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Flux essentially lives with a ghost.
Most of his days, he sits on the patio of the house he had bought with Saparata a few years back, watching cars pass past the grassy expanse of their front yard. He counts the number of colored cars, and more often than not — thanks to the teeny-tiny, pretty little town they’ve situated themselves in — it never exceeds a handful.
It’s a mundane process, mind-numbingly so. But he has nothing better to do, if not nurse the cigarette in between his fingers. It stops his thoughts from spiraling; from missing the very man he lives with.
Red pick-up. Blue sedan. Yellow cab — this one makes him miss him a little less, because he definitely would get punched for it.
Or at least, he tries to convince himself that.
Sometimes, there are no vehicles other than the typical beat-up white trucks at all for stretches so long that the world feels abandoned, swallowed by the thick summer heat humming over the pavement. The cicadas fill the silence where conversation used to be. Wind chimes clink lazily somewhere beneath the porch roof, off-rhythm and hollow.
He plucks at the blades at his feet, ignoring the nagging voice in the back of his head — “Hey! That’ll leave a dead patch!” — that is notably physically absent at the moment. On better days — ones that he hasn’t seen in far too long — he’d be watching his lover tending to the lawn, while he himself was preoccupied with a book.
“Watch this—!” Saparata would chirp, jumping on a shovel as he dug out a dead patch of grass.
Flux would look up, eyes narrowed, hand traveling to rub at his temples. He’d seen Saps get hit in the face with a shovel one too many times.
All he could do was bid, “Be careful,” because he knew nothing about gardening.
On even better days, they’d be sitting on the porch together, exchanging sweet nothings, feeling the wind, and allowing the time to pass by. No consequences, nothing to do, nobody waiting on them.
But they hadn’t had a good day in a hot moment.
Now, Flux can only sit alone as dusk simmers in — in the company of a thin, dying gentleman of smoke and an ash-keeping vigil. Sitting right where Saps had popped the question. Right where they’d mapped out the rest of their lives together.
The cigarette burns unevenly. Ash gathers at the tip until gravity finally wins, scattering gray flakes over his jeans and the porch steps. He doesn’t bother brushing them off. The smell has seeped permanently into the wood now; into the sleeves of his sweaters, of which Saparata used to complain about because he’d smell like a dive bar while they cuddle. That didn’t matter so much to him now, for reasons that pained him to accept.
We’re not okay, comes from the voice in his head. It’s more of a concession than an observation. He knows they aren’t; he has known they aren’t. But it’s been easy to chalk it up to their own commitments. They work at the same place. They check each other’s paperworks. They both know that the other is equally busy.
But as summer rolls around, the workload starts to shrink down, and there’s nothing to distract them from their disagreements.
It started with fights that quite literally bounced off the walls, shaking the framed, professionally-shot portraits they had. Saps had nagged him to get them, for keeps. Flux grew to love them, until he grew to hate them. They only served to remind him that there were better times he could be having.
“Let’s just talk about this,” Saps tried soothing him during one of their spats, arms wrapping around Flux’s back.
Flux squirmed, thrashed — anything to get Saps off him. He was pissed. Frustrated. An ugly, ugly amalgamation of anger and sadness and tiredness. The last thing he wanted to feel was a pair of arms around him.
Unfortunately for him, Saps naturally overpowered him, tightening his hold. Flux didn’t know when the tears started coming. His throat was raw from screaming.
“Get the fuck off me—” Flux sobbed. “Stop! Saps—”
Saps just shushed him, his grip never loosening, a hand fixed at the back of Flux’s head. He just waited for Flux’s fight to run out, but it didn’t. He whispers sweet nothings that Flux did not want to hear whatsoever. “I love you.” “We’ll get through this.” “We’ll get better.”
“Fucking asshole!” Flux finally finds his voice, finally breaks free, ricocheting into the wall behind him. His body slammed right on one of the framed portraits. He barely had the strength to keep himself from breaking straight through the drywall. The picture frame cracks.
