what is the word for it, for becoming familiar with cold hands running through hair, for shivering from the touch and leaning into it all the same? for returning back to eyes that don’t look back at him even when he stares straight at them, for curling into a body and knowing it being closer to a corpse than a living thing, for telling himself that he is, in part, always the reason for dead things underneath him?
there is a word for it. gods call it foolishness; how thin boys run fingers through hair and come back with palms moondusted and half-aching without knowing why, how quiet-pleading things beg for something it does not know yet but gets on its knees for all the same.
(perhaps there is another word for it, but we will not mention it. the two have spent a lifetime using it all wrong, and in the space between them, it will come out all jagged-iceberg mouthful-of-dirt ruined. no, we better not)
he asks for the truth. it is always, always too much.
that is why he gives it, and then some. boy is made of hollows now, between the patches of skin he has given to others to keep on him and his own hunger eating his insides whole; a cycle of digestion, all acid and bitter aftertaste. perhaps the hunger stems from the taking that has left him a boy so devoid of anything.
“true.” whispered in water lapping bases of necks, closes his eyes to wet skin pressed to him. “i broke my legs spread open before anyone else could. if you survive enough devourings, you become one.”
boy shifts and water falls over the edges of porcelain cliffs, less ocean between the two but still too much of a drowning with all the words that leave lips with a suffocation.
“you don’t regret drowning the first time, despite never wanting it again.” he murmurs, lips pressed to neck, eyelashes fluttering onto skin, catching dewdrops of their ocean. “or: i have ruined you too. take your pick. true or not true?”
What does it say—for him, about him—that he has allowed himself to be caught again? That he has not learned his lesson, even after ten years of running, on the run. A full decade of being pushed and pulled by the whims of the ugly little thing living in his chest, and he’s still playing the fool.
You always did have a taste for self-immolation.
But you may have outdone yourself this time.
A shift in volume, a loss of mass, an increase in pressure against his left chest. He wonders that his ribs haven’t caved under this added weight, flimsy structures that they are; they creak in weak protest, but somehow manage to remain afloat a little while longer.
The smell of cold ashes, embers burned down to soft gray dust under the gaze of indifferent gods, lingers on his skin where the boy brushes against him. He closes his fingers around damp silver, tries to commit to memory what the texture of holding moonlight in his fist feels like.
Do not mistake this for peace.
You two will only ever be the calm before the storm, and the worst is yet to come.
“True,” he utters his confession to the deaf sky outside the window, both an answer to the wraith tucked into his side, and an affirmation to the monster in his head. “Only to the first part. I was ruined long before you found me. Are you the same?”
