Archive of Our Own

The clock continues to tick.

It hadn’t stopped, of course. In its square of white wall behind the couch, right within his eyeline, the minute hand barely moves.

The psychiatrist is looking at Pete, and Pete is looking at the clock.

She has a name, he knows she does. He knows that it’s Lisa, and that she’s been his regular point of contact for too many years to count. The clipboard resting on her lap is angled in a way that’s supposed to be casual, while the polished, porcelain expression she wears is anything but.

In the silence between the seconds, the psychiatrist doesn’t clear her throat. She looks at him, misfolded and misshapen like a pot in a kiln that hadn’t formed right, shifting into the patch of shadow on the couch across from her.

Her lips thin into a line.

“Pete,” the psychiatrist says, her voice cutting, the knife-edge tip of her pen at the ready. It makes his skin crawl, the clipped, disappointed way all psychiatrists always are, “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”

Pete’s fingernails dig into his palm, tight in the curl of his fist. The psychiatrist is trying to make him feel guilty. All of them are trying to make him feel guilty.

None of them asked whether he wanted their help.

The nurses tried to make him better. The doctors tried to make him better. All wearing that pitying, slightly exasperated demeanour. Always the downturned shoulders, the drumming fingers. Grimacing through the patronising suggestion that he try harder.

Sighing, rolling their eyes, and saying that we all want to help you - you could at least pretend to be thankful for it.

Pete hates it.

Underneath his hoodie and his long-sleeved shirt, underneath the bitten-raw skin of ward bracelets and IV holes, is a bitter, furious beast that, if given the chance, would bite, and bite, and bite.

It pushes at the back of his clenched teeth, desperate for him to unravel what’s left of his haphazard stitches holding him together and let them really see what they think they want to see. Let them see the real, rotten inside, and let them finally, finally leave him alone.

But. He can’t.

For now. Pete knows, he knows the game, he knows the boxes that he doesn’t want ticked if he wants to keep his shoelaces. His fingers are trembling, out of her sight.

There is nothing to say.

It will be over soon. Each second that slips is a splinter in his skull, slow and agonising.

The psychiatrist sighs, and Pete doesn’t let the flinch that’s instinct reach her gaze, he doesn’t. Stamped down a moment a little too close to being too late.

He’s been here long enough to know that it’s a professional gesture meant to show him that he’s being irritating and should correct that behaviour.

Instead. Pete looks away. The bones of his neck rubbing against each other, ever so slightly.

It’s sunny for February. The window behind him is half-blocked by a thin gossamer of curtain, enough to let the milky blue sky drift sunbeams into the grey space, letting the dust dance in their rays. The sun is sticky on the black of his hoodie, pulled into his hands, hot in the grease of his hair.

It’s not quite the winter day he’s wrapped up for.

The psychiatrists’ pen taps once, twice, with the trail of her eyes over him. It burns, a spotlight too close to skin, and he doesn’t let her see him squirm.

The psychiatrist changes tactic. She leans forward, a millimetre, and attacks, even-toned and full of teeth, “Have you spoken to Patrick about this?”

That hits its mark. A weak point, fingers pushing a wound, twisting the heartstrings off-key in Pete’s chest.

Patrick.

Patrick, who’s somewhere in the UK, thinking that Pete just got in a minor car accident. That accident meant that he couldn’t join the tour like he was supposed to, but it was no big deal.

Completely and blissfully unaware of anything that’s going on, which is just what Pete wants.

The cold that washes over him is a different kind of pain, the flinch he can’t suppress in time yanking hard the strings of muscle and gauze.

The problem is. The problem is that Pete has absolutely no intention of ever telling Patrick anything.

The psychiatrist knows it, the doctors know it, and Pete’s parents idling for him outside, impatience in every rev of the engine, know it.

There is a lot Patrick doesn’t know, and Pete will do anything to keep it that way.

Anything.

Patrick can never know.

It takes effort, and pain ripping into the meat of him, but Pete scowls in the way he used to, familiar and sharp at the edges. Slipping back into the mask means forcing himself to uncurl his knees from his chest, to lean back against the hard edges of the couch.

He throws an arm over the side, feeling, distant, the pain weave along the nerves. Pete looks at the psychiatrist in the eye, a dare, and doesn’t say anything. His heart beats in his ears, and he swallows it, once, twice, unnoticed.

The clock ticks.

The psychiatrist stares back, the silence between them stiff, solidifying, and makes a decision he’s not privy to.

She writes something, looping and calm, apathetic and indifferent, “Your prescriptions should be ready to pick up today or tomorrow. As it’s been a while since you took your lithium regularly, expect some of the side effects to come back while it gets settled.”

Another grind of his teeth, seething under his skin. Threads caught in a hangnail, and he rips it loose a fraction too hard.

The truth, then. His mother complaining about the water splashed all around his bathroom sink at the allocated times, shaking her head even after years of it, putting away the half-empty glass. The chalk caught between his teeth, from where the peach coating popped, and the grit turning everything numb.

The truth they didn’t want.

They don’t want to think that the medication didn’t work, because that wouldn’t be as easy.

That Pete and Pete alone made the choice.

They tend to assume a lot, now that he’d stopped talking. Filling in the blanks to what they wanted him to be, waiting to see if it stuck.

The time has run out, and nothing has changed.

Pete’s stomach hurts, in the new, unfamiliar way that had been waiting for him, gleeful and mocking, from the very first moment he’d opened his eyes to cuffs around his wrists and the whine of fluorescent bulbs inches from his head.

The psychiatrist is annoyed with him, just like she was when she visited him in the hospital, just like always.

She scribbles something, underlines it hard. Flicks her gaze to Pete for a split-second, the edges of a frown threatening to break through her professional disinterest, and her shoulders move in a silent sigh.

“I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, Pete, and we can talk about recovery plans.”

Pete says nothing. His fingers tap against the couch, out of beat. The slick taste of blood in the back of his throat chokes back the polite reply that’s expected of him.

He won’t need them.

Just as he’s getting up to leave, the ache resettling into the wobble of his legs, weaker than Before, the psychiatrist moves in front of the closed door.

Lisa blinks, twice, trailing her eyes over him in the worried, uncertain hesitation that he wants to bare his teeth at. She makes an aborted flap of her hand that says to him that she’d wanted to touch his shoulder but thought better of it at the last moment.

“Pete,” Lisa starts, and pauses, for the first time since the clock started.

There are faint lines around her eyes, her dress new and the books in the shelf different from when they first met. Despite it, she looks at him like he’s still that same badmouthed little teenager.

Lisa hesitates, then says, as if she truly believes it, “It’s going to get better. I promise.”

Pete barely resists the urge to laugh. He’s heard variation after variation of that promise, from his mother’s tearstained vigil, his manager’s one-sentence demand, and the doctor waving impatiently in front of his eyes asking for the insurance paperwork.

He agrees with her. It’s no effort, no strings, to nod, to let the stretch of a smile pull pain in his cheeks.

Things are going to get much, much better, a fact that only he knows.

Things are going to get better, because this time, Pete won’t fail.

----

The problem with suicide attempts is that no one tells you how to deal with it if it doesn’t work. It’s not like there’s a how-to guide online, or a column in a shitty magazine where someone writes, ‘Dear Aunt Maureen, please oh please can you tell me how I can get them to stop looking at me?’

If there was anything like that, it’d probably be all bullshit anyway.

There are dead flies stuck in the dusty lampshades of his childhood room. They continue to buzz, rattling against his skull, brain shaking like dice inside a cupped hand.

The blinds are pulled, but not quite enough. What sun looks in traces over dust, plastic plants, the soccer trophies. Pete’s head buzzes, the quiet snick of insect legs clogging his throat, and he doesn’t bother to move the blanket over where his arms are covered in gooseflesh.

There are too many people watching.

There were always too many people watching.

Before, it was in the flash of cameras outside grocery stores, shifty, silhouetted figures bending behind bushes and behind parked cars. Eyes in the front row, staring right into his soul and mouthing along to the words he’d plucked straight out of the deepest parts of his heart.

It was the press of the microscope slide. The dripping saliva of the journalists.

After was worse. A constant, never-ending pressure of surveillance that follows his every breath, like they wish for the heart monitor, the unlocked doors, or the laceless shoes of the hospital.

Or. The gleeful giggling of a camera hidden in the hospital chapel, the microphone in the nurse’s smile.

They’re in the walls. Listening to Pete, the rock star dancing on top of the world, scream until his voice cracked, then broke.

There is a road made of good intentions, laid by someone who had their heart in the right place. It is impatient, waiting for him to hurry up and get better so everyone else can get on with their own lives.

Or. Get better at hiding the buzzing in his head, the cold, broken cries the microphone picks up at night, so they can all congratulate themselves on doing a good job of handling the mess he’d put them through.

The blood under his nails is starting to itch.

He knows they’re watching him, a fact so well-chewed over that it barely even tastes like anything anymore. Just like he knows that his bed is too small, the blankets musty, and the prison bars outside his window sealed with more than just a cheap dollar-store lock.

Everything is looking at him. The magazines hadn’t found out, yet, but it was only a matter of time.

His parents hid the knives. They hid his journals, the ones he’d stashed in the places he thought no one would ever think to look.

It was going to be difficult, but Pete had his mind made up, this time.

Of course, Pete had promised.

His wrist was rubbed raw from the bracelet, tubes slithering beneath blanket and skin, pumping him full of liquid poison. The dull, numbed pain of his bandaged wrists, and his mother’s hands shaking in his, his father’s eyes filled with tears for the first time in years.

There was nothing he wouldn’t have promised in that moment.

That road paved with good intentions didn’t lead anywhere.

Instead, he was in his childhood bed he’d outgrown, in a room that didn’t feel like home, and with parents who didn’t know how to deal with him outside of politely talking about the weather and tiptoeing around the shards of his broken masks.

It was no longer like the neon nights, back when the mania was a glittering skyline dripping and smearing stars into the puddles he could still taste the rain of. Instead, the mangled sunshine of a beautiful day skittered across his ceiling.

It’s softer than the hospital light. It hurts.

Snake eyes. His brain was an old TV, a beat-up, decrepit piece of shit that only occasionally worked when smacked just right, and even then, it was only a couple of channels everyone was sick of.

Snake eyes. He would never ever get them to believe him again.

His phone chimes, and Pete doesn’t move. The blankets aren’t covering him anymore. The slight breeze, catching the blinds, slides along his bare skin.

His manager is busy. His bandmates are busy. His parents are downstairs, sitting in silence.

They could have found him. The ink on the headlines might still be cooling, his image ruined, scribbled out.

The fear that comes with that thought falls short, weak enough to ignore. The emptiness settled in his chest swallows it, and his eyes slip closed.

It chimes again, a sharp, shrill interruption. Like the reminders his mom set up for him to take his meds, all smiley cartoon animals and empty cheer. Pete shoves his face deeper into his pillow, into the pillowcase that used to be reserved for guest rooms.

