Author's Note: I had a slow week and too much time to think about things. Like bus crashes, and how we tell stories.

"I know how the story goes down / I've told it about a hundred times now"

"The Book", Aubrey Peeples

~000~

Tristan has a story about them.

One that involves Paris and storms and illicit kisses in the Degrassi greenhouse; one where he insists how well he knows Miles, always knew Miles, understood that they would fall in love before either one of them would say it out loud.

It's a story that leaves out a lot of the…less-than-flattering parts, because Tris is nothing if not a romantic. There are times when Miles catches Tristan looking at him and can so blatantly see the stars in his eyes that it makes him want to soar headfirst into whatever galaxy Tristan must see whenever he looks at Miles; what cosmic stretch of his universe Tristan lets Miles Hollingsworth fill up.

Tristan has only looked at Miles twice since he walked into the room. His whole body is tense and rigid, but not in a way Miles understands. It's completely different from any way Tristan spoke to him before the crash.

The silence is so suffocating that Miles can't do anything except watch Tristan glaring out the window. There's nothing special on the other side of the glass. Just the blank endlessness of January, the snowplowed veins of the highways beneath them and the people as small as ants hurrying about their days.

These days never stop being Hell.

The air is so cold out there sparks with static charge, leaving little pinpricks of electricity on the tip of his tongue whenever he steps outside, like Miles could open his mouth and speak a thunderstorm.

Maybe he could. The crash changed the way he and Tristan both form language; Tris because of words like "head trauma" and "traumatic brain injury" and "restoring lost functional abilities", and Miles because without Tristan to talk to, he's lost the way that words would shape and fall from his mouth.

There are days between them that sound like they're reciting pages from a medical journal. Others when they can't speak to each other at all, because the only words Tristan knows are made of chaos and fire, twisted metal and twisted bodies, blood and pain and terror.

Then there are the days when Tristan is almost there. Close enough to where he and Miles can speak with a handhold, a smile, a head on a shoulder; a kiss on the cheeks, forehead, lips; fingers twined together, clear blue eyes.

And there are days like today. Days when Tris won't even look at him, when his eyes are narrowed with suspicion and his lips peeled back in a soundless snarl, arms crossed over his chest, right over his heart, when every shape and line of his body screams GO AWAY and I DON'T WANT YOU HERE and LEAVE ME ALONE.

More than once, Miles wonders what it was that filled up the air between him and Tristan before the crash. Somedays, he can barely remember.

Miles had his own story long before Tristan arrived in the picture.

But it's not the one he wants to tell.

It's not worth knowing.

He stands on the sidewalk outside the rehab center lobby, fingers twitching in his pockets and his face tucked against the wind. The wind sinks through exposed skin, like sharp nails being raked across his cheeks.

The past three days were just false hope. Three days where Tristan was as close to himself as he's been since the crash. He remembered the inside jokes Miles told him, the stories he told about Zoey and Winston and Maya and even the twins, recent events like the student council election and the Snow Ball and even that stupid plastic baby.

False hope.

Miles curses himself for being stupid enough to believe in anything. He ought to know better than that, by now.

Now, Tristan is someone who doesn't know the boy who visits him every day in this hellhole. The person who loves him and misses him and doesn't know how to mourn him because Tristan is still alive, but not in the way that makes him Tristan, not in the way that tells Miles: mine.

Tristan's parents talked words at him. Words like "agitated" and "bad day" and "later".

Really, it all amounted to the same phrase they weren't saying – "get away from him, things are bad enough without you here".

Miles stands in the cold and wonders if deciding not to run for student council president would have made a difference. If he'd listened to Chewy the night of the storm, when he and Tristan first kissed. If he bailed on the Paris trip last summer and the things that happened, never did.

More than anything, Miles wants to know the exact moment when he should have laid out the possibility of him and Tristan alongside his track record of being a human disaster zone, and run away from him as fast as he could. The moment Miles should have realized that the best way to love Tristan was to turn his back on the possibility of them, trading timelines and heartbreaks and catastrophes, because it was the selfless thing to do.

