@vxctrcs -- lost boy drabbles, the past.
their breath comes out in thick clumps when they exhale. creaky-ribbed and with effort. cold has a way of sneaking down a throat and making everything stiff. blood and air and circulation. fingers and toes, too. eunchan shakes the sleeves of the sweatshirt he’s stolen from hyunsu down around his hands. tries to melt that feeling of ice from skin. every so often and eunchan takes a pull from his nicked cigarette. the smog of it mixes and they’re left in a sea of clouds, left adrift on top of the blocky rooftop. the sort not made for people. they’d gone and shimmied up the last story of it using a broken pipe as a foothold. last summer and eunchan had sliced his shin open on it. clearly they haven’t bothered learning from the experience. “it’s mine, steal your own.” the third time eunchan’s told hyunsu that when he’s felt him shift forward enough, seeking. the kind of seedy resolution that comes from a sixteen year old with an addiction and no ready way to fill it. eunchan laughs, stretches his arm up and away from them both. he hopes, anyway. hynusu and his long ass reach.
there’s no room for them inside. that’s what it feels like a lot of the time. he likes those quiet moment when everyone in his house is gone for work. when it’s just him, worn-rough furniture, and an empty cabinet. otherwise he just follows hyunsu around. he has for as long as he can remember. there might’ve been a calculation in it once, the biggest kid on the playground makes for a nice sort of threat. but now it’s a lazy sort of comfort. the kind he takes for granted. like heat simmering under the floorboards in the middle of winter. a necessary comfort you don’t notice until it’s gone.
“fine. here.” exasperated, and eunchan hold his hand up somewhere near his shoulder. feels the sway of his wrist and puff of hot air fan out across his knuckles as hyunsu takes a drag. a hum at the thanks that follows. “you think we’ll ever do anything?” eunchan glares at the skyline when he says it. it’s one of those questions that doesn’t really have an answer. instead of waiting for hyunsu to try and force one into place, eunchan turns and kisses him before he gets the bright idea to speak. his lips are cold, and chapped from the wind. eunchan takes another drag instead of dwelling on it, leans back into hyunsu’s touch when he feels his fingers flex tighter at his waist.
eunchan has a way of collecting bruises, like a stamp-collector might. just pressed into his skin instead. from picking fights and mouthing off. from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. hyunsu does too, but only sometimes. eunchan thinks it’s different anyways. hyunsu is all firebright. red and wicked and hot. he twists up and unfurls into anger. not with his words, really. just with his body. heavy-knuckled and hard. it’s thanks to hyunsu that eunchan knows what bone against bone sounds like. and that wet pop of a noise when a head hits pavement. hyunsu’s got bruises like badges of honor -- deserved or not. maybe that honor’s a little wayward. so they’re different sorts. but sometimes it looks like they match. eunchan takes a strange, thrilled sort of pleasure in it. lining their forearms up side by side and tracing make-believe constellations across their skin, using bruises like connect-me-dot guidelines, with the fat-tipped marker of a pen and the sort of smell that left him dizzied from chemicals.
“it’s pretty, right?” eunchan asks him, once. mid-orion’s belt. “like we’re connected.” it might work out a little better if he knew exactly what orion’s belt looked like. he’s going off a half-remembered picture from a textbook he’d seen two weeks ago. maybe it’s stupid. they’re too old for this now. eunchan’s seventeen, but sentimentality refuses to leave him. it stays, like an overbearing parent. the only thing he had raising him through life. maybe it’s what makes him such a wanting, messy thing. eunchan shifts enough to hold the pen cap between his teeth, though reaches over to etch a smiley face against hyunsu’s cheek before he clicks it back into place. he laughs around the pen before it’s yanked free. hyunsu. and eunchan scrambles and runs before retribution is scrawled across his skin.
the air is a hot swelter, the summer sticky. the thought of high school has left them both. eunchan fingers at a tattoo he got near his bicep. the kind needle-poked painstakingly into skin. wobbly letters he’d winced through on a dilapidated couch. the beer he’d drank down had made it feel better, but it’d thinned out his blood enough that it’d been messier too. both of them had been too unknowledgeable to know it made any difference. it’s mostly healed over, now. but the skin’s raised enough that he can feel it. hyunsu’s hand eventually replaces his own, and eunchan lets him. despite the fan they have propped up on a shaky-legged table, it still feels too hot. the fact that they’re pressed close together doesn’t help. the whir of it sounds pathetic, like it’s on its last breath. struggling to puff more stale air across feverish skin. still, eunchan keeps himself in place. he likes the way he can feel hyunsu’s heart against his ribs. that rhythmic roll-thump of it.
the kind of feeling he could fall asleep to.
eunchan mouths at the thin skin of hyunsu’s throat. it’s graceless, but filled with sentiment. he knows if he angles himself closer, hips just right hyunsu will start to complain about where they are and if company will show up soon. eunchan knows it because he’s done this very same thing more times than he can count. he feels the way hyunsu’s fingers glide across the small of his back, slicked with sweat. eunchan ignores how borderline-disgusting that is. “what if we just-- for a bit.” eunchan digs his fingers in near hyunsu’s bicep, curls him closer so they can kiss.
eunchan’s always heard your twenties are supposed to be filled with potential. but his seem to be filled with mostly nothing. hyunsu’s there, he always is. deadend jobs and a drinking habit eunchan refuses to give up. he likes to pretend, between blackout-dotted memories, that he might not feel for hyunsu quite as much as he does. it’d make things easier. the trouble with that though, is that eunchan wants it. wants hyunsu to want him. the same way he wants validation for near anyone who looks at him long enough. and then hyunsu had gone and said it one day anyway, in that sleepy-husk of a voice. i love you, all fond and like he hadn’t realized the gravity of what he’d said. the way it read past platonic and straight into unabated fear. eunchan’s been thinking on that since. most of it’s no good.
“don’t.” they’re at friend’s party, hosted in a bar that looks more cement-basement than anything else. hyunsu’s hand flutters from where it sits on his forearm. back and forth, like a deer tap dancing across the highway. a semi hurdling toward it, a horn-blare between a decision or death. eunchan hates it when hyunsu doesn’t listen to him. like now. hand settling back into place. eunchan yanks his own arm away instead. if he weren’t waiting for a drink, he might’ve walked away. but he is, so he doesn’t. they haven’t talked in three days. it feels unfair hyunsu’s making him break his streak now. we should- and eunchan knows he’s going to say talk. like that’ll solve all their problems. solve all his problems. fat fucking chance.
he feels boxed in. digs a nail in at a cuticle and shrugs his shoulders. hyunsu doesn’t take the hint, follows after him even after he swipes his drink from the bar. “what does it matter?” words hissed out and riding that cheap sense of bravery bottom of the barrel liquor brings. “we were fine before. why did you have to go and change it?” words that drift like puzzle pieces, that have a tendency of only making sense to eunchan. he manages to lose hyunsu twenty-seven minutes later, only after eunchan had bitten love-marks into his neck in the slivered hallway back near the bathrooms. it’s one of the last time he remembers him, before eunchan had packed up his things. before he ran.
