It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
- T.S. Elliot
***Trigger warning***
Troye's POV
"I need to tell you something."
Troye felt as though he stood beyond himself. Something had taken control of his tongue and was shaping his words. He'd never told anyone this before. Half the time, he refused to admit it even to himself.
"Troye? What's going on?"
Troye heard the question, but for a moment he couldn't make a sound. Vertigo came for him, sharp and crackling. His mind stopped on the brink of an abyss that extended in every direction at once, and then it paused. Like it was awaiting instructions.
Troye made his way slowly to the couch opposite Tyler and sat down. Tyler sat up straighter, looking at him quizzically.
"I...." He stopped.
Now that he had decided to speak, he had no idea how to start. The space his mind was trapped in was too thin to allow words.
What was thinner than words?
Maybe the feelings that usually skimmed along deeper than words could reach. Maybe the kind of truth he hadn't even know how to feel until Tyler showed up.
You're the bravest person I've ever met.
Words, okay, but the way they had wounded him-they were also something more than that. Something thinner than paper, sharper than glass, that got between his skin and the flesh beneath and made him feel himself, outlined in bright pain. Something that made him savagely aware, again, of the Troye who had gone so numb.
"Tyler," he started again, trying a different angle. "What's the biggest question you ask yourself every day?"
Tyler closed his laptop slowly and stared at him.
"What?"
"Every day," he said again. "Do you ask yourself a particular question that you can't really answer? Like...what the meaning of life is, or if there's a God or...something like that?"
Tyler frowned and seemed to think it over. "Not really...do you?"
"Yes." Troye took a deep breath. "I always ask myself, if I had a magic wand, what would I do with it?"
His eyes drifted down to his hands, curled in his lap. "Would I do good with it, or would I do evil?"
Tyler looked at him, the light skewered on his spiked hair. There was something in his blue gaze that made it seem to take forever, crossing the air between them, as if his thoughts were enough to slow light to a crawl.
"Have you answered it?"
"I...Do you think you're a good person?" Troye asked, not looking up.
Tyler didn't comment on the seeming non sequitur, just frowned in thought as he thought over the question carefully.
"No," Tyler said after a lengthy pause. "But I try really hard to be."
Troye nodded, not taking his eyes from his lap.
"I think I would do good." He said. "But I might be selfish instead. I might materialize a new family for myself. Or a new home. Or..."
"Or what?"
"Or, I'd make myself a better person so that I wouldn't be so selfish." He whispered it, not looking up.
"Selfish?" Tyler gave a short, incredulous laugh. "You're the best person I know."
Troye breathed out slowly.
"I'm not. I'm not nearly good enough to you." He did look up now, briefly. "I'm sorry I can't be everything you want."
Tyler's frown deepened. "Troye-"
"No, please, just let me..."
Troye swallowed. It took every ounce of courage in his blood. He had to scrape out the last bit of bravery hiding in his bones. He forced himself to speak.
"Tyler, you know...I've never been good at saying what I feel, especially when it comes to you. But it's not because I don't want to. The thing is, you have to know what you feel before you can even try to say it. And I realize maybe that's not a huge problem for you. You're so completely yourself, so aware of yourself, all the time. But I'm not like that. I haven't always been able to...tell what my heart is doing, I guess. It just, goes on thumping, where I can't get a grip on it. Like, my heart's at the bottom of a chasm, and I'm standing up on the edge, staring down at nothing."
Troye wasn't looking at Tyler, but he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, so quick and subtle he wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't been so tensely watchful.
Troye looked up slowly, eyes wary as they rested on Tyler's face.
Tyler quickly stuffed his expression away, but Troye caught enough of it to know how intense it had been. Tyler's face was glowing with longing and melancholy and-
Troye fought not to drop his gaze. He didn't know if his words were making any sense or reaching Tyler, but something was. And the fact that Tyler looked that way because of him-it shocked him with a kind of tenderness and panic he couldn't fully process.
