AN: This is not a happy tale. There are more downs than ups in Spencer's story, we know this. This story will absolutely entail recreational drug use, the sexual abuse of a minor, vague depictions of sexual conduct by persons under the age of eighteen, and essentially a very dark skip down a very dark road. It will also be non-chronological and disorientated, because Spencer isn't the same kind of storyteller as Aaron was.

But it will also entail the light parts of that road too, because we know they're there. There's Ethan and Aaron and Elle and Jack and even Halcyon along this road, beyond all the pain. And a million stories left untold. I promise to do my utmost to depict each and every situation the characters find themselves in within this fic with realism and respect.

I figure by now absolutely everyone has gone NOPE and clicked out of this, because heck, what a list of contents (and I don't blame you if you have). But if you're still here, I hope you trust me enough to write this fic how it needs to be written, without shying away from the parts that hurt.

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Chapter One: Psychoactive, One

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He only woke up to come down.

Sticky hot with cooling sweat, he rolled and the bed rolled with him. Flung an arm out to grab something, anything, whatever would stop the world from picking him up and throwing him heartlessly down.

"Woah there," mumbled the voice attached to the arm he'd just grabbed, and he blinked and tried to piece together his brain long enough to remember the name that connected both of those things. "Grabby aren't you, Spencer?"

"Feel sick," he said, because his eyes were burning and his stomach was roiling and that voice was wrong wrong wrong and never getting better because he'd danced across his past and burned all the bridges behind him. He laughed. "Can you smell smoke?" He could. Ha.

He could.

"Shut up and come back," said the voice/arm/name and Spencer crawled back onto the bed and curled against that body, faceless, nameless, he didn't care. Last time he'd slipped into the bed of someone with a name (aaron), look how that had ended. "Is there any more?"

He looked, he really did. Wondered, for a heartbeat, how that named person would have reacted to the smeary mess of powder and liquid spooling together on the bedside cupboard. Gave up caring about his smoky past and reached for the clickity glass that rapped against his nails. His head hurt. His brain hurt with it. Too much thinking. Fingers touched his and he pushed it away and laid back on the bed.

Lazy, he thought, and the thought became a mouth kissing up his chest and his throat. "Lazy," the voice said, and he hummed as those fingers found his arm. "I'll do it for you, then." Shssshhh said the strap as the fingers tightened it, and he hummed again as the fingers became a needle that slipped in up up up in a sharp-hot bite into his vein.

"How would you start your story?" the voice said suddenly, as Spencer dropped back into the pooling nothing of sleep. "If you had to tell someone about your life?" The voice became a sucking bite of air as the needle fingers found it too. The bed dipped, thumped, groaned, as a body sprawled languidly next to him and tucked a nose against his shoulder. Breath against his skin. A heartbeat skittering on his arm. He wriggled away and wanted it to stop.

Thought again about the question. Didn't answer. What a question. Stupid question.

Who was left to tell?

But if he had been sober and still who he'd used to be, he'd have said this:

Once upon a time, there was a lonely boy in a lonely quarry…