I used to waste my time dreaming of being alive...20/?
“Show me.”
I’ll admit this scared me.
I wasn’t prepared, not really; it was more or less my only chance to show him. Spencer and Jon were both helping Spencer’s mother to prepare dinner, and we were up in the slowly darkening bedroom.
And I’d agreed that I would show him at some point, the reasons for my hatred of my body.
“Okay.”
He sat down on the bed, as though he was about to watch a TV show or something, but I saw in the tenseness of his shoulders and the set of his jaw that he knew that what I was about to do would be difficult for me, and he respected that.
I made sure that the door was firmly shut and pulled my shirt off resignedly before turning to face him again. His hand leapt to his mouth and he made a slightly strangled noise in his throat. Pain flashed across his face.
“Why, Ryan?” His voice cracked slightly, and I sat down next to him, watching his face crumple as he looked at my pathetically skinny, exposed torso.
“Oh, Ry...” he began, his voice trailing off as his arms secured themselves around my waist, and he began to cry.
What made it worse was that the most recent ones were because of him, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
“Don’t,” I mumbled, ashamed. “Don’t cry, Bren, please...”
“How could you do this Ryan?” asked Brendon, his voice growing shrill. “Why would you even think of doing something like that to yourself?”
“Brendon, please,” I begged, hoping that the others wouldn’t decide to come up here on a whim. “It’s - it’s -”
“Don’t say it’s nothing Ry, ’cause it’s not, and you know it!” he yelled at me, and I cringed, hiding my face as he stared at me.
His fingers traced over my chest, my stomach, my abdomen, pulling back to look at me with red eyes. I winced as his palms brushed against my stomach.
I was healing, but some wounds were taking longer to heal than others.
Strangely, it was only the physical ones. Emotionally, I’d never been better.
“I...” I didn’t know what I was about to say.
“Please say it’s not because of me,” pleaded Brendon. I’d never seen anybody look so desperate in all my life. Almost as though it were something he wouldn’t be able to live with if he were the cause of it.
“I’m so sorry, Bren,” I mumbled. He shrank back, horrified.
I continued, hating myself for telling him this, but I couldn’t lie to him. Not now.
“This is why I hate my body,” I said emotionlessly, not looking at him, “and this is what my life has done to me -” My voice was starting to crack, remembering everything that I’d ever done to myself, everything my parents had done to me.
“I was always the weird, emo kid, the one that no one liked, I -” My voice was rising now, becoming hysterical. “Because I was always the freak, to others and to me, I took away the pain and replaced it with something to distract me -”
I was cut off by Brendon’s lips against mine, forcing his tongue into my mouth possessively. He pushed me down onto the bed, his hands painfully tight in my hair. He pulled back and stared at me in agony.
The hurt, and the rage, and all that I’d ever felt seemed to show on his face at that moment.
“Don’t ever say that,” he said harshly, breathing hard. “Don’t ever fucking say that, Ryan Ross, because it’s not true, and you damn well know it!”
All this frightened me in a far more powerful way than my parents ever could have. That he, my everything, was so determined that I should never feel like that again, terrified me beyond the reaches of my imagination.
And it made me love him so much.
“Brendon, I’ve been cutting myself far longer than you think,” I blurted desperately. It was true; I had, but only I could vouch for that. Not even Spencer knew about it. “I’ve been doing - this since I knew how.”
He sank back wearily, and I rose off the bed, retrieving my shirt and hastily pulling it back on as Jon’s voice drifted up the stairs, telling us to come down to dinner. I cupped Brendon’s cheek with my palm, kissing him softly before pulling him up by the hand. He seemed away somewhere, deep inside himself, his gaze unfocused.
As my lips left his, he stared up at me dazedly and flushed.
“C’mon,” I mumbled, wrapping my arm around him and gently but firmly dragging him out of the room and down to where the others were waiting for us.
----
Dinner was a somewhat quiet affair.
Brendon ate slowly, not appearing to notice what it was that he was putting into his mouth. I didn’t really either, I think it was lasagne...
