have i told you lately /eden + avriel

He didn't know it was possible to feel more tired than he already was. But daily, his body ages, unravelling him in the smallest increments until the day when his last few threads of self scatter. It's getting harder to avoid the inevitable. He falls asleep beside Eden or not at all but he always wakes up, shadows of a dream slithering out of sight and it's too late. He can't sleep again, Avriel's stupid brain thinks three hours is well rested.

Pockets seem to work, three hours here, two to three hours there. Together it's at near six hours of sleep in a twenty-four hour period. That's something. Eden tells him it could be better, it probably could. There are new dreams now though, a room full of masks, another knife, there's always another one. Eden, but the kid in the photos from the file. In his dreams, he runs around in the dark looking for him but he never gets there in time.

But then he wakes up and it's just a dream. Eden is warm beside him, or reading in the chair because Av fell asleep on the couch and he knows. Avriel doesn't have to tell him that sleep is hard, that sometimes when he wakes up, he isn't fully there yet. It's easier to come back to himself when he looks at Eden.

He's looking at him now, strange angle, staring up at him from where his head rests on Eden's lap. The swing beneath them is sturdy, Avriel fixed it before he hung it up, replaced rusted chain with nylon rope, then sanded and varnished the wood. It was a three day project and after he was done Avriel lit candles on the porch and it was perfect.

Since then, they end up here almost every afternoon.

Laying there though, it's like his body has become part of the wood. Eden's fingers run through his hair over and over again and Avriel can feel himself slipping. Every instinct in him tells him to fight it, sleep only ever leads to fear. Beyond that, this moment is perfect. He has to go back to the Capitol in a few weeks, he needs to hold on to this memory, so that when he's stuck hundreds of miles away he can at least think of this.

But the warmth of the afternoon and the repetitive motion lulls him. Then Eden's looking down at him. He's smiling, lips moving, expression warping with the motion and Avriel can't stop staring.

For most of the time he's known Eden, he's had to rely on facial expressions and body language to communicate. It's still strange when his boyfriend speaks. It's always unexpected, no matter how much more he talks every day. His tone lilts up at the end, his voice is gentle, soft to Avriel's ears. He likes the sound too much, almost forgets to pay attention to the words he's saying because he just likes hearing it.

Sometimes he asks pointless things just to hear more.

They're staring at each other now, Avriel's busy. He's memorising Eden like he doesn't already know every piece of him. Paying attention to the way his hair frames his face when he's looking down at Avriel, and the arch to his eyebrows, the way they stay put while he's waiting for a response.

Like now.

Avriel's brow furrows slightly. He reaches up, callused hand cupping Eden's jaw briefly, thumb pressing lightly against the skin just under his eye before it falls away again.

"Sorry," he says, "What'd you say, E?"

Eden's hand moves to his forehead, running over his eyebrow, hitting the scar that cuts into the end of it. It's an old one, earned before he was reaped. He'd taken Duke down to the river bank to set off homemade fireworks and one had shot back and skimmed the side of his face. Somehow managed to hide it from their mom for a whole week before she finally caught Avriel cutting the sutures out with nail scissors.

Fireworks were banned after that. Avriel switched to making sparklers for Duke's birthday.

He'll be eighteen this year. There's a letter in the top drawer of the hutch in the front hall. It marks his upcoming graduation in the spring, asks for extra fees for the gown and cap. Avriel can buy a school photo package if he wants. They sent samples in the mail with a big watermark across Duke's face, blurring him out.

He stared at the rough shape of his brother for a long time, wondering if there was a way for him to pay for the photos without Duke knowing. Maybe that was crossing a boundary.

His little brother requested boarding school pretty fast after Billie left. That was two, three years ago. There's a drawer in his workshop with homemade fireworks rattling around in it, each one slightly better than the last as Avriel refines the technique. He figures if he ever sees Duke again, they can go down to the riverbank, set them off. This time with no new scars, just all the faded ones.

And if that's ten years from now, there'll be ten years of fireworks. Avriel hopes for less than that.

Still hopes, foolishly, that one day he'll look up from his place on the work bench and his brother and sister will be standing right there.

He hopes that he'll recognise them, that they'll recognise him. He likes to think he'd know them even with a decade of aging but it's hard sometimes to remember. In his memory, people are hazy feelings in a vague fog. It's only in his dreams that they take proper shape.

Sorrow comes in like the tide, longing ties concrete blocks to his ankles. Avriel lays there in the afternoon warmth, his fingers hooked lightly into Eden's shirt, face turned towards his boyfriend's but gaze empty. He can't remember what Duke's voice sounds like but it's probably different now anyway. Strange how so much can be taken from him and he still somehow uncovers new loss within it, like turning over stones in the forest.

Eden's mouth moves again and Avriel blinks, watching the way the corners flick upwards with the shape of the words he makes. He listens, catching the tumbling of consonants and vowels but forgetting to put them in order. His fingers reach up, brushing against Eden's lips, thinking about the way he sounds and how nice it is to have that. It's good to have someone else to talk to but Av doesn't think he'd like it so much if it wasn't Eden.

