sweat and now, thanks to him, non-refrigerated vegetables. It’ll keep the junkies away from him, so maybe Noah will dog after someone on the football team to sock the lights out of. Not that he really could.
It wasn’t like Damien to skip first period. Shayne and his stupid poetry had gotten him into ELA for the first time…ever. So his teacher, a petite older man who couldn’t help but sneer as he spoke with a cigarette cough, had taken a liking to his grit and diligence.
“Get on with it,” Mr Braun called out, “You don’t have much time ‘till finals.”
Right. Finals. Hooray.
He walked up to his teacher, holding a completely real pass (for once) in one hand and his chromebook with his completed essay in the other. He set both in front of the man, “I’m good, I promise. And I have a pass, so…”
Mr Braun scoffed good naturally, rolling his sleeves up, “And I’m the fucking milkman. It’s the 21st century; I bet you forged half of that.”
Damien shook his head, but Mr Braun was waving him off with a smile. They both knew Damien had been spending the past two detentions writing it and while it wasn’t hot stuff, it was certainly better than the shit he was pulling last school year. And every school year before that one.
Mr Braun skimmed it for a long, uncomfortable moment and Damien shifted from his spot beside the desk. Eventually, he nodded and passed the chromebook back to him.
“Good. Stop using run-on sentences.”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Mr Braun stood up to address the class, dismissing him, and Damien laughed to himself, rushing out and stuffing his things away in his bag. A pen hit his T-shirt and bounced onto the floor as Damien pulled the door shut behind him. He could still hear his bark from outside the door, and when he pressed his hand along the wood, he could feel the verbal vibrations. Mr Braun went cold and distant when it came to finals season, so he was glad he had a legitimate excuse.
Every Monday, he went to the library during first period to hang out with the “poetry” club. Well, its not like they never talked about poetry. It came up all the time because of Shaynes avid hobby of book shopping: even today, Damien suspected he’d shove a hardcover poetry collection underneath his nose.
But for the past two weeks, every bully in the school had gone back to shoveling dirt in Shayne’s mouth. Of course, they teased him before, but Damien being his boyfriend had gotten him out of trouble.
They were back to rock bottom, and Damien didn’t even get how it happened. Did Shayne just…piss off everybody who had a stroke of popularity in the entire goddamn school district?
It didn’t matter. The group of them (Shayne, Damien, Kimmy and Courtney) had stolen the back table near the non-fiction section, where the window glass could open if you knew how to pick a lock. And they did. So Damien took his place on the loveseat, sticking his tongue out at the collection of poetry Shayne was bent over and reading. Courtney followed in after him, taking their spot next to Kimmy’s hip, who was pretending she didn’t know them at all.
“Hey! Hi! Do you have anything to do with the Noah situation?” Courtney rushed through their greeting.
“Situation?” Damien put his feet up on the table, “Really? One bad hair day and that’s what their calling it? I mean, whose talking?”
“Literally everyone.”
“Shit! I guess if I was anybody else, I’d want to talk about it, too.” Damien gently shoved Shayne with his elbow, “But somebody promised to hold reign over this meeting.”
Last friday, Shayne had walked over to him with his chest sticking out and his blazer done up and said that he’d take charge on Monday. Damien had shrugged. If Shayne Topp needed to spill his heart out like a teenage girl on ecstasy, then good for him.
At the reminder, Shayne bit his bottom lip and started gesturing with his hands like a bad game of charades before throwing his head in his book, mumbling something under his breath.
“Uh, I don’t know sigh language, Shayne, I’m sorry.” Courtney complained, “Can you use verbal words this time?”
Shayne groaned, “It’s not even that serious.”
“You getting your shit rocked isn’t serious?” Damien pointed to the shiner on his left eye, “Try again?”
“That’s-” Shayne blew out a breath, “That’s not what I was going to talk about. It’ll go away soon, so…who cares. Now, let’s talk about something good.”
A moment of silence settled and while Damien had a few things he wanted to say to that , he bit his tongue to prove his point. Shayne gave up in a matter of moments, flipping his book open to a random page and shoving Damien over till all he could see was ink and pencil shavings.
“I told you about Sylvia, right?”
He had, a few weeks before, and Shayne never liked to repeat conversations, “I didn’t know you were on a first name basis with a dead poet. Should I be worried?”
Shayne ignored him, smiling at the crisp typings of his new favorite poet to talk about. “Sylvia Plath, you are one mysterious mother f-”
“Shh.” Kimmy pointed.