Saps’ jaw hangs agape. He instinctually reaches out, out of concern — as if he’s ready to cradle Flux and kiss it all better. But Flux just sees red.
In his choked-up, teary-eyed rage, he rips the portrait off the wall, pays no mind to the ripped paint that followed, and without missing a beat, hurls it at Saps, full-force.
It lands square in his chest, slipping past his hands and shattering on the ground.
Only then does the hope and compassion in his eyes die.
He stares numbly at the shards — the photo of him and Flux together. His own cheesy grin and Flux’s pursed-lip smile. His arm around Flux’s waist, and Flux’s reluctant hold around his neck.
Flux is looking at it too, guilt and shame creeping up his spine from the pits of his stomach, settling in his chest cavity.
“Saps—”
Saparata looks at him, expression unreadable, and turns around, disappearing into the hallway.
It takes one, two, three steps down, and then Flux hears their bedroom door slamming shut.
He slept on the couch that night.
He can hardly even remember what they used to fight about so often.
Lately, the screaming matches have turned into petty, upfront back-and-forths. Insults soaked in venom and points sharpened to hurt in all the worst ways. And then that turned into ignoring each other, if not to harshly brush shoulders when they cross paths in their shared home.
And even that dissipated into pure, ironclad silence.
He barely knows Saparata nowadays. They’ve been going through the motions of living together, without really living together. And only lately had Flux realized their schedules do not align as well as he thought they did. Or maybe they unanimously stopped trying to make it work.
Eventually, Flux takes reign of their bedroom, and by extension, their bathroom. Saps sleeps on the couch. Flux doesn’t know how he does his business, but he did catch him brushing his teeth in the kitchen sink one morning.
Saps goes for morning runs, which used to fall before Flux woke up, so he could spend time with him directly afterwards. Flux doesn’t know if he’s just been waking up earlier or if Saps has been taking walks later, but it’s as if the second the alarm on his phone goes off, he hears the front door close.
They don’t even share meals anymore. After their arguments, Flux would usually find takeout for him on the kitchen counter. In turn, he’d leave perfect halves of his sandwiches or whatever meal he’d taken to making that day for Saps, too.
But that hasn’t happened in a while. Flux takes to just not eating at all, in some fucked-up sympathy-grab.
For the first few weeks since things started to sour, Flux didn’t leave the room. He could take days at a time just sitting inside, only leaving to stock up on food. The curtains stayed drawn no matter the hour, the air turning stale and warm around him until even breathing felt heavy.
Empty wrappers and half-drunk bottles gathered around the mattress on the floor because getting up long enough to throw them away felt pointless. Most nights, he sat with his back against the wall and stared at nothing, fiddling with the ring on his finger, listening to the old house settle around him.
He’s also reconciled with an old friend as of late.
Saps stood in the middle of Flux’s depression room with a garbage bag hanging from one hand. At this point, they’d been friends for only a few years — just about sixteen years old. Flux had been going through a particularly rough patch.
He still lived with Crow, at this point. It was better than living with Elanuelo, at the very least.
“You live like this on purpose?” Saps asked, light-heartedly, more than anything.
Flux didn’t answer. His eyes stayed fixed somewhere past them, dull and unfocused. His mind even further away.
Saps sighed, and went back to cleaning — sorting through everything Flux owned, and everything he’d kept like a hoarder. His room looked like a dumpster dive haul, admittedly.
The blades came last. It was kind of like a fucked-up Easter egg hunt, more than anything. Flux could barely remember where all of them are, and he almost didn’t even want to tell Saps about them all. Just in case. Just in case.
Saps found them all around: taped beneath the desk drawer, inside a coat pocket, tucked into the spine of an old paperback with the pages warped from humidity, quite literally just on his nightstand.
Each discovery earned the same look from Saps: frustration smothered beneath concern.
“You said you wanted these gone.”
“I do, duh. Why would I want you to take them?”
