i can't idly, no, i can't move at all;

[wingborne]

Dave woke up with his fist balled against his filthy t-shirt. His leg muscles ached against his bones, so he stared at the slowly rotating fan above him. Outside, the faint caws of early black birds echoed against the titanium city, welcoming the iridescent orange created by smog industries. A faint gust blew through the cracks of their broken window, trailing goosebumps on his ghastly skin. Somewhere in the building, a child wailed incoherent rage against the deaf world, her cries echoing up the steel pipes.

He licked his desert lips with sandpaper tongue, and painfully sat up from the metal cot bed. The springs creaked loudly as he worked out the kinks of his aching muscles, rotating his arm in his socket. He swallowed back the urge to retreat back to escape the world, and phlegm.

His studio was covered in acrylic paint, stank of turpentine and smoke, weak from where it always leaked when it rained. His canvas was half-dashed with the shittiest art he could ever produce. Monday, he fancied himself a Picasso. Tuesday, Picasso was too mainstream, art deco was the way to go. Wednesday, art deco was shit. He had sold a piece a few weeks back, a hipster coffee shop with three cents to its name and proud to serve the poor and filthy with its organic free-range mumbo jumbo. Their coffee was overpriced because they bought it in a hipster country, imported away from capitalistic society. They still hung his work over the door frame.

He swung his bare feet over the cot, almost kicking John in the face. He settled for nudging him briefly with his toe, until John mumbled and curled up tighter against the floor. Dave stepped over him easily. He never understood why John couldn’t sleep in the same bed, which easily crammed two uncomfortable boys. Instead, John would lie on the floor, curled up and sleeping like an angel, legs and arms tangled together. John said it made him feel better. Dave didn’t care, but he generously dropped their threadbare blanket over him so he wouldn’t catch a cold.

Dave leaned against John’s sleeping figure, sitting on a dried splatter of pea green paint. He liked watching John waking up. Sleeping John used to be enjoyable, until they had found nearly-dead Jade. So nowadays, he settled for watching the long lashes to slowly blink open, bony hands to line the blankets, cracked lips opening. The shadows were unkind to his sunken cheeks, but Dave leaned over to kiss him on the forehead, above the skewed glasses they couldn’t afford to fix.

“Morning, sunshine,” he said hoarsely. He frowned and touched his Adam’s apple at the raspiness of his voice. His body, slowly but surely, broke away from him at the seams, like the way his leg uncontrollably jittered.

John sat up, cocooned the blanket. He didn’t say anything, but leaned against him for support. He smelled like sweat and dirt. Dave ran his fingers through John’s hair.

“Hurts,” John mumbled, and fell silent again.

John never asked, and never needed to ask. Dave knew John wanted his fix, but he wouldn’t beg for it. Dave had loved him too long not to know how the story fell into place. At John’s worst, he would cry into his hands, and scream until he was hoarse, leaving dark red fingernail lines down his arms and face. Dave had loved him too long not to feed him the drugs until John was soothed again, like a child.

Quitting seemed insensible, with the cutting edge of want livid in his stomach and his legs screaming to split open underneath him. John wanted to quit so they could afford food and water, but if they didn’t eat or drink coming down, there was no point in quitting. Then again, there was that strange little edge to John’s breath and the way Dave’s heart didn’t beat quite in time. The little motivations in cutting themselves off, paling against having enough money to watch Spongebob.

But Rose always said they were co-dependently self-destructive. Dave couldn’t refuse John anything he wanted. And John never tried hard to refuse Dave. He always had a little furrow in his brow, always with his piano hands pressed against Dave’s face to try and make him smile. But when Dave was feenin, he knew himself as angry. He knew himself as tearing apart their fucking studio piece by piece, scratching away at the dried paint on the wallpaper to leave yellow plaster wounds behind, screaming at John and the world. Just one fix, that’s all he was goddamn asking, his own goddamn studio, give it to him now, fucking whorebag, just give it to him, one more, just one more, what did he ever ask for, what did he even have, fucking cold bastard, everybody was a fucking bastard. John would relent, always relent. Not because he was frightened, but because he loved to see Dave happy.

And mostly, though he never said it, because John feared a clean Dave would always be unhappy.

Maybe he was right.

Not that Rose was the paradigm of martyrhood. He could almost hear her voice in his head, telling him, now, Dave, her mother had alcoholic cocktails, so she had her own batch of cocktails from Percocet, Oxycodone, Valium, Ritalin, Vicodin, Seroquel, Adderall, Xanax, and a whole slew of chemicals. She merely took the edge away from her pain with a liberal dose of societal chemicals, the modern day equivalent of television dinners. She allowed the brightness of the world to encompass her, where the tactile sensation of her fingers felt watery and slick, and she watched her plastic potted plant grow and twist into magnificent shapes and a multitude of bright gradients before the shimmering whiteness took her plants, and took her fingers, and took herself. She faded away into the brightness, until her throat filled up with the shimmery silk crawling down her throat and collapsing into folds inside her stomach. She felt considerably better afterwards.

