Shatter [s/a]
Title: Shatter
Author: filthyemotional
Rating: PG-13? PG-17? I don't know, I suck at ratings.
Pairing: Ryden
POV: Third person
Summary: He tears his eyes away from where his grave is dug on the dirty restroom floor, and he walks through the door, letting it swing shut behind him.
2,700+ words.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
Author Notes: I started to write this as a chaptered fic a while ago, but I never thought about posting it until now, when I decided to turn it into a standalone :) So, yeah. I hope you like it. Comments, con crit, all that good stuff welcome as always.
Warnings: This story centres around bulimia, an eating disorder.
Hand open, palm facing upwards. Two fingers folded, two straight, thumb out, almost a salute. More like a gun.
With expert stamina, Ryan parts his lips and plunges two fingers down his throat. He does it quickly, because he's learnt by now that it's easier if you don't let yourself think about it.
Despite his experience, the first try is a failure. He gags, wretches over the toilet basin, and pulls his hand out quickly. He gasps, drags air down into his lungs. His heart hammers in his chest. Try again.
This time it works. He gags once, his shoulders swelling as his stomach churns and he vomits violently into the toilet. The boy coughs, his eyes sting with tears, the familiar acidic taste burning his lips. Did it work? Was it enough?
He does it again. He thinks of all the ways this hurts. He could stop it, if he wanted to. He could stop the tears stinging his eyes, breaking away and rolling down his pale, shaking cheeks. He could stop the constant burning in his stomach, and the ache of his throat, the soft, steady hammer of his heart. He could stop it. Maybe he will. He has the power to stop this.
His body slumps and exhaustion sweeps his body, just like all the other times. He wipes the splatters of vomit from his cheeks with a shaking hand. Sticky, putrid-tasting saliva has filled his mouth. He spits into the toilet bowl, watches a string of saliva hang from his lip, grow narrow and snap. He flexes his hand against the toilet seat as though making sure it's still there, beneath his weakened grip, and only then does he place his forehead down on his arm and let his eyes drift closed for a moment.
He thinks of Brendon, Spencer, Jon, waiting on the other side of the door. They'll be wondering what he's doing. He sighs to himself, stands up and flushes the toilet. He stares down at the thick substance in the bottom of the toilet basin, watches it swirl and spin, be swallowed up by clean, clear water. And just like that, any trace of what just went on in that little bathroom in some nameless venue somewhere in America, is gone. Ryan turns on the faucet and splashes his face. He wipes away the traces of water with a sleeve (they were too long for his arms anyway), and steps out of the bathroom.
Brendon stares as Ryan sits down on the floor silently, long legs crossed and arms wrapped around his knees. He follows Ryan's stare to the television, to Spencer and Jon who are laughing with one another, playing hard at Guitar Hero with equally competetive expressions on their faces, and Brendon knows that the broken boy doesn't see them.
x
I'm going to float.
The roar of the crowd flies at the guitarist, a wall of noise that he can hardly bear. Just play.
My fingers will be as agile as raindrops or needles.
Drown them out. Sing over them.
I will play with such perfection that my fingers will escape, I will escape, and the music will carry on playing.
He wants to run away. He wants the notes to burst from the battered, bruised, beautiful strings of his guitar and pick him up, swallow him, consume his whole, crumbling body until he never existed in the first place.
x
When the show is over, Ryan eats a chicken salad tortilla with a side of fries followed by a slice of vanilla New York cheesecake and two glasses of regular, full-calorie Coke.
The band get a call saying that their show tomorrow night has been boosted forward an hour. They have to get on the bus now, and drive through the night to make it. There's no time for a bathroom stop. It's okay, thinks Ryan. There's a perfectly good toilet on the bus. It's okay.
Brendon takes a shower. Eleven o'clock. Tick. Tock. Spencer demands to take his make-up off, because he hates having stuff on his face. Eleven-thirty. Tick...Tock. By midnight, Ryan is standing at the bathroom door, foot tapping restlessley at the carpet. He hits the door with the palm of his hand, thinking of the food he has consumed, bubbling in his stomach, being digested and becoming calories, fat, weight. He bangs on the door again.
