Chapter Text
I have a deep and inarticulate desire for something beyond daily life. Everyday is a copy and paste of the previous, the paper is jammed and the ink is running dry. The seasons change and my heart does not, I love his green eyes and brash demeanor, but dear god do I hate him.
I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.
S
*
Memory is a funny thing, don’t you think? Fleeting and fractured in many places, neurons and brain waves made of bones that were crushed by a truck.
Trying to remember most things had always been a slight challenge for Sebastian, like looking into a smashed mirror, the image almost there, but parts of your face are distorted and smiling menacingly while you weep at its indifference.
He couldn’t recall exactly when it had started, his diminishing inability to reach back into what was supposed to be the storage of what you hold the closest. Whoever was in charge of his mind-library or however the fuck a brain was supposed to work, didn’t seem to be that committed to actually, you know, doing it’s job.
Sebastian liked to imagine that the person up there was careless with how they managed his memories, flinging the delicate books across his skull, holding the teetering tower of leather bound diaries in one hand, cackling as they fell to the floor.
The therapist his mom had forced him to see insisted that it was a coping mechanism, and however subconsciously, it was him in the messy library of his mind, chucking his memories around. That rubbed Sebastian the wrong way, he would much rather the person up there be a dickhead who was out to get him with their carelessness, the idea that he was his own worst enemy far too deep and introspective.
Sebastian’s mind was a separate entity to himself, he felt, and that was fine.
He is at the mercy to it, with its sadistic grin and canines sharpened into points, and that is just fine.
He never went back to see that therapist, despite his mom’s pleas.
Sebastian would sometimes describe to his friends that he felt as if he hadn’t come into consciousness until he was thirteen. That everything before then had been a horrible dream, or the experiences of his past life. He saw the pictures in the photo albums, standing next to the man with his face cut out, and looked skeptically at his childhood finger paintings, but he couldn’t imagine ever seeing out that little boy’s eyes.
When Sebastian was fourteen, he had gone through a trashy sitcom phase, friends, community, the IT crowd , he had seen them all huddled beneath his duvet, pretending the sun didn’t exist. He would sometimes ponder on the idea that his whole life was just an elaborate sitcom set, and that all the finger paintings and framed photos were decorations done by the creative team. Background easter eggs only spotted by the most committed fans, to create the illusion that the family on the TV were real, and not just struggling actors performing with other z-list actors for a show that would be aired sporadically at three in the morning every other st patrick’s day or some shit.
That was another coping mechanism too, apparently, said to him condescendingly by his ex-therapist, over her letterbox glasses her bright red lipstick smudging on her teeth. He had no idea why he had gone to the few sessions he had, when her response to literally everything was just that it was a coping mechanism . He could tell himself that and it wouldn’t cost five hundred gold an hour.
Anyway, this is where the story of tragic descent begins. One of the few days where the eyes that stared out the pair that were too big for his teenage skull were Sebastian’s.
*
High school had been a perfect nothing-ness for Sebastian. He had a handful of friends, grades were satisfactory enough for him to maybe not end up in a soul suck of a job until he perished from an inconvenient heart attack at age thirty-five. He glided along just fine, just on the cusp of insignificance, craving to be included in the insane house parties thrown by the popular kids, but as soon as he was there he wanted to go home.
A background character, frequently reused by the casting directors to add atmosphere in the hallway, because no one was looking at him to notice that he had been seen in the bathroom in a totally different outfit ten minutes earlier.
No, everyone was always far too focused on the jocks and cheerleaders, the ‘populars’ as his mom referred to them while she was trying to pry some vague pieces of information out of Sebastian about his life outside the four walls of his bedroom.
If Sebastian was honest, he sometimes struggled to not allow his floating gaze to fall on them. They were bathed in a golden light somehow, not themselves begging for attention but instead a higher force of power demanding it for them.
It was all so unfair, but who was he to question the involuntary social hierarchy placed upon them? He had to fall in line, right at the back, where it was deemed he belonged.
Realising this had given Sebastian an air of superiority, I mean, who wouldn’t have? He had cracked the code, noted the injustice of it all, and he would watch with an upturned nose as all his classmates became sheep in the manipulative herd. He had realised the cliche, and his response was complete apathy.
Sebastian didn’t care that he was seen as less, it was just the way things go. Because he knew, deep down, that all the people around him might be bathed in the grace of Yoba, but the angels that did it had hollow hearts and flimsy halos. They would abandon them by the time they stepped foot out of the graduation ceremony.
