Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I think he’s dead,” Smith said, crossing his arms and checking his watch. “All that doom and gloom and Tim Burton finally got to him, and he just died.”

“Yeah Jade, you better go find him,” Adam urges.

I sigh, because it’s always my job, but no one asks. They just assume I give a fuck where Davey Havok is.

Right now, he’s lost in the Spy Museum on the corner of F and 8 street in Washington DC. Smith and Hunter and my brother and I are all in the van, waiting for him. It’s been long enough though, too long. We’ve already watched a hobo steal some lady’s purse. We’ve already watched the cops come.

Davey’s still in the brightly colored, mazey insides of the Spy Museum, like a piece of shit stuck in someone’s constipated intestine. Grumbling, I go get him, and find him lost and wandering somewhere in the Cloak and Dagger section, standing still and not even reading the informational things on the walls. Just standing there, like he’s died but his muscles forgot to spasm him to the floor, like he’s died but his body doesn’t know it yet.

“Dave?” I ask him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

He twitches, starting a little before he turns to me. I almost look at the floor, almost stop myself from looking back at him because I know nothing good will come out of it. Nothing good ever comes out of eye contact with Davey Havok, unless you like that weightless, roller-coaster sensation of falling off of something.

Personally, I hate it.

Remember though, it was almost. The floor is right there, it would have been so easy to just drop my gaze the second Davey turned around. Mumble something about him holding us up and being a pain in the ass, and drag him out of there. But he’s a sharp-shooter and he looks at me before I can look away, his pitch-black-always-so-sad-it-hurts-eyes hitting mine like a sucker punch and holding me there, defenseless.

“Whoa,” I say, hand flying wildly with an involuntary urgency to my gut. I want to say, Dave are you okay? because he looks like someone ran over his puppy. He looks like his mom died. He looks like the whole world just up and bit the dust and he’s the only person left on earth, the loneliest guy in the whole world.

I think of that song, the one about one being the loneliest number.

I think of this time we drove from LA to San Francisco, and there was a field in Modesto off of the 5 freeway where there was only one, lonely horse grazing in all that dead grass, beside one, lonely three-armed windmill slicing a slow and lazy circle in all that dead blue sky.

I think of me, living alone in Davey’s room for a few weeks before I joined the band, waiting for him to come back from tour and tell me about how awesome his life was while I told him about how much it sucked to be an unemployed broke ex-student with a useless undergrad degree.

I think of all this depressing shit, and still, Davey hasn’t said anything. He’s just standing there in the Cloak and Dagger section with these trails of dried salt on his cheeks framed in sobbed-off eyeliner traces or something, with black eyes.

I want to say, Dave are you okay? But what a useless thing to say. Davey always looks like this. He’s clearly not okay. He’s one depressed, fucked up mother fucker. I’m almost used to being bowled over by the sadness in his eyes.

Almost. “Dave, are you okay?”

And he laughs, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. He’s looking all tiny and white in his big black shirt and he’s the one whose gaze cuts down.

“Aw, Dave,” I end up mumbling, and then I’m hugging him because I’m a huge pushover. A doormat. This is why Adam and my brother and Hunter always make me go find Davey. Because I deal with it. I’m a sucker. I’m sure they don’t put up with this shit, I’m sure they don’t look at his eyes and fall to pieces. They probably do what I should do, grab his arm and steer him where he needs to be and tell him to suck it up and stop being a baby or whatever. Maybe they don’t even notice. Because they’re strong and immune while I crumble like a rock that rots, granite or sandstone or whatever that pink, crumbly rock is. I take one look at Davey Havok and have to hug him , in public.

He sags into it, pushing his tear-sticky cheek into my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says like that accounts for all the times I’m surprised to find him alive, without a hair-dryer in his bath water or some gaping vertical red gash on both arms. All the times I’m surprised to walk in his room and find his ceiling fan isn’t buckled or in pieces under his weight swinging beneath it. All the times I’m surprised to find his car empty and not running. I’m sorry is what he says, even though I am perfectly terrified I’m gonna come home one day and find the oven housing Davey’s head, or his brain splattered against the wall of his bedroom and a pistol in his hand. I’m sorry.

But because I’m a glutton for punishment I say, “It’s fine, it’s fine dude. I just came to see if you were lost or something.”

He rubs his face on my shoulder, like he’s scratching an itch.

I find myself pulling back, holding him by either shoulder and saying, “God, Dave, what the hell am I going to to with you?”

And then, in Washington DC, on the corner of F and 8 street, in the Cloak and Dagger section of the Spy museum, Davey stops scratching his face on my shoulder and stands up, looks at me for a second with his lower lip all chewed up between his teeth and a confused line through his forehead, before he leans in and kisses me.

Just like that, Davey Havok’s miserable eyes close and his miserable mouth is against mine.

He’s probably kind of surprised to find that instead of the bunched up, tense, chaste shock he expects to be met with, he finds my lips half-open. Warm. Wet. Soft. Willing. Other stuff.

A sucker, because sure as hell Adam and Hunter and my brother and Fritch and everyone would not put up with this shit. This is why they send me out here. Because who else would not only let Davey Havok kiss them, but would kiss Davey Havok back? Without even thinking about it?

Me. I don’t know how I went from being older than all of these guys in high school to being the new-kid in the band who has to run errands and do chores and make out with Davey Havok in public. I don’t know how my life got so unglamorous , but here I am. Sucking face with misery, and liking the way he tastes because if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a tremendous glutton for punishment. A big ass, white-headed-puss-filled-ready-to-pop glutton for punishment.

He keeps kissing me the same way: like a fish gasping for water flapping around on a deck. Or, like someone trying to find an answer with their tongue in someone else’s mouth.

I choke, and he wrenches away suddenly, face freshly flushed and wet and and streaky, eyes still full to the brim with the saddest black ever. He looks at me.

I keep looking back, because I can’t not. The floor is right there, but we just stare at each other, offended like we can’t believe the other just tongue kissed us. Like it wasn’t a joint effort.

Then he wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his enormous black sweatshirt, and tears his eyes away, so they’re fixed to the right of him where tourists are walking by, pissed off and homophobic or whatever. There’s fat midwestern tourists with disposable cameras held up like we’re a Spy Museum exhibit. There’s big groups of asian tourists jabbering at each other in a language I don’t speak, all wearing white keds and visors. There’s 8th graders on school trips cracking up and whispering to each other, their gay-kiss cherry popped.