"Spence, hurry the fuck up!" He yells. The reply comes from within, muffled by the door.
"It's not my fault you used fucking waterproof face paint! Dude, what the hell, it's like, sticking to me, or something..."
Ryan kicks the door sharply in frustration. He feels sick. His feet are hardly touching the ground.
He glances out of the window to find them pulling into a service station. He breathes a releived laugh, only for a moment before he jumps off the bus and rushes into the trees beside the road. He's a few metres into the undergrowth before he finds a space, and doesn't hesitate before he jams his fingers down his throat. His hand is shaking. He gags, wretches, gasps. Please. Come on. The hand that isn't in his mouth is gripping the trunk of a tree beside him, his body is doubled over as his stomach churns and contracts, trying to eject something that isn't in there. He wretches again, and chokes on his fingers. He pulls his hand away and coughs, splutters, yellow bile rises in his throat and he spits it onto the ground beside him. Nothing. There's nothing left. The familliar tears of disgust have found their way down his face again, but this time they're heightened because he knows that he's lost control. "Fuck." He curses under his breath. His foot collides sharply with a tree trunk, and now his voice escapes in a tearful, angry sob. "Fuck!"
"Ryan?" A cautious voice. One that he knows only too well. "Are- Are you okay?"
The boy sniffs, wipes away his salty tears, nods. Brendon climbs through the bushes and sits down beside him. Don't look at me. Brendon stares, and Ryan finds tears weaving down his face again. I'm disgusiting.
"Were you just-"
"No."
Silence. Ryan wonders how much weight he's put on. Silently, he calculates the calories in his mind, but he knows that it's too many. He can feel himself weighing down the world.
"Talk to me," Brendon's voice is a whisper in the night, so slight that you might mistake it for a breath of wind. That will be me. That tiny, flawless whisper. Ryan doesn't mean to say it. His words are slight compared to his body, and they slither from his lips like silk, tragic and tear-stained.
"It's all gone. I- I can't-" He shudders suddenly, cringes at the way his stomach feels, bloated and heavy.
"Don't. Ryan, don't-" He smudges a thumb across Ryan's cheek, pushes his tears away. Then, Brendon's arm finds it's way round Ryan's shoulders and pulls him close. "I'm sorry." His words are so soft that Ryan isn't even sure if he hears them at all over the sound of cars racing down the distant freeway and the rushing of the world around him. Even then, he isn't sure if he understands them anyway.
Ryan doesn't speak a word, just curls himself into Brendon's body and somehow, that's all he needs to say. He finds that he like the feel of the singer's arms around him. They're strong; safe. They make him feel small, and that's all that matters. Small.
x
Ryan learns to love the way his heart beats faster as his stomach jerks and his shoulders slump forwards moments before he releases everything. It's like a split second of freedom, no restraints, an absolute loss of control for the narrowest period of time. It makes him weightless.
And it reminds him of Brendon. He told Ryan, once, a long time ago, about the day he went all the way to the other side of Vegas. Brendon was young, fifteen, an innocent, unblemished Mormon boy with no concept of just how real the world is. He bought a ticket and a bottle of vodka, jumped on a train and went somewhere else. Anywhere, as long as it wasn't the little religeous suburb that was suffocating him. He got wasted, passed out on the train and the conductor found him at the end of the line, a young boy without a purpose or direction in which to go. He was delivered in an ambulance directly to St Francis' Hospital somewhere far away from home, and had his stomach pumped. His parents picked him up, grounded him, and he never lost control again.
It's like that, thinks Ryan, as he sits against the cold tiled wall, wiping the dregs of vomit from around his mouth, hands shaking.
And he cries.
He cries without any sense of matter, cries with his swollen lips gaping open to release the loud, racked sobs which shake his body. He tilts his head back and lets the cries consume him, he cries like one cries when they know nobody is watching.
Brendon walks in.
