Lost in you

by lesbianneutra2

Summary:

Damien is the perfect son from a wealthy family, but behind his impeccable smile hides a void that only fills itself with control and manipulation. Pip is the troubled boy who turned his own body into a battlefield, having learned that lies make the most effective weapons.

Notes:

Please read the tags. Nothing in this history was written to be romanticized.

Chapter 1: you did a good thing,you did a bad thing

PIP

The Dawn Was Ironic

The morning sun cut through Phillip’s bedroom at strategic angles, tracing lines across the floor. He lay there for a while, watching the dust dance in the beam of light that insisted on pretending it was just another normal day. This should have been a happy day. The final medical report read “discharged due to satisfactory progress.” His mother had cried with relief in the doctor’s office, tears carving lines down a face marked by sleepless nights.

Phillip closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

His body — his — still didn’t feel like it was truly his. It still followed the same rules as always. The nutritional charts, the schedules. But at least now no one would be watching every bite. No one would stop him from compensating later.

“Pip, everything okay?” his mother’s voice came from the kitchen, mixed with the smell of toast he wouldn’t eat.

“I’m great,” he lied, adjusting the bracelet that still carried his clinic ID number. “I’m having breakfast in town with some friends.”

Her eyes lit up with hope, like she actually believed the cure had arrived. “That’s wonderful! Just don’t forget...”

“The meds. I know.”

He kissed her cheek, guilt tightening in his chest when she gently squeezed his arm. “Thinner than before,” he knew she was thinking. “But getting better.”

---

Walking through South Park after months away felt like watching a bad dream on replay. Same stores, same faces, same stale air of a town that never changed. Phillip ran his fingers along ribs he could still feel through his shirt. “Satisfactory progress.”

“Phillip! So you escaped the loony bin?”

He didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. Damien’s voice always carried that sarcastic edge that made Phillip tense up before his brain even registered it.

“The loony bin is where you spend your days with your family, Damien,” he replied, turning slowly.

Damien looked exactly the same — perfectly styled hair, that ever-ironic smile. But his eyes… something in them was different. Something that looked at Phillip like it saw through his words.

“You gained weight,” Damien commented, like talking about the weather.

Phillip’s stomach churned. “Thanks for the observation, Sherlock.”

“Well, since your treatment apparently worked, let’s eat. My treat.”

Phillip didn’t know how to refuse, so he just nodded.

---

The conversation felt like a chess match, each move carefully calculated.

“So, you’re really going to pretend everything’s fine?” Damien sipped his coffee, letting the question hang in the air.

“I’m great.” Phillip stabbed the piece of donut he didn’t want. “Better than ever.”

“Sure.”

“Someone suddenly cares, huh?”

Damien slammed the cup on the table. “I always cared! You’re the one who vanished!”

The waitress approached just then, wearing a tense smile. “Anything else, boys?”

“No,” Phillip answered too quickly. “Just the check.”

As promised, Damien paid the bill. “Let’s talk, Pip,” he said, pulling the blond out of the café.

“About what? I think we’ve caught up enough for one day.”

“You don’t get to decide that!” Damien snapped. “Do you think I’m an idiot or what? Last I checked, we were still dating, and what a lovely surprise it was to wake up and find out my boyfriend had been admitted without even a note.”

“And what did you want me to do? Send a postcard? ‘Dear Damien, I’m institutionalized because I can’t keep food down like a normal person. Kisses, Pip.’”

“That would’ve been better than vanishing.” Damien grabbed Phillip’s wrist tightly, his fingers digging in. The afternoon wind ruffled Phillip’s blond hair, revealing blue eyes tinged with anger — or was it despair?

“You disappear for months and I’m the villain?” Damien spat, his voice trembling with pent-up emotion. “You left me wondering what I did wrong, wondering if you were dead, for fuck’s sake!”

Phillip tried to pull away, but Damien’s grip was stronger.

“Let go!”

“No… not this time.” Damien pulled him closer, their faces inches apart. “You owe me answers. We still exist, Phillip. You don’t get to erase a relationship just because you decided to suffer alone.”

Phillip’s heart pounded, but his voice came out cold:
“Suffer alone? You think I chose this? That I woke up one day and thought, ‘Wow, starving until I pass out sounds fun’?”

Damien laughed bitterly. “No. But you chose not to call me. You chose to believe I wouldn’t understand. That I wouldn’t care.”

Phillip clenched his fists tightly.
“Because it doesn’t matter! No one can fix this for me, Damien! Not you, not the doctors, not this fucking town!”

“I DON’T WANT TO FIX YOU!” Damien exploded, making a couple hurry past them on the sidewalk. “I just want…” his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, “…to be allowed to stay while you fix yourself.”

Silence dropped like a blade. Phillip looked down, his shoulders rising and falling quickly.

“I don’t know how.” His voice came out cracked and exhausted. “I don’t know how to let someone see me like this.”

Damien released his wrist but didn’t step back. “Then learn.”

“You think you’re special for suffering? That no one understands your ‘big trauma’? Pathetic. You’re just another spoiled brat who’d rather starve than admit he needs help.”

“Get the fuck out of my way!”

“No. You don’t get to make me disappear again, sweetheart. I gave you everything — my time, my patience, my love — and you traded it for a toilet and a mirror. Is that what you chose?”

Phillip shoved Damien, unleashing his pent-up anger. But Damien didn’t budge, just smirked ironically.

“Well, look at that. Brave little Phillip finally shows some strength. Shame it’s only ever used to hurt himself.”

Phillip felt tears in his eyes.
“I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO SAVE ME!”

Damien stepped forward, invading Pip’s space, gripping his chin with firm fingers.

“But you need to be saved, Pip. Look at you — a bag of bones who can’t even hold a fork without shaking. You think anyone else would want this? Only I can love someone like you.”

Phillip froze, eyes wide with horror. When no reply came, Damien continued:

“So stop playing the victim. You need me. And deep down, you know it.”

The British boy stepped back like he’d been struck. Damien smiled, victorious, and turned away.

“I’ll be waiting at home at eight. Eat something before you get there — I’m tired of seeing you look like a corpse.”

He walked off, leaving Phillip frozen on the sidewalk, heart pounding as if trying to escape his chest. The world faded. All that remained was the bitter taste in his throat and Damien’s echoing words:
“Only I can love someone like you.”

---

The first glass hit the wall hard enough to leave a permanent mark on the imported wallpaper. Crystal shards flew like shrapnel, one slicing a deep cut into Damien’s flawless forearm. Phillip breathed hard, chest heaving, fingers still trembling with rage as he held the second glass — heavier, more threatening.

“Gonna throw another one?” Damien asked, calmly inspecting the blood dripping down his arm like it was mildly interesting. “There’s a set of twelve, imported from Europe. Go wild.”

Phillip gripped the glass tighter.

“You think this is funny?” His voice was hoarse, something between fury and desperation. “You let them say that shit and then come here to judge me for not eating?”

Damien’s phone was still lit on the table, open on the message group Phillip had found by accident:

“Dude, how long are you gonna play nurse for Pip? He’s a lost cause.”
“Seriously, Damien, he doesn’t even eat. It’s pathetic.”
“You’re only with him out of pity, right?”
“I feel bad for you, stuck in that mess.”
“Hey, if you want a real good time, hit me up.”

And worst of all — Damien hadn’t replied. Hadn’t defended him. Just let it sit there, like silent agreement.

Damien took a step forward, ignoring the crunch of glass under his Italian shoes.

“What do you want me to do, Phillip? Send you a sobbing voice note saying my life’s meaningless without you?” He tilted his head, a perfect strand of hair falling into his face. “They all think that. Even your mom. The difference is, I’m still here.”

The second glass flew.

This time Damien dodged with irritating grace, letting it smash against the bookshelf. A rare Nietzsche volume tumbled to the floor, pages spreading like broken wings.

“Jesus Christ!” Phillip shouted, fists clenching. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t need your pity! I don’t need you staring at me like I’m some goddamn charity case!”

Damien stared for a long moment, unreadable. Then, slowly, he began unbuttoning the bloodied sleeve.

“You really think I waste my time out of pity?” His voice was so low Phillip barely heard. “I’ve got a line of perfect people begging for my attention, Pip. And yet I’m here — with your shattered glasses and your drama.”

Something tightened in Phillip’s chest. The anger was still there, boiling, but now it was mixed with something else.

“Then leave!” he snapped. “Go to them! I’m not keeping you here!”

Damien let out a short, humorless laugh.

“That’s exactly the problem.”

The silence that followed was so thick Phillip could taste it. Rain started tapping against the windows, as if the weather had waited for that exact moment to collapse.

It was Damien who broke it, holding out his bleeding arm.

“So, are you going to clean this up, or should I call one of my admirers to do it?”

Phillip looked at the blood — bright red against Damien’s perfect skin — and felt something strange stir in his stomach. Not disgust. Not even rage anymore. Something more primal.

He grabbed the cleanest cloth he could find — an immaculate white, obviously expensive — and soaked it in warm water, wringing it harder than needed.

When he returned, Damien sat on the edge of the dining table, inspecting the cut with bored detachment.

“Does it hurt?” Phillip asked, voice softer than intended.

Damien looked up through his lashes.

“Did you want it to?”

Phillip didn’t reply. Instead, he pressed the cloth to the wound firmly enough to make Damien clench his teeth.

“Idiot,” Damien muttered — but the anger was gone.

He smiled, this time in a way that made something in Phillip twist.

And as Phillip cleaned the blood — carefully, as if mapping Damien’s veins — he realized the most dangerous truth of all:

They were trapped in this. And neither of them knew how to stop.

“You know I love you, right?” Damien murmured.

“I love you too. With all my heart,” Pip replied, finishing the cleaning.

“Come on. Let’s sleep,” Damien said, offering his uninjured hand.

Pip took it, fingers interlaced, following his boyfriend toward the bedroom. Heavy rain now pounded the window, but inside that room, only the warmth of their bodies mattered.

Chapter 2: No hope, no harm, just another false alarm...

DAMIEN

 

My dearest Phillip—no, Pip—  

 

I miss you in a way that aches. The days pass too quickly, and your absence is a wound that won’t close. I’ve just graduated, and I heard you finished your studies at home.  

 

Every night, I dream of you. When I see the moon, I remember the days when we were free, unburdened. Watching the stars used to be enchanting, but the way you looked at the moon—so captivated—now captivates me too. Because even though it’s just a rock in the sky, it feels like it belongs to you. To us.  

 

I miss you. I love you, despite everything.  

 

Yours,  

Damien  

---

Damien opened his eyes.  

 

Sleeping well after so long had been a relief. Maybe the best way to face the day was with a mature conversation—though maturity wasn’t exactly his forte. Still, he’d try.  

 

But Pip wasn’t there. He’d left like a fugitive. It was almost funny. A bitter laugh clawed its way out of his throat. Breathing was hard with the weight pressing against his chest.  

 

"Should I text him?" Resolved not to overthink it, he grabbed his phone—only to freeze at a notification:  

 

"We need to take a break. I can’t do this anymore. Not now, at least."  

 

"I can’t do this anymore."

 

The words echoed in his skull, followed by another, older message:  

 

"Don’t worry, I’ll come back. We take this seriously, but right now, I can’t play games. You’re still too young. You’ll understand why one day. Be a good boy and listen to your father, okay? I love you."

 

"I love you too! With all my heart!"

Did love always hurt this much? Like a blade twisting in his ribs, leaving a void even time couldn’t fill?  

Another hollow laugh. Of course being away from Phillip had left him like this—nostalgic, wounded, shackled to a past that wouldn’t return. But he wasn’t the type to give up easily.  

 

---  

 

Knock, knock, knock.

 

The door swung open, revealing Phillip’s mother, her eyes sharp, posture rigid.  

 

"Can I help you, Damien?"  

 

"Is Phillip home? I need to talk to him."  

 

"He is. But why should that matter to you? A rich boy like you must have better things to do. Or did Daddy refuse to pay for university?"  

 

"Ma’am, I just want to speak to your son. Who, by the way, is my boyfriend."  

 

"Boyfriend? I’ve made it clear I don’t approve. I’m sure your family feels the same!"  

 

"I don’t give a damn about your opinion—or anyone else’s. Now, please. Get Phillip. I’m not leaving until we talk."  

 

She hesitated, thrown by his defiance, but finally relented.  

 

"Fine. Five minutes. Nothing more."  

 

"Then five minutes it is."  

---  

Phillip appeared in the doorway, eyes cold, arms crossed. Nothing like the Pip who’d once laughed under the stars.  

 

"Pip..."  

 

"What do you want, Damien?"  

 

"That text—‘We need to take a break’? After everything, is that all I get? We spent last night together!"  

 

"God, spare me the dramatics. You think we’re still starry-eyed teenagers? Life isn’t a fairy tale."  

 

"No, it’s not. But it doesn’t have to be this. I love you, Pip. And I know you still love me too."  

"Stop. Stop pretending this can be fixed. Last night was a mistake. Understand that and grow up, Damien!"  

Damien grabbed his wrist. "You’re running. Like you always do!"  

 

Then—  

 

A sharp crack split the air. Damien staggered back, hand pressed to his stinging cheek. Phillip breathed hard, eyes blazing with fury and pain.  

 

"Don’t touch me. Don’t look for me. It’s over."  

 

Before Damien could respond, Phillip slammed the door in his face.  

 

He stood there, numb, the pain on his skin nothing compared to the wreckage in his chest.  

 

But he wouldn’t give up.  

 

Because deep down, he knew the moon still belonged to them.  

 

---  

 

The autumn wind carried the weight of the season, dead leaves scraping against the pavement. Damien sat on a park bench, cigarette dangling between his fingers, watching smoke dissolve into the cold air. Kyle approached silently, footsteps barely audible on the damp grass. He sank onto the bench beside him, his pale face washed in the dim glow of streetlights.  

 

Damien exhaled. "Stan again?"  

 

Kyle’s smile held no joy. "Always him."  

 

A thick silence settled between them, broken only by the rustle of leaves. Damien studied Kyle’s face—the red-rimmed eyes, the exhaustion etched into his expression.  

 

"I think he replaced me with a girl."  

 

The words hung like fog. Damien’s spine went cold.  

 

"Are you sure?"  

 

Kyle stared at his hands, fingers tracing idle circles. "Didn’t need proof. He never bothered hiding her. Now he posts photos, tags her, replies to her comments—things he never did with me." His voice frayed. "Things I *begged for, and he said ‘didn’t suit us’—because what we had was casual."

 

Damien pressed the cigarette between his fingers until the burn seared his skin. The pain was a relief.  

 

"Did you confront him?"  

 

Kyle laughed, brittle. "What’s the point? Ask him, ‘Are you with the girl you swore was just a friend?’ He tilted his head back against the bench, staring at the clouded sky. "I don’t need answers. I already know them."  

 

Damien thought of Phillip. How many half-truths had he swallowed?  

 

"Then he’s a coward."  

 

Kyle’s voice cracked. "No. I’m the coward. Because if he showed up right now, I’d go back to him without hesitation."  

 

The words cut deep. Damien closed his eyes. He understood.  

 

"The worst part? I knew. Knew he’d never claim me, that I was just... convenient. Someone for when no one else was around." A tear slipped free, and Kyle wiped it away angrily. "But I swore, at least, he respected me."  

 

"He doesn’t deserve your respect. Or your love."  

 

"And does Phillip deserve yours?"  

 

The question hit like a punch. Damien recoiled as if struck. Kyle immediately regretted it.  

 

"Shit. I’m sorry. That was—"  

 

Damien cut him off. "Understandable. I’m sure everyone sees us that way. But I’m not mad at you."  

 

The silence that followed was suffocating. Damien’s cigarette died, forgotten between his fingers.  

 

"The difference," he said slowly, "is that Phillip never lied. He just... left." Because I wasn’t enough, he didn’t say. But he didn’t have to.  

 

Kyle drew a shaky breath.  

 

"I should hate Stan."  

 

"You probably already do."  

 

"Maybe. But I love him more."  

 

Damien reached out, and Kyle shattered, sobbing into his hands.  

 

"I know," Damien whispered.  

 

It was the only truth that mattered.  

 

---  

 

A phone buzzed, shattering the moment. Kyle pulled away, scrubbing his face with his sleeves. He glanced at the screen, expression twisting.  

 

"It’s him."  

 

"You don’t have to answer."  

 

"I do."  

 

"Why?"  