The buzz of the flies in his head, gnawing at the base of his spine. His phone chimes again, insistent, and starts to ring.

One of the rules of keeping his job is that Pete has to pick up the phone, no matter how he feels about it.

He grits his teeth, right over the cracked cut on his lip. Every movement is slow, weighed down by a body torn up and pieced back together. A jigsaw shoved together with pieces that didn’t fit.

Yesterday’s clothes catch on the bandages, rubbing raw, just like they did yesterday. The phone continues to ring, and his fingers finally cooperate.

A beat, the background static of cans and string. Then, Patrick’s voice, half muffled, “Pete? You there?”

Pete hisses through gritted teeth to sit up, too quiet for the microphones. His legs twinge with electricity, needles in the joints, deadweight. The cold finally reaches him, gnawing right down to the bone, and he ignores it.

Patrick.

“I’ve texted you at least a thousand times,” Patrick says, talking over Pete’s slight grunt of pain, tired and exasperated in a way Pete knows well. “Did you see the photo I sent you? The crowd missed you tonight.”

Setting the phone next to him, by the pillow, Pete’s arms slide out from under him. The weight is a stone tied around his neck, knotted three times for luck. He swallows once, twice, and almost feels the pull.

He makes an exception for Patrick, and when he does force himself to speak, it’s barely more than a hoarse rasp.

“Yeah … I’m here.”

His voice is raw from disuse and the damage the doctors did. Every word cuts across his throat, tasting of the hot metal of split knuckles and train tracks.

A beat of static, stretched tight, broken by Patrick’s sharp inhale of breath caught by the microphone.

“Sorry. I forgot … your voice, Pete. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you.”

Pete licks over the dry skin of his lips, where it’s threatening to bleed. He swallows again, letting the stone sink right down to his damaged stomach.

Patrick hesitates, in a way that would make Pete bristle, usually, “How are you doing, Pete? You haven’t replied to me today.”

A thousand different ways of asking the same question, all with the same disapproving shakes of the head, curled smirks and hysterical guilt-tripping. But it’s different.

Patrick’s concern stings, too tired to be anything but honest after a show Pete was supposed to be there for, and it is harder to squash.

Patrick is sleep to the hypothermic, the warmth of the sunshine trying to reach him through the blinds, and Pete aches. He can feel the usual lies waiting for him, and guilt holds his tongue, takes away the impulse.

Pete won’t change his mind.

“I’m fine,” Pete whispers, and wavers. He swallows again, and he squeezes his eyes closed tight, fingers twitching on the sheets next to the pillow. “Patrick.”

He savours the syllables of Patrick’s name, always. As if it’s the first and last time he’ll say it, and it’s a secret kept just for him, and for Pete only.

The pressure behind his eyes builds, and Pete curls his hands into fists.

“Don’t talk, sorry. Listen, when I get back, I’ll totally bring you over some of my mom’s chicken soup for your throat.” Patrick says, distracted, and the background static pops.

It stretches into voices and excitement Pete can’t reach. Patrick adjusts his phone, and the tin-can string connecting them shivers.

“I gotta go, sorry. Joe is trying to tell me something and is being annoying about it. I’ll text you later, okay? Get some rest.”

The blinds in the breeze slam into the windowsill, and Pete almost laughs. His throat burns, agony coating every square inch of it, but he says, barely audible, “Have fun, Patrick.”

A cheery goodbye, another promise, and the dial tone. Snake eyes. Pete’s hands tremble when they pick up his phone. His cheeks are wet, in a distant, far-away version of him that he buries into the pillowcase.

The sunshine is still cold against his skin, and Pete forgets that Patrick is coming back tomorrow.

----

There is an ancient tree in his backyard that’s been there his entire life. It’s old, its bark layered and grooved with years and years of Chicago weather, roots gnarled and stretching just underneath the soil’s surface. It sheds its leaves every fall, the beautiful orange and yellow turning into black and mulch.

That tree was watching when they hung the laundry, giggling and chasing each other between the odd socks and neat sheets, when the stars were too beautiful to sleep inside, when Pete ripped his nails climbing up its trunk in the middle of the night.

From its branches, in the cold of winter that was biting and harsh on teenage limbs and thin pyjamas, Pete remembers the distant detachment that comes with watching the world the wrong way. The deliberate slip of his grip, and the porch light flicking on.

It happened again, with a stage and a deliciously ill-advised stunt that shattered the bone in his foot. The ground, far away, floating out of reach, and the distance of the impact.

That tree taunts him, now, standing outside the kitchen window in its usual place. Its branches are bare, fingers stretching into the grey sky, looking exactly like the childhood that doesn’t exist anymore.

Pete doesn’t have long left before everyone finds out. The kitchen clock continues to tick in the quiet, and his grip on his pen shakes. He’s not alone, but close enough to it, and the thought of it settles sweet and sickly.

The creak of tree branches splinters his attention - car keys no longer hanging on the hook, still missing the keychains snapped by the paramedics. Drawers full of what his parents hide. Fluorescent bathrooms that lock. The rattle of pills in the palm of his hand.

His arms press hard against the counter, right where the bandages rub wrong, and the notebook in front of him remains blank. Pete’s next breath burns, and his fingers can no longer stop his pen from falling to the page.

His hands crush over his ears, trying to block out the sharp note of the clock, the rattle of the tree in the cold, and the buzz of dead flies in his head.

The click of the front door.

It’s a gentle, careful sound. Like the wood was guided back into place without letting it slam. It still makes him flinch, the pain sharp right in the pit of his stomach.

A pause, and a familiar pair of footsteps still hesitate before coming in.

“Pete?”

Pete presses his hands against his ears a fraction tighter, and his elbow rips the corner of his page.

Patrick was not supposed to be here.

Someone told him something. His manager, his parents. A sentence said wrong, or a sentence said carelessly, and it would be enough.

Patrick was in the doorway, creases in his shirt and socks just shy of the entranceway, lingering in the space outside. His eyes flick to the hands over Pete’s ears, and his fingers tighten on the loose fabric of his hoodie.

Pete knows the expression Patrick makes when he doesn’t know what to do next. He can’t meet his eyes, right away.

“Hi Pete,” Patrick says, and pauses. He doesn’t enter past the threshold.

Pete doesn’t move, yet his hands loosen from around his ears, without him noticing. There’s a sudden, sharp ache in his chest, rattling against the rungs of his ribs.

It’s a different type of pain, and he looks at Patrick. The sky, the tree, the locked doors. They slip out of focus, collapsing back onto him.

Patrick is just there, where he shouldn’t be. Waiting for a sign from Pete that it’s okay to come closer, jet-lagged, pinched pink from the cold. Real in a way that Pete didn’t dream about anymore.

Patrick. His Patrick, even now.

Someone he had prepared himself never to see again. The version of Patrick he’d carried with him didn’t survive.

Pete’s throat tightens, and he swallows once, twice. His hands drop to his lap.

“I assume you didn’t get my texts, considering you look surprised to see me.” Patrick clears his throat, still rough from the previous show.

He doesn’t quite settle at the table with Pete, but hovers. Lingers against the counters, the plain fridge.

A beat of Patrick watching him, while Pete doesn’t respond. He pulls the sleeves of his shirt up over his palm.

“Hi,” Pete says, hoarse and far too late. It’s quiet and weak even to his own ears.

Like usual, Patrick doesn’t remark on it. He nods. Fiddles with a button on his shirt, shifting on his toes. Nods again, and his gaze falls to the empty notebook.

“Are you working on something?”

The pen had fallen somewhere out of sight. Pete glances down at the notebook, with its blank pages and torn paper. It’s two pages in, replacing the journals he can’t find.

“Yeah,” he says, eventually, as grey as the sky outside.

In his lap, his hands twitch with the urge to slam it shut, to tear the ruined page clean from the spine.

Patrick doesn’t reply right away. He’s moved closer, and his eyes settle not on the blank lines, but on Pete’s hands, pulling his sleeves at the seams.

“Hey,” he says, soft, careful in the way Pete hates, “Don’t put pressure on yourself, it’ll come.”

In the Before, Pete would have smiled, shrugged. He can’t quite make a smile. Instead, he shakes his head, and it exhausts him.

He turns away, and the tree outside stands, “I’m fine. Just not very inspired today.”

It doesn’t land properly. Patrick would probably want to argue, but doesn’t. In Pete’s peripheral, he nods, slow, and doesn’t push.

The space between them holds a moment too long.

Patrick moves closer anyway, untying the knot of Pete’s hands. He pulls him up just enough so there isn’t any space between them, close enough to see the window’s reflection in his glasses.

Pete doesn’t resist. Neither of them move for a heartbeat or two, with Patrick looking for something he doesn’t seem to find.

Then, letting go of Pete’s hands, Patrick wraps his arms around him, and pulls him close to his chest like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Patrick exhales, soft and silent. He’s warm, holding tight, but never enough to hurt.

Pete stills. The feeling doesn’t come back all at once. It’s a slow return, his aching arms heavy as he hugs Patrick back.

He grabs onto the soft fabric of Patrick’s hoodie, and buries his face in his hair.

The clock keeps ticking.

Pete closes his eyes, and ignores it.

----

The basement doesn’t echo upstairs.

Pete’s shoulder presses against the wall, settles into the bone. Years of dust and neglect dirty the soft cotton of his pyjamas, cold on the soles of his bare feet.

In this section of space, where the lonely lightbulb hangs from its knotted rope, there is only one door in and out. He hadn’t quite closed it tight behind him, and the dark outside spills through the crack.

The phone against his ear struggles through brick and dirt, the line crackling like gravel under a tyre. The only pipe that seems to catch a signal is in the closet with unfinished painting and the rusty furnace.

“Pete. Are you even listening to me?”

His manager sighs, tired and exasperated in an all too familiar way. The irregular kick drum of his fingers on wood, snapping against the spurs in the barely audible background.

“Yes,” Pete replies, off-beat, a moment too sudden. He hears it before he means it.

Pete fixes it.

He licks his lips over the split, lifts his chin up high. His voice is already worn rough at the edges, the dark under his eyes smudged, “I’m offended you’d think I wouldn’t be.”

“Don’t try that bullshit with me,” his manager snaps, his voice cutting tight and sharp into the bone, “Are you forgetting that a few days ago, I answered the call that was meant to be your suicide note?”

The damp, shallow air of the basement freezes over and locks in his lungs.

The static fills the line, and Pete can’t move. In the dark, the drip of leaky pipes cuts through the echo in his skull, pulling the words out of place.

The plastic of his phone creaks under his grip. It’s slippery with the cold of locked windows and painted over glass, the worn corner of the box he slides into.

The impact of his head hitting the wall isn’t quite hard enough.

“I told you,” Pete says, each syllable careful and even, without even having to remember the words, “It wasn’t like that. It was an accident.”