Spencer, in his all-knowing inquisitiveness, couldn’t keep his piercing blue eyes off us. I think he was carefully examining each of our reactions to anything said or done, because I could tell that he was slightly, if not extremely concerned.
So he should be, he stuffed up our lives first time around...
----
Brendon was distraught about the whole thing.
Okay, so he had been the cause of it partly, but he couldn’t have known, and besides, I had been doing that for years before.
I escaped from dinner as fast as I could; locking myself in Spencer’s room, stuff anybody who wanted to come in.
It wasn’t too long before I heard the soft knock on the door, but the quiet, “Ryan? Can I come in?” didn’t belong to Brendon.
The soft voice that met my ears belonged to one Jon Walker.
“Yeah,” I answered just as quietly, “yeah, come in Jon.”
The light flashed suddenly and disappeared as the door swung open and shut, and I heard the surprised, “Why are you sitting in the dark, Ry?” and the light switch flick on.
I blinked furiously as Jon sat down on the bed next to me, wrapping his arm around my waist.
He was like Brendon in that respect. I was more like Spencer, god help me.
I don’t think I’d been that close to him, well, ever.
“What happened?” he asked kindly, and I could see why Spencer had become such good friends with him.
Despite how he appeared on the outside, loud, occasionally obnoxious, he was clearly more caring, and definitely more understanding than at first glance.
It struck me just how very little I knew about him.
I could tell him - show him the truth, as to why Brendon was acting the way he was, but I really didn’t want to do that, but then, I felt I needed to tell someone why Brendon was like that.
I covered my face with my hands wearily. “I showed him why I hate my body so much, and he thinks that it’s his fault.” I left out the fact that it partially was, and I looked up at him, feeling exhausted already.
“Why? What is it?” Jon’s eyes queried me as bluntly as the question had, searching my expression for any betraying flickers of emotion.
I shook my head, and he sighed. “Okay then.”
“Well, just so you know, Brendon’s not as strong as you think he is - don’t look at me like that,” he said quietly in response to my disbelieving look, “because I haven’t come up here to lecture you. I know for a fact that under all the hyperness, he’s actually as freaked out as you are about everything that’s happened - when you two - weren’t speaking...it looked like he wasn’t feeling anything except pain -”
I shuddered inwardly, hating hearing the words come out of his mouth, because they must’ve been true.
I know that they are...
~Brendon~
“Okay.”
I sat down on the bed, trying to compose myself before I learned what I had wanted to know for so long.
He turned to the door and pushed against it, obviously seeing whether it was properly shut, before pulling his shirt off slowly. My heart leapt into my throat, seeing the smooth contours of his back and the slightly luminescent pale skin.
Then, reluctantly, he turned around.
I stifled a cry with the palm of my hand, looking at the wounds across the whole of his painfully thin torso.
Oh my...oh Jesus...
Angry cuts ravaged his chest, his stomach, his abdomen, some mere scratches, some going far deeper than just breaking the surface of the skin, all horrifying.
I couldn’t fathom how someone could inflict so many injuries upon their body.
Tears started to well up in my eyes and I swallowed, asking, “Why, Ryan?”
Sitting close to me, he looked at me sorrowfully, and all I could choke out was, “Oh, Ry...” before my arms found their way around his waist and I started to cry shamefully. I couldn’t look at him anymore.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t cry, Bren, please...”
My voice started to rise in pitch. “How could you do this Ryan? Why would you even think of doing something like this to yourself?”
“Brendon, please,” he said quickly, glancing around, “it’s - it’s -”
I lost it. “Don’t say it’s nothing Ry, ’cause it’s not and you know it!” I shouted at him, loathing the way he winced, knowing, from what he’d told me of his parents that they must’ve yelled at him like that.
He turned his face from mine and I felt so guilty all of a sudden.
I looked back at his ruined torso, my fingers tentatively touching the scars that had healed already. When my hands reached his stomach, a slight shiver went through his body and he said hesitantly, “I -”
“Please say it’s not because of me!” I burst out, my resolve, already partially crushed, crumbling even further as I realised the implications of our time apart and what his scars could be because of.
