The Good Life ~ Troyler AU

twenty-four - tyler

How did I meet Troye, you ask?

I was dancing with strangers in a club who's name I'd forgotten hours ago, full of alcohol that burned my throat and the smoke I'd inhaled from other people's cigarettes at the door - everyone around me was identical and faceless, copy upon copy of party animals, and I could see nothing else but a sea of moving bodies as the music swelled to the point of pain.

I looked up and saw him. He wasn't dancing and he wasn't drinking, and he was alone, a rare occurrence in places like this. He was devastatingly gorgeous, but people moved around him like repelled magnets. Maybe it was the intensity of his eyes. Maybe it was the hard cords of muscle in his thin arms, the way he stood like he was about to run. Maybe it was how he scanned the heave of people on the dance floor with wary caution - but when he caught my eye the first thing I thought was that he was the most beautiful person in the room, but the second was that maybe it would not be a good idea to speak to him.

I liked a challenge, and I fell in love with him.

Now, three years later - almost to the day - I was looking at a stranger again, someone who I did not know how to approach, how to speak to, how to touch. And it was bound to kill me more slowly, more painfully, than any knife or gun or blow.

Because this time it mattered. Because this time, it was killing him too. 

We were alone in his room. I was sitting on the bed and had a vague recollection of walking here like a zombie. Troye was not looking at me. He had his fingers on his temples and sat leaning against the wall on the floor, his knees drawn to his chest. Neither of us spoke, but I could hear him breathing.

"I didn't want to." he said, after a very, very long time, and I sighed, my lungs relaxing into a dead weight state.

"Neither did I." I replied. But I was not talking about murder; I was talking about coming here, about hearing his past, about falling in love with him at all.

But we cannot give back what we are given. And even though I felt like lying down and giving up on the spot, I knew that if given a choice between Troye and another, easier life, I would do it all over again. 

Finally Troye stood and went to me and kissed me briefly, and I let him. I thought there was something odd in how tightly he held me to his chest, but I buried my face into his shoulder and breathed him in deeply all the same. He smelled like sweat and sulfur, but beneath that, clinging to his skin was his normal smell of candles and rain and coffee. There were things that could not be stolen from him, even if everything else was.

"I love you very much." he told me.

"I love you too." I did; I couldn't even pretend to deny it. I'd love him until I died, even if I lived longer than him.

Troye sighed gently and finally released me, his hands lingering on my forearms briefly before he withdrew them - his fingers were trembling. "I had better go to sleep." His eyes were hollow and dead, dead, dead. "I have a big day tomorrow, after all."

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