"Where is it?" I shriek, sorting through the piles of clothing and useless trinkets in my bag that I hoard anyway. "Where did it go?"

I wouldn't make a scene about hydrogen peroxide at the hospital, but this isn't the hospital, now is it? Just because I made a promise doesn't mean that I'm not fighting against the leash that holds me to it, but that doesn't really concern me now, because I'm out of the hospital and can make as many scenes as I'd like.

So I do, and I perform them without remorse, but they're emerging on the opposite side of fire, and my peroxide is still nowhere to be seen.

"Are you looking for this?" a mysterious figure taunts, and as I pivot to face him, it's my own friend, the feline man with whom I share the residency of this cottage.

"Yes, and may I have it back?" I pounce to capture it for myself, but Gerard dangles it farther away from me, expecting an explanation.

A challenging stance accents the man's entire demeanor, frightening me if anything. "Depends. What are you using it for?"

Put off my Gerard's new personality, I wring my bones under the milky terrain of my flesh and subdue my volume. "None of your business."

"It is my business, because I don't want you hurting yourself." This sentence is unwaveringly on the kinder end of the line from what Gerard said earlier, but even so, this kind of authority is unnerving and the thing I hate the most.

"It's not your job to guard me."

"As your friend, it very much is," Gerard contradicts, grip cloaking the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in suffocation.

"Just give it back." I reach for the liquid, but Gerard once again thrusts it away, continuing to pry.

"What do you need it for?"

"Why do you care?" I scream, arms inverting gravity.

"I'm your friend!" Gerard responds with just the same intensity.

Finally my tone slopes downward, but spite still coerces my speech. "Not if you're doing shit like this."

Gerard's brows stale with equal portions of anger and chagrin, genuinely oblivious to what's happening in my sorry little head. "Shit like defending you against yourself?"

Hysterics trickle from my lungs, a display of fireworks with the utmost autoschediasm of insanity. "Why do you always assume that I'm going to fucking kill myself all the time?"

"Because you always look as though you're just on the edge." And from a reason I want to slap Gerard for, his face feathers in a pinnate bouquet at the reminder of my apparent suicidal tendencies that have never appeared until Gerard just now suggested them.

"Doing this will push me off," I snarl, a threat that holds more meaning than anything I've ever said, because I've been ready to jump since the day I first employed the hydrogen peroxide as the metaphorical version of suicide.

"Doing this will bring you back."

Groaning and never accepting defeat, I storm out the door, jostling Gerard on the way out so that he thoroughly comprehends that I'm never companions with someone who deprives me of my basic human needs, and just because other humans don't need the same things as I do doesn't mean that they're not essential to me.

My goal was to sashay right out of this stupid fucking house for a while, or at least until I cool down, but those plans are foiled right when the touch I was trying to prevent trails back to me and squanders anything I ever worked towards.

"Don't be so indignant, Patrick," the man heeds, teeth herded to lock with each other and convey more levels of spleen than I had previously expressed.

"Dallon, what are you doing?" Gerard demands, adhering to the threshold in the event that he'll have to arrest me from this criminal.

"I'll continue this chat with him." My attacker squints at me like I'm the one to do something wrong, when all I aspired to achieve was pour the peroxide over me, the peroxide that he made me need. "Don't worry, Gerard."

As I'm led down the hall, a new motive supplants my older one, announcing that I should pocket a dash of clemency for my own stores. "Let me go, rat ass."

"Just come with me," Dallon circumlocutes, pumping steamy carbon dioxide into my ear from a sharp tongue.

My lungs are domiciliated by the apprehension from not knowing where we're headed, but the nervousness is then stung by the sight of Dallon turning the knob (only left, not right) to the supply closet.

"Why are we going in here?" I interrogate, skeptical of my surroundings as the lightbulb colors the room to reveal a sundry of random items.

Nothing advantageous throbs in here, if we're not counting the graveyards of paper towels, napkins, disinfecting wipes, and raggedy mops, but my old friend appears to lurk on the inside of these matters.

