#izzal

Dissolution

It’s a sunny day.

Autumn leaves crunch underfoot, the chirping of sparrows fills the air, and an angry trucker yells at them to hurry the fuck up, goddamnit. Izzy grins as Axl lazily brandishes his middle finger, kicking a stray can at the truck. All is well in Lafayette.

“I hate this fuckin’ place,” he says, staring up at the deep blue of the sky.

A huff of laughter echoes from beside him. “You and me both, man.”

Lately, Izzy’s been feeling an itching under his skin. A sort of creeping, crawling sensation, as if termites are nesting in his body, pervading his mind. It makes him want to peel his skin off. It makes him want to step out his own body and never look back.

He glances over at Axl as they walk, squinting against the heat. Sunlight catches on his face, gently illuminating orange freckles and warming his red hair into a blazing halo.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve hung out together.”

Axl snorts. “It ain’t my fault the pigs are after me every second I step out.”

“So you’re telling me you didn’t punch half our classmates for looking at you weird?” he shoots back.

“Fuck you, that was one time,” but Izzy can hear the smile in his voice, can almost taste it on his tongue.

The last time he saw Axl, he was climbing through his window, staring at the fraying yellow carpet with eyes weighed down by stones and dark circles shining purple in the moonlight. Snapping at him when he got too close, wrapping his arms around himself and flicking his eyes around the room, wild, frightened.

Axl is different under the sun, softer. His steps are infused with an airy grace, and even the permanent scowl on his face is somehow muted. Izzy doesn’t realize he’s staring until Axl narrows his eyes.

“What?” This time there’s an edge to it.

He drags his eyes away, pointing at a spot on the tracks enveloped by a curtain of golden leaves.

“Good spot?” It’s a weak save- and what would he need to be saved from anyways?- but Axl shrugs after a moment, lowering himself to the railroad with a sigh.

The leaves crackle in the wind, thin stalks of trees fluttering violently. Izzy finds himself bringing a straw of wheat to his mouth, tilting his head back to the sun. He rolls his eyes when he sees Axl’s disgusted expression.

“Man- that probably has a thousand bugs crawling on it,” he says, gaze trailing along Izzy’s hand as he plucks out another piece of wheat.

“Free protein.”

Axl groans. “Free fuckin’ protein, he says. You turning into one of them kumbaya hillbilly motherfuckers, Izz?”

He shrugs, the corner of his mouth tilting up. “Maybe I’ve just seen the error of my ways.”

“Shit, next thing I know you’ll be buying a copy of Street Survivors.”

“I don’t know,” he drawls, “I’m startin’ to see the appeal in ol’ Alabamy.”

The look of horror on Axl’s face is enough to make him drop the impression. He cracks a grin, uprooting another weed clawing out from between the gravel. Shit. Weed. He bolts upright.

“I almost forgot- hold on-“

Axl stares at him, furrowing his brows, as he hoists the bag off his shoulders and digs through the front pocket. After a moment, he holds the metal container up victoriously.

Axl whistles, a grin spreading over his face. “You know me so well.”

He uncaps the lid. “Picked it up at Randy’s last Friday.”

Axl leans in to take the paper from him, his jean jacket riding up with the motion. “Thank god for Randy.”

“Didn’t you punch him in the record shop last Monday?”

“Oh.”

It’s quiet for a moment as Axl rolls the joint, the familiar sound of crinkling paper lulling them to a comfortable lethargy. The stifling scent of corn wafts across the fields, an ever-present reminder of Izzy’s whereabouts, and he feels the itching return with a vengeance between the layers of his skin. He opts to ignore it.

Izzy has always seen something almost feline in the way Axl moves, in the way he spins and snarls and fights to be heard. There’s no difference here, under the hot Indiana sun, and he finds himself entranced by the simple flick of Axl’s wrist.

He watches as he brings the joint to his lips, mouth suddenly dry. “In your defense, there ain’t a lot of people you haven’t punched. I think I’m the only one in Lafayette.”

“That’s cause you're different.” It’s said offhandedly, as if it’s an undeniable fact rather than a truth of the present as precarious as the parched leaves still hanging onto brown trunks- the leaves facing the spiraling winter fall to certain death- and the itching spreads into the cavern of Izzy’s chest.

When he looks up from the joint, Axl’s hand is held out for the lighter.

He brings a flame to life, cupping it in his palm. Light flickers and dances in his eyes. The fire vanishes when the breeze whips past them, but the glow in his eyes remains as he hands the smoking joint to Izzy.