Standing by the door and talking into his phone was Noah Grossman himself. He never used to be so hollow but about a month ago, he’d told everybody in the school that Shayne was hooked on hardcore drugs and that he spent his nights drug dealing. The stress of the rumors made his boyfriend go quiet, not to mention whatever the fuck happened between them this past few weeks. He had his own reservations about the guy, back when Shayne used to sit with him at lunch, but now…oh now he hated his guts.
Shayne went still, watching Noah shout into his phone about some boy named David or something: his plot against the football team had certainly worked.
After a minute, he groaned, pulling at his hair with his eyes locked on the screen of his phone. “When I find you, David!”
After a second, he turned on a dime and stomped away. Damien felt a sliver of satisfaction at seeing his glue covered, vegetable looking head.
The group let out a sigh, and Damien turned back to Shayne, whose eyes were wide and shoulders trembling. “Close call.”
“You could say that again.” Kimmy whispered back.
“Clos-”
Shayne slapped a hand across Damien's mouth, hiding his smile as best he could. Damien smiled back, “Okay, if you didn't wanna talk about your bruises then…what do you wanna talk about.”
Shayne shrugged, “I don't know, really. I just…I'm almost 18.”
“Yeah, in fucking September, you toddler!” Courtney retorted, “What about it?”
“Sorry- we're almost 18.” Shayne smiled, “And that's…crazy?”
“Yeah…time is crazy…I guess.” Courtney sighed, “And this is the type of thing you go crazy over but…”
“I'm scared of the future, of course I'm going crazy over that.” Shayne waved his arms around, “I'm going to college soon.”
“Just like all of us?” Kimmy voiced.
Both Courtney and Damien raised an eyebrow at that. Kimmy shrugged, “I don't know your life plans.”
“You've known me since diapers.” Courtney deadpanned.
“And I don't know your favorite color, either, so…maybe I'm just a horrible friend.”
“Or a horrible person…”
“Hey!”
Damien sighed, knowing his boyfriend wasn't gonna tell him shit about his real emotions. Instead of trying to push him, Damien silently fastened away his true feelings and simply muttered, “Tell me about Sylvia Plath as Courtney reads my awful essay.”
“I didn't agree to this.” Courtney complained as they took his chromebook into their hands.
“Thanks.” Damien mumbled. When he tried to look Shayne in the eyes, he looked away. Damien pretended he hadn’t noticed.
---
In the middle of PE, Damien jogged over until he was beside Shayne, slowing down his pace so he could match his boyfriend. Shayne gloomily looked over, clutching his arm. “Hey, um, what’s up?”
The sleezy cool tone just sounded like an echo coming from him. Damien winced, but shook it off, “Nothing much, just seeing how my favorite person is doing.”
“Obviously…I’m doing…bad.” Shayne wheezed, “Oh, by the way, I…don’t need a ride home.”
Damien blinked. “Okay, um, cool, got it.”
Shayne nodded, trying to suck in a few breaths, but Noah, who’d been awkwardly jogging behind them, shoved himself against Shaynes ribcage. He hollered, tripping over just starting to come undone shoelaces, and fell to the ground. Coach blew his whistle.
As Coach Mitchell starting aggressively tossing his way over from the other side of the field, Damien wiped his nose and tackled Noah, hitting him in his nose over and over and over and over and-
“Hey!”
---
It got him another week of detention. The room they used for detention was tiny, each desk from 30 years ago smelling of ammonia and mold. They had shoved half of the art department rooms in the basement along with it. Music, painting and then the social rejects.
After the bell rang, Damien wiped his t-shirt and grabbed his bookbag, weaving through the crowds of teens tripping over themselves.
As he was going, he watched Shayne speak to Courtney as he tied his shoes, bag sitting next to his foot. Shayne had stopped taking the bus after that time he’d drove him home during Junior year, so seeing him pick someone else was a doozy, but Shayne had a knack of always knowing what he wanted.
Still hurt, but he could rationalize the fuck out of it.
Down the staircase, into the basement, pass by the art classrooms and enter…
Normally, old, batty and nearly retired Mrs. Loyer would be there, standing over her desk with her arms crossed.
Today stood an officer.
Damien bowed his head and went to the usual spot in the back of the classroom, hoping to God this guy wouldn’t notice his fifty bajillion anti-police patches and pins that covered his bookbag and infamous leather jacket. What was he even doing here?
After about five minutes of him pacing around the classroom, with no sign of Mrs. Loyer, he coughed into his hand with a low rumble in his chest and introduced himself. Damien made good by staring at the rest of the group.
Noah Grossman was in the front, oogling the guy like a baby gays first boytoy. His head was still delightfully messy and the curls were sticking up like horns.
For the next ten minutes, he rambled about positivity and safety and respect which was all and good and nice but hearing it from a cop made his jeans catch fire. At some point, Damien drew into his back pocket and put some gum into his mouth. Inbetween every other sentence, he’d pop it.
