Chapter Eleven: Psychoactive, Five

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"What are you doing?"

Spencer scowled. What did it look like he was doing? Wasn't it obvious? Stupid brains. Stupid slow brains he was surrounded by, slowing him down, tripping him up, didn't they—

"Spencer…"

"I'm improving the efficiency of your morning routine," Spencer answered, lowering the screwdriver. Cross-legged on the floor, he touched the metal tip of the tool and winced at the shiny-slick texture, dropping it and rubbing his hands feverishly on his bathrobe. "You burn your toast. You always burn your toast. And then you're late and because you're late you don't make more and breakfast is an incredibly important meal that has dramatic effects on cognitive functioning and you don't eat it because you burn the toast so I'm fixing the toaster to make it Ethan-proof and then you won't burn it anymore and it will cause an incremental improvement in your quality of—"

Ethan coughed to cut him off, the grating throat-clearing crunchy noise that Spencer hated when he was sober, let alone like this. "Spence," he said, and crouched with twin cracks of his knees. Spencer reached out to touch those sounds and categorise them and then added 'remove reasons for crouching from apartment' to his to-do list. "That's the microwave oven."

Oh.

So it was.

"The toaster was yesterday," Spencer realized out loud, and picked up the screwdriver again to pop the number pad free. "I fixed it."

A glance to the counter where half the toaster remained.

"You certainly did something to it," Ethan muttered quietly. "Why aren't you at class?"

"Weekend," Spencer tried after a long moment of trying to find the answer to that question, made longer by the sudden realization that he didn't know how many tiles there were on the kitchen floor. He should know that. He began counting, looked up, saw Ethan, stopped counting.

Up went Ethan's eyebrow, a sure nope, try again. "It's Wednesday."

Oops.

"One moment," Spencer told him, and looked down again. "How many tiles are there? Wait, do we know how many corners there are? We should know that. Fire. Fire safety, somehow, do we have a fire escape plan? We should make one of those, quick—we'll do it now." He dropped the shambles of the microwave and sprung up, reaching for Ethan's arm and then twitching away. "But don't touch. No touching. Um, no."

"Jesus," Ethan hissed, and reached out to grab Spencer's chin, yanking his jaw around painfully to stare into his eyes. Spencer yelped, trying to fling himself back and tumbling back over the microwave, screwdriver digging painfully into his calf. Ethan went with him, stopping him hitting the ground and pinning him neatly with a knee to his chest. "Stop squirming. I'm not hurting you."

"Touching," Spencer snarled, because it itched and itched and he knew his skin was gross, clammy, sweaty. Oily and gross and spotty and Ethan shouldn't touch him, no one should touch him, he needed to be kept away. "Stop!"

"Coke?" Ethan asked, green eyes locked on his. Spencer tried to escape a little more and then froze, transfixed by that gaze. Green green green and dark hair and green and too close. "How long?" Spencer shook his head and kept shaking as big hands shook his shoulders. Suddenly, he was aware of every point of contact between their bodies; hands and knees and thighs. He closed his eyes and tried to gather his brain. "Spence, is it coke?"

"No," Spencer squeaked, because Ethan didn't like him on coke. And he was trying. Why was Ethan so hard on him? Couldn't he tell he was trying? After all, he fixed the toaster. Fixed the toaster sort of. Was working on fixing on the toaster. Or was it the microwave oven?

Ethan swore again and slipped off of him and Spencer was thankful because he was aroused and he didn't want Ethan to notice that because he was scattered but not that scattered. Yet. Maybe.

"With me," Ethan told him in a voice like he expected him to obey and Spencer had always been good at following orders, so he meekly scrambled up and trotted after his friend, counting corners as he went and wondering if he could make the carpet weave another way if he tried hard enough. Veering widely around the TV, he saw Ethan look at it and frown.

"It's fine," Spencer lied.

"Yay," muttered Ethan, and walked away. Good. Spencer would fix it before he saw it. It was loud and annoying and wouldn't be quiet even when Spencer pulled the plug from the wall and then removed the power cord completely but Spencer would fix that because Ethan liked to watch it sometimes. "You know, if they're annoying you, you can leave the room, right? You don't need to keep cannibalizing my electronics."

"Fixing," Spencer corrected him, following up the hall. Bathroom. They were going in the bathroom. Why? Nope. Wait. Not bathroom.

He stopped and stared.

