"go back to sleep."
john gives a small frown as he lightly grazes his slender fingers over dave's eyelids, tracing the faint blue veins, counting the teeny tiny freckles littered across his face like specks of brown sugar. he resists the urge to kiss every one of them.
"why?" the thin blonde asks, keeping his eyes squeezed shut.
"the world needs to wake up first." john holds him close to his body, tightly, as if protecting him from some sort of monster that lurked around in the closet, or a ghost underneath the bed, hiding, waiting for the perfect moment to jump out and scare them.
"the world's asleep?" the mumbled, sleepy voice rings through the darkness, bouncing off the walls, like some sort of light at the end of his tunnel.
a heavy sadness fills john's chest, and he looks around their bare room. the peach paint is chipped, peeling off, and the eclectic mix of posters that scatter the room all clash with each other in a disarray of colour and fonts. on the bedside drawer, there is a picture of them with rose, and jade. he vaguely wonders where they are now.
dave grumbles as he nods off, his chin rubbing against the top of john's head.
"we got to let the world wake up first." if you want the nightmares to disappear.
the heat from dave's soft breath, slowing and coming out like some sort of hushed, private lullaby, presses against the thin layer of john's bone-white shirt. he smells like leather, and soap, and the honey jam he puts on his morning toast (with warm, plain coffee; no sugar with a splash of milk. apple juice in carton boxes have long been forgotten, like the tall, smirking blond with the fondness for puppets he once knew, very long ago, as his brother.)
"we're safe like this," john murmurs, rubbing small circles into his waist, his nose buried into the crook of dave's neck. he takes in the smell of a warm human being, so real and so close, and so his, and he thinks to himself, almost mournfully, that he will not let him go. "i promise you."
"what will happen when we're not us anymore?" dave muses softly, as he idly twirls a piece of raven hair around his finger. his strong, sweet-sour breath smells like the alcohol john tries so hard to hide away, and he doesn't have to smell the pungent stench of weed lingering on his wool sweater to know why dave's eyes are bloodshot and watery, even from beneath his cool kid sunglasses.
"why wouldn't we be us anymore?" john whispers back, knowing exactly what the answer to his question is. it hangs on his tongue heavily, like he's storing broken fragments of the moon in his mouth.
dave never stays in the present. his mind always wanders into the future, and never forgives the past. he glosses over the middle and spoils himself, skipping over time with a big fuck you aimed towards the imaginary clock in the sky. no pause; only constant fast forward, constant motion, constant erasing of what is now and bitter regrets of what was.
john finds it terrifying, he always has, and he doesn't know what to do. even after all this time.
"i don't think we are anymore," is all that dave answers back with, and john fights the urge to push him away, like he always feels the urge to, and doesn't cry, doesn't cry, doesn't cry.
"how would you want to die?" dave asks him one day under the expanse of an orange sorbet sky. they're both laying on the cool, prickly grass sharing a cigarette, and john has to remind himself that he stopped caring about being healthy a long time ago.
"i've… never thought about that." john shrugs, handing the burning stub to dave. he reminds himself to buy another pack soon. "i don't know. old age, i guess." john say it like a question, swallowing the dry air, quivering internally like the wind has shook him. truth is, he has thought about it, but he doesn't want to. he wishes dave would think about children, about college, and disneyworld in florida. "why?"
dave says nothing, his face set in that perfected emotionless expression of his as he blows on the end of the cigarette and watches the ash glow a faint orange.
"why are you asking?" it's dave's turn to shrug, his body shifting under john's head. the raven haired boy hesitates, before deciding to ask only one more time, despondent tone in his crackly voice as he feels the shadows underneath his eyes grow darker.
"what about you, dave?" he flicks the tiny, burning nub and lets it drop to the grass, letting it fizz out, still smoky even in its suicide. john feels an indefinable aching in his chest when dave doesn't look at him, rolls over on his side, and buries his face into the grass, mumbling something so incoherently that john isn't quite so sure what he actually said.
later that night, in bed with their thighs tangled up like noodles, and the heater broken and two piles of blankets and an abundance of pillows surrounding them like a fort, john finally realizes what dave had said. he swears that he hears his own heart shatter in the dark of night like glass, and if he's being honest, he doesn't think the pieces can ever be glued back together, anymore.
"we should've died a long time ago."