He hated her attitude towards the drug life. Like getting her fix through tiny bottles was any better than snorting or injecting. Like she was any better, stealing from her mother. Like her mother didn’t know, like her mother would say anything.

But he couldn’t hate her, who couldn’t sell a book to save her life. No publisher would take her, and she kept taking more and more dosages until her typewriter was filled with only NO MORE for three pages until she slumped over, curled up on her bed, and cried out softly when they tried to open the curtains.

He should call her. Make sure she was still alive.

“They’re watching me,” John said softly. The bags under his eyes seemed liked bruises, looming larger with his dilated pupils swiveling to watch their cracked ceiling.

“Yeah. They’re watching you. The little aliens, they’re watching you right now. Watch you shit and pee, it’s pay-per-view up there, kinky little bastards.” He lightly hit John’s thigh, trying to nudge him up. But John slowly sank down, spine crumpling like paper, and his voice barely a whisper.

“They’re always watching me. They won’t leave me alone, they won’t stop, they’re trying to talk to me,” and John clenched his hands around his ears, squeezing his eyes shut. The blanket, unsupported, fell around his sharply-outlined elbows, white and pink scars lining his wrists, count the ribs underneath stretched drum skin.

See, that’s how he knew John was crazy. The alien delusions came hard and quick after John’s first few tries for graduation, and slumbering panic attacks afterward. But it wasn’t crazy to believe in aliens. Hell, Dave almost believed in them, not that he was the poster child of sanity. But John was crazy because he believed aliens would still be watching them.

If there were any aliens out there, they wouldn’t want to be watching them anymore.

“C’mon.” He tried to shake John, but John shook his head and muttered soft no’s to himself as he curled up again, scarred and scabbed knees drawn up to his chin. Dave left him lying in the strange hues of green and yellow, and went to wash up in the bathroom.

The beautiful design of their apartment had squeezed the sink directly next to the bathtub, leaving a rectangular space for a mat. They used to have a mat, but Dave sold it a long while ago. Sometimes, he could remember it. The shitty piece of fur rag had been blue, with a little picture of a dog on it. Back when personal hygiene mattered, he used to drop crusty toothpaste over the dog’s face.

Now, he turned on the faucet, which reluctantly coughed up a thin stream of yellow water. He washed his hands, and splashed some on his face, before running his hands through his thin and matted hair. His face appeared in the mirror like a phantom, an unknown separate part of him. He could barely recognize his red eyes in the sunken sockets, the pallid color of his skin showing his bruises in unhealthy hue. He had become morbidly thin now, but he didn’t care.

This skeleton in the mirror wasn’t him.

But that was his shirt, his shorts, his piercings, his tattoos brighter than bruises. That was the only way he could say it was himself.

He always felt empty, like the wind whistled through the holes of his face, without the silver web of jewelry lining his face. A story behind every single one of them, and they were all sang to the tune to fuck you, that’s why. A lip ring dangling, pleasantly hot when steamed with kisses, septum hanging from his nose, ears decorated with tiny darlings, and a single eyebrow pierced with a perfectly respectable hot pink on his good days. Today, he chose gray, because it was not a fucking good day. Most proud, on the concave of his stomach, was the little belly ring. He bought himself the best jewelry to the chorus of John’s little cries of Dave!, because fuck you. He fingered the shiny cherry one briefly, but decided on a word emblem for today. BITCH. Sounded about right.

He rubbed his face wryly, where the gray gears inflamed on his chest crept slowly around his jaw. They always croaked like clockwork to the time of too late, dark cogs perpetually splayed across his chest, until his tattoos allowed some skin to be on them. He could count each one, and John always did. John touched the crow on his back, who carried blades in the talons, with the dark wings spread out beating against his shoulder blades to brush against his ribs. Money spent coloring in the tattoos was money well spent, even if John grimaced around the needles. He had a record spinning on his arm, and on his other arm, a gratuitous heart with BRO scratched out in the middle with an arrow piercing it, both glorious irony and inglorious truth.

He had lost track of his brother a little while ago. Before he moved to take care of John, his brother used to hook him up with the sweetest dealers, the best cuts. They used to spend their weekends lying on the patio, hundreds of feet above cold cement floor, laughing their shit off. He used to think Bro was the coolest guy in the world.

He still did, nowadays. Just in a sadder way, like sepia colors flooded his memories and he was left watching his junkie brother stand on the rail, half-joking about stepping off forever, laughing his ass off. Nowadays, when he called, their messages were short breaths. Bro would tell him to quit, and then tell him a good place to get some weed. He knew his brother was too steeped in drugs to ever stop, too much in debt to ever live, and too high to ever care. He missed him, sometimes, the days when he didn’t know shit and just smoked a joint with his older bro. Missed when he wasn’t fucking scared out of his mind he’d wake up and be his brother.

He should call him. Make sure he was still alive.

Staring at his beautifully terrifying image didn’t pay their overdue bills. He peed into the cracking toilet, and thought his piss looked peculiarly yellow. He casually pulled up his shorts to his hips, and then lowered them as an afterthought. Against John’s better wishes, he got John’s name printed on his ass, anyway. Showing them to him was worth the trouble. He left the bathroom without washing his hands.