Sure Sebastian thought he was better, but who are you to tell him that he’s wrong?
There was one person though, one boy, who he struggled with. It was less cut and dry as it was with everyone around him. Through no fault of his own, Sebastian was attracted to the most jock, most opposite to his values person, Alex fucking Mullner.
It had started as a hate thing at first, Sebastian despising his letterman jacket and the way he used physical violence to get his way. Alex had grown bored of bullying Sebastian after eighth grade, his body now wiry enough to slip out of his grasp as he pushed him against the lockers, and his voice monotone, making everything he said sound like an insult.
Which to be honest, most of the things Sebastian said to Alex were.
He was an easy target for Sebastian’s sarcastic words, with these big puppy dog eyes that took a couple seconds to process what he was saying, his idiocy only adding to the humor of the situation.
Sebastian sometimes felt as if he slipped into the ‘bully’ role unnervingly easily, being able to remove it seamlessly, like a well worn coat that had only ever known his skin.
In the dark though, after the thrill of watching Alex’s face redden as he tripped over a response and the laughter of his friends encouraging him faded away, he felt excruciatingly guilty. But it was all gone by the morning though, so those pesky feelings can’t have been real.
What was it his mom always said? Oh yeah, “Don’t trust me with a credit card after ten pm!” Well then don’t trust Sebastian with his emotions under the cover of night either. They were unreliable, and definitely not a reflection of what he thought when he felt that there wasn’t an audience to entertain.
Definitely not.
Sometimes, Sebastian would feel as if he wanted to do something more to Alex than just slice him with clever retorts and insufferable winding metaphors. He liked to imagine pushing him down to his knees on the linoleum floor, forcing his hard cock in Alex’s idiotic mouth, watching as he choked against it.
It was a vengeance thing, he insisted to himself, some kind of sick psychological ploy his mind had cooked up to feel like he was in control.
In his fantasies, Alex struggled against it sometimes, trying to pull his head back against Sebastian’s hands knotted in his hair, other times, he would get into it. In his twisted imagination, Alex would sometimes fall to his knees of his own accord, open his own mouth without the prying of Sebastian’s hands, and look up at him with this devilish glint in his eyes that would nearly make him come with just a glance.
But these were little more than fantasies, a trick of the light served to him by his mind as he was jerking off. Everyone thought about their childishly named arch-nemesis while jerking off, right?
Right?
*
If Sebastian was a flower, he would be a crocus. Only emerging to the few during the coldest months, delicate petals unfurling against the flurries of snow and the gentle kisses of their flakes. Appreciated by few, by the time their existence is realised they disappear like magic with the turning of the seasons.
That is a little odd though, isn’t it? How all the crocus just disappear overnight, sucked back into the ground, or absorbed into the air. There one minute with petals a rich purple, gone the next, deteriorated as the moon turned its back.
That is how Sebastian hoped he would go, there as clear as day, and then gone as if there was nothing there in the first place. Only missed by the regretful few, who wished they had taken more notice of him when his body was still warm, a missed opportunity.
It had been explained to him that while people may mourn him and feel guilt for not stopping his actions, Sebastian would never see their reactions, making the act redundant.
Somehow, he felt as if he would feel the radiation of their feelings across all planes of existence. Or he liked to think that, anyway. It justified what he wanted to do to himself late at night.
Not that he would. No, like his father used to say, he was too much of a fucking coward.
But, what is death but a coward’s escape?
Unfortunately, Sebastian’s feelings for Alex hadn’t dissipated along with the change of the seasons. Or any of the seasons for that matter, years blending together, the waste of his youth only tied together with one factor, that he couldn’t stop imagining Alex next to him on his pathetic twin-sized mattress.
The fantasies had differentiated over the years slightly, maturing with him as he realised that he had unrestricted and unmonitored internet access. What had started with innocent blow jobs inside his mind, had morphed into messy handjobs on the school bus, secretive moans in Sebastian’s room, hands leaving sweat marks against the wall, and one time, imagining the two of them coming home after the feast of the winter star, fucking against the wall, suit and tie discarded across the room. That one had been particularly poignant in Sebastian’s mind, as he had imagined them going to the feast of the winter star as a couple. With all the horrific emotional attachment, and strings lacerating his neck.
He didn’t want Alex like that, he would insist to himself after the shameful orgasm, Alex was little but a projection for his dreams, the only conventionally attractive guy in town that would fit with his fractured fantasies. He was a blank canvas, Sebastian was the one with the paintbrush. What he was starting to realise though, was that he was trying his best to paint over a masterpiece that had been hung in the Louvre, with children’s play paint.
