Bury My Heart Next To Yours {Kolt}

i'm an invisible disaster
i keep trying to walk, but my feet don't find the solid ground
it's like living in a bad dream
i keep trying to scream, but my tongue has finally lost its sound
i've got to say goodbye to the pieces of me that have already died

My fingers scrape over the words I’ve likely had memorized for years, the soft shushing sound of skin over paper blending into a subtle symphony with the sputter of candle flames and the creaks of my dilapidated house (I refuse to call it a home. This place was never home. The only home I’ve ever known is in bottomless eyes and starlight smiles and steady hands I don’t know if I’ll ever hold again), the steady in-out of my breath fogging in front of me as the night grows colder. We never had heat even when the place was in prime condition – I remember all too clearly nights spent huddled under too-thin blankets, listening to the wind whistle through the cracks in my window and my own teeth chattering, a poor boy’s lullaby. I hadn’t wanted to come back here. There was no way I could have stayed with my family, however, not with the omnipresent sadness that hovers there, sadness that I caused, not with the constant reminder of Kiera’s absence blaring like a siren through the halls. I couldn’t exactly get a hotel room given my… celebrity status, and sleeping outside this close to winter would just add pneumonia onto my already lengthy list of problems. So here I am at three in the morning, in a house that’s never had heat, hasn’t had electricity or gas or water in at least a year, reading Hemingway by candlelight in hopes of distracting myself.

But it's a fool's errand. There are too many ghosts within these walls that simply won’t allow me to ignore them.

There’s a ghost of my mother at the piano, smiling at the ghost of a dark-eyed little boy sitting beside her on the creaky bench, so small that his feet swing in the air a few inches from the ground. She guides his fingers over the keys with a gentle patience, pets his hair back from where it hangs in front of his eyes (his father slurs that it’s too long, that in his day you had to have it cut above your ears, but she just can’t bear to trim the wild curls that fall around his face and lay in disarray at the nape of his neck). Her voice is soothing and gentle as the murmur of a river as she guides his tiny hands back into a starting position, try again, Kae, you’ve almost got it, and oh-so-slowly the broken chords of Moonlight Sonata begin to bloom beneath his fingers in time with the giddy smile that stretches across his face. That’s it, sweetheart. You’re doing so well.

There's a ghost of my father in the saggy armchair across the room, drink in hand and barking nonsensical orders to phantoms who never existed. The ghost of the little boy at the piano has aged a few years in his face and whole centuries behind his eyes, walking with measured steps through the shadows. The teachers at school see the bruises, the heliotrope canvas of human misery splayed out over skinny limbs and delicate cheekbones, but they don’t ask. They never ask. And maybe, in the end, it’s better they didn’t. The ghost of a boy is learning, you see, learning to foster a righteous indignation that sits in his veins with icy finality, learning the subtleties of cyanide and all the ways you can turn someone’s insides upside-down, learning to make his own justice in a world that never gave him any. But not now. Not now, because his father catches sight of him before he can make it to the stairs, stumbles up with angry shouts and undiscerning fists. Not now. But soon. You can see it in the ghost’s eyes as he winces up the stairs with a split lip and murder sparking at his fingertips. Soon.

There's a ghost of Kiera, laughing in the doorway of the kitchen and singing to the song on the crackly radio. Her voice rises like the tides that roar against the beaches of Four, strong and confident and holding a sort of wisdom at its core far beyond her years. The ghost of a boy joins her, older now, stronger, a sort of divine entitlement in his stride that speaks of his ascendance to a higher plane. He edges into the doorway beside her, clothes and hair training-rumpled and two frosty glasses of lemonade in hand, an easy smirk on his lips as he falls into a harmony beneath hers, both of them singing to the familiar strains that float through an old house, empty of demons he thought he had destroyed. He doesn’t know yet, you can see it in the ease of his movement, the way his spine isn’t yet bowed under a weight no one can withstand. He doesn’t know yet that those demons will never leave, caged up in the hollow place where his soul used to be and waiting to tear him apart.

