"I-I just came in to get paper towels for Lindsey," Pete stutters, immobilized by the scene he's unluckily witnessing.

Dallon somehow takes no blame for this, only watches my reaction as if he isn't a part of the consequences, but he's a half of it just as I am, and he'd better be ready to explain.

Without so much as a glance at Dallon, I levitate and intersperse my fingers onto Pete's, dragging us further into the hallway as I utter a simple command. "Get me out of here."

Pete, trusting me throughout the turmoil of this bumpy relationship, follows me down the corridor until we plop down on the bed of his room and I prepare for my delivery.

"You don't need to elucidate anything, Patrick," he assures, stopping me. "I just want to understand why you would do this if you hate Dallon."

Avoiding the question directly, I ponder, "Do you recall when you told me to touch my arm and see how it felt?"

Pete nods slowly, unsure of where this is going from here.

"Well now it's like that touch doesn't even matter anymore," I complete. "Because Dallon touched my arm, and he should be the worst of all people, but it didn't feel like anything, and I—"

Upon seeing the first of many tears emphasizing my melancholy, Pete swarms me and slithers his embrace over the top of my frail body in a protection of something special he's convinced I possess. "Patrick, why should Dallon be the worst of all people to touch your arm?"

"B-b-because..." I crease myself into Pete's chest in order to discover a stable place to channel my message. "Because he was the one who did it." I had predicted a steadfast response after wrestling the words to be torn out from my queue one by one, but all Pete does is become weaker than me at the news I had spent so long shielding from the world.

"Patrick" is his raspy feedback, and he is in need of a home more so than I am, so I allow myself to become a provision for him.

Gluing Pete's hands to mine once the tables have fully flipped, I study each nick and bump on his bones and tendons and pigmentation and everything that is wholly his. "Dallon James Weekes attacked me two years ago, and ever since then, I have been soaking myself with hydrogen peroxide and warding myself against the public, because that was the only secure thing I could describe when I was first assailed by the ambivalence of this anecdote."

"Why haven't you told someone about this?"

"I'm telling you," I contend with a pitiful shrug.

"And I'll tell Gerard." Pete elevates to do just that, but I pause his activities with a single look of desperation.

"Please don't."

Pete's agitation is at its horrible birth, and he taps his foot along to its hell-bound chorus. "Why not?"

"I'm doing better, and making my attack common knowledge isn't going to help me further." Abruptly then, my lips click their heels with an idea. "I know what will, though. Would you like to replace those bad memories with good ones?"

Pete's cognizant of what I intend to do, ink skidding over his sides as his shirt is drawn from him and bundled on the floor by his own force. "Are you sure you want to do this?" my friend asks, a bit nervous himself.

For the first time in two years, I'm equipped to start an optimistic relationship with someone new, so I agree to the conditions. "Positive."

Pete exhales a shaky river and manumits my shirt from me so that we're both showcasing our varying torsos, and Pete's response isn't nearly what I had foreseen. "Aww, you're so adorable!" is his squeak, Hudson River irises blithe with what they're perceiving.

"I'm unhealthily underweight, Pete," I counter, almost covering myself up with the comforter but refraining from it once reminding myself what the purpose of this excursion is. "I'm far from adorable."

Pete revokes my statement, weeding out the insecurities from my mouth with an abbreviated kiss. "No, just look at your cute little tummy!"

Through the cage of tickling, I am challenged to expel a nearly ruthless "don't call it a tummy," but Pete is passive to my desires.

"If you won't listen, I'm going to narrate a story for you," Pete elects, tone suddenly somber yet bittersweet.

I concur with his route, flinching subtlety when my friend seeds goosebumps onto my chest with the same delicate fingers that I want to hold me every night.

Pete zooms in on his path down my chest as the Sisyphean butterflies march along with him, reciting his journey with a joyful step. "I remember when my friend and I were talking about suicide, how she didn't understand it because there's apparently always something to live for, that nothing can ever get bad enough to kill yourself, and I wanted to scream. I wanted to reprimand her. I wanted to punish her. I wanted to make her understand that she was wrong in every way, and that things got bad enough for me until I was crying over piles of medicine as I slowly increased the dose, because that would surely prove her incorrect."

I hadn't suspected the course on which this story would descend, rather suspected a gleeful story intended to lift me up from the underworld I've been living in, but it must represent something meaningful to my lover, so I don't repeal his privilege of chronicling the tale.

"Contrary to popular belief, depression isn't magically solved when you do something great. Depression isn't magically solved when you're hanging out with friends. Depression isn't magically solved by forgetting about whatever it is that's making you sad, because none of us really know what that is."