 

"Because I’m stupid enough to hope this time might be different."  

 

And he answered.  

 

"Yeah... Okay. I’ll come. No, I wasn’t crying. Just tired. Yeah. See you."  

 

He hung up. Stood, avoiding Damien’s gaze.  

 

"I have to go."  

 

"Take care of yourself."  

 

Kyle didn’t reply. Just nodded and vanished into the dark.  

 

---  

 

The bar was nearly empty when Damien stumbled in. He drank until the pain blurred, until the world lost its edges. When the bartender refused to serve him another, he laughed, tossed cash on the counter, and lurched outside.  

 

He collapsed on the sidewalk in front of his building, the drizzle mixing with tears on his face.  

 

He thought of Phillip.  

 

The way he pushed food around his plate, the hollow smile when he said, "I’m full already." The ribs Damien could count when he held him.  

 

"Are you eating, Phillip? Or just lying to everyone again?"

 

No one answered.  

 

He pulled out his phone, typed a message:  

 

"Please. I need you. I love you so much. Let me help you. Don’t leave me."

 

Hit send.  

 

Then let the phone clatter to the pavement, where the rain soaked it into silence.  

 

Damien stayed there, motionless, as the night swallowed him whole.  

 

Still waiting.  

 

Like always.  

Notes:

I know I said I’d update this chapter by Wednesday or Thursday, but I managed to finish it early since I was stuck in bed all day with really bad nausea. Writing this chapter was so hard because Damien is such a difficult character to write in this story.
The next chapter won't take long—I promise the upcoming ones will be longer.

Thank you for reading!

REVISED

Chapter 3: I wear black on the outside, because black is how I feel on the inside

PIP

I was thirteen when I realized—cruelly, irrevocably—that my body took up too much space in the world.

 

It was a sweltering summer afternoon, the kind where the air feels syrupy and clings to your skin like an unwanted touch. I was hidden in the kitchen, devouring a pack of cream-filled cookies I’d stashed behind the pots, each bite a desperate attempt to fill something I couldn’t name. The kitchen smelled faintly of dish soap and the onions Mom had chopped for lunch, but all I could taste was sugar and shame.

 

The door creaked.

 

"Pip?"

 

My mother’s voice cut through the air like a knife, thin and precise. My heart lurched so violently it almost hurt. Her eyes—always so observant—swept over me with surgical precision: the thick thighs splayed over the chair, the belly pressing against the edge of the table, the round cheeks still chewing frantically as if swallowing could erase the evidence.

 

"Don’t you think you’ve had enough today, sweetheart? Why not go run outside?"

 

The question was sugar-coated, but the aftertaste in my mouth was bitter and metallic. My hands trembled over the torn wrapper, greasy fingers leaving transparent smudges on the plastic. On the TV in the background, a skeletal actress laughed in slow motion, her hip bones carving perfect curves under a tight dress. The laugh sounded less like joy and more like a warning.

 

In the kitchen mirror, my reflection seemed to occupy twice the space a normal person should. My school uniform strained at the arms, the collar tugged awkwardly, my stomach curved softly over the belt like an uninvited guest refusing to leave. I was a miscalculation of proportions, a caricature of adolescence that no one had asked for.

 

---

 

That night, in my bedroom plastered with band posters, I wondered if those strangers—faces frozen in glossy magazine pages—would ever accept me as I was. All of them were so thin and beautiful, their pretty speeches about self-love ringing hollow in my ears. How could people like that ever understand the heaviness of existing in a body that felt like a burden?

 

I pressed my fingers into the soft swell of my stomach and felt panic rise like a tide swallowing sandcastles.

 

"Be less," I begged my reflection in the fogged bathroom mirror after my third scalding shower of the day. My skin was red from the heat, but I liked it that way—it felt like punishment. "Please, be less."

 

My body was a traitor. It expanded in all directions when all I wanted was to vanish. It rose like overproofed dough in an oven, slow but unstoppable. It insisted on existing so loudly, so visibly, so… wrongly.

 

I started counting calories in a pink notebook hidden under my mattress, its pages curling from the pressure of my pen. 500 a day. Then 400. Then "as few as possible." I cut carbs. Then dairy. Then anything that wasn’t leafy greens and lemon water. Every bite became a negotiation.

 

When the first compliment came—"Wow, Phillip, you’ve lost weight!" from Aunt Carol at a family dinner—I felt a perverse euphoria no lasagna, no chocolate cake, no pack of cookies had ever given me. Compliments were a currency I didn’t know I craved until that moment.

 

That was when Mom brought home the magnets.

 

---

 

"Pip, sweetie, come see this!"

 

Her voice chimed from the kitchen one Saturday morning. I crept downstairs—already lightheaded between meals, my stomach a hollow drum.

 

Mom stood before the open fridge, holding an apple-shaped magnet that read "120 calories" in cheerful, bubblegum-pink letters.

 

"Let’s play a game!" She stuck it onto a half-empty tub of chocolate ice cream. "Everything in the fridge gets a calorie label. That way you can make smart choices!"

 

Her eyes shone with pedagogical pride, like a teacher unveiling a clever trick to help a struggling student. Back then, I just wanted to make her proud—the same mother who’d always said I was "big-boned," "sturdy," that I’d "lean out" when I grew up.

 

I didn’t realize I was being trained to see food as the enemy.

 

I didn’t realize she, with her own body insecurities hidden under baggy clothes and fad diets, was teaching me to hate my body as fiercely as she hated hers.

 

---

 

Nights were the worst.

 

After days of eating only lettuce and sparkling water, my body revolted. I’d wake at 3 AM with my stomach growling like a starved animal, hands shaking, mouth watering at the thought of anything edible.

 

I’d slink to the kitchen and devour everything: bread straight from the bag, butter by the spoonful, cold leftovers with my fingers. I chewed fast, swallowed without tasting, eyes brimming with tears I didn’t understand.

 

Then came the guilt.

 

And with the guilt, the punishment.

 

"120 crunches, "I’d command myself in the dark, sweating buckets. "Run 5km tomorrow. Fast for 24 hours."

 

When Mom saw me on her treadmill before school, she’d smile. "My son’s so healthy!"

 

She never asked why I rushed to the bathroom after meals. Never questioned when I skipped dessert. Never noticed my cheeks hollowing, my eyes sinking deeper into my face.

 

---

 

Now, at seventeen, my body is a battleground.

 

The lost pounds returned with reinforcements. Days of extreme hunger give way to nights of unstoppable binges. My food diary is a ledger of failures:

 

Monday: 300 calories (good)

Tuesday: 5000 calories (disgusting, wretched)

 

Damien watches me with those near-red eyes that seem to see everything, and I wonder if he can glimpse the numbers dancing in my head with every bite, every kiss, every time his perfect body presses against mine—still too big, still too wrong.

 

Mom still sticks magnets on the fridge.

 

I still count calories like other kids count stars.

 

And my body…

 

My body still takes up too much space in a world that never knew what to do with a boy who was too big to be thin, yet too thin to be big.

 

A boy who never learned how to simply… be.

 

---

 

Damien’s scent clung to me like a ghost from his private-school world—amber, Turkish tobacco, and that imported cologne he got for his 17th birthday. Every step down the stairs of his luxury apartment building was an earthquake in this glass-thin body, these sixteen-year-old legs that could no longer bear the weight of what I’d become.

 

You’re running away again," his phantom whispered against my neck, "like you always run from anything that could save you."

 

My hands shook, but it wasn’t weakness—it was liquid black fury corroding my veins, more caustic than the stomach acid that had long since replaced nutrients in this teenage corpse. Fury at myself. At him. At this poorly stitched prison of flesh still masquerading as a body.

 

"You’re too much trouble for someone so whole."

 

The voice in my head had the school psychologist’s drawl, my mother’s disappointed calorie-counting tone, the perfect cadence of Damien that night he found me kneeling on the marble floor of his father’s beach house bathroom.

 

---

 

I was fourteen when I learned bodies could be sculpted like clay.

 

Mom stood in the kitchen, weighing her whey protein shake on a precision scale. "Look, Phillip," she said without glancing up, "120 calories in this cup. A crime."

 

 

That night, in my band-poster-covered room, I pressed my fingers to my ribs and counted each one like a medal. "Be less," I whispered to the dark. "Take up less space. Disappear."

 

Years later, I still wondered when "be less" had turned into *"be nothing."

 

---

 

Stepping onto the street felt like freefall. South Park stretched before me, cruel in its sunlit normalcy. A boy from the neighboring school bumped into me and yelled "watch it, skeleton!" as his friends laughed. I smiled with cracked lips—if only they knew that was the closest thing to a compliment I’d accept.

 

My reflection in the diner window was a walking warning:5'9 of bones barely sheathed in skin, my school uniform hanging like a coat hanger, purple eye bruises like self-inflicted wounds.

 

"You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever held," Damien had lied once, fingers counting my vertebrae in the backseat of his parents’ car.

 

I lied back now to the dirty glass: "I’ll get better."

 

The reflection didn’t answer. It never did.

 

---

 

Damien first heard about my fainting spells through rumors—a boy who acted deranged, had "girl problems," the gauntness of an anorexic. After class, he left his school and waited at mine. I was fifteen, three days without proper food. He was sixteen, radiating the confidence of someone never rejected.

 

"Pip!"His shout cut through the chatter of students heading home. When I turned, he didn’t let me speak—just yanked me onto a bench and shoved a wrapped sandwich into my lap.

 

"Eat," he ordered, not as a request but as someone accustomed to obedience.

 

"This isn’t a request," he said, gripping my chin with a firmness that made me want to sob.

 

That afternoon, I ate under protest. When I vomited it all up, he stayed, holding my sweaty bangs back, murmuring "we’ll try again tomorrow" like he still believed.

 

---

 

I bought a diet soda and a greasy pastry that glistened obscenely under fluorescent lights. The cashier gave me that special blend of pity and disgust reserved for the damned—little did he know I’d worked hard to earn it.

 

I sat on the curb like the human sacrifice I’d become. The first sip burned like liquid fire. The first bite stuck to the roof of my mouth like an unconfessed sin.

 

"This is what you deserve."

 

 

I chewed methodically, calculating. 287 calories. 12 fasting hours wasted. Enough to make Damien clench his jaw in that particular way—like I was a project he couldn’t quit.

 

"You’re destroying yourself," he’d say later, and for once, it wouldn’t be hyperbole.

 

I finished in two minutes forty seconds. My hands trembled—not from withdrawal but primal terror. I ran to a dimly lit alley.

 

The vomit came hot and violent, acidic lava. I shoved my fingers deeper—until tears welled.

 

"Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting."

 

Afterward, I stared at my hands—smeared with bile and undigested scraps, nails clawing concrete as if digging a tunnel to another reality.

 

"Looks like someone’s trying to bury you alive," Damien would say if he saw me.

 

But no one was there. Just bones and the sacred void between them.

 

---

 

I knew he’d come. The moment I sent that message, I knew Damien wouldn’t accept a silent ending.

 

When I opened the door and saw him—so tall, so solid, so real—it was like being hit by every memory of who we’d been.

 

"What do you want, Damien?"My voice was colder than I’d intended. Good.

 

He spoke of the message, the past, as if we were still those two boys who met in a school hallway.

 

"Cut the bullshit,"I snapped. "You think we’re still those idiots who believed in happy endings?"

 

He said he loved me. As if that were enough.

 

When he reached for me, something snapped. The slap echoed in the empty hallway.

 

"Don’t come back. It’s over."

 

 

I shut the door. On the other side, I knew he was still there. Believing.

 

I’d wanted to believe too, once.

 

I pressed my forehead to the cold wood and shut my eyes.

 

Go away, Damien.

 

Please, go away.

 

Because if you don’t, I’m not sure I’ll be strong enough to stop myself from letting you in again.

 

And this time, neither of us would walk away whole.

 

---

 

That night, I dreamed of food.

 

Mountains of fries, rivers of soda, oceans of chocolate.

 

I ate. And ate. And ate until it hurt, until the sweetness turned bitter, until chewing felt like breathing underwater.

 

When I woke, my stomach growling with hunger, I realized:

 

Even in my dreams, I no longer knew how to stop.

 

---

 

 

Notes:

The brief conversation between Damien and Pip is different because it’s told from each of their perspectives, so don’t be surprised by the slight differences. It’s as if there are two versions of the story—and the truth somewhere in between. I hope I managed to convey a mind confused by hunger. Some details I took from my own life—I have anorexia and still battle this disorder every day, but I’m doing much better now. Thank you for reading!

 

REVISED

Chapter 4: I'll probably never see you again

DAMIEN

 

---  

Pip,

I hope you’re reading this. The thought of you ignoring my words is unbearable. It’s been days without a single word from you, and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight—all that’s left is you, and every hour without a reply feels like another nail through my chest.  

I know they told you to “focus on your recovery” and “not stress yourself,” but did anyone stop to think what this is doing to me? I’m here, alone, waiting, while you… you’re just gone. I’ve always stood by you, even when I shouldn’t have, even when it was hard. I’ve risked more for you than for anyone else.  

And now they say I can’t see you. That it’s “not the right time.”  

Don’t ask me to understand. I understand you, but not this absurd situation. I want to know everything. What you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, what you’re doing in there. You don’t get to hide a single thing from me, Pip. You can’t just disappear and leave me here imagining a thousand scenarios.  

I know you think you “need space,” but that space will only pull you further from me—and I won’t let that happen. I won’t let everything we’ve been through mean nothing.  

When you get out, I hope you still recognize the one person who’s always been here. And don’t forget: no one will ever love you like I do.  

— Damien

------

 

Silence had never been Damien's friend. Not the peaceful kind people romanticized in poems and love songs. Those quiet silences—the ones that whispered secrets between lovers or filled sacred moments of calm—were foreign to him. His silence came after — after the screaming, after the slammed doors, after all the knife-sharp words had been thrown and now lay useless on the ground, impossible to take back. It was the kind of silence that suffocated, that hung thick and heavy like a dense fog settling in a forgotten graveyard.

It was a silence that weighed like lead in his lungs, turning the air thick and hard to breathe. Every breath came slow, forced, like dragging himself through molasses. A silence that said, without words, that something had been broken beyond repair—something precious, fragile, and irredeemable. Ever since he'd hidden under the stairs listening to his parents fight in the kitchen, Damien knew this silence well. He knew how it arrived—first a sharp snap, a breaking note in the symphony of his childhood, then voices rising to a shrill climax, and then... nothing. The void. The emptiness that hurt more than any insult.

In Kyle's house, the silence was the same breed. Not the comfortable quiet of two people who didn't need words to understand each other. It was the tense silence of those who'd already said too much and now didn't know how to fix it. A silence that dragged through the rooms like a ghost, seeping into the walls, the furniture, the very air—pressing down on hearts until they threatened to crack.

From the next room, low voices intertwined in a halting dialogue. It wasn't an open fight—those, at least, Damien knew how to handle. Fights were clear. They had a beginning, middle and end, like the predictable burn of a candle wick. What came from Kyle and Stan's room was worse: murmurs loaded with hidden meanings, half-finished sentences, words that died before being fully spoken, sharp glances exchanged, walls closing in like the pressure in a deep-sea dive.

Kyle spoke in a soft, almost honeyed tone, trying to calm the turbulent waters around Stan. His voice was measured, deliberate, as if trying to soothe a wild animal barely contained. Stan responded with short, sharp phrases, each syllable tinged with sarcasm that burned like alcohol on an open wound. Damien caught fragments:

"...no use pretending that..."
"...always do this, like I..."
"...that's not what I..."

And then, silence. That goddamn silence. The kind that screams louder than any words ever could.

Damien lay sprawled on the living room couch, his body heavy as if each muscle were made of lead. His limbs felt disconnected, as if trapped beneath a veil of exhaustion and despair. His phone sat inert in his lap, screen dark, indifferent—like the world had forgotten him. Pip wasn't responding. It had been days. No "seen," no lone heart, no message. Nothing. As if Pip had evaporated from the world, leaving a vacuum growing in Damien's chest, devouring him from the inside out like a slow poison.

He hated this more than any fight. Fights had life, fire, movement. Fights were hot, burning bright and fast. Silence was cold. It was the absence of everything—of voice, of touch, of confirmation that he still existed, that he mattered to someone.