My fingers tighten on the edge of the book, eyes long since distracted from the words. A candle sputters, and I look up, startled.

There's a ghost in the cracked mirror over the fireplace, hollow eyes and too-sharp bones, the ice beneath his skin melted away by the fires of grief to reveal something far more broken than anyone would expect. He hasn’t slept in three days, hasn’t eaten anything more than a few bites of a sandwich in almost that long. His hair is disheveled, his clothes wrinkled, his collarbones pressing insistently beneath pale skin from the pounds lost to starvation and stress. There is nothing behind his eyes, nothing but demons finally free of their imprisonment and wreaking havoc on the fragile world he’d built for himself in their absence, shattering his delusion of the divine pedestal where he once sat and clawing him back to the mortal plane with a resounding crash. He is lost, floundering to keep his head above water in a malicious ocean of his own transgressions that repeatedly slams him against sharp rocks that cut down to the emptiness at the core of him. He’s such an echo of himself that once-careful senses don’t even register the quiet creak of the front door, just a fragile, shattered spirit, barely clinging to existence with ragged nails and clenched teeth.

Hi, I’m Kaelen Dempsey, and I’ve been a ghost for a long, long time.

“S-s-s-so you uhh...ran all um the way back uh to...to...your home...for a book? M-must...it must be a-a good one.” There's a ghost of love by the front door, taunting me with everything I've held in my hands and killed with a poisonous touch, just another check box on the list of things that will follow me forever no matter how far I try to run from them. It’s true that there are many reasons I haven’t slept since I got here, the fear of waking up to a Peacekeeper’s gun in my face, the gnawing guilt over Kiera’s fate that won’t let unconsciousness claim me, but it’s mostly because every time I close my eyes I see his face. I want to throw my book at him, to give into the urge to cry that’s been hovering at the base of my throat since Kiera Dempsey rang out over the TV speakers in Thirteen, to rage and shout and scream at him and all these other ghosts that I knew to just go away, to leave me in the solitude I wrought for myself a long time ago and let me slip away into a nothingness that would be far preferable to this newfound agony with which I have no idea how to cope.

But then I realize he’s not a ghost. A ghost of him wouldn’t be ragged and bloody from living rough, wouldn’t stutter like he hasn’t done since I first met him.

Before I have time to register what I’m even thinking he’s in my arms, solid and steady and real in the way that nothing else feels anymore, leaving me swimming in the smell of sunshine and laundry soap and home overwritten by the smell of autumn leaves and dirt and the wild. Something tight and heavy in my chest relaxes, an ache that in the midst of all the others I hadn’t known I was carrying. It feels like relief, like coming back from a long journey and falling into your own bed, that sensation of homesickness falling away. This house was never my home, but he has always been.

“Colt, wh-what… what the hell are you doing here?!” I sputter, finally regaining some form of grip on myself and pulling back to get a better look at him, scratches and scrapes thrown into sharp relief in the guttering light of dying candles. “Looking like you just got out of ten rounds with a mountain lion notwithstanding. You can’t be here, baby, it’s not safe, you’ve got to go home…”

The ghost of me barely remembers this, remembers smoothing dark locks of hair back into place, a thumb whispering across a defined jawline while words of endearment slip past my lips against my will. The other phantoms watch with a sort of curiosity at the missing piece somewhere beneath my skin clicking back into place, and it nearly undoes me. It’s all right, I want to whisper to the ghost of the little boy next to his mother on the piano, the ghost of the boy hiding from his father's wrath, the ghost of the boy laughing with his cousin who doesn't know he's about to loose everything. You will grow up, and you will be strong. You’ll be a god. You will be everything you ever wanted, but then you’ll break, and that’s all right, Kaelen, because after that, you will meet a boy. You will meet a boy with a smile brighter than the universe and a voice that sings away your darkest nightmares, and he’ll put you back together.

