#implied zaith

We could be gigantic, everything I need Vicodin on Sunday nights This could be worth the risk, worth the guarantee This could be the drug that doesn't bite

i guess kind of like for the whole of the modernverse kids, their neutral end isn’t meant to be a happy ending or something brainfuckingly tragic. things get resolved. things don’t. life moves on. 

they move away. they’re going to need a breath of fresh air after everything they’ve done to each other. the gaslighting and the love bombing and the blackmail and it’s too normal for them. 

rhys goes back home to new york and she’s sleeping 13 hours a day with the fanciest new drug on the street to help her forget about him, but damn, her aim’s never been better than before 

lacroix briefly gives his farewells to vaith, who’s found peace- shaky peace- with zathe. he slits the throat of a serial killer before he goes to back to switzerland (the number of killers in the world stays the same) and busies himself in the hospital for a while. 

so damn them if at any point in time they loved each other, or they thought they did, or they thought that it might’ve worked out. sure there’s no easy forgetting how she rolled her sleeves up come dawn or how he liked to fall asleep on the dining table amid a stack of paperwork. no easy forgetting the number of times they kissed just because they could, wanted to see how it felt like. 

they weren’t really too attached to the notion of sex and love being intertwined, but if we’re talking about the neutral ending, it probably wasn’t a hatefuck. say it was probably once in another country they’ve already forgotten the name of in a car that wasn’t theirs. and it wasn’t their firsts, either, but you could argue a lot of things are a first when it comes to both of them. 

didn’t talk about it afterwards. it happened, but that was all. 

come to think of it, he probably ends up traveling a lot with his brother. maybe it’s a little bit awkward at first but there’s nothing to fill the vacuum in your heart by exploiting capitalism and experimenting on people for the greater good of humanity, question mark 

it’s like an apology for freeing liam tenor vaith from his contact but it’s not really

the two of them discuss the crow at length and bond over his heroic tendencies. it’s not a healing experience but it soothes the raw in his chest. 

trey sits next to rhys’ bed one day and the two of them wallow in the silence. the dark, because they haven’t opened the windows. this is part of being human, finding out how to love. sometimes love doesn’t mean purely anal sex in a relationship, he says, and she throws the covers over her head. 

he introduces her to a slew of girls over the following weeks but she can’t ever get attached to any of them. she’s in it for the brief spark of maybe this is love but there’s nothing left for her after that. 

( once someone tries to apologize for snapping at you with a butcher knife via taking you to the edge of the coast just to see the sundown, and it works, and it’s this pretense of freedom that really makes you forget about anything-- well, after that, it’s all a candle to the sun ) 

anyways they don’t talk about their new scars, do they, the ones they’ve slowly accumulated over years of going at each others’ throats. they’ll never admit that they should’ve listened to zathe. 

assflash, newshole, for living with a psychopath, zathe had some good tips. 

their new years’ resolutions are to move on. maybe not to forget, although that would be nice, but just to. you know. not stop and stare at everything that reminds you of someone else. associate better things with old symbolism. 

they don’t really feel the need to go back to each other. rhys does, for a little bit, cries and almost stabs her hand into the wall to stop herself from running back to. well, anyone. we blame that on lacroix making her dependent on him.

we blame lacroix’s paranoia on rhys’ tendency to guilt-trip and emotionally blackmail him. they don’t come out of this nicely scarred and they’re not supposed to. 

lacroix lifts his phone away from his ear and stares at liam’s number splashed across his phone’s screen. time heals all wounds. but not this one. not now. 

.. and this is a really shitty closing thought but it’s 2:52 and i’m still awake at the most time people get up at bed all the way on the east coast but