His manager doesn’t respond.

Breathing in, out. The background static barely a whisper.

Waiting, and the death whine of the lightbulb increases in pitch, each grind of the filaments a scratch on chalkboard. The bone of his shoulder pops from its place against the damp of the wall, and his knees buckle under his own weight.

Pete’s teeth find the inside of his cheek.

“It was an accident,” he repeats, again, and stops. “It wasn’t a – I just. I gave you the wrong impression. I’m fine. I am.”

A pause. The filaments about to burn out, Pete’s back against the wall, sliding down.

The taste of iron coats the inside of his mouth.

He curls his legs inwards and insists, his voice splintering in the very depths of his chest, “It was an accident.”

The light buzzes louder, sharpening the shadows reaching for him, fingertip touches on the half-hidden door.

“It wasn’t an accident, Pete.” His manager replies, eventually. “You said goodbye.”

A tremor makes its way up the knots of Pete’s spine, and he drops his head to his knees, to the dark. The ceiling crowds against him, stealing what little space he has amongst the forgotten boxes and empty spiderwebs.

His phone is ice in his palm, fingers pressing over the microphone just to give himself a second. Half of one, not quite counted, the cold of the floor seeping through to the bone.

“What did you want from me?” Pete forces out, over the blood in his mouth. The soft skin of his cheek has split against his teeth, and his spare hand knots once, twice, in his hair. Tugs sharp enough.

A controlled sigh, the shift of papers that’s too loud. His manager flattens, sharpens, “People are asking questions. Your bandmates included.”

Pete squeezes his eyes shut. The world fades, the buzz of the open line thinning.

He keeps his breathing steady, controlled. It echoes wrong, pitched, against the water-stained cracks in the ceiling, the noise of the basement shifting. There is only one way out, and he won’t look at it.

His manager continues, his voice growing in intensity, leaning in close, “You’re the frontman. There are consequences.”

Breathing in. In. Out.

Pete’s stomach cramps at his position, curled in on himself like a teenager in his parents’ basement.

Hiding in the only light there is.

“You need to get better enough to go back in public, and soon, if we want to avoid another media scandal.”

His feet curl tighter under his legs, and the cold making its way up numbs everything it touches.

An impulse, too quick to catch, the grip on his hair tightening just shy of being unbearable, and Pete almost snarls, “Then fix it. Tell them the story.”

“I have been,” his manager retorts, impatient and even. The same exasperation as his parents’, stripped bare, “It’s not working, Pete. It’s not adding up.”

Some of the old feeling returns, red-hot and tasting of the blood dripping down his throat. There are old scars near his nails from when he’d torn the screws right out of the locks, and they burn like new.

Pete’s head snaps up, pushing back the ceiling, and he spits into the microphone, through his bared teeth, “It was an accident. Why won’t anyone listen to me?”

It’s not loud enough for upstairs to hear, but his throat rips anyway. He rears, untangling his hand to press against the wall, at just the angle to needle at the stitches underneath. The next words die in his throat.

His manager is silent under the pounding in his ears. The line pops, repeating his own words back to him in a metallic, hollow tone that ruins the recording.

“You need to pull yourself together, Pete, and get your story straight,” his manager says, his voice drowning, gurgling, as the interference rises, “If you can’t, I’ll have no choice but to pull you out of the band until you can.”

A beat, the cold in his chest starting to spread, a vice tightening towards breaking. His arm starting to shake, holding himself up.

Pete fixes it.

His next exhale stutters, and rewinds. He swipes his tongue over his teeth, wiping away the blood between them.

He uncurls, just slightly, and tilts his gaze up towards the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. It stings, right where the filament is about to shatter.

“Then it’s a good thing I’m better, right? I wouldn’t want you to overreact and make a hasty decision.” Pete states, a little too steady, a little too flat. A lawyer’s tone, polished to perfection.

The inside of his cheek aches at the press of his teeth, “I made a mistake. I’ve handled it. I’m not interested in your threats.”

The furnace is silent. The line starts to break, loud in the quiet, and the air tightens. Even the dust hangs completely still.

His manager slices through the static, colder, now, deliberate in the bite of, “Sure, Pete. That’s great. I can tell Patrick everything you told me on the phone, and we can have a big laugh about it, right?”

The words land like a slap, and Pete flinches. The words hit wrong, the name out of place.

Patrick.

Patrick doesn’t belong down here.

Not in the dark, the dirt and the cold. He doesn’t belong anywhere near here.

The door isn’t quite closed, and his eyes flick to it for a split-second.

Pete’s phone almost falls out of his hand, and he compresses it tight against his ear. He hears, far-away, the blow.

“I’m sure he’d love to hear it. Since you won’t tell him.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Pete says, in a jumbled rush, before he has time to think about it. It reverberates against the walls, ringing the pipes.

The traitorous wounds in his throat mangle his last word, cracking at the ends.

Half of a laugh, and his manager replying, all teeth and promises, “Sort your shit out, Peter. I’m not cleaning up after you anymore.”

Pete surges, bolting up against the wall, his ripped-up words spilling over each other. The dial tone skips, lags. A hard twist of the knife in his chest.

He blinks, once, twice. Stares at his phone, the call summary, and the smiley face asking how the quality was. The dial tone stretches into silence, cutting off mid-beat.

It clicks, and dies.

“No, no, no,” Pete mumbles. He pushes himself off the wall, unsteady, legs knotted under him. Slams redial on instinct, pacing through pins-and-needles.

“Come on. Pick up.”

The call disconnects, and the voicemail is switched off. He keeps moving, weaving tight circles in the same four walls. Each beat of his heart stutters, off rhythm.

Nothing. The floorboards creak upstairs, and the light dulls.

He slows without meaning to, circles getting tighter, smaller.

No answer. No matter how many times he tries.

Pete stops, mid-step, mid-breath. His phone rings emptily in his hand.

The basement constricts, and with it, him.

“Okay,” he murmurs. Once.

His foot hits the concrete. Above him, the floorboards shift again, a chair scraping against wood. It’s dull, meaningless noise that he ignores.

Something in him tries to arrange itself into the right shape – angry, careful, scared.

Something, or anything, that registers the unravelling of his stitches, the phone clattering to the ground.

It doesn’t hold.

Pete lets it drop.

There is a soft, fading hum behind his eyes, desperate and cornered. It rattles, half-empty, and it’s not anything anymore.

He doesn’t notice his hands shaking. The pieces click into place.

Pete switches off the light.

----

The battery of his phone is still somewhere in the basement.

Pete stretches as far as he can reach, half-shoved in the dark underneath his bed.

Pain makes its way up the rivets of his arm, sinking its teeth into the join of his shoulder. It’s distant, blunt enough to ignore. Beneath it, a low, constant ache grinds bone against bone.

His bare feet rub the dust into his carpet, recently ripped out and replaced with a guest-ready cream, soot in the sun trickling through the open blinds.

Half of a grip, memory filling in what he can’t see, nails sinking into the worn, hidden box at the very edge of his reach.

It slips, jerks a millimetre further away. He overcompensates, pressing further, the space between the bed and the floor collapsing in on itself.

It drags out the junk it’s surrounded with. Old pieces of tape, the stuffing of a smiley-faced chew toy, scribbled shreds of paper curled yellow, forgotten bands and torn photographs.

The box is smaller in his hand than it used to be, and he’s careful withdrawing it.

Pete’s knees collide as he withdraws, sitting on the floor, criss-cross applesauce. His focus fixates on the carved expression of Peter Pan, the same as when he was a child, the glitter of wooden stars in the lines of the sky that the sunshine doesn’t reach.

It’s the last remaining object in his room, now hollowed out, glow-in the dark stars painted over and the celling stooped. Everything else was done Before, in the gaps he doesn’t remember.

Half-dead plants and books for Andy. His bass, already flight-ready, for Joe. And the vinyl, the old photographs shoved loose and crumpled into envelopes, torn-up pieces of venue tickets and parking fines. They have their place, even if he can’t bring himself to think the name right now.

The batteries of his alarm clock rest next to the blank screen, the hum of the plug pulled from the wall. His blankets on his bed are folded, the patterns turned in.

Sunshine skitters down the wall in search for him, oversaturated in the gaps where his journals used to be, lingering on the cardboard box half-closed, the false gold of his soccer trophies.

It doesn’t find him.

There are spiders crawling along the ridges of his spine, wrapping up the dead flies that are no longer twitching, lampshade wiped clean and the gnawing on his brain a half-remembered dream.

A neat trick.

The blood under his nails is starting to flake on the wood, clotting in amongst the dust. The carpet under him rubs the wrong way against a layer of his skin, smudging the edges of a chalk outline. He traces along the carved smile of Peter Pan, worn from too many years.

A problem, then.

Pete’s idiot, blurry brain is melted synapses and slugged, slow connections. There are strings. Cause and effect.

Ones he could pluck into any tune he wanted, constricting around the beat of his heart, strangling the torn muscles of his arms to catch in the seam of them.

Cause. The phone call. The looks, the shifting, sly smile between nurses and between the silence. The painkillers saved up and saved a secret, one just for him.

Effect. Pete’s hands trembling, a second out of sync. Sunshine distorting in the shadow of the tree. The ripping of the edges of his sleeves, and the strong poke of the wounds inside his stomach, tasting of blood.

There is an empty space where things go to die inside him, and it’s never full. It’s a hole that keeps swallowing, keeps spreading, and nothing is ever enough to ignore it.

The alarm clock hums a fraction louder, deep in the base of his skull, sitting by the bedside like a picture in a magazine, perfect in the way his parents always wanted it to look, like he was the crucial part destroying it all together.

Inside the box, where the dust has settled into the seams, are things precious only ever to him. Secret, useless pieces of junk he’s kept close to his heart for years, back from before everything blurred and the sunshine grew cold.

His parents didn’t know about it. His manager didn’t, the journalists didn’t, and neither did the band’s fans.

Inside, lying right on the top, is a strip of photographs. They’re the cheap, plastic-lined kind spat out by a photo booth at the mall. They were laminated, which cost more than the photos themselves.

The smiles, the real, genuine ones that no magazine would ever see, twist a knife directly into where it would hurt the most.

Pete’s eyes skitter quick from it. He throws them aside, into the sunbeam and separate from the tape and paper.

It sticks out against the carpet, the bare walls, toying at the edge of his peripheral. He forces his legs to move, gritting his teeth at their refusal to obey him, and gives it his back.

A slam of a door, the front one, impacts hard enough to rattle up the stairs. The birds outside in the tree have long since flown off.

He hasn’t looked in here, not since the Before. It’s sickly-sweet, lemonade on the last day of school, the lines and grey of his parents after a tour. It’s stuck in his throat, bitter on the bitten tip of his tongue.

