Eyeshard

by Luna Quiche

[Beywheelz] Sometimes Sting lays awake at night, thinking about damage done to other people. (Sting/Jake of whatever intensity you want it to be)

Fingertips on scar tissue; fingernails brushing over badly healed skin. There was a bit of desire to dig deeper and tear it all open again, but the twitching hands were controlled after mere seconds. There was no way to do this. Even when the desire to break all that which was once again in his grasp was overwhelming, sickening, building up inside of him like waves of an illness, there was not enough despair (or maybe not enough courage) to destroy it again. Maybe he was holding on to glass shards, but then again they all were; so it had to be fine, right? He felt nauseated thinking about it. The scar under his fingers served as a reminder of reality; the lost and the attained one both.

There was no room for anything more than faint touches, all else would wake Jake up. He knew these boundaries better than anybody in the world. It was only within certain limits that he was able to feel the wounded skin under his touch. Breathing in and out, he let his fingers circle, savouring every one of those flaws he knew so well again and again.

Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire. Sting was fond of this method of coping. He was a boy who had been eaten up by nightmares inside out, remaining a shallow shell; so he did the next logical thing. Sting was a nightmare collector. Like other people would study rare insects, Sting observed the fears of other people. It would be ideal if he could put them in jars, to watch them absorb the lights falling in from the window; to hold his fingers in and feel the cold pass through to his bones. But even without that, fears were soothing. A room filled with other people's demons made no room for his own or even for himself. Sting could disappear between them and become a nightmare himself, which was just what he wished for.

Jake stirred in his sleep, but luckily enough he was nowhere close to awakening. The clock ticked on silently. The hands were set on early morning now, but it was still pitch black outside. Out of all the nightmares he had collected, Jake's was probably his favourite.

The scar was warm. Sting could feel the life under it, clearly pulsing. Jake was a living and breathing person; he had more 'presence' than anybody else and yet a part of him had already vanished forever a long, long time ago. Sting had never seen it, but he knew it had been there. It still remained, in a way. A ghostly shadow looming over a phantom eye that would never see again.

It was a secret, but Sting knew. Even though it was obvious, the subject was never addressed. Hidden behind a cap of blue, pink hair and a bright smile Jake turned a blind eye to all that held him. There was only the night-time for Sting to admire the damage done to a person that seemed whole and was hollow. He had played out countless 'why's in his head, when he was laying awake like this. It took some to not only take someone's sight but destroy all there was to their visual organ. A smile came to Sting's lips, thinking about it. He wanted to see those tears of red. It was within his power to make Jake bleed again, any moment would be fine. He wanted to see him cry, scream, fight back and give up; dying hopes, a dying soul; a breathless moment for one and a moment full of breath for another. Maybe then there would finally be a way to untie that knot, to erase that nagging memory of a boy who no longer cared, even worse, of a boy who could say big words so flippantly, a boy who would never take consequences.

An arm over his ribs called him back into reality once again. He couldn't do that. Tearing that warmth apart was an impossible thought. It was the bitterness that created a sense of self, a sense of being 'Sting'. Sting didn't quite know what it meant, but perhaps the meaning was close to the sensation of legs wrapped around his and soft exhales tingling against his body in the death of the night.

By morning light it would all be gone, the thoughts and the scars and all they brought. The lingering monsters of their lives pushed into the background to make room for sound in abundance so that they wouldn't need to hear a single note of their own regrets.

Sting closed his eyes for the first time in hours. Surrounded by darkness he could feel himself fade away slowly. There was no guarantee he'd still be there when he woke up, he thought, but Jake's sleeping arm only wrapped tighter around his waist.