His hair is wild and unkempt from the wind, a rat’s nest of the waves he’s never quite been able to iron out despite his best attempts. It’s the most beautiful thing Izzy has ever seen. He pulls on the joint, resisting the urge to cough, and examines the tendrils of smoke arching up to the heavens.

The faint humming of cicadas blossoms and swells. The choking aroma of corn fades into the background. Finally, finally, the mantra of iwanttoleaveihavetoleaveican’tleave pounding against the walls of his mind mercifully disappears, and the breath of air Izzy takes afterward feels like the first one he’s had since Axl stepped into his room two weeks ago. The thousands in between were mere bubbles of air to keep him from sinking to the bottom of the ocean, to keep him alive for this moment, trapped within the flames in Axl’s eyes and the breeze combing through his hair.

As the burgeoning pressure eases off Izzy’s chest, however, he is left with a silence he doesn’t know what to make of.

The words spill out like dead flies, thick and bitter and tumbling clumsily past his tongue. “I wish we could be somewhere else.”

Axl raises his eyes to meet his. He takes the joint from Izzy’s hands, which are suddenly leaden weight on his lap, and brings it to his mouth.

“Yeah,” he says in an unusually quiet voice, the smoke staining his words sepia.

“I wish we could- just, I don’t know, hitch a train to L.A. or something.”

Axl chuckles, tossing his head back.

A simmering irritation boils under his skin. “What?”

“Nothin’.” His eyes glimmer strangely.

“You’d rather go to church all day? You’d rather get hurt-“ and what he almost says is for no reason, what he almost says is by the people who are supposed to love you, what he almost says is don’t you want to be free?, but he knows Axl doesn’t like it when he brings his father up, likes to think he’s invulnerable, which is the shittiest joke Izzy’s ever heard-

-“by the police?” he finishes lamely.

Axl doesn’t seem to notice. “I ain’t exactly rushing to stay here, Izz.”

“You ain’t rushing to leave, either.”

He scoffs. “And you are?”

And for a moment, Izzy considers the question, weighs it in the palm of his hand, and places it in the blossoming garden of I was wrong, again in his mind. Then he thinks about the itching under his skin, the corn-smell slipping through his veins like poison.

He knows, deep inside his bones, that he’s going to leave soon.

He also knows, deep inside his bones, that Axl’s not going to come with him.

A bird croaks in the distance, as if urging Izzy to respond. Axl is still eyeing him expectantly, the joint held loosely in his fingers, smoldering under the warm orange light.

“I just-“ he begins, then pauses to reassemble his thoughts, scattered like dead leaves over the railroad tracks. “I just- I can’t take it anymore, man, all there is in Indiana is-“

Axl sighs. “You’re right, the only thing for us here-“

“-fuckin’ cornfields.”

“-is cornfields.”

They stare at each other.

Izzy’s the first to break, always is, and so he bends over from the force of his laughter, from the sheer weight of warm relief. Axl follows, grinning as he draws on the joint, stretched out all catlike towards the dwindling sun.

“I swear, I saw ten of them just on the walk over,” Izzy says when he catches his breath, reaching out for the joint.

“Wouldn’t be Lafayette without ‘em.”

“Where would all the brain-dead motherfuckers be without the cornfields?”

Axl pauses for a moment. “Church.”

“Ain’t you a choirboy?”

“Real funny, Izz, you know I quit,” he scowls, elbowing him sharply in the ribs.

He bites back a grin. “You can take the boy out of the choir…”

“Fuck you!”

There’s no real bite to it, just the easy camaraderie of a shared childhood and the joint experience of being outsiders stuck in a small town in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Izzy clutches his chest all the same, gasping loudly in mock offense.

“Think of the children!”

Axl shakes his head, still grinning. “Pa’s already telling Amy and Stu to not take the name of the Lord in vain. I don’t think I can do any more damage.”

Dear, sweet Amy and Stu, with their tiny hands grabbing for his whenever he seldom came around to visit, their eyes permanently wide with wonder at the endless world around them. Izzy feels a sickening lurch in his heart.

He knows better than to act on it.

Keeping his smile firmly affixed to his face, he trains his eyes on the smoke dissipating into the breeze. “Jesus, everyone round here’s so uptight.”

“I know.” Axl licks his lips, staring off into the distance. “They should try weed.”