But Pete rummages - searches through the butterfly coin his grandfather gave him before he died, his kindergarten crafts, the keychain of his family on vacation - letting them spill careless and heavy over the sides.

Spiders crawl over gooseflesh, webs narrowing his lungs. The dial-tone in his head drones louder the longer he searches.

At last.

In the shadow outside of the window, the pills are there. Shapeless. Their quiet, piercing rattle a chorus, weighed dice in a game he’s losing. The label ripped off, and poorly, but one memorised.

Besides it, the pocketknife he’d stolen from boot camp. It’s a survival one, notches in its handle, the blade curled sharp and curled around old childhood memories, ripping into the inside of the box.

Pete stares, a moment too long. Something in his chest twists, the strings tightening, a clove-hitch knot, his teeth slitting the flesh of his bottom lip.

He stares at the knife, the pills, and instead of the sick rumble of anticipation, a screaming crowd throwing his words back at him, a slow slide of wet fingertips along the brim of his brain, there is nothing.

Nothing.

Silence. The rush of his blood underneath the surface of his skin, and his own breathing.

He curls, spine popping out of place. The hotel room of his childhood doesn’t bother to press against him, he chokes on his next breath of his own volition.

The sky is blue, outside the window, the beautiful sunny day outstretching its fingertips towards him. And Pete’s throat burns, a small, pathetic whine ripping out of the depths of him, sounding weak even to his own, underwater ears.

Of course, he’d promised.

There was a promise to himself, however.

Cause. The flicker of a streetlamp in an abandoned parking lot. Tight bracelets and sly, practised smiles that didn’t reach his eyes. The bedroom being painted over behind his back, and the silence of a broken phone.

Effect. Pete doesn’t realise the blur of tears clinging to his eyelashes until they fall – soft, unnoticed - on the strip of photos he doesn’t register grabbing, eventually held carefully and held close.

He scrubs them away, rubbing hard at the moisture he hadn’t felt on his cheeks, which the sun won’t dry.

The photos. He can’t look at the photographs of him and Patrick, he can’t. That version of him got it right the first time, and will never, ever come back. The current version of him barely deserves to hold them.

It hurts. Their smiles, their arms squished against each other, too tight a space that they’d managed to ignore.

The photos don’t fit into a pile. They don’t fit anywhere but the pocket of Pete’s pyjamas, slipping secret, never daring to dog-ear the edges.

With the dust settling, the box half-spilt and a blemish in the carpet with its broken toys and sticky pages, the sound of footsteps stomping up the stairs shatters the silence.

A knee-jerk reaction, a painted-over star jostling loose, and the box slams shut, just as the interruption catches its breath behind his back.

“Pete.”

Patrick stands in the doorway, in Pete’s instinctive glance over his shoulder that twinges the muscle tight.

Glasses sliding down his nose, fingers flexing on the filled-in notches of the doorframe. He pants, staring, always, at Pete on the floor.

A moment, of Pete not quite turning around, and Patrick staring, catching up ragged and hoarse. Knife’s edge. Pete waiting, suspended in his half of the dark, watching the sunshine burn in the strands of Patrick’s hair.

Pete’s grip on the box tightens. It bends back a bitten nail, the pain ricocheting down his wrist. The stained edges of his sleeves are covered in strings, and he slides his palm to block the top of the box, pressing it hard into the jut of his ribcage.

“Pete,” Patrick says, eventually, a wobble in its core that he straightens, holding himself up as tall as he can manage.

He glares, as he does backstage, in the back of the van, the familiar bite behind, “What the fuck is wrong with you? I’ve called you about a million times, and they all went straight to voicemail.”

A beat, and Pete’s legs shuffle under him, moving half an inch, at best. The dust is heavy in the air between them, and he blinks, the box deadweight, sinking down through skin and carpet and floor.

Inside the box, trembling with the brush of his bandage against sleeve, the knife and the pills taunt him. Pulling tighter the strings around him.

Patrick’s gaze flicks, a millisecond, at best, to the airport tags on Pete’s bass, the pile of vinyl with the shitty folk ones neatly resting at the very top. His fingertips tap once against the doorframe, and the edges of his scowl softens.

“Why haven’t you been answering your phone, Pete? I was worried, I didn’t know what was going on, and your parents didn’t pick up.”

The battery is still somewhere in the basement, where it had collided against something he didn’t care enough to know.

Patrick. His heart in his chest, the crooning memory of a radio not quite in focus.

There is a small, dead part of him that pushes at the back of his eyes, tracing over the sun in the blue of Patrick’s eyes, the new calluses on his fingertips peeking from a band-aid, and the dial tone inside of him chimes a reminder of the knife inside his box.

Patrick doesn’t wait to pass the threshold, stepping into sunbeams and over piles of things waiting somewhere in their periphery. He makes his way into the patch of dark Pete resides in, the sun clinging to him.

He sits in front of Pete, squeezing into the space between the bed and the wall, their knees knocking together.

Dusting off his jeans, Patrick wriggles his socked foot against Pete’s bare one, not noticing the dirt transfer to the white. It’s an electric shock, tensing where it touches, warm where Pete is cold.

He doesn’t pull away.

Someone must have told him, and they think that bringing in Patrick will soften the blow. They’re wrong, and they know it.

In reality. Pete looks down at the box in his lap. His back twinges, hunched over it, the poorly-healed bruises pressing purple against the wood. His stomach throbs, an irregular, angry kick of the drum.

The quiet is different.

Patrick’s breathing is soft, scratching against the side of Pete’s skull. He’s too close. He’s filling the empty space, and cracking against the cold, a stain against the white carpet.

In the quiet, Patrick hesitates. Shifts, never quite sitting still, and gently, always so gently, touches against Pete’s cheek.

It’s burning, gentle and overwhelming, far too much at once.

An instinct, Pete pulls away, recoiling until their feet detach, and the tears on Patrick’s thumb stain his jeans.

He knocks Patrick’s outstretched arm loose, folding the box tighter in his lap, knuckles discoloured. Patrick hovers for a moment before withdrawing.

Where Patrick touched, there’s only the lingering ghost of his fingertips that stings, rubbed raw from salt.

“Pete,” Patrick starts, and falters. Swallows, and his eyes burn, his own hands knotted tight in his own lap, not quite inching forward. Continues, a small, unnoticeable tremor in his voice, “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

The space between the wall and the bed is constricting around them, Patrick sat in the exit route. Pete shakes his head, and every single muscle goes still.

The pills had rattled inside the box. Loud. Too loud.

He dares to look up. Patrick is already looking at him.

Pete knows what Patrick looks like when he’s worried. The blood on the back of his throat scratches a long trail down to the pit of his stomach, the stones inside him.

“Pete. I’m worried about you.”

Cause. Effect.

Another flinch, one stifled at the last second. A smack in the face, right where his cheeks sting.

Before Pete can respond, Patrick continues, his hair falling into his eyes without his hat, crooked shoulders tilting downwards, bouncing one of his knees.

In a rush, as if Pete would interrupt. Maybe, in the Before, or in the hospital.

“I mean, you’ve been radio silent, Pete. You don’t answer your phone for days. I get here and you’re sat on your floor surrounded by all your stuff. And your parents won’t tell me anything,” Patrick rambles, and he won’t look at Pete, gaze skittering down the wall.

In the pause for breath, and a moment too late, Pete scrubs away the tears with the edge of his sleeve. His spare hand tightens around the box, that Patrick can never, ever see inside.

There was a reason that he didn’t want to see Patrick again, even if it hurt more than anything else he’d done. The part of him that’s crying, without him feeling much of it, begs him to reconsider, to remember his promise.

But. The box. The other promise.

Patrick knows him too well.

So. The scrape of bitten, broken nails against wood, and Patrick’s attention starts to shift, unsettled.

Pete cannot let that happen.

“I’m fine, Patrick,” Pete says, tilting his head up to meet Patrick’s eyes. His voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t break, doesn’t do anything.

He smiles, his lip splitting neat in two, blood frozen just at the tip of his tongue. “I was bored. Just organising things, my mom’s been nagging me to sort my shit out for years.”

A half shrug of his shoulders, impossibly heavy. A practised, casual shake of his head. It hurts, in a different way than it usually does.

Patrick watches, letting the space between them settle. He searches for something in Pete’s face, lines between his eyebrows pulled tight, and his hands gripping hard at his legs.

The smile starts to waver, and Pete licks his lip. He watches, back, the soft silhouette of the sunshine behind Patrick dipping him in gold. His weak, fragile heart quietly aching, the slight drum of his hands on the box.

Patrick decides something, and he almost nods. He hesitates, again, and carefully, always so carefully, outstretches his hand again.

Pete lets him wipe at his cheeks, his eyes slipping closed at the touch, if only just for a moment.

“Okay,” Patrick murmurs, quiet in the two of them. He doesn’t smile, and his grip on his legs doesn’t loosen.

He blinks, and breathes in, holds it, exhales soft and devastating, “You know you can talk to me, right? I don’t care if you’re low. You’re still my Pete. And I will always want to help, no matter what your brain is telling you.”

Patrick. Patrick, Patrick, leaning in while Pete’s still - his defeated, paper heart breaking into pieces in the empty hole of his chest - to hold Pete’s tear-stricken cheek in the gentle give of his palm. He swipes his thumb over the blotches, his eyes sad.

It’s the flaw in his defences, always. Pete squeezes his eyes tight, enough to see glow-in-the-dark stars supernova in the dark, his next breath coming out as half a sob.

His strings are unravelling, letting the bandages holding him together fall away. If only for now.

The coldest, most desperate core of him leans into Patrick’s hand.

He tries to fix it, shoving it all back into a box full of sharp things and old, worthless memories, just as Patrick starts to hum something under his breath, something to anchor him back to shore.

“I know, Patrick,” Pete whispers. He doesn’t let himself cry, he doesn’t.

Patrick shushes him, continuing to hum something nameless and comforting. He’s leaning in close, not quite daring to go near the box that Pete’s left deep scratches in, flaking the blood under his nails into glitter caught in the carpet.

“I was going to stay here tonight,” Patrick says, and his other arm comes up to Pete’s other side, rubbing warmth straight through layers of fabric and hidden bandage. “I even brought you that soup.”

Even with his eyes closed, his chest heaving, his cut strings a hangman’s noose, he can hear the smile in Patrick’s voice.

Patrick shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be anywhere near Pete.

Somehow, the box gets shoved back under the bed when Patrick isn’t looking, and Patrick wraps the blankets around both of them.

The blinds snap shut.

----

Things are unravelling.

A problem, one underlined in neat, fucking psychiatrist red, is that the doors don’t have locks. The windows do. Each floorboard creaks under his tiptoeing, corners widening out to take away any hiding spots.

The clouds are starting to move back in. In the wind, picking up strength, the outstretched fingers of tree branches tap hard, irregular, familiar, against the glass of his locked windows.

