(no subject)
Title: Autumn Hollowing
Author: beautyisillness
Rating: PG-15ish
Pairing(s): Trace/Mason with a little Trace/Hannah
Summary: He didn’t think happy endings existed but it wouldn’t hurt to hope they did.
Disclaimer: Nothing and no one is in my custody.
Trace was, by no means, a God of any sorts. But his lips were shimmering like the heavens and his breath was hot like hell.
And the regret that covered the ground was like a thin layer of dust that he could easily brush under the floorboard with the rest of his decaying skeletons. He was like a closet full of secrets cemented into the confining walls with guilt scattered about its cracks. His world was in ruins and it just took too long to rebuild something of his caliber. Or lack of, maybe.
It had taken a long time to scratch away the insecurities his bandmates had soiled themselves with. Nearly two years. You can’t rebuild ruins, remember, but you can clean them. Most of them were still dirtied with heavy apprehension of their band continuing to circulate onto the tainted floor until they eventually released their hopes and simply gave up.
Trace was a tiny bit of an optimistic.
He had a way of carrying stress in a conspicuous manner while the rest held sunken in eyes and worn faces. He was just gifted like that. Instead he clutched onto the quieted afflictions; disregarded the cluttering sounds of them falling from his tightened grasp, and never looked back to see them glimmer on the long road he always found himself walking alone. But when he occasionally felt his heart pulsating with overwhelming desire to glance back and see his mistakes, he thought of his bandmates’ own faults alternatively because they were much easier to cater to; less messy. Anthony was too sweet for his own good, Blake too quiet, and Mason too pure.
While coloring their troubles, he assumed he’d simply used a base coat while his concerned more of his skill and time. Both, of which, he wasn’t fond of offering. It occupied him too much and he didn’t want to be bound to something so emotionally consuming. He’d much rather scatter cheap black paint against a white canvas and display the neglected work as his earnest thoughts. Faded and random; something to disparage as trivial.
But, unfortunately, over the years he learned not all his bandmates could be deemed as art and easily omitted afterward.
Mason was not a painting, he was a love song.
He wasn’t glazed over with dispassion like the coated acrylic resin on pictures; he was doused in intangible and marveling emotion and provoked reflection. He was real and alive and simply breathtaking. More importantly, he was inaccessible and clearly out of bounds; forbidden.
Trace bowed his head as he leaned the upper portion of his body against the room’s wall and chewed on his bottom lip with his burning cigarette placed diligently between his index and middle fingers of his right hand.
A haunting silhouette rested on the area beside him on the same bed; which he could just barely make out at the corner of his eye and, for the first time, he could see his mistakes etched into the looming shadow. He could feel his prior absent façade break under heavy solecisms and, when he gradually brought himself to lift his eyes, he saw his fallacy manifested in an existing form.
“Mason,” he heard himself exhale along with a smoke-ridden breath. The gray wisps hanged limply in the air as it contributed to the pollution already laden in the atmosphere. It was suffocating but neither of the two complained. They were already drowning as it was.
The boy hadn’t replied, quietly forcing a smile to his lips in its place. He fiddled carelessly with his callused fingers while his eyes remained fixated on Trace. The silence that the room had long before lapsed into preceded to envelope every corner and the tension was dizzying.
Trace wanted to listen to himself say the young vocalist’s name again but his phone rung instead and, without hesitation or an entreaty from Mason, he aimlessly snatched it from the room’s nearby burrow and answered. It was Hannah and Mason didn’t flinch the slightest when Trace greeted her with an enthusiastic tone. Because Trace was really in love with her and there shouldn’t be any reason to resent them. But he does; just quietly; delicately and so does Trace, in a way.
The weather in Chicago was cold and the trees were just starting to decay and shed their green pigments, he told her as he smothered his cigarette. It was about the beginning of autumn and the air is crisp and rigid there. Shorn leaves glided in the cool atmosphere and continuously attempted to reach the heavens with every given breeze.
The conversation turned into negligible and irrelevant, slowly seducing Mason into light slumber and Trace knew when the boy began to fade he still wasn’t done talking. So he leaned over as he listened diligently to Hannah’s cute new story that tugged smiles at his compressed lips and clawed a laugh out of his throat and he hummed his replies into Mason’s neck. He felt the teen stiffen under him and when Mason turned to move, he caught the vocalist’s arm in his unoccupied hand and Mason found his head pushed against a pillow.
“Yeah,” Trace breathed smoothly into Mason’s ear when Hannah asked him a question; languidly climbing over the younger boy. Mason squirmed uncomfortably, incidentally horrified at what his friend was attempting to do while simultaneously talking on the phone; however, was too weak to refuse the little snippets of what he thought was love proposed by Trace.
Mason felt pathetic. Beyond pathetic.
But he wasn’t. Not really. Or, if he was, Trace was just as much.
Trace’s hand slid from Mason’s arm to the vocalist’s neck, gently guiding it into a slight tilt as his lips trailed the exposed side of it. Mason stifled a groan as his fingers curled slightly at the bed’s neatly folded sheets. Hannah’s voice continued to keep his sounds at bay while Trace would quietly detach his lips, coolly reply to her, and press his mouth against Mason again.
When red hadn’t faded from the vocalist’s flesh Trace stopped, examining the flushed face of Mason, laughed at Hannah’s joke; told her of some girl trying to flash him at last night’s show, and began to unzip his jeans’. The teen felt helpless but longing when his own clothes were beginning to be discarded in return; his tight jeans being pulled to a messy clump at his ankles.
Nights like these made Trace feel like the devil rather than a God.
Like the apple in Eden, he had successfully tempted both pure souls into his iniquitous cycle that would eventually consume them all. Trace would be exposed for all he was worth someday, and then he’d be left alone; like he deserved to be in the first place.
“I love you too,” he echoed into the phone.
It wouldn’t take too long, he thought. It wouldn’t take too long until all his mistakes fell upon him and he’d be abandoned to dwell in them alone.
Beeping ensued just as he whispered again, “I love you too.” before attempting to intricately fuse a love song with a black and white painting that always managed to fall apart in the end.
Maybe this time it won’t. (It will.)
He didn’t think happy endings existed but it wouldn’t hurt to hope they did.
A/N: I actually really like Hannah Beth so I personally intended to have no bashing implied. I just really wanted to explore the possible conflicted feelings one would harbor if they were in love with two people at the same time; Trace being my lovely subject. I haven’t analyzed him enough to asses what type of character he is or how he acts; the only one I know is Anthony and he’s just a real sweetheart so yeah. Hah. Hope you enjoyed? I haven’t written slash in awhile so I hope my writing isn’t too shabby.