"Tyler," he tried again, and now his voice was just starting to shaking. "To you, maybe it wasn't a big deal-I mean, the things you've said to me before. But you told me about all these attributes you saw that I didn't-"
He didn't speak about the time Tyler had said there was nothing he could say that would make Tyler hate him. Not even now, when he was fighting so desperately to remain open. He didn't want Tyler to think he was expecting him to still mean it.
"-And I think that you've been trying to tell me that, in different ways, for as long as I've known you, but I couldn't take it in until—until everything was so hopelessly messed up. Anyway, it was like some kind of...I don't know, spell. Because it was like you made me real, by telling me that."
Troye paused again. That was a lot of pressure to put on Tyler, what he'd just said.
"Or—okay, like you gave me a chance to make myself real. I don't mean to—none of what I'm talking about is your problem, Tyler. I'm just trying to tell you how grateful I am."
Now he did have to drop his gaze. He continued speaking, trying to sound steady and failing spectacularly.
"And-I can't really say that I'm good for you and maybe it's better if I leave you alone but...I'm not going to try to make decisions for you any more. And. You deserve to know why I've...been acting the way I have-why I act the way I do. It's just...I've never talked to anyone about it before. And I don't know how you'll feel about me afterwards and-if you don't want to be friends with me after you hear it I'll completely unders-"
"Troye."
Tyler's voice cut him off before he could finish. The voice was very quiet, but he was saying his name.
Troye looked up. A hair-line flash of his beautiful face. Troye inhaled instinctively.
A tear. He'd made Tyler cry.
"Troye, did someone hurt you?"
No one had ever gone right out and asked him that before.
He swallowed. Now that the gap was wide enough for words, of course he couldn't speak. He couldn't say a single word. He could only work on containing the heart and lungs that were beating inside him, that filled his whole body until he was nothing but blood and breath.
He pressed his eyes shut and nodded slowly.
He didn't need to open his eyes to know what happened next.
"Please, don't." He whispered. He wanted to open his eyes again but needed another minute.
When he finally did, Tyler was still frozen in a half-stand. Tyler caught his gaze, before slowly settling back down.
Troye felt completely numb, and watched Tyler's face and shaking body with something approaching detachment.
"Who? Who did-" The rattling was in Tyler's voice now too, shaking his words apart.
Troye breathed, feeling his detachment toy coyly with whether to stay or whether to abandon him.
He really wasn't sure he could get the who out. If he really had to tell this story, then couldn't he whisper the words? If he had to think of their names, over and over, even when he was drifting through sleep, could he please keep them so soft that they settled like down feathers on his thoughts?
He practiced in his mind; repeating the names, so lightly that he hardly felt the sharp edges or the pain. When their faces floated up in his inner vision, he sent them swiftly out of focus, molted and smeared and wet. Not yet. He couldn't start there. He pivoted to a different who.
"You asked me once if I'd ever had a boyfriend and I said yes."
Troye's lips twitched up humorlessly. "I...that wasn't exactly true. He wasn't...I don't know if maybe he would have been if we'd...but he was never my boyfriend. He was everything else."
It was all true, but there was still something cold, flat, and numb in his voice-even though cold was the last thing he felt. The chill now was thin, a skin of ice over something inside him that was roiling.
"His name was James and he was everything to me. My brother, my best friend, my confident. He was the only thing I had that I felt was really mine."
He could feel his pulse striking against his skin. He took a breath that shuddered through his lungs.
"I loved him," he said, and then something gave way. At first, he didn't know what: the ground, his body, or what was left of his heart. All he knew was that he was sagging forward and had to arrest his fall with supreme effort.
Troye was straining so hard to force himself to stillness that everything else was turning into a kaleidoscope of fractured light. His vision was ringed in bright, toothy points. A buzz glutted in his head. Troye closed his eyes and tried to breath past his nausea; tried to find his center. He couldn't pass out now; he couldn't fall away from Tyler. He'd already let Tyler down, he couldn't do it again.