Then there’s Davey, staring to his right huffing a little, his cheeks red and his eyes red-rimmed and everything all wet and dripping.

I stare at him, wishing badly we were in high school again, when his eyes were still dark brown and framed in laughter, and I was older and I loved him. Imagining us as ten year olds with stupid nike helmets. Twelve year olds with our first Germs shirts. I’m wishing badly that we were sixteen again, and in the gift shop of the Spy Museum looking through the art books for pictures of naked tits, shoplifting magnets, anything.

I wait for a tornado, or the cops to come.

“Let’s go,” Davey says suddenly, takes my elbow in his hand, and starts walking. I trip after him, my heart this frantic thing trying to fight its way out of my chest. We stand close as we walk but don’t look at each other, strangers and siamese twins.

He’s rubbing his face against my shoulder, like he’s scratching an itch. Together we get outside and it’s raining, drops of it spattering against the overwhelming heat of my face, which is nothing compared to the way my lips burn with the memory of him. I wonder if this is the end of something, or the beginning.

I wait for a tornado, or the cops to come.

Chapter Text

That’s not my blood on the floor. I tell that to Christian, who’s bitching about the rust-colored smudges all over the torn up linoleum in the kitchen. It’s amazing a guy like him notices any variance in the stains on that linoleum, which is pocked-marked with frying oil blisters and forever-grainy with salt and sticky with soy-sauce. A little blood shouldn’t bother a slob in a slobby kitchen, but the fact he thinks it’s mine is enough to make him bitch. Christian doesn’t understand my body, so everything that comes from it is threatening. This is my working theory, at least.

Every time there’s blood anywhere, people blame me. I have this bleeding problem. Not hemophilia, but something like it, where any tiny cut gushes and takes an alarmingly long time to coagulate into a scab. There’s a possibility it’s psychological, and my mere desire to bleed keeps it going and going long after what’s normal. This is only a working theory, however.

The cause may be imagined, but that doesn’t matter seeing as the blood itself is real. All of my bed-sheets look like I committed a murder on them, complete with enormous brown-red irregular patches that don’t wash out. There are a lot of reasons why I buy black sheets, and the blood is one of them. My bed wears black because black is how it feels on the inside, and because I bleed without discretion. This possibly imagined not-quite hemophilia is especially strange because once I do stop bleeding, I heal so well I never scar, or if I do it’s not nearly what one would expect for an incision so deep.

It’s frustrating, straddling the margin between too much and then not enough. When I still talked to Jade, he told me he thought it was beautiful that I could only take what I wanted in moderation, lest I bleed to death, and then after the fact there was no evidence of the moderation at all.

I’m standing in the center of the living room, poised between Christian in the kitchen and the blissful, wet outside promised behind the front door. I’m standing instead of walking because my body stops moving when I think about Jade, even if I don’t want it to.

“It’s your blood, alright,” Christian says, holding up his spatula, which is shiny with chicken fat. “Who the hell else stumbles around the house bleeding at night.” There is no question mark.

“It’s not my blood,” I shrug.

I don’t like Christian. Maybe it’s the implications of his name, or maybe it’s his huge stinky plugs he never cleans, or maybe it’s his smoker’s breath. Most likely it’s because he doesn’t understand the nuance or gravity of straightedge, much like he doesn’t understand the rest of me. He offers me alcohol more than anyone else I know. Last winter at the Fear’s Fuck Christmas holiday party we threw, he made eggnog and poured me a glass, assuring me that it was completely booze free. It got about three inches away from my nose before I could smell that acrid, rubbing alcohol burn of things I don’t drink. I told him he was full of shit and he said, “Well yeah, it has a little bit of rum but it’s not gonna get you drunk, Dave.” He doesn’t get it at all.

He’s pointing at the blood with his spatula. “Dude. I’m not asking a lot. Just wipe it up.”

“It’s not my blood, ” I say again, then push out the front door before he can hassle me anymore.

It’s pouring outside, buffeting me and sticking my stretched out clothes to me like a second skin. I’m not wearing a jacket and my chucks have a rip where the sole collects to the canvas siding along the inside of my arch, so as I stomp along to get used to the cold, puddles sneak in. My gaze is downcast, and I keep accidentally stepping on these huge, fat, white worms so swollen with rainwater they’re turning distantly purple.

There’s something wonderfully private and lonely about the rain. Like when you choose to be out in it, you’re forgoing comfort and warmth and the company of any living breathing thing for the perfect, singing clatter of isolation made by water on pavement. I inhale, and the air newly inside of me feels wet and smells like sadness, pressing my chest convex from the inside, like something is wishing it wasn’t afraid to get wet. A puddle climbs up the denim in my pants as I step into it, so my eyes finally skitter down, face stifling a grimace though no one’s watching me. I’m not wearing socks, and I can feel worm guts in my shoe.

It’s hard to see, but I start running anyway, toward headlights all streaked through with runny, egg-yolky fingers of rain and lightbulb.

I sprint down Channing in the rain. Some people might call this “going on a jog,” but that’s not how I think of it. I’m not very good at running, and I’m made worse by the fact that I run in beat-up chucks with no socks, downhill, without stretching. People tell me that one day I’ll hurt myself, and I write those people off because they’re missing the point.

I make a right on College, the ache in my knees subsiding minimally during the block of flat. I’m not very good at running because I have no control. I don’t do it to stay fit or tone muscles or anything, I do it because it hurts and it’s easy. I flail when I run, breathe erratically and rhythmless until my ribs feel like they’re broken. When it stops being easy, I’ll stop, too. I’m not noble, in that way, but nobility has never been one of the virtues I strive towards.

I may not scar, but my body bears the lasting marks of me running badly. Shin splints, twisted ankles, scrapes and skins and a pulled right hamstring. All of these ache and sear as I turn left onto Durant and keep pummeling myself with rain and wind.

