Graffixation Stories and Artwork #9
Artist: katej
Fractured by cmk418
All the King’s horses… he wonders about that now. The illogical nature of the nursery rhyme. Why the fuck were horses involved anyway? If nothing, they’d make it worse, trampling poor Humpty to dust beneath their hooves.
Jesus, he felt like crap. Amazing they were able to piece him together after his tumble from the landing which resulted in multiple fractures and extensive internal bleeding.
Toby had it better after we broke his arms and legs. Not as many pieces to worry about.
But that has always been the difference between them. Toby hadn’t lost so much of himself that he couldn’t put the pieces back together.
Every moment of failed trust, every con, every bit of violence - physical, mental, or emotional - that had impacted his life since sometime around his fifth birthday, took a piece of him. Some pieces were never recovered.
No one was going to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Vox Nihili by Hth
Title Vox Nihili
Author: hth
He blacks out and comes to, over and over again. There's something sharp under his skin, and he doesn't know if the blade of Vern's shank broke off in there, or if he's only feeling his ribs, widening the holes in his body as the gurney goes BANG BANG BANG over the shitty cheap concrete floors in Oz. He's out of it, mostly, but he's awake for the part where he vomits and it all just comes out blood, the hot, miserable taste of blood, and Chris regrets it all just a little. All the blood. All the violence.
Everybody has just one thing in common, and that's that they're all born to die. Chris never could get too broken up about it, never could work up a real strong feeling about death one way or the other. He's lived his whole life kicked idly back and forth between fighting and fucking, the sharp thrill of running the perfect con and the sloppy thrill of blowing the perfect rail, too much loneliness and too many goddamn people, outside and back in again. One thing after another, and Chris has never counted the days, never put anything aside for a future he never even remembers believing in. People break - some of them sooner than others, yeah, sure, but at the end of the day, dead is dead. It's a fixed game, and you can play it any way you like, but you still end up being shit out by worms. At the end of the day, everyone's life is worth exactly the same, sinners and saints, decent men and men like Chris and everyone in between: wormshit.
He's a killer because he never could think up one good reason not to be, but right now he's a little bit sorry.
Nobody's going to miss Chris Keller when he's gone, and that makes him different from other people.
That makes him alone.
*
Vern hit him one time. Only one.
A long time ago.
Chris doesn't remember much about it. He was high on the ceiling. Vern was pissed, because Vern never changes. Chris was younger then. Smaller. Vern was still Vern.
He got hit hard enough to knock him to the ground, but he was loose and full of light, and it didn't hurt him at the time. Later on he had one hell of a black eye, rings of blue and rotten-fruit brown splashing outward across his whole cheek, but at the time he just rolled with it.
He was smaller then, a skinny kid who'd lived through a lot more beatings than birthdays. He just rolled with it, because he always did, because the people who protected you were always the people who hit you, and really with Vern it was a long time overdue.
Later on he crashed out. Sweated it it out first, then vomited the rest up, while Vern watched. There's most of one night he doesn't remember, and then he remembers pulling himself up by the sink, looking at his reflection by the sideways floodlights from outside the cell.
“I let you off easy,” Vern said.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “You always do.”
Chris carries a scar or two. Little ones. None of them Vern's doing. Not many guys who've been where Chris has been can say that. Maybe no one but him can say that.
“Next time you hit me,” Chris said quietly, “I'll kill you.”
Vern chuckled. “No, you won't.”
“I'm not afraid of you,” Chris said. It was probably the first time that he realized it: that he wasn't afraid of Vern, never had been and never would be.
Not many guys who've been where Chris has been can say that.
“I know,” Vern said on a quiet, deep note that seemed to buzz inside Chris's bones. “You love me.”
“Maybe I'd do it anyway,” Chris said.
“Stop, you're gonna give me nightmares,” Vern said dryly.
But he never hit Chris a second time. And Chris never loved anyone without trying to destroy them first, except Vern Schillinger.
*
He's happy not to be dead. Life doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day, but it still feels good to be drawing breath. He can't explain that. He never could. It just is what it is. Being not dead after he probably should be is a rush every time. He almost believes it changes things.
Fuck, maybe it does. Toby loves him, he knows that. He can taste it, iron-rich in his mouth, the flavor of Toby's pain and confusion and the way he doesn't want anything about who and what Chris is, but he's still gushing blood from the place where Chris isn't anymore.