But instead I only look from the ghosts to the very real form in my arms and back to the ghosts again, and for the first time in an eternity something like a smile pulls at my lips. And you will love him.

i'm a ghost haunting these halls
climbing up walls that i never knew were there
and i'm lost, broken down the middle of my heart
i'm broken down the middle of my heart
oh, you know you make me a ghost

i had done wrong, so build your tower
but call me home and i will build a throne
and wash my eyes out never again
so love the one you hold, and i'll be your gold
to have and to hold, a lover of the light

Once upon a time, there lived a foolish prince.

He held dominion over a kingdom won through poison and deceit, the crown upon his brow soaked in the blood of the unworthy and tempered in the fires of a righteous rage that never died. He had all he could ever want - influence over the masses, the fulfillment of his every desire, a power that made him a god among men - and he believed himself to be happy, sequestered behind sturdy walls he'd built for himself, content on his throne with his cyanide scepter in hand. What could possibly go wrong, he wondered, seemingly secure in the knowledge that his reign would never end. Under his tutelage was a beautiful and wise princess that would rise to rule the kingdom should he ever choose to abdicate his throne. She was as a sister to the prince, sharing his ideals and following in his footsteps, but he was always the steadfast ruler, doling out justice with an undiscerning hand. All in the kingdom feared him, for he always said it was better to be feared than loved, and for a time, it seemed that his self-crafted dynasty could never fall.

Until it did.

There came a time of unrest in the land, an insurrection of the peasants that gained enough power to make even the great prince fear for his life. Trusting rule of the kingdom to the wise princess in his absence, he fled, traveling through the wilderness in exile until he came to yet another kingdom, one that thrived in the quiet spaces below the earth. And in that land, the prince met a valiant knight who would reshape everything he'd ever believed in. He was a simple boy, with stumbling feet and words that slipped just past his grip, but he had the most beautiful smile and a voice that could make the whole world stop to listen when he sang. He taught the prince of love, something that he had always pushed away in fear that it would make him weak, and in time the kind, brave knight with the starlight-smile became so dear to the prince's heart that he destroyed the walls he had spent his whole life building, tearing them down so that the two of them could be together and rebuild his faltering rule.

But one day, news came that the brave and righteous princess he had left as his regent had gone marching off to war, almost certain to never return. With no walls to protect himself, the prince felt grief for the first time, felt the blame of the princess' blood paint his hands. Heart broken and fearing that his malicious touch would poison even the inherent purity of his knight in shining armor, he fled his new kingdom in the dead of night, throwing himself once again into exile. He had nothing now, no kingdom, no crown, and worst of all, no sense of direction. He lived as a hopeless wanderer, traveling aimlessly back to the kingdom that had once cowered beneath his rule and living as a pauper there, mourning the lost princess and the destructive power of his own foolish pride. But you see, the knight to whom he'd pledged his heart was not so easily dissuaded, following him across the forests and rivers despite the fact that the prince had tried to run, tried to keep him safe from the sorrow and death that followed him everywhere he went. He was either brave, foolish, or both, but most of all he was loyal, determined to show the prince that even at the end of it all, he hadn't quite lost everything. And for one fragile moment, the prince believed him.

The End?

"Y-you... left me," Colt all but whispers, something so broken in his voice that it tears me apart as he curls into my chest and sobs as if his baby-bird soul might shatter. The pain I've caused, the destruction that bloomed beneath my hands comes rushing back to haunt me with all the force of a locomotive, striking me hard at the center of my chest and stealing my breath. Don't cry. Baby, no, please don't cry. His hands clutch at the worn fabric of my sweater and he cries like his world is breaking, cries like I've wanted but wouldn't allow myself to for days. I've never been good with comfort but for him I could be anything, do anything, and so even though I feel utterly lost, hollowed-out by grief and guilt and a pain with which I have no idea how to cope, I do my best. Maybe the fact is that I've never been good with comfort because there wasn't anyone I truly wanted to comfort, because it feels all too natural to pull him closer, let my fingers climb a Jacob's ladder through his tousled hair and play out an intricate sonata against the notches of his spine, fragmented strains of one of my mother's lullabies hummed out into the hollow of his neck. But then he pulls away, fire in his eyes and fresh tear streaks down his face as he yanks a scrap of paper out of his pocket, my own scrawled penmanship across it. My note. "What. The. Fuck. Is. This?"