The seconds are running out, and the hourglass is smashed. Pete knows, he knows better than he knows anything else, that it’s only a matter of time before he gets caught. Again.

There is nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run, anymore. All the world screaming at him, his broken phone ringing off the hook, and it means nothing.

He leaves Patrick dozing, curled up cozy on the bed, glasses lopsided on the sidetable. In the in-between of being asleep and being awake, he rolls into the empty space Pete left, buries his face in the pillow, hands curling into the cold sheet.

With no-one, or maybe everyone, watching, Pete allows himself a small, simple thing.

Patrick was dreaming, his face twitching, every so often, just minutely enough that no one else would ever notice, and Pete watches. Lets his gaze drift along the planes of his face, the tired, worried expression he wears so often absent, making him look so much younger.

Patrick. Pete knots his hands in the ripped fabric of his pyjamas, aching with the lost, forgotten urge to touch.

Pete’s pockets rattle, weighed down by steel. It doesn’t wake Patrick when he leans down, just shy of falling back beside him, and gently, always, forever, presses his lips against Patrick’s forehead.

Each stair in the endless staircase splinters, cracks. His head flinches at each. Disjointed wants and guilt and adrenaline swirling like the rainbow of an oil slick - the swoop of his stomach before the show, realising the apple around his teeth is rotten to the core.

Last time, there was a note, there was a plan. The house is silent, the kitchen a still of a magazine, the cabinets painted over and the missing photos of the fridge erasing its familiarity.

Adrenaline is reopening the tender skin of his cheek. His hands tremble, useless, irrelevant twinges of electric pain coursing through the wires of his wrists, his arms, shoving open the drawers, slamming them shut hard enough to echo off the dull white.

The buzzing in the back of his head, different, now, with the bite of being found out, pressing hard against the back of his eyes, wrapping around his throat.

Car keys. Patrick cannot be here. Or. Pete cannot be here. Six and two threes.

The drawers are empty of what he wants, like the last time he’d checked. He slams the next one hard, rattling the pills in his pocket and the shined, pristine silverware within the drawer, and a growl rips through his clenched teeth.

Before he’d pulled away, he could have sworn he’d heard Patrick’s phone chime.

Pete stomps his way into the study, the living room. The rooms hold their breath, high ceilings and the shadows twisting in the setting sun, shivering behind chairs and empty space.

He tears away the quiet, catching on curtains and wobbling glass sculptures. His heart in his ears, breaking his ribs, and the mosquito whine of stopped clocks gnawing at the silence.

The bitter, furious beast that lurks under his skin and smiles ever since the hospital, baring its teeth at pity, the worried, exasperated suggestions, and the silence, pushes at the cracks in his mask.

There is no more time left. Pretending didn’t work, and now, his edges are starting to leak.

Pete lets out another growl, the knife-edge of a scream tearing open the wounds in his throat. The floorboards under his pacing, ripping open drawers, tearing books from bookcases, knocking over pictures of his younger, smiling self, don’t dare to creak.

Surrounded by debris. Garbage of another life, desperation tasting of salt and chump change, yanking hard, hard at his curled, unwashed hair until his scalp burns as much as his brain.

Almost a scream, this time. Pete stalks out, not looking back, and the rooms blur together, shrinking walls and dustless clutter, cowering windows and the laugh of the tree in the wind.

Of course, in his search, he’s breaking his mask, his perfect, cured persona that had emerged from the darkest parts of the night to repent all his sins. The one his parents wanted, the doctors. A neat trick.

The thought should have stung, should have dropped the first pebble that warns of a landslide, but he feels nothing.

Nothing but the pain, not quite enough of it, the weight in his pocket and the sure, bloody promise that he’s going to finish it.

His mouth is full of blood, and the pain is a vice around his skull, cracking open the soft, gooey yolk inside to scramble it.

At last. The bottommost cupboard of the laundry room. Spiderwebs in the forgotten back of the machine, the distant floral scent of detergent and his parents. Pete’s broken nails claw at the wood, through the first layer of paint.

A sharp, loud creak of floorboards and footsteps behind him, but he doesn’t hear it. Rooting through powders and bleach, belly against the ground, cold seeping into the bruises beneath. At last.

Pete withdraws his car keys. The keychain the paramedics snapped is nothing but a broken loop, clinking useless and sad against the other gaudy, overcompensating charms.

It burns right through his palm, the mark of Cain at last pulling through, a slow, sluggish memory of the last time he’d held the keys like this sliding into place a moment too late.

“Pete.”

Headlights, and the deer watching the truck about to collide. Pete cracks his neck around, curling his legs into half of a crouch, his keys immediately going to his chest. The cold sinks deeper through the skin, and his arms prickle.

Just outside the doorway, Patrick is awake. His eyes are wide behind his glasses, hair sleep-mussed and a crease on his cheek from the pillow. Behind him, the evidence of Pete’s destruction lies in ruins, reduced to shadowy prop pieces.

A hiss, in Pete’s chest, the dark, empty part of him repeating, over and over, that Patrick shouldn’t be here. That Patrick is interrupting, again, and the clock has already run dry.

The silence between them is unbearable, deadweight on the line of Pete’s spine, the soft, hesitant brush of Patrick’s tongue over his lips before he tries to speak, and fails.

“Pete. Please. What are you doing? What the hell is going on?” Patrick says, voice pitched. He crosses the threshold, stealing more of the precious, neglected space of the room, and doesn’t come closer.

It’s different with Patrick. The doctors, his parents, Pete knows what they want. It’s been years and years of practice, of weaving together the picture on the box rather than the puzzle itself.

But Patrick has caught him.

He’s staring, scared and worried in the way Pete hates, hates more than anything, and the way he’d tried to avoid in the first place.

The car keys burn a brand into his palm, the pot of hot water about to boil over, and Pete misfires. Caught in the syrupy-slow moment of the truck splitting the deer open, the image of Patrick stepping over pulled-out drawers, and the buzz of his phone.

It’s different with Patrick.

It hurts, with Patrick, but Pete has practice at ignoring that.

Patrick’s voice shakes. He knots his hands in the worn fabric of his jeans, and doesn’t step closer, “Pete. Please.”

In that eternity that follows, Pete blinks, slow, and tries to refocus. His hands haven’t stopped trembling. The knife, the pills, the strip of photos in his pockets tug at him, and the punch to the gut that is, always, Patrick.

But. If Pete doesn’t want to hurt Patrick, and he never, ever does, he needs to get him to leave.

Right now.

So. Pete fixes it.

He sits right on the tile, crossing his legs, keeping the keys in the cup of his palm. He raises up his chin, pushing away the insistent, screaming static in his head, to stretch his lips into an almost smile, blood lingering at the corners.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Pete says, rough, and it flatlines. Roadkill.

Patrick stares, and takes in a shaky breath, shoulders folded over. There’s a bottle of bleach discarded near his foot, and in the setting sun, he’s almost in shadow.

“Pete. What are you doing?” Patrick repeats, and one of his knuckles pops, a flinch he doesn’t stifle, but Pete does.

The purr of a car engine, idling, in the back of his mind, and Pete dips into the reserves of his energy to shrug, just the once, before forcing himself to his feet. He doesn’t look at Patrick, pressing the keychains between the cracks of his fingers.

For once, his usual retort wilts, and the bitter part of him seethes.

Patrick is blocking the door. But he scurries out of the way, silent in Pete’s shadow, coiled tension a spring at its last rung, thick and cloying in the shadow between them.

Pete’s mask is cracking, and Patrick will not love what’s behind it. Which is why he needs to leave, or let Pete leave, and why Pete needs to figure out what to say.

The script to follow, the buzzwords that people want to hear, that he never can figure out for Patrick.

“Wait. Pete, hold on.”

Half a moment of hesitation, old muscle memory. Pete presses the car keys in harder, and trips over empty space.

Patrick grabs at the back of Pete’s shirt, and even though Pete could rip away, continue walking somewhere, it’s an old, not quite forgotten instinct that makes him stop.

Patrick moves in front of him, the shapes of the living room out of focus, where neither of them fit in. He worries his bottom lip, just a touch.

The alarm bells aren’t ringing in Pete’s head as much as they are clanging, metal against the side of his fuzzy, blurry head, denting the sides.

But. It’s meaningless. It’s waking up in the hospital, and the tight cotton shackling him in place, and the grind of an animal under a wheel, splattering its insides.

In the dark, the twilight of Patrick’s eyes disappearing when he blinks, the dust trembling mid-air, Pete is falling apart, dirty gauze and hollow promises holding him together, right in front of the live audience.

“Pete, Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” Patrick’s shrill, his toes curling on the wooden floor, the flush of his cheeks nothing but bruises without the sunshine, rambling, “Are you okay?”

Car keys, pinching blood to the surface. Escape is behind Patrick’s back, and the knife twists in the vein of his thigh, the remaining adrenaline hissing deliciously tempting, ill-advised stunts that he’d played before, breaking straight through the bass drum of his heart.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

The options are running out, the locks sliding back into place.

So. Pete knows Patrick as well as Patrick knows him. All of his little tells, the twitch of his pinkie finger when he’s lying, how he looks when he’s scared and when Pete’s manic. When Pete’s stuck in the neon riptide and filling the empty hole inside of him with anything, everything.

So. Pete meets Patrick’s gaze, burning straight through. The weight of the knife against the photos, anchoring him to jagged, ship-sinking rocks.

His lips twitch, spasm, reopen, and half of a practised smile, twirling fragile around the blood in his teeth, the wounds of his throat, “Patrick. I thought of the perfect song.”

A beat, and the impact. The words don’t fit. They don’t make sense, they linger, wrong and off-script, and he knows it. It’s exactly what Pete is relying on.

The line of Patrick’s shoulders still, and he blinks once, twice, liquid. He furrows his brow, mouth opening, then closing.

“What?” Patrick says, eventually, almost inaudible. Almost, before he catches himself, taking a step forward in the gap between them.

A beat. Pete pushes past with no resistance, back where the ceilings skitter up and the cold is waiting in every step forward, tossing over his shoulder, “I gotta go to the studio right now.”

The lie comes easy. A professional gambler’s bluff, now, hurting in just the way that he remembers.

Pete makes it to the kitchen before Patrick’s footsteps race behind him, crinkling paper and glass under his heel, shattering the quiet that had just started to settle. The tree outside the window is silent, waiting, and the clock stopped.

“Pete, just – hold on, hang on – please.”

The buzz in the back of his head, insistent, and Pete doesn’t turn. Doesn’t stop.

His legs moving without him, sharp, needling knives between the rungs of his ribs, saying, almost slurred, a little too flat, “You know what it’s like. Don’t come. It’s going to be a surprise.”

A hand grabs the back of his shirt, hard. It twists into a knot, yanking with enough force to get Pete’s legs to stop, his knees to lock, balance wobbling just shy of slipping.