The creak of the door interrupted his thoughts. Stan appeared in the doorway, eyes red and swollen with exhaustion, shirt wrinkled as if he'd slept in it for days. The smell of cigarettes clung to him like a second skin, mixed with cheap alcohol and something else—anger, perhaps. Or despair. Or the kind of tiredness that buries itself in bones and refuses to leave.

"Gonna lie there all day?" — rough voice, as if he'd swallowed glass.

Damien didn't even lift his eyes. "Until I decide what to do."

Stan crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe with a challenging air, like a cat daring a dog to move. "Decide what?"

"My life." — automatic response, almost reflexive, the words tasting bitter and hollow.

The silence that followed was cutting, sharper than any blade. Stan let out a short laugh full of mockery that didn't hide his exhaustion. "You think you'll solve anything lying on someone else's couch?"

This time, Damien raised his head slowly, as if each movement required superhuman effort. His normally expressive eyes were dull, as if something in him had gone out—like a candle flickering against a cold wind.

"Better than solving it at your place, at least."

Stan laughed again, humorless. "Always playing the victim, huh? Always the poor misunderstood bastard."

"And you always think you know everything about me." — cold, mechanical voice. "But you only know what you make up."

Stan narrowed his eyes, fingers twitching as if he might step forward. Damien almost expected—almost wanted—that. At least it would be something concrete, real.

Before the tension could explode, Kyle appeared behind Stan, hand resting on his shoulder with a touch so soft it was almost maternal.

"Let it go." — voice sweet as honey but with a firmness that brooked no argument. "You're exhausted. Go sit down."

In a motion as natural as breathing, Kyle kissed the corner of Stan's mouth. A brief, almost imperceptible touch, but loaded with meaning. A silent reminder that, despite everything, they were still together. Still cared.

Damien watched with a mix of fascination and disgust. How could someone be so gentle with someone who deserved nothing but distance? How could they forgive so many times?

Stan scoffed but didn't resist. He turned and left muttering. Kyle entered the living room, sat in the armchair by the window, crossing his legs with innate elegance.

"Ignore him." — eyes shining with something between pity and exhaustion. "He woke up in a bad mood today."

"Don't care." — Damien lied, pulling the jacket from the couch and wrapping himself in it like armor.

The silence settled again, heavy, suffocating.

Kyle looked at Damien for a long moment before speaking: "There's a party tonight." — voice tinged with hope. "You should go."

Damien raised an eyebrow, corner of his mouth twisting in a near-smile. "Since when do you think parties are good for me?"

"Since lying here staring at your phone is killing you faster." — quick response, precise as a dagger thrust.

Without answering, Damien stood with slow movements, as if his body weighed tons, and left without looking back. His heart was a tight knot of uncertainty and fear—fear of what was coming, of what he might find, fear that in the end, nothing really mattered.

----

The music pulsed like a giant heart, beats echoing off the walls of the renovated industrial warehouse. Neon lights cut through the thick smoke in the air, creating mazes of color that blended with the sweaty bodies of the crowd. Damien felt the floor vibrate beneath his feet, each beat of the music echoing in his bones like a primal call.

He leaned against the wall, a glass of vodka with ice in hand, the liquid nearly gone as he watched the crowd with slightly unfocused eyes. The alcohol burned his throat, but the sensation was comforting - at least it was something real, something he could feel.

Across the dance floor, a group of girls danced in a circle, laughing loudly, their dresses clinging to their bodies with sweat. Closer, two guys kissed with urgency, as if the world might end at any moment. Damien looked at his glass, feeling a void grow in his chest.

Then he saw him.

Pip.

In the opposite corner of the hall, leaning against the bar, talking to a dark-haired guy with an easy smile. Pip wore a black shirt that highlighted his pale skin, his eyes shining under the flashing lights. His smile - that smile that had once been only Damien's - was now directed at someone else.

Something inside Damien twisted, a sharp, familiar pain. He gripped the glass tighter, his fingers going white with pressure.

Before he could think better of it, a guy approached, invading his personal space with irritating confidence.

"You here alone?" the stranger asked, voice hoarse from alcohol and cigarettes.

Damien looked at him sideways. Tall, muscles defined under a tight shirt, handsome in a rough way with dark eyes that seemed to want to devour him.

"Not interested," Damien replied, turning his face away.

The other guy laughed as if the response had been funny.

"I didn't even ask anything yet."

"And I already answered."

The stranger wasn't intimidated. Instead, he stepped even closer, the smell of his cheap cologne mixing with sweat and vodka.

"You're even prettier when you're angry," he murmured, lips nearly touching Damien's ear.

Damien felt a shiver run down his spine, but it wasn't desire - it was anger. Anger at himself, at Pip, at this whole situation.

"Go away," he growled.

The other ignored the warning. A warm hand rested on Damien's waist, fingers squeezing slightly.

"Just one dance. Then I'll disappear."

Damien was about to push him away when, from across the room, Pip finally looked at him. Their eyes met for a split second, and Damien saw something flash across Pip's face - anger? Jealousy?

It was enough.

Damien turned to the stranger and, before he could think better, pulled him into a kiss. It was aggressive, no finesse, just lips and teeth and tongue, a desperate attempt to prove something - to Pip, to himself, he didn't know.

The stranger seemed surprised but kissed back with equal intensity, hands gripping Damien's hips hard.

When they broke apart, Damien looked over.

Pip was gone.

His heart raced. Without thinking, he pushed the stranger away and ran toward the exit, bumping into people, ignoring protests.

The night outside was cold, the damp midnight air clinging to his skin. Pip was already several meters away, walking fast, fists clenched.

"Pip!" Damien called, voice rough.

Pip stopped but didn't turn.

"What do you want, Damien?"

"What was that?" Damien stepped closer, heart pounding.

Finally, Pip turned. His eyes were dark, anger evident in every feature.

"You know exactly what it was."

"I don't owe you anything," Damien spat. "You broke up with me, remember?"

Pip took a step forward, invading Damien's space.

"You always do this. Always find a way to stab me in the back. You say you love me but discard me so easily."

"I didn't do it to hurt you," Damien lied.

Pip laughed, a dry, humorless sound.

"Of course not. You just kissed some random guy in front of me because... what? By accident?"

Damien felt the anger rise, hot and familiar.

"And you? Who was that guy at the bar?"

"Nobody."

"Bullshit!" Damien shouted, shoving Pip with both hands.

Pip stumbled back but quickly regained his balance. His eyes shone with something dangerous.

"He was just a friend, but either way you don't get to say anything. You don't really want me, but you won't let anyone else have me properly either."

"I don't really want you?" Damien laughed, bitter. "I want you so much it hurts, Phillip. But you... you destroy me, it's always like this, I'm always chasing after this relationship - is there even love on your part? Or do you just use me as a placeholder for your frustrations?"

Pip didn't answer. Instead, he closed the distance between them in two steps and grabbed Damien by the shirt collar.

"Then stop trying to control me," he whispered, breath hot on Damien's face.

For a moment, Damien thought Pip would kiss him. He closed his eyes and slightly parted his lips, waiting for the touch.

But then came a punch.

A very hard punch.

The first hit landed on his jaw, making him stagger back. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth.

"Fuck, Pip!" Damien swallowed blood, eyes burning.

The second punch hit his stomach, bending him double with pain. Damien dropped to his knees, breath failing.

Pip stood over him, breathing heavily.

"You don't understand," Pip said, his voice trembling. "You can try to pretend you're moving on, drown yourself in parties, in people, but in the end..."

Damien looked up, eyes wet with pain.

"In the end, what?"

Pip hesitated, as if fighting the words.

"In the end, we always come back to this."

Damien laughed, a broken sound.

"Or maybe we just don't know how to let go."

Pip didn't answer. The night fell silent around them, only the distant sound of party music echoing.

Finally, Damien stood, wiping blood from his lip with his sleeve.

"One day we'll kill each other," he muttered darkly. "And it'll be your fault."

Pip looked at him, eyes dark and impenetrable.

"Who knows, right Damien Thorn?"

And then, without another word, Pip turned and disappeared into the night.

Damien stood there, his heart aching more than his jaw or stomach.

He knew Pip was right.

They always came back to this.

And that was the worst part.

----

---

Kyle's apartment had a peculiar smell - a mix of aged tobacco in the curtains, damp cardboard from the textbooks stacked in the corner, and something more intimate, something purely Kyle. Damien entered without knocking, letting the door close softly behind him with a quiet click. His lower lip was still bleeding - a gift from Pip that throbbed in sync with his temples.

Kyle was hunched over the kitchen table, shoulders tense under his thin cotton shirt that revealed the outline of his ribs when he leaned forward. His long fingers flipped through an anatomy book, yellowed pages reflecting the lamplight.

"You could've knocked," he commented without looking up, but the muscles in his back tensed when he recognized Damien's footsteps.

"Lost the habit of knocking on doors," Damien replied, voice rough from hours of unvoiced screams. He slid down the wall to the floor, legs splaying at a careless angle that made his ripped jeans pull at the seams.

Kyle finally lifted his face. His green eyes darkened at Damien's state, pupils dilating like a nocturnal cat spotting prey. The book closed with a soft thud.

"Again?" he asked, wiping his fingers on his jeans before standing. His pant leg rode up slightly, revealing a bony, pale ankle.

Damien watched the movement with vague interest. "He was right this time."

Kyle made a sound between a laugh and disdain as he moved to the kitchen. Damien heard glass clinking, the glug-glug of liquid being poured, the fridge creaking open. When Kyle returned, he carried two glasses - one with straight whiskey and ice, the other with something that smelled like old orange juice.

"Drink," he ordered, handing Damien the whiskey. His fingers - always so careful, so surgical - brushed Damien's intentionally, lingering longer than necessary, like a violinist testing string tension.

Damien downed the liquid in one gulp, feeling it burn like lava. "You don't drink anymore?" he asked, nodding at the juice.

Kyle knelt before him, knees popping slightly. "Someone has to stay sober enough to stitch you idiots up." His breath smelled of mint and something medicinal. "Let me see."

His hands - always so cold, so precise - cradled Damien's face. Thumbs traced hypnotic circles on his cheekbones, passing dangerously close to the corners of his split lip. Damien held his breath, feeling his stomach muscles contract.

"You look dangerously beautiful when you're hurt," Kyle murmured, eyes fixed on Damien's busted lips. "It's almost a sin to clean you up."

Damien let out a rough laugh that echoed through the empty apartment. "You always say things like that to provoke me." His fingers drummed on the empty glass, chipped nails tapping crystal like little hammers.

Kyle smiled, white teeth gleaming like small threats in the dim light. "And does it work?" His thumb descended to Damien's chin, pressing lightly on the bone.

Before Damien could answer, Kyle leaned in. The kiss on the cheek was quick but calculated - warm lips touched Damien's dirty skin exactly where dried blood met raw flesh, so close to his mouth that Kyle's breath tickled the sensitive corners of his wounded lips.

Then the hallway door creaked.

Stan stood there, his silhouette filling the doorway like an ink stain. His black eyes - always so expressive in their fury - darted between them, his mouth a tense line of contempt that made his jaw muscle jump.

"What the fuck is this?" he spat, voice laced with a poison only years of intimacy could distill.

Kyle didn't move, but Damien felt the fingers on his face tighten for a split second before releasing. "I'm taking care of him," Kyle replied, turning his head with the calm of someone expecting a storm they've seen form many times. "Any problem?"

Stan laughed, a dry, empty sound that didn't reach his eyes. "Taking care?" He took a step forward, muscles tense under the sweaty shirt clinging to his torso like a second skin. "Looked more like you were preparing to ride him."

Damien rose in one fluid motion that made blood rush faster through his veins. "Fuck off, Stan."

Stan ignored him, his eyes burning only for Kyle, blazing with a toxic mix of possession and unrequited desire that Damien recognized well - it was the same way Pip looked at him during rare truces between their wars.

"You do this on purpose, don't you?" Stan closed the distance, his chest nearly touching Kyle's. His smell was aggressive - sweat, cheap beer and the cigarettes he always smoked when nervous. "Drive me crazy, push me to the edge, just to run to him after."

Kyle didn't retreat. He raised his hand and planted it on Stan's chest, fingers spreading like roots over the damp fabric. "You're pathetic when you're jealous," he murmured, voice so low Damien had to lean in to hear.

Stan trembled under the touch, nostrils flaring. "Get your hand off me."

Kyle clenched the shirt fabric, pulling Stan closer in a motion that was almost an embrace. "Or what? You gonna hit me too?"

Stan swallowed hard, his Adam's apple jumping. Damien saw the conflict in his eyes - hatred, lust, desperation - and recognized each as old acquaintances.

"You know I'd never..." Stan began, but Kyle interrupted, his lips a breath away, hot breath mingling with Stan's in the narrow space between them.

"Then stop pretending you don't want this."

It was the spark.

Stan shoved Kyle violently, slamming him against the wall. The anatomy chart fell with a crash, glass shattering like diamond rain. "You don't own me!" Stan roared, voice breaking in a way that reminded Damien of when they were kids and Stan would cry hidden in the school bathroom.

Damien lunged, fists clenched before he could think. "Get your hands off him, you shit!"

Stan turned to him, eyes bloodshot. "Want a fight? HERE!"

The first punch hit Damien in the stomach, bending him double with pain. He immediately countered, his fist smashing Stan's nose with a wet crack that echoed in the small room. Blood gushed like a crimson river, staining Stan's white shirt.

Kyle shouted something, but they were already lost in the whirlwind. Stan grabbed Damien by the hair and threw him to the ground, mounting him like an animal. Broken glass cut Damien's back through his thin shirt, but the pain was distant, almost welcome.

"You think you can have everything, huh?" Stan snarled, teeth stained red. "But you're just emptiness. A black hole that sucks everything in and never fills up."

Damien laughed, face swollen, eyes blazing with liquid fury. "Keep going, Stan. Loving seeing you like this."

Stan raised his fist, but Kyle intervened, grabbing his wrist with surgical strength. "ENOUGH." Kyle's voice cut like a blade, so sharp even Damien was momentarily stunned.

Stan trembled, his entire body tense like a violin string about to snap. "You... always choose him."

Kyle released him, face impassive like a plaster mask. "No. I'm just tired of watching you two devour each other alive."

Stan swallowed hard, blood running down his chin like red ink. For a moment, Damien thought he might cry. Instead, Stan spat on the floor, a mix of saliva and blood that splattered Kyle's shoes.

"Go to hell."

The door slammed with a bang that made the windows rattle.

The ensuing silence was thick, heavy, loaded with everything left unsaid. Kyle looked at Damien, lips slightly parted, chest rising and falling rapidly under his thin shirt.

"I'm going after him," he announced, already grabbing his coat from the rack. His fingers trembled slightly as he buttoned it.

Damien laughed, the sound echoing through the empty apartment like a gunshot. "Of course you are." His fingers found the empty whiskey glass, spinning it on the floor like Russian roulette. "You always come back."

Kyle hesitated at the door, hand on the knob. "He has nowhere else to go."

"And do I?" Damien asked, but he already knew the answer. He stood with a groan, feeling the cuts on his back throb. "Don't worry. I'm already leaving."

Kyle looked at him, really looked, for the first time that night. "Where are you going?"

Damien shrugged, a motion that made something in his chest hurt terribly. "Somewhere where doors don't have owners."

He picked his dirty coat off the floor, wearing it like armor. At the door, he turned one last time. Kyle stood exactly where he'd left him, silhouette outlined by the weak lamplight - beautiful as a Greek statue, distant as a museum painting.

"Damien..." Kyle began, but the words died in the air between them.

Damien smiled, his split lip reopening, the taste of blood filling his mouth like an old friend. "Don't stay alone too long, Kyle. The silence in this house is unbearable."

When the door closed behind him, Damien breathed deep the night air. A few streets ahead, he saw Stan's hunched figure leaning on a closed newsstand, shoulders shaking silently.

He could walk away, leave that scene behind. But instead, Damien lit a cigarette and waited - because in the end, they always came back, always fell into the same cycle, always chose the same familiar pain.

And when Kyle appeared on the corner, running after Stan as he always did, Damien would already be melting into the shadows, watching the end of a story that was never really his.

—---

The night was cold when Damien left Kyle's apartment, the taste of blood still fresh on his lips. The cutting wind made him pull his coat tighter, as if it could protect him from what was coming. A few blocks ahead, a familiar figure leaned on a closed newsstand, shoulders tense, fists clenched.

Stan.

Damien hesitated. It wasn't his fight. It never had been. But something—maybe loneliness, maybe just the habit of inserting himself where he wasn't wanted—made him approach.