"Exactly what it says," I say softly, suddenly unable to look at him, preferring the taunting vision of the ghosts of my past to the sight of the one person I never wanted to hurt but destroyed nonetheless. "When she... when I saw her... I couldn't, I just couldn't. So I left. I don't know why. You told me once that I run from the things I can't fight, and I guess you were right. I just needed some time to collect myself, and somehow I ended up back here. I was going to come back, Colt, I swear, but things here... they're bad. My family's in danger, and you're in danger by being here, which is why you have to go home."

Once upon a time, there lived a foolish prince. He was ruthless and greedy and prideful, but in his many mistakes he learned an important lesson about love. And for the sake of love, he threw his crown away and vowed to protect the ones he cared for with what was left of his broken life.

and in the middle of the night, i may watch you go
there'll be no value in the strength of walls that i have grown
there'll be no comfort in the shade of the shadows thrown
you may not trust the promises of the change i'll show
but i'll be yours if you'll be mine

there is love in your body, but you can't hold it in
it pours from your eyes and spills from your skin
the tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks
and the kindest of kisses break the hardest of hearts
the hardest of hearts, the hardest of hearts, the hardest of hearts

“NO.” The whole house shakes with a fury I’d have never even thought him capable of, and in a panicked moment I’m reminded of the only other time when someone shouted that loudly within these walls, eyes darting around wildly in search of slurred taunts and impending bruises before I remember that we’re all ghosts, here. We still hold the power to hurt, but not in the way that shows. Colt drives a hand into the doorframe and it shakes me the structure of the room down to the foundation, dust breaking loose from the rafters and floating down in a poverty-stricken snowstorm, dusting the dark locks of his hair with gray. He had looked old before, years of hurt trapped behind his eyes and sleepless nights carved into his face, but now he looks ancient. This is all my doing, I realize, standing rooted to the floor and paralyzed by shock. Every exquisite fiber of Colt’s ruination was spun between my fingers, even though I’d never meant to do so. This wreck of a boy, he’s mine, all the brokenness inherent in his soul is what makes him mine. I was never meant to keep something that wasn’t broken. I’m a deposed god of destruction, and anything that’s whole only serves to remind me of what I can’t have.

Colt used to be whole in his own sort of way, right when we first met. I can remember him as he once was, shining like the stars at the center of the universe and always ready to smile, fingers that were clumsy when holding a pencil but had the most beautiful kind of grace in them when they were flitting along the strings of a guitar or tangled and tugging too-tight-just-right at a fistful of my hair. He could lull me into a fitful sleep with murmured lullabies when my demons kept me awake at night, could pull a smile from my lips without the slightest effort when it had taken even Alyssa years to learn the mechanics of how to do it. He was bright, he was pure, and he was beautiful. But he was also mine, which was what destroyed him in the end. Ask Dahlia. Ask Kiera. Ask my mother. Anything I touch is saddled with the impending curse of mayhem, a destruction of their soul that leaves them unable to function again. The boy in front of me? He’s just like me. A ghost. I have turned the person I loved for radiating life into a ghost.

Somehow, that knowledge manages to make my stomach twist even more than the full force of his anger does.