Rather than a verbal reply, Dallon rewards me for my enterprise with a fresh bottle of hydrogen peroxide that I never knew to be stocked in the closet — I should pen a mental mark of that. "Go ahead," he directs, nodding at the bottle trembling in my hand.

To balance myself, I position my back so that it's depending on the wall below a shelf, and Dallon joins me, much to my discomfort.

"Just try not to get any on my gloves," the man includes to his prior statement of permission while he observes me carefully as I recycle the cap to the floor.

Fixed on my actions with just as much fascination as he has, I conclude that it's time to decode the cryptic Dallon. "Why do you wear those anyway?"

"I don't want to corrupt anything with my germs." His vision now centers on his hands as he gouges them through the anxiety of this situation where he's suddenly the one being crushed, but I'm not regretting anything. "Not like I corrupted you."

I admit to my fallacy. I am regretting something, but I don't know what. Maybe it's the apatetic way his sapphire eyes are whipped with dust until they're dull stones without any of the coquettish gleam they used to hoist, mutated until they're able to be smoldered in the death of dubiety, and that agitates me, because there was once a time where he deserved so much more than this, and the entelechy that he still does is the most unsettling thing out of all this shit.

With or without impulsion (I'll let the ramifications decide), I'm nearer to Dallon than I was, the charity of a newborn thawing the ice of my eyes. "You wear them because of me?"

"Well you're doused in peroxide because of me, so maybe it's an accidental favor," Dallon laughs aridly, underlining his voice with the heartbreak of an ambition chipping away into nothing.

I curl in dejection, though I shouldn't. "You sound far too amenable about wearing those gloves."

"That's because I'd be struck by my own brain if I took them off."

I halt from my positon of buttering my arm in a chemical that gives more fucks than I do to soften myself for a man I never deemed sentimental enough to say something like this after what we did two years ago, and I want to proceed, but I don't, because the truth is that I can't.

I once loved Dallon Weekes, and I know that it's far away — I think about it often — but maybe it isn't, or at least not as far away as I conceived. We're similar in the manner that we're contriving plans to stay alive with the same things that people claim to be killing us, and if we're the only ones who disagree, we could be quite the proactive team.

"Are you saying...?"

"Yep," Dallon bemoans. "Obsessive-compulsive disorder, just like you."

Gesturing all around with no direction, I stammer, "But at the club you were being so ignorant about it."

The man shrugs. "We do odd things to hide ourselves."

I clasp Dallon's hands in my own, exploring the landscape of coal that furrows in some places, prolongs in others, and murders me with each second. "Except you're literally hiding yourself."

Beholding me for a few moments in the radiance of solitude, Dallon begins to pluck the fabric from his fingers one by one until his hands are bare — vulnerable — and it's the purest form of nudity that one can seek, because his heart has been stripped of its misgivings and is still beating as it scraps the fear of damnation. Then, with a bow of the head, Dallon's coating burns the barrier between us, and we're touching like those shitty diagnostic meetings never affected us at all.

My skin still sweats the hydrogen peroxide that I had applied only minutes before, but Dallon doesn't seem to be stirred by it, and somehow neither am I, because the substance never did much for me, and I'm basically just as liable as he is.

Liability can spur complications, though, but nothing is as complicated as Dallon yearning for my lips on his and actually earning it, and it yet becomes even more complicated when I'm enthusiastic about it, too.

I'm beginning to hate myself — hate myself for liking Dallon so close to me, hate myself for being in this closet with him, hate myself for betraying Pete because I can't control myself — and it's unable to be fixed from where I see it. Though this isn't the genesis of this adversity, it's blooming again, and it's evolving at an alarming rate.

Yet the phenomenon is so stunning that no one can disregard it. Not even me, who has hated Dallon Weekes since he created the thing that we're both cowering at right now, but as I said, this is complicated.

Perhaps the most complicated part of all of this, however, is when Pete happens to stumble across it.

~~~~~

A/N: lmao bye

imagine if you had to wait a week for the next chapter like you have to do for some authors lol

current vibe: when my friend told me that Gerard Way met Misha Collins and I screamed for three years

~Dakisha