It's ugly, all of it. Chris never said it wasn't. There's something beyond ugly in him, something inhuman, that makes him love Toby even more when he's bleeding out. But dying is the truth about everyone's life, and so the realest thing you can ever be to anyone is their killer. It's a bond beyond every last lie. It's the thing that you can never go back and undo, or even deny.
If there's meaning in anything, anything at all, it has to be that.
It's funny to him that he came a lot closer to dying for Toby than the other way around. It's. New.
Chris shifts restlessly, hating the way he can feel his body chafed and weakened from doing his hospital time. Toby's stronger than him right now. Closer to whole. That's not usually how people walk out of a relationship with Chris.
It kind of makes Chris want him even more. And this time, not in - that same way. The ugly one.
When he closes his eyes and pictures Toby's face, Chris sees him smiling, shy and smug at the same time, correcting Chris's grammar with a little flutter of uncertainty, desperate to be liked but unable not to be better than everyone around him, even when it's safer and smarter to keep your mouth shut. He's an ordinary-looking guy, but beauty's never been worth anything to Chris. It's so fake.
He believes in death. He knows death.
Maybe he believes in love, a little bit. He's never known any kind of love that didn't turn out fake in the end, cheap and breakable. He doesn't know why he still looks for it. Chris is a pragmatist, in every other way there is.
Chris wraps an arm across his ribs and presses on his stitches, through the cotton hospital gown. Vern wasn't wrong, what he said: it's sloppy fucking work. Way below the standard Vern sets for himself and his boys.
He let Chris off easy again, maybe?
It doesn't sit right, but Chris has to admit, it's been years since he and Vern were close. Years since Chris could say they knew each other inside and out.
It doesn't sit right, and he doesn't like it. He doesn't want Vern's fucking forgiveness, doesn't want to be allowed to live when any other man on the planet would die for violating Vern's trust. Doesn't want to be whatever that makes him to Vern. Not anymore.
Like everything in Chris's life, Vern's just a thing that comes and goes as the years pass by. In a world full of cockroaches scrabbling to eat, fuck, and die, Vern's just a bigger roach than most.
When he closes his eyes and pictures Toby's face....
When Chris closes his eyes, he pictures Toby's face.
*
Toby's not a very good kisser. At least not with Chris. At least not yet.
He's awkward, flinging himself into it too desperately. Too much to prove to both of them. It's pathetic, honestly. Lying to himself that he can handle this. Lying to himself that it's brave, that he's stepping up.
Okay, Chris thought. This is what he really is: a liar like any man. Every man. Like Chris. He's no better than Chris. Fuck him.
For a minute there, Chris was thinking...that maybe he didn't owe Vern this. Who was Vern to him now, anyway? A brittle, bitter old man who used to protect Chris, a million years ago when Chris needed protecting, but only because he could wring more use out of Chris alive than dead. Someone Chris used to love, in the same shallow, fractured way that got him divorced four times. Someone Chris wanted, up until he didn't anymore.
For a minute there, he thought very clearly, with the kind of clarity that only a mason jar of prison homebrew could provide: Keller, don't be stupid. Vern's the same dead end he's always been, and you don't know what this guy is yet, what he could be to you.
He almost backed out right there.
Toby said, Get the fuck over here, and he was just too fucking cute, ruffled and impatient and - kind and hopeful, and for one drunk second, Chris was sure that he couldn't go through with any of it. Not because he's a good person; he's the worst kind of person, the kind who would betray a friend, the kind who would wreck anything, everything, for just one grab at something he'd probably only want right up until he didn't anymore.
He's the worst kind of person, but Toby isn't, and that...mattered. For a minute.
Toby said, I love you, and it all began to fall apart. Because it wasn't true then. Toby didn't even know him. It was the first lie he'd heard from Toby's mouth, and it changed things. Made Toby an ordinary man again, and Chris has never been good at forgiving men for how fucking ordinary they are.
What Chris did to Toby, he didn't do for Vern Schillinger. He doesn't have the fortitude to give a shit, in 19 fucking 98, for the guy he was in love with when he was seventeen.
He did it because everything is a fucking lie, and everything breaks, and everyone uses everyone who comes near them, and everyone thinks they're the hero when really they're wormshit. He did it because Toby deserved it for making himself out to be some fucking hero, rising above it all and embracing his inner faggot to rescue Chris from his regrets, when really that's a lie, too, because Chris doesn't regret anything he's ever done. They're just things that he's done. They don't matter to him, and at the end of the day, they don't even matter to God.