It took a stupid amount of time to realise how much he was attracted to him, longer than it should have.

He doesn't notice at first, that the swing has stopped. Avriel stares up at Eden, blinking slowly, taking too long to realise that he's asked him something. He tries to figure out what that might have been, hand lowering to rest against his chest, just over his heart. He taps once with his pointer finger, a question.

"You done?" he asks. Maybe Eden has other things to do than just laying here all afternoon with him. Avriel doesn't move though, whole body against the idea anyway. 

The way Eden's looking at him is off though, his eyes read worried. There's a question there back, Avriel knows this one without hearing it. He smiles slightly.

"I'm good," he says, "Just memorising you."

Moments like these used to be much harder to catch. Bouts of silence went unnoticed before Eden started speaking, Avriel could go a day out of focus and it slipped through the cracks. As long as his hands were moving, if he nodded when Eden took his hand, it was enough.

Now it's more noticeable, Eden tries to catch him before the tide takes him but sometimes all Avriel can do is go through the motions. Sometimes he wakes up and their home is a forest. He can no longer see the trees.

"Am I going somewhere?"

Rhetorical. It's just a joke. Eden has always had jokes but Avriel's still learning how the verbal ones work.

"You didn't hit your head did you?"

"Mmm," he hums softly as Eden's fingers start pushing into his hair again. He waits for the swing to start but it doesn't. His boyfriend is shifting beneath him, fingers running through his hair, probing for a bump.

Av tries to be helpful for a moment, tries to think about if he hit his head at all in the past week but the only thing that comes to mind is Scout deciding that Avriel made a good landing pad from the second floor on Saturday. "No?" he says.

Scout isn't all that heavy.

He blinks, hand sliding slowly down Eden's front, hooking his fingers in the fabric of his shirt as his thoughts begin to drift again. It's hard to stay on guard like this, head cradled so safely. Afternoon sun touches the edge of the veranda. It can't reach them where they are, but there's pressing heat, so heavy that it seems pointless to try to fight it.

It reminds him of another summer afternoon, years ago. He doesn't know how old he was, who else was even there, just that it was warm like this and one of his mother's favourite records was skipping on the old player that lived at the back of the house. It smelled like campfire, a scorch-mark still on the grass from where they roasted marshmallows the night before.

Pieces of a clock were at his feet in the grass, the long minute hand of a grandfather gripped so tight in his palm that his skin paled around its shape. He'd taken it apart to try and figure out how it worked but he didn't know how to put it back together then, not yet.

Eden speaks again, that particular memory fades as the intake of breath from his partner shifts Avriel's hand and his attention. The hand in his hair stops. Av pushes his head slightly, questioningly, into Eden's palm and comes up against no resistance.

"I-"

Eden's still looking down at Avriel but not really. There's a silence there, deeper and further along than his voice suddenly cutting out. It's like Avriel's dark, just always lurking and waiting for an opportunity to slip in and wrap its hands around Eden's throat.

"Hey," he whispers, then raises his hand from where it hangs off Eden's shirt to cup his neck gently, movement slow and exaggerated to warn Eden that it's coming.

His boyfriend's gaze flicks away, then comes back but he's seeing somewhere else, another place in time and space that Avriel can't physically go too. "S'bad. Slow?"

"Baby, it's okay," Avriel says softly, rising slow and careful from his lap. His free hand reaches up to trap Eden's against the back of his head, hand running over his until his palm is against the back of Eden's hand and his fingers lace with his, trembling.

"The other one- slug- slugging?"

"I'm okay," he promises, straddling Eden lightly, resting most of his weight on his own knees. He pulls Eden's hand off the back of his head gently and places it on his chest right where his heart should be, "See, count the beats."

"Can't see. Hurts."

"I can see," he says, leaning in so close that their noses nearly touch, until their eyes are level and Avriel can see the little flecks of warmth around Eden's pupils, blown with fear. "Look."

"But you-"

"Yeah?"

"Ok?"

Avriel gazes at him, hand that was cupping his neck rising slowly, thumb finding his jawbone, running back and forth over Eden's cheek out of habit. "I am right now," he whispers, "Didn't mean to scare you."

Then Av leans in and gives Eden a kiss just beneath his eye, thumb impatient against his lips as he gets in his own way. He pulls back then, his other hand leaving Eden's to cup the back of his head and pull the other boy slowly into him, until Eden's ear is against his chest where his hand just was.

That hazy, heavy feeling is gone, he can't imagine sleeping now. His heart beats too quick, mistaking Eden's pain for non-existent danger.

And Avriel knows that it's not easy for him, that there are pieces of him so jagged it's impossible not to get caught up in them. The words get torn from him before they can even hope to make it out in one piece. Every small sound, soft and stilted from Eden's mouth, every precious note, he holds onto it because there was a time when he didn't even speak at all.

"Good now?" he asks after a moment, hand cupping Eden's jaw the same way he might hold something fragile from beneath while carrying it against his body. His thumb has found the corner of his mouth, it runs up and down, a seconds hand on a clock stuck in the same moment.

He's still just learning how to put him back together.