When Tyler's twelve, he dreams of a great green lion prowling through a field, each of it's paws the size of cars. Strings of sunlight drool from it's sticky jaws and soak the grass. Tyler kneels beside a bright puddle of it, wets his hands, and smears them up against the blue of the sky. His fingertips sweep and smudge, and when he wakes up, the column of symbols that he drew are painted onto the back of his eyelids in technicolour, as though he really had just been staring down sunlight.
Flinging a hand out to the bedside table, Tyler flicks on the lamp and scrambles for a pen. On the nearest surface available - the back of his forearm, with his elbow stuck out and his wrist at his neck - he copies the shapes from memory, tongue between his teeth.
A few days later - before they fade - he copies them out again, layering ink over greyed-out ink. He doesn't know why. They just feel important. In time, his mom notices and tells him to stop, so he sketches them out on a sheet of paper and tapes it to his bed frame - but the next week, going through a particularly slow math workbook, he finds himself idly doodling them onto his arm again. When his mom throws his felt tips out, he just works a ballpoint back and forth until the lines are thick enough.
When he's sixteen, they let him get his first tattoo.
Tyler's fingertips blindly play up and down the nonsense-familiar lines of it as he reads through the acceptance letter on the kitchen table again, his heart beats faster in his chest. He has three weeks to pack a suitcase. And write his will.
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Neptune Rising (Twenty one Pilots)
FanfictionThey're calling it the end of days. Teenagers selected for a week of tuition at Camp Wormwood are trained to protect their hometowns against the worsening rise in demonic attacks. On the final night, pairs of students are each sent to an isolated ca...