It's not like he didn't know. It's not like it caught him offguard, unaware, so Ryan isn't surprised when Brendon sits down quietly beside him, and asks in as soft a tone as possible:
"Why are you doing this to youself?" It makes Ryan cry harder.
"I don't know. I don't know."
"Yes you do. Ryan, speak to me," He pleads, and his words shake Ryan's fragile body like an earthquake.
"I don't want to," Brendon falls silent.
"Are you sure?" He knows that this isn't the case.
"Yes."
"Ryan, why are you doing this?"
"I don't-"
"Ryan-"
"Okay! Fucking fine! You want to know why?! To get some fucking control over my life, Brendon. That's all I want. I could never have control over what my father did to me. I could never control how I felt. You know how much that hurt, Bren? My fucking dad was killing me, he didn't care, and I don't care, I can't stop myself from loving him all the same because he's my fucking dad! I can't control this band. I can write the lyrics and play the guitar but at the end of the day, if you guys don't like it then it doesn't happen! You know why? Because I haven't got any fucking control! This is all I have, Bren. This is it." He's worn out. Spent. His body slumps against the tiles as he catches his breath. Brendon doesn't speak for a long time.
"I get it. I understand."
"No. You don't."
"I do-"
"No, you don't!" Ryan yells, and his eyes are so fierce that Brendon is scared for a moment. Then, without thinking, Brendon stands, and begins to walk away. Ryan is crying again, sobbing into his hand with shaking shoulders. "Brendon!" He cries out suddenly. The younger boy stops in his tracks, but he doesn't turn.
I'm sorry, he wants to say. Don't leave me. Please. I need you, more than anything.
He stays silent, just breathing.
Brendon walks away.
x
The bowl of spaghetti makes a clattering noise against the table as Spencer places it in front of Ryan. He frowns.
"Spence, I didn't-"
"I know, I know. Just thought you might change your mind. If you don't want it, I'll eat it." Spencer is already stuffing his face with a veggie burger and fries, his eyes focussed concentratedly on the food in front of him. The smell hits Ryan and makes his stomach churn. He thinks of his mother, thinks of her soft voice as she brought the food closer to his greedy baby mouth.
Here comes the train.
He prods the spaghetti gently with a plastic fork, debating wether to slide the dish across the table to Spence (who would, no doubt, appreciate the gesture), but then he glances up and Brendon is watching him like a hawk, his eyes reading You'd better eat that meal, asshole. Ryan quickly diverts his gaze back down to the food. He twirls some spaghetti around his fork slowly.
Choooo, choooooooo.
He picks up his knife, places it back on the tabletop; adjusts the position so that it lies vertical beside the dish. He pushes the strands around the plate with the loaded fork, watching steam curl upwards from the food like tendrils of ivy.
Open up the tunnel.
Strings of fat. Threads of calories. Strands of bloated stomach and XXL hoodies.
Here comes the train.
He lifts the fork to his lips and slides the spaghetti in. He can't quite bring himself to bite down, so it sits in the cavity of his mouth for a moment, warm and slimy and slithering. Bile rises instantly up his throat, he splutters and coughs and gags and slams a hand across his lips as he jumps up, knocking his chair backwards.
BEEEEEP. Train wreck.
He wipes the back of a shaking hand across his lips, gasping for breath. He coughs twice, and his stomach burns worse that ever as he slumps, defeated, over the toilet bowl. Tears which are, of course, induced only by the puking, leave their shining tracks on his pale cheeks. He smudges them away with his fingertips, and stands up. The cracked mirror reflects a broken boy, pale and thin and lost, and Ryan thinks ha. Look who's in control now, Dad. Just look at me. And he looks down at the dirty, cracked tiles on the floor of the bathroom and wonders if he could disappear. If he lay down now, flat on the tiles, curled in on himself like a child and never moved again, would he disappear? Would he crumble and slip away, become the tiles and the grout and the muddy footprints on this scarred ground? He'll be thin enough to crumble.
He tears his eyes away from where his grave is dug on the dirty restroom floor, and he walks through the door, letting it swing shut behind him.
