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“I thought you liked me.”
And isn’t that the worst part of it all? Not that he’d trusted you—no, no, trusting the wrong person is an easy mistake, a rookie mistake. His greatest sin wasn’t trusting you—it was thinking he could show you the stars and have you stick around. This is the last gift you’ll give him, as his Muse: that no one ever means it. That no one ever, ever stays. He sobs, face pressed into your thigh, the rest of him curled against the floor of the shrine like a dead millipede.
“Crybaby,” you hiss, pulling on his hair. He whines at the mistreatment. Doesn’t he know by now not to show you his belly? You’ll always take advantage. Your claws will always cut right to the heart of him. “Stupid little thing. Just because I—what, just because I remembered your birthday? Just because I pretended to listen when you told me about the constellations, you think this meant anything? You’re an idiot, Sixer. The multiverse is going to eat you.” You punctuate each statement with another tug, until his body is bent back into a parabola, almost as perfect as all your angles, mouth open and drooling like some blind cave-creature.
You let go and he falls back, snuffling and sobbing into the crease of your thigh, hands wrapped around your knee and your waist. He’s got you pinned like a moth to a corkboard, and you’ve got him trapped like a hand nailed to a table. Whoever pulls away first is going to bleed out.
This is what happens when you’re a moth. When you love the corkboard. When you love the knife.
You thread a hand through his hair again—he flinches at first, before relaxing into the touch, gentle as you know how to be. It’s easier to pretend with a thousand miles of spacetime between you. You’re not really there—but you’re in his neurons, all tangled up in those golden threads, and you know how to manipulate them well enough to create the feel of a warm body beneath his hands. To hurt. To hold.
(Fly, spider, web. Black holes. Corkboards. Inescapable gravity. Maybe you’d think more of this if either of you believed in divine punishment.)
“I would have shown you the entire world. I would have made all this seem trivial. There are entire planets out there that are just ocean, just stars—anything you wanted, Sixer, I could have given it to you.” You let him feel your hands travel down. His flushed neck, the ridges in his spine. His ribs, hitching as he breathes. The blood on his hands, under his nails, red. The blood on yours. “I could still give it to you.”
His head turns, face getting all scraped up by the floorboards. You feel it, in his mindscape—the way something breaks when he inhales only empty air.
“I can’t. You know I can’t.” He peeks open a brown eye, Antheraea Polyphemus, staring at the ceiling, the tapestries. Your eye, always watching, always watching him. The way his voice cracks. The way you’re surprised, for just a second, at the lack of a body next to him.
(Pins, nails, inescapable gravity. Dying, pinned to a wall, callouses pulling at your carapace, epidermis.)
He shuts his eye again, sobs again. Blind, but he trusts you to see what he can’t. Fool. You know how it turned out the last time.
“I can’t let you hurt people.”
But a nail isn’t a real person, neither is a hand. You know what he means, because you’re the same. Would calling him an open book be too obvious?
“Silly little lamb. What do they matter? They can’t see what we see. Can’t see you for all that you are.” A claw along the bulging vein in his throat. A hand palming at his face. You need to be inside him, again—need him to see that he was made for you. Only for you. No one on this stupid planet loves him. No one on this stupid planet would fight as hard as you have to keep their promises to him.
He shudders away from your touch, nose pressed into your stomach. Blood pumping too-fast through greedy veins that will never last long enough, still so warm against your surface.
(Putting your hand in fire. Getting burned. Static ringing in your ears. Always an Ouroboros—wakey wakey, here’s a snakey!)
“They matter—to someone, they matter, and—and I’m just like them, Bill, you know I am. If you destroyed them, you’d destroy me, too.”
You flinch, so hard that your projection of the body flickers out. He whines like a squirming piglet when his head hits the floor, bounces against it—you’re there again in a moment, fake hands on his jaw, real ones inside his skull and brushing away the dizziness you find there.
“Oh, poor little pup, bet that hurts. Here, shh, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” He whines again, face wet, needy—he’s lucky you own him. Overwhelmed little thing—he can pretend to care about this life as much as he wants; you both know reality is too much for him.
(Icarus, like a moth to a flame. Astronaut to the inescapable pull of a black hole. Skin meet fangs meet venom—maybe love is just a knife looking the lamb in the eye and saying I can protect you. Maybe love is just drowning, is just an ember, is just inescapable gravity.)
Inside his mind—well, a lot of things really, this guy’s good at overclocking. Terror and hatred and the feel of your unreal body against his—resolve cracking because both of you would do anything to keep this. Because you’re the same. Because there’s not much difference between a hammer and a careful hand, not really. Because there’s not much difference between a whirlpool and an event horizon. Between light and inescapable gravity.
But more importantly, the memory of faces unimportant—a mother, who needs ‘em, and a brother, even worse—and sick days, and stories. You know what he wants, because you know how he asks for things, because he knows that you’re always in his mind and you’re always going to take care of him.
Hands cup his ears, hot, his cheeks, warmer. Greasy hair and long lashes. Skull fragile as a snowglobe—you’ve long forgotten how to hold fragile things. But he’s strong enough not to break. He’d never let you break him, not really. Too good for things like inescapable gravity.
“Want me to tell you a story, hmm?” You laugh, you can’t help it—wouldn’t be you if you weren’t being mean. He knows how you are. “Alright, Fordsy. But only because you asked so nicely.”
A moment of silence, laying his head back on your lap. Hands tangle in his shirt, hair, brainstem and spine. Always connected. He loves it.
“There is a monster in the woods,” you begin, because stories always start with something big and bad, “and one day, it’s going to eat you. But for now, you are a fool, and the two of you are building something beautiful.”