I choke on the wet, sooty smell of car exhaust. It burns in my lungs until I pass Top Dog, and then there’s that greasy stink of fried things and oily green peppers. Then cinnamon and burning fat past the donut place, the lemony spices in tabouleh past the Mediterranean deli. I’m shoving past the few brave, stupid college kids who made it out in the rain, my hair a black, sopping slick across my brow. My shirt’s clinging to hot skin, this awful tent of humidity between me and the rain.

I plunge past the Hoagie joint with the gay looking logo, a bunch of leather daddies all gripping one elongated sub. It’s only a few more stinging, burning strides until I hit telegraph, where I stop and double, hands braced against my bent knees, taut and shuddering. I don’t think anyone’s looking at me, but I wish they were. I wish they were looking and wondering what haunted me, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d never tell, and it was all mine.

Chapter Text

He’s soaking wet and in my doorway. I can tell by the way he smells of petracore.

Petracore is the word for the way rain smells. You should never use it if you’re trying to be poetic, because it’s not a poetic word. The smell of rain, possibly the most romantic smell in the world, has an ugly name. There are loads of strippers like that, beautiful girls with names like Hilda and Betsy. That’s why they choose things like Magnolia and Candy and Misty and Jade. That’s right, my name sounds like a name Bertha the stripper would choose to match her pretty face.

Not that strippers are usually pretty. Usually they look like shit. Like Davey must look like shit, were I to look at him.

Petracore Davey is still in the doorway, dripping this puddle of sad all over my floor. The smell of rain all sharp and clean on him, mixed in with this chemical wet-pavement smell that reminds me of grade school, basketball games in April when the sprinklers would go on and chase us off the court.

He raps his knuckles against the chewed up wood of my doorframe, and I finally look up. I can see the daggers and heart tattoos glaring and red through his shirt, which is soaking and white and stuck to him. He probably did this on purpose. I usually can choose not to imagine what’s under his clothing, but he’s clever enough to not give me a choice.

I swallow and say “This is my room. The bathroom is another door down, on the left. There are towels there.”

He smiles brilliantly, but it falls just short of moving me because I know he’s faking it. He ignores my sarcasm and says, “Your door was open.”

“You opened it.”

“I fashioned my own invitation, yes,” he says somberly, dropping his head. He’s pushed his devil lock back and slicked it across his scalp, but it falls now like some sad, burnt, wet noodle. It drips on the carpet, water that is grey with dye. “Would you like me to leave?” he asks with his body still bent.

I don’t say anything. Every conflicting force in me battles, metal against metal and bloodshed. The whole shebang. The result of this war is silence, which is all he needs.

I watch him close the door behind him, and I dogear the page of the book I’m reading, shut it, then drop it to the floor. He tugs the shirt over his head, stretching his arms up so the skin of his stomach pulls across the hard muscle beneath it, this smooth pallor all prickled in gooseflesh.

My life is suddenly reduced to a poem with the word petracore in it. Striving for romance, but with everything that colors eggs beautiful stripped down to porous white super market shell. All the power and beauty and nuance reduced to one word that sounds like the name of a dinosaur. Petracore the Dinosaur. Horned herbivore from Cretaceous period, extinct for sixty five million years. We walked hand in hand as the moon dropped low and creamy in the sky, the air brisk-magical with the pure and promise filled gasp of PETRACORE on its held breath.

It ruins everything, you see? Like finding out that Caramel Mocha’s real name is Gertrude. The blood just drains from the boner.

I stare at Davey and his pearly flesh. His nipples are hard, because it’s cold. Not because I turn him on. Nipple is another one of those words. If you’ve ever tried your hand at writing any kind of sex scene, dropping the word nipple in there is an instant sexiness killer. You’d think the masters of erotic fiction would come up with a suitable euphemism, after all they figured out pussy and cock and the like to substitute for other mood killers, but nothing for nipples. Gertrude found Caramel Mocha and Sooyun Xiang found Jade, you’d think those erotica people would do the same.

“You didn’t come find me,” now naked Petracore Davey says from where he’s perched on all fours over me on the bed. “I was out there, self-abusing in the rain and you sat in here and read. Are you full of guilt? Will you contribute to the blood on the floor later with all of your guilt?” He nearly spits it, but it’s the spit of self-loathing. I’m familiar with the way that sounds, coming from his lips and from mine.

I cower, try and make my body as small as possible, so narrow none of me has to touch his cold skin. He’s shivering, his hair is quaking. I look at it so I don’t have to look at his eyes, because they’ll surely eviscerate me this time. I’ll be this hollow shell with intestines torn out, a lifeless heat generator for freezing Davey to crawl inside of so he won’t get frostbite before Han Solo can rescue him.

“It’s your job, you know,” Davey adds through chattering teeth. “Self appointed.” He’s so close to my face right now I can see the blackheads in his chin. If things weren’t so fucking weird now, and they were the way they used to be when we were friends and we talked and I wasn’t worried about his impending death all the time, I would hold him down and pick at him, squeeze the blackheads until they popped out. His eyes would water, and he’d scream, but ultimately when I had this satisfying miniature log of oil and dirt resting on my nail to show him, he’d agree it was worth it.

I don’t correct him about the self appointed part. He’s just saying it to get a rise out of me. He thinks, like I used to think, it was a role forced on me by everyone else, by him. I’m the only one that knows the truth: that I can’t help it. I don’t tell him this, though. I can’t because he’s kissing me, cold lips on mine.

I don’t kiss back at first, just breathe through my nose and quietly count in my head, reverse back from ten because the right way to ten is not nearly distracting enough. It’s hard though, impossible, even, and before I can stop myself I’m kissing him back, letting his tongue slip inside my mouth and trace the crooked path of my teeth.

My hands are in his wet hair, squeezing water out of it while he squeezes jizz out of me, jacking me off with a clammy hand that feels good anyway. He stops kissing me in favor of resting his head on my chest so he can watch his white hand on my red dick, the blood-and-snow contrast of us clashing. My come matches him, these ropes of blueish white dropping in weak parabolas on my stomach. I see his own dick is soft where it knocks around on his thighs, shrunken because it’s cold, not because I don’t turn him on.

I tell myself these lies like Hulga and Greta tell their clients Foxy Red and Bella Noche.

Davey and I are silent. He has nothing to say, and I’m saved because I can’t breathe, nose and mouth buried in the wet-enough-to-drown mess of his hair that smells, romance-free, of petracore.