“They’d probably put it with the sticks up their asses.”

“That must be why everyone spews so much shit ‘round here. They just ain’t too familiar with the difference between their mouth and their ass.”

That startles a laugh out of Izzy, and his gaze drifts back to Axl. His lips are curved in a smile, mouthing something unintelligible, lost in the patter of a thousand autumn leaves. Izzy can’t help but wonder if he’s sharing something secret with the wind, something he’ll never be let into no matter how hard he tries.

“Axl.”

He waits till he turns towards him, eyes half-lidded and shining under the purpling sky.

“When we get outta Indiana, no one’s gonna be able to keep us down.” Not your father, not the teachers, not the kids at school, not the cops, not your father, he wants to tell him, but he keeps the bubbling words trapped under his tongue, praying Axl will see them in the ones he did say.

Axl stares at the clouds, a small smile blooming on his lips. “Sure.”

Izzy has always trusted in Axl to understand him better than he understands himself. Just like how Axl trusts in him to keep the memory of yellowing bruises hidden from prying eyes, counts on him never mentioning Axl’s pain cause he doesn’t need your goddamn pity, Izz. It’s a shitty agreement that never should have seen the light of day, but it means that Izzy is sure Axl has gotten the message.

The sun dips below the horizon.

————————

Smoke slips away into the forest, and so does time.

————————

“Hey, Izz,” Axl suddenly says.

His eyes flutter half-open and catch sight of the figure in front of him, outlined against the dimming light. Far away, a bell rings faintly. “Yeah?”

“Promise me you’re gonna get to L.A.”

Something about the tone of his voice- a certain urgency he doesn’t think he’s ever heard from Axl before- raises alarms in his mind. He sits up on one hand, head spinning, and blearily attempts to focus his eyes on Axl.

“Wha-“

His heart skips a beat.

Axl’s standing stock-still on the tracks, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. His eyes are shut, his hair billowing in the breeze like a tangled mass of kelp.

Far away, yet closer now, the train bells ring faintly.

For a moment, he half-expects Axl to jump down and fall to pieces laughing at the stricken expression on his face. He can almost picture it: eyes sparkling with mirth, a crooked grin. You really need to stop fallin’ for my tricks, Izz.

His eyes are closed, however, and Izzy stumbles to his feet. His tongue is numb, swollen, a dead weight in his mouth, but he manages to get the words past his constricting throat.

“What are you doing?”

Axl looks at him like he’s stupid, that familiar shade of fond amusement in his eyes. The ringing is louder now, the sound of metal scraping against the tracks-

The words grate like sandpaper against his throat. “Axl- you can’t fucking- get off the track, man, please.”

He’s finally gone silent, devoid of his usual Twain rants, and Izzy wants to laugh, he wants to tear his hair up by the roots, and he thought he wanted quiet and solitude but not like this, never like this.

He forces his voice out, small, indistinct, enveloped in the grinding and shrieking of the approaching train. “You’re gonna- you’re gonna leave Stu and Amy alone? You’re gonna leave me alone?”

Despite the panic flooding his veins, Izzy is frozen in place. He can’t seem to tear his eyes away from Axl, but the thought creeps in that if he did look down, he would find his arms bowed down with twisting branches, his legs crawling with gnarled roots, his feet stapled to the ground.

He hears his voice grow desperate. “I can’t make it without you, I- fuck, please, Axl, I can’t survive without you. I-“

Izzy registers the black shape hurtling towards them, and then he finds himself lurching towards Axl, as if through the haze of a dream. He’s suspended above the scene, held in the safety of the midnight sky, watching as he shoves at him.

To a passerby, they would look like two boys roughhousing outside- normal, mundane, whole. Everything he and Axl are not. A passerby wouldn’t see the expression of peace so unfamiliar in Axl’s eyes as he stares death down by its glaring headlights, or the panic in Izzy’s, or the cracks in their skin that shimmer pink under the fading light.

Time bleeds together like a watercolor painting, hazy and unfocused and splotched with the deep red that threads through his every moment with Axl, and then Izzy is stumbling back, Axl’s jacket caught in his wrist. His eyes water from the force of the hot gust kicked up as the train shoots by. Strands of black whip wildly into his face.

Axl is staring at him, something akin to betrayal in his gaze. He wrenches himself out of the grip Izzy hadn’t realized he was still holding, clenching his jaw. His eyes flash white with anger.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” he yells, his hands tearing through the snarls of his hair. He’s breathing heavily, craning his neck to peer at the train still roaring by, and Izzy can see the unveiled longing so plainly in his eyes that he thinks he might be sick.