Stan lifted his head at the sound of footsteps, his dark eyes flashing with recognition and disdain.

"What do you want?" His voice was rough, like he'd swallowed glass.

Damien didn't answer immediately. Instead, he took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, the flame flickering between his fingers before offering the pack to Stan.

"I'm not here to fight."

Stan looked at the pack as if it were a trap, but then took a cigarette with jerky movements.

"You're never where you should be, Damien." He took a deep drag, smoke escaping through his teeth like an angry sigh. "But you always show up to fuck everything up."

Damien laughed, a dry sound.

"At least I'm consistent."

Stan didn't smile. His eyes were fixed on the corner, as if expecting Kyle to appear any moment.

"He's not coming after you," Damien said, knowing it was a lie before finishing the sentence.

Stan looked at him, and for the first time, Damien saw something beyond hatred in those eyes—it was fear.

"You made him break up with me," Stan spat the words like poison. "Kept putting ideas in his head that I wasn't good enough, that he deserved better."

Damien bit the inside of his cheek. It was true. He had done that. Not out of malice, not exactly. But because Kyle deserved more than a hidden relationship, more than a boyfriend who never claimed him in public.

"He deserves someone who isn't ashamed of him," Damien replied, voice softer than intended.

Stan went very still.

"You don't know shit," he finally muttered, throwing his cigarette down and crushing it underfoot. "You never did."

Damien was about to respond when they heard quick footsteps approaching.

Kyle appeared around the corner, face pale, green eyes scanning the street until they landed on them. He stopped a few meters away, breathing deeply.

"Stan." The name came out as a plea, a warning, a threat.

Stan didn't look at him.

"Go away, Kyle," he said, voice cold. "I'm tired of being your secret."

Kyle looked like he'd been punched.

"My secret? You're the one who always hid me, and now... I can't reciprocate?"

"That's not how it is," he began, but Stan was already turning away.

"That's exactly how it is."

Kyle moved to follow, but Damien extended an arm, blocking his path.

"Let him go."

Kyle looked at Damien, eyes shining with something between anger and desperation.

"This is your fault," he accused, voice trembling. "You always put ideas in my head, and now I see you never left us alone."

Damien didn't deny it.

"Maybe not." He met Kyle's gaze steadily. "But you know I'm right. He was never going to claim you."

Kyle swallowed hard, as if the words pained him.

"I love him."

"And does he love you?" Damien asked softly. "Enough to stop hiding?"

Kyle didn't answer. His eyes filled with tears he refused to shed.

Then Damien's phone vibrated.

Need to see you.

Damien looked at the message, then at Kyle, who now stood with arms crossed as if trying to hold himself together.

"Go after him if you want," Damien said, putting his phone away. "But don't expect things to change."

Kyle looked in the direction Stan had gone, then at Damien.

"Where are you going?"

Damien smiled, an empty gesture.

"To solve my own problems."

Then he turned his back, leaving Kyle alone on the dark street, between the love he couldn't have and the pride he couldn't abandon.

As he walked, Damien felt the weight of silence again—that old friend, that old enemy.

But this time, he wasn't alone in it.

They all were.

—

Pip's house was a fragile structure at the end of the street, with loose porch boards that creaked underfoot like subtle warnings. Damien knew every shadow of that place—the exact spot where the third stair step creaked, the tree branch that bent just enough to reach the bedroom window.

Pushing the slightly open window, he found Pip sitting on the edge of the bed, swallowed by a t-shirt that seemed too big for his fragile frame. The weak light from a lamp on the floor cast elongated shadows of his protruding bones on the walls.

"I knew you'd come," Pip said, voice so light it almost got lost in the rustling curtains.

Damien rubbed his still-sore knuckles from the fight. "You called me."

"I always call." Pip lifted his eyes, and in that moment he looked even smaller, more fragile. "You almost never come."

The mattress groaned when Damien sat beside him. His fingers automatically found Pip's wrist, so thin he could circle it with thumb and forefinger.

"Why'd you go to that club with your little friend?" Damien asked, thumb tracing tiny circles on the translucent skin.

Pip shrugged, a motion that made the t-shirt slip further. "He said I needed to get out. That I was losing myself inside these four walls."

"And then you saw me with that guy."

"You kissed him like you..." Pip cut himself off, fingers twisting in his lap. "Like you weren't destroyed inside too."

Damien felt his chest tighten. He pulled Pip close until his forehead rested against his shoulder. "You broke up with me, Pip."

"Because you devour me alive!" Pip's voice broke like thin glass. "Every day it's a new scar, a new mark. I can't tell love from pain anymore when it comes to you."

The words hung heavy and true between them. Damien closed his eyes, feeling Pip's slight body tremble against his.

"And yet," he whispered, lips finding Pip's temple, "here we are."

The kiss started soft—a touch of apology, of recognition. But it soon became what they always were: teeth and nails and skin, as if they could merge and fill all their emptiness.

When Pip lay back on the bed, his t-shirt rode up, revealing ribs that stood out like waves on a skeletal sea. Damien stopped, lips hovering over that landscape of self-inflicted pain.

"Phillip..."

"Shh." A bony finger touched his lips. "Not today. Today just love me, Damien. Even if it's a lie."

And so they surrendered to that familiar ritual—hands that hurt and comforted, lips that lied and promised, bodies that joined like enemies in a temporary truce.

Later, when dawn light began peeking through the curtains, Pip traced Damien's face with trembling fingers.

"You'll leave when the sun rises," he murmured, not as a question but an inevitable fact.

Damien looked at the shadows Pip's eyelids cast on his gaunt face. "And you'll pretend I was never here."

"We're already lying again," Pip observed, a sad smile curving his lips.

Outside, birds began their morning songs. Somewhere in the house, a door opened—Pip's mother starting her day.

Damien held Pip tight one last time, breathing deep his scent—cigarettes and cheap shampoo and something undeniably Pip.

"Until next time," he whispered into his hair.

And Pip, already retreating to his corner of the bed, just nodded. Because deep down, they both knew—there would be no "until

never again." They would keep dancing this way until one of them couldn't get up anymore.

 

Notes:

My neurons are officially scrambled from fic planning... and why does Damien keep getting wrecked every update?
Don’t worry—I promise the next chapter will be practically all about dip.
Thanks for reading!
REVISED

Chapter 5: Sad veiled bride, please be happy Handsome groom, give her room Loud, loutish lover, treat her kindly.

PIP

Lies. Everyone lies—through false promises, hollow words, empty gestures. Apologizing for a single lie is easy. Apologizing for a habit of lying is harder—maybe impossible. Because a habit is not separate from you; it is you. In joy or despair, it lingers, stitched into your thoughts. Phillip knows this. He repeats it daily, endlessly, like a saint reciting a prayer to a silent God. Like rosary beads sliding through trembling fingers.

 

The door clicks shut. Lies. The house moans around him like an empty stomach, like an abandoned cathedral where the wind itself prays. His ribs press sharp against his skin, a cage tightening with every shallow breath.

“I’m fine.”

He says it again, quieter, to the dark. The mirror across the room keeps its silence. But silence has teeth. It watches. It knows.

 

His mother’s tears hang in the air, sticky as old cobwebs spun between walls that never stop listening. Why are you lying for me, Phillip? Her voice still cracks in his memory—not just with hunger for food, but with hunger for truth. But truth is a luxury. Like meat. Like medicine. Like waking up without counting the holes in the ceiling. Like hope you can bite into.

 

He peels off his shirt. Bruises blossom along his sides—purple constellations, galaxies born from cruelty—where the factory foreman “accidentally” shoved him into the pallets.

“I’m fine.”

Third lie tonight. The worst part? He almost believes it. Lies are lullabies when you’re desperate enough to sleep.

 

Under his mattress: half a moldy bread roll, stolen from work. His hands tremble as he splits it—ritual of hunger, ritual of survival—one piece for tomorrow, one for the stray dog whining by the dumpster, its eyes the same shade as his mother’s. A shared sadness, animal and human alike. The last crumb melts on his tongue. Lies taste like salt. Lies taste like grief.

 

Floorboards creak. His mother’s muffled sobs seep through the wall, fragile and wet, like water breaking through stone. Phillip digs his nails into his palms. He should’ve given her the bread. Should’ve told her about the eviction notice. Should’ve—

 

His phone buzzes. The foreman’s number. Shift tomorrow: 4 AM. No late.

Phillip types OK. Deletes it. Types Go to hell. Deletes that too. Finally sends a single thumbs-up emoji. The smallest surrender, dressed as obedience.

 

His stomach growls, loud enough to make him wince. He presses a hand to it, feeling the sharp flatness beneath his skin—like wood under stretched leather, like drum-skin stretched too tight. Hunger isn’t new. Hunger is a companion. Familiar. Almost intimate. He drags himself down the narrow hallway, past the sour stench of mold and unwashed dishes. His ritual is simple: half a roll of bread with a slice of cheese. Two hundred calories, no more. Enough to break a fast. Swallowed in two bites.

 

Tomorrow, he tells himself, he’ll go to that party. He’ll have fun. Pretend. Pretend until even his shadow believes him.

 

“Mom, I’ll sleep at a friend’s house tonight. Don’t wait up. I love you.”

 

–––

 

The party breathes like a living thing. Lights strobe in fractured colors, music pounding like a second heartbeat. The air is thick with sweat, perfume, stale beer—a storm of youth trying to outdance tomorrow. Phillip clings to the wall, water cup in hand, ice melted hours ago. Alcohol isn’t an option—too many calories. He sips, invisible, while bodies grind and laughter slices the air like broken glass.

 

He shouldn’t be here. He should be saving his strength for the 4 AM shift. He should be anywhere but here. But then—he sees him.

 

A boy near the DJ table. Sharp angles, shadowed eyes that don’t reflect light but devour it whole. He laughs, reckless, alive, and the sound is fire on wet wood. Phillip’s throat tightens. Go.

 

Before fear can stop him, Phillip cuts through the crowd. The boy notices—head tilting, gaze curious, almost daring, like a knife held gently at the wrist.

 

“Hey,” Phillip shouts over the music. His voice cracks. He doesn’t care.

 

The boy grins. “Hey yourself.” His eyes flick down to Phillip’s bruised knuckles, the crescent cuts on his palms, then back up. “You look like you’ve got a story.”

 

Phillip huffs a dry laugh. “Not a good one.”

 

“Those are the best.” He steps closer, drink in hand—vodka-clear, probably water too. Phillip exhales, stupidly relieved.

“I’m Damien,” he says.

 

The name strikes Phillip like a lit match. Dangerous. Burning. A syllable with teeth. He wants to taste it out loud but only nods.

“Phillip.”

 

Damien’s smile sharpens. “So, Phillip-with-a-story. You gonna stand there looking tragic, or dance with me?”

 

The bass swells, vibrating in Phillip’s teeth, rattling his bones like coins in a tin cup. He should say no. Should leave. But the hunger isn’t in his stomach anymore—it’s in his hands, itching to touch.

 

“Tragic’s my brand,” Phillip mutters. But he’s already moving, already being pulled into the heat, the noise, the living pulse of it all.

 

For the first time in months, Phillip stops thinking about lies.

 

–––

 

Across town, his phone buzzes. The eviction notice waits. The moldy bread waits. The foreman waits.

 

But not tonight.

 

Damien leans against the wall, messy dark hair falling into his eyes, a can of diet soda in his hand—zero calories, zero guilt. Shadows cling to him like they belong there. Like they were carved for him.

 

Phillip swallows hard. He came here to forget, not to fall. But Damien looks at him—direct, unflinching—and smiles.

 

It isn’t a kind smile. It’s sharp, almost a dare. You really just gonna stand there?

 

And Phillip moves.

 

Closer. Too close.

 

“You look lost,” Damien murmurs, voice smoke and glass.

 

“I’m not lost,” Phillip lies. “Just… looking.”

 

Damien’s laugh is low, rough, magnetic. “Looking at me, you mean.”

 

Phillip should roll his eyes. He doesn’t. He leans against the wall, shoulder brushing Damien’s. “What if I am?”

 

Damien studies him for a beat—hungry eyes cataloguing every fragile inch, every hidden truth Phillip thought he’d buried. Then he smirks.

 

“Then stop looking,” he says, tugging Phillip closer, “and come here.”

 

And Phillip does.

 

For one night, hunger means something else.

 

For one night, the lies are almost beautiful

 

---

 

The sound of laughter floated in the air, thin and fleeting, like smoke dissolving under neon lights.

“So you never ate McDonald’s? Oh God, rich kids really live in another world.”

 

“Shut up.” Damien smiled, brushing Phillip’s hand with his own. The touch was brief, almost careless, but it lingered. “Why don’t you leave me now to eat there?”

 

Leaving him for food? Phillip’s lips curved, irony sharp as glass. “Oh my God, yes—come on with me.”

 

“Okay.” Damien pushed his hand and pulled Phillip up, easy, natural, as though gravity itself bent toward him.

 

“You know it was a joke, right?”

 

“Yes. But I’m hungry, so let’s eat.”

 

And that was enough. Without another word, they slipped out, side by side.

 

–––

 

The night air hit them like a slap—cold, damp, carrying the smell of wet asphalt and fried food from some hidden cart. Phillip shivered, tugging his cardigan tighter, but Damien only shoved his hands into his pockets, walking like the city belonged to him.

 

“See?” Damien tilted his head, his half-smile catching the yellow light. “You don’t look so tragic out here.”

 

Phillip let out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and disbelief. “Give me five minutes. Tragedy always catches up.”

 

Damien stopped. For a moment, the party was only a dull echo behind them, the street stretching out empty, lamps humming like tired stars. He looked at Phillip with a seriousness that sliced through the sarcasm.

 

“Maybe you don’t need to let it.”

 

Phillip’s throat tightened. He wanted to protest, to say you don’t understand. But Damien’s hand brushed his, casual, like nothing. Warmth sparked and lingered, soft, unassuming. The kind of touch that said *I see you* without demanding anything in return.

 

They kept walking, silence softer than Phillip expected. For the first time in months, the weight on his shoulders loosened. He wasn’t fixed, wasn’t safe—but lighter. Almost human.

 

“Alright,” Damien broke the quiet. “McDonald’s, then. First time for everything.”

 

Phillip smiled despite himself, faint and helpless. “You’re ridiculous.”

 

“Yeah,” Damien grinned, “but I’m fun. You’ll see.”

 

And when his laugh echoed down the empty street, Phillip thought—maybe tonight, just tonight, following that sound was enough.

 

–––

 

The golden arches glowed at the end of the block, a strange lighthouse in the dark. Phillip almost laughed at the absurdity of it—his first real meal in days, waiting under fluorescent lights and greasy air.

 

Inside, the place was nearly empty. A tired cashier blinked as Damien ordered two burgers and fries, no hesitation, no shame. Phillip slid into a corner booth, the plastic seat cold against his legs, his heart pounding with a hunger that wasn’t just about food.

 

When the tray landed between them, Damien slid one burger across, wordless, just watching. Phillip froze, his chest tight, the old voice whispering numbers, calories, guilt. But Damien leaned back, cracking open his soda with a grin.

 

“Eat, Phillip. I promise the world won’t end.”

 

It was so simple. No pity, no lecture. Just an invitation.

 

Phillip unwrapped the burger. Took a bite. Then another. Salt, fat, warmth—his body staggered beneath the shock of it. For the first time in months, eating wasn’t war. It was… ordinary.

 

Damien didn’t stare. Didn’t make it heavy. He ate too, casual, as though sharing food were the most intimate act in the world. Maybe it was.

 

By the time Phillip had eaten half, he was laughing—actually laughing—at Damien’s rant about rich kids who swore caviar was better than fries. The sound startled him, like hearing his own voice for the first time.

 

Damien’s eyes softened. “There it is,” he murmured.

 

“What?” Phillip asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

 

“That smile. Thought you didn’t have one.”

 

Phillip rolled his eyes, cheeks burning. He tried to look away, but Damien’s gaze pinned him, steady and unyielding. The space between them shrank without either moving.

 

Then Damien leaned across the table—slow, careful, giving every chance to retreat. Phillip didn’t.

 

The kiss was soft, hesitant, tasting faintly of soda and salt. Then steadier, warmer, until Phillip’s chest ached with something larger than hunger.

 

When they pulled apart, Damien rested his forehead against his.

 

“See?” he whispered. “Told you the world wouldn’t end.”