Chapter Text

After the tour I never know what to do with myself. The last few shows I’m so overcome with gratitude and exhaustion that anything but my mattress at home seems impossible, but once I get here I don’t know what to do. It’s like I’m a shark that’s outgrown its enclosure, longing for and fearing the unrestraint of the sea.

It’s got to go somewhere, the restlessness. Usually it goes on the inside of my thighs.

This stretch of infernal is preferred because anything there is bound to be reopened and remembered and reminded by the seam of my pants, and Jade’s cheeks, sometimes rough, when he sometimes sucks me off. He doesn’t do that very much though. Usually it’s my mouth on his body, and his eyes screwed tight so he can imagine it’s someone else, the heels of his hands pressed to the sockets to force back any tears that might be threatening to push their salty fists through the careful closed scar of his eyelids. I think of every opening on the body as a scar, just one that will never heal, and instead stays suspended in this forever state of incomplete.

I contemplate and count all these permanent states of incompletion on my body while I stay curled in bed, feet cold and shins aching, own eye-scars shut against the light of late afternoon. My room stays dark for a very long time, creates the illusion of night until the sun sets in the west. This is how I know that it’s after four pm right now, and all I’ve been doing for hours is drifting in and out of fragmented dreams where I inhale water and very peacefully watch the sun ripple and disappear under waves of increasingly midnight blue, and count, loathing, all the openings on my body. I keep imagining pulling my skin off like one big, stretchy piece like a wet-suit with the inside slicked with blood, and thinking about all the holes, and getting nauseous.

Rolling over, I feel every broken thing in my body hate me for moving. I hate myself for moving. I hate moving. I hate the way that the mere action of inhaling and exhaling moves my ribcage up and down. I try breathing shallowly a few times, just to see if I can defeat the endlessness of that involuntary movement. Try and make it voluntary. I can’t, and that makes me just want to go to sleep again, so I can stop thinking about things that are so small.

Maybe it’s like post-holiday let down. How you always feel turned inside out after Christmas, with this brittle tree dropping pine needles all over the floor, a few broken ornaments, empty stockings and lights to take down off the house. It’s such an awful, empty feeling, being forced to embrace that your life goes on and you have school to go to and weight to lose. That January comes after December, and February after that. The horrible fact that it’s only going to get warmer, and dryer, and you’re only going to get older.

That’s what the first week or so after touring is like. I must shift from being a god, to taking lights off the house and collecting shattered glass. I’ve reaped the benefits of creating a masterpiece. Now I must create a new one.

I sob without words and without tears into my dirty pillow with the blue-black eyeliner and hair-dye smudges on it like some inky anti-halo. It’s just a sound that comes out of me, angry and raw and babyish in its lack of articulation. I wonder if Jade’s in a similar state, overwhelmed by the necessity of life calling to him, mocking and bright in its promise to keep going on . Jade is the answer to all of these questions I have about what to do next. Or, he was before we fucked and that fucked everything up.

The most logical alternative is to kill myself.

If I can’t create, if I can’t hold the wick to the flame and set myself on fire again, if I can’t speak to Jade now that I broke all the ornaments, then I end it here, after the last album. I try it on to see if it’s romantic enough, enough of a spectacle for me to be satisfied. The last breath I ever take will be Midnight Sun. I think about this, think about leaving Black Sails in the Sunset as my last ever mark on this world.

And I know it’s not good enough.

Still, I go through each song, wonder how they would be hacked apart and analyzed by faceless surgeon types in masks and white gloves, dissected as my suicide notes, how I’d leave behind Jade as my only witness to the context of their creation, and incidentally, the context of their interpretation. I don’t think anyone would be able to figure out what it all meant. If Jade can’t even tell, then no one else will. Or maybe Jade can tell, and he’s just keeping me twisting and glistening out on a wire, gills fluttering while I drown in air. Maybe he thinks I’ll kill myself if I know that he knows, and he doesn’t care.

I laugh, because Midnight Sun is a brilliant ending. So perfectly ironic. My cough comes out to split the laugh apart into pieces, and I sputter as I kick my covers off, making sure my cold feet hit the cold floor before I can think too deeply about anything and stop myself from making this trek. I pull on a sweatshirt that still smells like nylon and windex and un-deodorized sweat from the gym, then stumble out my door.

It’s like being in a video game, a first person shooter. I see what’s in front of me: the stained carpet that’s trying to be blue in places. The big plastic trash cans everyone keeps outside their door, some overflowing with beer cans and the acidic, fermented smell of old takeout containers. Framed pictures on the wall of past frats, showing rows of stupid looking, mostly white guys with 70’s hair. Delta Chi’s emblem painted in white, yellow, and navy.

I see all of this, but know there could be people lurking around every corner, ready to try and fucking talk to me. I dart quickly down the hall, doing my best to avoid conversation and interaction. I make it safely to Jade’s door, and let myself in the room.

“What are you doing here?” he barks, pissed I didn’t knock. I look at him, try and access if he’s as lost as I am now that the tour’s over. He seems fine. In fact, he seems like he was about to leave, jeans and shoes on and his wallet in his back pocket, keys in his hands.

“I had to come tell you something,” I say, blocking the door in case he tries to push past me.

He sighs, this incredulous sound accompanied by a bottom lip pulled under a row of crooked front teeth. I start talking, in case I lose him.

“If I killed myself today,” I say, and Jade makes this strangled noise, then sits down abruptly on the edge of his mattress. It’s so weird to see him on his own mattress, still, after getting so used to his mattress being the blow up kind, and being in my room. It somehow seems like a betrayal to see him here.

He’s perched on the edge, head in his hands, jiggling his foot so fast it makes me queasy. “Dave, I cant...” he takes a ragged breath, and I drop to my knees in front of him just in time to hear the tail end of his voice mumbling, do this anymore , and I still his thighs with my palms.

I press a rough kiss to the inside of his knee from where I’m sitting, and say “No, listen to me, listen. It’s funny, I promise.”

He looks up, eyes huge and red rimmed and shadowed by his hands. “Dave, I swear.” But he doesn’t tell me what he swears.

“I was just thinking, that if I killed myself, Midnight Sun would be the last...not chronologically, but in terms of the album, the last thing I ever publicly say,” I raise my eyebrows at him, give him a moment to come up with the punchline himself. He never does.

