LANCASTER AND MAXWELL ( ✔ )

chapter thirty.

Chapter Thirty.

ON the ride home, Arthur doesn't think that life can get any better.

Sully's hand is intertwined with his, love is in his heart, and he can cry he's so filled with happiness.

All of his life, Arthur has been searching for something — anything — that would fill up the aching hole in his insides. He has filled it with meaningless trinkets and treasures and hobbies and fixing everyone but himself, and it has never worked. Artie almost gave up, but then his home came crawling back to him and he knows peace.

He's wondered if this is what love feels like, if love feels like this exact snippet of time. If it does, he never wants to experience anything else or feel anything else ever again. Before love, he has never understood before how people can become addicted to drugs or alcohol, he's never seen the point of it. He has never been able to comprehend how somebody can surrender their mind and their body to something so trivial and small, he's been wondering for years how something can ruin a person. But now he understands.

He feels it fermented in his bones, in his hair — it is even meddled within the fabrics of his clothes. Arthur's lightheaded, his mind is somewhere between heaven and nirvana, and he feels like if he tries to move he would melt on the spot. This is a feeling he will forever chase for the rest of his life.

Arthur Lancaster has let love become his favorite drug, and it has ruined him.

"Do you wanna spend the night at my house?" Arthur's husky voice cuts through the comfortable silence with his words, and he looks over to see Sully leaning back in his seat, eyes closed shut with blissful sleep. The blonde watches as dark eyelashes flutter against high cheekbones, and those green eyes that he loves so much have finally opened but just barely. The face of an angel. "Everyone's asleep by now, I reckon."

"Mhm," he slurs with sleep, a giddy and lazy smile on his face as he squeezes Arthur's hand tighter. "That sounds nice; some sleep in a king size bed sounds like heaven right now. You gone snuggle me all close and tight, baby?" He teases quietly.

If his heart was pounding in his chest before, the groggy baby that accidentally slips from his mouth makes it explode inside its bony cage. Arthur doesn't say anything back, just smiles and presses a kiss to Sully's knuckles, telling him to go back to sleep and that, "We're heading home."

Home, he thinks. I can get used to saying that.

He finally arrives at the estate, the sun barely dipping above the horizon. making sure that he turns his lights off not to wake anyone else up in the house. Turning off the ignition, he gently shakes his lover awake so that they can sneak into the house. They both climb out of the car and lazily walk up the steps and slip inside carefully. They climb up the staircase. One step, then two, and they're at the door of his bedroom. Before he can turn the knob, Sully gently nudges him so that Arthur's back is pressed against the wall and not even air can separate them.

Artie's pearly teeth gleam in the dimly light atmosphere, still doped up on his drug of choice. "What are you doing to me, Sullivan-Jaymes Maxwell?" Fuck the world and everything else in it, these words are for him and him only.

Sully knows it's a rhetorical question, but he answers anyways. "I'm lovin' on you, dummy," he murmurs sleepily before pressing his lips against his. Weaving his fingers through dark tresses of curly hair, Arthur breathes him in like he's never had oxygen before and holds him like he's going to lose him the second after they depart. In another life, he'd open his eyes and see that Sully isn't there and he's lost in yet another dream, without his love and without purpose.

But this isn't a dream, far from it. Sullivan is here, here with him, and as long as he's got that then he doesn't have anything else to lose. Sully is his everything — his sun, his moon, his stars. This is the definite and absolute truth: Arthur can no longer live without Sullivan-Jaymes Maxwell. This is his heaven.

Then hell makes itself known.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" The quake of anger in the voice is enough to shake the house down. Before they can even pull away, Sullivan is yanked away from Arthur by the collar of his shirt, and Arthur's blood freezes in his veins when he comes face to face with his demon.

Arthur Lancaster the Second stands before the two of them, so red and so angry that Arthur wants to run away and hide like he did when he was younger, but he can't even do that. His feet are frozen, blue eyes wide with horror and pure fright. The storm is here, and there will be no escaping.

"Dad, I-" His words are caught in his throat, like cotton has been shoved into his mouth, and he has to swallow to speak again. "I-I can explain."

His father laughs humorlessly, venom seeping out of every pore of his body. "What? You want to explain to me why you're kissing this son of a whore like a faggot?"

Fuck what his father says to him, but he will not talk down on Sully. Nobody will ever do it. "Call me whatever the hell you want to, I don't care." Bravado swells up in his gut, and he attempts to turn his eyes into the hardened steel that his father perfected long ago. "But you will not call Sullivan out of his name again."

Sully is trembling, his chest squeezing so tight that his lungs threaten to pop out, and fuck everything that will happen to him but he will save Sully, even if it is for the last time.

His father takes one hard stomp closer to him, and he looks his son in the eyes as if he was dead to him, and at that moment, Arthur knows what's happening: he no longer has a father. "You care about the boy this much? Is this what you've been hiding from me? The fact you've been prancin' around like fucking fairies together?" His voice is low, at his most terrifying, but Arthur doesn't care. He's tired of hiding.

"I love him." The words dangle off a cliff, and then they tumble all the way down. His words hang heavy in the air, and he thinks for a sliver of a moment that his father will have some sort of understanding. He prays to a God he no longer believes in, he prays that his father has some glimpse of humanity left inside of him.

Prayers have always been futile devices, anyways.

His father is as quick as lightning, and before Arthur knows it, he's passed him and he's shoved Sully as hard as he can down the staircase.

Thump.

He can feel a scream crawling out of his throat, and he yells out, "SULLY!" He takes half a step to go after him, but he gets struck down by his father. Arthur can't even feel the sting of the punch, or the way his body hits the ground like a brick before his father's shoe is indented into his ribcage. All of his breath is gone, his vision's gone fuzzy, and he wheezes out for what little air he doesn't have. Rolling over, blurry eyes filled with tears looks down and sees an unconscious Sullivan, laying at the foot of the steps.

Arthur reaches for him, but his father yanks him up by the collar of his shirt and punches him.

Once.

Then twice.

Then minutes pass, maybe hours (what is time anymore?), and all he can see is red from his own blood. He's spitting it out, gurgling out to his father, pleading, "Let me save him, dad. Please." The begging falls to deaf ears, the torture doesn't stop, and he's becoming numb to everything until he can feel himself slipping into unconsciousness. His vision is no longer existent, barely keeping his eyes open as he feels himself drift off into a sea of nothingness.

This is it, is all he can think. This is how it all ends.

He sees stars in the back of his eyelids, and as he slips into somewhere between nothing and everything, he sees Sully smile one more time. He'd smile too, if he could.

If this is the last thing I see, then I'll be okay. I'm dying a happy man.