 

Phillip closed his eyes, breathing grease, neon light, the hum of machines. For once, the lies didn’t matter. Not the bruises. Not the bread hidden under his mattress. Not the hunger.

 

For once, he believed him.

 

–––

 

Silence swelled between them, fragile and alive. Even the buzz of the lights and the hiss of the soda machine faded into nothing.

 

Damien leaned back enough to study him. Phillip’s chest rose quick, his eyes darting away, embarrassed, afraid.

 

No teasing this time. Damien reached across, slow, steady, resting his hand on Phillip’s wrist. Solid. Warm.

 

“C’mere.”

 

Phillip hesitated, then slid out of his booth. Damien opened his arms like he’d always known this moment was coming. Phillip folded into him, finding his place against Damien’s chest, as if this had been waiting for him all along.

 

The embrace wasn’t frantic. It was steady, protective. Phillip buried his face in Damien’s hoodie, breathing smoke and sugar, his body trembling under the safety of it. Damien’s chin brushed the top of his head. His arms tightened—firm, but never hurting.

 

For the first time in months, Phillip felt held instead of broken. Not a burden. Not a hollow body made of hunger and lies. Just a boy.

 

“You’re freezing,” Damien murmured, rubbing his back.

 

Phillip huffed. “I’m always freezing.”

 

“Not right now.”

 

And he was right. In that corner booth, under cheap lights and the faint smell of fries, Phillip was warm.

 

–––

 

The walk back was slow, deliberate. Neither spoke much, but every sound—the scuff of shoes on pavement, the distant hum of traffic, Damien’s low whistling—felt like a secret language, spoken only for them.

 

Phillip stole glances at him: the way streetlight caught in his dark hair, the tilt of his mouth. How someone could look untouchable in a party, yet so human under a quiet sky.

 

But when his street appeared, the weight returned. Moldy bread. Peeling walls. His mother’s sobs, muffled through paper-thin plaster. Phillip’s steps faltered.

 

Damien noticed. Shoulders brushed. “You alright?”

 

Phillip swallowed. “Yeah. Just… don’t like goodbyes.”

 

Damien stopped at the gate, leaning casually but watching closely. “Then don’t say it. Just say ‘see you.’”

 

Phillip huffed a shy laugh. “See you, then.”

 

They lingered. Night air heavy with damp earth and gasoline. Damien tugged lightly at Phillip’s sleeve, pulling him closer.

 

“Phillip,” he said, softer now, grin gone but warmth intact.

 

Phillip looked up, shadows breaking under Damien’s gaze. He stepped forward, arms circling his waist. Damien didn’t hesitate—he held him tight, steady, like this was inevitable.

 

Under the flickering streetlamp, two boys held each other as if the world could wait.

 

When Phillip finally let go, Damien brushed his thumb across his knuckles—a small promise, wordless but true.

 

“Sleep,” Damien said. “You’ve got school tomorrow, right?”

 

Phillip nodded. For once, the thought didn’t crush him. “Yeah. I’ll… see you.”

 

Damien smiled, softer this time. “Count on it.”

 

Phillip slipped through the gate, chest humming with warmth. He glanced back once. Damien was still there, hands in his pockets, waiting until Phillip vanished behind the door.

 

For the first time in months, Phillip climbed the creaking stairs not with dread, but with dangerous hope. Maybe tomorrow wouldn’t be all lies.

 

–––

 

The days after the party blurred together, but Damien’s presence lingered like smoke that clings to clothes. One message at night. A glance across the cafeteria. A hand brushing his in the hallway. Nothing loud, nothing official. Just enough to keep Phillip waiting. Always waiting.

 

It felt good—too good. Someone wanted him. Someone saw him not as shadow or burden, but as a boy worth noticing. He began timing his days around Damien: when he might appear, when his name might glow on Phillip’s screen. Even in silence, Phillip stayed awake, replaying their words, filling the gaps with desperate imagining.

 

Damien seemed to know. He always arrived just when Phillip thought he wouldn’t. That sly smile, the tilt of his head—and Phillip’s doubts melted like sugar in tea.

 

“Eat,” Damien would say, sliding half his sandwich across the table. Phillip hated being seen. But he ate, because it was Damien.

 

“Don’t go with them,” Damien murmured once, when classmates called from the yard. His arm rested heavy over Phillip’s shoulders, anchoring him. “They don’t get you like I do.” And Phillip stayed, because it was Damien.

 

Affection wasn’t loud. It wove itself into gestures so small Phillip almost missed them—until he realized Damien was always there. Close enough to touch. Close enough to matter.

 

At night, Phillip stared at the ceiling, chest aching with something hunger couldn’t explain. The thought pressed in, soft but relentless:

 

Without Damien, I’m nothing.

 

---

 

The music pounded like a heartbeat, heavy and relentless, but Phillip couldn’t hear it anymore. His eyes were fixed on Damien—on the way he leaned just a little too close to the girl with the green eyeliner, on the way he laughed, head tilted back, smile sharp and dazzling.

 

It was the smile that broke him. That smile that had once belonged only to him.

 

The heat rose in Phillip’s chest, clawing at his throat. He shoved through the crowd, desperate, frantic, not caring about the elbows and the laughter pressing against him. His hand found Damien’s wrist, yanking him away, away, away.

 

“Hey! What the hell—?” Damien stumbled after him, surprised, but Phillip didn’t answer. His heart was a storm. His body was a furnace. He only stopped when the night air hit his face like a slap.

 

Outside, beneath the yellow wash of the streetlight, he spun on Damien, chest heaving, words spilling before he could cage them.

 

“Why her? Why were you laughing with her when I was standing right there?”

 

Damien blinked, eyes narrowing. “Phillip—she was just talking. You’re imagining things.”

 

“Imagining?” Phillip’s voice cracked, raw and jagged. His fists trembled at his sides. “You don’t laugh with me like that anymore! You don’t look at me like that anymore! You think I don’t notice when your eyes wander, when you slip away, when you leave me waiting—always waiting—like I’m nothing?”

 

Damien’s expression hardened. “Do you even hear yourself? I talk to one girl for two minutes and suddenly I don’t care about you?”

 

“It’s not just two minutes!” Phillip’s words were sharp enough to cut. “It’s every time you disappear into your silence. Every time I have to beg for scraps of your attention. Every time you make me feel like I’m not enough for you, not good enough, not anything enough—”

 

His voice broke, tears burning hot at the corners of his eyes. “I can’t breathe when you look at someone else, Damien. It feels like you’re pulling the ground out from under me. Like you could leave and never look back.”

 

Damien dragged a hand through his hair, pacing, jaw tight with frustration. “And do you know what it feels like for me? To have you clawing at me every time I so much as breathe near someone else? You smother me, Phillip. You don’t even see me anymore—you only see your fear.”

 

Phillip flinched as though struck. His chest caved in on itself. “Maybe I don’t see you because I’m too busy needing you,” he whispered, voice shaking. “Because you’re the only thing that makes me feel real. Because when you laugh with someone else, it feels like I’m vanishing.”

 

The silence that followed was thick, poisoned with everything unsaid. Both of them breathing hard, both of them trembling with anger and longing, both of them too entangled to step away.

 

Damien finally stepped closer, voice low, dangerous, but not unkind. “Phillip… I’m not leaving you. But you can’t keep making me pay for the ghosts in your head. You’re bleeding on me for wounds I didn’t cut.”

 

Phillip’s lips parted, his whole body aching with the terrible, fragile truth. “Then teach me how to stop. Teach me how to believe you. Just don’t—don’t look away from me. Don’t laugh with anyone else like that. I can’t take it. I can’t lose you.”

 

Damien’s hand rose, cupping his face, thumb brushing over the wetness at his lashes. His touch was soft, but there was something fierce in it, something possessive that matched Phillip’s own desperation.

 

“Then hold on to me,” Damien whispered, leaning close enough that his breath brushed Phillip’s lips. “But learn to hold me without crushing me.”

 

Phillip’s chest heaved, his heart a wild thing between them. “I’ll try,” he choked out. “I swear I’ll try. Just… stay.”

 

And Damien kissed him.

 

Slow at first, almost merciful—but it burned quickly, tangled and violent with all their fear and longing. Phillip clung to him like he was drowning, and Damien let him, let himself be clung to, while his own fingers tightened in Phillip’s hair, grounding him, claiming him, binding him.

 

When they broke apart, Phillip’s voice was wrecked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

 

Damien hushed him with a kiss to his temple. “Don’t apologize for needing me. Just… learn to trust me.”

 

Phillip nodded, trembling. “I’ll try. I promise.”

 

Damien smiled, soft and infuriating. “That’s all I want. For now.”

 

And under the indifferent glow of the streetlight, Phillip pressed himself against Damien’s chest, listening to his heartbeat like it was the only rhythm keeping him alive. He wanted to be better, to be less afraid. But more than anything, he wanted Damien—messy, toxic, necessary Damien—to stay.

 

---

 

Yet when Phillip returned home that night, the silence was unbearable. The echo of Damien’s words gnawed at him: “You’re bleeding on me for wounds I didn’t cut.”

 

He hated how true it sounded. Hated how it lingered in his ribs like a bruise.

 

And so he reached for the only comfort he knew—the fridge.

 

Hands shaking, he pulled out everything: bread, cheese, leftover pasta, the half-cake he swore he wouldn’t touch. He ate quickly, ravenously, as if swallowing could silence the storm in his chest. Bite after bite, his throat burned, his stomach cramped, but he didn’t stop.

 

He was trying to fill the emptiness Damien left behind. Trying to push down the shame, the fear, the unbearable need.

 

But food was a cruel lover. It never loved him back.

 

By the time he collapsed onto the cold kitchen floor, surrounded by crumbs and wrappers, tears smeared his face. His body ached with fullness, but his heart remained hollow.

 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the shadows, as though Damien could hear him. “I don’t know how else to stop hurting.”

 

The streetlight outside filtered weakly through the window, pale and indifferent. It reminded him of Damien’s arms around him hours earlier—warm, firm, promising safety he couldn’t quite believe in.

 

He closed his eyes and clutched his stomach as if it were Damien’s shirt, as if he could trick himself into feeling held again. But all that remained was the taste of shame on his tongue and the certainty that, no matter how much he ate, no matter how tightly he clung—

it would never be enough.

 

---

 

Phillip lay curled on the cold kitchen floor, his chest rising and falling in shallow, broken breaths. His skin was damp with sweat, his stomach heavy, his throat burning with the taste of shame. The wrappers around him rustled when he shifted, like mocking voices.

 

He closed his eyes and wished Damien was there.

Wished he hadn’t said those words.

Wished he knew how to stop bleeding inside.

 

And then—

a soft tap against the window.

 

Phillip froze. He thought he imagined it. But then came another sound, a scrape, a low grunt. His heart lurched violently when he saw the shadow move across the glass, a familiar silhouette climbing clumsily, stubbornly, like some half-feral ghost.

 

 

---

 

And when Damien kissed him again, it tasted like salvation wrapped in sin.

 

Phillip’s hands lingered on his shirt, trembling, as if afraid Damien might vanish if he let go. Damien only pressed closer, steady and unyielding, his mouth gentle now, coaxing Phillip out of the storm.

 

Without a word, Damien rose, guiding Phillip to stand. His hand never left Phillip’s wrist, his thumb stroking over the fragile pulse there. They moved through the darkened hallway, the faint glow of the streetlight following them like a ghost. Every step felt hesitant, tender, but necessary.

 

Inside the bedroom, Damien pulled the curtains shut and sat Phillip down on the edge of the bed. The mattress creaked softly under their weight. For a moment, they just stared at each other, the silence filled with everything they couldn’t quite say. Phillip’s eyes were red and swollen, his lips parted as though he might apologize again—but Damien silenced him with a kiss, softer than before, lingering.

 

“You don’t have to explain tonight,” Damien whispered against his mouth. “Just… let me be here.”

 

Phillip nodded faintly, his throat tight. When Damien tugged off his shoes and coaxed him beneath the blanket, Phillip let himself be guided. Damien followed, lying down beside him, wrapping an arm around his waist.

 

The warmth was overwhelming. Phillip buried his face in Damien’s chest, inhaling the faint scent of smoke and rain still clinging to him. His body, tense for hours, finally loosened beneath the weight of Damien’s embrace.

 

“You make it hard to breathe,” Phillip admitted quietly, words muffled against fabric. “But when you’re gone, I feel like I can’t breathe at all.”

 

Damien’s hand slid slowly through his curls, his voice low and steady. “Then I’ll stay. Even if it kills me, I’ll stay.”

 

Their foreheads touched, their breaths mingling in the dark. The kiss that followed was unhurried, more fragile than desperate now—like they were sewing themselves back together thread by trembling thread. Phillip’s fingers clutched Damien’s shirt, tugging him impossibly closer, as if the fabric itself could tether them.

 

They whispered apologies, promises, fragments of truths that felt too heavy in daylight but came easily in the cocoon of night.

 

At last, when Phillip’s lashes fluttered and exhaustion began to soften his features, Damien pressed one final kiss to his forehead.

 

“Sleep,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”

 

And Phillip did. Slowly, his breathing steadied, his body going slack in Damien’s arms. Yet Damien stayed awake, watching the fragile rise and fall of his chest, one hand stroking over his back as though he could keep the nightmares at bay.

 

For once, the silence was not unbearable. For once, the ache in Damien’s chest was matched by something tender, something dangerously close to hope.

 

In the half-light of the bedroom, with Phillip asleep against him, Damien realized he would rather break a thousand times in this boy’s arms than ever feel whole without him.

 

---

 

The window creaked, and with a thud of boots against tile, Damien dropped into the kitchen. His hair was disheveled from the climb, his chest heaving, eyes burning with the kind of reckless fire only Damien carried.

 

For a moment, he just stood there, staring at Phillip—at the wreckage on the floor, at the tears, at the emptiness etched across his face. Something in Damien’s expression shattered.

 

“Phillip…” His voice was low, rough, almost breaking. He knelt beside him without hesitation, brushing the damp curls back from Phillip’s forehead. “Why didn’t you answer your phone? I knew something was wrong.”

 

Phillip’s lips trembled. His throat closed around words he couldn’t force out. He wanted to tell Damien to leave, to not look at him like this. But instead, the only sound that escaped was a ragged sob.

 

And Damien pulled him in.

 

Strong arms wrapped around his shaking frame, tugging him against the black fabric of his shirt. Phillip buried his face in Damien’s chest, breathing him in, clutching fistfuls of his clothes as if he might disappear again.

 

“I’m disgusting,” Phillip choked out, the confession muffled. “You shouldn’t see me like this. I can’t stop—I don’t know how to stop—”

 

“Hey,” Damien whispered fiercely, tilting Phillip’s chin so he’d look at him. His thumb brushed away the wetness at the corner of Phillip’s mouth, lingering against his skin as though anchoring him back into existence. “You are not disgusting. Do you hear me? You’re hurting. And I don’t care how messy it looks—I’m not leaving.”

 

Phillip shook his head, the words spilling helplessly. “I’m too much. I ruin everything. Even you.”

 

Damien leaned closer, so close Phillip could feel the tremor in his breath. “You don’t ruin me. You undo me, Phillip. You make me feel too much. And maybe it hurts, maybe it’s ugly, but it’s real—and I’d rather burn with you than feel nothing at all.”

 

The words cracked Phillip open. His chest heaved with sobs that shook his whole body, and Damien held him tighter, rocking him gently, like he was both furious and tender at once.

 

“I don’t want to lose you,” Phillip whispered hoarsely.

 

“Then stop trying to push me away,” Damien murmured. “I’ll crawl through a thousand windows if I have to. You think I scare easy?”

 

Phillip laughed weakly through the tears, the sound fractured but alive. “You’re insane.”

 

“Maybe.” Damien’s lips ghosted over his temple, then his cheek, soft kisses trailing like promises. “But I’m yours.”

 

Their mouths found each other, slow and trembling at first, then desperate. Phillip clung to Damien’s jaw, kissed him like he needed air, like Damien was the only thing that could pull him back from the hollow place inside. And Damien kissed him back with raw intensity, like he wanted to erase every shadow Phillip carried.

 

When they finally broke apart, both breathless, Damien pressed his forehead to Phillip’s.

 

“Let me be the one you reach for instead of… this.” His gaze flicked to the wrappers, then back to Phillip. “Promise me, next time, you’ll call me. Scream at me. Break something. Just—don’t break yourself.”