*
It had been a shock to get the letter in the mail. The innocent mailbox out front not looking like it harboured any world splitting secrets until its stiff door was cracked open with Sebastian’s hands shaking against the cold.
‘A shock’ was simplifying it, to be honest. Sebastian felt as if his heart had been pulled out and wrapped twice over, before being tossed like a piece of trash polluting his ribcage.
Sebastian’s father had left when he was young, being forced out the house by his mom, her tear stained face and disheveled hair still fresh in his mind. He feared that the image of her like that may be burned into his eyelids forever. This was back in the days when Sebastian looked out of glassy eyes, and he dumbly believed his mom when she said the bruises covering her body were from the falls she seemed to be suffering from every other day.
She was so very thin, back then. Even though she never exercised or wore anything other than a dressing gown, she was so painfully thin. Skin and bones, blood taking a permanent residence on her pale skin.
Sebastian’s father used to hiss to him that Sebastian was lucky he never hit him. That there were some parents that believed their children needed to be punished, their blood a sacrifice to their malevolence along with their mothers.
Eye’s lit with a dumb light, offering no accusation, he would silently nod his head. Blinking against the darkness, he would sometimes wonder if his father was wrong, but it is the most animalistic of tendencies to not question the only thing you have ever known.
When he finally left, scurrying like a wounded animal against his mother’s threats that she had told her father, and that the police were on their way, Sebastian almost didn’t believe that life could be like this. That he could just live, without offering any justification for it. It was a joy that he hadn’t known before, and he revelled in it.
The letter, cream paper embellished with looping handwriting that could only belong to a lawyer. Informed him of his father’s death, cause of death, suicide.
The fucking coward .
The obnoxious overpaid lawyer that Sebastian felt as if he could almost feel behind his handwriting, told him that while nothing was left to him in the will, because of course it fucking wasn’t, it was customary to inform the next of kin.
Sebastian had been completely fine pretending his father had simply never existed, nothing more than a painful memory, but what they don’t tell you about being in a blissful bubble of ignorance, is that the higher you go, the more it hurts when you come crashing down.
He couldn’t remember much past the paper sliding out his hands, his shaking body falling to the floor with a thud. He was told later that his mom had crashed the door open, and he could vaguely recall rocking back and forth in her arms, while she whispered comfortingly into his hair.
One thought, one phrase, ran rampant round his brain, lit with red flashing alarms and sirens blaring,
Like father, like son.
Like father, like son.
Like father, like son.
*
Sebastian was seventeen when his father died. The letter shredded and a furious email sent from his mom to the lawyer, asking ‘what the fuck did you think you were doing, sending that to a kid?’ He didn’t have the energy to remind her that he wasn’t a kid, and could drive next year. He didn’t have the energy to do much anymore, it felt like.
The sitcoms were no help anymore, imagining his life being scripted only leaving him with this deep existential dread and a strong urge to fire the writers. There is a stark difference from watching something for enjoyment, and watching something because you hope it to be a distraction. Because then all you can think about is the fact that it's a distraction, and then you are thinking about what it is distracting you from, and then you’re back at the start. A hellish circle.
He never really saw Demetrius anymore, the ten steps down to the basement too much for a troubled child not born of his flesh and blood.
Maru still came down though, her chubby eleven year old face peeking tentatively around his door, doe eyes blinking through her oversized glasses as she whispered worried questions to her mom about what had happened.
Why her big brother stopped smiling at her jokes, or responding to her pleas to play outside in the gentle spring breeze.
Sam and Abi had stopped around a few times, played Solarian chronicles with him, overcompensating with laughter that was too loud and smiles too wide, but all of their emotions were hollow. The only real thing behind them being worry, or even worse, pity.
Sebastian hated how much of an affect that his father had on him, even in death, he was pulling the strings. His frame was tall and his body hair thick, but he still felt like a child, gripping a teddy bear underneath his arm, the soft flannel of his pajamas rubbing against the bear’s fuzz. It was this crushing guilt almost, that he couldn’t move on from the man who had made his life living hell, that he had this symbiotic relationship with someone who only served to bring him down, clip his wings.
He hated that the few pictures he had stashed between his bed of him and his father, when the cameras were decorated with grain and filled their eyes with bloodshot, his father looked the spitting image of him. Purple-black hair that everyone questioned if it was dyed, dark eyes like pools of a dark forest, skin ghostly pale.