“Then why do you keep hiding more?” he asks, dumbfounded. He isn’t mad, Flux knows. Or he tells himself.
Flux rolled the ring around his middle finger with his thumb until the skin underneath turned red, shrugging. “Forgot where some of them were.”
It was a weak lie. Both of them knew it. Saparata could pretend not to, though.
Saps crouched beside the mattress after finding presumably the last one beneath the sink, dropping it into the metal tin with the others before snapping the lid shut.
“That all of them?”
“...Probably.”
“Flux.”
Let it be known, Flux considered it. He considered telling the truth.
“…Yeah.”
Another lie. It rolled off his tongue too easily.
It’s not like he wanted to use them — not right now, at least. He just couldn’t stand the thought of not having the option. It was like squandering all control he had of his life. He kept getting fucked over. His parents hated him. It was a matter of time until Saps would end up hating him. He’d feel the pain either way. The only difference was it was in his hands. The possibility mattered more than the action most days.
Saparata rubbed tiredly at his face before sitting down on the edge of the mattress beside him.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
“Try to sleep tonight,” Saps broke the silence.
Flux gave a vague nod. Saps took it as his cue to leave.
He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the cleaned-up room like it belonged to somebody else.
Saps probably didn’t think to look through the obvious.
Cracking off the back of his old, broken Samsung, the battery pack was empty.
What lay in its place was a single razor blade.
Flux stared at it in his palm for a long moment, jaw tight.
Wake up, shower, lie awake all day, slit his wrists, go back to sleep. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Ignoring the footsteps all around the house gets easier over time.
At first, every sound had made his shoulders tense automatically. Every floorboard creak had felt personal, like a warning. But eventually the noises blur together into something dull and constant, part of the house itself instead of the person living in it.
He treats all the sounds he had taken for granted as white noise — the running tap water, the opening and closing of the microwave, the doors creaking, the chairs shifting. The muffled thud of cabinet doors in the kitchen. The scrape of a plate being set down on the counter. Sometimes the television murmuring low through the wall for about an hour before cutting off again. He knows Saps’ routine like the back of his hand, but he forces himself not to think about it too much. He has to tune out all the sounds so he doesn’t visualize whatever the other man is up to.
Because once he starts picturing it, he can’t stop. Saps standing at the sink with his sleeves pushed up. Leaning against the kitchen counter while waiting for the microwave to beep. Running a hand through his hair when he’s tired. Ordinary things. Stupid things. Everything Flux used to absorb without realizing, and now can’t seem to scrub out of his head no matter how hard he tries.
And he especially has to tune out the footsteps that lead up to right outside his room every once in a while.
Those are the worst, because he knows they are not part of Saps’ routine — Saps’ routine would be to just walk in.
He takes in the slow and familiar thuds against the hallway floorboards, stopping just short of the door like whoever’s standing there can’t decide whether to knock.
Flux freezes every time it happens, every muscle locking up despite himself. Sometimes he stares directly at the door, waiting for it to open, or at the very least, the sound of knuckles against wood — but it never comes. But neither does the footsteps trailing back,
Only after a minute or two, the footsteps leave again. Saps already knows he isn’t wanted.
Similarly, since Flux has taken to sitting on the porch instead of rotting in the bedroom, Saps knows better than to go outside when he’s there. Flux knows it’s hindering some of his usual activities, like the jogs he takes when he’s stressed out — which is essentially perpetual, honestly — but he spitefully continues to loiter.
He had limited his smoking because Saps convinced him only one of them can be addicted at a time, and between the two of them, Flux was far sloppier — leaving trails of ash and fragments of smolder. Admittedly, Flux didn’t know Saps even smoked so often for the first few months of their relationship, because he made sure not to do so in front of Flux.
