He would kill to have his body touched again. To have Geoff hold him. To have the older boy's lips moving softly against his own to promise him that it's okay, I'm not going to leave you.
Except now he was alone in the almost dark bedroom, feeling as safe as he could given the circumstances. Geoff had taken a few of his sour strawberry candles up to the spare bedroom with him when he'd left, lighting a few that were left, littered around the room for Awsten.
'The room will feel a little less lonely, sweetheart. A little bit brighter and just a touch warmer, just that little bit less lonely.'
At first he thought it was quite odd that the older boy would want to take the candles with him. They were just candles, and it wasn't as if he had gone out of his way to tattoo a fucking candle somewhere on his body like he had with the safety pin. Except Geoff was afraid of the dark, the older boy reminded him, and he could laugh all he wanted, but Geoff was taking his fucking candles.
Somehow, his boyfriend had been right about feeling safer with their wicks being turned to soot. Maybe it was because Awsten knew that the older boy had matching candles burning in his room and was staring at the flame thinking about the smaller boy, and that was a comforting thought. A pink thought. One of those thoughts that helped him breathe through the shaking and whispered to him, reassuring him that nothing bad will happen if he just takes a small step back away from the edge of the cliff before the unsteady ground crumbles beneath his feet and sends him plummeting past death and towards the place that was way worse.
And there were places worse than death, he knew that. If there wasn't, if death was the worst thing that could possibly happen, then people wouldn't be taking their lives or even considering doing so. And a lot of people did. Awsten wasn't even too sure that he wasn't going to be one of them.
But not right now. He was okay right now. He would name Geoff's bedroom his third safest space in the world, which was pretty high on the list. His safest space in the whole world would be his own bedroom, as ironic as it was. The only way that he could get to the place that made him feel the most secure was to wander through the place that made him feel the least. His home.
Maybe his bedroom was just an illusion of a safe space, though. The only place available to him when he was the most unsafe. It was the place that he had to keep himself bottled up in and it created his own faux security and convinced him of safe safe safe no matter how many times he'd been hurt there, physically and emotionally. It was the place that he was forcefully condensed into until the pressure that built up became too much and his hinges busted, leaving him a broken mess, sprawled out on the floor in an open room of unfamiliarity.
The second safest place was within a small radius of Geoff. If he had to choose an exact measurement then he would say a maximum of two metres, but it all depended. If he could see him and get to him within a couple of seconds, he was safe. The third was where he was now. A soft glow of pink washed through him, subtle enough to be an afterthought but enough to extinguish the little ink blots of blue-black that made him feel like he was sinking in tar.
His vision traced every movement and twitch of the flame that was flickering on the bedside table, his eyelids falling heavily as the strawberry candle wax dripped carefully down onto the wood, collecting in the same puddle of candle wax that it did every night that it burned, a permanent mark that stained. His eyes were trained to it.
The weight of the blankets were making it hard for him to keep himself awake, which he usually didn't have a problem with, since his anxiety kept him on high alert for most days and prevented him from grazing the brink of sleep for nights on end because he just had to stay awake because what if something was out to get him? He couldn't go to sleep. He could die.
But now he was safe. He was clean. He was tired.
And finally it did wash over him like a translucent weight. The weight of pigment in pink paint which was much lighter than the weight of blue-black but this time the threatening tonal qualities weren't here to muddy up his colours. His metaphorical colours, the ones that he depicted as beautiful or tragic based off of how warm his blood felt and how tingly his hands were and how fast his heart beat. They were his colours, nobody else could see them, nobody else could feel them.
The sleep induced. His eyelids sealed shut as he sunk into a dream-like world where no pictures would be played. Just a simple state of sleep. The safest state of sleep.
YOU ARE READING
Serendipitous (Gawsten)
Fanfiction[COMPLETED] An apathetic boy with colourblindness and too many problems serendipitously meets a boy who may be able to help him feel all of the colours he'd never seen.
