Un Coup de Foudre (Brallon)

could this get any worse honestly

"Fix yourself," I demand out of the blue, seemingly out of the depths of my brain where no one dares to dwell for fear of destruction by thoughts that lie and cheat and scam with no viable motive, only weaned by a reaction.

Fixing himself is precisely what Dallon needs to rescue him from the deep, dark abyss of his demons, because he's been immersed in a misconception about them. Demons are not creatures with soot-stained skin and irises that drip of crimson — no, they are much more familiar than that. They are the monster you witness by briefly darting your vision to the mirror before shying away, embarrassed. They are the ticks you can't be rid of no matter how hard you try, because they will always be counting sonnets upon your leg without rest. They are the planters of ideas in your head that say you're safe from the dark because you don't give a shit if you're snatched but never recognizing that such a plea for death is a demon itself. They are in the traditional things, like meticulously ordering shoes in a line and enjoying the bite of a rubber band upon your wrist and patting the hellhounds that'll kill you just to hasten the process of their labor. They are as real as you and me, and I know that Dallon has seen them, too.

However, he denies it with this pardoning: "Excuse me?"

"Fix yourself," I repeat, this time stronger than my heart could ever be.

"I can't!" He's more frustrated than angry, really, so I interpret that as a sign to continue prying.

"I said fix yourself."

"Don't you think that's what I've been trying to do?" Tears deify the shear pain in his eyes, so blue and so estranged and so irreversible. "Don't you think that's what the placebo pills are for? I need a schedule in my life, Brendon, a routine to assert that there's something I'm compelled to do every day instead of withering like an old man clothed in a seventeen year-old's body that's rapidly deteriorating to show what he truly is on the inside, and I don't want people to see that, most of all you, because you've been with me since the beginning, and my own peevishness is shoving you away. I don't want that, Brendon — I don't — but I do want you to believe me when I say that you are the best thing I've ever stumbled upon."

"Then what have we come to? What, after we endeavored to break free of our shackles, do we make of ourselves? What are we now?"

"Un coup de foudre," Dallon concludes without missing a beat. "A strike of lightning, or, if you prefer, love at first sight. I believe that is what we are, and what others believe is that love at first sight is either one of many fantasies of a six year-old, or it's an unsustainable wish that's just as fleeting as human intrigue, that falling in love solely by sight is conditioning you to never expect how you fall out of love after you realize that maybe this won't work out, and that maybe you're more different than you had once thought, and that maybe a strike of lightning is a harm instead of a blessing, so all I'm doing is figuring out how to cushion the blow."

I cross my arms, proposing a challenge. "How are you going to do that?"

And without a word, Dallon is gripping his jacket with knuckles soaking in Everest snow, then pouring through the door and into the concrete border of the road, and it's all I can do to follow.

"You better not be leaving me," I scold him, paced at the intensity of an exasperated suburban mother.

Dallon doesn't spin around, rather speaking against the wind and hoping that it'll carry towards me. "And why is that?"

"Because I'm an important person to you, and important people aren't usually abandoned for fucking pills, placebo or not."

This time he does spin around, marching towards me and jabbing a spear into my chest with his finger. "Don't trick yourself into thinking that you are even remotely important, because you're just an ordinary person. I'm just an ordinary person. You're only art because everything is — everything is beautiful, everything is destructive, and everything is just completely and utterly ordinary, and that's all it'll ever be. That's all you'll ever be." My friend's foot punches the sidewalk as he turns, as he deserts me.

"Dallon, stop pushing me away from you! I'm just trying to help!"

"No, you're trying to shove a gag in my mouth with the claim that you're only someone who cares about me, just completing what you're meant to do because you're somehow my friend after all of this, but if you truly consider yourself my friend, don't act as though controlling me is the best for my health. I know who I am, and I know what I want, and sometimes what I want isn't to stay alive, but you have no right to decide what I do with my life, however limited it is."

"Killing yourself shouldn't be on the market."

"Perhaps you're right," Dallon agrees, halted by the gravity of his burdens. "And I wanted to tell those pills that the bruises on my hips were from the tiny swing set in the backyard of my home in France, not from them, but that would be a lie, because every purple and every black were their rigid fingers on me, instructing me not to utter a sound, because this was supposed to be art, right? This was supposed to be art." Dallon has now returned and is leashed to my hands as if uttering his vows at a wedding that'll never transpire with the state of things, and as a tear from his very own eyes splotches my skin, all he feels is shame.

"But then I realized that only you are art, Brendon, and I'm losing you faster than I met you, and art is meant to be cherished, but I'm doing a pretty shitty job of cherishing it, because I can see that your tears are burning your skin so fucking much, and you somehow regard me as art, though I'm far from that. I am sordid, I am the scum of the earth, and I am worthless, yet you're still here telling me that I shouldn't get on with it and kill both my body and mind, that I shouldn't think of myself as what I truly am, that I'm better than this, as if this isn't what I want for my life like you want a new pair of shoes or another friend or someone to remind you that you're not in this alone, but let me tell you something, Brendon: you are, because I can't fucking take it anymore. I can't pretend that I'm all right, 'cause I'm not. I'm fucking sick in the head, and soon that'll all be over. You can return to your life where you can act as though I never painted that apple on the back alley or kissed you with paint chemicals on my lips or promised that I would've wanted you to fight, because maybe fighting isn't so attainable anymore. Maybe you'll destroy yourself over me, and because of that maybe I'll regret doing this, but you instructed me to never be sorry for helping myself. This is only a part of that, nothing more." My companion nods with the largest surge of self assurance he can muster, still ambivalent about his opinion, and he should be. I'm not a stranger to him, though I might become one soon, might become the ghost whom I continuously fear draping its skins of invisibility over me like I was never a person at all, like I've willingly surrendered the thing I loved the very most.

"Dallon, what the hell are you talking about?" My hands are shaking now, earthquakes upon earthquakes rupturing my bones and tendons and everything that comprises my body, but it's false, prosthetic, dirty as wearing someone else's name, wearing a the badge of a ghost that stole my identity. "You're scaring me, Dallon."

Latching his fingers onto my hands I suspect for the last time in a while, Dallon's gaze beatifies me with true purity amidst the situation, as if departing from his lover to enlist in a war, a war no one realized would be against his own mind. "Then find it in your heart to be brave."

Upon turning his back and jogging as quickly as possible away from me, away from his doubts, away from my ostensible control over him, away from everything that corrupts him, all I can do is yell one final thing to the shadow he's fading into: "Dallon, where are you going?"

He stops for a moment, glancing back as lovers do, and delivers his reply. "Some destination where I could never possibly hurt you."

~~~~~

A/N: LOOOOOOLLLLL CAN YOU IMAGINE NOT KNOWING WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN AND GETTING HIT WITH THIS SHITSTORM LMAO I ALMOST FEEL BAD FOR THE READERS

Quwingaling: Do you have a crush on someone?

Angalang: when people ask their viewers this, it's usually because they're head over heels in love with someone, but really I'm just curious as an asocial person myself how you could actually interact with people like wtf how (also I have a hard time distinguishing platonic relations and romantic relations for some people so idk)

~Dacranky