48 parts Ongoing MatureMason, a guilt-ridden high school athlete, must confront his internalized homophobia and toxic relationship with Iago, in order to find redemption and healing after a tragedy. (Can be read as a stand alone)
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Mason Cardova is drowning.
A year ago, he was the golden boy of Mosley High-talented, popular, untouchable. Now, he's nothing. The whole town knows what he did. They know how he bullied Ontario Hackman, how he pushed him to the edge and watched him fall. They know his name was on Ontario's suicide note. They whisper it in the hallways. They carve it into bathroom stalls. They throw it at him like a knife every time they pass him in the halls. Killer. Monster. Waste of space.
His friends abandoned him. His father beats him bloody. His mother doesn't care. And Mason? Mason isn't sure how much longer he can survive in the wreckage of his own making.
Then there's Iago Rivera.
Older, jaded, and thoroughly unimpressed with Mason's bullcrap, Iago is everything Mason isn't-strong, disciplined, untouchable. He doesn't drink, doesn't spiral, doesn't tolerate Mason's reckless self-destruction. He's made a life for himself, one that doesn't include babysitting a self-loathing high school burnout with a death wish.
But Mason keeps coming back.
He doesn't know why. Maybe it's the way Iago looks at him-not with pity, not with judgment, just sharp, cold indifference. Maybe it's the way Iago sees through him, sees the wounds Mason hides under bruises and bravado. Maybe it's because, for the first time in his life, someone refuses to let him get away with running from himself.
Their relationship is toxic, messy, and doomed from the start. A slow-burn collision between a boy who doesn't know how to be saved and a man who stopped trying to save people a long time ago.
But when Mason loses the last person tethering him to this world, he finds himself on Iago's doorstep-broken, bleeding, and out of places to run.
And Iago makes the mistake of letting him in.