Work Text:
His Aunt June had glasses like this. Small, carefully cut memories of a mutual grandmother he never knew. They'd seemed so long and slender in her hands – carefully pinched between her painted fingertips.
The glasses are too small for his hands, but the bubbles snap crisp in bright constellation against his tongue, in his blood, his belly, and Isak laughs so it's perfect, perfect, per –
I love you,
He says, because he means it. Can feel it fizzing through his veins, bursting from his pores. Isak has eyelashes like golden threads and they flash and spark and cling so pretty.
I love you,
And he's naked, because he is, pulled open and asunder, teeth gritty sharp against stubble, against burn and sting and tears like stars.
I love you,
Fear is like static, a distant buzzing, a stop, wait, think that pops the bubbles in his vessels, takes a needle to the aching, stretching balloon of his heart. So he lifts Isak's knee and kisses the bend of it, presses truth into the sweat and the softness and deafens himself to it all.
I love you I love you I love –
The after is still. Soft. Quiet.
Isak's branding touch is too soft, too quiet. The static swallows harder than Even does and there's salt behind his teeth, acid in his belly. There are freckles on Isak's cheeks, little black holes sucking him forward, closer, an inevitable crash. Panic lies invisible, like gravity, deep in the leaden soul of him. Mikael’s face a crumpling moon; Sonia’s a child's painting, yellow blotched and weeping blue.
I love you,
He thinks of June. Of the cracked downturn of her mouth. The shivers in her fingers. All the shattered empty glasses too big for her hands and how she'd said it, the last time, all wild eyed and bleeding.
How his mother hadn't said it back, only,
Don't say it unless you mean it. You'll ruin it.
He says it. He means it. He ruins, ruins, ruins it.
His muscles twitch, move, send him out of the bed, out of the room. He drowns in the shower but the water feels worse and he's trembling with it, without it, with the slam of the door and the gnawing, craving, want –
I love you.