Sebastian worried, and he would never tell anyone this, that he was just his father with slightly different skin over the same bones.
*
Sebastian floated through the rest of his teenage years with complete indifference. He let every opportunity, every experience pass him by, like he was bobbing along a lazy river with his eyes closed.
There was always this lingering fear though, paddling just behind him, that he was going to look back on this period of his life with a great deal of regret. Sitting alone in his box apartment, he would be able to pinpoint it all to exactly where it went wrong, exactly where everything collapsed in on itself.
It was almost funny, how he spent half his childhood with a pair of hands over his eyes.
At first his fathers, with chapped skin and big metal rings pushed against his eye sockets, and then his own. Tired hands brought to his face of his own accord, hating himself every now and then when he would become acutely aware of the time slipping beneath his fingers, grains of sand falling through the gaping smashed hourglass. His eyes were blinking and his heart still beating, but he had lost all consciousness.
Through no fault of his own, he was back at the beginning.
*
The sun was bright that day, I remember that much. It shone through the windows in these shafts of light that made everything you were staring directly at a silhouette. It was so strange, it was like someone had snuck in during the night and replaced my soul for someone else’s.
Sebastian stretched against the light like a cat adjusting its flexible spine on a windowsill. Drinking in the sunlight, feeling the warmth radiate over his skin.
He dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, brushing crumbs off its metal with his sleeve. Bread hadn’t looked appealing to him for months, but it felt different today, almost like every object in his house had been placed a couple of inches to the left, not an annoyance, but just something to nod your head at and think, ‘oh. That’s new.’
A song ran rampant around his head, dancing hand in hand with his thoughts, and he hummed the familiar melody under his breath to himself, popping open the lid to the strawberry jelly and clattering the drawers open, looking for a knife.
For the first time in what felt like a decade, but could’ve only been a few months, the sharp knives didn’t wink at him from the drawer, didn’t sing their siren serenades for him to drag them over his skin. They just sat, motionless, their metal dull and lifeless.
His mom wandered in, her hair in a loose bun and pale face decorated in a spattering of freckles, tiny kisses from the sun. Her face adopted a strange look, and she blinked a couple times, marvelling at seeing her son out of bed, eye bags that usually hung heavy like plates on his face disappeared back into his skin.
Her face split into a smile, and with a warmth that could heat a home even in the coldest of winter days, she said,
“You look happy.”
“I am. I think.”
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.
*
Sebastian’s mom stared at him over her coffee, it had been a couple of days since the aliens seemed to have slipped in through a window during the night and replaced her son, and it was obvious that she was stepping lightly around him still, worrying about the permanence of this boy that wore Sebastian’s skin and bore his scars, but lacked his dead eyes.
She sipped her scalding coffee gently, and Sebastian shuddered as he watched her effortlessly drink it, when it was still bubbling with heat. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, a fish out of water, before murmuring, like she was afraid the walls would berate her for gossiping,
“Evelyn died.”
Sebastian’s brain short circuited for a second, pausing as he typed on his laptop, he had taken to coding on the kitchen table. He didn’t know why, but he hadn’t imagined Evelyn ever being able to die, instead that she was this immortal being that would bake cookies and hum tunelessly under her breath until the world fell from beneath her feet.
“Oh.” Was all he said back, unable to get his mouth to form the correct words that fit sympathy. These kinds of situations made him uncomfortable, everything he said being assessed for being sympathetic enough, kind enough.
Shaking his head, he tried again.
“I mean- that's awful. I feel bad for George.”
Robin took another long, thoughtful sip on her coffee, before replying,
“Yeah. It’s Alex I feel for though, that poor kid, he’s seen far too much far too young.”
Sebastian nodded wordlessly, returning to tapping back on his computer. He could feel the heavy silence in the room, and was just waiting for his mom to shatter it with the words dancing on her lips.
“Do you think.. You should go see him? Take a care package for something?”
Sebastian couldn’t stop himself from snorting underneath his breath, before then realising that was a bit of a cryptic answer that definitely made him sound like an asshole. He stuttered out a quick,
“I think that I’m the last person he’d want to see.”
His mom stared back at him with a hard gaze that spelled out as clear as day, well you don’t have a choice.
Against his protests, he was bundled in a coat and a small pouch of gold was stuffed in his hands, his mom saying breezily to go get something from Pierre’s for him.
Despite his begging to get Maru to do it, and seeing Sebastian would only make it worse, the door was slammed behind him, and he was left watching the early autumn leaves spiral through the air.
Right.