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His knuckles and fingers are always pink, this time of year. Whole body turns pink, recently, because Øystein spent the last of their money on stamps — he stupidly agreed to it, this time, at least stamps don't make shitty music that grates his ears like that godforesaken synthesizer — as if he's feverish.
Sometimes Pelle feels so cold that the numbess turns hot and burning in his hands and feet, covered in holed-up socks that mismatch enough a few pairs will give close to one solid layer of fabric. It's the most he can ask for. He can't really ask for anything of life. He has been reminiscing since September on the question of whether he truly takes up as small of a space as he attempts to; if someone like him ever could take up a speck instead of a ship. Even this chill feels undeserved, because it graces things that once felt warmth.
It feels like grief, and he has not felt love in a very long time. Pelle ponders now and then if he can feel it again. Whether he's capable is a great thing to wonder but that question tastes, to him, more like am I allowed to?
He does not believe in God, not really, but there must be something more than himself that decides these things. Thinking that he might need to decide them for himself stirs up feelings he does not like: inadequecy, for one; fear, for another; and for the worst of them comes the weight of the world, which has been breaking his back for at least twenty years now.
Maybe it's that weight that has crushed him this far. He feels gored when he wakes up and goes to bed after scraping himself from the mattress enough to realize a full day has passed. Sometimes it is Øystein's job to scrape him, and then he feels guilty, very guilty. For what reason, he doesn't know. He has told himself once a day for almost two months that he is coming to hate Øystein, and has told himself once an hour since they met that Øystein hates him.
In some conscious part of himself, one that resurfaces every blue moon, Pelle knows he tells himself this because it's hard to face Øystein.
Even now when they do nothing but clamp at each other's throats and twist out the veins day after day, there's a deeper hurt in his face that hurts Pelle because he cannot mirror it. He's a grown man, and he's smart; as much as he dislikes it, this is true of both of them. They are not children anymore, and things are complicated. (Sometimes he wishes he had met Øystein when he was fourteen and the doctors called him hyperactive.)
He's yet to dig deep enough into his mind to realize that he has simply hidden that hurt from even himself. The weight of that fact would be the last round in the game of Russian Roulette he's been playing inside his head, waiting for the one-more-thing that fires the bullet and lets him go.
He still loves Øystein. It is the nameless thing that makes them fight: love, as ugly as it is. And desperation, because he cannot pin down — not in his heart, as confused and terrified as it is growing — why Øystein looks disappointed and hurt before he looks angry.
Pelle decides, all things considered, that he cannot love anymore because he does not care.
It is late in Oslo. His father sent them some money after he gently eluded to the fact they are both freezing and starving, which made him feel a little like a harlot— and with it, they squeezed enough gas out of Øystein's car to drive to the tank station and fill it.
From there it was the store to spend some on food that Pelle found inappetizing for the most part, besides the candy and cheap bread, but it's enough that his ignorance of eating will feel less like a divine punishment and more like a knowing choice. He always has preferred calling the shots.
Now it is late, and the streetlights look dull against the black and battered-gray tar of the city streets and concrete sidewalks. He's already had his fill of being around others. Despite Øystein's presence sometimes chafing with his own, he's familiar and comfortable; these strangers are not, and he feels watched.
Still, he is standing and waiting near the mouth of an alleyway while groups of teenagers — he misses being seventeen, at the tips of his fingers, but they are too cold to grasp the longing to go back completely — walk by and laugh, sometimes at them. He is used to that much, they both are. Øystein offers little more than a glare in their directions, because he is preoccupied.
The tomcat stalked out easy, from between the garbage dumpsters and old crates. Meowed shriller than a tomcat should at the two of them. Øystein bent onto his knees before Pelle could tell him to ignore it and yank on his leash, the way he always has to anymore to keep the other man on track — feels sour at the realization that things used to be the other way around — and had glued his hand to the back of a cat which has clearly been fattened with attention, even despite how frail it looks.
He comes into himself while Øystein is reaching into a grocery bag to break open a package of sweet loaf slices.
"What are doing?" He asks, and then steamrolls over his open mouth because he knows. "Those were mine."
"We both eat them," Øystein says easily, doesn't seem to register that Pelle is irritated. He never does, anymore. "Little dude can have my share."
Do I even remember how to sound mad?
"It's already being fed, if it's alive."
Øystein looks at him then, face fuzzy in the darkness of the alley's maw. Still looks young and soft in it, and that makes Pelle feel—
Horrible. Like always.
"It's clearly socialized," Pelle adds. "Probably has an owner. It's just being abused."
"C'mon, man," he says, as if coaxing Pelle to roll over just as the cat who is eagerly waiting on the bite he's got pinched between his fingers. Øystein turns back, hair swinging off his shoulder and shrouding his face. Thin, and his nose pokes through the curtain, looking bone white. "He's a fuckin' cat."
"It is, yes."
Pelle wonders when he lost the ability to care for things like Øystein does.
The party is too loud and smells like alcohol, smoke, and weed. Pelle likes being drunk increasingly more, but he's coming to dislike all of these other things.
The reek of Øystein's vomit is almost a welcome reprieve. He had been sitting on the lip of the bathtub, waiting on him to throw up so he could go drink some more and feeling too much like a lost dog following around a nice-looking fellow with a steak in his hands. Then he had groaned and said he was done drinking forever, and it was hardly one o'clock, and Pelle got on his knees beside his hunched figure at the toilet and scooped his hair up in time for him to hurl.
It used to make him feel good to know Øystein like this. He knows the meanings of what the man does, says, of how the energy rolling off of him feels. It takes some blinking, some scrambling internally, anymore to remember these things, but eventually it will come back to him. A kind of muscle memory in his heart.
All the same, the soreness that comes after working muscles hard is gone, for this particular exercise, and Pelle no longer feels the adrenaline rush of knowing someone intimately.
It's just Øystein, and he always does this, and so Pelle knows he does it. The sweet sickness that had taken him only eight months ago — seems approximately right as to when he last felt like he was the smartest man alive because he had studied Øystein's eyelashes in the sunlight and knew when they'd flicker open — is drowned.
His chest does hurt, but he thinks it is his tired lungs and the pain that seems to always be creeping up on him lately. His heart feels weak and the smoke has been making him lightheaded. The familiarity of Øystein's needs-washed hair between his fingers and the grease building up beneath his nails has no part in it; and then, when he's told himself this, it truly doesn't anymore.
He strokes his hand over Øystein's nape through the tickets of his hair and says: "We need to dye this again." The man groans as if dying in pain, but laughs around it anyways.
Pelle wonders, once more, if he will ever be able to care again.