Now, Flux burns through packs like he’s doing it competitively. He sloppily discards the used butts, and is sure to leave ashes all over the patio. He doesn’t even spray air fresheners to discard the acrid, pungent smell. He knows it’s petty and vindictive, but that only gets him to do it more; to push the limit and get another half-pack a day. Half the time the cigarettes burn forgotten between his fingers while he stares blankly into the yard, only to light another off the dying end the second he notices it’s gone out.
In a similar spirit, he wears his fresh cuts like trophies. He abandons long sleeves and lets the litany of cuts of varying depths, the atrophics and the keloids, show. He wants them to be seen. He wants it to hit Saps like a punch to the gut.
Everything he’s doing is petty. It’s petty and childish and deliberately self-destructive — exactly the sort of thing Saps would recognize as a tantrum if he ever stepped outside long enough to see it.
And he does, really. He walks out, tries to ignore Flux, but he grimaces, giving Flux the gratification he needs.
But it’s never enough. Flux doesn’t know if he wants to scream at him again, to get all the pent-up rage out, or if he wants to go back to how things were before everything went to shit. Anything but whatever cold war they were having right now.
Flux looks up at him, and Saps is quick to meet his eye, like he’s been stalking in his peripheral. Everything he’s been keeping for the past week is scalding hot on his tongue, ready to jump out — insults, compliments, everything interesting he’s been itching to talk to Saps about. They all bubble right at his throat, and he ends up choking and not saying anything.
The moment passes, and Saps speaks first—
He spits, harsh without needing to shout, “Get your shit together.”
He turns around and goes to wherever he was supposed to go, leaving Flux once again. If Flux had listened closer, he would have heard the quiver in Saps’ voice.
Flux snuffs out the cigarette, goes back inside, and spends two hours sitting on the couch, just waiting for Saparata to come back.
At some point the room goes dim around him. He doesn’t remember the sun setting.
There’s a cigarette balanced between his fingers again, unlit this time. He can’t bring himself to just light it, opting to roll it back and forth against his thumb until the paper softens and wrinkles. He thinks about what Saps said again, muttering it under his breath, desperate to get it out of his system.
Get your shit together.
Get your shit together. He whispers, trying to taste the words — engraving into his memory exactly how Saparata said it.
It was too clean, Flux notes, because if it were him, he’d tell him to fuck off, never talk to him again, and die in a ditch for the betterment of all of humankind. Hell, he almost did — he definitely would’ve said something more uncouth if given more time.
But Saparata couldn’t even bear to throw in a curse. Get your fucking shit together. Something like that.
Which somehow feels worse.
For one, it kills his ego to not be the bigger person. He knows it’s part of Saps’ scheme — to make him feel like a dick. To withhold from resorting to petty insults because oh, only Flux is capable of being that big of an asshole.
But on the other hand, it means Saps still thinks there’s something left to salvage here — that he can’t just sever the last string of attachment by cussing him out. THat some version of Flux is capable of fixing himself if he just tried hard enough. As if Flux is a machine kicked apart on the garage floor, all the pieces technically still there, waiting for someone patient enough to reassemble them.
Saps has been patient enough to reassemble them.
…Well, no. Flux scowls at himself for even thinking about it.
If he was, they wouldn’t be here. Saps frankly did not understand him, and if he did, he didn’t care to do anything about it. If anything, Saps wanted to pin it all on him — like he himself didn’t need to get his fucking shit together just as much. The phone works both ways. If he wanted to fix things, he shouldn’t had pussied out at his doorstep every fucking night. It doesn’t work like that.
They had only been nineteen at the time, and Flux had known for a long time that Saparata had something up his sleeve.
Every afternoon they spent lounging on their front porch, he felt his lover scheming — as if pinpointing the right time for something. He’d known exactly what that was for a long time coming.
He had to pretend to not notice Saps’ hands fiddling with his pockets more often. Had to pretend not to hear bits and pieces of the speech he’d been practicing for years.
Every time it crossed his mind, he thought of what to say. Commitment had always been something he couldn’t stomach. Call it trauma, call it paranoia, but he’d seen how his father promised eternity to a man who was quick to discard it. He was, quite literally, the apology baby.