 

Phillip swallowed hard, nodding against his chest. “I’ll try.”

 

“That’s all I ask,” Damien whispered, holding him tighter. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”

 

The kitchen remained dim, littered with proof of Phillip’s despair. But in Damien’s arms, for the first time that night, Phillip felt something close to warmth. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t easy. But it was theirs—messy, consuming, and alive.

 

And when Damien kissed him again, it tasted like salvation wrapped in sin.

 

---

The small apartment seemed to shrink around them, the air dense with the aftermath of jealousy, fear, and desire. Phillip’s hands shook violently, clenching at the fabric of Damien’s shirt, gripping and letting go in frantic loops. Every thought of Damien laughing with someone else, smiling at someone else, had ignited a storm inside him that refused to calm. He hated himself for it—but he couldn’t stop the panic, the possessiveness, the burning need to own.Damien as much as he felt owned by him.

 

Damien’s dark eyes were sharp, unreadable, cutting through Phillip’s tremble with their cold precision. But there was fire there too—heat, ownership, warning, and a strange, intoxicating tenderness all at once.

 

“You think you can hit me,” Damien whispered, voice low, almost growling, “and I won’t notice? Every surge of jealousy, every panic, every fleeting fear—I feel it all, Phillip. And it… it makes me want you even more.”

 

Phillip’s chest constricted, tears brimming, cheeks burning. “I… I can’t control it! I just… I hate thinking you might care for anyone else more than me!” His hands shot out impulsively, punching Damien’s chest with more force than before.

 

Damien flinched, eyes widening momentarily, then darkened. His own temper rose, sharp and dangerous, a dangerous shadow of his usual control. “You hit me,” he said, voice low but edged with steel. “Because you dare to doubt me. Because your mind can’t accept that I chose you. That I own you, Phillip. Do you know how ridiculous, how desperate, that makes you?”

 

“I… I—” Phillip tried to defend himself, but his voice cracked, raw with desperation and shame. “I just… I can’t help it! I… I need you!”

 

Damien’s hands went to Phillip’s shoulders, gripping firmly, holding him in place. His gaze softened slightly, but the possessive edge never left. “I know. I *need* you too,” he murmured, close enough that their noses brushed. “But you… you can’t lose control like this. Not in front of me. Not ever. Fighting, hitting… it only proves you fear losing me more than you love yourself.”

 

Phillip’s body trembled, a mix of adrenaline, guilt, and unquenchable desire coursing through him. He felt small, fragile, almost broken under Damien’s commanding presence—and yet, the danger, the power, the wealth that Damien exuded, the sense that this boy, this man, could crush the world and choose to cradle Phillip in his hands, made him shiver with longing.

 

“I… I can’t stand it,” Phillip gasped, tears spilling freely, fingers clutching at Damien’s chest again, digging into the expensive fabric of his designer shirt. “I… I don’t want to lose you! I… I hate feeling invisible!”

 

Damien’s dark eyes softened only slightly before flaring with ownership and warning. “Then learn to trust me,” he said, voice low, sharp, impossible to ignore. “Because I *own* the right to want you, to claim you, to touch you, and I will. Not because I have to, but because I choose you. Do you understand me?”

 

Phillip’s tears streaked down his cheeks, voice breaking. “Yes… I… I’m yours.”

 

“Say it properly,” Damien demanded, a dangerous edge in his tone, hands gripping Phillip’s waist, leaning down so that the intensity pressed into every nerve of Phillip’s body. “Say it like you mean it. Like you know there’s no escape.”

 

“I’m… I’m yours,” Phillip whispered, broken, trembling, surrendering completely to the storm that was Damien.

 

“Good,” Damien murmured, a dark, possessive smile tugging at his lips. “That’s exactly it. You belong to me, and I’ll show you every day, every hour, that you can’t escape me. That no one else matters.”

 

The weight of Damien’s presence pressed against Phillip, heavy, intoxicating, overwhelming. He wanted to run, to push, to fight—but he couldn’t. Not against this boy who was a storm of power, wealth, and obsessive love. Not against the man who had made him tremble and crave, fear and need all at once.

 

Phillip’s hands shot out again, almost violently, pushing Damien away. “Stop… I… I can’t—”

 

Damien caught his wrists easily, holding him in place with a strength that sent shivers down Phillip’s spine. “No. You won’t push me away. Not now. Not ever. You belong to me. You feel everything—fear, desire, anger—and it’s mine to hold. And you’ll learn that. You’ll learn that your chaos doesn’t push me away—it draws me closer.”

 

Phillip gasped, chest heaving, trembling uncontrollably, hands fisting the edges of Damien’s shirt. The possessive, dark energy radiating from Damien pressed into him like a physical weight. His jealousy, his panic, his need to claim Damien collided with the love he felt—messy, dangerous, suffocating, consuming.

 

Damien leaned in, lips brushing his temple, then his neck, teeth grazing skin in a possessive, intoxicating claim. “You feel that? That’s your fear, your love, your panic—and it’s all mine. You’re mine. No one else matters. You’ll burn with me, or you’ll burn without me. But either way, I *own* you.”

 

Phillip shuddered, hands gripping Damien’s hair, pulling him closer, desperate for connection, for dominance, for reassurance. “I… I love you,” he gasped, trembling, voice breaking, “even when it hurts… even when I… I lose control…”

 

Damien’s dark smile deepened, lips finding his in a kiss that was slow, fierce, and intoxicating all at once. Hands tangled in hair, body pressed hard, marking him, claiming him, making Phillip ache in every part of his being. The first punch, the first spark of violence from Phillip, only fueled Damien’s obsession, feeding the dangerous fire between them.

 

Phillip collapsed against Damien, tears soaking into his hoodie, chest heaving with sobs and desire. “I… I can’t… I don’t… I…”

 

Damien’s fingers pressed into his hair, tilting his head up, forcing his gaze to meet Damien’s. “You will,” Damien said, low, dark, infuriatingly tender. “You’ll survive this fire because it’s ours. Messy, dangerous, beautiful, and poisonous. And even when it hurts, even when you scream or hit me, you’re still mine. You’ll see. You will see.”

 

The room seemed to pulse with their shared chaos, each breath a storm, each heartbeat a dangerous rhythm they danced to together. Phillip trembled, sobbed, kissed, clung, all at once, caught between terror and desire, anger and love, and Damien—dark, wealthy, controlling, intoxicating Damien—held him firmly, protectively, obsessively, and endlessly.

 

Hours passed, or maybe minutes—they had no meaning anymore. Only the storm, only the fire, only the dangerous, consuming, intoxicating love that neither of them could escape, neither could control, but both willingly surrendered to.

 

And Phillip, trembling and broken, found himself loving it. Loving Damien. Loving the chaos, the possessiveness, the toxicity, the dangerous power and wealth that made him untouchable, and yet so achingly, beautifully, impossibly human in the moments he claimed Phillip with everything he was.

 

---

 

Phillip woke before Damien, sunlight spilling through the thin curtains and catching on the edges of the expensive apartment he had never imagined he would see. The warmth of Damien’s body beside him, normally comforting, now felt like a cage. His chest ached with longing, jealousy, and panic all at once.

 

He couldn’t stop the thoughts, spiraling uncontrollably. What if someone texts him? What if someone flirts with him? What if he leaves me for someone else, just like I always fear? The idea made his stomach twist, hands trembling. He could barely breathe without imagining Damien somewhere else, smiling, laughing, being… not his.

 

Damien stirred, stretching languidly, still half asleep, hair falling across his forehead like a dark curtain. “Morning,” he murmured, voice low and teasing. “Sleep well, mine?”

 

Phillip’s heart twisted violently. “Why… why didn’t you wake me first? Did you sleep with your phone next to you? Were you… texting someone?” His voice cracked, trembling with accusation and panic.

 

Damien’s eyes snapped open, a glint of something dark and dangerous there. “Oh, now we’re starting the morning with accusations?” He sat up slowly, the silk of his sheets shifting around him, and studied Phillip as if weighing his very soul. “Mine… you’re insane. But… adorable.” His grin was sharp, almost cruel.

 

“I… I just… I can’t… I hate… I hate the thought of losing you!” Phillip’s hands shot out, clutching at Damien’s arm, pulling him close, shaking, nails digging in. “I… I can’t control it. I can’t stop thinking about… anyone else… touching you… talking to you… laughing with you!”

 

Damien’s laugh was low, dark, a sound that could have been soothing but cut into Phillip like fire. “Mine, calm down,” he said, voice soft but edged with possession. “You’re trembling. You’re small. And it… it makes me want you even more.” He leaned close, eyes dark and intense. “You think I could ever care for someone else? Someone like you, like this—messy, desperate, obsessed with me? No one else could survive it. No one else would want it.”

 

Phillip’s breath hitched, his small hands shaking as he pushed at Damien’s chest, frantic, desperate. “I… I can’t… I can’t control it! I just… I just want to hurt… or punish… or… I don’t know! I just want to feel like I matter!”

 

Damien tilted his head, dark eyes narrowing. “Hurt me?” His voice dropped, dangerous. “You want to hit me, mine? You want to push me, to make me feel your chaos?” His grin was sharp, possessive, and intoxicating. “Do it. I won’t stop you. And… I’ll still want you, even if you do.”

 

Phillip’s chest heaved. The jealousy, the fear, the panic—it all exploded at once. He lashed out, small fists striking Damien’s chest, once, twice, reckless and uncontrolled. Damien flinched, eyes widening for a heartbeat, then darkened with a fierce, predatory gleam.

 

“Mine!” Damien’s voice was sharp, low, and possessive. “Do you see what you’re doing? Do you see how beautiful and dangerous you are?” His hands gripped Phillip’s wrists, holding him firm, unyielding. “You think hitting me would push me away? You think punishing me with your fear and your anger would make me leave?”

 

Phillip sobbed, shoving against him, shaking, desperate. “I… I can’t… I just… I can’t stop! I… I need you!”

 

Damien leaned close, forehead resting against his, voice almost a growl. “And you *have* me. You will always have me. But you have to see it, Phillip. See what your jealousy does. See how dangerous and consuming it is. And… I love it. I love every bit of your obsession, your fear, your need. Because it’s yours… all yours. And I’m the only one who can tame it—or destroy it.”

 

Phillip trembled, tears sliding down his face, chest heaving. “I… I can’t… I don’t know how to… survive without you…”

 

Damien’s lips brushed his temple, slow, possessive. “You won’t. Not without me. You’ll never survive this, mine. But that’s the point. I’m here. I hold you. I claim you. And even when you hit me, even when you panic, even when you spiral… you belong to me.”

 

Phillip clung to him, small, fragile, desperate, letting the chaos of his emotions pour out in shudders and sobs. Damien’s hands were firm on his back, pulling him impossibly close, possessive, intoxicating, dangerously loving.

 

The room seemed to shrink, the sunlight too bright, the air too thick—but in Damien’s hold, Phillip found a terrifying, addictive sanctuary. Every heartbeat, every shudder, every pulse of jealousy and fear became part of the rhythm between them.

 

Damien whispered against his hair, low and intoxicating: “Mine, you’re fragile, you’re messy, you’re dangerous… and I wouldn’t want you any other way. This obsession… this madness… it’s ours. Completely, undeniably, ours. You can hit me, hate me, panic, beg, cry… I will still hold you. Still claim you. Still love you.”

 

Phillip trembled, clutching him as if he could never let go. “I… I’m yours,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Completely… even when I… even when I hurt you…”

 

Damien’s laugh was low, dark, satisfied. “Good,” he murmured. “Because I want all of you, mine. Every desperate, jealous, wild piece of you. And I’ll never let you go.”

 

Phillip rested his forehead against Damien’s chest, trembling, sobbing, gasping—but in that chaos, that toxic, consuming love, he felt… dangerous, fierce, alive. Because he was Damien’s. And Damien… Damien was his.

 

 

---

 

The days after the fight had left Phillip in a fragile, tremulous state. Every small interaction, every glance, every text from Damien became a pulse of need, fear, and longing. He knew he was too young to understand half of it, and Damien… well, Damien was always just a step beyond what Phillip could comprehend—rich, confident, untouchable in a way that made Phillip ache with envy and desperation.

 

Then the message came.

 

“Meet me. Now.”

 

Phillip’s stomach twisted as he raced to the park bench, hands shaking, hoodie clutched tight. Damien was already there, sitting stiffly, posture perfect, face unreadable under the flickering streetlights. His designer tie and crisp school uniform made him look like he had just stepped out of another world—a world Phillip didn’t belong to, and yet he felt himself tethered to it, to Damien, in ways that terrified and thrilled him.

 

“Phillip…” Damien’s voice was clipped, tense. “I… I have to tell you something.”

 

Phillip’s heart slammed against his ribs. “What is it?” His voice cracked before he could stop it. “Is it—are you leaving?”

 

Damien swallowed, eyes darkening, shadowed with frustration and something Phillip couldn’t quite place—fear, maybe, or guilt. “It’s… my father. He’s decided I have to transfer schools. Effective immediately. He says… I’ve been… distracted, misbehaving. Getting involved in situations he doesn’t approve of. Me… with you.”

 

Phillip froze. Every nerve in his body screamed in panic. “With me? That’s—what does that even mean?” His voice trembled as his chest tightened, air catching in his throat. “You can’t just… leave me. Damien, you can’t!”

 

Damien reached for him, hand hovering, hesitant. Phillip pulled back instinctively, fists clenching. “It’s not up to me,” Damien said softly. “I… I can’t fight him, Phillip. Not fully. Not yet. And it… it’s a punishment. For me, for us. He thinks this will… teach me focus. Teach me control. But all I feel… is losing you.”

 

Phillip’s chest ached, hot and sharp. “Losing… you? Damien, I… I can’t survive without you!” His voice broke. “You’re… my world!”

 

Damien’s lips pressed into a thin line, his hand dropping to his knee. “I know, and it’s… it’s tearing me apart too. I hate that I have to obey him. I hate that I can’t just be… free with you. But I’m still yours, Phillip. I won’t leave you. Not really.”

 

Phillip’s hands shook violently, clutching the fabric of his hoodie, knuckles white. “But you will! You’ll be somewhere else, with people who… who don’t understand! Who won’t care about me!”

 

Damien’s dark gaze softened just slightly, almost imperceptibly. “I’ll care. I always will. Even if I can’t be there when you want me, even if my father thinks he can control me… you’re mine. You’ve always been mine. And I’ll make sure you know it, no matter what.”

 

Phillip’s throat constricted with both relief and terror. “But… how do I… survive? How do I—how do I deal with seeing you… with not being able to reach you whenever I need you?”

 

Damien leaned closer, voice low, possessive, unyielding. “You survive because I’ve already claimed you, Phillip. I’ve already… made you mine. And no one—no one—will ever take that from me. Not my father, not anyone. And I… I’ll see you, every chance I get. You just… you have to trust me.”

 

Phillip’s chest heaved. Trust. The word felt heavy, impossibly heavy. He wanted to scream, cry, cling to Damien until the world dissolved around them, but he also felt a tiny thread of stability in Damien’s presence. “I… I trust you,” he whispered, voice shaking. “I… I think I do…”

 

Damien’s hand brushed against Phillip’s, possessive and soft, yet firm. “Good. That’s all I need. Even if it’s messy, even if it’s… chaotic. You’re mine, Phillip. Don’t forget that. And I’ll be… careful. I promise. But I can’t promise it’ll be easy.”

 

Phillip’s tears slipped freely, unrestrained. “I… I don’t care if it’s easy! I just… I just want you. I want you here. I need you here!”

 

Damien pulled him into an embrace, one arm wrapping around Phillip’s trembling frame, other hand brushing through his hair possessively. “I’m here. I’m here. And I won’t let go. Not now. Not ever.”

 

The embrace was fierce, intoxicating, slightly suffocating—but Phillip didn’t care. He melted into Damien’s arms, needing the chaos, the obsession, the dangerous warmth of someone who both terrified and held him.

 

They stayed there for a long while under the weak glow of the park lamp, shadows stretching around them. Phillip clung to Damien, feeling the world’s cruelty—the wealth, the rules, the authority of Damien’s father—press against them, but finding a fragile sanctuary in Damien’s relentless, possessive hold.

 

When they finally pulled back, Phillip rested his forehead against Damien’s chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. “Promise me,” he whispered. “Promise me… you won’t leave me. Not even for a second.”

