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“I never took you for a smoker.”
He stares blankly at his white ceiling. There’s a cigarette hanging loosely from his fingers, embers slowly and quietly drifting onto his sheets. He doesn’t face the voice in the doorway. “‘M not.”
“The cigarette in your hand says otherwise.”
He brings it up into his line of sight, frowning. “‘S jus’ once a week. Jus’ like how it smells.”
“That shit’ll ruin your lungs.”
It’s plucked from his weak grip. It takes him a second to properly react. “‘S jus’ once a week,” he repeats, reaching out for it. “Gimme.”
“I don’t want to live in a house with a smoker.”
“I’ll go outside.” He pushes himself to his buckling legs. Sapnap puts a hand on his shoulder and he comes crashing down on his bed. He blinks indolently at him. “‘M I allowed to hold it inside?”
“ No .” Sapnap inhales, making a show of pressing the cigarette out. He whines, knowing he would’ve done it on his skin were he alone. He already had a pretty line going up his thigh. “We aren’t smoking anymore.”
“You smoke?”
“No, it’s just—whatever. No smoking if you want to live in this house.”
Past the thick fog of listlessness sparks a burning hatred. “This is my house.” A furrow forms between his brows. “This is my fucking house, Sapnap.”
“I know—”
“Obviously you fucking don’t.” His gaze sharpens. He is a fire. “You can’t come live in my fucking house and make ground rules.”
“Dr—”
He snatches the pack of cigs off his nightstand as he comes to a stand. He pushes his way past him, into the living room. “I can’t fucking believe you.”
“What’s fucking wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me ?” He whirls around, and he is an exploding supernova, molten silver rushing through his veins, a series of withered explosions. “ I’m not the one invading people’s homes and telling them to stop doing shit. Fuck you, I’m leaving.”
“Dream—”
“Don’t fucking look for me.”
The door slams behind him. The Marlboro Light box digs into his palm, and he lights another. This one he brings to his lips and inhales deeply. The smoke curls out of his mouth, spilling into the open air.
He’s an asshole. And he fucking hates himself for it.
Sap tells me you yelled at him
so what if i did
That isnt like you
hes telling me how to live my fucking life
Hes worried about you, Dream
Theres a difference
whatever
Dream
what george
Just talk to him
Or me
Talk to fucking anyone
Just dont yell anymore
whatever
Dream.
okay
He bites the skin around his thumb, a faint stinging blooming against his lips. It’s obsessive, how often he shuffles through Twitter.
But there’s just so much to hate himself over. The flimsy accusations of pedophilia and genuine manipulation of minors. And he knows they’re fake, of fucking course he does, and he knows a majority of people know it’s fake too, but just the small handful of people calling him a piece of shit who belongs in prison is like a vise pressure on his overfilled glass heart.
Not everyone has to like him. He knows this. He fucking knows this. But it doesn’t stop his hands from shaking, his stomach from turning.
They don’t have to like him, but they don’t have to tell him to kill himself either.
His hands tremble as he logs out of Twitter, off his computer. Pushes back, fighting the urge to throw up. He’s sick. So, so sick.
He hates them. He hates himself. Why does he bother. No one likes him. He’s just entertaining a mindless void.
He chokes on a sob. His face crumbles and scorching tears fall down his scrunched face, his chest heaving. He hates himself, he hates himself, he hates himself.
He collapses onto his hands and knees, watching tears fall onto his bedroom floor. He envisions vertical slashes on the delicate skin of his wrists. Bleeding, sanguine wounds. A frigid death swallowing his mind.
A strangled keen tumbles from his chest. He raises his head and drops it, and raises it and drops it, raises and drops raises drops. An ugly throb crawls its disgusting way across his skull, but he keeps banging it against the floor. He wants to fucking split it open and watch brains and bone trickle onto the floor with his last dredges of life.
Blood drips down his cheeks, tasting like copper on his tongue. It’s like he’s actually fucking dying. He wails, feeling like some big, dense child. He can’t breathe, he can’t fucking breathe.
He hears, somewhere in the background, his door crashing open, and the beginning of an angry shout, but it cuts short as he bashes his head into the floor again, blood mixing with tears to make him absolutely fucking disgusting. There’s rushed footsteps, and a pair of hands is trying to get him to stop, wrapped about his middle, and like the child he is, he kicks and screams, straining against the arms.
