Detoxified

Chapter 18: Episode 10 - Part 3

"You're tense."

"Of course I'm tense; I don't want to do this."

"Type, can you please at least try to go into this with a little less negativity?"

"I'm not being negative. I'm expressing frustration."

"Yeah, which you haven't stopped doing since we woke up this morning," Tharn muttered under his breath.

Mistakes had been made.

"Oh, fuck me then, right? I guess I shouldn't feel anything but joy and positivity about the fact that we're currently driving to go meet your ex-boyfriend and his brother to discuss the really rather private matter of our relationship and the dickhead trying to destroy it." Type huffed and folded his arms over his chest with indignance as he slumped discontentedly into his seat.

Tharn sighed curtly--an attempt at self-composure. "Type, that's not what I meant. I'm just saying I know you're frustrated and you'd rather be doing literally anything else right now. You don't have to keep repeating yourself. This isn't exactly my idea of a fun after-school activity either, you know."

"Ooh~ Dismissive today, aren't we? That's new; where did you learn that from?" Type knew--he may not have wanted to admit it to himself--but he knew that he was being spiteful and... Quite absurd. He honestly didn't know what had happened overnight, especially considering he and Tharn had both fallen asleep on relatively good terms with one another, but he'd woken up with an inexplicably insatiable disdain for--well, everything.

He was in probably the crappiest mood he'd been in since he was a young teen. And poor Tharn was caught in the crossfire of all of it, which was exceedingly unfair to him, and Type knew it. Ashamedly so.

God, why can't I just get a grip already? An internal war between anxiety-charged irritability and rational, conscious impulse-control, it seemed. An age-old human struggle...

Tharn, having assumed the unfortunate role of ever-patient punching bag for the past several hours, had been largely leaving his responses neutral and impersonal to avoid exacerbating whatever the hell Type had going on.

Until now.

Type's words had finally struck just a little too hard for Tharn to ignore this time:

"At this point, I'm beginning to think I learned it from you. "

A personal affront. Hurtful. Deep-cutting. It was the first time a dispute of theirs had ever gone so far as to take fully personal, ill-reasoned jabs at one another.

After many, many seconds of insufferable, deafening, tense silence, Type--eyes glassy with tears--quietly asked, "when have I ever been dismissive of you?"

"Type, I didn't--"

"No, really, Tharn, tell me: when have I ever been dismissive of you?" Type repeated, voice raised, wavering.

"You haven't, okay?!" Tharn snapped. "You've never been dismissive of me."

"Then why did you say that?"

"We should stop," Tharn suggested suddenly on a deep, trembling exhale.

" No, we shouldn't. You don't get to drop a bomb like that without giving me a reason," Type countered, posture rigid and defensive as he pivoted in his seat to face Tharn more directly.

"There isn't a reason, Type. That's why we should stop. If we keep going like this, the argument will be nothing but empty, personal insults. What does that do for either of us? What goal would we be trying to achieve? At that point, the only goal would be to hurt each other, and that's not healthy. That's something we may not be able to recover from," Tharn reasoned, a certain desperate plea in his voice that burrowed deep into Type's chest. Sobering him.