I’d never felt so utterly worthless and idiotic in all my life.
Then the words I’d never wanted to hear, because I knew what they meant instantly: “I’m so sorry, Bren.”
Translation: “Yes, you do know why I’ve been slicing myself up, Brendon.”
I moved away, so terrified and horrified that I couldn’t stand to look at him, but he continued.
“This is why I hate my body and this is what my life has done to me,” he said dully. “I was always the weird, emo kid, the one that no one liked, I - because I was always the freak to others and to me, I took away the pain and replaced it with something to distract me -”
No, no, no, NO, NO, NO, SHUT UP!!!
I lunged forward, kissing him hard, forcing my tongue into his mouth.
He froze as I pushed him back into the mattress, my hands in his hair, and when I pulled away, I felt horrified.
“Don’t ever say that,” I said, my breath coming fast, “don’t ever fucking say that, Ryan Ross, because it’s not true, and you damn well know it!”
I felt like my heart was twisting and wrenching and being pulled slowly and agonisingly apart.
What’s happened to someone to drive them to hurt themselves that much?
“Brendon, I’ve been cutting myself far longer than you think, I’ve been doing this -” I flinched at the inflection “ - since I knew how.”
My mind went into a hazy blur at that moment. I couldn’t have remembered anything if I’d wanted to.
----
“Would you like seconds, dear?”
“What?” It had taken me a few seconds to realise that Mrs. Spencer was talking to me and I looked up somewhat absently. “Oh, no thank you, Mrs. Spencer.”
She probably thinks I’m retarded or something...
She smiled across the table at me understandingly, knowingly. “Alright then, dear.”
I excused myself and went and sat down in the dark living room, realising that Spencer was following me as the door snicked shut behind me.
“Is Ryan always like that?” I knew Ryan had already assured me that yes, he had been doing that for a long time before he’d known me, but doubt crept into my mind and nagged at me, and I needed to know.
“Like what, Brendon?” Spencer’s quiet voice met my ears and I suddenly wanted to cry, remembering how Ryan’s body had looked.
“Y’know -” I hated to say it “- the cutting and everything -”
“WHAT?” Spencer screamed, leaping up. I jumped. “What did you say?”
“Jeez, Spence, don’t need to get all dramatic.” I tried to be sarcastic, my voice curiously flat though, rather like Ryan’s had been.
What an understatement, though, particularly considering how I’d behaved throughout dinner.
I wondered absently why Mrs. Spencer didn’t come in and say something about how loud we were all the time. Then I wondered if she was used to it.
“He - he cuts himself?”
From the look on his face, I realised at that moment that Spencer really had had no idea what had been going on.
“Yeah,” I barely croaked, feeling a wave of drowsiness wash over me. So tired all of a sudden...
Spencer sank down onto the couch, so...he looked as though he’d aged about a hundred years, in the space of around five seconds.
He cared for Ryan, I could tell, so much, perhaps not in the same way as me, but he cared for him, and it was that compassion that I had mistaken for love when I’d first met him. His behaviour had been altered yes, by what he was trying to put across, his ‘crush’ on Ryan, and that had confused me.
But essentially, it was there, and it scared him so much that Ryan should cut himself, the same as it had done to me.
“You didn’t know?” I asked, looking at him sharply. “Didn’t you - having watched him like you did, a-after all those years - didn’t you think it’d turn out like that?”
“No,” said Spencer in a very small voice, “I should -”
“No!” I blurted, before he even started to get up, “don’t.”
There was a moment’s pause in which we stared awkwardly at each other, not knowing what to do, what to say.
“I - I really wanna go to bed, Spence,” I said, my voice bordering on whininess, my fingers tapping incessantly against my thigh.
Spencer nodded mutely, and got up when I did, making our way up the stairs.
“By the way, that sounded so dodgy, y’know.”
This one was harder to write, so I'm sorry if there are any inconsistancies, and feedback people!!!!
