fuck politeness

the more he looks at her, the more guilty he feels. by now it’s easy enough for elliot to read when olivia’s exhausted, and she’s making no real effort to hide it. too tired to hide it, which says enough about it. on the subway, he was trying to think of how he’d explain this, like the way he’d plan what to say to krista on bad days. it sounds stupid to just say that he couldn’t sleep, and it was a few degrees beyond that. it wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep. it was that he couldn’t still. he couldn’t ground himself. he couldn’t find himself. mr. robot even looked a little off-balance.

there’s something - a soft exhale that’s more subconscious when her fingers tangle in his hair. when he does that same motion, it’s a nervous gesture, something to do with his hands when he pushes the hood down and experiences that moment of fearful exposure. but when it’s someone else doing it, especially olivia, it almost feels like it’s untangling something in his shoulders, her touch trailing down his neck towards that knot of stress falling apart.

keep touching me. or don’t. he can’t tell which one he wants more. “the shower was more for me anyway.” wake up. stay alert. force his brain into overdrive so he could leave his apartment without feeling too vulnerable.

on her request, elliot shuffles over to the couch, placing the coffee down on the table in front of the couch and working off the hoodie as he goes. it ends up crumpled into a ball and left on the far end from the couch from him, him leaning back for a moment and staring up at the ceiling. aimless looking. is it cold in here? he isn’t really noticing. it doesn’t feel real, even though he’s in the same t-shirt as always. his voice is a low mumble as he glances over at her. “tv might be good, yeah. i… i’ll watch anything. and i’d take monstrous over. you know. the normal shit.”

of course he would. he doesn’t like holidays, but halloween would be his favorite. “thanks for letting me show up. i’ll be okay in a little bit. it’s just.. you know.” a vague gesture up at his skull like that explains anything besides my brain feels like it’s overheating. // @glittcrrp​

there’s an apparent relief in him when she touches him.  so she follows, sitting down besides him on the couch with a low grunt in her throat.  she swings her legs up to tuck beneath her as she reaches her fingers up towards his hair again.  digging and brushing through the locks in an odd mimicry of how she would touch allen when nightmares chased him into her room.  elliot has been there for those, once or twice but not enough to understand the mimicry she’s offering, olivia is sure.  

better like that.  better for him not to realize, not to feel shame from it.  he’s already bare in so many ways with the stripping of his favorite blanket off of his arms, leaving scars and twitching muscles visible as she watches him sag into the couch.  the air is luke warm.  nothing bad for sleeping, but a bitterness to bare skin.  goosebumps already trickling across his elliot’s skin even if he seems oblivious to it, mumbling on unfiltered words.

olivia nods slowly.  with her free hand she turns on the television, flipping to netflix and smashing okay until dragula begins to play.  “okay.  yeah, you’ll like this.”  he won’t even watch it, but that’s not the point.  normalcy is what matters here, pretending that they’re okay.  

he knows allen’s not with olivia tonight. that’s good. it’s good not because he dislikes allen, or because he doesn’t want to see him, but because he doesn’t want to expose a kid to what he’s like right now. the rattle and hum of all his thoughts, marching around in disorder instead of neat rows, like lines of code. he’s not any good at this right now. it’s midnight, and he took the late night subway and watched a guy murmur to himself further down the car, rocking side to side with nervous energy.

normally that kind of thing would make him nervous. it just made him empathize, though, just a little.

the door creaks open a little. olivia is in a bathrobe as she leans over to kiss his cheek. his hands are hurting, he realizes, with how long he’s been holding onto the piping hot cups. it’s a distant feeling, a fuzzy one a few degrees away from where his brain is. he shuffles inside once she lets him, going to put down the cups on the table and shake out his hands a little. his palms are red and a little tender to the touch after all that, even if the pain’s already seeping away now that he let go of them.