“How about we stop tomorrow?” he said. The words tasted familiar on his lips, even as he rummaged through the clothes on the floor. Nothing was clean, but he steered clear of the ambiguous underwear stained in yellow and the T-shirts splattered in blood red. Never could tell if it was paint or actual blood. He settled for going commando, and a long-sleeve shirt so he didn’t scare the kiddies going out for school with his scarred arms.

“It’s okay?” John sounded quiet, and terrified.

“Just one more hit. Then we’ll quit for good.”

When Dave turned around, John was already scrambling under their cracked floorboards, where he kept his stash. Dave didn’t care to watch what he already knew would happen, so he fished around the hole in the wall, where they kept their money next to the fritzing blue and red wires. The white envelope was thin, and he grimaced as he peered inside. He would need to pick up a job again, soon. John had a job, which killed him slowly, but Dave always swung from sale to sale on his shitty pieces of art. Amazing what a crackhead and an addict could do from the power of love.

John was smoking when Dave turned back around, and he wasn’t sad he missed the depressing scene of his boyfriend desperately picking up every granule. It was freaky as fuck, and he was sure he looked the same, but he didn’t like to see John so desperate, keeningly wanting, needy, with no shame and no dignity.

“Fuck,” he muttered, peering at the empty boards.

John was running low. He hit up his drugs harder and faster than Dave, but it was worth it, to see the rosy color return to John’s cheeks and fingers, and to see John look up at him adoringly. The crashes had been getting worse since John switched to a lower grade, on his own insistence, because the price shot up due to some economic bullshit. Which meant John now came home from his jobs with trembling hands and wouldn’t move from the television for hours.

But when John was high, he was fucking high, and even as Dave counted out the few scarce dollars in the envelope, John was draping himself over him.

“Are you going out today?” John mumbled into his neck.

“Yeah. I’m out.” He eyed the boards one last time, in futile hopes for drugs to suddenly grow from mildew. Going cold turkey had seemed a convincing idea when he was high, but now his body trembled and his stomach churned.

“I’ll come with you.”

Dave couldn’t help snorting.

“Wow, okay, you do it by yourself then. And I won’t give you any of the sex when you come back home, because you’re a complete jackass. You should see my dealing deals. They are so dope and they are so real.” John kissed him on the ear, and Dave felt happier despite himself. Rose was right, she was completely fucking out of her mind with her meds most of the time pretending she was normal, but she was right. Co-dependently self-destructive, couldn’t resist feeding his boy drugs so he could get the kisses and love, like a coin-slot machine with buckteeth and broken glasses. And his boy toy couldn’t stop feeding him drugs back so he would be happy and laugh in his face, instead of yelling and scowling, a broken machine painting in black and white.

“Do you have work today?”

“No,” John said regretfully. “Tomorrow. And we need the money today, God.”

“It’s cool. It’s your day off. Maybe we’ll do something.”

John worked as a gopher on movie and television sets, with his little headsets and intense hours. Dave wondered what John had been like clean, heavy bags under his eyes and jittery hands, drinking ten tons of coffee per day and pissing strange colors against the bowl. John told him he had started because the hours had started getting to him, so he just took it when he needed it.

John just never stopped needing it.

“No, Dave. No, it’s not cool. We should quit. We really need to quit.” John pressed his cold hand against Dave’s arm. But, as always, he seemed frightened, wide eyes swimming as he stared up at him.

“We’ll quit. After today.” It was logical. They would just spend the rest of their money today because John would crash in a few hours, and he couldn’t fucking go to work tomorrow when he was dragging razors over his skin. John had the better-paying job, so fixing him came first. And he liked seeing John happy, talking a mile a minute about his stupid movies, kissing him, laughing so hard he couldn’t choke out his own sentences.

“Do we have enough money?” John murmured.

“Yeah. We’ll make it stretch. Be like one of those did you know’s, did you know we have enough money to cover half the world and maybe a candy bar from the drug store.” He closed the envelope quickly, though, so John wouldn’t see it. They should have had enough, but John had a bad trippy month and Dave only got paid when someone was too drugged up to tell the difference between his paintings and a non-shitty work of art. They were hitting the hard end of the month, where paying for water and electricity was a bad idea in retrospect.

It was partially his fault. He kept lying to John, pretending he had a second job as a DJ. He actually stayed out at the local playground, sitting on their colorful plastic red tunnels and staring at the stars. Once, he could have played at the nightclubs, but he needed to sell his turntables.

But he lied about his second job because if John believed they had enough money, maybe John would stop saying he’d one day go to school and actually fucking enroll. Dave had failed out early, but John was the one who had the gift. Back in the day, listening to John play the piano was a rush, each note beautiful and held high into the air, admiring its fucking glow and bathing in the sorrowful songs. He could have gotten into fucking Julliard, Dave would swear on all his nine lives spent high off his ass.

It was John who sold the piano.

It’s expensive to have a piano, Dave, he said, and that's really all there is to say on the matter.