And Brendon sits there, listens to him leave, sitting on the closed toilet seat of the cubicle beside Ryan's with his legs pulled up and his arms wrapped around himself, and he isn't even sure, if he called Ryan's name, he isn't even sure if Ryan would stay. He curls tighter in on himself and tries to swallow the boulder in his throat.
x
"You're killing yourself, Ry!" Brendon roars, and it would scare Ryan but there's so much fear slithering around the boy's heart that a little yelling doesn't make a difference. So, instead of backing away, he yells back, short and sharp and painful.
"I'm not!"
The shouting match has been going on for countless minutes, what started off as a conversation and grew heated, heated until the two boys were screaming their hearts out to one another.
"Don't you fucking care?!"
"Of course I do!" Contradiction, Ryan thinks to himself. Brendon doesn't notice.
"So why, Ryan?! Why are you-"
"You think I want to be like this? It never used to be this easy! It used to be an acheivement every single time I threw up!" His throat is aching. He needs to cry. "I know I'm wasting away! I know it! What the hell am I supposed to do, Bren?" Now the tears are coming, for both of them. With Ryan, rythmic, racked sobs of misery, and for Brendon silent tears, slipping down his face like water on porcelain tiles. "All I wanted was to have some control- now there's nothing." His last sentence is a whisper, terrified. At last, Brendon's experssion shows some emotion. His lip trembles, his eyes close softly and he begins to cry properly. Ragged breaths and shaking shoulders.
Then, he stares at Ryan, and he thinks what if he were to finally run out? What if he grows so weak that he can't function anymore? What if he stops being here every day, what if I never see him smile again, what if I never hear him laugh, what if, what if...
Brendon steps over Ryan's long, splayed body on the tiled floor, kneels down beside him. He looks straight into Ryan's dancing caramel eyes, his expression ferocious as he breathes heavily through his teeth. His eyebrows are furrowed in concentration and determination. His voice is thick with tears and rage and fear and love. It shakes when he speaks, his words solid and perfect as they hit the tiled walls of the bathrooom.
"You've always controlled me."
Brendon kisses him then.
Author: filthyemotional
Rating: PG-13? PG-17? I don't know, I suck at ratings.
Pairing: Ryden
POV: Third person
Summary: He tears his eyes away from where his grave is dug on the dirty restroom floor, and he walks through the door, letting it swing shut behind him.
2,700+ words.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
Author Notes: I started to write this as a chaptered fic a while ago, but I never thought about posting it until now, when I decided to turn it into a standalone :) So, yeah. I hope you like it. Comments, con crit, all that good stuff welcome as always.
Warnings: This story centres around bulimia, an eating disorder.
Hand open, palm facing upwards. Two fingers folded, two straight, thumb out, almost a salute. More like a gun.
With expert stamina, Ryan parts his lips and plunges two fingers down his throat. He does it quickly, because he's learnt by now that it's easier if you don't let yourself think about it.
Despite his experience, the first try is a failure. He gags, wretches over the toilet basin, and pulls his hand out quickly. He gasps, drags air down into his lungs. His heart hammers in his chest. Try again.
This time it works. He gags once, his shoulders swelling as his stomach churns and he vomits violently into the toilet. The boy coughs, his eyes sting with tears, the familiar acidic taste burning his lips. Did it work? Was it enough?
He does it again. He thinks of all the ways this hurts. He could stop it, if he wanted to. He could stop the tears stinging his eyes, breaking away and rolling down his pale, shaking cheeks. He could stop the constant burning in his stomach, and the ache of his throat, the soft, steady hammer of his heart. He could stop it. Maybe he will. He has the power to stop this.
His body slumps and exhaustion sweeps his body, just like all the other times. He wipes the splatters of vomit from his cheeks with a shaking hand. Sticky, putrid-tasting saliva has filled his mouth. He spits into the toilet bowl, watches a string of saliva hang from his lip, grow narrow and snap. He flexes his hand against the toilet seat as though making sure it's still there, beneath his weakened grip, and only then does he place his forehead down on his arm and let his eyes drift closed for a moment.
