disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: summertime depression is the worst.
notes: sorry this chapter isn't up to snuff. i didn't really want to write it, either.
notes2: warnings for peer pressure, gratuitous drug abuse, and idiots in love. wow, it's like high school all over again.

chapter title: hold it together 'til our friends are gone
summary: Jonas, stumbling after Alex. — Alex/Jonas.

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[smoking cigarettes 'til dawn]

They're at another party.

(Why does it seem like they're always at another party?)

The steady thud of a bass trembles through the walls, the kind of sound that's so loud you don't hear so much as experience. Every time he closes his mouth, Jonas can feel it shaking through his teeth. Lights in his eyes, smoke in the air like snowdrifts, Alex's mouth open around a laugh; the urge to fit her into the cracks and crevices of his own body hits so hard it nearly the knocks the wind out of him. Her hair shines beneath the dull lamp glow, freshly aquamarine and wild as storm-tossed ocean waves before she disappears, and he's left alone.

Jonas' fingers are still blue-green, and he's decided he's never going to help her dye her hair again.

Well, at least until she asks him to, again.

He pulls long and low from the lukewarm beer someone had shoved into his hand when he walked in the door, and i-spy-with-my-little-eye tries to find his friends.

It's a busy place. Michael's playing pong with a crowd of adoring twenty-somethings, the light glancing off his teeth and his arm around Clarissa's shoulders. Nona's there, too, because she and Ren are off this week, but who knows how long that's going to last. They're all there, mixed in with three dozen other people he doesn't know and it would be so easy to lose himself in it. Jonas could join them, let himself be jostled and hustled and swallowed into the loud warm cacophony of laughter and life. He could go meet people, maybe feel normal for a little while.

He could do that. He could.

But the idea of it is already abandoned, left in the dust and the debris like Jonas leaves all the things he leaves, tucked away in the empty corridors of his memory with light shows and his mother's grave and all the Edwards Islands' he doesn't remember.

He's never been the kind to dwell, Jonas.

And it's easy to weave his way through the crowd, tracking the fuchsia flash of Ren's shirt through gaps in bodies, sucking down beer like his life depends on it.

It's so hot, and he's so lost, but then the sea of people parts, and Jonas finds Alex because Jonas is always finding Alex.

And Alex—

Holy mother of sin, Alex is rolling a joint.

There's a practised air to the way she tamps the weed down into the grinder, twists, twists, pulls the metal apart and clinks it together to knock mossy green herb out from between barbed metal teeth. Her hands are soft-focus brown smudges in the low light, knobbly shadows over the pale pink wash of the paper. Half a gram of shake and then she's rolling it, tongue flicking out to lick along the adhesive and Jonas is—not entirely able to concentrate, anymore.

Well, uh, shit.

"Jesus, Alex," Jonas sighs, and he doesn't know if it's scolding or resigned or what. It's something, though.

"Ma sit down and stop being judgey," Alex says, twisting off the ends of the blunt. Ren giggles.

"I'm not being judgey," Jonas says, and flops down beside her on the crusty brown couch. He winces when it crunches. Gross.

"You're being a little judgey," she says, conversational. Alex's eyes are big and dark as she holds the thing between her fingers, offers it the same way she offers sandwiches: so easy, so simple, like nothing matters anyway. "Hey, I need a light. You got one, garbage snowman?"

Jonas remembers reading something about girls with exorbitant large dark eyes and blue hair chain-smoking at parties, once. Something about asking her about her day, and how the strangest people can tell the most captivating stories.

But he knows what happened in Alex's day, and he knows very well all the captivating stories she could tell. Can tell. Does.

And she has him already, anyway. She doesn't need to open her mouth.

"Yeah, I, uh—shit, here, it's—" he scrubs into his pockets, half frantic and half clammy, all delirious. He wants her like he's never wanted anything else in his entire life. He wants her whole, entire, all her ghosts and all her problems and all her bright red coats! He wants her when she's smoking and when she's not and he wants her when she's a wreck and when she's trying to figure out how to put her back together and he wants her when—

He wants her always. It's easier to say that. Jonas wants Alex always.

"Oh," Alex says when he hands her the little green lighter, with it's lighter fluid still half full. She kind of just holds it for a long moment, and then one more, such a still thing in the swirl of light and smoke around them. "Oh."

"Yeah," Jonas says, and he doesn't tremble. "That work?"

"Yeah, I guess," she murmurs, shakes her head a little. "Here, hold on."

Alex puts the joint to her lips, flicks the lighter, breathes in.

She keeps the smoke in her lungs for a long time before she exhales with her eyes closed, and Jonas watches her face with a sick hungry thing in his chest, some awful combination of want and need.

Please and you and always. Jonas doesn't know the right words.

"You want?"

"Nnnghn, nah."

"C'mon, garbage snowman," Alex says, and then she's climbing into his lap, knees splayed on either side of his hips. A shock of lightning goes down his spine, the warm heavy weight of her the only right thing Jonas has suddenly ever known. "Smile for me?"

