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Thorne hums, a note that isn't quite a melody, and threads his fingers against Aleksy's hair. There's something catching about the sight of the black tattoos against his wrist flashing in between strands of red, and he gets lost in it because without Aleksy's voice, he feels grounded in the others weight alone. His touch and scent and presence.

"Afraid?" Thorne responds, tasting the word on his tongue in its new light. "I suppose I am, but back then I was a mess." He tilts his head down, mouth brushing the top of Aleksy's head as he tastes words in his throat, contemplative on his lips. "Do you still want to?" He teases, the words rumbling in his throat. His eyes flicker up to the far wall, and he sighs. "It's alright. If anything, it was very memorable."

Thorne knew this would come up, understood that by coming here he was submitting himself to an explanation sooner or later. His eyes lid, and it is strange that he doesn;t feel an echo of hurt inside of him. Sure, there is damage, like a ghost rattling around. A hollowness, an ache. He keeps searching his mouth for a tooth that isn't there anymore.

There's something significant about the gap he has created, the things that he has lost. But it doesn't hurt the way he thought it would. Maybe that means that it was right all along. Is this what being free is like?

It's not running this time and he knows this. It's something else, and has no name. Not yet.

"Maybe that's where it started," Thorne responds, softly. "And I thought I was too, at first. But I kept sleeping and dreaming about that night. In the basement - there was a monster and it spoke and it was Lucas's voice saying all of the things my dad used to say." He sighs out, deeply. "Or I would dream about the blood at Blackfriars. Or - " He sucks in a breath and pauses. "I kept swallowing all of it down, waking up and feeling trapped because I was never alone but I was never with someone that I thought would hear this. I felt like I had to be quiet in my own house, sneaking about because I didn't want anyone to know how much it had affected me. Because I said I would try. They kept calling me a perfect storm, as though I were a poem or a painting. But there isn't anything beautiful in breakdowns and nightmares and I woke up one morning and realized that I was swallowing this trauma to be that fictional thing for someone else."

He lowers his head, speaking against the crown of Aleksy's head. "I know all about the guidelines of trauma. I know that I wasn't processing it. Because I was trying to make myself what someone else wanted. I don't blame them. What we had was good. But when you stop trying to fix yourself for anyone else but you, that's when you have to step back. That's what I told them. And I hoped they listened. How embarrassing is it that the reasoning is really that it is me? And that's it. They left." There is nothing but exhaustion in the way he tells this story. The shame and guilt of admittance isn't there the way he'd felt it, keenly, when he'd pressed himself into the shape of someone else.

"I'm not - upset though." And there's a sick sort of truth there, a humor that is sad. "I feel like I'm finally able to breathe again. I don't think I made the wrong choice. I hope they heard me. I offered to start over... on footing... as - as people just getting to know one another as friends first, because there was never that." Thorne stares at the far wall. "But they won't take it. I know, because I saw the look in their eyes. And it's alright. It's alright."

He would rather breathe again than continue to let himself drown. And sooner or later the hollow space would fill. And he would become whole again. Alone, on his own two feet.

Thorne laughs, and the sound is low and raw. He wants to tuck himself against Aleksy, curl around this pinprick of heat and simply be. Nothing else. He listens to the other talk and he's grateful that Aleksy doesn't pick at the explanation but lets it lay. Lets it stay the way it is, not a discussion, not an argument or a debate.

That's all it can be, after all.

"The problem with poems," Thorne retorts, "is that they end. And this doesn't." So I will be alright as myself before I will be alright with anyone else, he remembers thinking, as he stared at the edge of the Renard works and asked what it could tell him. "I think I would go crazy. Beauty is terror."

He sighs out, and his response is more alive, as though he's returning to himself. Waking up from the shell shock. The free fall.

"I wonder what it's like to see a beautiful world and nothing else," Thorne responds, his voice dipping low and raw, "I wonder what it's like for a person when the people in their poems wake up."

The asylum. Thorne hates the concept that Aleksy was put there, that his past involves a life where he was made to fit into someone else's concept of what a person was supposed to be. "Aleksy," he says, halts, and looks down, leaning back enough that he can see the other. His fingers ghost over those that stretch, a point of contact, considering. "They were blind, and stupid." And I want to punch them, Thorne thinks, and the tremble in his hand, like a surge of unspoken protective wrath, signifies it. "And dangerous. If something isn't beautiful to them, it's - "

Something to be fixed.

Thorne sighs and curls closer. "They're wrong. People end every day. There are all these little deaths in going to sleep and waking up. You're right." Thorne's eyes are sharp and hungry and wild in the dark, burning with the ghost of his usual flames. "It would all be boring if we lived in that kind of world."

Thorne makes a noise. It is a guttural sound, more animal than human. And it is everything that he swallows down around Aleksy on good days. But it is hard to press it down here.

"I'm glad you let me," he replies, and he doesn't care, doesn't care that his world is inverted, that his life is a ruin of his own making, that he is in a free fall again. He doesn't care because there is an anchor here. I would come again. I would come whenever you asked. The words sting and burn the air around him. And he refuses to let them be heard out loud.

He presses his fingers against Aleksy's neck and bends his head, but he stops because this is territory he will not cross. He touches his chin to Aleksy's crown of hair and makes a wild sound. "I'm nothing to worry over," he says, and his voice ghosts with self-deprecation, bone deep. But he pauses, and gently, he adds, "I'm sorry I scared you."

"Oh yes," Thorne responds, in perfect tune with Aleksy's sarcasm, "whatever would I do if I were to drop and break you by accident?" But he understands his warning and swallows something in his throat down. Closes his eyes, and lets the night envelop them both.

"As are you."

It is also bone-deep, this sentiment. As if it had been burned into his core.

Thorne tastes the ashes of it. The reminder.

"Go to sleep, Aleksy. If you want, I'll stay as long as you need."

we came to dance

"Hey," Thorne says one windy afternoon-verging-on-evening, leaning in through Aleksy's window, "I need your opinion on something. Am I allowed to kidnap you? I promise this time, I won't get caught."

Thorne grinned at Aleksy wickedly. "If you insist," he said, and disappeared.

Aleksy would find him leaning against the car outside, arms crossed, looking somewhat clean-swept for once. "How good are you at interior design?" he asked by way of greeting, his voice a low purr of sound. "I was told that if I'm going to live like a hooligan, I might as well do it in style."