The fresh taste of mint cooled him off from saying something he would regret. He looped cell block tango in his head, blissfully popping his gum and rubbing his glassses down with a piece of fabric and officer just kept talking to the air, since nobody else was really paying any attention.
At some point though, the officer decided to cut deep. He started talking about rape and murder and the crimes of if you get caught. He talked about the sex offenders who had graduated from this building. He talked about programming humans to do as you say, he talked about abuse, and domestic violence and teenage hormones that run in boys and girls.
With the way he glared at them as he said it, it was clear he thought of them in a similar way. Damien felt his throat clog up.
The rules of detention were simple. No talking, no leaving, no rough housing and no touching. Simple.
As the officer paced the room, getting close to each kid until they just had to look away, Damien raised his hand.
He forced the hatred out of his mouth, the delusion of purity that this guy hid behind making the gum in his mouth taste of gasoline. The man in blue nodded.
“Hey, can I go-use the bathroom?”
The officer glared harder, “Make it quick!”
Damien stood up, dizzy, and slowly walked to the door. He kept talking, in this gravity defying tone that leaked of an assureness that Damien wrinkled his nose at.
The second he was out of the hallway, he was gasping. He got about two doors over until he was lying on the floor, gasping and shaking, faces blurring his vision.
Damien Haas had committed a singular murder. And it was gonna haunt him for the rest of his life. It was right before the mall trip, the holiday, that he and his best friends had went on. He hadn’t even known his name or his hobbies or if he took cream in his coffee or his kids name or his wifes name or…
He forcibly sat up, trying to get oxygen to rest in his lungs. He tried to breathe.
Damien went into himself to hide. He walked back into the detention room. He heard static.
---
The rest of the week went a little something like this: Damien would sit and talk with Mr Braun about colleges he doesn’t wanna go to and then he'd antagonize Noah, watching him swing around girls. After that he would have PE with Shayne who could never meet eyes. Every day, he refused to go home with him again and again, and so Damien felt himself die a little every time. And then finally, he'd wither himself down in a chair while the still unnamed (to Damien) officer stood lecturing.
He had never felt so ghosted by someone. Shayne traversed through his thoughts hourly. He declined an invitation to a rural cafe and Damien covered his eyes with his sweater sleeves.
By the end of Thursday, he called Kimmy and they went out to a coffee shop.
“Okay, am I overreacting? He hasn’t been seeing me at all.” Damien rubbed the back of his neck, “And usually he’s so talkative, but…”
“Hmm,” Kimmy pursed her lips, “It’s not just you. He’s been blowing off Courtney for weeks.”
“Woah!” Damien hummed, “But-It’s Courtney.”
“I know!”
“And shes such a stick around friend. I mean, it’s Courtney !”
“I know !” Kimmy sighed, “It’s a bad sign if he’s avoiding you two, so much that your noticing-”
“Hey!”
Kimmy continued as if she hadn’t heard him, “There is definitely something wrong with him.”
“I gotta talk to him.” Damien stared at his herbal tea, “Oh he is not gonna wanna do that, though. Maybe…”
It had to do with last Christmas, Damien was absolutely sure of that, but Damien recalled long nights of Shayne sitting in his lap, talking about that December. Back then, the words were surprisingly easy; it was all they ever talked about. Now, if he brought it up, Shayne would go out running like a rabbit hiding from a wolf.
Damien shrugged, “Maybe…I dunno, Noahs getting to him?”
“I saw them talking this morning, though?”
Damien’s grip on his coffee mug tightened till the skin around his bones turned white. He sucked in a breath, the words hitting like a literal blow, “He hates his guts.”
“It wasn’t a happy conversation. I uh…may have followed them, but Noah didn’t throw hands, so…”
“ Why ? Why would Shayne wanna talk to him at all, I-?” Damien short circuited, a mind numbing realization grabbed him around his throat. He choked on his coffee, forcibly setting it down.
“Hey, breathe,” Kimmy shoved a bunch of tissues at him and Damien hesitantly dabbed his face with one.
After a second, Damien spoke, “Oh my God, he’s cheating on me.”
---
Of course.
Of fucking course he’s cheating on him, what else could this disapearing act mean? Noah and him, it…the image made him want to hurl, want to fling away every secret enclosed moment, every far away stare and every smile. Every single one. Damien pressed his hands together.
After paying for their drinks, Kimmy met up with a few other friends to party. She pressed a hand to his shoulder, wordlessly asking if leaving him alone was alright but he’d tersely nodded.
He didn’t want to break apart in front of her. Now, in the middle of the street with his hands in his pocket, he felt a very necessary feeling to throw himself off a ten story building.
