Flicker, Fade ⧫ Kellic / Ryden / Jardougall / Jalex

21 :: california kids

[may 1st]

: hey hi it's una's birthday (well,, tomorrow. the 2nd of may) and if you don't know who una is she is therosevest and the sole source of the comments on this story. one more chapter in this damn thing and i am DONE d-o-n-e this is really. a shock

nyawyasyxways this song is california kids by an amazing band called weezer. it's really good. but their whole pinkerton album is better. 

it's gonna be alright if you're on a sinking ship

the california kids will throw you a lifeline

and if you're up all night

thinking about some thing you did

the california kids will show you the sunshine

"Hey."

Vic was sitting cross legged on his bed, watching the clock flash 4:00 in neon red letters at him. The night had swallowed him whole, his body felt emotionless, almost hollow. He had sat hunched over in that way for two hours, his mind going places that it had barely returned from, his body hadn't moved. It had been an odd sort of breakdown, a realization, something that should have made him happy, freedom was his and all he could do was overthink it; he wanted Kellin.

And Kellin crept back into the room at four o'clock in the morning smelling like nighttime and marijuana, he was coming down from his high and fairly right in the head, enough to realize that Vic wasn't asleep and that Vic wasn't acting normal.

"Did your family go?" He asked, sitting down in front of Vic on the bed.

"Yeah," Vic breathed, his eyes blankly following Kellin. "My dad didn't want them gone for so long." Kellin took Vic's hand and held it in his own. Vic looked at Kellin for a long while in silence, his eyes sad, silent.

"We're done," he said, finally. "With school." Kellin nodded, rubbed at Vic's hand. Both of them had very different attitudes about it that could be shared if they had the words to come to a common conclusion, but both were rightfully overwhelmed, and one of them had gotten rid of the worry by smoking weed while the other had spent the night thinking about every single aspect of the future and how he didn't want to leave Kellin.

"It's just us now," Vic said, his voice shaky. He had applied to colleges, of course, in the haze of junior year he had taken the SAT once because he hadn't had the sixty dollars to take it again and gotten absolutely average scores, he didn't want to be average. He didn't know what he was going to do.

"But we have each other." Kellin said, moving closer to Vic. He seemed almost confident, warm, happy. Different. 

"Do we? Are you going to leave? Where are you going to go? Where am I going to go? What are we going to do-college? Jobs? Careers? Are we going to have each other, really? How long is that going-"

"Vic," Kellin said, cutting him off. "You have to live right now. You have to." He was sincere now, nothing was a joke. "If you get your head stuck in the past or the future then you're going to miss every single beautiful thing going on in the present. We have the summer. We have our time. I'm not going to leave you. I have nowhere to go except somewhere with you. The only place I want to be is somewhere with you. Live now. We'll worry about the future when it catches up to us, but we'll worry about it together."

It sounded staged. It sounded like he had written it out beforehand, like he had come up with it days before, but he was coming up with it all at once, beautiful words for a beautiful person, and they calmed Vic down.

"Do you want to go on a road trip with us?" Kellin asked, and Vic smiled.

"Yeah."

"We're leaving later. Today." Kellin giggled. "It's so weird how time works." Vic loved the smile on Kellin's face, Vic loved the way he talked, the way his voice sounded, the way his eyes looked in the dim light, the way he moved, the way he looked, the way he smelled, like weed and the wind and flowers that didn't have a smell, that was Kellin's smell. All he had needed was Kellin, a few words had been exchanged back and forth and there, suddenly, everything was okay again.