Declan went still in his arms, and Antonio didn’t know whether that was better or worse than the shaking.
“You mean it?”he asked, sounding so damnedfragile.“I’m not– I don’t doubt your word.Just…”
Christ, he wanted to kiss him.Touch him.Anything to show that he meant it.That it wasn’t the way it’d seemed.Except it had been, and they’d never talked about it.Left it there, this sickness.
They were talking now.
“I mean it,” he said fiercely.“I love you, Murderpunk.Love you and your fucking aspect and what youare.You’re not a damned exception.Swear it.”
“Oh,” Declan said, so softly that Antonio shouldn’t have heard.But he did.
“And that’s why the rest doesn’t matter,” he added.“This is your world.It’s part of you.And it’sbroken.If I have to give up the garage to help you fix it, that’s worth it.You’re worth anything, Murderpunk.”
He’d thought,hoped, it would help.Instead, Declan crumpled in his arms, more limp than clinging.Guiltjoined the misery, a torrent of it, feeding the spiral of despair, snuffing out the brief flicker of understanding they’d started to build.
“I can’t– Iwon’t, Antonio.”Words between sobs, and Antonio’s shirt wet with them.“We can’t win.Throwing matches at our feet.Burning ourselves instead of the bloody system.I won’t let you give up the one good thing you have.”
His Murderpunk.His fierce, defiant, incredible sluagh, who refused to accept his world as it was.With each new revelation, of Faerie fading, of babies discarded or left, he’d only grown more determined.A cause bigger than himself, and Declan willing to burn for it.
Until now.
“You’re the good thing I have,” Antonio answered, knowing the words were wrong but needing to get them out.
“You’re miserable.”
“We’rebothmiserable.”Pick up the fucking spoon and choke down the glass.“I never expected to like it.”
“Then let’sstop.”Declan held on tighter, still shaking.“Let’s just stop.Step down.We can’t win.Not like this.”His voice cracked as he said it.“Can’t win, but we can try not to be so bloody unhappy.”
The shift in Declan’s emotions, from misery to relief to defeat, was almost too rapid to track, each bleeding into the next and nothing really leaving.A pyre of dreams, burning.
“We’ll do whatever you need,” Antonio said.Because it was true.Anything.For Declan, he’d do anything.“You want to stop, we stop.But this is where you’ve been fighting to get.This is what you wanted me for.I told you I’d stand behind you, and I meant it.”
Declan pulled away from him then.And for all Antonio wanted to hold on tighter, he didn’t.Story of their fucking lives.
“I wanted abondfor this,” Declan said, with a hollow laugh.“You, I just wanted to keep talking to.I’m sorry for being bloody selfish.You’ve done everything, and I just– It’s all so much worse than I thought it would be.”
A tightening spiral of trapped pain.Antonio was supposed to be good at fixing things.You couldn’t fix the whole fucking world.That was the problem.
“I–”
Declan’s breath hitched as he grabbed his shirt, fishnet splitting as he tore off his tops with a vicious tug, leaving them draped at the base of his wings.
“How gray am I?”He asked, voice breaking on the last word, eyes on Antonio.“I know they're not bloody black anymore.”
Look at my skin.Do you understand what you’re seeing?
Antonio did.
Skin like cracked porcelain, except it wasn’t.Declan’s marks weren’t merely faded.They weregone.White and white and white.
“A sluagh with only their nails, wrists, and eyes blackened is not long for this life.”
Why hadn’t he noticed?
The answer was brutally simple.He’d not seen because they lived in two separate worlds.Because it hurt too much to want Declan, to touch him as he had, so he’d simply … stopped.Because he was a raging asshole.
Declan had been dying.And Antonio hadn’t even fuckingnoticed.
