porcelain | shyland ✓

porcelain

i am so proud of this. i received an A* and couldn't be happier. my teacher is so pleased and impressed, i hope you guys are too.
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shane had never wanted to fall for him.

the phrase "you always fall for the right person at the wrong time" would crawl into his brain and lace his mind, sitting on the tip of his tongue and straining against his lips. often, he would swallow them back down, taking a deep breath and allowing his eyes to illustrate the ceiling above him with the black and white memories he had added colour to. yet sometimes – it had only happened once – shane would be so overwhelmed with anger and pent up emotion that he would spit the words out, crushing them in his fist and leaving the chewed up thoughts scattered across his moth eaten carpet.

ryland adams was broken. destroyed. more shattered than the words shane had crumbled in his hands; more damaged than the mirror shane had punched because even looking at his own reflection reminded him of the boy. he had porcelain glass for skin, spiderweb cracks of his past decorating his very bones like a song that never leaves your head.

all shane wanted to do was fix him. to take the fragments that the last few years had left him in and slowly piece them back together. that was the problem with shane, though. he cared. he cared to such an irreconcilable extent that he neglected anything else around him, even himself.

there would always be one night that stuck in his head. tuesday the seventeenth of october, when ryland crawled through his window with trembling hands, a tear stricken face and the words "i love you" on his lips. the way the auburn boy had grabbed his hand – his broken, fractured hand that cut deep into shane's skin – had been injected into his blood stream, and trickled through his veins ever since.

the hardest part for shane was that ryland was everywhere he went. memories of the boy would sit hunched in his peripheral vision, ready to leap in front of his eyes and make time stop. he would freeze like a deer in headlights, the urge to turn around and be greeted with the source of happiness he so deeply craved crowding his mind like a fucking drug. only sometimes, on rare occasions, would shane let this emotion overwhelm him. yet, every time, he would be greeted with the full sense of emptiness, and ryland wouldn't be there. he would never be there, not ever, but to shane, it was inconceivable to ever comprehend that.

he didn't miss him. not anymore. there wasn't a single ounce of him that missed the way they would sit opposite each other, legs curled against their chests as they rested their heads upon the glass of the cold window pane. books would be clutched between their fingers – ryland's were broken, burnt and tattooed with all the times he'd been hurt – and sentences would be tucked behind their ears as they paged through countless novels and love stories.

shane wasn't one for love stories: he didn't particularly like romantic tales of flawlessness (or reading them for that matter) but he was so deeply infatuated by the boy and their own story that he played along, often sneaking glances at him and becoming accustomed to the way the corners of his lips would twitch as he read.

sometimes, though, when shane's heart was feeling bruised or his mind couldn't push away the thoughts of ryland any longer, he would find himself stumbling towards the window where they'd once laid with such little worry. with quivering hands, he would pull the fraying scraps of curtains and his breath would hitch with the sheer possibility that the boy would be waiting on the other side.

yet, the difference between them had driven them apart. even when they were asleep, the distance between the two was wide awake, growing larger by the second until it finally burst. they were from different backgrounds, different childhoods, different fairytales. one of such pure happiness and one so ridden with darkness that not even shane's positivity could shed any light onto it.

of course, the auburn boy had told himself that this didn't matter, that they could make it work. hours on end would be spent trying to fix the boy, his heart aching from effort and tiredness and just pure, raw failure. it would never work. perhaps for a few days, a week, a month at most, ryland would smile, and suddenly shane could breathe again. yet, just as he would exhale, his counterparts emotions would come tumbling back down again like a stack of cards, each one being a black and white memory that shane had so desperately tried to colour.

eventually, it got to the extent where shane started draining his own colour, his own happiness, his own positivity, just to give it to ryland. to the extent where one boy broke himself to fix another.

because, to put it simply, the broken boy had broken him, leaving him with gaps and fractures and shatters like porcelain glass, and vanished.