"I don't want to," he said, shaking his head. Not Ethan's room. Never Ethan's room. That was where he wasn't allowed to be, the things he wasn't to have in there. A locked box with painkillers and a packet of instructions he'd given Ethan telling him what to do if he went too far and a book with a note in the front and various things Spencer had wanted to fix and Ethan had tucked away and the instruments that sung when Ethan touched them and screamed if Spencer so much as looked in their direction—

"Come on," Ethan coaxed, holding out his hand. Spencer wavered. "Spence, it's alright. Come on. You're with me. I need help with my coursework."

Oh. If he needed help, that was different. Spencer padded mutely after, into the room that smelled of music and cologne and Ethan and no one else, because he never let anyone else in here to mar the clean, musky scent. Spencer breathed it in and felt his heart kick a little, prowling the outskirts by the door with his eye on the bed until he paced forward and traced his fingers around the outline of the tussled sheets, learning with his hands exactly where the other man would lie at night.

"Come here," Ethan persuaded, and Spencer did. Stood next to him and turned to find himself staring back. He ripped away from that hollow-eyed spectre, whining, finding himself tangled in wiry hands. "Shh. No. Stop. It's what I need help with."

Spencer closed his eyes so he didn't have to look into the mirror, anxiety bubbling up inside him like an ooze and setting the whole world to spinning. "Can't," he mewled, and turned to huddle against the body offered to him. Ethan let him. Arm around his back, tracing small circles on his spine, a soothing, circular touch. An allowable touch. But the bed yawned behind them and Spencer began to shake.

"Look again," Ethan said gently. "It's for my psych class, Spence. Case study. You need to help me with what's wrong with the boy you see."

"Me," mumbled Spencer, brain tripping a moment over trying to puzzle out how many people were in the room.

"No. It's not you. You're right here, see? If you weren't, how could you be touching me? What's wrong with my case study? I need to know. You know how shaky my grades are."

Spencer looked. It didn't look like him. It looked like a gaunt wasted version of something he could have been. Stringy hair, bruised eyes set deep into a skinny face. Maybe distantly related. Maybe not related at all. How would Spencer know what he looked like? Ethan would know better. He relaxed, minutely, at the reassurance he wasn't in the mirror and set his mind to the puzzle offered. And the anxiety slipped away along with the itching, crawling mania and the swollen sun outside.

"Schizophrenia," he offered first, because he could see it in the boy's eyes. Madness. His mother. "Genetic, likely. Maybe he has a family member. Look how much he fears it."

"He's too young," Ethan replied after a long pause. "Only sixteen."

Good point.

"Drug induced mania," he finally settled on, eyeing the rashes up the boy's thin matchstick arms and the repetitive beat of his fingers against his hips. Ethan's hand rested on the boy's shoulder, fingers brushing a point where Spencer could see a pulse hammering sporadically away, his chest erratic. "Likely after sustained use. Mydriasis suggests a possible psychedelic, or anything causing large amounts of serotonin to be created. MDMA, methamphetamines, stimulants. Hard to tell without behavioural clues. Likely due to trauma. Depression. This boy is a mess. You shouldn't be mixed up with him."

He turned away, the puzzle's edges turning jagged.

Ethan was jagged too, watching him warily with the bed behind him like a threat. "If stimulant abuse is occurring, what should I alert his caregivers to look for?" he asked carefully. "Pills? Hypodermic? Powder?"

"He's too smart, you won't find it," Spencer whispered, pacing to stop the carpet from moving. "Shelf life of the drug is an expected four hours on an average dose, but then, he's not average and he does have a degree in chemistry."

Ethan winced at that. "Coke," he tried again, and Spencer shook his head and tried to back away, but almost hit the mirror. Darting around Ethan, the man blocked the door. "Meth?" Another head shake and another attempt to escape. But he wasn't trying to get away from Ethan. "Spence, help me here, come on. I've been gone days. I need to know what you've done."

"Hours, you've been gone hours," Spencer hissed, and finally turned to face the bed. "It's Sunday."

"It's Wednesday. Did you leave the house while I was gone? Have you eaten at all? Did you hurt yourself? You were clean. Where did you even get money for drugs? We're skint, and nothing is missing so you didn't pawn anything."

Spencer finally looked at him, giving in and sinking onto the bed with his knees drawn up and all his energy gone. Crashing. He was crashing.

About time.

"Ritalin," he managed, his stomach twisting. "I don't want to have sex with you. But don't leave me. I will if you won't leave me, I will—"