 

Damien’s lips pressed to the top of Phillip’s head, soft, possessive, claiming. “I promise. But you… you have to remember, Phillip. I’m not yours to control. I’m not even fully mine. But whatever time we steal… whatever moments we have… they’re ours. And I… I’ll fight for every one of them.”

 

Phillip nodded weakly, tears slipping down his cheeks. He was terrified, panicked, jealous beyond reason—but in Damien’s arms, dangerous as it was, he found beauty. A toxic, fragile, desperate kind of love that burned through his chest, consuming everything except the knowledge that Damien was here, that Damien was his, and that somehow, just somehow, they would endure.

 

Even if the world—his home, his school, Damien’s father, their own insecurities—tried to tear them apart.

 

---

 

 

Notes:

I accidentally posted the wrong chapter twice—I hope no one read that poorly written draft. I only just found the correct chapter. The next chapter will probably be as long as this one and will continue in this same timeframe. Damien is one year older than Pip here.

Thank you for reading!

REVISED

Chapter 6: Well I wonder do you see me when we pass

DAMIEN

The silence in the Thorn mansion was a carefully curated illusion, a symphony of suppressed sound. It was the low, perpetual hum of the climate control system, maintaining a constant, sterile 72 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the metronomic, judgmental tick of the Breguet grandfather clock in the vaulted entrance hall, each second a measured beat in the passage of a perfectly managed life. It was the faint, almost musical creak of the centuries-old jacaranda wood flooring under the silent, practiced steps of the staff, who moved like ghosts in a well-funded purgatory. This was not an absence of noise, but the presence of order. It was a silence that spoke of immense wealth, of control so absolute it had seeped into the very plaster of the walls, a perfection so immaculate it felt more like a beautifully presented autopsy than a home.

For the ten-year-old boy folded into the dark, dusty space beneath the main staircase, it was the sound of a loneliness so profound it had its own weight and taste. It was the silence of being an accessory, a piece of future-proofed furniture in a showroom no one truly lived in.

This narrow cavity, his secret annex, was the one place the order didn't reach. Dust motes danced in the thin slivers of light that cut through the balusters, and the air smelled of old wood and forgotten things. From this vantage point, he had a fragmented, cinematic view of the hall and the dining room entrance. The voices that rose to him were not muffled; they were sharp and clear, each syllable a chip of ice that found its way into his hiding place.

"Is completely unacceptable. What possible rationale was going through your mind?"

His father's voice never rose. It was a flat, calm instrument, its tone as smooth and cold as the polished obsidian table in his study. It was a voice that could flay the hope from a room without ever needing to shout. The boy didn't need to see the man’s face to know the exact expression that accompanied it: the pale, dissecting eyes that missed nothing, the thin lips pressed into a bloodless line of supreme disappointment, the ramrod-straight posture that was itself a condemnation.

"Thinking? Maybe I was thinking that he's a child! He's ten years old, Robert. He wanted to have fun. I know these are alien concepts in this house, but try to stretch your imagination."

Her voice was a violent, beautiful counterpoint. It was louder, warmer, tinged with a raw, untamed emotion that always seemed to vibrate just outside the frequency the house was calibrated for. It was a splash of vibrant color on a monochrome canvas, a ray of stubborn sunlight trying to burn through layers of black velvet. Beautiful, fleeting, and he had already learned, always, always extinguished.

"Your child," Mr. Thorn emphasized, and the boy felt the pronoun like a tiny, precise incision right below his sternum. "The heir to my name. Your... little adventure yesterday. Letting him consume that street-vendor filth. He spent the night vomiting his guts out. That is not 'fun.' It is a profound failure of judgment. It is negligence."

"He was sick because he ate too much! Because he was happy for once! He's not a cadet in your personal army, he's a little boy!"

"He is a Thorn. And Thorns do not lose control. We do not succumb to base impulses. Your influence..." the pause was deliberate, heavy with unspoken accusations, "...is destabilizing. You weaken him. You make him vulnerable."

The boy buried his face in the knees of his tailored shorts, the fine wool scratching his cheek. No, he thought, with a ferocity that surprised him. She makes me strong. She makes me feel real. The memory of the previous day washed over him, a Technicolor explosion in the gray monotony of his life: the glorious, greasy smell of the hot dog, the way she’d thrown her head back and laughed when a squirt of mustard landed on his chin, the overwhelming, wonderful cacophony of the movie theater, the simple joy of his feet swinging freely, not touching the floor. It had been perfect. Even the subsequent stomachache had been a worthy price, a tangible proof of the experience. Now, that golden memory was being dissected on the cold stainless-steel table of his father's logic, its parts labeled and declared defective.

"Vulnerable?" Her voice was tired now, the fight seeping out of it, but a core of stubbornness remained. "I'm trying to give him a childhood. A real one. Something you have clearly never had and cannot begin to comprehend."

"What I comprehend," Mr. Thorn's voice lowered, becoming softer, clearer, and infinitely more dangerous, like the whisper of a razor being drawn, "is that your quaint concept of 'childhood' is on a direct collision course with his future. There are expectations. There is a standard of behavior. A necessity of control. You are failing to instill it. As a mother... and, I might add, as a wife."

The air in the hall below seemed to solidify. The boy held his breath, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.

"What are you implying?" Her question was a ragged whisper, all the fight finally gone, replaced by a dawning horror.

"I am saying that perhaps... you require a hiatus. A significant period away. To reassess your priorities. To remember what is expected of someone in your position."

"Time... away? From him?" The panic was instant, electric, lifting her tone into something sharp and brittle. "No. Robert, please. You can't. He is my entire life."

"And yet, you seem determined to ruin him with your mawkish sentimentality. Decisions must be made. For the good of this family. For his own good."

The boy heard no more. His heart was pounding so violently he was certain the sound was echoing through the cavernous hall, betraying his hiding place. Time away. A hiatus. The words bounced around his skull, hollow, terrifying things. Was she going away? Was she leaving him? Leaving him alone here? With him?

His father's footsteps echoed with finality on the marble, firm, measured, and retreating. The boy heard a single, choked sob, quickly stifled, the sound of tears he knew she would fight to hold back until the door of her rooms was locked behind her. He didn't move. He remained frozen in the dusty gloom, arms wrapped around his legs, trying to make himself small, trying to understand the new, terrifying equation that had just been presented to him.

The long, aching wait began in that precise moment.

In the days that followed, the house grew even quieter, as if holding its breath for a death that hadn't yet occurred. She seemed to diminish, to wilt like an orchid placed in a dark corner. Her smiles for him were sad, fleeting things. Her hugs became tighter, longer, more desperate, as if she were trying to memorize the feel of him through the fabric of his shirt. She whispered "I love you" with a frantic urgency that chilled his blood, each utterance feeling less like a comfort and more like a goodbye.

His father, in contrast, became a constant, corrosive presence. The schedule tightened. Tutors for advanced mathematics and economics appeared. Lessons in etiquette, in posture, in the precise pressure of a business handshake. His days were dismantled and reassembled, each moment emptied of any frivolous choice and filled instead with something new, something more suitable, something more Thorn. It was a systematic process of unmaking and remaking.

And he waited. He waited for her to erupt, to finally shatter the perfect crystal prison of their lives. He waited for her to storm into his father's study and declare "enough!" and sweep him away in a glorious, chaotic hurricane of laughter and rebellion. But the fire in her had been extinguished. She simply drifted through the rooms, often standing by the library window for hours, staring out at the manicured grounds with a hollow emptiness in her eyes that he had never seen before. It was the look of someone who had already left.

The memory of the hot dog, once so vivid, began to feel like an artifact from another life, a dream he’d once had.

Then came the morning.

Damien woke with a jolt, a cold, visceral dread coiling in his stomach. Something was wrong. Not the usual wrong of a misplaced homework assignment or a disapproving glance. This was fundamental. The silence of the house was different. It wasn't the expensive, cultivated silence of order. It was the hollow, echoing silence of absence.

He padded down the grand staircase, his bare feet making no sound on the icy marble. The mansion felt like a museum after hours.

The door to her room was slightly ajar. He pushed it open. The bed was made with military precision, the sheets stretched taut, the pillows arranged in a perfect, sterile symmetry. There was no trace of her. No half-empty glass of water on the nightstand. No book splayed open on the chaise lounge. The perfume bottles were gone from her dressing table. The room had been sanitized of her presence. It smelled of nothing but lemon polish and void.

His heart began to slam against his ribs, a wild, caged thing. He ran to the main hall. His father was there, immaculate in a Savile Row suit, reading the Financial Times and sipping coffee as if it were any other Tuesday.

"Mom?" The word escaped him, thin and reedy, strangled by a panic too large for his small body.

Mr. Thorn lowered the newspaper with an infuriating, deliberate slowness. His eyes, the color of old ice, found Damien's. They held no light, no warmth, no emotion whatsoever.

"Your mother has decided that she requires a... prolonged period of rest. She departed several hours ago."

The world did not shatter. It did not explode. Instead, it turned to lead, heavy and cold and suffocating. Departed. Prolonged period. They were adult words, smooth and meaningless, designed to hide the monstrous truth of the abyss that had just opened up inside his chest.

"Where... where did she go?" he whispered, his hands beginning to tremble violently, uncontrollably.

"That is not your concern," his father said, his voice devoid of any inflection that could be mistaken for comfort. "What matters is that you and I have a great deal of work to do. You possess potential, Damien. The potential for true exceptionalism. That potential will no longer be diluted by distractions." His father raised the newspaper again, a gesture of utter and final dismissal. "Eat your breakfast. Your tutor for macroeconomic theory will be here at nine o'clock sharp."

Damien stood rooted to the spot in the vast, empty hall. The expensive hum of the mansion now sounded like a mournful elegy, a sound meant to fill a horrible, new emptiness. He did not cry. The shock was too absolute, the betrayal too profound.

She had promised. She had said he was her everything. She had said she loved him more than anything.

And yet, she was gone. She had left him.

The scene that followed two weeks later was arranged with the same cold, efficient precision his father applied to corporate mergers. He was driven to the airport. It was not a request; it was a directive. "Your mother wishes to say goodbye."

The international terminal was a jarring assault of noise, light, and frantic movement—a chaotic, vibrant world a million miles from the oppressive quiet of the mansion. And then he saw her. She was thinner, paler, a watercolor version of herself. But she smiled when she saw him, a ghost of her former radiance. She knelt, her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel a fine tremor running through them.

"Damien, my love," she began, her voice a rushed, frantic whisper beneath the blare of a flight announcement. "Don’t worry, I’ll come back." The sudden shift to English sounded alien, rehearsed, as if she were reciting lines from a script she didn't believe in. "We have to take this seriously, but right now, I can’t play games." Her eyes glistened with tears she refused to let fall. "You’re still too young. You’ll understand why one day." She pulled him into a brief, crushing hug. Her signature scent, the one he associated with safety and love, was already faint, almost erased. "Be a good boy and listen to your father, okay?" She released him, cupping his face for one last, desperate second. "I love you."

Before he could form a word, before he could scream, before he could clutch her and refuse to let go, the firm, impersonal hands of the family chauffeur settled on his shoulders, pulling him back. He watched her turn and walk toward the security gate, her back straight, never once looking back, swallowed by the indifferent crowd.

The car ride home was silent. He walked up the mansion's stairs slowly, each step an effort, as if he were wading through deep water. He went straight to his hiding place under the stairs. He sat in the same spot, in the familiar dark, and pressed his forehead to his knees, his thin arms wrapping around his legs. The smell of jet fuel and the echo of her words—I’ll come back... listen to your father—clung to him, a nauseating perfume of abandonment and betrayal.

The nature of the wait changed in that instant. It was no longer hopeful. It became a grim vigil. A hardening. A silent, furious oath sworn in the dust.

He would learn. He would become exceptional. He would become so perfect, so controlled, so impeccably powerful that no one would ever have the power to leave him again. Because if you were powerful, you were the one who decided who stayed and who went. You were the one who dictated the terms of love. You were the one who possessed.

And if anyone ever dared to promise they would stay and then attempted to break that contract... that was not a simple goodbye. It was a breach of the highest order. And breaches were not tolerated. You did not simply... let people go. You kept them close. You made them remember every single vow they had made. You made them stay.

The ten-year-old boy who had loved hot dogs and the messy, joyful chaos of the movies died in that dark space under the stairs. Something else was born in his place, something colder, sharper, and dangerously, obsessively possessive, pulling on his skin, answering to his name.

The scar it left was not one of mere sadness or longing. It was a scar of ownership. And everyone who drew close to him from that day forward would be forced to bear its weight, whether they wished to or not.

------

South Park High was an exercise in brutalist absurdity. It was not a place designed for the progeny of industrial titans or the scions of legal dynasties. It was a concrete box with perpetually damp corridors that smelled of cheap ammonia-based cleaner and the collective anxiety of a thousand adolescents. The lockers were dented monuments to petty frustrations, their combination locks a daily test of will. For Damien Thorn, it was a calculated exile, a punishment devised by his father after the "library incident"—a vague term that covered a multitude of sins, primarily the sin of being caught doing something his father couldn't control. Plucked from the polished halls of Crestview Academy and its curated cohort of future leaders, he was a predator caged in a zoo of common, bleating animals. Every shriek of laughter, every slammed locker door, was an affront to his senses.

Kyle Broflovski was an anomaly in this ecosystem. He was there not as a punishment, but because of his parents' baffling commitment to "real-world experience" and public education—sentiments Damien found hopelessly sentimental and intellectually lazy. Yet, Kyle was an island of sharp, familiar intelligence in a sea of staggering vulgarity. His mind was a rapier, and Damien respected its edge, even when it was turned against him.

Their encounters, once rare and meticulously orchestrated to avoid the prying eyes of their respective social spheres, became paradoxically easier to facilitate in the chaotic, anonymous throng of the public school. And with that ease came a new, heightened intensity. The constant, grating pressure of the environment—the sheer noise, the lack of privacy, the ever-present, low-grade threat of meaningless violence—lent their stolen moments a desperate, electric urgency. They became more physical.

It wasn't love. Damien had excised that particular fallacy from his personal lexicon. It was a coalition of intellects. A strategic alliance between two minds that recognized their mutual superiority amidst a world of inferiors. And for Damien, this alliance had an inevitable, biological component that demanded management. Attraction was merely another variable in the equation of human interaction, another base need to be acknowledged, mastered, and directed. It was, in its own way, perfectly logical.

Their meeting places were monuments to teenage indifference: the last carrel in the school library, hidden behind shelves of outdated encyclopedias; the far end of the football field where the grass grew long and wild and no one ever went; the back seat of Damien's Audi, parked in a perpetually shadowed alley behind the gymnasium, the deeply tinted windows offering a privacy his own home, with its ever-present staff, could never provide.

The kisses evolved past initial clumsiness. They became experimental, precise, a data-gathering exercise. Hands no longer fumbled by accident; they mapped territory with a clinical curiosity, two young scientists testing a dangerous and thrilling hypothesis. Kyle debated with the same fervor he applied to moral philosophy, his fingers tracing lines of logic and counter-argument across Damien's back, his mouth forming a silent, emphatic Q.E.D. against Damien's.

Damien viewed it all as a natural, almost inevitable extension of their cerebral connection. It was the physical proof of their intellectual compatibility. Controlled. Mutually beneficial. Rational.

Until Kyle's rationality spectacularly failed.

It happened in the car, on a bleak autumn afternoon where the steel-gray sky seemed to press down on the roof of the Audi, compressing the world inside. Kyle was uncharacteristically quiet, his body held in a state of rigid tension against the cold leather of the passenger seat.

"Is your father pursuing another frivolous lawsuit against mine?" Damien asked, his fingers still loosely tangled with Kyle's—a habit he permitted for its efficiency in maintaining a point of physical contact. "Is that the source of this melodrama?"

Kyle pulled his hand away as if shocked. "No. It's... more complicated than that."

Damien waited, his patience a thin veneer. Their time was always measured, a stolen commodity.

"It's Stan," Kyle said, the name escaping on a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the world.

Damien's brow furrowed in genuine, unfeigned bewilderment. "Marsh? The boy who seems to own one Terrence and Phillip shirt and a seemingly endless capacity for profound mediocrity? What's he done? Finally mastered object permanence?"

"Just stop it," Kyle snapped, twisting in his seat to face him. His green eyes, usually alight with the fire of solving an intellectual problem, were clouded with a stormy, messy emotion that Damien could only classify as... irrational. "It's not a joke. It's... God, it sounds insane to say it out loud."