He repeatedly slams into the floor with his heel, wanting to feel it break break break, but it won’t and he’s thrown onto a bed. There’s nothing to hurt himself here, so he screams and thrashes. He wants to hurt, everything in the world would make sense if he hurts. He needs it, doesn’t this person understand that he needs the pain like a baby needs its mother?
Eventually he’s exhausted, weakly begging to be let go, please I just need to die, please please.
He goes limp against a solid wall of desperately breathing warmth. He tells them to eat shit and die, but they don’t say anything.
He falls asleep.
Dream, what the fuck
Dream, Sap says you hurt yourself, are you okay?
Let me know when you read this
He wakes up with a distinct taste of sleep and iron thick in his mouth. His whole body aches. His skull is bursting into two distinct sections.
He licks his dry lips, wincing as he pushes himself up. He wonders why his ankle is wrapped and burns like all hell. Now that he thinks about it, there’s a bandage across his forehead too. He prods at it. He hisses, feeling dripping wax cascade down his face. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
The memories that trickle down his back ignite a bigger fire.
The door opens. It’s Sapnap, holding a glass of water. His lips are pressed into a fine line as he passes the glass over.
He considers it. “You don’t have to help me.”
Sapnap snorts. “As if.”
He sips in the pensive silence, his face itching something fierce. Sapnap sits on the chair next to him. “What’s happening? What is this, Dream?”
He opens his mouth, but his throat is a dried well, an empty basin, the vestiges of a burned forest. He swallows, staring into the glass as he swishes it around. He doesn’t know what to say. What is there to say? The world hates me and I’m afraid I do, too? If I hurt myself enough maybe I’ll finally have a reason to cry? I want to have a physical reason to hurt because my father taught me mental pain was a falsehood invented to sell tiny pills?
He says none of this. He says nothing at all.
“Dream.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he chokes out. His hands shake around the glass of water. He presses his eyelids together to hide the sheen of tears.
“Dream—”
“I don’t know what happened.” He forces his eyes to open, stares at Sapnap with a blank look and an empty smile. “Did I get hurt?”
Sapnap pauses, before a vicious frown marrs his face. “Don’t play that game.”
“What game, Sap?”
Sapnap snatches the water back. He’s only taken a sip from it. “Fine. Be like that. Last time I try to be a good friend.”
His hands fold atop one another in his lap as Sapnap slams the door shut behind him. His heart is a crackling fountain. Tears spill down his face, and he bites his lip to keep himself from crying out. To beg for Sapnap to come back and please please please just see through my veil of bullshit and tell me you see me hurting.
But Sapnap isn’t a goddamn mind reader and he doesn’t know why he expects him to be.
He pushes his curled hands against his chest and sobs.
Dream
Dream.
Dream, you cant ignore me forever
Whatever
Say sorry to Sapnap, hes just trying to help
Dream, you cant ignore you problems, they dont disappear
Dream
Dream
Fine, okay
Text me back whenever
It’s like
there’s a storm at sea. A storm, and he is foolish enough to think God will rise from the waves and rebut the winds and the sea.
And there will be a great calm.
But he has not been religious since the age of fourteen. Has not been religious since his father told him his little sad boy disease was no excuse to stop going to church. Has not been religious since his father pushed his head underneath the lake beside his house and told him he would wash the sin from his mortal frame. Has not been religious since he pressed a blade to his fragile skin and called it repentance.
He leans against his window. Sapnap has him under some kind of house arrest. He’s unable to leave his room without his permission. And he’d yelled at Sapnap, bitchy and in so much fucking pain, gaining only a flat look and another slammed door.
He pushes off the wall, stalking up to the offending barrier.
He’s burning burning burning, there’s an empty flame in his chest, cold and incandescent. It’s eating him from the inside out, melting him into a puddle of fat and singed bones.
His foot goes straight through the wood. He reaches through, unlocking the door, hating that Sapnap had felt the need to add a lock to keep him in, was probably afraid of him, afraid of h
i
m
and shoves the door open. It bangs into the wall, but it’s white noise against his backdrop of roaring static and malignant waves. He spots Sapnap in the kitchen, eyes wide with a knife in his hand. He’s cooking.
No need.
He strides out the front door, blood pooling in his mouth from where he’d bitten on his tongue. He darts through traffic and hears Sap call after him. Probably run out the house in nothing more than those stupid pyjamas he insisted on keeping. He knows he’s no better, barefoot and wrapped in bandages.
He ducks into an alley, Sapnap rushing past. His eyes track his retreating form with exhaustion. He drops to a squat, the back of wrists against his eyes. Stars and circles ripple from the darkness, in either white or a color he can’t determine.
