nosebleed ; phan

v :: storm

"he was my home. and i made him leave." 

the words dripped from dan's mouth like a venomous rhapsody; seeping out from the bitter taste of frostbite and ashen cigarette embers that coated his velvet tongue. the words had drifted from his shattered, whiskey-hazed mind and blended out into the ice-cold crystallization of greys and blues and cheap exhales of nicotine that made up the wintry winds that whipped past his pale skin.

tae clenched his jaw as his blackened eyes darted to the shadowed cement, dan's words painting an abstract reality drawn by the bitter colors that painted the brunette's lilac undereyes and the crimson that had once slashed at his fragile wrists. after all, life imitated art, right?

"dan, come on. let me take you home," he exhaled, the torn luminescence that flickered in the blackness of his irises glimmering against the yellowed street lights cast upon him. dan shook his head, his skin blending to primrose as the cold ate away at his shivering body, but he didn't even seem to notice. he turned, walking away through the mist of regret and aging cigarette smoke that dragged him down like tar.

he didn't turn to look, but he knew tae wasn't chasing after him. tae wanted dan to be happy more than most things, but even he knew that it was no use to chase down a lost boy who was addicted to being lost. no use trying to be a savior to a boy who was so far gone, only he could bring himself serenity.

only he could quiet the skin-singeing winds that spiraled him farther and farther away and cease the storm of his twisting mind.

dan walked, his curly hair tangling in the wind that whipped at his bitten skin as he ambled forward, the sense of how long he had been alone unknown to him.

granted, if he wasn't talking physically, dan had been alone for a long time. forever, perhaps. his distrusting mind has been as vacant as his heart, and dan couldn't remember a time he didn't feel like that. he couldn't remember a time he felt, at all.

there were times he thought he was feeling, the times carter's velvet fingertips brushed against his bruised bottom lip and then travelled around his delicate neck, holding the lost boy in his sculpturesque arms. it was just a dream, the hickory-haired boy thought, a delusion that i could be loved. or that i could love.

vodka-scented fragments of carter's voice swam in the shadowed oceans of dan's mind, like sharks attracted to the blood rushing to his head and chewing away at his ruptured heartstrings.

the lavender bite marks on bottom lips and smiling while kissing and lilac-blending-to-azure veins flooding with cognac and euphoria were what dan liked remembering about carter; about love.

but love is only an illusion. the calm before the storm.

he couldn't remember when he had stopped walking as he noticed he was a stand-still with the wintry weather that chewed at his velvet skin and the deathly vacancy of a neighborhood at 1am. he exhaled as his oxygen evaporated in a clouded fog, disappearing to reveal a giant, hickory house with emerald ivy clawing it's viridescence up the seemingly-abandoned walls.

it looked unnervingly familiar as dan's eyes narrowed, trying to imagine what the house would look like in the sunlight. with every timid step he took forward, his mind was overcome with the anxiety-weighted feeling that he had done this all before. it was like every nerve in his body was telling him to turn back. every hair on his body standing up in a fear-ridden defiance of entering the abandoned home.