“You should buy something to eat, then. You’re so thin, jeez.” John giggled to himself, running his fingers along Dave’s ribs. Dave tickled behind his ear until John fell off, snorting like he was choking, because fuck him, he ate like a hog. Wasn’t his fault he couldn’t keep the weight on.

“Maybe we’ll go out for pizza tonight.” They had respectable store credit in the least respectable pizza stores in town.

“Okay. Do you have to go now?” John kissed him, obviously with romantic lewd thoughts in mind. Sex between two addicts must be a fucking scary sight. He knew once, when the apartment was still being wrecked by their trips, they had been too busy fucking to realize John had torn his arm on a loose nail, a deep wound where they could see his bone. He’d sent pictures to Jade to make sure it wasn’t infected when they sewed it back together because they couldn’t afford the fucking hospital bills. They’d been careful after that for almost an entire week, before Dave woke up with burn marks on his thigh.

It wasn’t like they could get it up all of the time, either, but Dave liked trying. He liked putting on some deep music, which rattled their floorboards and their bare furniture, liked laying him down, kissing him, touching him all over with his calloused fingers and pressing around the dark bruises of their sickly skin.

But today, Dave felt like his muscles were going to melt into his bones, and the craving crawled upon his insides until the vomit hedged on his lips, so he pressed his lips to John’s forehead in finality.

“Watch some TV or shit. Don’t piss yourself.” He wished he could say that jokingly. “And if the boys in blue come, give them what-for.”

“Maybe I’ll go spray-paint their windows with ‘my boyfriend’s an ass.’” It was hard to tell what John was saying, because he slowly swung into the painful arc as he rocked from his toes to his heels, snorting out his laughter before the last syllable fell on the paint-splattered floor.

Dave laughed, too, but he stuck by the door frame with his cell phone in his hand.

“Yeah, don’t do anything too fun without me.” His way of saying, John shouldn’t do stupid shit without his babysitter. Dave talked the talked, but John laughed his ass off when he walked the walk. He’d seen John send water balloons at policemen, and giggle hysterically to himself on the floor until he peed himself. He didn’t want John to get arrested, get three years of hard time for possession and five more years for being an ass. Conjugal visits weren’t half as fun, and yeah, it scared the shit out of him to think John would serve time in the big house.

But John grinned up at him, so lovingly, and kissed him on the nose so mischievously, Dave felt his mouth go dry and hope today, John would feel too high to move from his blanket cocoon and mess with the police.

He pocketed his cell phone on his second try from his trembling hand, slid on his sunglasses so his pinched up eyes wouldn’t burn. John kissed him again, on the lips. His heart surged with the irregular beat because sometimes, he loved him so fucking much, and it hurt. But he only left the room without looking back, slumping down their concrete stairs even as he could hear their door mournfully shut.

The hot sun broke upon his back, mounted reverentially atop the looming cement buildings. Tarred streets, scattered with dark and loose gravel, twisted beneath his feet. Steaming hot cars on phosphorescent rims rolled past him. People tiredly ducked from store to store with logo-covered baseball caps pulled over their eyes, sinister and shadowy. Even in the midday sun, the crows screeched above, echoing from peeling Pepsi billboards and scraped green dumpsters filled with degrading shit and infants no mother could love.

He thought he could coast through his estrangement with his lady powdery love for just the few hours, or hell, even a day, but he underestimated the heat. A city rookie mistake. The suffocating waves pressed upon his sweaty skin, throbbing in time with the pain that sloughed off his flesh in globs of slice and dice red muscles. His legs carried a phantom ache and he choked back the vomit threatening to spew on passing children. The cramps intensified. He wouldn’t last.

On Third and Magnolia Street, John’s usual dealer smoked a joint on the side stairs of a Chinese restaurant. He sat hunched over in the restaurant’s dirty apron and hat, folds of his face drawn back into a grimace when Dave sat next to him to make the deal.

They’d been fortunate to find a fair dealer on this side of town, one who wouldn’t rip them off and rip them out. Bro had introduced them, and Jade had made the call because she knew everybody’s safety code. She had been a fucking mental psychic on drugs, who planted trees and wanted to save the Earth through love. Even though Rose was the one with the stable job and presentable appearance, Dave never shook the feeling that Jade was the most successful of them all. Which made no fucking sense, because she was a goddamn hippie. But she was always smiling and laughing with her cracked yellow teeth.

When she was hopped up on shrooms, she claimed to see the most amazing things. Rose wryly asked about Cthulian miniature monsters, the ones featured on television shows and games, but Jade always insistently denied. it’s the universe, i feel like i’m not a body. i sit down and i am relaxed, i sit down underneath a tree and i am not myself. my finger tips stretch beyond me into everything, i see how small we are and the smallness of hatred and love and emotions and humans, humans are so small. i am the stars and i am space, i am the smallest burning quark entering the world, burning fast and hard and so small, i am the planet, big and large, and looming with my gravity and my moons around me, I am the meteor and the comet and the asteroid and the places i must go are the places because i have been destined to journey for a thousand years in a body that is not my body, and i am not myself, i am the sun with blistering fingers and i am the cold rock, and, dave, oh, dave, it is so cold.

