The ocean on the wall has cultivated a life of its own, if only inside the ridges of paint and canvas above the headboard, and it now dances before me, curling its waves to ride the sky with a pleasant giggle as it subconsciously snubs me for being so trapped in a world where I could easily step away, but it's just an ocean, and it doesn't know anything about me.

And yet, through its haughtiness, the water offers a location in which I could drown, and that concept has become intriguing to me, omnipresent in an already suffocating mind, and aloofness is irrelevant in death.

Perhaps it's a hallucination how the waves veer into each other — such wonders are typical for me, and treating them with a psychologist is partially why I wish to drown — but it's mesmerizing nonetheless, so hypnotizing that I can feel the liquid painting my lungs already, erecting a tower of water within the organ so essential to life, and I'm already on my way to the grave.

The sensation is nectarous once you shun the fact that my funeral will continue to be planned frivolously, but it's not like it's significant once I'm dead, so I beckon the water into my body until it will conquer my soul and glue my lashes shut, and even if I'm still animate, I won't protest, because it will all be over soon anyway.

The existence of Pete Wentz obstructs any further thought of decomposition, and it seems as though I should be hiding something from him physically, but the only thing around me is the water in my lungs, and that's a gratifying being...yet it should be protected still.

"Are you all right after...you know?" Pete's whiskey eyes have lost their bite, enameled by an untraceable gloom that pursues his weary feet as he enters with a close latch on the door.

"Um, yeah, I'm fine." My words are spiders in delicacy, fusing a web of betrayal, but Pete is apprehensive.

"That's great and all, but" — my friend descends onto the edge of the mattress, a pensive incision whittling his movement — "that's one of the most common human lies."

My tone slopes into disappointment, deadpanning, "So when it's candid, it's never believed."

"Well it's rarely candid, so it shouldn't be a problem." Pete's head angles in discouragement, dooming me to a fate of a gnarled stomach.

"Is this not a rarity?"

"This is evasion." My companion's voice is like rock, beaten away towards disintegration and the chastisement of my perspective.

"I would've thought you'd noticed me evading you since the day we met."

Brows careening, Pete challenges me. "Who's to say I didn't?"

"Please," I counter, a laugh being coughed up. "Anyone who is cognizant that I'm a freak doesn't stick around for the aftermath."

"You hated when Spencer and Jon called me a freak." Pete zooms in on my lips, weathered by the teeth around it, and such can be predicted by confiding in those you shouldn't. "Why do you do it to yourself?"

"Because they were liars, but I'm not."

"You say that all the time, but everyone is a liar, Patrick." Pete entangles his hands in mine, a lachrymose elocution showering his vocal chords. "Everyone."

"No, that's impossible." I snatch my hands away, frightened by the idea of my theoretical amorality. "I am not a liar."

"But you're lying right now." A quizzical expression chars my friend's face. "It's a paradox, you see."

Discomfort scars my countenance, a shift to my shoulders chasing it. "Then fuck paradoxes, okay?"

A chuckle cuts the tension with incomparable precision, a sort of clemency. "That's not exactly how things operate."

"If it's not, then it isn't imperative."

Pete quiets me, kissing my lips with his finger. "And that's not a proactive mindset."

"Who cares about proactive mindsets when you have a lovely painting of an ocean guarding you at night?" Gesturing to the picture, a cogent grin carbonates my mouth, and Pete is a tad relenting.

"Patrick, don't sidetrack me," he prescribes, nibbling the tip of my button nose. "Even if you're adorable."

My arms coast around Pete's neck, entertaining the strawberry fields nearer to me. "Am I really, though? Adorable, that is. I don't think I am."

"We've already established that you're a liar, so how can that be a fact?" I realize my friend's intentions are to soothe, but being labeled as a liar isn't so soothing.

"Pete, please stop," I implore, a warped sob marring my prudence.

