𝐨𝐤𝐚𝐲, 𝐛𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢

𝟸𝟷. 𝚘𝚛𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚓𝚞𝚙𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚛

❥ don't mind typos, i kinda just gave up tbh. enjoy.
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"Marco." That name. The name. The one Jean
can't ever bring himself to say, no matter how hard he tries. How many times that he chokes on it. How many times he heaves on it. The name that holds more than the cavity of him can sustain.

It is so heavy in both mass and meaning you can feel it weighing in on your chest. The cords of your heart unraveling, your lungs exploding into a million tiny pieces.

Five letters coming together to form something that knocks all the wind out of him and shrinks his body to a minuscule size while swelling his heart up so much it overtakes him. Bleeding, beating, and breaking, ten times over, with something that he can no longer give away because the one receiver of every ounce of it no longer exists.

Your eyes are entirely turned in Jean's direction now. You feel them as they droop. Sinking deep into their burning sockets as you take him in as he lay restless beside you. He's only a couple of inches from where you are, but for some reason, the distance feels equivalent to a couple lifetimes. A length that won't allow you to get to him in enough time. One that has stretched too far.

By each fleeting second that ticks by like the count down to a deadly bomb set to detonate, Jean's trembling lips and twitching body are increasingly monopolized with restlessness due to the cruel internal barbarism that's pushed him into the dark corner of solitude with no way out.

His fears, in all their rawness, are chaining him up and skinning him alive like an animal in an overcrowded slaughterhouse. All the while, he swallows his own bleeding tongue that's still wearing a name that sounds like perennial loss and hurts like distressing melancholy. The result of it lingering beyond wherever it is that forever reaches to.

Jean's consciousness is still out like a light. He's still lost somewhere in his shadows that are shaded as dark as a rogue planet that has no knowledge that the sun exists and that it is also a star.

His words, weighted with importance and hurt, continue to spill free from the string that create his voice. A granular substance painted with grieving black as he stirs in his dreams of fear that are a little too vivid the images might not ever leave him, not even once he wakes.

"Sorry, Marco. So sorry." Jean utters, words falling out of him and off the edge of your bed, cracking the supple ground of your bedroom. It's a cry before it's anything else. And then it develops into something more. Something substantial enough to snap your neck in half and revive you back into franticness that can't be tamed. "Marco, I'm so sorry."

And that's exactly what it does. It makes you frantic, it makes you queasy, and everything else in between. As quickly as two particles collide with each other, you are swallowed whole with the need to try and help him. To try and make it better. To try and save him from himself.

To try and fix it.

And you don't hesitate, not even for a moment. It's nothing you have to internally debate or make a single passing thought about. With something like this, there is no coercing to be made.

Your body works by itself, fully controlled by your beating heart that holds the existence of Jean closer to its center than you want to believe is true.

Pulling your body up from where you are on the mattress that emotions are turning hard as a ribbed rock, you bring your heaviness over to him, closing up the respectful space set between your once-rested bodies that's been there since he first drifted away to the place he now needs rescuing from.

You feel the warmth of his body and his movements of terror against yours. Both of which are skyrocketing past the crust of the earth.

There's a bottomless, darkened pit in your stomach that formed the very second you realized what was going on. And now it's starting to branch out like roots of a plant that are housed down in subsoil weaving around every single part of you there is to possibly latch onto to find its nutrients.