dial tone

last time i cried

i write on ao3 im posting this on her for clout to be transparent. also maybe it's funny IDK. hope the wattpad audience appreciates.

im r1caner on ao3, twitter, tumblr (spotify too. I HAVE A PLAYLIST FOR THIS FIC it's called dial tone. also r1caner on ccat? whatever you're feeling like. )

i dont know how to put this in bold. i dont know how to use this platform. and i dont want to know. Sorry.

I need you to know that even though this really sucks, I'm trying my best to be okay with it. The whole thing's just unfair and I'm sorry. It fucking sucks because I'll never hate you, and I never want to, and I know you'll never hate me, so this has nowhere to go. I love you and I wish I told you sooner. Maybe it would've changed things. But I really doubt it, because I feel like you always knew, even before I said it. And it was never about us, anyway. It's just how it worked out. That makes me hate it more.

It's almost August. I have to stop writing these.

Love,

Dream

Today is Dream's last Friday while he's still sixteen.

He tends to think about things like that lately, last Friday while being sixteen's, and last summer while still being at home's, and last round of texting everyone asking about their schedules's.

Because although he'll technically be a teenager for a little longer, it won't always be like this. He doesn't know much, but he knows that being seventeen and preparing to leave, being eighteen and nineteen in college, won't be the same as being sixteen and still being around everyone he's known for his entire life.

It's the last time that things will be like how they are right now, and he doesn't know how he's supposed to feel about it. Doesn't know how he's supposed to feel about the beginning of his senior year creeping closer and closer, high school ending, moving on to other things. He takes note of it all, and just...thinks. Thinks about everything that will happen that hasn't happened yet, and decides that he has space to breathe. He'll worry about it, all of it—college applications and tours and essays and paperwork and budgeting—when it's happening, and that's not yet.

He has time.

It's two days before his birthday, and it's hot out, and the boredom that comes with the end of summer is drilling into his head, so he opens his bedroom windows—not an easy task because of their age, the weird, complicated locks and thickness at the bottom of the glass—and lays on his bed on top of his sheets for a while, staring up at his ceiling and avoiding everything he doesn't want to be his reality just yet.

And when that isn't enough, he grabs a popsicle from the freezer and kicks open the screen door to sit on the porch.

The white paint on the wood outside has peeled awfully, and his mom always says she wants to redo it, but she never has. She's never even bought new gallons of paint, just shakes her head and tsks at the state of the it. But Dream likes it more this way—he thinks it gives it character. He always tells her so, but she just says that it makes the market value go down, like she'd ever sell in the first place.

The porch is where they talk, sometimes, when it's dark out and it's still warm enough to (which is most of the time), drinking lemonade that always has too many seeds in it, and where Dream likes to sit by himself and finish popsicles before they melt and run down his hands and get them all sticky. Of course it's happened to him now, but that's only because he's distracted by some boy across the street.

Dream's never seen him before, and he sees everybody. It's not like his town's overly small, more that Dream just knows it like the back of his hand, like the marbling of his skin and his veins that stick out a little and the bruises on his knuckles; he knows a lot about this place, because he doesn't have any other choice.