Instead of doing that, he picked a random store to enter.
The walls were painted a flowery pink and every chunk of available space was covered in candles. He’d been meaning to buy Shayne a gift but now just the thought of his name sent shivers down his spine. He was so fucking angry but he picked out a candle that smelled of licorice because Shayne hated licorice and it was the type of bad gift a kid might do to act out in the smallest way possible. He was a tiny spot in the world.
He paid for the little candle and stepped into his car. He thought of all the things he’s done with…with Him over the years. He dialed Olivia.
The phone rang.
And rang.
And rang.
And it kept ringing.
Damien pressed his head into the steering wheel, as he attempted to steer his heart away from a collateral crash. The phone picked up and Olivia spoke into it tired and Damien groaned, pulling himself up.
“Olivia, Oliv, I-” He cut himself off, shaking.
“Hey, you alright, dude? You sound…” Olivia hesitated, “ Bad .”
“I need a favor.”
He could practically see Olivia’s features sharpen comically, like a vulture, “What is it?”
“I need you to make me an invitation. And I need you to give it to Shayne,” His breaths picked up, “Underneath the bleachers afterschool. Say its a scholarship celebration.”
“What celebration? I-what?” Olivia sighed into the phone and Damien imagined her eyebrows shooting up “Were the drug rumors real! Oh fuck, is this an intervention ?”
“No! It’s none of your business. Sign your name at the bottom, and I’ll take care of everything else.”
“But why…” Olivia suddenly sounded a lot closer, as if she was pressing her mouth to the speaker, “If you are planning on tricking that boy-”
“After what he did? Please, this is nothing,” Damien covered his face, “Look, I’m not gonna hurt him but…He hasn’t talked to me all week and I’m scared. And…whatever, you don’t need to know everything. I’ll pay you back.”
“Damien. As long as you don’t send him to tears, you don’t need to give me anything,” She paused on her end, and he waited, “What did he do?”
“I’m hanging up, now.”
“No, wait-”
Damien shut his phone off and flicked on the radio. Frank Sinatra played and he shut his eyes tight. God, why did it have to play their artist, right here, right now, in this stupid fucking town? He was content with driving in silence.
A band played on the corner. A woman pulled a man into her arms.
Damien looked away.
Finally, he pulled into an abandoned parking lot, leaning his chair back. His intuitive fingers, which hadn't caught up to his mind, fished for the Emily Dickenson book that he kept in the junk drawer. His hand paused in midair.
He reached for his phone, instead. Sylvia Plath, who died by suicide at age 30 and, Shaynes words, not his own, was also entirely self-absorbed.
He read a small excerpt of her history before turning the blue light off for the night. He couldn't stomach reading about her, not when he was so painfully alone.
---
The next day, he woke up feeling like he was a marionette.
It was a side effect of the programming. Every day since he was 12 he was taught, over and over, that he was a puppet to be used. Damien couldn't help but imagine the strings attached to his limbs being snapped as a metaphor for the destruction of The Bandits from the inside out.
And Damien knew he would never get away from Ian’s body, from that father from south Illinois, from the mall in the middle of nowhere, from him.
He was a ghost. PE 2nd period made him slip into it deeper, something about training himself until he couldn't move, paralyzed in bed. But detention roused him back to reality, and his skin crawled as the officer talked about suicide and depression and said goodbye and thank fuck, he would never have to see him again.
Before he left, the officer grabbed him by the shoulder and it took 6 years of intensive spy torture to force him not to flinch. “What's up?”
“You alright, kid,” He sniffled, pulling his hand away, “You were out of it today, more than usual.”
Damien nodded, “Fine. Can I-?” He pointed in the general direction of the door.
Officer rolled his eyes and sat down, “Just checking in, calm down. You know I care, right?”
Damien stiffened all over before grabbing his bag and roughly handling it, shoving himself out the door.
“Stay safe, kid!”
Stay safe, kid. Stay safe. Oh, shut the fuck up.
Damien huffed out a breath, sliding past the club goers who were texting their parents with paint covered thumbs and warm smiles on their faces. Damien pursed his lips and pressed his back against door 3, entering the blacktop just in front of the field.
At least he wouldn't have to see that bitch, that copper, that asshole in person ever again. It was cold and Damien was shivering in the middle of a field in the middle of a tiny, boring coal town about to accuse his boyfriend of the most ridiculous claim he's ever made.
Really, Damien, do you think Shayne Robert Topp could possibly hype himself up enough to ask another guy out, even though he was a nervous wreck, even though he was already taken.
He dumped his bag in the grass and pulled out a sketchbook, lighting up at the page he'd bookmarked.
So he sat there.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.