“You know nothing, Kaelen Dempsey.” On the contrary, love. I know too much. In eighteen years I became more jaded than most of the great cynics ever were in their lifetimes, witnessing too much of the world and its shortcomings to let me be who I might have been in another life. I think about that particular ghost sometimes – he’s the ghost of a boy whose mother never died. Whose father never tried to drown his guilt in whiskey and a violence he couldn’t contain. Who never sequestered his own humanity in the deepest parts of his own reflection and traded his heart for a glacier, his blood for arsenic. For a few shining moments in the deepest levels of the underground, I was almost that boy. Colt was like an antidote that pulled the toxins from my veins, the sunshine beneath his skin coaxing my fragile, atrophied soul back out into the world of light. But then my mistakes came home to roost in the form of Kiera’s pretty lies of divinity played out over a television screen, and with nothing left to protect me I shattered in the same way I had always watched all my victims break with a cold, unfeeling smile.

Some part of me thinks that when I broke, he broke too. By that time his light was so hopelessly entangled with my darkness that the fate of one was doomed to be the fate of the other.

Outside, a peal of thunder rattles the windows in their frames and the heavens open, the soft shhhh, shhhh of rain on the roof falsely soothing, like my former celestial status is trying to console me and failing miserably. The wind that leaks through the windowpanes makes the candle flames sputter, flashing a muted light show across Colt’s skin, across the faltering dance between rage and agony that flickers across his face. Those are all mine, too, all those dark things that never sullied his soul before I got my claws in him and my poison worked its way into his very bones. I would give anything in exchange for going back to when things were simpler with us, before he’d worked his way under my skin and there was only the simple pleasure of the essence of him, of having a harmony that sat rich and decadent beneath my own in the back row of glee club and a head rested against the seashell surface of my ribcage in the dark of the night, breaths heavy with sleep warming the constant chill on my skin that radiated from the empty cavern beneath. But going back there would mean going back to a time before he became such an integral part of me that it felt hard to breathe when he wasn’t there, back before he’d reach over under a desk and hold my hand and my whole soul would light up, back before the sex meant something I could place and before I could feel anything other than icy derision and a cynical wonderment of when this was all going to hit the fan and blow up in my face. Going back to that, back to a time before I loved him… it would probably destroy me.

“W-why? Why did it have to be… you?” Colt stammers, looking so lost and broken and utterly destroyed that every inch of me aches at the knowledge that I did this to him. I was stupid enough to think that he could be an exception, selfish enough to take the chance of holding him to me and praying that the destruction that had come for all the others would pass over him. Why did it have to be me? In a world where I’d never drawn him in with a siren song of honey-coated lies and the promise of so many things I couldn’t give, he could have been so, so happy. I pretended not to see the way Wheaton looked at him across the room sometimes, pretended not to hear my fragmented thoughts that he’d probably be better for him than I had any hope of being (as much of a bumbling idiot as Jace is, he is the sort of unfailingly kind that I could never hope to be, something that would have magnified Colt’s light rather than destroyed it), for no other reason besides that I have always been selfish at my core, wanted to keep him close to me because even as I destroyed him he was rebuilding me into something better than an unfeeling deity of carnage. Colt made me human again, and in exchange I annihilated him in my last act of divine retribution. That much is clear in the betrayal that lurks behind his eyes, in the accusing pain behind the words that make my world fall. “I love you.”

No. No. It’s not supposed to be like this, he’s not supposed to be looking like he might cry, I’m not supposed to be standing here hating myself, this is wrong, it’s not supposed to be like this. I want to hit the pause button on the world and rearrange things until they match the words that just bloomed from his lips, change the scenery into something warmer and not so broken, rewrite the story so I hadn’t said it first on a hastily scribbled note and he wasn’t saying it like he was accusing me of murder - and that’s an ironic twist of thought. Good one, Dempsey - and we both weren’t so dreadfully undone. In a more ideal existence this would be it. I would smile and he would kiss me and the credits would roll, all white picket fences and sunsets and a happily ever after we were never meant to have. But this is not that world. Despite my delusions of grandeur we are still standing in a creaky old house with too much misery ground into the floorboards, it is still raining like the sky is trying to wash away the stains of my inadequacy, and he still says words that completely, utterly destroy everything I was, everything I am, everything we ever had the potential to be.

“You don’t love me. You don’t know what love is.”

