tales of dominica, nico.

NICO
 thorne.

mid 91st games.

Tune, girl who spit fire, out like a light.

Ten years wash over him, and he sinks into the cushions of Twelve's couch. Let the velvet swallow him whole. He remembers being a cunt to Dynamo somewhere between the eighty-third and the eighty-fourth about renovating the goddamned place, but he can't for the life of him remember why he thought it was a good idea to get a velveteen gold couch. Most of those days are a blur, if he's being honest with himself.

Maybe an overbearing creative needed it as a backdrop for an interview, or a shoot. Maybe the color reminded him of Francis' hair in the sunflower field, sunset streaking gold through it.

He's buried the memory, either way.

He palms it now, hand flat against the softness.

There's a wine stain on the other side of it, Nico knows. He spilt pinot stumbling in one night, desperate to find a feeling at the bottom of the bottle. It's the same thing, year after year, half-invested to the point of neglect, making messes because he won't stick his fingers where he really needs to.

She spits up water, girl who spit fire, the cursed river spilling out of her mouth as the boy from Five struggles to kill her. A part of him wants to cheer for her, hope his voice might find her through the screen and give her enough fight to take him down before her light goes out, but he doesn't have it in him. Nico hardly blinks, feels his body still to the point of barely breathing. He's suddenly so aware of, and so far away from his body. Knees spread, shoulders slumped, hands flat against the couch on either side of him. Walker burns until the last second, and Nico stops breathing when she does. Soon he feels water start to pool along the bottom rim of his eyes, stinging, his chest burning, but still he can't move. Won't move.

A decade of not doing enough and everything to prove it.

Tune Walker dies, and he watches Texas Lovell shatter himself the same way Nico did for years. He can't move. He can't move. (He doesn't want to.) This is why they told you to get a therapist, Mackenzie's voice stirs in the back of his mind, his brain trying, clawing desperately for ledges to grasp onto. His friends are a safe place to land, but they aren't here, and Nico won't go to them. His thoughts slide away form him, kindness bleeding out of his brain with every passing second. C'mon man, don't sink, he hears Beck, breathless, fading, fading, fading until,

( you pluck the glass off the table in front of you, hurl it at Texas welcoming another of terror into his mind. you see red, and then gold when you pick up the lamp from a side table and swing it like a bat into the vase that was standing next to it. the air is suddenly filled with the sound of shattering glass, ringing in your ears. heartbeat accelerating, you blow through the apartment like a gunshot through flesh. )

The screen shattered, but it's Nico in fragments when he looks at it now. Man who ruins himself over and over, even when he thinks that he's healing. Maybe especially then.