“The chorus of which is...”

“Beyond and to all time, I stand,” he says weakly, thickly, with lots of wet in his throat. He smiles, but it’s somehow a scared type of smile.

“Pretty good, huh?” I ask him, getting up and punching him gently on the back.

He walks to the door, pauses, then looks over his shoulder at me. “Pretty good.” Then he just stands there, breathing in and out like it’s killing him and there’s something he wants to say but can’t find the words. I’m usually good at predicting what people are about to say, but Jade’s the only one who I can’t read like that. I think it’s because his thoughts are original, whereas everyone else's are borrowed and stolen. That, or he never knows what he’s going to say either, so I can’t possibly know better than he does.

“I’m going out,” he says finally. Which I could have predicted, had he been someone other than himself. He sidles out the door, and slams it behind him.

I sit on the floor for awhile, pretending that I can find patterns in the carpet. Eventually I admit that I can’t, crawl into Jade’s bed, curl up with my head on his pillow, and begin the painstaking must of planning my next masterpiece.

Chapter Text

Somehow, my body has become a map of Davey Havok’s miseries. I do not mean this in a metaphorical way.

What I mean is, you could take an acupuncture diagram of my body and erase all the critical areas with things that make Davey Havok sad, or angry, or hopeless. That fleshy junction between your thumb and your index finger, when your hand becomes a right angle? Acupuncture diagrams say that location is connected to your head. Apparently, if you knead it when you have a migraine, the pain will subside. I don’t get migraines, so I can’t vouch for this. It’s probably bullshit.

But maybe I should reevaluate my faith in the unexplainable, because that spot on my body? The right angle in my palm? It gets mysteriously tingly, like a numb limb coming back to life, when Davey Havok slams his door.

I know this probably seems minute and disconnected. I wrote it off as such the first few times. But then it happened repeatedly. Each time the resounding thwack of plywood getting sucked into the doorframe, that nervy hum in my hand. The longer he stayed locked in there, the farther the sensation crept up my wrist. Some days it gets all the way up my forearm, paralyzing me from the elbow down. I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing in there, but it doesn’t matter, the pain is real. If I had an acupuncture diagram up on my wall, I’d erase head and replace it with door slam .

This is not the only incident of this weird transference of sensation. I get stabbing pains in my left lung when he bite his upper arm; I know because I’ll double over with that unexpected lash in my chest, and later that day I’ll catch glimpses of half-moon teeth stencils all over his shoulder, just beginning to bruise mauve and mustard. I get ear infections when he skips more than one meal a day. I get a sore throat when he goes on his silence binges. Sore, bloody hangnails when he’s in one of those I’ll never write again moods.

The list feels fucking endless. I get charlie horses when he drives my car up to north Berkeley at eleven pm and runs down to Shattuck even though there’s no fucking street lights up there and one day he’s gonna get mauled to death by coyotes. I get pink eye when he becomes overwhelmed by a rare onslaught of too-much-feeling and spend the afternoon crying. That’s right, pink eye when he cries. Do you know how much this guy cries? Do you know that pink eye is a highly transmittable infection ? That it requires a prescription treatment? If you missed it, I used the phrase “rare onslaught” above, in line 25, ironically.

Let me update the new acupuncture point chart: replace headache with door slam . Lung meridian with bite. Adrenal gland with starvation. Asthma with silence. Depending upon the finger, replace fatigue, arms, feet, heart, and head with writer’s block or denial of oneself as an artist, depending upon the cause. Pancreas, kidneys, and digestive trouble with running downhill. Chest and bronchitis with tears.

This is my fate. To erase every one of my own potential illnesses and broken bits with one of Davey’s. Somehow, I’ve become his human voodoo doll, just by the mere act of giving a shit. I care, when no one else does, and now I’m constructed as a mess of Davey Havok’s slammed doors and bit biceps and skipped meals. His silenced and still pen, his shin splints and his tears. As if my own misery wasn’t enough.

“Why is this happening to me?” I say aloud, because I’m alone in my car trying to drive safely though my entire right arm is numb with his locked, slammed door, and no one will talk to me because he’s been crying too much so I have a fucking infectious disease and my left eye is swollen shut and crusty with mucus. I’m on my way to Walgreens to pick up the prescription (in a car instead of walking because I don’t want to get chewed out by pedestrians for spreading my conjunctivitis around.)

I’m wondering about a lot of things, like why I chose to make this excursion on a Saturday, when I’m sure where will be no parking anywhere, and if I should stop at Pegasus Books and pick up a guide to acupuncture points for a personal and rewritten reference guide. But even above these two very pressing matters, I am wondering why and how Davey Havok dying is still my greatest fear, even though his death would mean my body could be mine again, and I’d stop losing sleep and suffering from a series of foreign, invasive maladies not my own.

Unless some part of my body knows that maybe if he died, I would too, and the acupuncture point for heart would be replaced with life and they’d both stop and this whole fucking mystery of my reluctance to let him die would be easily explained away with some deep-seated, biological and self-protective desire to survive.

Or it could be something more sinister. I force my infected eye open, so I can squint around for parking. Some of my eyelashes get torn out because they’re mired in eye-snot. I decide, as some lady in a silver BMW with a goldigger sticker on the bumper steals the only parking spot on Bancroft, that there is not a single thing that is good or glamourous or beautiful about love.

I get sinus infections when he drinks low-grade household cleaners to make himself puke up dinner and dessert. Replace liver, spleen, larynx, pharynx, and both large and small intestine with purge. I get lock jaw when he wishes he hadn’t made the grand mistake of fucking me. Replace back, knee, thigh, and umbilicus with regret. I get restless leg syndrome when he’s looking for me, and he wants to talk about dying. Replace palsy of lower extremities with morbidity. I get nightmares when he can’t sleep. Replace gall bladder with insomnia.

I get inexplicably, overwhelmingly nauseous in my gut, solar-plexus, chest, and the rest of me with that sinking feeling of combined guilt and self-loathing hypocrisy when he hurts himself. Replace self with self-injury.