He didn’t want such bitter thoughts to taint his perception. He was not his father, and nor was Saps. Saps was his boyfriend. Saps has seen all the ugly, unloveable parts of him, and stuck by him. Saps has kissed all his scars and reminded him to love himself, time and time again.
And yet, he didn’t know what to say.
He’s just almost-certain it’ll be an affirmative. Scratch that, he was certain it would be.
“Fluixon,” the beautiful pale-haired angel started, looking Flux right in the eye, taking his hands into his own.
Flux’s eyes darted to the boy’s moles, because he couldn’t bear looking him right in the eye as this happened. He was sure he’d sob and throw up and die. Saps didn’t force him to look, either. Flux knew Saps could probably feel his hands growing sweatier and shakier.
A soft chuckle escaped his lips, “I’ve known and loved you for the better part of six, going on seven-ish years…”
By now, that was probably seven-ish years ago, too. Flux doesn’t know where it went wrong. Hell, it was probably wrong to begin with, knowing him. He’s always known all good things in his life weren’t meant to last.
Selfishly, and even with all his atheistic rejection of the lord, he prayed every night it’d be different with Saparata.
But apparently, he truly did deserve to be punished.
Flux presses the cigarette hard enough to crumple it.
He sighs out loud, because god knows Saps already expects him to fail. And that’s exactly why he hasn’t done anything to fix things. Saps watches him the way people watch a dying dog limp into the road — pitiful and helpless and it only makes the scowl on his face deepen to think about.
There’s ash under his fingernails, tobacco on his shirt and his throat burns constantly now. His voice has been hoarse since he’s taken up this vengeful pasttime. He smells stale all the time no matter how much he showers. The entire house probably smells like him right now.
The front door finally clicks open close to midnight.
Flux’s head snaps up too fast.
Saps freezes for half a second when he sees him still sitting there, snapping out of it to shut the door behind him gently.
Right as he walked in, Flux’s eyes found their way to Saps’ ring finger like it served him confirmation of whether or not he was still loved. It was still there, but it didn’t do much to reassure Flux.
“...Wow, you’re up.”
Flux wants to say something cruel immediately just to break the tone apart. Wants to accuse him of staying away on purpose. Wants to ask where he went. Wants to ask who he talked to that was apparently easier than talking to him.
Instead, he swallows his pride, You were gone awhile, he settles on.
“I drove around,” Saps says, slowly, as if he’s still considering his choice of words as they leave his mouth.
Flux can feel it building again — all the heat under his ribs, all the things he can’t say correctly. The apology trying to claw its way out through the anger. They wrestle all the way up his throat and knot together until neither can breathe. Until he can’t breathe.
Saps finally looks at him directly, properly — for the first time in what feels to be years. Both relief and resentment pump through Flux’s bloodstream.
…And there it is again.
That awful expression, clear as day on Saps’ usually relatively-positive demeanor. Flux knows he isn’t angry, nor sad; he looks bone-tired. Flux feels small, like he’s been a chore for Saps — someone to talk to, take care of, every single day.
Only then does an awful thought click in Flux’s head: Saps had probably expected to come home to an empty house tonight.
…Or maybe even a trashed one…
…Or maybe even a body.
Saps rubs a hand over his face. “Flux…” his voice cracks, and Flux spots the tears prickling at his eyes. Saps looks away immediately afterward, jaw tightening hard like he regrets letting it slip.
Before he says anything rash, Saparata takes a good look at Flux. Taking in his features, every flaw and crack, every scar and gash, like it was the last time he’d see him ever.
Flux hates how that’s entirely possible.
“Just—” he exhales, but it reads like a scoff. Or a resignation. Or as if he was trying to expel everything he was feeling with a mere huff. Or as if he didn’t want to say what he was about to. Or if he—
“...I can’t keep doing this.”
Flux doesn’t answer.