Patrick spins him around, nails biting with the force of it, his chest heaving, the window behind him rattling low.

At once, Pete tries to wrench himself free, his unoccupied hand pushing, pulling, feeling it burn through to bone. He had a plan, he needs Patrick to leave, he needs Patrick to be happy, and things are falling apart.

“Fuck – Pete!” Patrick lets go, and closes the distance, holding onto Pete’s arm just shy of digging his nails in, shouting loud and unbearable, “You just got in a car accident, fucking stop for a minute!”

In their struggle, Patrick squeezes hard around Pete’s wrists.

A hand folded, the cards spilling to the ground.

The pain, sinking its teeth into the traintracks of his stitches, is lightning hot. It rips each and every little secret open wide, a scream pressing against the back of his teeth, his knees buckling.

The bottle of pills rattles, loud, as the pain severs the nerves of his spine, toying with the wounds of his stomach, his throat, either blood or tears beading from the bone of his jaw.

Patrick’s grip immediately drops, and somewhere, far-away, Pete can hear the hitch in his breath, the creak of the floorboard in the half a step back he takes.

“What?” Patrick breathes, barely more than a whisper, and his soft voice wobbles. Breaks. Looking, slow, at Pete’s sleeves, pulled over palm, and his throat struggles over a lump, completely and utterly motionless.

Silence. The aftershocks of Pete’s trembling hands clinking the keys together, knives against glass, the slow settle of the pills.

This is the moment that’s been waiting for him.

It decides how the losing streak ends. Maybe with Patrick’s face, vulnerable, in the split-second of shock that he hasn’t hidden yet, turning nasty and ashamed, or the ring of dark in Pete’s eyes when he says something ugly and something that Patrick won’t forgive him for.

The clocks. The basement. The idling engine crooning of chords and desperation. Each of them race, faster and faster, blurring in the panic attack of Pete feeling, for the first time in days, too much, too fast.

Patrick, Patrick. A lamp in the other room, on a timer, of course, flicking on a gunshot, and the bright whine of the bulb withdrawing into silence.

At last, the car keys slip from Pete’s useless, uncoordinated grip, and splatter onto the floor.

His legs scream at him to run, his chest tight with the tidal wave of fear, animal, raw fear, all spelling out the same outcome, of Patrick finding out.

All the things he’d tried to ignore are clawing their way through stitch and skin, and snap every frayed nerve that might have let him move.

The silence wobbles, collapses, in the roar of Pete’s head, the soft, audible gasps Patrick makes to himself.

Patrick exhales short, staccato, blocking the exit with the curl of his back, and he drags an inch closer. He’s aged and young, drenched in the dark with Pete, hair still ruffled and gooseflesh peeking out of his short sleeves.

“What?” Patrick murmurs, the notes off-key, taken from a nightmare. He hesitates, and lifts to reach for Pete’s arm, hanging in mid-air before landing. He heaves, hard, “Why – Pete, what. Please”

A pause, of Patrick’s gaze lingering between Pete’s pulled sleeves, and he shakes his head, hard, clutching at his forehead, the collar of the soft shirt that used to be Pete’s. He wobbles between stepping forward and stepping back.

Pete can only taste blood, the hollow, empty part of him overflowing with it, carving deeper, flinching with the small, desperate sound Patrick doesn’t quite stifle.

“You promised. Pete, you promised,” Patrick whispers, barely able to get the words out. When he looks up, tears glisten in his eyes, catching in the dark, his touch finally feather-light on Pete’s upper arm.

A beat, and the impact. A slap, stripped away lies and the rotten, gnarled core. The photos in Pete’s pocket press in against him, heavier than the knife and the pills combined.

The sweet, soft memories dirtying and corrupting in the bitter, desperate beast under Pete’s skin, the tears glistening on Patrick’s cheeks.

He’s reminded, then, of his last promise, and the one before that, and the previous one. They’re wilted daisy chains, meaningless wishes made on dandelion seeds or eyelashes.

Pete reacts a second too late and pulls his arm back from Patrick’s grip, looking away as Patrick’s expression cracks. He aches, and squeezes his nails hard into the imprint of the keys.

If there is anything Pete knows, anything at all, it’s that he has one chance left to not break Patrick’s heart, in the way he’s always been afraid of. He tries, then, to fix it, one last time before he fixes it for good, in an act of selfishness or selflessness.

“I’m. I’m fine, Patrick,” Pete rasps, the cold path of each word stuck on his tongue, the bleeding mess of the tender part of his cheek. His voice breaks, into something unrecognisable, “It’s just. The accident.”

Silence. Pete holding his breath, catching in the thorns inside his lungs, and crossing his fingers, holding onto a loose knot.

Patrick was never any good at hiding his emotions. But. A pause, chewing the string from Pete’s lie, the slow, deliberate drag of his gaze up to Pete’s face, his own blank.

A clean slate.

Patrick pulls in a breath, drawing up his shoulders, hardening, dark blown in the white of his eyes, and a tear slips from an eyelash, without him seeming to notice.

“The accident.” Patrick repeats, quiet, controlled through clenched teeth, and another one of his knuckles pop, making Pete flinch, even as he continues, low, “The – the accident. Right.”

The bluff wavers, and Pete’s car keys at his feet, right between the middle of them, catch the first dregs of the moon behind Patrick’s back. The spotlight is starting to burn, caught red-handed, the sleeves already starting to stain, and Pete wets the blood of his lips.

“No one would tell me anything,” Patrick says, and moves, just a little, to stand in front of the straight line to the door, pushing his glasses up his nose, scraping nail against plastic, “And. And I just thought – I assumed. Things weren’t adding up, but I thought -.”

Patrick scrubs hard at his cheek, rougher than he would have for anyone else, and he knows, he knows. He spots Pete’s feet shifting, the slow, deliberate tilt of his head that interviewers always believe, and at once, he’s crossing the boundary between them.

“Don’t. Pete. Please,” Patrick grabs Pete’s arms, careful of his wrists, and his fingers are vices, burning molten to the bone. His tears are dripping from his chin, and he holds tighter when Pete recoils at his touch, saying rough and rushed, “Don’t lie to me, I hate when you lie to me. Tell me, please, what’s going on.”

Patrick. It’s all Pete can see, feel, the pain screaming in his head, in his torn stitches and unsewed seams. Everything is gone, his mask, his band, and now, Patrick, not letting him run away, not letting him give the love of his life, always, a happier life free of him.

He shakes his head, hard, blurred furniture and cracked china, and Patrick makes a pained, desperate sound in his throat, pushing in closer. They’re almost chest to chest, Patrick a softer and more dangerous restraint than anything the hospital could offer.

“Pete. Please, please, just tell me the truth,” Patrick’s voice breaks into something resembling a sob, a knife in Pete’s heart, a trembling hand quietly wiping liquid from Pete’s cheek.

The game is over.

Pete swallows, rocks tied to his throat, and Patrick is warm, breathing shaky and holding onto him tight. He adds it to the memories he has kept close and kept well-loved, to hold onto when his house of cards folds, and Patrick grows cold.

“Patrick,” Pete says, and hesitates. He can’t fix it anymore, and Patrick withdraws just enough for him to see the tears, the soft, worried look in his eye, the unconscious swipe of his thumb on Pete’s cheek.

He thinks, then, of exhaust fumes and empty pill bottles, and he closes his eyes when he whispers, far-away and tired, “I tried to die, Patrick. And it didn’t work.”

Pete feels, more than sees, Patrick’s next breath stutter against his own skin, and the empty, hollow part of him congratulates itself. Patrick’s small, choked gasps, his grip tightening to bruises, and the air thickening to concrete, setting between them.

All of them are reminders that Pete has destroyed something precious, and it’s his own fault that he can’t have it.

The buzz behind his eyes has quieted. Patrick knows, now, and Pete’s opening his eyes, slow, to Patrick crying, and crying.

“You told me it was an accident,” Patrick murmurs, fraying, cracking like glass, his hands keeping Pete in place, cheeks splotched with shadow. His fingers almost rip through the sleeves of Pete’s arms, “You told me. It was an – an accident!”

Numb, blood on his tongue, his teeth, and Pete doesn’t have enough in him to shrug. An old, pushed-away urge to wipe Patrick’s tears burns at his feet, next to the keys. He hurts, the pain the only feeling pushing through.

“Patrick,” Pete says, and stops, savouring each syllable. He swallows, and doesn’t feel another tear fall, admitting, finally, quiet enough that only Patrick would ever hear, “I lied.”

In the split-second of loosened grip, Pete drags himself out of the circle of Patrick’s arms, and folds his own, colder ones around himself, squeezing tight, stitches against bone, and waits.

There is no more mask, no more empty promises to hide behind, just the ugly, broken pieces of Pete, laid out and exposed, for Patrick’s verdict. He still has the photos, and his memories, just in case, his soft heart weeping over the truth staining the tip of his tongue.

“Oh, Pete.”

Patrick barrels into him, and Pete’s knees buckle, held up only by Patrick’s arms wrapping around him, pulling him tight. It knocks the breath out of both of them.

“Pete,” Patrick tucks his face, wet, tear-stained, into the crook of Pete’s neck, and breathes in, deep. One of his hands travels up to the nape of Pete’s hair, while the other crushes him tight.

A steady tremble works its way up his spine, to his voice, “You lied to me, you – I. Please don’t. Please don’t leave me. Don’t, Pete, please.”

Pete wobbles, and cracks. Patrick’s tears are slick on his skin, staining his collar, and he aches. There are a thousand promises he could say, to get Patrick to stop crying, to get him to leave, to get him to not quite forget but not bring up either.

But none of them would work.

Pete doesn’t deserve it, but Patrick makes a small, vulnerable noise into his skin, when he places his own arms around Patrick’s back, loose enough to break. There’s no doubt that Patrick knows what’s in Pete’s pockets, but both of them ignore it.

The time doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Pete leans his head against Patrick’s, and buries his tears into his hair.

Eventually, Patrick pulls away, keeping Pete close, but enough for his eyes to flick over Pete’s face, searching, ink of blood in the dark caught in his lips. He exhales, shaky, and flexes his fingers on Pete’s shoulders.

“Please tell me.” Patrick asks, thick. He hasn’t pulled away yet. And he waits, just in the beginning of the moonlight, thumbs in Pete’s collarbones, tears still on his face.

A moment of hesitation, and Pete considers, reaching for the old lies, but comes up empty-handed. He hesitates, again, and lets his hands stay on Patrick’s waist. Shakes his head, and drops his gaze.

“Please, Pete.” Patrick’s breathing chokes, and he squeezes tight, “I’m not leaving. I’m not. I. I know what you’re thinking.”

Another twist of the knife. Pete shakes his head, just a little, while Patrick waits him out.

“I’m tired. I’m so tired,” Pete breathes, barely anything at all, and it’s a weight in his stomach, the water in his chest, to finally admit. He keeps his gaze on the floor, where the floorboards are still, whispering, “I can’t. Anymore.”