I drive home without a prescription, because there’s nowhere to park and I cannot feel my arm, nor see in front of me. I stay sitting in the car for a long time, resisting the urge to rush inside and knock on the door I know Davey’s locked, that I know he slammed fifteen minutes ago, before I left. My eye keeps itching, but my throat is sore, so I stay in the car because I know he won’t talk to me anyway. My throat is almost always sore, now, it’s flirting with the realm of chronic condition.

I wonder how many days it will be until my heart stops, and also wonder by that time, if any of my body will be left that’s mine.

Chapter Text

I think I want someone to break down the door, with the butt of their rifle or their foot or maybe their shoulder all toughened with adrenaline and concern. I think I want them to rush in, heave me to my feet and shake me and ask me why I do what I do. Throw a slew of journalist questions at me, what are you doing and why are you like this and do you want to be different? And if they couldn’t break down the door, I think I want them to pound their fists on the outside and shout at me to come out; I think I want them to say my name and beg and scream are you in there? Where are you?

And I would answer, without my voice, I am mired in the complications and uncertainties of the word want.

I say this to myself, without my voice. I am mired in the complications and uncertainties of the word want. Because I do not know what I want. Because I don’t even know what it means to want something. If you know something will be bad for you, but you want it, do you still want it? Do you really want it? Or do you merely think you want it?

I sneeze. I am lying on the floor, on my side so my hipbone clicks and groans as it grinds into the hardwood. There is a whole army of dust bunnies down here, collecting behind my stereo and my record player, lacing all the crumpled tissues I tried to throw away but bounced off the rim of the wastepaper basket, landing elsewhere so they could become covered in this coat of grey and dead skin cells.

I’m on the floor because it’s uncomfortable. I’m practicing being uncomfortable this afternoon. Discomfort is one of my favorite things to focus on, because enduring it means I never lose self-consciousness; if I’m uncomfortable, then I can’t forget than I’m me, and I’m in a body I can’t get out of.

I inhale and sneeze again, rubbing the snot off my nose and leaving it there on the cuff of my sweatshirt, this shiny snail-trail of egg white. A ribbon connects my nose to my sleeve, so I huff out, blow it somewhere so I won’t keep sucking it back in every time I breath. I imagine the dusty air rushing in and out of my untarry lungs, coating them with little bits of me and everyone else in this house. Particles of every human’s skin and hair inside of my lungs.

I hold my breath.

I can hear footsteps outside my room, up and down the hall and never stopping in front of my door to break it down. I think about getting up to unlock it, so that I won’t have to withstand the embarrassment and shame when someone gives up after merely knocking and rattling the doorknob, before wandering off. But getting up seems impossible, and it makes me uncomfortable to think that no one will try very hard. I don’t want to waste a perfectly good opportunity to wallow in discomfort.

I try very hard to whittle down every wish I have to a pure want, free of thought. Something I just want, rather than something I think I want, or something I want a fraction of, or something I want but don’t want the consequences of. I settle on one truth: I want to be perfect.

The only other thing that is true is that I am not. Not yet anyway. So here I must remain.

It’s very uncomfortable for me to not talk. I think I want, desperately, on some days, to be understood. Because of this sometimes want, I talk incessantly, tell every person who will pause to listen every detail of my history, my artistic vision, my list of favorite bands and foods and brands of toothpaste. I use words like water colors, like an art with little control, little pigment, and lots and lots of dilution. It disgusts me, the layered nature of watercolor paintings. But I do it anyway. Just because of some sad, watered down sometimes want.

The sometimes want to be be understood, to be anything other than being alone. And people do come, and they do listen, and they do buy into it and they do fall in love with me. But they don’t break down the door. That’s the funny think about being alone. It feels the same when you’re lying on your floor between the dust bunnies as it does when you’re in a crowded room.

I’m practicing being silent this afternoon. To see if people still come and listen and buy and love when there’s no canary singing. If the tree still makes a sound if there’s no one there to here it. So far, I’m betting on no.

Silence is hard because I don’t have enough faith in people to ask the right questions so I can tell them the right answers. I am used to just giving the answers unsolicited. Waiting for the cue is difficult, it’s uncomfortable. Which makes it honorable.

People are hard because I imagine them to be beautiful, but every single one of them is flawed. This is why I don’t really want to be understood, why my want is a sometimes want, why I only think I want. Because those people who come, the listeners and buyers and lovers? They are never what I want them to be, never what I imagine.

People are hard because I am cursed with this dual ability to see the worst qualities in them, and the most beautiful. The hidden shimmer among all the layers and layers of shit, or if someone seems mostly golden, I see the spot of tarnish. I can’t help it.

This makes having friends a constant issue. I’ll connect to someone, but because I see everything wrong with them, all the flaws that make them different from me, all of the discontinuities that make real communication a syntactic mess, they can never be the one who breaks down my locked door.

All communication, on some level, gets reduced to mere syntax. The words themselves are meaningless, the meaning does not lie in the word itself. When I say want to one of my many listeners, one of my many buyers, one of my many lovers, they register the word want. But it is meaningless, because they don’t know if it’s truthwant or sometimeswant or thinkwant or wantwithoutconsequences. And if I say, I wantwithoutconsequences to fuck you, they wouldn’t know what that meant. Because we would be communicating syntactically.

Talking to other people is like calling a movie theater to get showtimes. You press 1 for the truthwant movie, 2 for the thinkwant movie. But it’s just programmed to respond with the truthwant answer when prompted with the number 1. The number 1 doesn’t mean truthwant. I mean truthwant. I want truth. But talking isn’t truth, it’s a huge labyrinth of symbols.

That is why, for today, I am choosing silence and the grind of my hipbone on the floor. Because no one I speak to will I be able to communicate with in something other than symbols. I’ll be speaking one language, and they’ll be speaking another, and we’ll have a Me to You dictionary between us that we look up words in, and say, ah, I see that in your language, want means todaybutnotalwayswant, swell, let me write that down. And then we’ll decipher, and carry on a conversation, but the meaning and intent and poetry will be lost in translation. It’ll always have that cumbersome second-language nature to it, that uncanny, that not quite right.

Some days I can settle for that, but not today. Today I want truth, and perfection, and silence seems to be the only delta that leads to that river. People are hard because they can talk, but they can’t communicate, and that it why they are always lonely.

