Insubordinate ( Gay ) ( BxB )

Prologue ✓

His fault. Our faults.

He tells himself truths that aren't quite truths and lies that aren't quite lies. He tells himself anything at all to shut out the inevitable. But what he knows is overpowering what he wants so desperately to believe, raging louder and heavier the more he tries to reason it out. He'd believe anyone if they told him otherwise, because hearing it from someone else may justify the things he's done- but he knows anyone moral wouldn't say anything he doesn't already suspect. He fears what he will find if he were forced to look his decisions in the face.

My fault.

These words flap around like birds in the back of his mind before being shot down by his blatant deniability. He doesn't want to believe such a thing. He doesn't want to believe that he could be capable of something so despicable. 

It's been one week, seven hours, and twenty-four minutes since everything fell apart and rendered him this way. Since then, he's been entranced by numbers and the counting up to something. Counting up to... to what- to when- he wonders? Until this all goes away? Until his quiet mourning ceases? Regardless, count as he may, it will unquestionably take infinities for him to recover, that much is clear. And unlike everything else, he won't try and deny that. His wound, although not physical, is fatal.

He's set to graduate in less than a month; it's a day coming up with rapid pace, it's only around the corner. But in his head and in his heart, he knows he's never going to see it. All his work- though, he's no scholar- will be for nothing. But does it matter, really, when the one person he'd sought to graduate for has slipped through his fingers?  He and his love were supposed to graduate together, they were supposed to move somewhere together where they would make a life for themselves and live freely for the first time. They were supposed to make it together.

But now? They won't. 

He had never realized how delicate such an ideal could be.

The sky outside begins to lighten slowly but surely. This night has gone by faster than the night before, or the night before that. Meaningless time has passed him by and he never realizes it until the sun has risen high over another meaningless day. He can hear his mother downstairs bustling around. It's nearly six in the morning and she's about to leave for work.

He rises from his bed, his tomb, and crosses to the narrow window overlooking the neighborhood from his spacey loft. With hardened hands, he slips his fingertips underneath the sill and pushes it open, letting the dewy air breeze into the room. From his pocket he draws a box of cigarettes and matches, pulling one of each of the contents from their containers. There's a flash of heat before smoke slowly begins to coil from the end of the cigarette between his lips only to be sucked quickly from the room through the screen and into the cool Californian morning. 

He observes his mother as she crosses the driveway to leave, jingling her keys as she searches for the one that will fit her small silver Toyota. She slides the key into the door, then she pauses mid-turn. It must be the smell of smoke, he guesses, as her nose leads her to look up at the second-floor window that frames her son. Her face goes taut as the two acknowledge one another. His mother looks away after a moment and pulls open the car door, sliding in without a word. 

She must be so disappointed in him. He had kicked his habit for a few months. It had been hard, but he did it for his mother- none of it matters now, though. Nothing matters. Death should have come to him one week, seven hours and thirty-one minutes ago. 

He's a shell, yet he breathes.

He watches his mother pull out of the driveway, watches as the lights on the vehicle disappear down the street. Within seconds, she's out of view, not to be home again until late that evening. In her wake, the calls of birds liven in lieu of nocturnal insects. His fingertips grow hotter as the cigarette dwindles. By the time his mother returns, he will be long gone.