Alex lies awake beside Henry, the walls of their brownstone bedroom seemingly closing in around him in the darkness, the burning coldness of the key strung around his neck branding his chest. He tries to think about the boy who used to push it into the lock, because he doesn't know how else to forgive himself for his survival if not paying homage to the grave. He wants to burn holes in his skin until he sees bones, just so he can pluck the last remaining fragments of that boy nestled inside of his ribcage.
He thinks about June, how she told him that he 'has a fire under his ass for no good reason', and if he doesn't slow down, it's going to burn him from the inside out.
He thinks about Nora, the way she told him he needs to 'learn to take it one day at a time instead of ten years in the future,' that looking straight ahead and moving through life faster than he's supposed to won't veto everything else from catching up to him.
He thinks about Henry, snoring gently beside him, his chest rising and falling in a slow cadence, and remembers when he told Alex that he 'carries too much.' His first instinct had been to fight back, but he just bit his tongue as he realised it was the truth. He knew he carried too much, but he had nowhere to put it down.
In the darkness, Alex cobbles up a list. He thinks, if you offered him a time machine with only three stops, he would first take a trip to 2010.
He'd find himself in his childhood home in Austin, climb through the window into his bedroom adorned with lacrosse trophies and find that twelve-year-old boy beneath the covers, having arrived home from a Boy Scout camp-out to discover his dad's things moved out.
He would unhook that little boy's claws from a tub of Helados ice cream and wipe the tears from his eyes, pressing the unscarred skin of his softer, kinder twelve-year-old self into the flowerbed beneath his window. He would cup his ears to distract him from the arguments and the yelling and the snapping of jaws behind his bedroom door, etch his unwilted shoulders into the fires that he has always felt with everything that he has.
He will ask that boy, a small cathedral of dead locks and an inferno ablaze, what it is like being the sun, despite it all. And he will listen as he collapses into the embers and tells him: It burns. It burns.
His second stop would be to California, and he would slide into the passenger seat of the Jeep driven by himself at eighteen far too fast down the 101 with the doors off and N.W.A blasting from the radio. He would reach across the centre console and grasp his hand in the palm of his current, calloused one. He would become something permeable, absorb the Maker's perpetually soaked into the skin of his eighteen-year-old self and wrap the burn marks on his arms after a night of climbing through Liam's dorm room window.
He would nurse the blisters on his younger self's feet from long, punishing runs and tell him that he doesn't have to set himself on fire to prove that he's been hurt, that the heat from flying close to the sun will not make him feel alive like he thinks it will, and tell him that his body is still salvageable. Tell him fires can be extinguished.
His last trip would be to the moment a bubble of hysterical laughter emerged from his throat when his and Henry's emails were leaked, when everything happened in such fast succession and all seemed to say right there in hard facts and figures that this was the damage he caused, this was who he hurt.
He would pull that boy close, coax the staggered breaths of the panic attack out of his lungs, swallow the spill of fireflies that fell from his tongue, coated in gunpowder and firing away.
And then, Alex would bury himself, as he had done so many times before, and his grief would chew through the earth but he would not dig it back up.