#ifayf fic

[super-liminal-times]

Zach put his hands on your face and told you it was going to be fine. And you knew that you could trust him, because haven’t you always trusted him before? But this is the first thing that’s ever happened to you that’s too big to solve. This is the first time that Zach can’t clarify the situation for you, when you look over at him for help.

Zach put his hands on your face and held you together and told you it was going to be fine. And then he disappeared.

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic

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[liminalweirdo]

And although Zach can think of a hundred things to talk about, to ask him, all of them seem immense and terrifying, like shutting off a flashlight in a dark room, you don’t know what horrors are in there with you. If they steer the conversation towards shallower waters, they’re both just people who were friends, once. Like being in a boat on a calm, sunny day; you can pretend there’s not all this cold, dark water right beneath you, with things waiting down there. Waiting to pull you under and swallow you up.

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 5 UP: do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive

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[liminalweirdo]

“...you never say the shit that matters...”

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 18 UP: i whispered in the night, you whispered back 'i know'    

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[liminalweirdo]

And Josh thinks that people did ask him. He called the teacher a dumb cunt and then they’d asked him in the guidance office if anything was wrong. Wrong at home, wrong at school, and like, fucking yeah it was wrong, but it had always been wrong and he’d thought you’re wasting your time, asshole, because what could a guidance counsellor fix? How did they make Josh feel the way he was supposed to about girls, how did they make his parents proud of him, how did they go back in time and change the fact that Daryl was dead and Zach was being strange and Danny was in the marines and how being under the fluorescent lights in the science room made Josh’s head hurt and that sometimes he felt like there was something awful beneath his skin but he didn’t know how to get it out?

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 11 UP: headlong into the night

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[liminalweirdo]

She realizes that it’s her they’re waiting on — she’s the one meant to give a response here, because Zach already knew this. I came out to my parents.

Karen says, “Oh,” because she can’t imagine not accepting your kid, your own kid for something like that. She can’t imagine that Joan and David are any different from her. But if that’s the case, then why is Josh here on their doorstep (without a coat, at Christmas) if they put their arms around him the way she had with Zach when he came out?

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 21 UP: you’ll breathe easier just knowing that the worst is all behind you

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[liminalweirdo]

“Josh, you killed somebody. Someone we knew.”

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 4 UP: alone is a prison

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[liminalweirdo]

Josh gets out of prison the same year Danny finishes his active duty with the Marines. It’s that, partially, that makes him decide not to go home. He doesn’t want to see Danny. Or, well no, it’s the other way around. He doesn’t want Danny to see him. He doesn’t want to see anything from that time. Not his room, his computer — the video games he longed for, the familiar bed, the smell of the laundry soap, the way the early evening light filtered through the curtains. He almost feels like going back there would… trigger something. Someone would find some little piece of evidence they couldn’t tie to him before, that they missed in the trial, that his lawyer forgot about.

He rides the Greyhound for forty-four hours from upstate New York to downtown Seattle. He almost stays in Denver when he changes buses at a rest stop. Something about those mountains, maybe, when he’s standing out on the sidewalk, shivering with cold while passengers start filing back onto the bus. In the end, he isn’t sure why he doesn’t just stay, watch the bus drive off, do something completely different from what he planned.

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 2 UP: what’s the point of being here, and

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[liminalweirdo]

And suddenly it’s the day before they head home for Christmas and Zach stands and stares at the plants and says, “Do you think they’ll be okay if no one waters them for a week?”

“I think they’re dead, Zach.”

And Zach makes a face and says, “I know, I just don’t have the heart to throw them out…” and then he kind of forgets about it until he comes home from work to find that Josh has rigged up some kind of self-watering system with old soda bottles from the recycling that will let the soil pull water into it when it’s dry and it’s maybe the nicest thing anyone’s done for him in a really really long time.

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 19 UP: but it was love i felt when you tied my hands back with your belt

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[liminalweirdo]

At least Josh has been out — biking in the rain, going to swim. Zach should want to go home, but he’s also got this feeling like if he leaves, that will be it. Because what ties them together, now, aside from all that death? Aside from the hurt they keep heaping onto one another? Why did it get so intense so fast? Because looking at him now, Zach finds it hard to see the murderer; the boy who stood over him and brought a sword down towards his face, and cut his head open, and scarred his skin. They’ve been friends since they were still losing milk teeth, and he has missed him.