I’ll admit this scared me.
I wasn’t prepared, not really; it was more or less my only chance to show him. Spencer and Jon were both helping Spencer’s mother to prepare dinner, and we were up in the slowly darkening bedroom.
And I’d agreed that I would show him at some point, the reasons for my hatred of my body.
“Okay.”
He sat down on the bed, as though he was about to watch a TV show or something, but I saw in the tenseness of his shoulders and the set of his jaw that he knew that what I was about to do would be difficult for me, and he respected that.
I made sure that the door was firmly shut and pulled my shirt off resignedly before turning to face him again. His hand leapt to his mouth and he made a slightly strangled noise in his throat. Pain flashed across his face.
“Why, Ryan?” His voice cracked slightly, and I sat down next to him, watching his face crumple as he looked at my pathetically skinny, exposed torso.
“Oh, Ry...” he began, his voice trailing off as his arms secured themselves around my waist, and he began to cry.
What made it worse was that the most recent ones were because of him, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
“Don’t,” I mumbled, ashamed. “Don’t cry, Bren, please...”
“How could you do this Ryan?” asked Brendon, his voice growing shrill. “Why would you even think of doing something like that to yourself?”
“Brendon, please,” I begged, hoping that the others wouldn’t decide to come up here on a whim. “It’s - it’s -”
“Don’t say it’s nothing Ry, ’cause it’s not, and you know it!” he yelled at me, and I cringed, hiding my face as he stared at me.
His fingers traced over my chest, my stomach, my abdomen, pulling back to look at me with red eyes. I winced as his palms brushed against my stomach.
I was healing, but some wounds were taking longer to heal than others.
Strangely, it was only the physical ones. Emotionally, I’d never been better.
“I...” I didn’t know what I was about to say.
“Please say it’s not because of me,” pleaded Brendon. I’d never seen anybody look so desperate in all my life. Almost as though it were something he wouldn’t be able to live with if he were the cause of it.
“I’m so sorry, Bren,” I mumbled. He shrank back, horrified.
I continued, hating myself for telling him this, but I couldn’t lie to him. Not now.
“This is why I hate my body,” I said emotionlessly, not looking at him, “and this is what my life has done to me -” My voice was starting to crack, remembering everything that I’d ever done to myself, everything my parents had done to me.
“I was always the weird, emo kid, the one that no one liked, I -” My voice was rising now, becoming hysterical. “Because I was always the freak, to others and to me, I took away the pain and replaced it with something to distract me -”
I was cut off by Brendon’s lips against mine, forcing his tongue into my mouth possessively. He pushed me down onto the bed, his hands painfully tight in my hair. He pulled back and stared at me in agony.
The hurt, and the rage, and all that I’d ever felt seemed to show on his face at that moment.
“Don’t ever say that,” he said harshly, breathing hard. “Don’t ever fucking say that, Ryan Ross, because it’s not true, and you damn well know it!”
All this frightened me in a far more powerful way than my parents ever could have. That he, my everything, was so determined that I should never feel like that again, terrified me beyond the reaches of my imagination.
And it made me love him so much.
“Brendon, I’ve been cutting myself far longer than you think,” I blurted desperately. It was true; I had, but only I could vouch for that. Not even Spencer knew about it. “I’ve been doing - this since I knew how.”
He sank back wearily, and I rose off the bed, retrieving my shirt and hastily pulling it back on as Jon’s voice drifted up the stairs, telling us to come down to dinner. I cupped Brendon’s cheek with my palm, kissing him softly before pulling him up by the hand. He seemed away somewhere, deep inside himself, his gaze unfocused.
As my lips left his, he stared up at me dazedly and flushed.
“C’mon,” I mumbled, wrapping my arm around him and gently but firmly dragging him out of the room and down to where the others were waiting for us.
----
Dinner was a somewhat quiet affair.
Brendon ate slowly, not appearing to notice what it was that he was putting into his mouth. I didn’t really either, I think it was lasagne...
