#the last two terms of school are always the busiest bc all my teachers are like oh youre Graduating soon? shit

[bravemccalll]

a flood of blood, all for you

There is blood dripping down my fingers, but you seem more concerned with this than I am.

“Your knuckles are busted but they aren’t broken,” you murmur, almost to yourself. “But your nose wasn’t so lucky. Damnit, Fuyuhiko,” you curse, reaching up to drag your hand through your hair in frustration and a streak of dark red is left in the pale colour.

I blink. Slowly. I know you’re talking but the words take light years to reach my ears as though we are on separate planets and you are shouting in a megaphone just to speak to me. Or as though I am in a swimming pool, sitting below the water and you are sitting above, your words causing ripples in the water. All these metaphors spin my head in a circle and it makes me feel sick, so I stop thinking and just focus on you.

Everything is going blurry, but you are clear, you always are, you always will be. I wonder if you know I’m in love with you. I suppose that you do, somewhere between the first bouquet flowers I bought you and punching that guy in the throat for catcalling you just an hour ago, I must have said something. I feel as though ‘I love you’ is strong enough to describe how I feel about you anymore. Perhaps at some point it could have been but the second you smiled at me for the first time, it became too weak. How do I describe to you that my heart is a fist that clenches whenever I see you? That my lungs only exist so that I can stop breathing when you make eye contact with me? I don’t know much about love in general, but I know enough to realise that what I feel is much more than that.

You’re frowning now and I hate that, even if you are beautiful with your brows pulled together and my blood staining your hair. You’re always beautiful. It’s beside the point. You’re frowning and I want you to stop because I want you to be happy, that’s all I ever want. I scramble to say something, anything. Half of me wants to talk about what happened, about how the anger I felt had pooled in my veins like hot lava when I heard that man whistle at you, how my knuckles had felt when they hit his cheek, how my head felt as though it had split open when he punched me back. I think you had looked angry as well, almost as angry as that time I fell off your mother’s ladder when I was trying to hang fairy lights above her front door, but the memory is fuzzy so I let it go and it floats away into the abyss.

The other half of me wants to talk about anything else. Maybe about that TV show we were binge watching last week or about that book you were reading when I came home late the other day, what was the name of it. I can’t remember.

“Fuyuhiko?” you say, still frowning, your hand cool where it cups my cheek. We had a running joke, didn’t we? About how you are always as cold as the dead but I am always as hot as a furnace? I can’t remember. “Fuyuhiko, are you alright? Fuyuhiko, what’s my name? Fuyuhiko.”

Peko, I want to say. Peko, Peko, Pekopekopeko. But the words don’t come and I feel like I’m frowning right back at you. What a pair we make, people must wonder if we ever smile.

You say something else but I don’t quite hear it and I feel like I’m back on that planet again, seeing you as a pinprick in the distance but you don’t have your megaphone anymore, or I’m underwater but there are no ripples in the water because you’re not there and I inhale sharply and suddenly my lungs are filled with water and I’m choking I’m drowning and there is a crack in my skull that seems to throb like a heartbeat – your heartbeat? – and you aren’t there and you should be there where are you where areyouwhereareyou?

What was I thinking? I can’t remember. I should tell you I love you, I think and close my eyes and slip into the abyss.