Tyler didn't say a word. Even with his eyes closed, Troye could feel how intensely Tyler was watching him. How still he was holding himself while he waited.
"My father-"
He stopped talking, because the next words were already taking shape just under his heart. They hurt so much even in silence that he almost thought saying them aloud would choke him.
"My father...he walked in on us once. Just once. And he-"
He wasn't supposed to talk about this. This was the forbidden beans that he didn't spill, because the stalks that grew from them would skewer his chest, send its tendrils bursting through his arteries, feed on his blood.
"He-"
The buzzing in his bones was so loud he thought he might disintegrate.
"He said he wasn't going to let 'this' happen, and that it wasn't going to happen again."
"Did he hurt you?"
Troye shook his head. His father would never be so crass as to hurt Troye himself. He always outsourced.
"Who did?" Tyler's voice sounded strangely repressed, as though he were pushing the words through a constricted throat.
Troye couldn't feel the ground under his feet anymore. All his sensations were limited to the nausea pulsing through him, the pressure of his fingers digging into his side.
I don't think I can do this.
He didn't say it. If there was one thing he owed Tyler, it was the truth, even this truth.
"I went to...he sent me to this, um, treatment facility that was supposed to help me get better."
He almost laughed, except he could barely breathe.
"There were a lot of people there who tried to...to get me to understand...why what I did was wrong. But I...mostly worked with..."
Even before he opened his mouth, just the thought of that name slammed him with a freezing blast of panic. His breath turned to solid ice, blocking his lungs. Then he concentrated, and exhaled, and the name came out with it.
"Dr. Mengele."
Maybe he'd screwed up everything else in his life, but he really couldn't blow this. He had to get through this if it killed him.
"He...the first week I was there they tried to get me to...comply. And when I wouldn't he...they showed me a video of James."
It got darker and Troye realized he had squeezed his eyes shut again. It felt like the black air was eating all the light right out of his eyes, and he would never see again. He found himself clutching the arm of the couch so viciously it felt like he could splinter it.
"And he was...he looked like he was locked up, like in some kind of facility. And he just...he looked so sad."
God, how it hurt to say that. He felt like his ribs might split.
"I don't know what happened or how he got there, but I just know my father had something to do with it."
Tyler hadn't said anything for a while. Now he spoke softly, voice hesitating. "And you blame yourself for that?"
Troye could hear his unspoken objection. Troye hadn't been the one who had hurt James; had destroyed his life. Troye was just a kid, his life knocked sideways again and again by all the screwed-up games the adults kept playing with each other. It was just the sort of thing Tyler would say, and for a moment Troye was at a loss how to explain.
When you've been living with the same pain for so long, it seemed so obvious and self-explanatory that it wasn't even worth thinking about.
"Yes. Because I'm to blame."
There were murders of the kind that were obvious to everyone, with guns and blood and blades. Then there were the murders that were so gentle and insidious that even the murderer had no idea what he'd done until much later. They might not realize what they had done for days.
The second way, the soft way: that was how he'd killed James. He'd killed him with a kiss. And even if he'd had no clue what would happen, even if all he'd done was to do one wrong thing, the consequence was still that James had died.
"Troye, whatever happened...it wasn't your fault."
He knew Tyler was trying to be kind, but when Tyler told him not to accept the guilt, he was really telling Troye to forget his own heart and bury it along with James. Because there was no possible way to get rid of the truth, not without getting rid of the heart that held it. He knew what he'd done.
"Yes. It was. Because-" he said, then had to stop. God, was he really going to have everything squeezed out of him? He would rather rage, smash all the windows, set the whole house on fire, run away screaming, than say the words that came next. But then he did, because he had to.
"Because knowing me didn't just ruin his life, it ended it. The video he showed me, it was of James being attacked and-he didn't make it. I ruined his life, then I got him killed."