It explained why they found Jade lying in the snow, staring at a speck on a leaf, with her lips and fingers blue. They had taken her to rehab, where she weaned off drugs. But she was more successful and happier on them, and she relapsed quickly. She was a self-made crap philosopher, who said to be yourself, to believe in tomorrow. She believed in the tomorrow, but nobody believed that crap. Being yourself was enough? And what crappy tomorrow was she looking at when she begged for five more dollars for one night, and she ate shitty sandwiches while walking the dogs for a living? Mostly, she traveled from city to city and stayed on people’s couches until she found someone rich enough to pay her to clean a dog’s ass, and she sent them postcards when she begged enough money for her fix and a faint reminder of her friends.

He remembered her, though, as asleep. She slept on his dreams with her delicate features, long dark eyelashes blanketed in snow, wild and dark hair tumbling over her shoulders as she dreamed about the better lands.

He would call her if he could. But he wasn’t sure if she was still alive.

Back in the splitting heat of the city, he carefully bought two dime bags, with fruit flavoring because he thought it’d make John happy. He’d never be able to calculate two cars hurtling at each other, flying to their doom at 66 mph, but the G’s per dollars was fair enough, even if it hurt to peel off the bills. The dealer didn’t say much at all. A fair deal was a fair deal, especially for consistent quality like that.

He excused himself to use the backwash bathroom of the restaurant, stinking with stir fry and shit. He washed his hands, licked his chapped lips, and vomited like a propulsion canon into the toilet. His nose hovered inches away from where hundreds of people must have sat their pulpous asses, but an invisible hand wretched out his insides. Clumsily, he turned to tug down his jeans and take a shit, trying not to spew chunks of empty food down his red shirt, with the faded logo of an unknown band. He gripped his stomach, trying to hold himself together, trying to stitch together the skin underneath the shiny little dangling pink BITCH but he vomited into the sink and heaved emptily when that was gone.

But he prided himself on never crying. John told him that he never cried, even when he wanted his fix, even when he coming off, even when Rose told him in such a dignified voice that she couldn’t fucking do it anymore, even when Jade laid like a dead girl out in the snow because the planets were too big.

Fuck, his stomach was coming apart, like a thousand souls screaming and ripping at him. Like someone ninja’d into him and replaced his stomach with a goddamn fucking fleshy stone, sliding against his sides, like all the stomach acid boiled against him. He heaved in choked sweat-filled gasps on the floor, trying to shit out the world, Atlas shitting, pelvis jerking at his every touch, couldn’t even move, just wanted to sit there and shit forever at the faint cries of stir fry.

When he finally leaned against the wall, he flushed the toilet. He zipped up clumsily and turned on the faucet at full blast, splattering some vomit on the pallid tiled walls. Wetting his hands, he tried to clean himself up, get a pen, fucking Jesus, he didn’t want to look like a first-timer, lose everything before he got it.

He left the toilet a mess, rolls of wet toilet paper streaming down the sink. His legs wouldn’t work, like a mechanical toy separated from him by a chainsaw. They shook, ached, trembled, and he leaned against a cool alley with rough brick walls to choke down his pain. He stumbled the last few steps and collapsed next to a dancing electronic dildo, eyes watering. Yawned, yawned again, and tried to walk to the back of the store without screaming inside his mouth.

He knew the store, faintly. He once sucked a guy’s dick in the alley behind the shop, knee-deep between a trash can filled with banana peels and used condoms. Gone down salty and ugly in his throat, but he left with enough cash to buy that shiny iPod in the store, fourth generation of the family. When he went home and kissed John that night, he tasted the man on his lips.

He loved his fucking little iPod and never regretted it for a second, but he wouldn’t let John listen to it.

His hands were shaking when the dealer finally came around the corner. No idle chit-chat, peel off the bills, get his little bag for his bang, leave. No surprise the dealer seemed reluctant to part with the bag at such a low price, leaving Dave almost enough moolah to either buy a candy bar or stash the cheap bills away to send John back to school. Maybe the dealer was convinced by Dave’s sweet talk, or Dave’s bullshit promise that John had a father who was filthy rich. Everybody in town knew about John as some phantom boy toy, since Dave refused to let John make the deals anymore, after the one time John came home and didn’t leave the studio for days.

Not everybody knew John hadn’t talked with his father for years, John who always paled an ashamed hue when he thought his father might find out about his life. Their lives.

Still afternoon. He climbed the steps to their studio two at a time. First floor, the dowdy mother vacuuming with her hair curls pinned up, prim white dress, almost fuckable if squint. Second floor, door was open to an old man playing jazz, die in half a day without anybody noticing, liver spots against his dark skin and outdated moth-covered wardrobe. Take a break, vomit into the cement, crawl a few steps and pretend he didn’t. He climbed on, half-praying to find John wiggling in paint instead of shooting spitballs at the police station.

When he opened their unlocked door, the sight was far more pleasant. Not only had John accidentally knocked down his ugliest canvas in the room, somehow he’d been coaxed up to the thin metal cot, where he slept with the ragged little rabbit in his arms.