Spencer, in his all-knowing inquisitiveness, couldn’t keep his piercing blue eyes off us. I think he was carefully examining each of our reactions to anything said or done, because I could tell that he was slightly, if not extremely concerned.
So he should be, he stuffed up our lives first time around...
----
Brendon was distraught about the whole thing.
Okay, so he had been the cause of it partly, but he couldn’t have known, and besides, I had been doing that for years before.
I escaped from dinner as fast as I could; locking myself in Spencer’s room, stuff anybody who wanted to come in.
It wasn’t too long before I heard the soft knock on the door, but the quiet, “Ryan? Can I come in?” didn’t belong to Brendon.
The soft voice that met my ears belonged to one Jon Walker.
“Yeah,” I answered just as quietly, “yeah, come in Jon.”
The light flashed suddenly and disappeared as the door swung open and shut, and I heard the surprised, “Why are you sitting in the dark, Ry?” and the light switch flick on.
I blinked furiously as Jon sat down on the bed next to me, wrapping his arm around my waist.
He was like Brendon in that respect. I was more like Spencer, god help me.
I don’t think I’d been that close to him, well, ever.
“What happened?” he asked kindly, and I could see why Spencer had become such good friends with him.
Despite how he appeared on the outside, loud, occasionally obnoxious, he was clearly more caring, and definitely more understanding than at first glance.
It struck me just how very little I knew about him.
I could tell him - show him the truth, as to why Brendon was acting the way he was, but I really didn’t want to do that, but then, I felt I needed to tell someone why Brendon was like that.
I covered my face with my hands wearily. “I showed him why I hate my body so much, and he thinks that it’s his fault.” I left out the fact that it partially was, and I looked up at him, feeling exhausted already.
“Why? What is it?” Jon’s eyes queried me as bluntly as the question had, searching my expression for any betraying flickers of emotion.
I shook my head, and he sighed. “Okay then.”
“Well, just so you know, Brendon’s not as strong as you think he is - don’t look at me like that,” he said quietly in response to my disbelieving look, “because I haven’t come up here to lecture you. I know for a fact that under all the hyperness, he’s actually as freaked out as you are about everything that’s happened - when you two - weren’t speaking...it looked like he wasn’t feeling anything except pain -”
I shuddered inwardly, hating hearing the words come out of his mouth, because they must’ve been true.
I know that they are...
~Brendon~
“Okay.”
I sat down on the bed, trying to compose myself before I learned what I had wanted to know for so long.
He turned to the door and pushed against it, obviously seeing whether it was properly shut, before pulling his shirt off slowly. My heart leapt into my throat, seeing the smooth contours of his back and the slightly luminescent pale skin.
Then, reluctantly, he turned around.
I stifled a cry with the palm of my hand, looking at the wounds across the whole of his painfully thin torso.
Oh my...oh Jesus...
Angry cuts ravaged his chest, his stomach, his abdomen, some mere scratches, some going far deeper than just breaking the surface of the skin, all horrifying.
I couldn’t fathom how someone could inflict so many injuries upon their body.
Tears started to well up in my eyes and I swallowed, asking, “Why, Ryan?”
Sitting close to me, he looked at me sorrowfully, and all I could choke out was, “Oh, Ry...” before my arms found their way around his waist and I started to cry shamefully. I couldn’t look at him anymore.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t cry, Bren, please...”
My voice started to rise in pitch. “How could you do this Ryan? Why would you even think of doing something like this to yourself?”
“Brendon, please,” he said quickly, glancing around, “it’s - it’s -”
I lost it. “Don’t say it’s nothing Ry, ’cause it’s not and you know it!” I shouted at him, loathing the way he winced, knowing, from what he’d told me of his parents that they must’ve yelled at him like that.
He turned his face from mine and I felt so guilty all of a sudden.
I looked back at his ruined torso, my fingers tentatively touching the scars that had healed already. When my hands reached his stomach, a slight shiver went through his body and he said hesitantly, “I -”
“Please say it’s not because of me!” I burst out, my resolve, already partially crushed, crumbling even further as I realised the implications of our time apart and what his scars could be because of.