“No,” Patrick responds immediately, spitting it through his teeth, and gently raising Pete’s chin, to force him to meet his gaze.

He keeps his hand there, and his expression is hard, vulnerable, shaking the hair out of his eyes, “Pete. Listen to me. Please. You’re not going to - going to do that again.”

Pete’s breath catches, and dies. Plenty of people had said that, plenty of well-intentioned, disappointed people, plenty of people that he bristled and hissed at, keeping his own private promise, but it’s different.

Patrick means it.

“Pete,” Patrick lets go of Pete’s chin, and wipes away a stray tear, his own unnoticed. He takes a step closer, pushing the keys out of the way, letting them skitter and hit something fragile neither of them care to check.

“You.” Patrick squeezes his eyes shut, a tear escaping in the crease, and when he reopens them, his eyelashes are clumped, his lips trembling. His grip unmoving, and voice thick, “You lied to me. Why. W-Why didn’t you tell me?”

Pete’s throat constricts, muscle memory of tubes shoved down them, concrete solidifying the inside. He shakes his head, muscle memory of the Before, and Patrick doesn’t move. It was never about hurting Patrick, it was never meant to, but it’s too late.

It’s too late. Patrick isn’t moving away.

So, Pete unburies the truth. The deepest, darkest secret that had plagued him in the planning, the preparation, the tying of the last knots and the dotting of every letter, the weight of it a dead albatross around his neck.

Pete looks at Patrick, and says, simple and desperate and everything else at once, “Because I love you.”

The impact, razor sharp. Patrick winces, and pain blooms across his face, exposed and easy to see. He trembles, hard, right down to bone, gasping hard enough to hurt.

It’s another bitter, hollow victory for Pete.

Patrick’s breathing hitches, then catches. He pulls Pete back into him, pulling their edges together, blurring, in the dark, where they begin and end, holding tight enough to stop Pete slipping away.

“I would never be happier if you were dead,” Patrick says, into the soft skin of Pete’s neck, pushing, gently, carefully, Pete’s face into the crook of his own.

Pete’s world narrows down to Patrick. The warmth of his skin, the smell of sleep still on his stolen shirt. His heart, beating hard and worried, against Pete’s.

The sudden flood of emotion Pete feels, a splinter in a dam threatening to burst, is drowning, tide pulling his arms tighter around Patrick just to hold on.

For a long moment, the two of them breathe, unsteady, shaky, hiding their faces in each other, and none of the world seeing them. Patrick holds Pete close, his tears warm, and Pete holding him back, unable to stop himself anymore.

And Patrick murmurs, a secret between them, his sideburns rough and familiar against Pete’s skin.

“Because I love you. So much. Nothing will ever, ever change that.”

The slap, and Pete breaks.

The tears start coming, and don’t stop. When the shaking starts, hard, Patrick doesn’t say anything. He swipes a hand over Pete’s back, long, deep strokes, from base to neck.

When Pete’s knees give out, Patrick doesn’t hesitate to take his weight, holding them both up, keeping them from crumbling.

Pete clings to him, shoving his face further into the hiding spot of Patrick’s neck, as the sobs come and come, waves crashing over him.

Patrick’s arms are a pressure keeping him together, the steady sound of his breathing, his pulse, an anchor, refusing to pull away or flinch even as Pete’s cries become louder, desperate, pathetic.

Patrick, Patrick. Not quite stifling his own cries, hiding them in Pete’s neck, and not letting Pete pull away, even when he tries, every so often, to wrench himself away from Patrick’s warm embrace.

Pete doesn’t deserve it, but he wants it, and he hurts, splitting open with everything he’d ignored. Patrick holds him.

After a while, Patrick starts to hum, something soft and gentle underneath Pete’s sobbing, and sings sweet, broken little words into Pete’s hair, running gently in the curls, always.

Slowly, the tremors start to soften, and Pete holds tighter to Patrick, not wanting to let go, not wanting Patrick to pull away.

He wipes his eyes on the wet fabric of Patrick’s shoulder, hearing their clothes crinkle together, their feet silent as they step closer on the floor, bones aching from the strain.

A hand in his unwashed, greasy hair, as if it were spun gold.

Patrick’s saying soft and shaky, not loosening his grip, cutting through the drum of his heart, the static of the world trying to rush in, “Hey.”

Pete doesn’t raise his head, and makes a noise in the back of his torn, rough throat. His nails had picked a few threads loose from Patrick’s shirt, and he digs into the holes, seeking the skin underneath.

There is a bitter, angry thing telling him to pull away, to think of Patrick’s tears, the expression on his face that so clearly showed the moment his heart broke. But Pete squeezes tighter, his raw, broken pieces shifting sharp against each other, trying, through Patrick trembling, to hold them together.

“Pete. Can I have the pills from your pocket? Please?”

The words don’t even register, before Pete’s nodding, slow and hollowed out. Patrick’s hand sneaks into his pocket, faltering around the knife, the pills, before pulling them free.

The weight of their absence is a chain around Pete’s leg, neither relief nor guilt.

The photos fall out of Pete’s pocket, and Pete comes to.

Patrick doesn’t let him go, but he lets him reach down to pick them up. In the dark, the blurry, smudged nighttime pressing against glass, the moonlight traces over the photos, and Patrick gently takes them from him.

A small, sad smile breaks through the tears still on his cheeks.

“Look,” Patrick says, quiet, soft, his voice sweet and cutting through everything. He tilts the photos, so Pete can see too, even though he has them memorised, “We’re going to go back to the mall and make new ones. I promise.”

A promise. It’s different.

Patrick means it. Pete wants to believe him. He really does.

“Okay,” Patrick presses their foreheads together, and takes in a breath Pete can feel, deep, once, twice, saying, quieter, to himself, “Okay.”

“Let’s finish our nap.” Patrick murmurs, and his liquid, wide eyes are full of nothing but love, which Pete doesn’t look away from. “Then we can clean up. And. We can talk, Pete. Please.”

It’s late. Pete’s adrenaline is nothing but a fondly remembered daydream now, and he doesn’t have the energy to fight back. The game is already over, and he’s tired, so tired.

Patrick is looking at him, defenceless and open and tired too, loosening the locks inside Pete’s heart.

“Patrick,” Pete says, his voice broken, cracked, dragged through his throat, the confession another rock tied to his waist, the waves outstretched and waiting, murmuring ugly and honest, “I want to die.”

At last, the final lie, laid bare, and Patrick tenses, every single muscle going rigid. His heartbeat pushes against Pete’s, through chest and flesh. Fresh pain bruises across his face, down the tear-slick planes of his neck.

He sucks in a breath, deciding, something, and readjusts his hold on Pete, keeping them close.

“That’s too bad. I want you to live,” Patrick replies, weak and stubborn, a firm line of his jaw, in the sand.

He traces his hands down Pete’s arm, careful to be light on his wrists, until he can tangle their fingers together.

He doesn’t care or notice that Pete’s barely respond, frozen and not quite thawed.

A tug, and Pete’s numb, empty body is gently moved from its spot. Patrick squeezes their hands once, twice, a rhythm made backstage spelling out love, and promises, and a million other things they don’t name.

“Come on, sweet thing,” Patrick says, wobbling, still. He pulls Pete back beside him, stepping over car keys and broken vases, glancing, every so often, out of the corner of his eye.

A pause, of Patrick slipping on ripped pieces of paper, almost losing his balance, his grip. Pete’s fingers tighten, enough.

Patrick pushes back the strands of hair stuck to his face, shoulders folded over, and looks up at Pete, waiting in place, his bottom lip bitten raw.

He presses a kiss, chapped and dry, to the back of Pete’s hand, and promises, broken and teary-eyed, vulnerable in the way that means he truly believes it, “You’re. You’re not going to do it again, Pete, you’re not.”

A flinch, too late to be visible, and Pete doesn’t move, caught in the snare.

Patrick swallows, working over the words in his throat, and says, small and fragile, a secret just for Pete, “I want you to live.”

It washes over Pete, teasing, toying, in the way that twists. Promises made on cigarette butts mistaken as shooting stars, wishes on weeds blown into the drain. He wants to believe him. He really does.

Patrick doesn’t wait for him to agree, turning to toe a piece of paper out of their path.

Pete lets Patrick lead him through the debris, the broken pieces of his home, splintering, shaking. There is a before and an after, the scales tipped, the house always winning, yet Patrick touches him like it’s Before, like nothing has changed.

In the near distance, close enough to feel each note and each waver, Patrick hums something soft and sweet. The melody is familiar, lingering at Pete’s fingertips, his feet shuffling forward no matter how hard he tries to move them, blinking, and the world pulling on the thread of Patrick’s voice.

It hurts.

Pete doesn’t register the change to carpet under his torn, bleeding feet. The fallen-over pile of his memories in the corner, the sharp intake of breath at Patrick tripping over something wooden and hard.

Something else falling, and Patrick stutters, swears, pitched at the very end before he can steady out his breathing.

It’s choppy, interrupted by a hitch in breath, syllables not meant for either of them, but Patrick continues to hum, never letting go of their hands, and Pete aches.

The old familiar blankets are pulled over their heads, Patrick’s nails caught in the loose threads.

Patrick knocks their knees together, no space left between them, and breathing the same air.

The warmth of Patrick clinging onto him, pressing his cheek on Pete’s chest, right above his heart, slinking under his skin. This close, his humming is a steady bassline, a ripple of the water settling.

The world compacts, withdraws.

Pete exhales, rough, sticky, congealed blood lining his throat. Thorns torn into flesh.

His bedroom is silent, the moonlight peering in through undrawn blinds. Patrick holding him tight against worn blankets and loose threads, keeping him from spilling out the sides.

Shame isn’t strong enough for Pete to feel, the animal in the corner keening as it faces down the barrel, no longer full of teeth and claws.

Slowly, he throws his arm around Patrick’s side, and doesn’t pull away when Patrick snuggles in closer.

A lullaby, of Patrick’s voice, a kiss pressed into the fabric above his heart, and Pete doesn’t have the energy to pull away from the warmth it leaves behind.

“It’s okay,” Patrick whispers, in their world alone, memory outlining the planes of his face, the path of his free hand trembling nonsensical shapes into the exposed skin of Pete’s shoulder. “I’m here.”

Pete’s eyelids are heavy, the empty, hollow dark waiting with outstretched hands, and Patrick’s humming turning into words, some of his most heartbreaking, sung sweet.

Pete falls asleep, thinking of car engines and real, sunshine smiles.

----

Patrick didn’t agree. At first.

He had the keys. The car keys, somewhere. The one to the back door, the front door, all the doors, while Pete’s pockets were empty.

He’d also had a handwritten note. Scratched out. The strip of photographs of the two of them, resting on a framed picture covered in dust. Crossed out.