He thinks of Brendon, Spencer, Jon, waiting on the other side of the door. They'll be wondering what he's doing. He sighs to himself, stands up and flushes the toilet. He stares down at the thick substance in the bottom of the toilet basin, watches it swirl and spin, be swallowed up by clean, clear water. And just like that, any trace of what just went on in that little bathroom in some nameless venue somewhere in America, is gone. Ryan turns on the faucet and splashes his face. He wipes away the traces of water with a sleeve (they were too long for his arms anyway), and steps out of the bathroom.
Brendon stares as Ryan sits down on the floor silently, long legs crossed and arms wrapped around his knees. He follows Ryan's stare to the television, to Spencer and Jon who are laughing with one another, playing hard at Guitar Hero with equally competetive expressions on their faces, and Brendon knows that the broken boy doesn't see them.
x
I'm going to float.
The roar of the crowd flies at the guitarist, a wall of noise that he can hardly bear. Just play.
My fingers will be as agile as raindrops or needles.
Drown them out. Sing over them.
I will play with such perfection that my fingers will escape, I will escape, and the music will carry on playing.
He wants to run away. He wants the notes to burst from the battered, bruised, beautiful strings of his guitar and pick him up, swallow him, consume his whole, crumbling body until he never existed in the first place.
x
When the show is over, Ryan eats a chicken salad tortilla with a side of fries followed by a slice of vanilla New York cheesecake and two glasses of regular, full-calorie Coke.
The band get a call saying that their show tomorrow night has been boosted forward an hour. They have to get on the bus now, and drive through the night to make it. There's no time for a bathroom stop. It's okay, thinks Ryan. There's a perfectly good toilet on the bus. It's okay.
Brendon takes a shower. Eleven o'clock. Tick. Tock. Spencer demands to take his make-up off, because he hates having stuff on his face. Eleven-thirty. Tick...Tock. By midnight, Ryan is standing at the bathroom door, foot tapping restlessley at the carpet. He hits the door with the palm of his hand, thinking of the food he has consumed, bubbling in his stomach, being digested and becoming calories, fat, weight. He bangs on the door again.
"Spence, hurry the fuck up!" He yells. The reply comes from within, muffled by the door.
"It's not my fault you used fucking waterproof face paint! Dude, what the hell, it's like, sticking to me, or something..."
Ryan kicks the door sharply in frustration. He feels sick. His feet are hardly touching the ground.
He glances out of the window to find them pulling into a service station. He breathes a releived laugh, only for a moment before he jumps off the bus and rushes into the trees beside the road. He's a few metres into the undergrowth before he finds a space, and doesn't hesitate before he jams his fingers down his throat. His hand is shaking. He gags, wretches, gasps. Please. Come on. The hand that isn't in his mouth is gripping the trunk of a tree beside him, his body is doubled over as his stomach churns and contracts, trying to eject something that isn't in there. He wretches again, and chokes on his fingers. He pulls his hand away and coughs, splutters, yellow bile rises in his throat and he spits it onto the ground beside him. Nothing. There's nothing left. The familliar tears of disgust have found their way down his face again, but this time they're heightened because he knows that he's lost control. "Fuck." He curses under his breath. His foot collides sharply with a tree trunk, and now his voice escapes in a tearful, angry sob. "Fuck!"
"Ryan?" A cautious voice. One that he knows only too well. "Are- Are you okay?"
The boy sniffs, wipes away his salty tears, nods. Brendon climbs through the bushes and sits down beside him. Don't look at me. Brendon stares, and Ryan finds tears weaving down his face again. I'm disgusiting.
"Were you just-"
"No."
Silence. Ryan wonders how much weight he's put on. Silently, he calculates the calories in his mind, but he knows that it's too many. He can feel himself weighing down the world.
"Talk to me," Brendon's voice is a whisper in the night, so slight that you might mistake it for a breath of wind. That will be me. That tiny, flawless whisper. Ryan doesn't mean to say it. His words are slight compared to his body, and they slither from his lips like silk, tragic and tear-stained.
