#if not--

not-doing-too-good starters / accepting! / @chraeon

the nightmares are getting worse. even when he jolts awake, gasping and trembling, he can still hear the crunching of her bones, the mangling of her throat. he can feel her flesh twist and tear, what it feels like at his fingertips and buried beneath his nails. when he sits up from the pavement, he can still feel the phantom lingering of her blood across his face, how it had burst from her snapping joints and showered him in brilliant red. when his eyes fly open for the second time in the same night, skin stained from yet another nosebleed, he gives up on sleep altogether. she will not grace him tonight.

the hour hand is nudging at three when he slinks into the diner, past the dingy glass door and beneath a rusting bell. it hardly chimes when he enters, but it may as well be a siren in the silence that has been otherwise undisturbed. he hates it. the sunken rings of lavender beneath his eyes appear almost turquoise beneath the green-tinted lights, but the melancholy he wears must not be an uncommon look for late-night patrons. the woman behind the counter greets him without missing a beat, unperturbed by the listlessness of his gaze; as awful as he looks, she has probably seen worse.

his muscles groan in protest as he retrieves what litle cash he has from the pocket of his jeans, straightening out the wrinkles and creases before counting the total, twice. it isn’t until after his gaze floats between the plastic-covered menu on the counter and the bills in his hands, then back to the menu again does he place his modest order for a single serving of french fries. he is as slow to move as he is to speak, but the server doesn’t seem to mind. there are only two other people in the building, not counting the pair in the kitchen, and they look just about as close to death’s door as he does. there’s no rush.

somewhere between the sizzling of oil and the traffic signal switching from green to yellow, a voice cuts through the music playing from an old radio in the kitchen. how’d you get a bruise like that? it asks, and the weary-eyed boy has to wait a full twenty seconds to make sure the voice is speaking to him. he can’t count even with all the hairs on his head how many times he’s turned to answer a question, only to realise it hadn’t been meant for him. they’re always for other souls, contained only in the glimpses that he can catch of other worlds, other times. so when it becomes clear that, for once, a stranger is speaking to him, he glances at their shoes, then at the end of the barstool they’re sat in. they must be asking about the bruise on his jaw, the one he’d gotten when he–