warnings: drugs, major character death, language, reference to sex
There are three things lying on the table in front of you: a newspaper, a necklace and a needle.
The newspaper is today's. It's folded neatly to a small article on page 4—a tiny piece, no longer than a paragraph, detailing some kid who was shot by the fuzz after sticking up a grocery store. It's got Dallas' mugshot next to it, haughty as ever, eyebrow arched and a twisted sneer on his lips. After all these years it's more familiar than your own reflection but his smile is still clearer in your mind, even if you only ever saw it a handful of times— and it makes you wonder.
You can't say you never expected the way he went out. The way he had it coming. You're not delusional; that'll be you one day. Maybe you'll make the paper, probably you won't. Doesn't matter either way.
Once, you thought you knew him well, or at least well enough to expect his next move. Never the specifics, of course, but he was predictable—you'd fight, sure, but he'd come back every time, just for the kicks. The two of you could operate like a dysfunctional machine, and you miss it and hate that you do. One foot forwards, follow each other off the bat, he was twisted and so are you.
It was easy, your game. He'd start it; you'd end it. He'd start it again.
It's easy, until you let him into your bed the first time and wake up with his blue eyes soft and tired and his hand in yours. It's the first thing you don't think to anticipate. The first stumble in your well-oiled dance, before all the pieces start unravelling faster and faster and he goes out in smoke and flame and leaves you helplessly grasping after the space he left behind.
His necklace runs through your fingers now, glinting silver and falling to the table with the tinny rustle of cheap alloy. It's yours, now, but as all things, it's too little, too late.
You didn't see him die and you didn't grace his funeral either. It's easier to fake indifference without a witness—and there's little use standing with a handful of mourners who thought they knew him but didn't, just like you did.
The night he goes out is wrong. Surreal. There's a rumble, and he's there when he shouldn't be, and your nose breaks again and the blood that runs through your fingers is warm and sticky. He's gone before you can close a hand around his wrist.
Still, you're not sure why you end up in the Curtis place at three in the morning to drop off a necklace you found glinting in the mud. Probably the whiskey thrumming in your veins that makes the world hazy and the pain duller, even if the thumping in your head is stronger. Maybe it's an insane instinct that you've developed courtesy of his breaking point—you know he's living on a hair's breadth, maybe he has been his whole life, but suddenly you care.
"You seen Dallas?" you slur, too out of it to take in the situation in the dark. The Curtis house is dead-silent, save for Randle's choked-off sobbing. Eerie in stillness, like the whole world is put on pause. You see tear tracks reflected in faded yellow down Two-Bit's cheeks and you vaguely remember a time that you buddied around in 6th grade and thought he'd never cry.
"What the hell happened?" Your voice rings in your own ears, jarring in the silence.
For once, Two-Bit doesn't have a thing to say as he slumps in half-light, fixated on a spot in the air like he's looking at a ghost you can't see. The necklace in your pocket suddenly feels like a dead weight. Heavy and hot.
Steve turns to face you, eyes hollow and young face haggard. "He's dead, Shep," he chokes out, all the bitterness in the world twined in his words. "He's fucking dead."
Nothing changes in the liminal space you're occupying but suddenly Dallas Winston has been struck out of your world and it's impossible because Dallas Winston is immortal, indestructible, laughs in the face of death.
"What?"
"He's dead," Randle repeats, raw. "Him and Johnny both. Saw him pumped full of lead. He was dead before the fuckin' rain caught up with his body on the ground."
Two-Bit still says nothing, and in the moment he's less alive than Dally, who'll surely be off smoking in an alley or slashing a tyre somewhere, that dangerous glint bleeding through his thin lips and smile.
You turn away from two gaunt faces and leave the house in a daze, unable to wrap your mind around the static in your head—the rain splatters cold on your face and sobers you up just enough to picture Dallas Winston, a lit fuse hitting the ground in the rain, crumpling and jerking and out like a candle. Is it raining hard enough to wash out the bloodstains on the street?
Unbidden, you catch a flash of pale skin by your face and you whirl around, startled—you're stupid and jumpy and it's just your own hand that's reached up to brush away hot salt that's escaped your eyes. Your body's responding even if you still can't form a coherent thought. Then that flash of white drags mangled images of a waxy figure with Dal's features lying stiff in a body bag straight to the forefront of your mind and you have to stop there, in an alley you don't recognise, to spill your guts in the dark.
There are dark spots throbbing in your vision. Are you crying? If any more tears escape they blend in with the rain. Your nose throbs. He'll never make you feel that pain again. The scar on your face aches as you hack up liquor and bile. He stitched that part of you together. The necklace burns through your trouser pocket and that used to be his.
The rain plasters your curls to the side of your face and you slick them back with a shaky breath and turn to walk away with mechanical steps. He's dead, and for some reason, you care more than you planned.
It's bizarre, the knowing, although it dawned on you a while back. You're gentler than you have to be when you kiss him even though your laugh is cruel as ever, and you like the feel of his corn silk hair between your fingers when you pull it. Then Johnny leaves and Dal comes to your door near bursting with nervous energy, jumpy, like static, and you're certain that he isn't as stone cold as he wants everyone to believe. But you say nothing.