Pete's right, and I hate that it has to be that way with depression, because we are all entitled to a happiness, to a happiness that doesn't come and doesn't breathe and doesn't give a shit about people like us, even when it should, because we've suffered through hell and busted lungs just to find that we are endowed something that is off taking its leisure time without reckoning that we're all waiting for it to repair itself and repair our lives and repair everything that we destroyed just to get to it, and once again we're fucked, and we're fucked really bad.

I have a story of my own that's a mirror image of what transpires all day for idiots such as myself, a story we never care to tell, tucked behind the last page of a book like a library registration pocket that no one passes their attention over, the grim version of a film that we all hope to watch but never do for fear of shuddering doors in our chests.

The event was almost biblical in a sense, with the obliteration of the familiar, with the transformation of the rivers to host cyanide, with the carnage of bodies that had so much potential for stopping this plague, but it all existed in our minds, and we were convinced that we had to kill it.

So we spoke in silence, in hushed tones, shepherding soft doe eyes poised to please the watching lexemes that had not yet been uttered, never stopping to wonder if they would ever be released with the daring flick of a tongue — just waiting to strike.

And very soon, the world began to plead, blood pouring from its mouth as it spewed out words that tore its throat, that always labored to fabricate struggle, mundane capacity, but were as illegitimate as ever.

The truth, however, is drugged with disparity, tumbled and strained until it's nothing but the gentle breeze who tucks us in at night, and that seems to be the only credibility we can seek out. We crave the childhood with which we were never blessed as our teeth turn to fangs and our quietness to hunger, and even our own soul does not recognize us before it is poisoned with black.

It seems that the world is our representative, though it promises a reform and supplies its own perverse alterations. It is nothing — nothing worthwhile, nothing real, nothing that benevolently lifts us over the clouds to return to our fireplaces and our homes — but we can't do a single thing about it.

We belong to the paranoia.

The absence of substance has established an authority over us, fussing and moaning over the things it can never entertain, the lively shades of yellows and blues, and it hurries us back to the tricks our minds play on us to make us sympathetic, like we're in the emergency room, and in some ways, we are — our entire existence is a clarion call for death.

The commander of our stability twists and mutilates our words and hands them back to us as if it were a balloon animal, as if we're supposed to be grateful for their depiction of suffering, and once we accept that doctrine, once the falsifications have been washed down our throats, we caress the tattered shards of glass and wait for ourselves to bleed so that we can taste our own soul and know just what kind of dangerous we are.

It's a hoax, and we believe that there is a light, but there is only impending sickness and hatred for anything that hovers over us, and that's the sole ending that preys on people like me, so I write myself a symphony of my own and harmonize with the screaming tenderness of my lover as we drown in the little chambers we've constructed for ourselves.

"But maybe she was right," Pete confesses, fingers stationed at my cadaverous hipbones as a lone tear circles the hem of my jeans. "Maybe there is something to live for, and maybe it's you. Maybe it's smelling the pure scent of rain before it comes and ignoring the storm that follows. Maybe it's thrusting spears into my spine just to announce that I've survived."

And we laugh, and it's more delicious than anything we've ever devoured, almost saccharine in the realization that we never know what's real and what isn't, but we're actually doing fine on accepting the truth. We're both just intercenine wolves pillaging each other for solace, and it's somehow working.

"Depression isn't going to win me, because I know that I am not totally lost. I know that there are people out there who don't deteriorate as I do, and the disparity between that group and myself reminds me that a healthier lifestyle is attainable. I know that intolerable boredom is as fleeting as my happiness is, and I'm willing to make that sacrifice to grasp something whole. I know that I am viewing life from a distorted lens that will eventually clear to unveil a terrain where joy is abundant, and the melancholic ghosts who bear my name will have vanished."

The allegory drums on without the worry of being depleted of cassette string, Pete's fingers gripping my waist as he dives into the gulf of my neck to encase his cracking countenance in secrecy. "And perhaps it's insensitive for me to say so, and I must clarify that I'm not condemning depression for doing what it does best, but pills are only temporary, and they will disappear once I swallow them all, but they could disappear just the same if I threw them into the trash."

Pete grazes my chin with the raven fringes of his locks, heat lingering so close to me that I feel the batting of his lashes on my cheeks. "That's the other option. That's the thing I will live for. And you, Patrick — you are a part of it, and I want you to say that you're willing."

And in the megalithic monument between us, my breath is a fog over my lover's as they mix, and my reply is just as warm. "I'm willing."

Willing to survive this war. Willing to love Pete Wentz. Willing to be tangled in the sheets all night with him and not give a shit about any subsequent torture, because torture is only temporarily, and it will disappear.

~~~~~

A/N: BOY OH BOY THIS WAS THE BEST I COULD DO BECAUSE I HATE SMUT

also this is my third chapter today

current vibe: talking about jesus and satan and stuff despite being an atheist

~Dakillinga