I’d never felt so utterly worthless and idiotic in all my life.
Then the words I’d never wanted to hear, because I knew what they meant instantly: “I’m so sorry, Bren.”
Translation: “Yes, you do know why I’ve been slicing myself up, Brendon.”
I moved away, so terrified and horrified that I couldn’t stand to look at him, but he continued.
“This is why I hate my body and this is what my life has done to me,” he said dully. “I was always the weird, emo kid, the one that no one liked, I - because I was always the freak to others and to me, I took away the pain and replaced it with something to distract me -”
No, no, no, NO, NO, NO, SHUT UP!!!
I lunged forward, kissing him hard, forcing my tongue into his mouth.
He froze as I pushed him back into the mattress, my hands in his hair, and when I pulled away, I felt horrified.
“Don’t ever say that,” I said, my breath coming fast, “don’t ever fucking say that, Ryan Ross, because it’s not true, and you damn well know it!”
I felt like my heart was twisting and wrenching and being pulled slowly and agonisingly apart.
What’s happened to someone to drive them to hurt themselves that much?
“Brendon, I’ve been cutting myself far longer than you think, I’ve been doing this -” I flinched at the inflection “ - since I knew how.”
My mind went into a hazy blur at that moment. I couldn’t have remembered anything if I’d wanted to.
----
“Would you like seconds, dear?”
“What?” It had taken me a few seconds to realise that Mrs. Spencer was talking to me and I looked up somewhat absently. “Oh, no thank you, Mrs. Spencer.”
She probably thinks I’m retarded or something...
She smiled across the table at me understandingly, knowingly. “Alright then, dear.”
I excused myself and went and sat down in the dark living room, realising that Spencer was following me as the door snicked shut behind me.
“Is Ryan always like that?” I knew Ryan had already assured me that yes, he had been doing that for a long time before he’d known me, but doubt crept into my mind and nagged at me, and I needed to know.
“Like what, Brendon?” Spencer’s quiet voice met my ears and I suddenly wanted to cry, remembering how Ryan’s body had looked.
“Y’know -” I hated to say it “- the cutting and everything -”
“WHAT?” Spencer screamed, leaping up. I jumped. “What did you say?”
“Jeez, Spence, don’t need to get all dramatic.” I tried to be sarcastic, my voice curiously flat though, rather like Ryan’s had been.
What an understatement, though, particularly considering how I’d behaved throughout dinner.
I wondered absently why Mrs. Spencer didn’t come in and say something about how loud we were all the time. Then I wondered if she was used to it.
“He - he cuts himself?”
From the look on his face, I realised at that moment that Spencer really had had no idea what had been going on.
“Yeah,” I barely croaked, feeling a wave of drowsiness wash over me. So tired all of a sudden...
Spencer sank down onto the couch, so...he looked as though he’d aged about a hundred years, in the space of around five seconds.
He cared for Ryan, I could tell, so much, perhaps not in the same way as me, but he cared for him, and it was that compassion that I had mistaken for love when I’d first met him. His behaviour had been altered yes, by what he was trying to put across, his ‘crush’ on Ryan, and that had confused me.
But essentially, it was there, and it scared him so much that Ryan should cut himself, the same as it had done to me.
“You didn’t know?” I asked, looking at him sharply. “Didn’t you - having watched him like you did, a-after all those years - didn’t you think it’d turn out like that?”
“No,” said Spencer in a very small voice, “I should -”
“No!” I blurted, before he even started to get up, “don’t.”
There was a moment’s pause in which we stared awkwardly at each other, not knowing what to do, what to say.
“I - I really wanna go to bed, Spence,” I said, my voice bordering on whininess, my fingers tapping incessantly against my thigh.
Spencer nodded mutely, and got up when I did, making our way up the stairs.
“By the way, that sounded so dodgy, y’know.”
This one was harder to write, so I'm sorry if there are any inconsistancies, and feedback people!!!!