Out of all the things I should be pondering, the topic of Dallon's gloves is the one that snares me, tosses my mind into oblivion with a prompt giggle and the release of an autonomous finger.

The ceiling staring down at me is a cue to goad my mind into thinking about the gloves — their texture, their gloomy color, their audacity to slither across terrains such as the bar and abduct my attention so thoroughly.

Dallon told me once that he hated wearing gloves, as they made him feel like a criminal who was supposed to shepherd their touch into a meadow of surreptitiousness, and he never thought that he could carry out something illegal, not in a million years.

But now that he did, it's appropriate, and the gloves are the only things that cloak the intrusive fingers who caused it — it's almost like he's ashamed.

No, that can't be. He knows what he did, but...when I saw him at the bar, he was oblique in a misconstrued air of presumptuousness, and that's his approach wrapped into his new personality, so whatever secrets mummified in his mind are now only dwindling.

It's a pity Dallon refuses to remember the extirpation he inflicted on a world that was comprised of just me, a lonely drifter until this guy immigrated to my perception, because my life practically revolves around it, and when my fellow citizens celebrate the gyration of the Earth around the sun, another gyration alleges to be more significant, and I accept its requisition.

The simple fact is that this event consumes my time, my social life, my sanity, and it's a bittersweet taste that I nevertheless swallow, because I have to do so in order to spare the people around me from the terror.

The same people I try to save maintain an aversion towards my kind, but Dallon never did, and maybe that's why this individual drag on a cigarette was particularly arduous to breathe away, but then it was like becoming asthmatic when he began to torment me, and my inhaler was hidden under the tender floorboards in the spot right below Dallon's foot, where it was left for dead.