That's pretty fucking obvious to anyone who's paying attention to the world.
He did it because Toby's clumsy, needy, pathetic kiss was probably the worst one Chris has ever had in his life, and he didn't care, and he dreamed about it while he was in the hole, drifting in and out of sleep, naked and alone and puking his guts out in the dark. He didn't care, he wanted Toby with him, even though it was all built on bullshit, even though everything about what they had become to each other was a lie.
Toby made the lies sound a million times better than the truth, and there wasn't any way in hell that Chris was going to forgive him for that.
*
It's lights-out, and Chris can't stop picking at the raw scar on his side. Can't stop. Can't sleep. Doesn't know what comes next.
Is he really in love with this person, this permanently pissed off son of a bitch who can't stand him, who won't touch him, who'd shank him in the back as soon as look at him? This isn't the Tobias Beecher that Chris knows, the one he betrayed his oldest friend for, the one he risked his life for.
But if the Beecher that Chris wanted to wreck is gone now - and the one Chris wanted to welcome him home is even longer gone - then who's breathing above him in the darkness, squirming restlessly, snuffling and humming like he just can't get right, can't find his rest? Who the fuck is this?
Chris only wants to talk to him. Offender to victim. Man to man. Whatever way, any way. He just wants to talk - to know - to be seen - he just wants -
Well, what does he want?
Unconditional love. Right? Sounds good.
He's kidding himself, though. It was bullshit all along, this idea that Toby could love him in some pure way, some kind of love that lasts. Toby's in Oz just like the rest of them. Toby's in the world, just like the rest of them. Nothing is pure, and nothing lasts, and there's always a condition.
Chris presses on the edge of a wound and smiles a little into his pillow. Well, fuck unconditional love, then. Chris believes in love, he guesses, but he knows death. Scars. Worms. Lies. Goodbyes. He knows those things, knows them so deep down in his gut that he doesn't even have to put words to them.
He knows revenge, that's for damn sure. Hell, between him and Toby, what don't they know about revenge?
He knows there's no meaning of life, but he loves the pain of pushing down on his scar, loves the high on the ceiling of just breathing. Loves falling in love all over again, better every time, deeper every time. He knows what it feels like to regret now, but still, here he is. Here they are. And Chris isn't sorry about that.
Toby mutters a string of nonsense sounds in his sleep; he says God in the middle somewhere, and Chris laughs, just a silent burst of air. Vern's got a guy who literally prays day and night for a chance to destroy him.
“I meant it,” Chris says in the morning, the first words either of them speak as they shuffle through the routine, Toby unfolding his pants, Chris holding himself up on the sink, looking at his reflection by the ugly fluorescent glare. “You want to take down Schillinger. I want in.”
“You won't get anything for it,” Toby says. “Not from me.”
Chris almost doesn't recognize the face he sees in the mirror. When did he get old like this? He never imagined it would take him this long to die.
He shrugs and says, “Maybe I'll do it anyway.”
*
Toby kisses him at midnight. January 1, 2000. Chris puts a hand on his neck, feels the stubble under his jaw where he shaved carelessly, feels the blood moving through his jugular. Toby's mouth is dry and soft, shaping itself easily to Chris's, and now, here, more than a year after their first kiss, Toby is so fucking good at it, so earnest and generous and real. Chris can't help making a noise against his lips. He thinks he says, God.
Toby smiles into the kiss and gently pries Chris's hand away from where it's clamped on his shoulder. Their shirts are off, their belts undone, and Chris still hasn't had anything to do with it. Still can't do anything but kiss the rough side of Toby's face, mumbling his name.
“I think you're beautiful,” Toby whispers, as if he's confiding some kind of secret. Chris already knows that he does, though. His voice breaks then, when he says, “If you hurt me again, Chris, I'll kill you.”
“No, you won't,” Chris murmurs, sucking a tiny kiss against the line of his jaw. He feels Toby tense up, shift his jaw, get ready to protest that he's nobody's helpless pussy bitch, not ever again.
Chris doesn't need to hear about it. He knows that; he wears that on his body, carved into his body, every day. He stops Toby's argument with a kiss and says, “You won't have to.”