This is what dying feels like. This is what it is for a heart to stop beating, for a soul to fracture and float away. I want to collapse, I want to fall to the floor and sob and scream that it isn’t true, it’s not, I swear, but I can’t. I’m nothing but a ghost already, and ghosts are mere snatches of memory. I don’t have a memory of breaking to follow, and so I merely stand there, teeth gritted and eyes stubbornly betraying me with flashes of liquid fire that lap behind them. I suppose it’s only fair. I destroyed Colt, and in exchange he has taken everything within me and scooped it out, revealing a truth that I was never brave enough to admit to myself. I lived my entire life behind mile-thick walls of my own design, just to keep me safe from love. For only six years I knew the inherent love of a mother’s touch, but I soon forced myself to forget, denied myself any attachment because it was weak, love had the potential to wound and it was a liability I couldn’t afford.

And love can wound. Love can kill. Love can kill because I am dead all the way from the underside of my skin down to the deepest roots at the core of me, reduced to a shriveled, fractured thing as he presses my hand to his lips and gives the saddest smile I have ever seen. “You don’t love me, babe. I’ll go, but not back to District Thirteen.”

And then he’s gone.

“Co-Colt?” Now I’m the one who stammers, a marionette whose strings have been cruelly cut, floundering for movement in a stagnant world. Perhaps I’m not quite dead yet, maybe because what he said was only half true. Maybe I don’t know what love is, but that doesn’t stop me from knowing that I love him more than the entirety of creation, even if only in the warped, damaging way that I’m capable of loving. My puppet limbs don’t want to cooperate as I lunge for the front door and yank it back open, hissing venomously out into the rain. “Colt!”

It would be stupid for me to leave my house, for me to run out into the streetlights for the whole District to see even if it is almost four in the morning and no one is likely to be awake, but my lingering sense of self-preservation holds me back, hovering in my doorway and calling after the huddled form retreating into the storm. “Colt Hanlon, get your hormonal little ass back here, this conversation isn’t over!”

If he hears me over the roar of the rain, he doesn’t show it, and in that moment the last remaining spark of my old divine fury flares to life and my eyes harden into a glare. How dare he? It’s all well and good to come waltzing in my door and accuse me of shortcomings that I’ve already realized, but to take a Parthian shot like that, to turn and leave without giving me a chance to counter, that is beyond childish, beyond unfair. It’s his defense mechanism, his way of closing the book and never giving me a chance to say something that could salvage our sinking ship. It’s his way of leaving me.

“God dammit,” I growl, flinging the door the rest of the way open and sprinting out into the downpour. It’s a textbook autumn storm, the kind with cold rain and even colder wind that whips right down to the bone, and within five seconds I feel like I’ve just been dunked in an icy swimming pool, squinting against the sopping hair that’s been blown into my eyes and running after him until I’m close enough to grab him by the shoulder, spin him around, hold him in place although in his mind he’s probably already gone. “What gives you the fucking right… You don’t get to tell me who I do and don’t love. You don’t get to tell me what I feel, and you sure as hell don’t get to leave, got it?!”

And then I kiss him so hard my head spins, all bruising force and unspoken regret from both ends and maybe, just maybe a few mutinous tears that get mixed in with the rain. My world has fallen and nothing is okay and I’m cold and soaked and my heart is broken, but for a moment, for a single cataclysmic moment none of that matters. This is what I’d needed, the missing piece that left me unable to stand on my own. I’d missed the smell of laundry soap and home and the taste of pure summertime, the steady solace in strong shoulders and familiar bone structure that I come to memorize all over again, not caring that we’re standing under a streetlight in the middle of a thunderstorm and outside our little bubble of renewed contentment the entire universe is crashing and burning. It doesn’t matter. Not now. Maybe in the morning it will, when I wake up and realize for the millionth time that I’ve destroyed everything I ever held dear, but for now I can still hold something that is perfect and beautiful and mine, a thumb brushing carefully over a defined cheekbone as our lips part just enough to allow us to breathe.