But still, the mystery of his hand-wear remains in the atmosphere, and I might ask for some gloves of my own.

~~~~~

"Where are your mittens?" My hands furl around the threshold, apprehension galvanizing my fingertips as they gouge into the oak.

My friend is situated on the couch near the fireplace, the crackling of the flames hollowing his ears as a simpering rose lights his cheeks.

Pete's vision departs from his book as it balances on his thumb, disengaging his legs from under him. "My mittens?"

My feet scrape the floor, an anxious tilt in my gait. "Yeah, didn't you bring any?"

"Did you not?" Pete shifts further, withdrawing his finger from the middle of the book to devote his engrossment to me.

"I probably left them at the club."

Pete is unconvinced, but he knows better than to investigate me. "Check my bag. It's in my room."

Without a word, I abscond from the area, leaving Pete in startled astonishment before he can call back to me about how someone such as myself could be so foolish.

By some luck, I am drawn towards his room, the nearest to the threshold from which I entered, and the knob incarcerates my will to avoid my compulsion, so it's flicked once left and once right before I close myself inside the strawberry field of Pete's room.

His satchel lounges on the wooden tiles, zipper and flap diverging from halfway around and revealing a plethora of colors from products within the bag.

My extremities whisk through the items, exposing variegated clothing pieces, dirtied scraps of paper, and leaves collected in the turmoil of vacation — but none of the pills Pete claims he takes.

Forgetting my prior duty, I crush the flap of the bag on itself and scamper from the room, the door agape from my haste. My socks walk their fabric across the floor, accompanied by the electric force of friction, and my breathing wobbles with my physique, readjusting in the threshold again.

Pete descries me near the wooden frame of the aperture, brows raised from his book. "Did you get the mittens?"

"Did you get your pills?" My respiration elongates the air, frisking with the colors surrounding it, and the man's expression melts into one of foreboding.

"Patrick, what are you talking about?" Pete is generally calm, except for a fidgety rainfall of fingers on his knee.

"You said you take pills, right?"

My friend's face spills into the ink on the page, as black as the words pounded into the paper. "Patrick..."

I boycott a resignation, clarifying, "You professed that the pills are the only things that work. Now where the hell are they?"

Pete's view flickers around the room, scavenging for anyone creeping behind the curtains. "Is Gerard here?"

Teeth lacerating my lip with an injurious anxiety, I reply, "No, he's at the store."

A flower of guilt wilts in Pete's stomach, but it's a flower amidst a garden, so that blossom is worth very little in relieving nervousness. "Okay, come and sit down." Pete lures me towards him, and my head nestles into his quaking shoulders without proper deliberation.

A lone tear stumbles down my cheek, grappling for a switch to end it all. "Pete, I don't want you to ruin your life like this."

"Shh," he coos, boxing me in a fluttering embrace. "Don't worry about it."

Don't waste your time on him. He almost touched your arm.

"I will worry about it, because I'm tired of you pretending that things are all right, when they're really not." My doe eyes loop their fixation on the boy whose arms harbor my emotions, but that harbor is breaking, and a storm is stirring in the skies. "We're all screwed up in this place, and maybe that's okay, but starving yourself of medication is going to make you more than just a head-case, and the people around you won't be able to figure out how to help."

My speech ticks through Pete's thoughts, kissing flames onto every structure and burning them to the ground with a signature of beauty printed in the ash. "What if I don't want help?"

"Everyone wants help." My visage is sketched like the desert sand — somber, melancholy, and arid. "We just don't care to admit it."

Antagonism pricks Pete's Hudson River irises, and it soon dominates his entire cognition. "When I said the pills worked the best, I didn't say they were favored."

I recant my previous nepotism towards my friend's embrace, praying that he didn't espy my infuriated quivering, and my hands itch for something stimulating so that I won't tear apart my relationship, but they eventually flat line in a bursting spark to make way for my rant. "What, would you rather shoot up with cocaine? Extinguish all your problems with a powder that doesn't give a fuck about you? Because if that's what healing means in your context, you'll be dead within the minute."

"I don't want to die. I just...I want to live, you know? I want to feel my own heart, love someone who is gentle and kind, but those pills forbid me from doing those things, so then what? That is called dying." Pete's touch evaporates within his hair, a sigh trailing behind as a conditioner. "But yeah, I know drugs that waft poison will intravenously swallow me from the inside, and I don't sit around waiting for that day, because I value life and all its benefits, and prescriptions are the ones stomping me out, not my natural mind."

My fingers jab into an eyelid united with the skin below, attempting to make sense of this whole thing. "Pills are supposed to alleviate your symptoms and brighten your mood, not renege on their promise of restoring your cheer."

You're going to lose friends for being such a smartass.

Pete secures my hands in his own as some sort of solace, so that at least one part of me is near him. The size of his pupils fluctuates inquisitively, locking my focus to them as he speaks. "Patrick, I stopped taking my meds when I met you, and do you know why that is?"

My head is bowed to study our connection as it whirs back and forth in an answer.

The man compresses this tether between us in an act of reassurance, continuing, "Because I saw potential in you — potential for a friendship, potential for a wild expedition, potential to make me feel for the first time in a while — and that was fucking glorious." A smile inspirits Pete's countenance, a liberation that sings of splendor. "I cannot describe how elated I was when I saw you in the coffee shop after you picked up Mikey from daycare. You must've been pretty damn special to evoke those emotions. Truth is, you've always been special, even if you never knew it, and if you say I'm going to die, I want your image rooted in my eyes."

"God, now I'm crying," I laugh, soiling my thumb with the saltwater concoction. "I'm too weak for my own good."

"Crying isn't weak," Pete contradicts, shaving the residual water away. "Crying is a sign that you survived — and damn, that's fucking courageous."

I intercept my friend's hand in the air, implementing a stationary latch on it as I cower away. "Yeah, I survived, but you're not going to if you keep this up."

Pete enforces nothing to wriggle free from my grasp, only shrugs around it. "It's not like I have anything to lose."

"You have me, right?" I pry. "Tell me you didn't forget that there are people who care about you."

Pete then worms out of my bonds, panicked. "No one cares about me."

"I do, and as a result, I've noticed that your hands shake when you hold things, that your script is always slightly rough and vapid. I've noticed that when you write, you scrawl things across the paper, because if you took your time, it still wouldn't look perfect. I've noticed that you dry the tears of others before you dry your own, because you know what it feels like to suffer. All those things I love about you will be gone if you don't take your goddamn pills.

"You've already sacrificed your body by refraining from medicating yourself. Now don't sacrifice your mind by thinking you're in this alone."

A print of a grin traces the edge of Pete's lips, introducing positive ideas to his array. "Maybe I'm not."

On this occasion, I'm the one to squeeze our hands together. "I know you're not."

Pete unrolls a flow of breath from his trachea, declaring, "This is what it's like to feel, Patrick." My friend's limbs slice through the area, beholding the magnificence of nature, of being awake. "And trust me — it's miraculous."

A giggle somersaults off of my tongue as a kiss sprouts on Pete's raven hair. "You've experienced enough for now," I dictate, inhaling the strawberry fields again. "Will you finally take your pills?"

Reciprocating my action, Pete applies a kiss to my own peroxide locks and promises, "I'll consider it."

And with the current state of things, that's enough for my standards.

~~~~~

cries bc this chapter

current vibe: when I put Mad As Rabbits at the top just bc I referenced it in the title

~Da!<ota (that was supposed to be a K but whatever)