Tronnor One-Shots

The Missing E

A/N: Trigger warning: racism and (mentioned) violence. This is one of my less filtered one shots, so I stress that I mean no offence to anyone in the way I word things. If you have any issues, in any of my works, I insist you let me know :)

"His eyes, they were the exact color of black coffee. Rich, brown-black, unadulterated coffee. Beautiful."

"Do you like coffee?"

Slowly, with an overfamiliar deadness, I turned my head to the therapist. Her face, as always, was of unsettlingly stoic questioning, and I stared quietly until the neon yellow of her dress began to hurt my eyes; I didn't feel comfortable in this room. The ceiling was the colour of his favourite pants, the couch the same impressibility as the mattress we used to share. The lamp behind me mirrored the light behind his eyes, and it was official; that place reminded me too much of him.

But, okay, part of this was my fault; I let everything remind me of him. In fact, I made it remind me. I wore those ceiling coloured jeans even though they fall off my tiny self. I ate his cereal, I used his pillow, I visited his family. I closed my eyes so I was laying beside him in that bed instead of alone on this couch. I was always imagining him being there. I lived to manipulate reality so I could feel his fingers ghosting over my thighs, the taste of Juicy Fruit that he always had on his tongue when we kissed.

Instead of saying to myself he's gone, I pretended he was just making his sister's famous casserole in the other room, or bailing his mom out of jail again, or out doing something as simple as grocery shopping. But, the devastating fact was, we always went grocery shopping together. We cooked together and I had always held his hand as we dragged his mother to rehab after rehab. And that was before. Before I spent most of my time imagining our legs intertwined, tangled in those flannel sheets of ours that were much too hot for summer. We talked about getting thinner ones, but had never gotten around to it.

"Connor?" The therapist pulled me out of my reverie. Was I drowning in him for a minute? An hour? I'd been having trouble with time perception since it happened, so I never really knew. "Do you like coffee, Connor?"

"Julien liked coffee." I answered blandly, the phantom in my head brewing a cup of medium blend with cute, sleepy eyes. I started to imagine me snaking my arms around his waist as he meddled with the coffee maker, but then shut my own tired eyes tightly. "Julien loved coffee, perhaps even more than I do."

I heard a little scribbling, then my stomach ached a little, like it did every time the therapist dropped her pen and asked another question. "What were some of Julien's other distinctive attributes?" She asked, continuing the conversation we'd been having since the session started.

I leaned my head back, washing my eyes in the mental images I so wished were reality still. "He had this confident, polite way of holding himself, I guess." I said, my body relaxing as a tall, strong apparition strutted into the therapist's office. "You always felt noticed when he walked into a room, even if he didn't talk to you."

The therapist didn't see him walk in, but I instinctively lifted my legs so he could sit down at the end of the couch. Julien did sit, placing my legs on his lap, and opened one of his heavy philosophy textbooks on my shins. He graduated university the year before, but he loved rereading those things, his sociology textbooks and Pablo Naruda paperbacks too. I sighed contently as I watched his face. His mouth always flickered upwards when a sentence pleased him, and he was smiling so wide and beautiful that heaven must've been fused into the ink of this volume.

His ever so missed presence put me into a trance. "He was so smart. I mean, yeah, he was book smart, he got a scholarship to one of the best schools in the state, but he was also really witty. In a way that made him endlessly interesting. He knew all these little useless facts about everything, and could always remember those awesomely terrible jokes that everybody else forgot how they go."