"FRACTURED
chipping away at my resolve
slowly bringing me back to life
i try to ignore all this blood on the floor
now you are all i hear
so loud and so clear"
Fractured by cmk418
All the King’s horses… he wonders about that now. The illogical nature of the nursery rhyme. Why the fuck were horses involved anyway? If nothing, they’d make it worse, trampling poor Humpty to dust beneath their hooves.
Jesus, he felt like crap. Amazing they were able to piece him together after his tumble from the landing which resulted in multiple fractures and extensive internal bleeding.
Toby had it better after we broke his arms and legs. Not as many pieces to worry about.
But that has always been the difference between them. Toby hadn’t lost so much of himself that he couldn’t put the pieces back together.
Every moment of failed trust, every con, every bit of violence - physical, mental, or emotional - that had impacted his life since sometime around his fifth birthday, took a piece of him. Some pieces were never recovered.
No one was going to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Vox Nihili by Hth
Title Vox Nihili
Author: hth
He blacks out and comes to, over and over again. There's something sharp under his skin, and he doesn't know if the blade of Vern's shank broke off in there, or if he's only feeling his ribs, widening the holes in his body as the gurney goes BANG BANG BANG over the shitty cheap concrete floors in Oz. He's out of it, mostly, but he's awake for the part where he vomits and it all just comes out blood, the hot, miserable taste of blood, and Chris regrets it all just a little. All the blood. All the violence.
Everybody has just one thing in common, and that's that they're all born to die. Chris never could get too broken up about it, never could work up a real strong feeling about death one way or the other. He's lived his whole life kicked idly back and forth between fighting and fucking, the sharp thrill of running the perfect con and the sloppy thrill of blowing the perfect rail, too much loneliness and too many goddamn people, outside and back in again. One thing after another, and Chris has never counted the days, never put anything aside for a future he never even remembers believing in. People break - some of them sooner than others, yeah, sure, but at the end of the day, dead is dead. It's a fixed game, and you can play it any way you like, but you still end up being shit out by worms. At the end of the day, everyone's life is worth exactly the same, sinners and saints, decent men and men like Chris and everyone in between: wormshit.
He's a killer because he never could think up one good reason not to be, but right now he's a little bit sorry.
Nobody's going to miss Chris Keller when he's gone, and that makes him different from other people.
That makes him alone.
*
Vern hit him one time. Only one.
A long time ago.
Chris doesn't remember much about it. He was high on the ceiling. Vern was pissed, because Vern never changes. Chris was younger then. Smaller. Vern was still Vern.
He got hit hard enough to knock him to the ground, but he was loose and full of light, and it didn't hurt him at the time. Later on he had one hell of a black eye, rings of blue and rotten-fruit brown splashing outward across his whole cheek, but at the time he just rolled with it.
He was smaller then, a skinny kid who'd lived through a lot more beatings than birthdays. He just rolled with it, because he always did, because the people who protected you were always the people who hit you, and really with Vern it was a long time overdue.
Later on he crashed out. Sweated it it out first, then vomited the rest up, while Vern watched. There's most of one night he doesn't remember, and then he remembers pulling himself up by the sink, looking at his reflection by the sideways floodlights from outside the cell.
“I let you off easy,” Vern said.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “You always do.”
Chris carries a scar or two. Little ones. None of them Vern's doing. Not many guys who've been where Chris has been can say that. Maybe no one but him can say that.
“Next time you hit me,” Chris said quietly, “I'll kill you.”
Vern chuckled. “No, you won't.”
“I'm not afraid of you,” Chris said. It was probably the first time that he realized it: that he wasn't afraid of Vern, never had been and never would be.
Not many guys who've been where Chris has been can say that.
“I know,” Vern said on a quiet, deep note that seemed to buzz inside Chris's bones. “You love me.”
“Maybe I'd do it anyway,” Chris said.
“Stop, you're gonna give me nightmares,” Vern said dryly.
But he never hit Chris a second time. And Chris never loved anyone without trying to destroy them first, except Vern Schillinger.
*
He's happy not to be dead. Life doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day, but it still feels good to be drawing breath. He can't explain that. He never could. It just is what it is. Being not dead after he probably should be is a rush every time. He almost believes it changes things.
Fuck, maybe it does. Toby loves him, he knows that. He can taste it, iron-rich in his mouth, the flavor of Toby's pain and confusion and the way he doesn't want anything about who and what Chris is, but he's still gushing blood from the place where Chris isn't anymore.