Jade is the only exception to this rule, I’ve found. Or at least he used to be. I see his flaws, certainly, but not as tarnish on silver. More as capillaries of quartz through sedimentary rock. Something neither good nor bad, just natural and glittering in places, rough in others. Veins in a whole body, dividing it into unequal pieces.

It used to be that when Jade and I talked, is was without syntax. There was no dictionary. We just spoke the same language. Not even in a beautiful way, not in this earth-shattering, I’ve found my other half! way. It was like I didn’t even notice it, we just talked and talked and halfway into it I would suddenly realize that there was no mediation of truth. What was his truth was my truth, effortlessly.

I’m not exactly sure if I can even say, without words, the words used to. There is no meaning in them, because they’re syntactical. If I look it up my my own dictionary, the entry for used to says maybe we still do, but I don’t know anymore because neither of us talks to the other one.

There are people walking in the hallway outside my door, pausing to say nothing to each other, words upon words of nothing while they do that dance around the Me to You dictionary. I hear shoes on creaky floorboards. Someone is playing Slayer, and the floor is vibrating against my bones every so slightly to the base. It feels like I’m lying on a muted buzzsaw, whirring blades and sawdust. The voices all kind of melt into this uniform blend of nonsense and syntax, I’m fine, you? for shut the fuck up and a million other hollow connections.

Like a bell striking noon, I hear the chime of Jade’s voice somewhere in all of that garbled clatter and I think I want to know what it’s saying. I think I want that noun ending in ave to be my name. I think I want used to to mean still do. I think I want.

I think I want him to say, “Is Dave still locked in his motherfucking room?! I’ll break down the door if I have to...”

I think he does.

I open my mouth to talk, but instead, I sneeze.

Chapter Text

I end up in a place I’ve never been before. It’s this hokey, stupid patio. The most fucking stupid patio I’ve ever seen, behind this Indian food joint that’s only open for dinner. It’s lunch time so it’s empty. They’ve painted the pavement back here so it looks like tile, and there’s a fountain bubbling away, the water shooting out the spout of this tacky-ass magic lamp. It looks like the Genie from Aladdin designed this patio, like Disney’s version of Arabia materialized behind an Indian Restaurant on University ave.

I must look ridiculous sitting in the middle of it, with my toothpaste stained black sweats and chapped lips and ungelled, overgrown hair. My hair is such a mess. It’s taking over the rest of my body, a virus lysing other living cells and colonizing every square inch of my head. My lips are split and bleeding in at least four different places because I lost my fucking chapstick. I have pink eye.

I’m just waiting for someone to call the cops. Call them up and tell them there’s some homeless delinquent with conjunctivitis hanging out in the back of that ritzy hookah place that’s only open for dinner.

As I await the handcuffs and flashing lights, I sit on the edge of the stupid fountain with my ankles crossed. Excuse me, it’s not just a fountain. It’s a wishing well, judging by the rusting assortment of change littering the bottom of it. I need to waste time, so I start by hiking up the sleeve of my shirt and fishing around in the cold, slimy water and collecting handfuls of other guy’s wishes, and piling them next to me. Soon I have a dripping heap of promotions, true love, dead exes, and cured cancers.

People are getting fired, divorced, resurrected, and dying all over the East Bay. I pull up more nickels. More dimes. Scores of pennies.

There is a collection of fancy looking hookah pipes next to the un-wishing fountain, all dusty with their ash and foil. I put the quarters, the twenty five cent wishes, in the bowl of the nearest hookah. The wet metal collects little bits of charcoal and tobacco.

I don’t know why I’m here. I had to get away from Channing, so I left, but I kept passing all of the usual places I go to sit and think and feel what it feels like to be alone and away from the source of my chronic illness. I passed the benches tucked along Stawberry Creek which runs through campus like an artery. I passed the Goodwill, where I like to sit in the used furniture and pretend to read books.

I passed them all, and now I’m here. In Agrabah.

I chew on the neck of my shirt, letting all the little cottony strands of fluff and fiber stick to my tongue. I don’t know why I needed somewhere I’d never haunted before. Probably because everywhere I know is polluted by memories of him. And here I am, infecting Agrabah with the same disease. Pretty soon I’ll ruin every patio at every restaurant, every library and every bookstore and every inch of this city. And then I’ll have to move away, and take my pink eye with me, pockets heavy with other people’s wishes I stole and took back for my own.

The fountain burbles. I put my head in my hands and inhale shakily, disgusted by my own excess of melodrama. I needed to get away, so I left, but I still feel like shit. This is because what I’m running away from isn’t Davey Havok. It’s something inside of me, intrinsic, inescapable, and beating too hard.

If it were just him, I could write it off. Call it something else, something like “fascination” or “infatuation.” But it’s not just him. It’s not Davey Havok, causing me to feel. It’s a feeling that will remain, even if I destroy the whole city and move away and run and run until everything from Agrabah on has contracted pink eye. Because it resides within me. It’s grown into its own living, breathing, eating, fucking, shitting thing.

Which means it’s love. What an unfortunate truth.

I kick over the nearest hookah, on accident. It makes a ton of noise but doesn’t shatter, so I let out a sigh of relief, all the wet wishes glittering in the yellowy light of late afternoon. The illusion-of-tile is littered with powdery grey-white, and if a breeze were to come, it would dissipate into nothing. I watch the little unmoving hills of ash, and try and try and figure out how on earth I could have fallen in love with Davey Havok, who I hate.

I flick a penny off my thumb into the wishing well, where it sinks slowly, caught in the eddies of gurgling water. Make it go away , I wish. The feeling stays. I conclude that these things are a one time use sort of deal.

I think about the nauseating burn of Davey Havok’s fingers pushing into my ass, lubelessly. I think about the blood I draw to the inside of my cheeks when I clench my teeth into it, trying to banish the feeling of him invading me. My dick stirs in my sweats, the dirty ones I’ve been wearing for days.

I think about the way he sucks my passive lips into his mouth, like he’s trying to draw sensation out of me and into him. I wonder why I don’t let myself kiss him back right away, why I don’t touch his dick even though this desperate part of me wants to. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m afraid that if I touch him too much, I won’t be able to stop. I’ll get sucked up into his body and dependent upon the unreliable beat of his heart.