“Hey, ki—”
He’s in no mood for games. He swipes the man’s legs out from under him, moving in the direction of the beach. He just wants
noise
to replace the monotony of cotton in his useless mind. He is dripping through the streets of Florida, a shadow amongst the bright blotches of unwavering personalities. He drifts.
The sand is warm beneath his toes. He stares at the grains. The ever-shifting nature of them, the way they fall and tumble and never come to a stop. He smiles, the threat of tears building behind his throat.
He listens. He sits and listens.
Waves lapping against shores, the rustle of waters, the shuffle of sea foam.
He could die like this.
Sometimes he thinks he’s the only person in the world. Sits on his bed at night, a single earbud in place, playing music he doesn’t even know the name of, and wonders if the world is full of people. Remembers places he’s never been, and people he never was.
He holds the faces that peer at him from the darkness. His fingers wrap around nothing. Ink slips through his knuckles, mocking him from their infinite ocean.
He turns to the place where his door should have been. It’s empty. A broken door had no use, anyways.
He turns to the floor at his left, where Sap is splayed out in his restless sleep. Ready to wake up the instant he makes a motion to get out of bed.
He turns to the window. It’s a gaping black hole, the smell of evaporating water drifting through. Summer.
Sapnap is right there, he tells himself. Ignore everything that says you’re alone alone alone, focus on Sapnap. He’s right there, right there.
What if he isn’t? This is all a massive joke against you. He’s not there, your eyes are playing tricks on you.
He stumbles on a breath, bending over his crossed legs. He’s decaying.
Breathe. Breathe
breathe.
Catch the breath in your throat.
Catch it and hold it.
Hold it.
Hold it.
The room is spinning.
You’re dying.
The room is shrinking.
He gasps, pushing out from beneath a thin blanket from his youth.
Drops beside Sapnap.
A friend.
Alive.
Breathing.
Breathe.
He jostles his friend awake, quietly losing his breath.
He startles awake, looking around blearily.
“Hello?”
he says.
But he is stuck focusing on the fabric beneath his fingers.
The way Sapnap’s chest rises and falls.
His eyes are real.
Right?
And he’s most certainly talking
but what if he isn’t
and from outside the window the fake world is laughing
at the boy so desperate for attention
he makes up his own demons.
He’s brought to a solid chest. It’s
warm.
He blinks, swallowing lump after lump.
There’s a steady voice talking.
Talking.
Focus.
Breathe.
Breathe, yes he can do that.
He sucks in air, coughing violently.
Someone brings his hand to a beating heart.
Dreams don’t own beating hearts, right?
No, they can’t.
So this person is real, and so is their breathing.
Breathe.
Yes, he can breathe.
In and out, he inhales and exhales, oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen to carbon dioxide and nitrogen and hydrogen.
His blood gathers oxygen and his brain begins to process again. His face is smushed into Sapnap’s shoulder, his palm is flat against his heart, there’s fresh tears on his face. He draws back, wiping at his face, licking his lips, trying to figure out why he’s on the floor.
“Please,” Sap says, sounding so incredibly heartbroken. “Just tell me what’s happening.”
And his throat is the saplings of a redwood.
He tells him he doesn’t know. Not really. Just that sometimes he feels so strongly he needs to break something or cry or maybe hurt himself. That he knows it is irrational, but his body won’t stop shaking until something happens.
He’s not a smoker. He doesn’t like how it smells. He just knows it’ll hurt him, and that’s enough to tide him over until rage bubbles in his listless chest.
With thick lips, he says he’s sorry. He’s sorry he yelled, he’s sorry he scared him, sorry he can’t be a better friend.
And Sap stops him, grabs his hands and shakes his head. Says that this isn’t a little sad boy disease he made up when he was fourteen, that this is something real and you’re real, this is real, Dream I love you.
And for the second time that night, he breaks into ugly sobs
In the morning, he wakes up on the floor, tangled in sheets he doesn't remember buying. The smell of something cooking hangs in the air. Breakfast, maybe.
The window is a soft stream of light, revealing a cityscape. It smells like fruit and maybe bacon. The doorway is still devoid of a door, but there’s a curtain hanging for some semblance of privacy. There’s no one next to him, but he knows there’s someone in the kitchen.
And they’re real. This is real, there’s no joke. There’s no joke.
His head still hurts. It’s wrapped in dirty bandages that he should probably change now.
For the first time in seven years, he draws in a lungful of air.