"Okay, I'm sorry," the man apologizes, igniting vampiric skin with terse contact to my forehead. "But you have to remember that life is shit, that there will always be liars, and you may be one of them."

Proposing partial truths has occupied my time, because official lies are absolutely obscene and undeniably dirty, an unfortunate concept in my brain, but it's apparent that Pete comprehends none of this, and he's making a joke out of it all.

A portion of me desires to hate him for it, but we just emerged from a crisis, so an abhorrence such as that would be more than indecent. Rather, I should love him for staying with me through my fluctuating emotions, but our relationship has been feeling like falsified air lately, and we're both addicted to oxygen masks that supply us with the drugs we never dispute.

So I breathe in the strawberry fields as a consolation, as an amnesty from those masks, bundled in the hospitality of my companion's chest as I speak and notice the vibrations played entirely by me. "That may be so, but I'm trying to be honest with people now."

Pete's head bends around to observe my emerald irises, entranced by my acute conclusion. "When did you ponder that?"

"Recently, in fact." I delve into the man's neck, seeking comfort in the activity. "I'm sure Dr. Saporta would be proud of me."

"Don't listen to that fool, Patrick," Pete advises. "He's no good for you."

I shrug into him, ambivalent about the situation, because on one front, I need a hell of a lot of help, but on the other front, Dr. Saporta is not the man to administer it. "He's the one with the PhD, contrarily."

"Which you know is fake."

"Yeah, I guess." I stir inside Pete's arms, reveling in the static silence until Pete bleeds on the shards he forms while cracking it.

His voice is a husky bruise, tears fortifying it without a professional command. "Do you know how much you mean to me?"

My fingers blacken my lover's complexion, a plague of sorrow eroding his body, and all I can do is utter his name. "Pete—"

"It's ghastly how you get worked up over trifling events, because you're basically tearing yourself apart like that." Tears gleam on the ebony slate of Pete's visage, opposite factors mingling with each other to form a variegated champagne.

My extremities elongate to absorb the substance diving from my best friend's eyes, so strange and iridescent upon my flesh that it's an itch to keep it any longer, so I cast it away to be rid of the depression it represents.

"You're not okay, Patrick," Pete murmurs, smudging me with the falling liquid. "You know you're not."

I pattern a cup around his chin, imbibing those penny eyes. "Pete, I'm trying for you."

And then caramel merges with pine, tethered together by parted lips dropping crumbs of faith from tongues too spellbound to speak, and my focus is chained to my lover's taffy mouth, scrubbed in a divine beauty that no one can replicate, and abruptly the taffy sighs into my own rosewood, bound by the passion of our impending troubles.

It's a fixture in which the hues glide across each other, soot spread across our padlocked lashes as they step on their counterpart's skin with a dainty coyness, and the sense is a remarkable kind of cure, healing sutures to scars, but it's nevertheless necessary to regrow the wilting flower that is our relationship, but instantly when the door opens does our flower cry out in agony and implode on its rotting figure.

Dallon Weekes — the one who demolished any friendship I sustained among the people in this house, the one who's now angry at the repercussions he brought about.

"Pete, would you come with me?" My attacker's jaw suppresses any exploding rage, though barely — his veneer is smoldering into an earnest wound.

Pete's vision passes between me and Dallon, confused. "Why?"

The man glares at me, damning my inscrutable existence. "I don't want your boy toy to get too heated by what I have to say."

Pete flips him off, but I lower his hand for a route of negotiation. "Just go. I'll be okay."

Dallon's limbs gnaw on his hips, a chortle rasping his throat. "Has it gotten to the point where you need consent to talk to someone?"

"It's not like you'd understand," I riposte. "Consent was never your thing."

And before I can scandalize Dallon any further, Pete is tugged out the door, and the ocean drowns me again.

~~~~~

A/N: oh my damn that was a fluffy chapter

current vibe: when my friends and I had a whole conversation on whale sex

~Danootnoot