I had never wanted this, not at first. I tried to push him away, but he grew roots around my ribcage and sprouted flowers just below my collarbones. I spent whole eternities plucking their petals in an effort to figure out something that perhaps in retrospect I had known all along, an unspoken truth that I manage to voice aloud for the first time in a broken whisper against his lips. “I love you, Colt. I’ve always loved you. And you’ve got no goddamn right to tell me I don’t.”

I can’t tell if I’m shaking from the cold or from the renewed rush of life that bubbles back up within my veins. Without him, I was a ghost, but now I’m something still broken but a little more real. Before I know what I’m doing I’m kissing him again, the action not quite as desperate, but softer and closer to what we used to be, all languid and easy and consoling in a way I once thought I could never be. “It’s freezing. Just come inside and we’ll talk.”

Before him there was so much I swore I’d never be, so many things I swore I’d never say. One was I love you, and the other was the soft, entreating syllable of the next fragile thing that ghosts over my lips, trying to figure out if I can crawl back beneath his skin and live in the corner of his heart that's always belonged to me. “Please.”

there is love in your body, but you can't get it out, it gets stuck
in your head, won't come out of your mouth, sticks to your tongue
and shows on your face that the sweetest of words have the bitterest taste
darling heart, i loved you from the start, but you'll never know what a fool i've been
darling heart, i loved you from the start, but that's no excuse for the state i'm in

what have i become?
something soft, and really quite dumb
'cause i've fallen, 'cause i've fallen
oh, 'cause i've fallen, i've fallen so far
away from the place where i started from

People say that space is an asundered thing, but I found it beneath Colt’s eyelashes and in the pauses between our shared breaths in the stillest parts of countless nights. Before him space was a void, an absence, something cold and empty that sat within the spun-glass cage of my ribs and cried plaintively for something to fill it. After him it was something different, waves of him crashing through my veins and through the clockwork mechanisms of my heart until they washed away everything that wasn’t him, filling me to the point that my body couldn’t hold it and my strength crumbled. His light poured out from under my skin and seared away the inky self-defense I had once thought impregnable, and I was left weak and unable to stand on my own anymore. It doesn’t make sense to say, but in that moment, in all those moments, I was so full I was empty. I lost myself in the tide of everything Colt stood for, things like longing and a love I’d never understood, but rather than carrying the sensation of being hollowed out it felt like the most blissful dream of redemption.

(I know better than to think that there’s actual redemption waiting for me. I’ve put too much poison into the world to escape from it without reaping what I’ve sown)

In another life, whole universes away, I believed myself to be a mountain, tall and strong and unshakeable. But if I was a mountain, he was the sea, slowly but surely washing away at my surface until I eroded beneath his touch and there was nothing left of me. Colt operates under the delusion that nothing he does will impact anything, but I know the deepest truth of the matter, which is that he can shake me to my foundations and send me reeling into a realm I’ve never known how to handle. It took being without him and feeling that dreadful hollowness settle in my bones again to make me realize how much I need him, how he’s put roots under my skin and grown into such an inexorable part of me that even breathing without him was the burden of holding up an entire crumbling world. He melts into my touch and something about it hums a vibrant aura of undeniable rightness, two parts of a whole that have been separated for far too long finally falling back together. Perhaps my life is falling apart, but the simple, constant knowledge that Colt is mine and I am his will be enough to hold the fractured pieces of me tentatively together in the horrible days to come. He says nothing, but the two of us passed the realm of spoken word so long ago, far more attuned to a language of glances and touch that speaks far more than any words could ever hope to. People say that space is an asundered thing, but I found it in the gaps between his fingers where mine have always fit perfectly.