I know it’s only a matter of time, minutes even, before he follows me here. I already have the beginnings of an ache in my arch, the charlie horses I get when he runs. He’s on his way to me, pulling muscles and breaking bones.

I try and figure out how on earth I could have fallen in love with Davey Havok, who I hate. Who is a burden. Who, literally and figuratively, makes me sick. Who isn’t even alive all of the way. Who is despicable and self-pitying and helpless and arrogant.

And I know that the answer is as follows: I am just as despicable, self-pitying, helpless, and arrogant. And on top of that, I am a sucker.

It’s a perfectly balanced chemical equation. What an unfortunate truth.

______________

“Why here?” I ask him once I find him. There’s sweat on my brow from running, and I’m out of breath, shin splints singing in a shrill, electric pain. He doesn’t look up, just nods quietly like he was expecting me.

“You hadn’t contaminated it yet.”

The three letter word you hangs in the air, laden with meaning. I suck in thirsty breaths, bending at the waist to brace my hands on burning quads.

“I guess I fucked that up.”

He shrugs, looks up me with one eye, because the other one is sealed shut. A wound trying its hardest to heal itself, in vain and heedless to its permanence. I think it’s beautiful that the holes in Jade’s body try and shut, in spite of themselves. I think about all the places I’ve split, and how few scars are left to tell the stories. I take a deep breath, cheeks beginning to cool.

“Did you bring any change?” he asks.

I shake my head no, then walk towards him, sit down close enough our thighs touch. I feel his muscles gather, but he doesn’t pull away. “What are you running from? It was weird. I had to follow you. I’m used to being the one who gets to be chased down.”

He laughs: harsh, cold. “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work.”

I look at the single penny in the whole wishing well, glinting and copper like a promise. Then I look at the change, scattered around the cheap looking painted tiled, spreading out radially from the head of a cracked hookah lying on its side. “What did you wish for?”

He laughs, and then surprises me by putting his palm flat on my knee for a second, this searing, rough grip. Then he lets go, clenches and unclenches a fist out in front of him, the pantomime of fighting. Jade is quiet, looking thoughtfully to the back of his hand and the back of the restaurant, where paintings of ornate gold filigree frame the arched door.

After a few moments filled with the aching emptiness of water sounds, he says, “I’ve been trying very hard not to fall in love with you.”

I nod, chewing at the perpetually raw skin around my lip ring. After awhile, I ask “Is it working?”

“No,” he says firmly. He picks up another penny, tosses it with a plink into the water.

“It only cost you two cents?” I say, fishing his pennies out of the water. The skin of my hands is cold in and out of the fountain, shaking and shuddering with a faint, imagined whirring noise. I feel white and blanched from not eating. I wonder why I do this to myself, and to Jade who loves me.

“It wasn’t even my two cents. It was someone else’s,” he mumbles.

There are lots of things I want to say to him. My throat feels like it’s bursting with how badly I want him to know everything, how I thinkIwant him to break down my door, how I think I run only because I need him to follow. How the only thing I truthwant is to be perfect, and how I hate him because he makes it impossible. How badly I miss when we talked without syntax, how sorry I am that I fucked it all up with lustwant. All of this runs through me chaotically, jumbled.

“I miss you,” I say, rubbing my face on his shoulder.

“You’re going to get pink eye,” he says, rubbing his shoulder against my face.

“I’m sorry I had to go and kiss you that day in DC. I wasn’t acting to make myself feel. I was feeling so hard I acted,” I say, scars on the inside of my thighs itching with memory. “It’s always all or nothing for me.”

“I know,” he says, voice choked and moved sounding. “You either bleed to death or don’t scar. That’s got to be hard.”

My head is close enough to his jaw that I can put my mouth on it, so I do. I scrape my tongue against the stubble of his cheek, tasting salt and sleep and sad. He takes a ragged breath in, like I’m hurting him. “Somehow, it’s easier to fuck you than to let you know me,” I tell his skin.

He nods, day old beard scratching my lips. “Yeah. It’s really unfair, because I do the same thing. I want you, all of you. Your mind and the rest, and it drives me crazy that you don’t let me. But at the same time, I only let you use my body. And now that we’re fucking, we don’t talk.”

I think I want to say, Do you want me, all of me, or do you only think you do? I shut it up and make myself say in a reedy voice, “I want all of you, too.” I think of waking up every morning, my chest warmed by Jade’s back. I think about kissing the shell of his ear, about a future where I don’t want to die, because I’m sharing my life and that changes everything. I think of Jade filling all of the permanent holes on my body.

Then I think about him bleeding out on the floor, and take it all back. “At least, I think I want that. Or, I want without consequences, that.”

“Obviously,” Jade says with a sad smile. “I would want that too, if you weren’t a living, breathing, eating, fucking, shitting thing.”

My body hurts so badly so suddenly, because we’re talking without syntax again. We’re touching and communicating; it’s happening, and we’re both surviving. At least for right now, these passing seconds at three fifty nine pm turns into four pm and pretty soon, this place will be open for dinner and we’ll be kicked out. And then where will we go, and will that atmosphere sustain human life? Everything feels fragile and temporary right now.

“I feel like I’m not choosing life over death when I choose life. I feel like I’m choosing a more painful death,” I admit, snaking my white, blanched, starving hand into Jade’s bigger and sweatier one.

“I thought that, too. But when you love someone, I don’t think you’re choosing at all. Which is an unfortunate truth.”

With my free hand I push the handful of silver beside us into the fountain, and the splash from so much metal into water makes a plunk sound. My ass gets spotted with mildewy wet. “Ugh,” I say, squeezing him.

It’s getting cooler, and the sky has a weird yellow tint to it. I remember reading somewhere that the sky turns yellow before a tornado, but that might not be true. It might be a story I’m making up to explain why I can’t choose life or death, but heart keeps beating. I close my eyes and still see jaundiced sky, and the painting of filigree on the back of the building.

“I bet someone’s called the police, and we’re going to have to leave soon,” he says at a whisper.

I sigh, my breath moving my own hair off my face. “And then where will we go?”

“I don’t know. The police station. Jail. Agrabah.”

“To jump into a volcano,” I decide, choosing a more painful death. I feel him nod against me, his hand tightening around mine.

We wait for a tornado, or for the cops to come.