It's ugly, all of it. Chris never said it wasn't. There's something beyond ugly in him, something inhuman, that makes him love Toby even more when he's bleeding out. But dying is the truth about everyone's life, and so the realest thing you can ever be to anyone is their killer. It's a bond beyond every last lie. It's the thing that you can never go back and undo, or even deny.
If there's meaning in anything, anything at all, it has to be that.
It's funny to him that he came a lot closer to dying for Toby than the other way around. It's. New.
Chris shifts restlessly, hating the way he can feel his body chafed and weakened from doing his hospital time. Toby's stronger than him right now. Closer to whole. That's not usually how people walk out of a relationship with Chris.
It kind of makes Chris want him even more. And this time, not in - that same way. The ugly one.
When he closes his eyes and pictures Toby's face, Chris sees him smiling, shy and smug at the same time, correcting Chris's grammar with a little flutter of uncertainty, desperate to be liked but unable not to be better than everyone around him, even when it's safer and smarter to keep your mouth shut. He's an ordinary-looking guy, but beauty's never been worth anything to Chris. It's so fake.
He believes in death. He knows death.
Maybe he believes in love, a little bit. He's never known any kind of love that didn't turn out fake in the end, cheap and breakable. He doesn't know why he still looks for it. Chris is a pragmatist, in every other way there is.
Chris wraps an arm across his ribs and presses on his stitches, through the cotton hospital gown. Vern wasn't wrong, what he said: it's sloppy fucking work. Way below the standard Vern sets for himself and his boys.
He let Chris off easy again, maybe?
It doesn't sit right, but Chris has to admit, it's been years since he and Vern were close. Years since Chris could say they knew each other inside and out.
It doesn't sit right, and he doesn't like it. He doesn't want Vern's fucking forgiveness, doesn't want to be allowed to live when any other man on the planet would die for violating Vern's trust. Doesn't want to be whatever that makes him to Vern. Not anymore.
Like everything in Chris's life, Vern's just a thing that comes and goes as the years pass by. In a world full of cockroaches scrabbling to eat, fuck, and die, Vern's just a bigger roach than most.
When he closes his eyes and pictures Toby's face....
When Chris closes his eyes, he pictures Toby's face.
*
Toby's not a very good kisser. At least not with Chris. At least not yet.
He's awkward, flinging himself into it too desperately. Too much to prove to both of them. It's pathetic, honestly. Lying to himself that he can handle this. Lying to himself that it's brave, that he's stepping up.
Okay, Chris thought. This is what he really is: a liar like any man. Every man. Like Chris. He's no better than Chris. Fuck him.
For a minute there, Chris was thinking...that maybe he didn't owe Vern this. Who was Vern to him now, anyway? A brittle, bitter old man who used to protect Chris, a million years ago when Chris needed protecting, but only because he could wring more use out of Chris alive than dead. Someone Chris used to love, in the same shallow, fractured way that got him divorced four times. Someone Chris wanted, up until he didn't anymore.
For a minute there, he thought very clearly, with the kind of clarity that only a mason jar of prison homebrew could provide: Keller, don't be stupid. Vern's the same dead end he's always been, and you don't know what this guy is yet, what he could be to you.
He almost backed out right there.
Toby said, Get the fuck over here, and he was just too fucking cute, ruffled and impatient and - kind and hopeful, and for one drunk second, Chris was sure that he couldn't go through with any of it. Not because he's a good person; he's the worst kind of person, the kind who would betray a friend, the kind who would wreck anything, everything, for just one grab at something he'd probably only want right up until he didn't anymore.
He's the worst kind of person, but Toby isn't, and that...mattered. For a minute.
Toby said, I love you, and it all began to fall apart. Because it wasn't true then. Toby didn't even know him. It was the first lie he'd heard from Toby's mouth, and it changed things. Made Toby an ordinary man again, and Chris has never been good at forgiving men for how fucking ordinary they are.
What Chris did to Toby, he didn't do for Vern Schillinger. He doesn't have the fortitude to give a shit, in 19 fucking 98, for the guy he was in love with when he was seventeen.
He did it because everything is a fucking lie, and everything breaks, and everyone uses everyone who comes near them, and everyone thinks they're the hero when really they're wormshit. He did it because Toby deserved it for making himself out to be some fucking hero, rising above it all and embracing his inner faggot to rescue Chris from his regrets, when really that's a lie, too, because Chris doesn't regret anything he's ever done. They're just things that he's done. They don't matter to him, and at the end of the day, they don't even matter to God.
