modern au with phainon + you falling out of love...
It's nothing he did. There's nothing he could do. It's just—you look at him one day, look up from the snowdrift of paper bills on your kitchen table, from the monotony of carrying the numbers to add it all up because your phone died again. It's charging on the counter that you keep meaning to get chairs for, chained just beyond your fingertips by a too-short cord, the screen still blinking with the little battery icon, so you suppose it doesn't matter anyway. You don't have a calculator without it so you scratch a number into the margins of the bill, pressing hard enough that it cuts through to the next paper, a deep little pinprick, a tiny fang through the skin.
You're tired and you're sifting through the numbers and you can hear the clink of Phainon's water bottle against the counter. You look up and he's Phainon—he's beautiful and he's sweet and he has been the perfect lover and he is, you think in some quiet part of you—empty.
Except maybe it's you that's empty—empty of the soft space inside of you that used to fill when you looked at him, like the pulsing body of a star growing far too quickly to stay steady. Maybe it's you. Maybe it was always going to be you.
You loved Phainon, once. Loved, you realize. Loved. Though you think you still might, underneath it all. But thinking is not knowing, and besides—you're not sure what the skeletal remains of your love even are. If it's romance that sits in the catch of your throat, a bone shard not easily moved. If it's something deeper, more inexplicable, the intoxicating flare of being a sun for a lonely little planet. (Because you know you are. You used to think Phainon was the sun, and that you orbited around his glow, but you blinked that light out of your eyes years ago. It is Phainon who adapted to your light, who made an environment inside of himself that was built around the way you shone to him.)
You watch him for a moment. He knows; you know he knows. It's in the crinkle of the paper thin skin at the corner of his eye. It's in the way his back straightens, just a bit, sheep's wool pulling tight around the spindle to thicken into a skein.
You look back down at the bills. You mark off the chicken-scratch number in the margin; you round it up to the nearest decimal. The pen is steady in your hand as you say, "i think we should break up."
Phainon goes stiff. He starts to turn to you, a flower following the sun as it tracks steadily across the sky, and in those seconds before he faces you, you can see it.
You think of permanent marker against the whiteboard, how it lingers no matter how many times you scrub against it. Phainon wrote you into the blank slate of himself. You wonder if that's why it's shifted. If you could always love something you'd carved yourself with an accidental hand.
Phainon will try, in these next few moments. He will be good at it. He understands people, Phainon, the way water knows a body submerged in it.
(One day, the slate of him will be inked with his own handwriting. It will be enough.
But you do not know this yet, and so you will say again—)
"I think we should break up."