He could sense that Tyler had gotten closer, had possibly even sat beside him, was possibly saying something to him. He didn't care. He was battling the overwhelming urge to collapse onto the floor and scream. All the blood dropped out of his head and he didn't think he would have been able to see anything, even if his eyes hadn't been shut tight.
Tyler was waiting for him to go on, and suddenly he didn't care anymore, because the story was taking over. The words lunged out on their own.
"I got left behind be everyone because that was all I was good for, being lied to and disregarded over and over again, and I always just kept going but that...I-once I really processed what had happened I just, I couldn't keep going. I just-went catatonic, I-I'd just curl up in a ball and rock and refuse to move or eat or say anything."
Troye was still clinging to the couch arm. It felt like the gravity there on that couch was unstable, mailicious, tugging him from different angles. Maybe it was the gravity of the past, reaching for him through the cracks in the universe.
Any minute now he was probably going to puke.
His body was wet with sweat, slick and cold, but not cold enough to stop his skin from buning.
"Do you know my father wanted to name me Cassian? It means hollow. He should have just done it because what the hell else have I ever been? Even with my father, it felt like he must have picked me out of a gutter somewhere. Except I know he didn't because he never would have bothered. He made it clear he never wanted me but I still-I still thought he would-"
Troye gasped but didn't stop. All at once words were bubbling up into his mouth, jumping up and smacking on his teeth, and he wasn't even trying to hold back. His heart was spewing lava.
"I still thought he would do something to help if he knew how bad it was, but he didn't. He didn't care about anything except making me normal and he told them to do whatever they had to do and they did."
This was said all in one breath and the words were slowing down now, longer pauses spaced between each one.
"I thought I'd been empty before, but I realized there was still something in me I was holding on to, and that's the thing they wanted to rip out. And I wouldn't let them. For the longest time, I wouldn't let them. But then they-"
For a while, he couldn't make himself speak. He couldn't move at all. The darkness was so profound that it turned every sound, every movement, into another spike of fear and unreality. He could hear Tyler's laboured breathing beside him, his breath whistling like wind through a cracked window. He only really knew he was still there from the nagging tick of his heartbeat, the dull, deep burning in his chest.
"I know you haven't known me that long, but I wasn't always...like this. I wasn't always so empty. That's what...happened after they got what they wanted. I feel like they stole everything real inside me. They stole me from myself."
He could feel Tyler tensed beside him, holding himself in place, waiting for him to continue.
But for way too long, he couldn't say what came next. He had already said so much, he just wanted to stop one confession early. But he was out of time. He was out of screams and breath and darkness to hold inside his closed eyes.
He shuddered and swallowed compulsively but opened his eyes and found his voice enough to continue. Because he knew he couldn't ever look Tyler in the eye again if he didn't finish this.
"When you started talking to me, when you told me you wanted to be my friend-it wasn't like you said a lot to me at first. It wasn't a lot. But it was enough to make me feel like I had a shot at being a person again."
For that, he'd fight against anything that tried to hurt Tyler. Even himself.
"I'm sorry I hurt you, Tyler. I'm sorry I didn't handle this better. I was trying to protect you but I just made everything worse. And I don't...know if being my friend is really helping you, but being your friend is helping me and I don't know if I can not be selfish about that."
They both sat motionless for a moment, Troye staring down at the couch.
Something flashed between them and broke open on the skin of his hand, leaving a glittering scar. A tiny diamond. Then another. Then another.
"Troye", Tyler whispered, reaching towards his wet cheek.
Troye couldn't stop. He broke in all directions at the same time. He pushed himself up and folded his legs beneath him. He covered his face with his hands. Tyler shifted forward and pulled him close, holding him. After a while, Troye felt a hot point at the crown of his head, trickling through his hair, and realized that Tyler was crying, too.
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A/N. Aw man, this was really hard for me to edit, that's why it's taken me this long to post it. It was hard enough writing it, I was so reluctant to read it over again. The next chapter is already written, just needs editing. It won't be this sad :(