John usually hid his rabbit from the faint fear Dave would try and sell it. But Dave wasn’t that stupid. Nobody would pay a dime for that ugly drool-covered thing. And, sure, maybe he liked that John was so happy with the sack of fleas.

“Hey. Wake up.” He nudged John’s knee, but John only murmured sleepily. His cracking buck teeth gnawed on the bunny’s ear, and Dave knew only a fucking loser in love would find that shit adorable. He patted John’s face a few more times before he stumbled back into the tiny bathroom, where he kept his shit in the cabinets when he could remember to stuff it back.

His spoon, his shitty syringe, spilling them onto the floor and trying to get everything ready before John woke up because John was a fucking wimp against needles. Smoking was a waste, but John could never shoot himself up the right way. He did eventually get that stud in his ear, and that nerdy-ass protino neutron pack or whatever from his stupid-ass movie tattooed on his arm, and he waved it around with such pride. It was nerdy as hell, but when Dave was in better moods, he could spend hours just studying John’s arm against the fading light of the broken window.

He nearly burned his fingers with the lighter before warming up his cooker, hand carefully pressing his stomach together. The feeling of taking a dump combating against empty hunger was a weird-ass feeling. In the haze of the pain, he could still see the flickering light of the flame, wispy to the touch.

His fingers mechanically ran through the rest. Cotton ball, syringe, inject, tie off his arm with John’s belt and play the game of find the vein. He had years of experience on his arm, where he covered the track marks with stars. Each star meant another smattering of scarred shots, and another shot meant another scattering of stars.

The burning sensation in him didn’t leave immediately, but he relaxed against the sensation deep in his throat, buried in his larynx and screams. The sensation traveled to his stomach and he heaved, suddenly, the hit taking him by surprise, but there was nothing left in his throat and there was something pleasant in his scalp, now, like when John ran his fingers through his hair, and he bit down on his lips as he slumped on the floor with his face between the boards because it was goddamn erotic, like when John kissed him on the lips and clockwork tattoo and on his naval and laid there between his legs and he made a soft sound on his lips because it was all of that, just inside him, and he breathed heavily through his flaring nostrils.

Somewhere, he could feel John sleeping on their bed. He should get up, call in some pizza, fuck his boyfriend, watch the television. All in that order. Good day. Great day, because fuck it, John had work tomorrow but he was here in the apartment today, and he could touch his boyfriend and his stupid ass tattoo arm and kiss his hair and smell him all over like a creeper.

It was peaceful, for a while. He heard the birds outside, felt the heat radiate against his skin and sizzle against his ink, and the people downstairs climbed the stairs like they always climbed the stairs, a never-ending flight of cement and somewhere, a present from D. Strider’s stomach bag to the floor.

The first sign should have been the time. He laid there on the floor, and he stared at the wall because his head had fallen strangely and he couldn’t be assed to get himself up. But he stared at the wall, and it was like time was frozen. He could actually see time, literal time, because it wasn’t solid like a rock, but it wasn’t watery, either, it was solid and liquid and gassy like a baby burp and he could watch it forever, watch it waft away from him, around him, surrounding him, touching his tattoos until he felt hot and flushed under the skin, because the lighter had burnt so bright and the flame had flickered so temptingly, soft and gentle against his scorched skin, he was burning up with time, he was on fire because time licked at his heels and it felt good.

The first sign that he noticed were his arms. He tried to get up, push himself up and away from the cold floor. It felt like he’d been watching time for a million years, though he couldn’t tell. He wanted to wake John up, or maybe even paint a bit when he was still feeling good, but his arms wouldn’t move. He thought he accidentally sent the neuronic and moronic signals to his legs, so he tried again. Imagined his muscles twitching, moving, raising his body from the ground, propelling him to the easel or his toppled over stool. But his arms wouldn’t move.

He tried to curl his fingers, and then just his pinky. He watched from fifty thousand miles away when his fingers didn’t react, just laid there, pink and shriveled up like shrimp gone wrong. He tried again, and again, until he would be shaking from effort. But that was the thing, the goddamn thing, he wasn’t moving at all. Couldn’t even tell if he was breathing, but he certainly wasn’t shaking. No matter how hard he imagined the little muscles of his pinky to creep up at him, he was trapped in his own body. Tried harder, and harder, but it was like pissing with a cap over his dick because his body weighed five thousand tons and his hand laid there like a dead fish.

There were footsteps.

He couldn’t turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw the faint shadow flicker against the melting wallpaper. His breath remained shallow, but he wasn’t controlling his breath. He wasn’t controlling anything. Fuck, the broken window, he shouldn’t have thought the fifty million floors up meant anything to robbers or cops. Or maybe their unlocked door, he’d forgotten to lock it and John wouldn’t remember. Somebody had gotten into the apartment, and fuck their shitty little brains for seeing the boy lying on the floor and the boy sleeping on the bed and thought it would be a great time to rob them. Or worse.

