a million miles apart going nowhere believe that even if we're lost you know it won't be long 'til we get there

the road-trip back home was full of too much traffic and too little fall out boy so i had too much time to think about actual slice-of-life things with some nerds

i can’t sleep so it’s time to crack open another cold one with the boys and write. this time it’s fluff & cuddles ft. @whispering-carnage​‘s oc 

there’s a universe where they are better people— so much more decisive and hard-hitting— where rhys helps lacroix escape by morning light, before zathe wakes and kills him, and he escapes california owing a debt to the would-be usurper. 

liam remains mourning his dead wife in chicago. it’s not like he can set fire to his memories if his lighter doesn’t have fuel in it. it’s not like he can forget her when the ring is still in his pocket. 

and in this universe, rhys doesn’t kill his sibling for anyone, and it’s not because the hero’s supposed to kill the villain— they’re not heroes and villains, anyways— but because this is the only way that they’ve known how to exchange power.      

news spreads fast throughout a dying nation. lacroix feels a faint pang in his chest when he hears about it, but they did try to have him killed. it’d be numb if it weren’t for the fact that the rumors lead him straight to liam, come to mourn again, liam who is inevitably attracted to dead and dying things like his own epithet. 

and when the lesser gangs try to carve out a piece of what must be a faltering slaughterhouse they find a bellicose empire, because by God she’ll have what her father promised her before he died. ( myles connors dies, too, in this verse. it’s important that he remains an idol to be cast away. ) 

there’s a universe where liam and lacroix throw their necklaces into the fire and swear sic semper tyrannis. and it’s a little gay, it is, because there’s nothing quite like being next to your former partner to set the mood for staging a revolution. 

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 

who’s the first to distance themselves (if either)?

The two of them fight, often. ‘We’ll help each other’ was just another shitty promise made at the wrong time in the wrong place, in the back of someone else’s car. Their problems aren’t going to fixed with each other. It’s why Fuzen wakes up to an empty apartment and Tresch isn’t anywhere to be found in the small hours of the day, not lounging in the couch or getting high on the kitchen floor. 

Nobody told him how to deal with his problems in a healthy way. It takes him until evening to come back with a dripping wet jacket and a pack of cigarettes bought in apology, which isn’t accepted until after the make-up sex. 

who cries more in an argument? do either of them cry?

“Then why don’t you go back to him?” is a recurring statement in their arguments, but so is “you’re just using me for the sex” and “you’re not going to miss me”. By that time, Fuzen’s crying, with a balled-up fist that may have already made its way into Tresch’s face. See above for how it plays out. 

Tresch cries, too, but less. It’s a problem, but on the bright side, it’s a gauge to tell when it’s really bad. Like if Fuzen leaves first. Like if he finds himself half-dead after another relapse.

if one of them gets injured, who worries more?

Funny how all these questions lead into each other. Tresch doesn’t worry, not unless it’s already too late. He doesn’t have nightmares about Fuzen getting shot out of the blue but if it ended up happening he wouldn’t be sure on what he’d do or how he'd feel. Fuzen, on the other hand. 

She might question him when he comes home with too many bruises and blood welling up in his mouth, and it’s concern masked with a heavy layer of possessiveness– which leads to more fights galore. Makes you wonder how they end up staying together, after all this ‘neon dreamer’ aesthetic’s been dashed to the ground.