Jonas grins.

(He's so fucking weak.)

"Shotgun with me," she says.

"What?"

She's already bent away to get another lungful of smoke, and Jonas has no idea what's going on because she's right back in his space, all of her sharp edges pressed up against all of his. Suddenly nose to nose, and she's so close he can see the flecks of yellow-green in her eyes—

Alex exhales and Jonas inhales; they're mouth to mouth, not quite kissing but not quite not kissing either.

He thinks, breathe your smoke into my lungs.

They pass the smoke back and forth until they've both breathed it a hundred times and it's not shotgun kissing anymore, it's just kissing, lips on lips, and she's small, Alex is, she's small but she's big as the whole universe. Jonas keeps his hands on her hips and lets her lead, smoke hazing out of her mouth and all around them, her hands in his hair pulling him down and down and down.

"Let's go," Alex says. Her pupils are wide as her face, mirror-black in the dim light.

"What?" Jonas slurs, chasing her. She sounds so far away. She sounds like she's in the back of his head and that's right, isn't it, because she's always been there, sunk in deep and real as the ghosts had ever been—

It's like ice cold water down his spine, that thought.

Back the fuck up, man, that's not okay.

"Let's go," Alex says. "Outside, I wanna go outside, come with me outside, please?"

"Yeah," Jonas says. He needs to get out, suddenly, needs to be out in the cold clear air away from the smoke and the pounding of the bass. Needs to be away from the pull of Alex's skin, but that's probably not going to be a thing. Her fingers are hooked into the collar of his shirt and he doesn't have it in him to dislodge her. As though she's not everlasting, ever consuming, everything, everything. "Yeah, let's go."

Alex and Jonas stumble outside.

Hands twined, they slide past the cabal of smokers, the kids loitering on the steps, the easy offers to come back inside and light up. No one's surprised to see them go; they all know Jonas and Alex have been attached at the hip practically since the day North Valley moved in. It's been a year, but no one's getting any better.

The music haunts them in faint clinging threads, siren's song to reel them back. Smoke and song, rust and bone, crimson ghostlight flash. The past reaches for them, offers empty palms and the promise of oblivion, a deep-sea drowning for the late nights.

It's easy to ignore, though, because they've both died a hundred times.

There's a park down the road. This late, it's empty, and the jungle gym groans out of the murk like a fairy tale monster with iron teeth.

Jonas follows Alex down the hill into a grassy plain, and flops down to the ground next to her.

The stars spin out above them, a diamond spill across the sky that Jonas finds himself trying to frame into memory. Alex laughs without sound into his jaw, just a shaking of the shoulders, and he wonders about the golden-champagne texture of it, the way it seems to bubble through his bloodstream. The grass is wet with dew. He can feel every single blade.

"Hey, Als, you okay?" Jonas finds himself asking.

"Mmm, yeah, I think so," Alex says, shifting so that she's not mashed so uncomfortably into his side. She digs her elbow into the ground to prop herself up and then she's looking down at him through silver-shot starlight in the faintly cool night air. "Are you okay?"

"I'm always okay," he says, one side of his mouth picking up.

"Sure you are, garbage snowman," she says.

"My feeling," Jonas says, deadpan.

"Only the one," slips out of a crack in her like a whisper, a shuddery broken thing.

(God, only the one, always only the one. Jonas thinks his mom would like her, and that's maybe the worst thought he's ever had in his entire life.)

And they've had this conversation a lot of times. Jones knows that. He knows that they've had it more times than he knows, which should be counter-intuitive but it isn't because after everything, after everything and the end of the world, they're out here lying on the grass with the stars glinting above them and Alex is a heavy warm weight on his chest. It's cyclical, is the thing, but maybe not in a bad way.

"What am I gonna do with you," Jonas says. He doesn't run his hand through her hair, but he wants to.

"I dunno," she says. "Follow me to the ends of the earth?"

"Probably," he says, because it's true.

Alex is very quiet for a long moment, only the buzz of far-away firefly glow for flavour. She pushes up on her elbow again, and she frowns. Her lashes are so long. "Why are you like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like… that, that thing you do where you just, like, go with it. Why do you do that?"

Because someone should, Jonas doesn't say. He stares up at the sky, dizzy, far-away sick in the bones. He can feel Alex's eyes on his face. For you, someone should.

"…You know what, never mind," she says. "I don't actually wanna know."

"Yeah, you probably don't," and if that's not the most confident lie Jonas has ever told, he doesn't know what is. Alex drops her cheek back down to his chest in the gathering night, a gentle warm press of skin against skin separated only by a thin layer of cloth. In the empty air, it's an anchor. It brings him back.

"Nerd," Alex murmurs like she's already dreaming. "Go to sleep."

They lay there for a while without saying anything, as her breathing goes shallow and slow. She's gone already, left to wander through the ghostfields and the static wastes behind her eyelids, the soundless brush of half a standard blink.

Jonas counts Alex's freckles.

He doesn't close his eyes.

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tbc.