That's pretty fucking obvious to anyone who's paying attention to the world.
He did it because Toby's clumsy, needy, pathetic kiss was probably the worst one Chris has ever had in his life, and he didn't care, and he dreamed about it while he was in the hole, drifting in and out of sleep, naked and alone and puking his guts out in the dark. He didn't care, he wanted Toby with him, even though it was all built on bullshit, even though everything about what they had become to each other was a lie.
Toby made the lies sound a million times better than the truth, and there wasn't any way in hell that Chris was going to forgive him for that.
*
It's lights-out, and Chris can't stop picking at the raw scar on his side. Can't stop. Can't sleep. Doesn't know what comes next.
Is he really in love with this person, this permanently pissed off son of a bitch who can't stand him, who won't touch him, who'd shank him in the back as soon as look at him? This isn't the Tobias Beecher that Chris knows, the one he betrayed his oldest friend for, the one he risked his life for.
But if the Beecher that Chris wanted to wreck is gone now - and the one Chris wanted to welcome him home is even longer gone - then who's breathing above him in the darkness, squirming restlessly, snuffling and humming like he just can't get right, can't find his rest? Who the fuck is this?
Chris only wants to talk to him. Offender to victim. Man to man. Whatever way, any way. He just wants to talk - to know - to be seen - he just wants -
Well, what does he want?
Unconditional love. Right? Sounds good.
He's kidding himself, though. It was bullshit all along, this idea that Toby could love him in some pure way, some kind of love that lasts. Toby's in Oz just like the rest of them. Toby's in the world, just like the rest of them. Nothing is pure, and nothing lasts, and there's always a condition.
Chris presses on the edge of a wound and smiles a little into his pillow. Well, fuck unconditional love, then. Chris believes in love, he guesses, but he knows death. Scars. Worms. Lies. Goodbyes. He knows those things, knows them so deep down in his gut that he doesn't even have to put words to them.
He knows revenge, that's for damn sure. Hell, between him and Toby, what don't they know about revenge?
He knows there's no meaning of life, but he loves the pain of pushing down on his scar, loves the high on the ceiling of just breathing. Loves falling in love all over again, better every time, deeper every time. He knows what it feels like to regret now, but still, here he is. Here they are. And Chris isn't sorry about that.
Toby mutters a string of nonsense sounds in his sleep; he says God in the middle somewhere, and Chris laughs, just a silent burst of air. Vern's got a guy who literally prays day and night for a chance to destroy him.
“I meant it,” Chris says in the morning, the first words either of them speak as they shuffle through the routine, Toby unfolding his pants, Chris holding himself up on the sink, looking at his reflection by the ugly fluorescent glare. “You want to take down Schillinger. I want in.”
“You won't get anything for it,” Toby says. “Not from me.”
Chris almost doesn't recognize the face he sees in the mirror. When did he get old like this? He never imagined it would take him this long to die.
He shrugs and says, “Maybe I'll do it anyway.”
*
Toby kisses him at midnight. January 1, 2000. Chris puts a hand on his neck, feels the stubble under his jaw where he shaved carelessly, feels the blood moving through his jugular. Toby's mouth is dry and soft, shaping itself easily to Chris's, and now, here, more than a year after their first kiss, Toby is so fucking good at it, so earnest and generous and real. Chris can't help making a noise against his lips. He thinks he says, God.
Toby smiles into the kiss and gently pries Chris's hand away from where it's clamped on his shoulder. Their shirts are off, their belts undone, and Chris still hasn't had anything to do with it. Still can't do anything but kiss the rough side of Toby's face, mumbling his name.
“I think you're beautiful,” Toby whispers, as if he's confiding some kind of secret. Chris already knows that he does, though. His voice breaks then, when he says, “If you hurt me again, Chris, I'll kill you.”
“No, you won't,” Chris murmurs, sucking a tiny kiss against the line of his jaw. He feels Toby tense up, shift his jaw, get ready to protest that he's nobody's helpless pussy bitch, not ever again.
Chris doesn't need to hear about it. He knows that; he wears that on his body, carved into his body, every day. He stops Toby's argument with a kiss and says, “You won't have to.”
"FRACTURED
chipping away at my resolve
slowly bringing me back to life
i try to ignore all this blood on the floor
now you are all i hear
so loud and so clear"