"Patrick, why were you screaming?" A haggard Frank Iero, with pitch hair riding the sea and boxers corroding his legs, leans in the threshold, banishing the waste from his tear ducts with the insides of his fist as he anticipates my reply as to why I woke him up at one o'clock in the morning with my uncontrollable shrieking.

Winnowing the comforter between my fingers as the last stable thing I can hold onto, nervousness distorts my speech. "I-I had a nightmare."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Why would I want to talk about a nightmare that devastated my cooperation with reality in a matter of a few hours? Why would I want to talk about hands grabbing me from every direction with the same black gloves that have appeared everywhere? Why would I want to talk about glancing up to find that the beholder of the gloves isn't even Dallon but Pete? Why would I want to have a fucking panic attack in someone else's embrace as they silently condole with me at a dream they don't even understand? Why would I want to make myself so vulnerable like that when I could be slashed down so much more easily?

"I don't know. I just..." A wave of sobbing billows through my lungs until it's all I can manage, and Frank, recognizing my inability to do anything else, comforts me in a hug.

"It's okay. You don't have to tell me."

"I feel like I owe you something, but I'm just comprised of secrets that I can't disclose to anyone, so I'm fucking lost," I gush like the self-pitying character in a high school drama movie that all the girls crowd around while covertly despising them.

Frank weaves an arm around my shoulders in reassurance. "You don't owe me anything, Patrick. You're an individual person."

I shrug hopelessly and overdramatically, refusing to accept Frank's law. "But you're always so kind to people, and I treat everyone around me like shit."

"No, Patrick, that's me," a figure opines from the doorway, a figure who haunted my dreams only minutes before, and I crawl deeper into the bed in fear.

The memories of my nightmare rush back vividly, baptizing me in blood and terror and everything in between, and maybe our relationship shouldn't be as hectic as it is now, but Pete has scarred me in the span of twelve hours or less, and with something as impressive as that, I can't resist fleeing in trepidation.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I screech, wielding the nearest pillow to me and flinging it at the man I used to call my boyfriend, and the connotations of the action are more hurtful to him than the pillow's impact.

"I thought you two were madly in love," Frank spectates, elasticized with glances between us in intervals. "Why do you hate each other all of the sudden?"

Pete's vision is shackled to me while he speaks, brows leached by candid ache. "Because I made a terrible mistake."

"The hell you did," I mutter as I slant away from him so as to not revisit the events of my harrowing nightmare.

Frank squirms anxiously through the awkward (more so for him than for us) silence, proposing an offer as a solution to the quietness. "Should I leave you alone to, um, sort things through?"

Pete agrees before I can object to the advocacy, and I find myself barred within the version of reality in my nightmare, but this time I can't escape by simply cutting through my lids, who happen to be as stubborn as me.

"Please go away."

"I just want to explain," the man pleads, begging me to address him with an unbiased approach that I haven't utilized in years.

"Explain how much of a fucking idiot you were?" I finally snap while awarding him the unbiased approach he was beseeching me to give him.

"Yes, explain how much of a fucking idiot I was." Pete searches for my permission before he begins, which I provide with a mere nod, and he carefully selects his phrases to start. "I was dead set on loving you, Patrick, but then...there were these notes I found in my room."

I pretend to be disinterested, back the only thing greeting the man, but I'm actually cleaving to every word like it'll be his last, and such is a vow in these circumstances, because you can't really stay angry at someone who gave you everything he had, at someone you told all of your darkest secrets, at someone you cried with at a wonder as simple as the horizon, because it might be that you don't want to stay angry at someone like that, as they mean too much to you to let go as if they're nothing, and Pete definitely isn't just nothing.

"The first note accused you of being a bratty child who will only pull me down and stop me from achieving my personal goals, so I, of course, didn't listen to it, because I love you very much and don't consider you to be any of those things." Pete's tone then lapses into sobriety, and the tides are less jaunty than I suspected they would've been. "Then the second note was aimed towards me, ordering me" — Pete's throat cracks in the epicedium of his message, and I allow him a moment to gather himself — "ordering me to kill myself."

I could remind Pete that ordering someone to kill themselves is actually illegal, even more so if they go through with it, but I'm cognizant that what he needs is emotional support rather than a lawyer, so I contribute all that I can.

"That's fucking awful."

"No shit." Pete gropes for my hands, and after flinching away, I replace them for him with the reminder of my promise for emotional support. "I guess that's why I lashed out at you, and I was weak. I was so fucking weak, and I shouldn't have acted the way I did, but we both know I'm an idiot, though that doesn't make it okay, either."

My eyes are commodious with infatuation, my heart downloaded to a new server that fits me well, a server of receptiveness, and it projects my love towards the man with me.

"So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm incredibly sorry for what I did, and I hope it won't happen again." Pete anxiously waits for my approval, which slams into him with the collision of my lips upon his, a fierce sonata shivering under the moonlight as it's sheared through the blinds and deposited to our fluttering lashes.

It's like mending ourselves over and over with more strength each time, like a web reticulated into our fluid bodies as they swish over each other in dives and bows and dips towards unexplored patches of skin and heat that rouges our cheeks, and it's all just ecstasy drenched in stomachs colorful with more excitement than ever, and I'm enjoying every bit of it.

Pete claws at the hem of my t-shirt, raveling it an inch at a time until it pours over my head, and I do the same for him so that we're two bare chests clashing against each other and painting the hues of a flame on each other's skin as allegiance salivates from our arched spines and spills onto our tumbling bodies, now guarded in the sheets.

Promises sway from our mouths, promises that we intend to keep, promises that we intend to throw away, promises that we intend to forget about in five years until they're but ruins of saudade, but in this moment we're connoisseurs of each other's wine, and we're phlegmatically helpless about it all.

Butterflies hum in my bones as they metamorphose into kisses spouted from Pete's gentle lips, meandering wherever they can discover vacancy and quilting my complexion in blooming violets and roses, and I giggle with each spring season wending across me.

Pete only toys with the area where my hipbones have been installed, drawing spirals from the tip of my pelvis to the curve of my waist and back down again until he's decorated the entire space in vines invisible to the human perception but alluring nonetheless.

Musing on a smile that pokes out of Pete's composure, I climb onto him and reciprocate the favor of spinning butterfly chrysalises onto his bronzed flesh — in the crook of his neck, down the swerves of his collarbones, along the blade of his jaw, everywhere that I can plant adoration, and it's all so amazing for both parties.

Every aspect of the man clinging to me is beautiful in the light, his Black Sea tresses cascading onto my nose as I tug at his lips and snapshot each second to be welded into a scrapbook that narrates our love to those who could never understand otherwise. Leaves coil from his lashes, fanning me delicately and sailing over peroxide dust and vampiric complexions, and he performs it all so amiably.

But I can't pretend that everything is all right with us, because it's not, and as much as I detest lies, this one feels right enough to dismiss, but I know that it's not partial in anything. Pete overstepped his boundaries when he shouldn't have, and he'll have to pay the price.

However, I've become skilled at acting when it's against the law, the only real thing in this affair being the panting selling my lungs to the devil after doing something that rescinds all of my morals regarding lies with a cackling harmony, and I should be more apologetic than I am.

Sleeping in the arms of falsehood is more dangerous than you'd think, and I've found myself in the crossfire.

~~~~~

A/N: what the fuck was this

this wasn't supposed to happen lmao

why do I go against my outline like this I need to fucghing clhill

current vibe: when I drew a young Perez Hilton bc I hate him

~Dakhilton