"It's all gone. I- I can't-" He shudders suddenly, cringes at the way his stomach feels, bloated and heavy.
"Don't. Ryan, don't-" He smudges a thumb across Ryan's cheek, pushes his tears away. Then, Brendon's arm finds it's way round Ryan's shoulders and pulls him close. "I'm sorry." His words are so soft that Ryan isn't even sure if he hears them at all over the sound of cars racing down the distant freeway and the rushing of the world around him. Even then, he isn't sure if he understands them anyway.
Ryan doesn't speak a word, just curls himself into Brendon's body and somehow, that's all he needs to say. He finds that he like the feel of the singer's arms around him. They're strong; safe. They make him feel small, and that's all that matters. Small.
x
Ryan learns to love the way his heart beats faster as his stomach jerks and his shoulders slump forwards moments before he releases everything. It's like a split second of freedom, no restraints, an absolute loss of control for the narrowest period of time. It makes him weightless.
And it reminds him of Brendon. He told Ryan, once, a long time ago, about the day he went all the way to the other side of Vegas. Brendon was young, fifteen, an innocent, unblemished Mormon boy with no concept of just how real the world is. He bought a ticket and a bottle of vodka, jumped on a train and went somewhere else. Anywhere, as long as it wasn't the little religeous suburb that was suffocating him. He got wasted, passed out on the train and the conductor found him at the end of the line, a young boy without a purpose or direction in which to go. He was delivered in an ambulance directly to St Francis' Hospital somewhere far away from home, and had his stomach pumped. His parents picked him up, grounded him, and he never lost control again.
It's like that, thinks Ryan, as he sits against the cold tiled wall, wiping the dregs of vomit from around his mouth, hands shaking.
And he cries.
He cries without any sense of matter, cries with his swollen lips gaping open to release the loud, racked sobs which shake his body. He tilts his head back and lets the cries consume him, he cries like one cries when they know nobody is watching.
Brendon walks in.
It's not like he didn't know. It's not like it caught him offguard, unaware, so Ryan isn't surprised when Brendon sits down quietly beside him, and asks in as soft a tone as possible:
"Why are you doing this to youself?" It makes Ryan cry harder.
"I don't know. I don't know."
"Yes you do. Ryan, speak to me," He pleads, and his words shake Ryan's fragile body like an earthquake.
"I don't want to," Brendon falls silent.
"Are you sure?" He knows that this isn't the case.
"Yes."
"Ryan, why are you doing this?"
"I don't-"
"Ryan-"
"Okay! Fucking fine! You want to know why?! To get some fucking control over my life, Brendon. That's all I want. I could never have control over what my father did to me. I could never control how I felt. You know how much that hurt, Bren? My fucking dad was killing me, he didn't care, and I don't care, I can't stop myself from loving him all the same because he's my fucking dad! I can't control this band. I can write the lyrics and play the guitar but at the end of the day, if you guys don't like it then it doesn't happen! You know why? Because I haven't got any fucking control! This is all I have, Bren. This is it." He's worn out. Spent. His body slumps against the tiles as he catches his breath. Brendon doesn't speak for a long time.
"I get it. I understand."
"No. You don't."
"I do-"
"No, you don't!" Ryan yells, and his eyes are so fierce that Brendon is scared for a moment. Then, without thinking, Brendon stands, and begins to walk away. Ryan is crying again, sobbing into his hand with shaking shoulders. "Brendon!" He cries out suddenly. The younger boy stops in his tracks, but he doesn't turn.
I'm sorry, he wants to say. Don't leave me. Please. I need you, more than anything.
He stays silent, just breathing.
Brendon walks away.
x
The bowl of spaghetti makes a clattering noise against the table as Spencer places it in front of Ryan. He frowns.
"Spence, I didn't-"
"I know, I know. Just thought you might change your mind. If you don't want it, I'll eat it." Spencer is already stuffing his face with a veggie burger and fries, his eyes focussed concentratedly on the food in front of him. The smell hits Ryan and makes his stomach churn. He thinks of his mother, thinks of her soft voice as she brought the food closer to his greedy baby mouth.
