Time Apart
CW: Trauma survivor, referenced noncon and assault, heavy internalized victim-blaming and self-loathing/anti-asexuality (Chris has serious issues from his conditioning around this)
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
When Chris picks up his phone, it’s not at all the message from Laken he expected to see. Not the kind of thing they’ve ever sent before.
He has to read it two times, then three. The letters swim and shake along with a dull pounding inside his head, but no matter how he tries to make them into other words - tell himself he must have misunderstood, must be missing something - they come back together the same in the end.
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
Each letter is as crisp and clean as a sterilized blade between each rib, one by one by one by one.
The words are a body blow. They’re a hundred blows, beating him into a barely recognizable shattered shell of himself. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way - it’s been a bad few days, yeah, a bad week really, but until yesterday’s fight it had never occurred to him that Laken might give up on him.
The fight was his fault, anyway.
He meant to apologize last night, but then Nova had come into his room, and he’d lost the rest of the night to lying next to Jake, trying to remember how to stop living inside his head again, how to stop being still.
He’d woke up this morning with his stomach doing butterfly flips inside him, nervous, but he’d really wanted to say he was sorry, for the fight, for all the weirdness lately. He’d wanted to apologize for being difficult.
Instead… he’d woken up to find a missed text from the night before, sent after he’d shoved Nova away but before he could stand to look at anything again.
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
He hasn’t unlocked his phone yet. Instead, he keeps tapping the button to light up the screen, looking at the message preview that has all he needs to see. Lets it go dark again. As if one of these times he’ll click and it’ll say something else.
It just says the same damn thing.
I think you should spend time apart.
He’s still staring at it when another one comes in. He feels the soft pulse of his phone in his hand, and the screen lights on its own.
LAKEN - NOW Did you see my message?
He thinks maybe Kauri had it easier when he was the age Chris is now. Back when Kauri carried on entire conversations in emoji form, letting the nuance and ambiguity take over, the recipient working through the meaning on their own. With this, each letter is merciless, each word is unmistakable. He can’t misunderstand it.
He opens the phone with shaking fingers, types back yes, presses send, and turns his phone off.
Then he throws it at the wall.
He’s grateful for the heavy plastic case that makes it bounce off and drop to the floor without breaking. There’s a strip on the back, textured and a soft purple, gray, white, and black. He rubs his fingers over it sometimes in class to keep himself from rocking and being distracting.
Now he just… stares at it.
Laken bought that for him. They bought the shirt he’s wearing right now-
He yanks it off his head before he can think, balls up the soft fabric and throws it as well. It just sort of drifts pointlessly to the floor, a single eyeball from the print of a band he likes staring back at him.
Laken has ranted before about people who break up by text message, and Chris has to breathe through a physical ache in his chest that tightens every muscle at how awful he must be that they’re not doing this face to face. How awful, how used-up, how shredded apart, how fucking pretty he is.
After all, he and Laken have been together for more than a year, and he still held perfectly still for Nova to touch him before he remembered how to move. After all, he’s a grown man who still cried and fell apart when Jake was hurt. After all, after all, after all…
He scrambles across the floor for his phone again, turns it back on. Part of him hopes he’ll see a new text saying they take it back, they didn’t mean it. Or just asking him to apologize for what he’d said that night before, for how he’d thrown their confusion over his reaction to something back at them, echoing out the way Kauri fights sometimes, talking about himself the way he thinks everyone else might be thinking about him, so he says the insult first and no one else gets to surprise him with it.
He manages to open the texts again, barely, and breathes in gasps, nearly pants, as he types out, you don’t want me at your place?
Is it because of what I can’t do?
It takes them a minute to answer. Every single second ticks by with a slowness Chris hasn’t felt since his days in the cold white room, tied down to stillness, forced to endure every minute that passed in perfect silence or to the soundtrack of his own tears and pleading for it to stop.
When they do respond, it’s just, it’s because of what you won’t do.