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 8 UP: i think the kids are in trouble

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[liminalweirdo]

And it is different, Josh thinks, but sometimes it feels like the kind of love they’ve always had for one another. That fierce, unbreakable bond between the inseparable kids they used to be. What if they can say and do all of this stuff they say and do now, but they still don’t trust themselves to hold this thing between them for real? What if they’re using their friendship, the way they used to be, like a life vest? ‘I actually really liked you in high school.’ ‘I think it would’a worked on me the way it worked on you…’

a Super Dark Times fic

FINAL CHAPTER UP: are we getting wise

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tumblr’s links suck lately, if you’re getting an error message, there’s a link to my ao3 in my tumblr’s sidebar

[liminalweirdo]

Zach put his hands on your face and told you it was going to be fine. And you knew that you could trust him, because haven’t you always trusted him before? But this is the first thing that’s ever happened to you that’s too big to solve. This is the first time that Zach can’t clarify the situation for you, when you look over at him for help.

Zach put his hands on your face and held you together and told you it was going to be fine. And then he disappeared.

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic

read it on ao3

[liminalweirdo]

Zach smiles at her, not as forced as it used to be when he was trying to alleviate her worry. There are, of course, those mostly-untouched things that she is furious at Josh for: what he did to those poor girls, and the way he almost/could have/tried to kill Zach. But after the trauma of that. After the flashing police car lights in the rain, and the long hours in the hospital, and the way Zach had cried when they got home (only once, sobbing like his heart had been broken), and finally after Josh’s trial, it was the aftermath of everything that was the worst: the fact that even after all of that, after the injuries had healed, Josh had still taken her kid from her in this tangible way — Zach somehow not really present — even when he was right next to her in the room.

But in the end, when the whole world was inadvertently telling her that she should be happy to still have him — unlike that Miller girl’s family who don’t have their kid anymore — it wasn’t like it was really her place to grieve. She isn’t sure if Zach felt like he could, either.

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 20 UP: but hear his breath come through his teeth

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tumblr’s links suck lately, if you’re getting an error message, there’s a link to my ao3 in my tumblr’s sidebar

[liminalweirdo]

But it was never just that. Never just Zach’s hands on his face, it was everything else, too. Only, it’s so hard to differentiate which parts of loving your best friend are just the way friends love one another, and which parts aren’t. And it’s that all the books and movies hadn’t aligned correctly with the way that Josh had felt sometimes, because there was no perfect lighting, no electric charge when they changed for gym in the locker rooms, no gazing at him from his seat in Mr. Collins’ class the way he’s seen Zach do to the back of Allison’s head a thousand times.

Instead, it’s Zach stopping dead on their way home from school on a Friday and saying, “I forgot the movie in my locker,” — whatever they’d rented from the video store on lunch break — and then both of them having to race back to get it before they locked the doors. Josh panting with his hands on his knees when Zach turned back to him and held the video case up with such a goofy, jubilant look that Josh had had to catch his breath all over again.

Like how Zach could touch him sometimes and it was just a touch. He could peel his shirt off to swim in summer and he was just Zach, bare-chested, sharp-shouldered, the same as always. But then, randomly, he’d reach to share a can of soda Josh was holding, and they wouldn’t even touch, but Josh would be completely struck by the ridge of his knuckles, or the crooked tilt of his front teeth when he was explaining something, and all sorts of other ridiculous, mundane things that they don’t warn you about.

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 10 UP: all the stars are coming out, they shine like steel swords

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[liminalweirdo]

And suddenly there’s the memory of looking up at Josh as the sky went so dark, so fast — the rain blurring his vision as Josh’s hands wrapped around Zach’s throat for the first time — suddenly it feels less of a memory and more immediate. And suddenly, the ceiling in Zach’s apartment presses down on them both and Zach’s field of vision darkens and goes narrow, ceiling gone, only a canopy of winter trees closing in overhead. And all Zach can see is pieces of Josh — one fragment at a time. His half-open mouth, dark wild-animal glitter in his eyes, the tic of his jaw as he clenches it.

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 17 UP: i guess the missteps pressed us back into line

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[liminalweirdo]

His heartbeat picks up, anxiety spiking through him the way it has for years now — someone moving too fast past him on a sidewalk, glitters out of the corner of his eye that remind him of sharp steel. But it’s always just someone’s metal water bottle, umbrella handle, glass and mirrors catching the light in just the wrong way. Girls’ shrieking laughter with their friends at the beach in summer. Girls screaming as their boyfriends hoist them playfully over their shoulders. Those things cut straight through him now, whiplash of cold terror. Old fear.

(or, Josh and Zach meet up again, by mistake, several years later.)

a Super Dark Times fic

CHAPTER 6 UP: people say friends don’t destroy one another

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[liminalweirdo]

Zach half-laughs because he gets it. Sometimes the line between their friendship and this new way of being together is too undefined to see very clearly; drawn and redrawn, erased and corrected. Still the compliments are at once both gratifying and startling. A little funny, even, because Zach still feels like an imposter when he’s teaching, sometimes. Like they’re eventually going to realize he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. Or maybe Zach still doesn’t know how to take compliments, or think he deserves them.

a Super Dark Times fic CHAPTER 15 UP: so i just think of you, i think of you

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