John. Fuck, John, he was still asleep on the cot. Fuck. Fuck, no, fuck. He pulled at his arms, go, retrieve arms from the chest, but nothing was moving and the world was melting slower around him and the shadows were flickering. The footsteps were heavy and real, it wasn’t a pipe dream, wasn’t a nightmare, it was a real fucking heavy footsteps like a boy from the streets, scuffing against the paintings. He could hear the person walk over to where he worked with his paints, hear the sharp disgusting sniff as they must be looking at his works.

He pulled again, harder, until he would be pissing himself in the pants if he could even control his prick. His face wouldn’t even change, like a solid wall, his arm laid there beside him, but—there was a reflection, on the lighter he had dropped, which hadn’t burned down the apartment. He couldn’t move his pupils, not even his dumbass eyes, but he could barely see the flowing shapes from the round metal. Could see the shadows flickering close by, could feel his heart beat madly in his chest even when his fingers wouldn’t move for him.

His poor, broken heart, tick tock tack tick tock teck tick tock tuck tick tock fuck, slamming against his ribs so hard, they might break, the hot blood surging to his ears, but he couldn’t move from his body, like cold weights had been placed upon him but he could see the shadows and fuck, he could see John, still sleeping in the corner with his stupid rabbit, fuck, no.

Shit. Shit, the shadow stepped closer to the cot with his fuckass heavy steps, and Dave screamed inside with his teeth gnashing together and he begged his body for this one fucking thing, let him up, let him control his body one more time, he knew enough about fighting to at least get John awake and out of there, and he could hear Rose’s voice in his head, saying begging was step number fifty, and he didn’t care, and Jade had been sleeping when they found her in the cold, and fuck, no.

The shadow was drawing out something long, and Dave watched the reflection of the lighter because it was a sword, who brought a fucking sword to a city of guns, and why would he have a sword in the first place, and John wasn’t awake, John couldn’t give him any harm, just take their shit and leave, just take it, he didn’t have much shit but they could take it all, but, God, no.

Bone crunched as John’s heart split open.

He woke up with a start, or half a start. He was still trapped in his body, but when he shifted his attention to the lighter on the floor, he could have breathed a sigh of relief at John’s breathing, and sleeping form.

There was something wrong. He tried to curl his fingers, but they still wouldn’t move. Leg, leg, arm, arm, nothing was moving, and the wallpaper was blurry. But John was still alive, and his heart, which had jumped the shit up his throat, settled back down again in its cushy muscular seat. Shitty ass dreams.

Except he heard the footsteps again.

He knew what was going to happen. It went in slow-mo, like taunting him, and he struggled to grip his hand to anything, everything, to stop him, because fuck, he’d seen this movie, he’d skipped to the end and he’d give this two thumbs down, where was his fucking hand, he couldn’t feel his face or his fingers or his toes and the footsteps pounded on the floor, reverberating up his cheek and up his bone, and each step, his heart sank lower and lower and his breath stilled until less and less air wheezed out from between his lips and his cold lip ring and he heard the sword

and he woke up with half a start.

No.

The footsteps came again.

A thousand times, the time burned him a thousand times, or it must have been a thousand times, because sometimes it went faster and sometimes it went slower, and sometimes when he woke up, his walls were cracking and falling and sometimes they were silver and sometimes the footsteps went faster and sometimes they went slower and he was screaming himself hoarse inside his head, no, fuck, no. He should have locked the door, fixed the window, why didn’t he just do that, just one simple thing, what did he have to do to get John’s heart to keep going.

The millionth time, when time dripped from him in hot flames and rolled on the floor, he watched the lighter with almost resignation. Except this time, he caught something. Even behind his shades, he could recognize that stance, and he should have recognized it the fiftieth time because that cocky stance, the way he held the sword, that stranger wasn’t a stranger, and for the first time in all the repetitions, his breath caught in his throat.

The stranger turned around, and he could see his own face staring at him.

Time was burning him, melting the ink off his flesh and roasting his muscle until he smelled like chicken and tasted like human, and burned clean his bones, and he watched Dave step towards him, heavy footsteps, felt him push him to the ground, and suddenly he could move his hands again, but Dave was pinning him down and he could see himself in all his glory, his skull beneath the dark cogs winding around his face and chest, the ring swaying from gravity, his blood red eyes staring at himself, and he was choked, choking, the time was burning at him, burning at him, burning at him, nothing left, just himself and him, the rest of the world melted away, minutes melted into hours melted into days melted into weeks melted into months melted into years melted into goddamn centuries before Dave smiled, cheekily, opened his mouth, and said

there they go there they go

And he was sitting on the bed, now, not John, John was gone, and it was his studio before he met John and back in the day before he met John who kissed him and loved him but Dave was standing in the room, Dave with the shades making it hard to read his face his expressions his emotions, his mouth softly opening and the room smelled like mustard gas and roses and the paint dripped off the walls like a splattered rainbow, all different sorts of colors, rust bronze gold iron olive jade teal cobalt violet fuschia indigo purple the time licked at his feet.

listen dave strider has become unstuck in time

Dave stood in the room, a quiet figure in red, who had seen him naked in the dark and knew he touched himself underneath his blankets, saw him sucking dick behind a porn shop downtown, watched him pull at John’s hair until his scalp was red.