But some of us are very selfish people and sometimes this is a lesson we learn a little too late, after we have already trainwrecked other people's lives and hopes and hearts. Some people take and break and let go of what they've been given, and there are consequences for every choice we make.

This is a lesson Miles has learned many times over.

And still, he never learns.

Miles has a story about them, too, but his is so much different from Tristan's version of events that he's never told it.

He doesn't think he ever could tell it, even if he tried.

The closest he's ever gotten was that first night together, in his room, with the door locked and the lights off and the sheets kicked aside. He thought it would be a little slow or hesitant, guiding Tristan through his first steps of this old routine, but he was so wrong, and it scared him to be that wrong, because it wasn't Tristan's fear he was feeling that night.

It was his own.

Miles thought it boiled down to the fact that he'd slept with several people, but has only ever been in love with one of them. But it's more than that, so much more, and he couldn't put his finger on what it was until he laced his fingers with Tris's and realized he didn't want to let go, so they stayed.

There were no secrets there, riding this out together, motion for motion, push and pull and forehead to forehead, bones and tongue and heat. There was no story about Paris, about student council elections, about Miles the Playboy Billionaire and Tristan the Hopeless Romantic and happy endings. It was just them and everything they were, raw and completely cracked open.

He knew he was a selfish person and accustomed to getting what he wanted, but he didn't know how to accept what Tristan handed to him. And Miles wanted to give it all back, to give him everything and not hold back. But nobody ever taught him how, because he had never known that he was capable of anything like this, of total and unconditional surrender. He didn't know how to lay himself out like that, but Tristan did it like it was as natural as breathing.

Miles has a story about them. But he isn't sure where to begin, because what does Miles know about giving and giving and giving all of yourself the way Tristan did for him, letting all of himself be seen so openly, trusting someone so completely that you don't hesitate to lay down everything until you're left with just the barest bones of you.

Miles doesn't like telling his own story.

It's the one where nobody could ever love him; his dad had said as much, not to mention more than a few extremely pissed-off hook-ups he'd disappointed one way or the other.

It's the one where he's a screw-up; an obvious conclusion, when you looked at the events in his life.

It's the one where he's a disappointment, a failure, a nothing. Worthless and hopeless. Doomed to a lifelong cycle of letting people down and hurting the people who were foolish enough to love him; destroying everything in his path as he crashed through people's lives, tearing out the ground from under their feet and raining destruction down on them as he blew onto the next tragedy.

He never liked his own story. But he always believed it, because why should he believe anything different?

Then the bus crashed.

And he realizes, there is something else he believes more.

Now, Miles has spent every day since then telling and retelling and retelling the same stories, the same words and emotions, the same mistakes and screw-ups and miscommunications and heads-being-pulled-out-of-asses moments. And he realizes, there can't be a story for them without what came first.

What came before Tristan and Miles were officially Tristan and Miles isn't just the story of things that happened to Miles before he fell in love – most of them bad, most of it his own stupid fault, and the ones that aren't make him want to die so he doesn't go there – including the long list of people he's toyed with, hurt and discarded, left without a goodbye or an apology. It's not just a story of Tristan's countless maybes, his countless almosts, his own list of coulda-shoulda-woulda boys, some of them with names he can't remember because he never bothered to learn.

What came before Tristan and Miles were officially Tristan and Miles –

That's their love story.

Some days, Tristan doesn't love Miles – doesn't even know him – and it looks like the story ends here. Then there are the days when Tristan remembers who he is, what they are, what they're supposed to look like together.

But even on the days he remembers, Miles doesn't know how to make Tris understand, make him recognize how important it is that he realize this every time he comes out of a string of bad days:

There is no story where Miles does not love Tristan. There is no story where Tristan is not the only one he's ever loved.