#augustuspierce

niko: i'm offended u didn't tell me u guys were working on new music ??

niko: as if i'm gonna leak anything,,,,,there's nothing i'm more careful about than making sure no one knows i know u 🤪

     even as niko walks inside gus’s apartment--which had been unlocked, no big surprise there--he’s not one hundred percent sure he can go through with this. he knows it’s the right thing to do, that in terms of their mental health it’s what they both need, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult. the thing is, over the last three years he’s managed only to become further infatuated, except unlike before there are actual feelings involved now. feelings he’s cultivated and let fester and grow every time they’d slept together, every time he’d let gus kiss him and allowed himself to believe it was mutual. it isn’t, though; he has to constantly remind himself of that. even when it feels real, like it had at the lake, it isn’t. and that’s why niko had finally decided, impossible as the prospect feels, to stop doing this to himself. 

niko: you DO realize ofc that i'll be at my most powerful when we're out in the forest in a couple weeks

niko: i have ur nine inch nails shirt u were wearing at the lake btw in case....you've been looking for that lmao

niko: i've washed it twice and it still smells like campfire sorry

     getting into gus’s building isn’t hard--the doorman is one of perhaps two or three people in the world who know that he and niko even know one another, let alone how often niko’s at his apartment. not dissimilarly to the way niko had talked his way backstage three years ago at a cherry bomb concert to try and meet who had then only been one of his favorite artists, he persuades the doorman now to let him into the apartment itself using a skeleton key which, technically, is probably only for the most extreme of emergencies. it isn’t not an emergency, though, he thinks as he enters the dark apartment, pulse quickening as soon as the familiar smell settles over him and with it, an ache that stems from deep within his gut. he hasn’t seen gus in over a week, since before all those videos had surfaced of him collapsing on stage, and aside from their brief but sufficiently volatile text exchange niko hasn’t even been able to speak to him. and he’s worried--he can hardly even admit the fact to himself, but he is. he knows it because he hasn’t been able to sleep lately, and his patience has been thin. because he skips past even his favorite cherry bomb songs on his shuffle and changes the station if an old one comes on the radio. so he’s come up with an excuse to stop by--one that even kinda-sorta works on himself, as well.