For once you don't know what to think when he grinds out the butt of a cigarette with his heel and you know it's real bad when the next pack of cigarettes he pulls out doesn't smell like menthol. You visit him in the hospital and laugh because he's got his picture in the paper and it doesn't have wanted splayed over the front and he looks like shit. More fragile than you've ever seen him. Like maybe he'll blow away in the wind when you run a thumb over his palm and wait for him to start something. He doesn't. You think maybe he'll cry instead.
If he cries, you'll show him you care. He always moves first. That's how it works. Of course, he doesn't cry, so you keep your mouth shut, then he dies, and you realise he's hurt you right where it counts. Worse than twisting a knife once it's already in the ribs.
But he's dead. That's your game, and you've won it now, but don't know what it is, exactly, you've won. Would he still be here if you'd broken away from your illusion of routine and just fucking said something—would he have walked away?
He might have been the one who kept coming back, but you were the one who kept letting him, and it makes you wonder. He stayed the night once so you called him your bitch; he moaned so you made him choke. He offered, you gave, he took. But you still can't figure out who was actually leading your two-man game—you always ended it, but he always got the first word in. Hell, you're still half-expecting him to waltz in like he fucking owns the place and try pull a switch on you.
And the funny thing is, if he does, you won't hesitate to take that same blade and run it between his ribs.
But it's not any use thinking about it, not when he's dead and gone and he'll never open those lips for you ever again. You're numb, don't mind much. He's not the first person who you've loved and who's left, and you'll get over it.
You loved your mother, after all, and she walked out. You've all but stopped thinking about her. Now it's Dallas, and you can't find it in yourself to be bothered to grieve.
The tourniquet is already fixed on your arm when you pick up the needle. You've cooked up the hit already and the brown liquid glows amber, a solitary ray of sunlight slicing through the dust in the room and hitting it just right. It's strangely pretty and you focus on it, ignoring the bluish tinge to your veins. Delicate in your fingers when you slide the sliver tip in and a clatter when you let it drop to the table, a single bead of blood welling on your arm.
The first time you steal one of your stepdaddy's joints and smoke it next to the train tracks, you're young. It's a cold day and you have to walk through piles of rotting leaves to get to your usual spot, but the afternoon sun stains the brick yellow.
Dallas hurls when he takes a hit and you laugh at him, callous as ever. This is before, long before your shift in dynamic, back when things are just starting to make sense and you've just begun your back-and-forth. So, Dallas hurls and you laugh and he calls you a junkie, just like his skag bitch of a mother. He's there when you bunk your stepdaddy's funeral, when your mama walks out, when you shoot up for the first time.
It's a rush of feeling, and you tell him as much when you're high, and neither of you think much of it when you run fingertips over his jaw and he frowns. You're no junkie, you know that—a hit every once in a while condemns nobody and you hate the disorientation that comes with it, the unfeeling, the numbness. The safety.
Warmth like you've never felt and the ache afterwards. More, but it disgusts you, and you're above that anyway. Above the hollow-eyed ghosts that float in corners, palms up and begging for the next bit of comfort. Frail little things. Wanting like you've never wanted.
But the rush is welcomed now, even if it's a poor surrogate for an intangible feeling. China white and pearl, clouds your judgement when you find yourself in front of a gate, clouds your movements like wading underwater. It takes three times fumbling with the latch before you realise it's locked and you nearly impale yourself when you hop the fence. Warmth on your hands, is it blood? You can't feel it anyway. The rust flakes away from your palms and you've got no fucking clue how long it takes for you find the simple wooden cross. All a hood has earned.
It creaks a bit when you collapse and lean against it and for a wild moment, you imagine pushing against it like a lever and flipping up dry dirt and a wooden coffin, corn silk hair in your face already eaten by worms and teeth you once touched with your tongue. It's so bizarre you almost laugh because you're back at square one.
He's untouchable behind the glass walls of your memories, even if you press your palms to it and try smash it again and again. You can't break through your soft haze and bridge your two worlds—your now, and then—you can't comprehend that there's a rotting vessel six feet underneath you wearing Dal's skin and Dal's bone and that's what you're supposed to miss. Do you wish you'd gone out together or not at all? It's hard to tell anymore, what with your consciousness hovering somewhere over your shoulder, just as disembodied as the Dallas in your head and the Dallas in the ground.
Cry your sentimental tears. Useless asking why; you think you know. Useless hating him, without hating yourself too. He's buried and you're higher than you've been in a long time, closest you've come to touching the universe.
It only makes sense that God and heaven are been distant concepts to you, after all. There's never any time to look up when you're accustomed to seeing grey walls in a jail cell, but all of a sudden you feel awfully close to tipping skyward, upside-down on a precipice—the freshly dug dirt under your fingers does little to keep you anchored. Dig your hands in. Smells like earth; smells like blood. Maybe his hands will break out from below, take yours again and keep you grounded—you've made your move; it's his turn.
Two-step tango with an asshole. Shoot once but you're out of bullets and he's gone with the wind, bitter laugh echoing at the end of a tunnel. You'll pick yourself up like you always do, no matter he's not there to dust you off—you're unsteady without a counterbalance, but you'll live. You'll live, but you'll look over your shoulder for a glimpse of blue eyes for as long as you do.
The speedball must take you into some sort of stupor because you wake up staring at the stars. Take a breath; that's easy; let it go. It's cold and you're cold but you're alive and that has to be enough.