ask yourself about the present
how wide it is
how deep it is
how much is yours to keep

bone splitting, felt the skin rip off searing blinding hot pain screaming out scrambling to keep his skin back on falling to the ground the tattoo on his back split open wings sprouting losing his feet his legs melding together it wasn’t his body anymore it would never be his body anymore he didn’t have legs he didn’t have feet he didn’t have toes he had heavy weighed wings as muscle shifted shoulder blades broke wings dipped in blood scraggly wet and damp and pained and

this was the dave who watched him as he sold off his turntables his children who he promised never to part wedding ceremony bells ringing except divorce papers served up those were his dreams and he’d never get to live them

all moments past present and future always have existed always will exist

when he was young, he kept a ninja sword up on his wall. Dave wielded it now, and as he watched, slashed his throat. clean cut, he could feel it tear apart his skin and split apart the layers like peeling back a bloody onion and blood gushed down his front no more breath no time to talk he watched as he stared down at his dead body and it was his own fucking dead body and the blood splattered on his hands and his face was twisted up in fear and he screamed as he stared down at himself so pale so still

ill call it the childrens crusade

throat cut out sliced out gouged screaming no breath to scream this dave watched his friends die watch his brother lie on the sofa and die with white powder coating his nose and mouth watch rose surrounded by her little red green yellow pills red green yellow red means stop but didn’t watched jade sleep in the snow, the cold snow

among the things dave strider could not change were the past present and future

shot in the back felt the bullet hot cut against his spine pierce through his lung like a balloon he was screaming shit he was screaming he was screaming but nobody could hear him red everywhere blood in his throat bitter and hot pulsating up time burned his skin to his skull scraping away his fingernails screaming without a voice without breath body breaking splitting open this dave watched him get a tattoo because fuck you he said fuck you but he meant fuck me

everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

exploding he was exploding his arms torn off his legs twisted away from him he could see them lying there in a puddle of blood raw meat torn away at the jeans bones stucking out the pulp he was screaming screaming head twisted off blood and bone splattered on the walls of his studio lying there thousands of feet away thousand of miles away this dave watched him grow up never stop taking the drugs watched his heart miss that beat too many times watched him die face down in an alleyway

so it goes

dave!

the daves in the room laid there dead and in pieces he was dead and in pieces and nothing made sense time was spiraling out of control couldn’t anyone see it couldn’t anyone see they were running out of the time the time they lived was a goddamn asshole a literal asshole of time they were all shits who were running out of time to live their lives they would die empty and ashamed on the floor in their vomit

oh, god, dave, god, fuck

daves piling up on the floor dead daves his own death his own mortality staring him in the face not the worst part the worst part was he could feel time licking on his back knew behind him he could see himself young and happy with his brother just once he said so he did just once every time was just one more time so that counts it all counts he was so young so invincible when did his heart start skipping that beat when did he sell his dreams away when did he lose control

dave, please, fuck, wake up, please

he was going to die one day and he could do fuck all to stop it

dave, i love you so please don’t
dave don’t go
dave!






The dealer sold him a bad cut.

He woke up slowly, lips swollen together, but twisted in thought of the fucking asshole. No wonder it was so fucking cheap, and he’d been so needy that he didn’t bother to suspect a thing.

His fingers twitched, relief flooding his body like cool water. His left arm felt numb, but he lifted up his right arm easily. His breath caught when he found his hands swabbed up clumsily in gauze. Blood caked brown against the wrap, some dried lines still dripping on where his shirt ripped.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the mirror was broken. Explained it. They wouldn’t be getting a new one any time soon.

He didn’t know the day or time, and he felt strangely empty without the knowledge. But he stank of sweat, and the shirt had plastered to his armpits and groin. He tried to sit up, but his left arm was still numb.

John was sleeping on his arm, curled up around his bunny, and looking thin and exhausted as always. His hair was dark and matted, his lips slightly discolored. But there was something so innocent about him when he slept, so Dave slumped back against the floor carefully, so he wouldn’t wake him up.

The fan slowly rotated above him and the darkness outside penetrated inside the studio. He’d lock their door, board up their window, and try to find a clean batch so he wouldn’t have to think about the nightmares he had seen. Didn’t have to think about what they meant. What they really said about him. The nightmares inside him twisted up his stomach and his heart, but he made no sound.

He knew he’d maybe never recover. Never stop thinking about what he saw, never stop trying to figure out what they meant. His eyes rolled back up to the ceiling and thought it was a shame the aliens stopped watching, a long time ago, because he could show them fucking amazing things. Could show them that even though those thoughts lived inside him, he felt strangely at peace for the moment. Part relief of waking up, and part knowledge of something, something warm and there and smelling like sweat.

He wrapped his arm around John’s shoulders, and kissed him on the forehead. To make sure he was still there. Thought, maybe that was why John didn’t sleep in the bed. For moments like these, fragile moments like these, in his drug-addled dreams those moments were his, but they weren’t here, and he curled up around him carefully, and tried to go to sleep because it might be night but he knew he was tired. In the thin shadows, he balled up his fist against his shirt, and tried not to let reality go.