Here comes the train.
He prods the spaghetti gently with a plastic fork, debating wether to slide the dish across the table to Spence (who would, no doubt, appreciate the gesture), but then he glances up and Brendon is watching him like a hawk, his eyes reading You'd better eat that meal, asshole. Ryan quickly diverts his gaze back down to the food. He twirls some spaghetti around his fork slowly.
Choooo, choooooooo.
He picks up his knife, places it back on the tabletop; adjusts the position so that it lies vertical beside the dish. He pushes the strands around the plate with the loaded fork, watching steam curl upwards from the food like tendrils of ivy.
Open up the tunnel.
Strings of fat. Threads of calories. Strands of bloated stomach and XXL hoodies.
Here comes the train.
He lifts the fork to his lips and slides the spaghetti in. He can't quite bring himself to bite down, so it sits in the cavity of his mouth for a moment, warm and slimy and slithering. Bile rises instantly up his throat, he splutters and coughs and gags and slams a hand across his lips as he jumps up, knocking his chair backwards.
BEEEEEP. Train wreck.
He wipes the back of a shaking hand across his lips, gasping for breath. He coughs twice, and his stomach burns worse that ever as he slumps, defeated, over the toilet bowl. Tears which are, of course, induced only by the puking, leave their shining tracks on his pale cheeks. He smudges them away with his fingertips, and stands up. The cracked mirror reflects a broken boy, pale and thin and lost, and Ryan thinks ha. Look who's in control now, Dad. Just look at me. And he looks down at the dirty, cracked tiles on the floor of the bathroom and wonders if he could disappear. If he lay down now, flat on the tiles, curled in on himself like a child and never moved again, would he disappear? Would he crumble and slip away, become the tiles and the grout and the muddy footprints on this scarred ground? He'll be thin enough to crumble.
He tears his eyes away from where his grave is dug on the dirty restroom floor, and he walks through the door, letting it swing shut behind him.
And Brendon sits there, listens to him leave, sitting on the closed toilet seat of the cubicle beside Ryan's with his legs pulled up and his arms wrapped around himself, and he isn't even sure, if he called Ryan's name, he isn't even sure if Ryan would stay. He curls tighter in on himself and tries to swallow the boulder in his throat.
x
"You're killing yourself, Ry!" Brendon roars, and it would scare Ryan but there's so much fear slithering around the boy's heart that a little yelling doesn't make a difference. So, instead of backing away, he yells back, short and sharp and painful.
"I'm not!"
The shouting match has been going on for countless minutes, what started off as a conversation and grew heated, heated until the two boys were screaming their hearts out to one another.
"Don't you fucking care?!"
"Of course I do!" Contradiction, Ryan thinks to himself. Brendon doesn't notice.
"So why, Ryan?! Why are you-"
"You think I want to be like this? It never used to be this easy! It used to be an acheivement every single time I threw up!" His throat is aching. He needs to cry. "I know I'm wasting away! I know it! What the hell am I supposed to do, Bren?" Now the tears are coming, for both of them. With Ryan, rythmic, racked sobs of misery, and for Brendon silent tears, slipping down his face like water on porcelain tiles. "All I wanted was to have some control- now there's nothing." His last sentence is a whisper, terrified. At last, Brendon's experssion shows some emotion. His lip trembles, his eyes close softly and he begins to cry properly. Ragged breaths and shaking shoulders.
Then, he stares at Ryan, and he thinks what if he were to finally run out? What if he grows so weak that he can't function anymore? What if he stops being here every day, what if I never see him smile again, what if I never hear him laugh, what if, what if...
Brendon steps over Ryan's long, splayed body on the tiled floor, kneels down beside him. He looks straight into Ryan's dancing caramel eyes, his expression ferocious as he breathes heavily through his teeth. His eyebrows are furrowed in concentration and determination. His voice is thick with tears and rage and fear and love. It shakes when he speaks, his words solid and perfect as they hit the tiled walls of the bathrooom.
"You've always controlled me."
Brendon kisses him then.