will you still love me /e+a pre 94th

Eden flinches.

Avriel lets go fast, pulling back like the other boy's skin is burning hot.

Did I hurt you? he wants to ask, but the words sit heavy on his tongue and he just holds his hands out in front of him in silent offering instead. Except the ends of his fingers are claw-like and so tensed that they shake. Heat beats against the back of his eyes and for too long of a moment, he can't take his eyes off his hands, or the memory of what they've done.

The idea of what they could do.

He's been silent for too long. "Sorry," he says and then gives Eden a lopsided grin. Then Avriel closes his hands into fists and lets them fall into his lap, gaze falling on the file on the table between them, looking anywhere but at his boyfriend.

It's an old file. The cover is soft from age, Avriel runs a hand flat against it to test it and it makes this soft sound, like a hush voiced in a back room. Eden is so still beside him that it's almost like he's not. Avriel's always aware of him, but this is different, it's electric, It's loud.

"Shhh," he says softly, reaching out absentminded to put his hand on Eden's knee. Av catches himself at the last moment and his hand just hovers there for a moment, so close to Eden that he may as well be touching, but he doesn't. He doesn't take his eyes off the file either, gaze trapped on the number '12' written on the tab.

There's a faded ring on the cover, someone must have used the folder as a coaster for their coffee at one point. The edge of the ring is streaked, like they noticed the spill a little too late and gave a half-hearted attempt to wipe it away.

Eden's hand falls on top of Avriel's, pushing his hand down against Eden's knee, intertwining their fingers together again. It's how they're always supposed to be. Avriel's shoulders settle. He squeezes once gently, then he opens the file.

At first he isn't sure what he's looking at.

It's just lines of numbers. There's a column marked earnings and another marked losses. Both have amounts beneath them, slowly raising as the tally markers jump from the year of the eighty-second to the eighty-eighth, the year of Avriel's games. There's a common denominator, it's the number 12 under a column marked longshot.

Every now and then the 12 jumps to a usually empty column marked favourite. This becomes more common by the third page of these numbers, written tight and cramped, filling up every inch of the page, as if the author was starved for space.

Then there’s a column marked kills. The tallies in it accompany the wins, not all of them, but some.

Avriel's finger runs down the page, gaze moving over the sheets in the same way that they would move over a piece of machinery, taken apart and laid methodically across the counter of his work bench.

'Showmanship needs work.'

He reads the words numbly, none of it makes sense yet. He doesn't have context, he never has when it comes to Eden. All he's ever had is gentle touches and eyes that learned how to say all the things that Eden no longer could.

Av turns the page and forgets how to breathe halfway through an intake.

His fingers land on the faded black and white photo of a little boy. He smiles so big that the corners of his eyes meet, his whole body seems to lift with that smile and Avriel smiles back down at him. He knows that smile, he can count the number of times he's seen it on less than ten fingers.

The pad of his thumb runs across the kid's face slowly. It's treasure.

A photo of Eden, a hint of his life before, it's treasure to Avriel.

Part of him wants to stay here, staring down at the little kid in the photo, at the smile on his face and the joy shared through the lens, vibrant. It's a lot like the sun, Avriel struggles to look away from that too. He knows how lucky he is to have it.

"Jason?" he whispers, gaze falling on the name beneath the photo. He hardly pauses here, this information is easier to understand. It's simple call and answer, his information is listed neatly in two little columns beneath the photo. It's pretty standard until it mentions something about an inking process and the number 12.

Av pauses there, fingers toying with the corners of the pages as he stares down at that line. And he thinks about how only a few minutes ago, he'd lovingly held that same stretch of skin in his hands, and ran a finger over that tattoo, like it was something lovely instead of the horrible thing that it must have been to Eden.

He has an answer now to his unasked question, he had hurt Eden right then.

Fuck.

Avriel turns the page, moving on. Page six is just a continuation of the previous intake form. They call it a capacity assessment. At first, he doesn't get what that means.

low pain tolerance. obedient, but asking too many questions. sweet kid but stupid.

Oh.

He stares down at those words, breaking them apart in his head and putting them back together again as if that will make it all make sense. Low pain tolerance, written on a capacity assessment. He turns that around again and again. He thinks about the kid in the photo and that big smile and he thinks about the Eden that he met almost six years back, with furrowed brows and a mouth that spent most of its time slack.

His free hand curls over the edge of the table, gripping so hard that his knuckles go near white. There's a sharp taste in his mouth, metallic, and that old familiar spark of adrenaline that comes with it.

The imagery of what that tolerance test might have been floods his brain as vivid as any of the dreams that haunt him. Avriel lets out a hiss of a air, as if trying to breath past a sharp pain.

But it's like glass. Every new word he reads on the pages after, it's just like glass in his lungs and each shuddering breath comes too low, too ragged. This happens sometimes, when his brain is racing and there are too many things going on, all working together to short circuit at the same time.

He reads words about them hurting Eden, about them skipping surgery in favour of letting him fight with broken bones. Avriel thinks about the way Eden's elbow clicks sometimes. Just thought it was a weird quirk, even found it endearing. Now he knows why and it's like all the little things he's always loved about Eden are just little markers of the way he's been abused.