Even without any real source of heat, the creaky old house feels less like a tomb full of ghosts and more like a canvas of something that could maybe become home one day when we cross the threshold, the candles in the living room sputtering in time with the water dripping from our hair and clothes. I have never seen him look so lost. Colt was always the one I could count on to remind me where I stood, simply because sometime between hello and the first time I noticed that our hearts beat in perfect sync within a nest of rumpled sheets and tangled limbs, he became the focal point around which my universe turned. Despite his faltering words and stumbling feet, he’s always been so sure of himself (or maybe sure of us, although there isn’t a difference between the two. There was a tipping point where I became him and he became me and we became each other, so hopelessly entangled that functioning independently again was nothing short of impossible), and the thought that I’ve taken that security from him with nothing but a scrawled note and a hasty absence only serves to make the spiderweb of cracks across my soul splinter a bit more. Leaving him was never an option for me, not really. He was in my blood and bones and soul long before I ever had the sense to try and tear him out, but right now he doesn’t seem to realize that, standing there so terribly broken and looking at me as if I might disappear if he blinks.

Before he came back to me and gave me the breath of life that lingered on his lips, I might have. Ghosts are transient things, but I can never vanish as long as I have him here to tether me to life.

“I love you.” I say it again, slowly this time, experimentally. The words are still rusty and stilted on my tongue despite how fluently they flow at the core of me, still awkward and foreign upon lips that swore a long time ago to never utter them. But now that I’ve started there’s a pull along the backs of my teeth that says I’ll never stop, and I keep playing with the syllables until they sit right in my voice, fingers of one hand still tangled up with his and the other carefully brushing the soaked hair back from his face. “I…love you? I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

There’s such freedom in the words that without me realizing it, they trail into a giddy smile and a breathless laugh, the soft thump of Colt’s back colliding with the wall. “I love you.” I kiss him. “I love you.” I kiss him again, and before I know it my entire world is nothing but a mantra of searching lips and fumbling hands and I love you I love you I’m sorry I love you as we fall back into who we were before, a world of swan songs and soft things and tangled sheetslegshearts that feels more like home than anything I’ve ever known.

People say that space is an asundered thing, that it takes three years to travel to Mars, but I can spend twenty minutes in Colt’s arms and have traveled farther and learned more than any astronaut.

---

Almost immediately after, he curls into my chest with deep, even breaths, the exhaustion of travel that I know far too well claiming him. And that’s fine, really, it is. While his mind may be the property of the land of dreams for now I still have him here, the steady drumbeat of him playing out a slow rhythm against my ribcage and his breath washing warmth back onto my skin. I lost count a long time ago of how many times I've had sex, but I can count on one hand the amount of times I've made love, and each one of those precious numbers belongs to Colt. Part of me thinks that if I give into the sleep that’s begun to tug on the backs of my eyelids as well, I’ll wake up in the living room, hunched over my book, cold and hungry and with no one but my ghosts for company. But this is all a bit too real for that, the chill of the rainwater on the back of my neck and the familiar, sticky-sweet ache in my bones and the lingering sensation of more that’s always been associated with him. I would rather stay awake for a hundred nights and watch Colt sleep than give into the nightmares that always wait just beyond the edge of my consciousness. I shift slowly, carefully beneath the mess of threadbare blankets in a bed that used to be mine but now could never be anything but ours, flinging an arm around his waist and getting lost in the smell of rain and heartbreak and home.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move,” I whisper into the damp, dark strands that have become a fixture on the pillow next to mine, fingers whispering out a sonata of broken things against the texture of his skin. This isn’t new, me stealing from the prose of others to articulate a feeling that I’ve never quite been able to make sense of. Whole books of e.e. cummings and Pablo Neruda have murmured their way into his sleeping ears, never to be heard except in dreams. But that's all right. If he dreams of me as much as I dream of him, there's a steadfast security that from this day forward, he will always know the meanings behind words I have never known how to say until now. “Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love.”

Love is a tricky thing just as space is an asundered thing, but I have found them both in Colt’s eyes and on his fingertips and in the visceral beat of his heart.

i never thought i could love anyone but myself
now i know i can't love anyone but you
oh you, you make me think
that maybe i won't die all alone
maybe i won't die alone