Flicker, Fade ⧫ Kellic / Ryden / Jardougall / Jalex

14 :: me (&)

[march 25th]

: hey . welcome to chapter part 1 of Death. it may start off semi happy but that's just a facade to lead you on and make things feel okay. trust me, they aren't.

this song is one of the saddest i have ever heard and it is called me and it is by the 1975 and holy shit it is an absolute work of art. their self titled album is in complete control of my life.

i was late, but i arrived

i'm sorry but i'd rather be getting high 

than watching my family die

Ryan was lying on Brendon's bed with their pants down, sort of wincing in pain.

Maybe it was because Brendon was giving them a tattoo and it was sort of odd because they had always thought that their pain tolerance was oh so high but apparently they had been wrong the whole time and breaking their foot in P.E class in fourth grade just wasn't the same type of pain as getting a needle jabbed into their skin for the sake of art.

Well, Brendon had drawn a sun on his thigh in pen and asked Ryan just to go over it with a needle. They had, and had done a spectacularly bad job. The sun looked all wobbly and trippy and the ink was thicker in some parts than others but Brendon had still smiled when they had finished and then told them that he now had to do a moon for them. Sun and moon. Yin and yang. Right and wrong. So perhaps Ryan was weaker than Brendon when it came to tattoos and worse when it came to art, but as they winced every time the needle pushed harder into their skin, all they could think of was that they really did love Brendon.

Because Brendon had carried them around the school and acted as a crutch for the days after they had broken their foot in P.E class in fourth grade and had made a paper mache sort of cast for them that he had worked on all week after school and it didn't do shit but it was better than Ryan's father completely ignoring them and it was a clean break that healed properly after Brendon's older brother drove Ryan to the emergency room one night. And Brendon had bought them bath bombs on bad days and had let them use his trainers because Ryan's father wouldn't buy them anything anymore and Brendon stole his sister's pads for Ryan every month because their father wouldn't buy them any and sometimes he included chocolate. Brendon had always been there, Brendon had taken the bus into Vegas with them that night when Ryan was behind on photography work and posed for their pictures in front of those neon lights and had announced that everything in their life was completely fake on their dark ride back through the dusty desert

His house had always been open to Ryan, and every day that they saw him a little twisting feeling wormed its way into their stomach and it made sense that he was the sun and Ryan was the moon because he kept Ryan alive, kept Ryan happy, kept everything going. And Ryan was different, Ryan was colder, Ryan might have been sadder, but in the end they always worked together and fit together, they were perfect for each other and sometimes Ryan wanted to scream because Brendon didn't seem to understand it.

"Done." Brendon leaned back and wiped the needle with the paper towel he had been dotting at the tattoo with. It was small, of course it was, but it was much more even and prettier than Ryan's sorry excuse for a sun. All it was was a simple crescent moon but Ryan smiled immediately when they saw it properly, and poked at the raised skin. "Leave it. Needs to heal." Brendon said, putting his india ink and clean needles back into a cloth bag. Ryan wanted to say something, because they felt like it may be the right time and that they may be finally brave enough.

The shorter hair might have done it, the way Brendon had opened his door and smiled as soon as he had seen Ryan's new hair and how he had said, "it suits you" so casually, so nicely. The same way he had told them that of course he would use their pronouns because, "it shouldn't be a hard thing to do!" And everyone had the occasional slip up with them except for Jack and, well, Brendon, because they had gotten the practice of switching pronouns and names for when Gee had told them that she was trans. Maybe it was harder with "plural" pronouns and using the same name, because it had been so much easier for everyone to associate female pronouns with a name like Gee than a name like Gerard.