There are so many little things that Avriel never thought to think suspicious.

He turns the page to another picture. An older Jason Song, shadows under eyes that deadpan the camera with a cold stare. This Jason isn't smiling. Avriel pulls the photo out from under the paperclip and sets it aside. His fingers ache to compartmentalise, to take the file apart piece by piece and lay it out neatly organised before putting it back together again.

He knows how to fix things when he does that, he can see what parts are broken, what pieces are missing.

Avriel reads about broken bones and fights that ended with Eden in care. He reads the page that talks about an outburst that ends with him concussed and marks around his throat three times. It takes him a moment to move past that page, he has to figure out a way to stop the tightening in his chest first.

From there it just gets worse. Words merge together on the page and Avriel sits there staring stupidly down at the word Solitary for so long that it loses all meaning.

And then at the very end there's a contract for the sale of 11 and 13. Then 12 thrown in at a discount.

Gesture of good will, he reads.

Then there's no more.

He closes the file from the back cover as if closing a book. Callused palms and fingertips run over that softened manila and it's like he's holding a breathing thing, pinned to the table top beneath his hand.

He thinks of a boy who spent his life doing everything he was told at the risk of being punished brutally if he didn't. It's hard to link that boy to the person sitting beside him, harmless looking in one of Avriel's old t-shirts. Same person with tally marks in the kills column at the beginning of the folder.

And somehow that's a relief?

Maybe it's that all of this awful shit happened to Eden but he's still okay, or maybe it's because they've both hurt people. It's not just him anymore, a monster alone with blood on his hands. There's two of them standing at the edge of the world, a trail of bodies to mark the path that led them to each other.

The rings in his pocket wait for him to reach in and pull one out but it's still not the right time.

Avriel shifts on the bench, turning to look at Eden instead of the file sitting neatly in pieces on the table top beside them. His foot is still detached, he folds his stump onto the bench between them for stability, a visual reminder of the heights of pain that Avriel has also felt. When he finally looks at Eden, there's a pain behind his eyes, turning them glassy. There's a sharpness there too, an anger that usually lays quiet beneath layers of his armour.

There are questions of course, so many.

There's the anguish of not being there for the kid beaming out at the world in the that first photo. He knows how long a minute can last and when he thinks about years of living like that it makes him want to throw things. Av almost hates how many questions he has, how he doesn't know how to form them or even explain properly what he's feeling.

Because it's kind of like an avalanche, running down his shoulders, pressing him down into the table top even as he holds the photos of Eden in one hand because somehow they're his now, not really but they are. It's just like how Eden is his, but not like that. It's a trade off, because it's the same between them, it's like how Avriel is Eden's.

He wants to hold the boys in these photos in his arms and tell them that they're going to be okay because they don't know yet, they have no idea that one day they're going to find Avriel on the balcony where he shouldn't be. They don't know that things will be different after that.

There are plans forming, the fantasy of finding the people that did this to Eden and hurting them in all the same ways they'd hurt him. Av still has his throwing knives in his closet, he still has the bin full of half-built weapons in the corner. He has the clearance to travel on the trains and his morality seems to slip further from him by the day.

His skin burns with it, fingers itching to wrap around the hilt of a knife and carve the pain out of him by destroying the people that did this to Eden. Why would anyone think they could even touch him? He wants to sit there and pick apart the money bet on him, then the amount he was sold for and then find every last person involved and hurt them.

He wants to go back to that house in One, the one he met Eurydice in, and burn it to the ground.

All of these feelings converge on Avriel and he doesn't know whether to laugh or scream. He can't stop thinking of Eden in that ring in Four when he had a sword through his chest. How he'd seemed surprised to see Avriel crying over him.

But there's a question in Eden's eyes, it's pointed and it's fragile enough that one wrong move could shatter him.

Avriel knows now that Eden expects it. Sometimes Avriel sees this thing in his boyfriend that reminds him of the deer in the forest and he could never understand why that was. Now he knows, it's the fear of not knowing what someone is going to do to you, if they're going to hold you or hit you. You see it all the time on kid's faces in the bad parts of Nine.

Not everyone grows up knowing what it's like to be loved.

And that thought breaks up all the anger under his skin like shattered glass. When Avriel tells Eden that he loves him, does he even know what that means?

Eden doesn't need Avriel's rage right now. He doesn't need sorrow either.

He reaches out with shaking hands, leaning over the space between them, careful so that Eden can see every small move he makes. Av gives him time to pull away if he wants to.

But his thumbs land on Eden's cheekbones, his fingers on his jawline, his palms on his cheeks. His skin is soft and Avriel's index finger fits perfectly between two freckles, so far apart that if they were stars in the sky then they'd never hope to meet.

Like two boys who grew up hundreds of miles apart.

"I love you," he tells him, tone as firm as he can make it, "Before this and after, okay?"

Then he leans in, bumping his forehead gently against his, "I'm always still gonna love you."