Patrick hadn’t slept.

Things were twisted, frayed extra thin where the knots had pulled loose. Funhouse mirrors with no exit, and the glass two-sided. Patrick watching, and the silence of Pete’s head.

No more static, and the flytraps wrung clean. Finally put down for good.

So. Before Patrick could spit out the thoughts that burned in every hesitant touch he withdrew, before he’d lifted his weighed-down head from the pillow, Pete had asked, his voice lost.

So. Patrick didn’t agree, but Pete didn’t respond. His body was on autopilot, strings cut and limbs heavy, going through the motions of ripping away the blankets, and heading halfway down the stairs before Patrick could catch up.

When Pete catches up to the present moment, Patrick is rummaging for his keys by the back door. Muttering something, lost to the impact of Pete’s forehead against the door, and the distant, familiar sound of metal against metal.

Pete’s bare toes brush against the cold of the glass, chilled by the frost caught in the cracked sill. Outside, the sky is dark, the stars still sleeping in grey, the tree gently swaying its branches to the wind's beat.

This close, Pete can almost see his own reflection, in the wood of the trunk. The cold seeps in, whispering, and his stomach chews on itself. He doesn’t look behind him, he doesn’t. He can already feel the eyes on him.

“Finally,” Patrick says, after an eternity. His own set of keys are worn with use, keychains tangling in each other, the point of a knife against the rim of a glass, quiet under, “I don’t understand why you want to go outside so bad, but here.”

A heartbeat of hesitation, long enough for Pete’s gaze to waver, from the sky, the tree, the swirling clouds, to Patrick, thumb over the grooves of the key, his teeth back on his bottom lip.

He wouldn’t have hesitated, if he hadn’t known.

It wasn’t like Pete was fully, deeply asleep, when Patrick had continued crying, had emptied the little wooden box full of secrets, paced a line into pristine carpet and leaned over Pete’s side, just to check, more than once.

There are no more tears from either of them about it.

Pete fishes, in the murky depths, for something to say, and finds nothing. He swallows, leaning back a millimetre to hit his head against the glass, the cold a balm.

“Patrick,” Pete doesn’t turn around, soft and fragile and not quite put back together, even as he feels Patrick flinch. Another swallow, over his ruined throat, and he doesn’t quite beg, “Please.”

Skin against glass, frost seeping through. There are no keys for Pete. Only locks.

A shift of Patrick’s feet, one to the other, on the floorboard. Pete presses his knuckles, bitten, raw, into the cold, flattening out his palm over the outline of the grass, the fence.

“Um. You’re not planning to, uh, y’know,” Patrick exhales, stutters, moving a millimetre closer, keys tight in the curl of his palm. He waves a hand in mid-air to finish his sentence, slicing through it, and drops it.

A recognisable, biting worry failing to hide itself, piercing and unfamiliar in Patrick’s voice.

Pete recoils, just enough for Patrick to notice. His nails scrape along the glass, the rest of him still. Keeping his face turned away, his breath rattling in his chest, on its edges.

Patrick wraps a free arm around himself, looking, and nods, shakes his head. Clears his worn, weary throat, a little, and says, “Okay. Sorry. Okay, let’s go outside”

Crossing the distance, Patrick slots the key into the lock on the second attempt, and it clicks free. He tugs open the door, and the outside wastes no time in rushing in.

The night air is freezing. It slips into the gaps in his clothes, raising gooseflesh beneath bandages and icing the bruises it touches. The wind rustles the papers left forgotten on the floor behind them.

Patrick isn’t fully out of the way when Pete leaves through the open door, his legs trembling to support him, breathing in, for the first time in the After, the air outside.

Finally, finally. He wouldn’t be able to climb the fence, but he was free.

The backyard is empty in its sleep, memory filling in the gaps that the moonlight doesn’t reach, misremembered indents of play slides and barbeques where only grass remains.

“Wait, Pete!”

Grass between his toes. The slight tickle of the strands against his ankle, the cold a harsh Chicago winter’s kiss. Pete dips his head up towards the sky, the patches between the branches, and aches, and aches.

The sky is the same. The stars are the same.

They don’t care what happens beneath them, and Pete is nothing. No one.

He’s made wishes on every single star still in the sky. Sometimes twice, three times for luck. He doesn’t remember most of them.

The world is cold. Empty. The moon brushes gently over Pete’s face, as he breathes. In. Out.

Pete wants to die.

It would be so easy, the easiest thing in the world. Even now that Patrick knows, even though Patrick has defied his expectations by staying.

He’s done it before. In the tree, in the parking lot, hundreds of times he doesn’t remember, blood on his tongue and the crying, desperate thing inside him rattling the bars of its cage.

“Pete, fuck, where did you go – “

But.

The bark of the tree is rough on his back, scraping a layer of skin as he slides down, down to the crook where the roots hold him in the dirt and the leaves. Frost is dewy light on the sticks, the silent grass holding its breath.

The tree is older than it was. A few more of its roots are rippling under the surface, its bark harder, wearied and hardened from where a rushed, frantic attempt to climb it had once ripped it bare.

It curls over Pete at its base, branches clicking a rhythm that’s off-beat, solid against his spine, breathing with every gust of wind.

Patrick’s footsteps draw closer, harder. He rounds the corner of the tree, at last, interrupting.

“Pete,” Patrick says, and stops. He catches his breath, hands on his knees, for a millisecond, quick in the closing of the distance between them, and sharp, “Don’t fucking do that, don’t run like that, I thought. You.”

Half of another word, and Patrick’s voice trails away. The cold inside, now, of Pete, where maybe once he would have bitten back.

In. Out. A routine that drags him forward, one he wouldn’t move without. On the ground, the sky swirls on forever, past the house, past the fence. The branches can’t reach, and Pete’s fingers dig into dirt.

He tips his head back, not looking at Patrick. Not looking, but knowing, the look on his face, the answering pain of his own. The stars glitter, low, in the grey.

Pete is hollowed out, stripped clean. Nothing left, not even the secrets rotten on the inside.

He’s waiting. For the leather bracelets around his wrists, chalk on his tongue, the shrill drone of fluorescent hospital lighting. For the shift in Patrick’s attention, maybe.

Maybe.

Instead, Patrick finishes hesitating, catches his next step on a root rippling around its base. He retraces Pete’s steps, and half-collapses, half-sits, threads pulled free in the bark, knees knocking into Pete’s.

Patrick is cold beside him, just shy of trembling.

Without their layers, their breath is visible, ever so slightly, in the air. Patrick is a steady line against Pete’s side, and when he pauses, he reaches over, and takes Pete’s hand.

A lump in Pete’s throat, an old bruise pressed hard, and their hands pulled into Patrick’s lap, where his other hand rubs pins and needles. He doesn’t look.

The world is quiet. Just the wind, weaving through each strand of grass, the frost shining silent in the moonlight. And Patrick breathing, quiet, regular, a rhythm Pete has memorised.

In the nighttime, where no one can see them, nothing else exists. There is no manager. No torn pieces of paper. No empty plastic bottles and no locks on the escape window.

There is the tree, firm against his back. There is Patrick, somehow. Scared, not quite understanding but not quite knowing what to say, either.

Pete breathes. In. Out. His bones are heavy, his fingers covered in dirt that Patrick doesn’t bring up.

Nothing left to hide from.

The cold is starting to numb, when Patrick breaks it, weak and unsteady but continuing, soft, “Pete. Can you, just. Can you please promise me something?”

The wind takes away the hitch in the words, in the quiet that follows, sweeping them into the sky. It’s an old instinct, one Pete could never ignore, to turn, and look.

At Patrick holding their hands close to his stomach, gently, ever so gently, the cold rattling the bones of his shoulders. Small against the width of the trunk, in Pete’s old clothes.

Another press of the bruise, a splinter of a stick just shy of breaking skin. Pete waits, and doesn’t look away, even when Patrick hesitates, and he knows the shape of what wasn’t said.

“Pete,” Patrick savours each syllable. Swallows it. Eyes dark, the stars in them, whispering in the shelter of the tree from the cold, “Promise me. Just tonight. Please. Just stay.”

The impact, of the cold squeezing in Pete’s chest, wringing itself through bone and heart. A promise, pinkie-sworn, covered in blood and dirt, the tear-stained blotches of Patrick’s cheeks, and the broken promises before it already forgotten.

Pete knows promises, and wishes, and the teeth hope can have. The promises he’d said in the hospital and the ones to the psychiatrist.

But.

This one is different.

Patrick is waiting for him, watching. Squeezes their hands at the small noise Pete lets slip, and doesn’t point it out.

Patrick. Always. Even when Pete breaks his heart, and drags him into the cold, and hurts him, and hurts him.

The quiet settles, the soft plants reach for his bare ankle, the outside stays bitter and freezing, and the stars stretch out of cloud. Pete drags in a breath, feeling it catch.

He wants to die.

He doesn’t have to die tonight.

So. Pete gathers all that he has. He squeezes Patrick’s hand back, smudging dirt on Patrick’s fingers, and nods. Just the once, the click of his neck inaudible.

A heartbeat, shared. Patrick blinks, still, traced in moonlight.

A small, broken smile, not quite what it used to be, splitting his bottom lip. He leans further into Pete, pressing his forehead against his shoulder, a moment of pressure before he moves.

“I love you,” Patrick murmurs, a secret, a promise, just for the two of them. He doesn’t look away.

A cold, broken hallelujah. Pete keeps it close, before the wind or anything else can have it.

The impact, of Pete aching, in his fragile heart, and a ghost of a smile too weak to appear.

His voice is far-away, silent, for once, with nothing left to say.

He smooths down the mess of Patrick’s hair, and lets himself press his lips against the side of Patrick’s head, the shape of three words hidden from the rest of the world.

It should be everything falling apart, collapsing, trickling between the gaps in his fingers from holding on too tight.

But.

The sky will be the same. The stars will be the same. They will still be there, tomorrow. Patrick will still be there, tomorrow.

The urge will still be there, tomorrow, but it’s not tomorrow yet.

“I’m freezing,” Patrick says, quiet, eventually. He rubs along Pete’s upper arm with his free hand, rather than his short-sleeved own. He shakes his head, “Come on. We can – we can watch the sunrise after we get some coats. Please.”

Patrick.

Pete drags himself to his feet, leaning a hand on the tree for support, while keeping his other in Patrick’s. The cold makes itself known, ice in his veins, the frost held back only by roots.

He dips his head back up towards the sky, letting the moon touch, the stars to blink their indifference.

Pete breathes. In. Out.

By his side, Patrick waits. He doesn’t hesitate to press a kiss to Pete’s frozen cheek, warm and familiar and aching.

The sunrise, waiting for them.

Patrick trips over a stick, and Pete almost laughs. Flustered, Patrick huffs a laugh for the both of them, warm in the squeeze of Pete’s hand.

The door clicks shut behind them.