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Billy made it sound like Lex was dying.
He didn’t often get into fights, but when he did . . . you never wanted to see the other guy.
Lex was on the edge of his bed, layers and layers of blood caked on his hands, Descendants t-shirt torn to pieces more than it was a few hours ago. His prized leather jacket was discarded on the floor at his feet, bright blood stains already soaking into the material and turning it a deeper black than you thought possible. The white of the screen-printed Adikts back patch was mostly crimson.
You could already see the deep blues and purples of a black eye as it began to color, as it trailed down across his left eye and descended down, down, down his cheekbone. Like the milky way when you saw it against the black expanse of the night sky outside of the city.
Except this wasn’t the night sky, nor a galaxy, or even a far-away nebula. This was someone who was apart of you, someone important to you, and he was a fucking mess.
You shut the door once you stepped inside, and when he didn’t look up you were in front of him in a flash. Legs bent to rest knees on the hardwood floor, hands extended to take his hands in your own, gently sliding the brass knuckles off his steady fingers and starting a bloody pile on the bundle of leather and metal.
You removed the bracelets next. Silver and chrome spikes were now tinged vermilion, chains were slicked with a carmine color that began to turn rusty brown in certain places. They left his skin bare and raw and streaked with stains of bright, heart-stopping red drying rapidly. Neither of you spoke and your heart burst into flames.
He was rarely like this, and you knew it would be a long night.
“Are you . . . are you hurt?” you asked him quietly, head ducked to meet his eyes. They were glued to the ground: vacant and unseeing. Your hands slid to rest on his knees.
A spark of something, appeared when your eyes met and it shook him awake from the daze he’d fallen into. His head twitched in a shake, mumbling no soon after.
A breath escaped your lungs, and you hadn’t realized how shallow your breathing had become. “All right,” you answered, “I’ll be right back.”
You ignored the feel of blood sticking to your hands when you rose, ignored the feel of the skin peeling from the cold metal of the doorknob, and ignored the stain of your skin after you washed them as clean as they would get that night. Healing supplies found their way into your stained hands in a matter of minutes.
Lex was in the same position when you returned.
There was a Buzzcocks vinyl sitting on the record player on his desk, you noticed. You both had agreed time and time again that music was always better than silence, so you flipped it on and carefully placed the needle on the third or fourth groove. I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life, ironically, began to fill the void of growing tension.
It brought Lex back to life.
“Now that you’re done having an out of body experience,” you said over the background buzz of Pete Shelley’s voice, “Try wiping that shit off while I take a look at your eye.”
Without a sound, he took the damp towel from your hand and started scrubbing his own. He wouldn’t meet your eyes when you tilted his head up with a finger, a second warm towel cleaning away the dangerous color that didn’t belong on his pale skin. It was only when you skimmed the outline of the blossoming bruise that he looked at you, really looked at you, and leaned into your touch when it drifted down to his jawline.
“It wasn’t – I didn’t start anything this time.”
“You rarely do.”
“That look on your face says otherwise, love,” Lex opposed. He had come back into himself more; you supposed looking less like a walking Carrie cosplay and more like a normal reflection in the mirror could do that to anyone.
The bloody towels hit the growing discard pile so his clean hands could take yours into his own. You sat there for . . . some time. Words weren’t needed to convey that neither of you liked cleaning blood off of each other, or sharing this pain when it shouldn’t even exist in the first place. You both wished for other lives – better lives, and . . . that’s all it was, for the foreseeable future. A wish.
“Do you want your wrists bandaged?”
“My first gnarly fight in months and you insist on covering me in that gauzy shit? Who do you take me for, a prick like Marcus?”
A laugh fell through your lips and it was the sweetest thing Lex had heard in all of eternity. He pulled you off the floor and onto his lap, head buried into your neck, arms holding your waist tight. He held you close, like he didn’t think he would have ever saw you again.
Lex didn’t believe in miracles, but that night . . . that night he did. Seeing you was like a breath of fresh air in lungs that had only known rot and decay and broken things. You were crafted from the weathered hands of Leonardo Da Vinci himself, he knew. Life changing. A beautiful work of art. Capable and worthy of all the love the universe had, and ever will have, to give.
He didn’t think he deserved you, but he would never tell you that. You would tell him to shove it where the sun doesn’t shine and that you both deserved better than what the universe had given you, but maybe it wasn’t a completely shitty hand at the center of it. You both had each other and you both had a future, no matter how dark and dreary and melancholy it looked. Where there was you, there was hope.
And for you, where there was Lex, there was light.
“I’m not leaving you here after this, you know,” you told him, hand raking through his hair. Arms tightened around your waist, gently tugging you closer into him.
After a moment of silence, his voice echoed into your skin and pierced your heart like a cliché version of Cupid’s Arrow.
“I don’t want you to,” is all he said.
As awful as it makes you feel, you don’t want this night to end. Moments like those are fleeting and rare and only come about when you two are so alone it felt like no one else existed in the cosmos.
That was okay, you realized, because if anyone knew Lex wasn’t always the obnoxious piece of shit he led everyone to believe . . . you weren’t about to be the reason he ended up like this again. Or you in his place. King’s Dominion was a vicious, unforgiving environment and you were not about to throw each other to the wolves.
It didn’t matter how bittersweet your relationship was. All you had to do was survive finals.