#« ᴛ ᴏ ᴍ ᴏ » / 「 & ziv. 」

[becameundone]

WHERE: single carrot theatre WHEN: 15th november (or something around that time) WHO: ziv boo ( @scyboo )

It was time for Tomo to face what he'd spent a week and a half avoiding. Or, maybe, he'd been avoiding it for months. It depended on where you drew the starting line, on his birthday when he'd been sent a script with a note or back in August when Ziv had originally made the proposition. Either way, he'd been living like a coward for too long now. At first, he'd insisted he was happy to keep working as a volunteer and he believed he'd meant it but the truth was that he'd been afraid of tempting fate. They'd put him on a forced hiatus, insisting he wasn't stable enough to keep working, and he'd always feared it might be true, despite the gaping void in the pit of his gut that grew and grew with each passing day.

But, now, Tomo had hit rock bottom again. Anybody who had seen him since that awful part could tell; the dark circles under his eyes and the unattended dark roots bleeding into scarlet hair were a decent giveaway. He could barely remember how he'd spent his birthday. The little brush with hypothermia had already kept him from feeling his best but the whole night had been twisted and distorted and screwed up by vodka shots and ecstasy. All he could remember was waking up at noon the next day, with a splitting headache and a creeping sense that he was barely even human anymore. And, then, his card payments had bounced. More money would trickle in eventually but his bosses, regardless of country, weren't exactly generous when it came to paying his residuals on time. He couldn't turn to his mother for help, not since she'd disowned him, and, although he'd been given the right to a decent chunk of his father's limited posthumous earnings, he was afraid to touch it for fear being labelled a nepo baby trainwreck. After all was said and done, he could go no lower so why not risk everything chasing what he loved? If he had to be depressed or whatever, he could at least try and act again.

"Hey, so, I gave your offer some more thought," said Tomo, marching into the room without so much as a greeting. He'd always been a very abrupt person but, in his defence, you never found time to overthink yourself into a hole if you skipped thinking altogether. If you needed any measure of how well he was doing right now, just look to the fact that, although they were indoors in the early days of Winter, he was wearing sunglasses. Tomo slipped into the seat nearest Ziv and slumped into a very casual position. A voice far in the back of his head tried to insist he looked as much a wreck as he felt. "I'm accepting it. I want to act. Here, with you guys." He wasn't a stage actor and the prospect of jumping to a new medium terrified him but the alternative, that swirling dark void of shame and dwindling self-worth, had become much more frightening. And, here's the thing: Ziv had asked him personally. That meant something. That meant a whole lot of something. "Only problem is... I misplaced the script you gave me. And, by that, I mean I set it on fire but, y'know, same difference." And he'd done it with a cigarette lighter, no less, during a particular lylow moment. God, he could use a smoke right now. But that was probably just the nerves speaking.