“yeah,” he says. “before i left. needed something to wake me up for the subway ride.” too paranoid to fall asleep on the subway. too tired to trust himself to stay awake. “i, um, got you some hot chocolate from that place down the street.” he taps the lid of the appropriate cup gently, just so that she doesn’t accidentally get a sip of his black coffee at midnight.

a shudder of breath. after a moment, he reaches up to push down the hood, running his fingers through his hair. it’s already a mess, so it’s not like he’s going to do more harm. “sorry,” he says again. “i just… it was a bad night. probably wasn’t a good idea for me to be alone.” it’s an awkward recognition of the fact that he sometimes has to seek out outside help, as much as he still wants to isolate. this took more effort and willpower than he wants to admit to her.

there’s an odd feeling that comes to waking suddenly out of a deep sleep.  it’s said that when you approach rem state your brain shuts off your muscles -- stops you from acting out your dreams.  waking up too fast is like walking the fine line between how olivia feels and sleep paralysis.  even if you avoid the horrible dreams filtering over, your limbs don’t feel real for awhile.  they weigh down like muscles packed with stones and hang loosely while you try to bring yourself together.  

it leaves her drifting after him, conscious but heavy.  wondering at the look in his eyes that seem as heavy as the wretched pressure on each of her muscles.  she wants to drape herself over his shoulders and curve into his spine.  let her heartbeat pummel against him like a hammer, a pattern he’ll have to follow.  but it could scare him off just as easily.  not his fault.  that’s just how things work, and olivia’s never let herself forget it.

instead she mimics the motion of his own hand through his hair.  curving her fingers into the curls there for just a little bit of pressure before she slips them down the nape of his neck.  drift them away.  “thank you.  for the hot chocolate, not the shower -- i wouldn’t have noticed either way.”  for a moment olivia touches the drink.  recoils.  temperature stings at her fingertips.

“don’t apologize.  this... it’s part of this.  us.  sit down baby, i can’t stay up much longer.”  it’s a half joke, even as she sits in the nearest chair and pulls a leg up to her chest.  “nice to see you, even like this.  ...do you uhm.  want me to put on the tv?  i’ve been watching this weird show that’s like ru paul’s drag race but it’s drag queens trying to be the most monstrous.  like.  in outfit.  it’s weird.”

@glittcrrp ( tumblr let me @ you please god )

sometimes he can tell when he’s going to have a bad night. sometimes it hits him in line at a fucking coffee shop at an hour before midnight, when it’s bitterly cold in february and he’s thinking of nothing, thinking of static, thinking of a crack down the center of his skull he can’t see. sometimes he visualizes his brain as nothing but code but then that’s too clear, it’s too understandable. so he thinks of it as a horrible fucking orb knocking against the inside of his skull, causing damage every time it collides with something, and yeah, okay, that’s more fucking like it.

stop doing that, says mr. robot. we’re here to get your goddamn girlfriend some hot chocolate to apologize for knocking on her door at midnight, not let you think about how you cracked open your skull once when you were eight and all the rational thought left and never came back.

you stayed, elliot doesn’t say. you fucking stayed. and you’re going to stay through this too.

the barista smiles at him when he gets a hot chocolate and a black coffee. she calls him a black coffee kind of guy, whatever the fuck that means, and elliot leaves before he can think too much about it. wasn’t thinking. forgot the cardboard sleeves, so his hands almost hurt by the time he gets into her apartment building. he sent her a text before he left his place, and he got a reply with a spelling mistake. so the math there is that he probably woke her up.

thus the hot chocolate. like a bribe. this is what he does when he feels guilty: he overcompensates.

he has to kick the door gently with his foot more than he has to knock. mr. robot is leaning against the wall behind him, just waiting for there to be no answer.

@skullsort​

she wakes up to a message -- a beeping that draws olivia from deep sleep and leaves her flailing to find her phone on the near empty bedside table.  not a week ago elliot showed her how to keep some contacts always unmuted even if she had her phone on silent.  since then there’s been nothing from the chosen few, not until now, flaring hot panic in her stomach as she rises with both eyes squinting and jaw locked tight.  

elliot.

it’s not excellent, but olivia’s stomach releases some of its knots.  no darlene with bad news.  not her ex saying allen is at the hospital, just elliot, asking to come over when the clock warns of midnight’s fast approach.  that’s not much to him, she knows.  sleep schedules aren’t something elliot adheres to unless he’s staying over with her.  

even then, olivia’s half certain that he slips out of bed when she falls asleep to do more work.  that’s just who he is.  private.  interior.  focused.

all reason enough for her to struggle through pulling a robe on over her underwear and t-shirt, the fog in her brain smothering every sense.  for some minutes she wanders the apartment in that haze.  ghostly, back and forth, before she careens to a halt at the sound of knocking.  this, her brain offers in a brazen strike of clarity, must be what love feels like.  losing sleep for someone precious.

with small effort she pries the front door open.  next come lights, a sheepish smile stained with the remnants of sleep plastered on olivia’s face as she leans over to kiss elliot’s cheek.  pretend, for a moment, he doesn’t look wretchedly gaunt.