He thinks both of them might be sick.

But now isn’t the time for self-pity, so he pulls Axl into his grasp, wincing as hands immediately fly out and try to shove him backwards. It’s a sort of awkward half-hug, half-death-grip, and Axl is still spitting out insults and shoving hard at his chest, but Izzy has a picture in his mind of the boy in his hands slipping out like dandelion seeds in the wind if he lets go, never to be seen again.

And maybe he’s already lost him to the abyss, but he’ll be damned if he lets Axl go alone.

His eyes raise to the moon, glimmering silver against the night sky. Finally, the curses muffled against his chest peter out, the bony joints fluttering against him stilling. He feels Axl soften in his arms.

Axl has never let himself cry in front of others, even during those sleepless nights with Izzy, and he’s pretty sure he has never let himself cry alone either. It’s not in his nature- hard-headed, driven, strong Axl, who would rather step on broken glass than break his bubble of denial, or, god forbid, ask for help.

When Axl begins shaking in his grasp, the only thing Izzy can do is hold him tighter. The night is silent as a funeral, punctuated with the faint song of warbling crickets. The air is thick around them, swollen heavy outside of the pale world they normally inhabit. In the corner of his eye, the joint lies abandoned beneath the vicious blur of the train, unfurled like a crushed cockroach.

Izzy feels painfully young all of a sudden, an ill-equipped child trying to save someone one step from the edge. But who else knows Axl like he does? Not their classmates, for sure. Not his old man. And Amy and Stu, who he hasn’t seen for months- are they more like their brother or their father now? Do they still look at the world the same, or do they have a sickness running through their blood, an eye which traces railroads hungrily?

Slowly, tentatively, the panic still infiltrating his system seeps out his veins. Izzy finds his mind veering off, as always, to the boy who’s silently trembling against him.

Had Axl planned this beforehand?

If Izzy hadn’t been with him, would it be his body rather than the joint lying forgotten on the tracks?

It’s a horribly sobering thought, one he brushes away as quickly as it comes, and yet there was a split second where he was sure he’d failed, an agonizing moment where he lost sight of red hair in the inky blur of panic.

He threads his fingers through that hair, remembering grainy days long ago when he’d come home crying to Ma about a scraped knee and she would lay him down and do the same to him. The world-famous Isbell treatment, she’d say, smiling softly the way she used to before it all inevitably crashed down. This isn’t nearly as trivial as broken skin, but the fingers burrowing into his back press tighter all the same, and for the first time, Izzy thinks he might not be the only one afraid to let the other boy go.

How did he miss the signs? There must have been something- an offhand remark or an otherwise innocuous comment which Izzy would have ignored because it’s Axl, and Axl doesn’t hurt like normal people do. Everything he does is with the subtlety of a bulldozer, or perhaps a blinded animal, lashing out with teeth and claws at its nearest target and hitting where it aches. When Izzy scours his memories, however, nothing seems amiss.

Maybe both of them have denial in common. Then again, with Axl, he’s never quite been able to tell. He’s always been unpredictable, forever jumping head-first into whatever new scheme his brain cooks up, a challenge blazing in his eyes. But something deep in Izzy’s bones tells him that this isn’t just an act of impulsivity.

He swallows, his throat crackling dryly. One day, he won’t be there to stop Axl, and where will he be then? Rotting in some grave carved with the ill-fitting name he’d shed like snakeskin, and Izzy will be right next to him. Whether it’ll be six feet underground in the same town he’s rotted in for the past 16 years of his life or laying flowers on his grave, unable to stray far from his friend- well, that’s a question for another time.

He wonders if Axl was ever relaxed under the sun, if the dark blanket of night and the weed only makes him unable to hide under his front. If the constant burden hunching his back and hardening his gaze will ever lessen, if stealing him away from Indiana won’t take away his fear the way it will the spreading infection under Izzy’s skin.

He finds himself coming to the conclusion that none of that matters right now, because Axl is still here, warm in his arms. He presses him closer, counting the heartbeats strong against his chest.

One, two, three…

To a passerby, they would look like a pair of friends having a sweet moment. A passerby wouldn’t see the turmoil boiling in Izzy’s head, or the damp patch on his sweater, or the crescent-shaped markings on his back that shimmer pink under the fading light.