"Nothing is insane once it's properly examined and categorized," Damien countered, his voice maintaining its customary, cool detachment. "Explain."

Kyle swallowed hard, staring at his own hands as if they held the answers. "I think... I'm in love with him, Damien."

The silence that descended inside the car was so immediate and total that the sudden patter of rain against the sunroof sounded like a thunderclap. Damien simply blinked, processing. The words refused to cohere into a sensible statement. Kyle Broflovski. In love. Stan Marsh. It was a non-sequitur of epic proportions, like claiming a supercomputer had developed a passionate affection for a particularly uninteresting rock.

"Are you ill?" Damien finally managed, his tone flat, diagnostic. "Have you contracted some form of fever that induces romantic hallucinations?"

"I knew you wouldn't get it," Kyle said, a harsh, bitter laugh escaping him. "It's stupid, I know! It makes no sense on paper. He's not the smartest, or the funniest, or the most... anything, really. But there's a goodness in him. A kindness that doesn't have a motive. He doesn't calculate. He doesn't analyze. He just... is. And when I'm with him, for some stupid reason, I can just be, too. I'm not a problem to be solved, or a son to make proud, or a... a variable in your goddamn personal equation."

Damien observed him, his initial perplexity giving way to a wave of pure, unadulterated contempt. It was the single most illogical, emotionally irresponsible decision he could imagine Kyle making.

"So what is your proposed solution?" Damien asked, crossing his arms over his chest. He approached it as a logistical puzzle, nothing more. "A territorial treaty? You keep the emotional swamp lands, I retain the high ground of reason?"

Kyle looked at him then, and for the first time, Damien saw not just frustration, but a flicker of something that looked disturbingly like pity. "No. I'm saying that... this has to stop. Us. We need to end this."

Damien's expression remained a perfect, impassive mask. Internally, a hot, sharp spike of irritation lanced through him. Kyle was introducing chaos into a perfectly calibrated system. He was destabilizing everything out of sheer, weak-minded sentimentality.

"Understood," Damien said, his voice as smooth and controlled as ever.

Kyle seemed to wait for more—for an argument, a question, a flicker of anything. "That's it? Just... 'Understood'?"

"What more is required?" Damien retorted, a faint, cold smile touching his lips that never reached his eyes. "A theatrical display of jealousy? A physical altercation? We are not characters in a particularly maudlin teen drama, Kyle. You have collected what you believe to be data—though I would argue it's hopelessly corrupted—and you have reached a conclusion. I acknowledge it."

And he did, on a purely intellectual level. It was a flawed conclusion based on emotional bias, but it was, technically, Kyle's conclusion to make.

Kyle shook his head, dragging his hands down his face. "Sometimes I forget just how... broken you are in there. It's all just a grand chess game to you, isn't it? People are just pieces to be moved and sacrificed."

"The world is a chessboard," Damien corrected, utterly unmoved. "It operates on data, strategy, and predictable consequences. 'Love'..." he invested the word with layers of sarcasm, treating it as a primitive and thoroughly debunked superstition, "...is the delusion people employ to justify irrational moves and catastrophic losses of control."

"My parents love each other," Kyle argued, his voice losing its strength, knowing he was debating a brick wall.

"So did mine," Damien shot back, his voice dropping into a colder, sharper register, like the slide of a steel bolt. "Look at the result. My mother loved her freedom so much she abandoned me. My father loves his control so much he erased her and is trying to do the same to me. Love is the preferred excuse of the coward and the tyrant. It's the justification for every act of weakness and every exercise of absolute power."

He didn't just say the words; he hurled them, and with them came a surge of real, acrid emotion—not jealousy over Kyle, but a deep, polished hatred for the very concept Kyle was defending.

Kyle just stared at him, the frustration and pity in his eyes finally giving way to a kind of horrified resignation. "Jesus, Damien. What a fucking frozen wasteland you live in."

"It's the only landscape that reflects reality," Damien said, his mask of icy composure locking firmly back into place. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a system to recalibrate. Go on. Go find your happiness with Stanley Marsh. Document the experiment. Do let me know the final results."

He said it not as a curse, but as a coldly accurate prediction of a failed venture.

Kyle seemed to have a dozen more things on the tip of his tongue, but he let them all go. He simply nodded, his face a canvas of defeat and a strange, weary relief.

"Right. Okay. This is it, then."

He pushed the car door open, letting in a gust of cold, rain-scented air. Without a backward glance, he stepped out into the downpour and was swallowed by the gray afternoon.

Damien did not start the car. He sat perfectly still, listening to the steady rhythm of the rain on the roof. The "Kyle" variable had been removed from the equation. It was a simple matter of adjusting the remaining parameters. A recalibration. Nothing of true value had been lost.

But the echo of his own words lingered in the silent, enclosed space. My parents loved each other. Look how that turned out.

He thought of his mother, of her increasingly sad smiles, of the hollow promise to return that still haunted his nightmares. Of the "love" that had proven so weak it couldn't keep her there, couldn't make her fight for him. He thought of his father's "love," a possessive, controlling force that sought to annihilate anything that didn't conform to its design—anything that smelled of her.

Kyle had the luxury of his belief. His family was a loud, messy, passionate organism. Their love was a noisy, observable fact, a social phenomenon Kyle could point to as evidence.

For Damien, love was the confounding variable. The bug in the code. The fatal vulnerability that, once exposed, gave others the power to leave—or worse, the power to remold you by force, to hollow you out and fill you with what they needed you to be.

He started the car. The engine purred to life, a smooth, efficient sound. Somewhere out there, Kyle was probably already tracking down Stan, his heart foolishly full of a hopeful, fragile emotion that Damien could only view as a profound and dangerous weakness.

He felt no jealousy. Only a vast, yawning disdain. And a tiny, almost imperceptible constriction in his chest that a less disciplined mind might have misinterpreted as loneliness—but which he instantly and correctly diagnosed as the minor annoyance of recalculating a now-incomplete dataset.

The world operated on logic, cause and effect. And Damien Thorn was not a romantic; he was the logician. And logicians do not believe in love. They believe in control.

They identify faulty variables, and they eliminate them.

-------

The Rolls-Royce Phantom moved through the city like a silent, black predator, its progress unnervingly smooth. Inside, the silence was a physical presence, thicker and more expensive than the wool-blend upholstery. Damien's father occupied the opposite seat, his attention ostensibly on a financial report glowing on his tablet, but every line of his body screamed of a fury so cold it had frozen into a state of permanent, ominous calm.

"The theatrics. The utterly pathetic spectacle of it," Mr. Thorn stated, not looking up. His voice was a low, precise instrument, each word chosen for maximum impact with minimal effort. "You have made this family a subject of gossip. Your adolescent petulance will have consequences. You wish to slum it with the common herd? Your wish is granted. You will learn what it truly means."

Damien kept his gaze fixed on the world passing by the tinted window—his world, or what was left of it. The cityscape looked different from behind glass this thick; it was a muted, silent film.

"Crestview was for young men who understand legacy and responsibility. South Park High..." He finally looked up, and his gaze was like being doused in ice water. "...is for those who understand neither. That is your new reality, effective Monday. Perhaps a taste of genuine mediocrity will teach you the value of the name you seem so determined to defile."

South Park High. The name itself was a vulgarity. It represented everything his world scorned: chaos, lack of ambition, a sprawling, uncurated mass of humanity. The punishment was elegant in its cruelty. It was designed to humiliate, to remind him of his place by casting him out of it.

On Monday, the reality was a sensory assault. The smell was the first thing that hit him—a cheap, astringent cleaner trying and failing to mask the scent of sweat, anxiety, and processed food. The sound was a constant, undifferentiated roar of voices, slamming metal, and shuffling feet. His custom-tailored suit was a flag of alienness in a sea of denim and faded band t-shirts. He was a specimen under a microscope, and the lens was grimy.

He moved through the days like an anthropologist studying a primitive, baffling culture. The boredom was a lead weight in his stomach. Until, during a mind-numbingly dull literature class, the universe—with its perverse sense of humor—intervened.

"Damien Thorn. And... Phillip Pirrip. Pip, is it?" The teacher's voice droned down the attendance list, arbitrarily pairing students for a project on Fitzgerald.

Damien's head lifted from where it had been resting on his hand. Pip. The name cut through the fog of ennui, bringing with it a sensory jolt: the acrid-sweet smell of cigarette smoke, the synthetic cherry taste of Coke, the feeling of cold night air on his skin.

His eyes found the source. Two rows ahead, a familiar figure seemed to shrink into itself at the sound of its own name. The same shock of pale, almost white-blond hair. The same fragile neck, the same shoulders perpetually hunched as if expecting a blow, swallowed by a worn black jacket. It was unmistakable.

The boy from the McDonald's parking lot. The boy with the shy, unpracticed kiss. The boy whose vulnerability had been a siren call in the darkness. The scared mouse now had a name. Pip.

Damien gathered his things and moved to the empty seat beside him with a sense of purpose he hadn't felt in weeks. The project was The Great Gatsby. The irony was almost too perfect—a treatise on the nouveau riche desperately buying their way into a world that would always see them as outsiders. He could have written the paper in his sleep.

"Fate appears to have a rather literal sense of humor," Damien murmured, his voice low enough to be a secret shared just between them.

Pip flinched, his slender fingers tightening convulsively around his pen. "I... I didn't know you went to school here." His voice was barely a whisper.

"A recent and... temporary relocation," Damien replied, his gaze sweeping over Pip's profile, noting the new pallor, the faint shadows under his eyes. "It seems we are to be collaborators on the great American novel."

Their study sessions in the library became a strange, intensified echo of their first meeting. The same charged tension, the same dance of approach and retreat, but now layered with a new intimacy. Damien knew the landscape. He knew the taste of Pip's mouth, the specific way his breath hitched at a certain touch.

And driven by an impulse far deeper and more possessive than any of his father's dictates, Damien began to orchestrate. It was as natural as breathing. He noted the absence of a lunch bag, the way Pip's Adam's apple would work nervously over an empty water bottle. On the second day, he arrived at their designated table with a turkey club sandwich, meticulously cut into triangles, and a bottle of pomegranate juice.

"Eat," he commanded, placing it before Pip without ceremony. "I can't concentrate with the sound of your stomach contracting."

Pip stared at the food as if it were a complex and possibly dangerous artifact. "I'm... not really hungry."

"Eat," Damien repeated, and the tone brooked no argument. It was not a suggestion; it was a directive.

Pip ate. Slowly, mechanically, but he consumed every bite. And a profound sense of satisfaction settled in Damien's chest. A problem identified. A solution implemented. A variable controlled.

He began to micromanage. He corrected the slump in Pip's posture ("You'll develop a spinal curvature."). He dictated the terms of their meetings ("Three-fifteen. Not three-twenty. Punctuality is a sign of respect."). He took Pip's written analysis and eviscerated it with a fountain pen filled with blood-red ink ("This is emotional claptrap. Analyze the symbolism, not your feelings about it.").

Pip, to Damien's endless fascination, didn't just acquiesce. He bloomed. Under the relentless, focused beam of Damien's attention, a faint flush returned to his wan cheeks. His eyes, once perpetually downcast in fear, began to seek Damien's, filled with a look of awed, absolute devotion that was like a drug to Damien. It was the unconditional surrender he had never received—not from the mother who chose escape, not from the father who demanded perfection, not from Kyle, who offered only intellectual rivalry.

Here was someone who required his direction. Someone he could shape, protect, and utterly own. Someone whose profound brokenness was an invitation to complete control.

His father's punishment—this exile to South Park High—had backfired spectacularly. Instead of a lesson in humility, it had delivered him a kingdom. A kingdom of one, perhaps, but its sole subject was perfectly, beautifully his.

And Damien discovered that the act of possessing Phillip Pirrip was the most potent intoxicant he had ever known. It was better than any academic accolade, more satisfying than his father's grudging approval, more real than any philosophical debate with Kyle.

It was pure, unadulterated power.

And he would never, ever relinquish it.

------

The days after his father's cold pronouncement of another transfer were a maelstrom inside Damien. The familiar, cold fury at his father's absolute control was a constant hum. The frustration of being a pawn moved across a board against his will was a bitter taste in his mouth. But overshadowing it all, burning brighter and hotter, was a renewed, razor-sharp possessiveness over Phillip. The meeting in the park had been a catalyst.

Seeing Pip there, so utterly shattered and exposed, needing him with a desperation that was both a weight and a potent elixir, had tapped into something dark and primal within Damien. He had made a promise. He had staked a claim. Pip was his. And what belonged to him, he protected. He managed. He controlled.

Their "relationship" intensified, becoming more clandestine, more charged. In their stolen moments, there was a new, almost cloying tenderness, but it was undercut by a toxicity that grew stronger every day. Damien's control became absolute. He dictated the timing and location of every furtive meeting (always isolated, always with multiple exit strategies pre-planned). He dictated Pip's wardrobe ("Wear the gray sweater. The blue one makes you look washed out."). He dictated, most especially, what Pip ate.

The food. It became an obsession.

Damien watched Pip eat with the focused intensity of a scientist observing a critical experiment. He noted the hesitant way Pip pushed food around his plate, the ease with which he claimed a lack of appetite, the fleeting look of guilty relief in his eyes when Damien—temporarily—let the matter drop. Damien knew these signs intimately. He had seen them before, in his mother during her final months in the house—the silent, terrified negotiations with her own reflection, the visceral fear of calories, the punishing self-discipline that was really just self-loathing in disguise.

One night, after leaving Pip at his back door with a brief, hard kiss that tasted of salt and cold night air, Damien didn't drive home. He navigated the familiar streets on autopilot, ending up at a scenic overlook that was deserted at this hour. He killed the engine, and the silence of the car was absolute. From the glove compartment, he retrieved a cut-crystal tumbler and a bottle of aged Macallan. The whiskey was smooth and expensive, and it burned with a clean, clarifying heat.

Each sip was an attempt to drown out the ghost of his mother, whose memory now seemed inextricably tangled with the image of Pip's fragile form.

She had been thin, too. Not just slim, but drawn, ethereal. He remembered finding her in the vast, cold kitchen late at night, the refrigerator door open, illuminating her in its stark white light. She would stand there, a spectral figure in a silk robe, staring at the contents with a look of both longing and sheer terror. Just like Pip.

"Not hungry, my love," she'd whisper, closing the door with a quiet, final click, her decision made. "Just getting some ice."

Damien took a long, deep swallow from the glass. The alcohol didn't silence the thoughts; it just gave them a softer, blurrier edge, making them easier to examine from a distance.

Pip was different, though. His mother's thinness had been a form of armor, a desperate attempt to meet an impossible standard, to become something her husband's world would approve of. Pip's... Pip's thinness was a surrender. A white flag. It was as if he believed that if he could make himself small enough, quiet enough, insubstantial enough, he might simply cease to be a target for the world's cruelty. He was trying to erase himself.

And the most horrifying, thrilling part? The part that made the whiskey taste like ash and guilt on his tongue? Was that he, Damien, reveled in it. Pip's profound fragility was what made him utterly ownable. His sickness was the chain that bound him to Damien, ensuring his dependence, his loyalty. As Pip dwindled, Damien's power over him expanded, becoming more absolute.

He drained his glass, picturing the delicate architecture of Pip's collarbones under his fingertips, the individual vertebrae he could trace through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. It was terrifying. It was wrong. And it was his. Completely.

His father wanted to tear this away. To pluck him from this school, from this town, from the intricate life he was building around the axis of Pip. It was an unacceptable disruption.

The whiskey fueled a darker spiral. His mother had been taken. His father was trying to take Pip. Everything he fixated on, everything he needed to anchor himself, was systematically removed. No. Not this. Not again.

He fumbled for his phone, the screen's glow a cold moon in the dark car. His thumb hovered over the keys.

To: Pip
22:47 -> His plans are irrelevant. Wherever I am, you are mine. Never forget that. No one sees you like I do. No one understands what you are. Drink a full glass of milk. You need the calcium for your bones. Do not make me ask you again.

He stabbed the send button. The message was a twisted knot of possession and a perverted form of care, a threat wrapped in the language of concern. It was precisely the kind of message Pip would interpret as love. It was the kind of message that would bind him tighter.

Damien tossed the empty bottle into the footwell of the passenger seat. His head throbbed, but his mind was preternaturally clear. His father's plan would be circumvented. He would be moved, perhaps. But Pip would remain his creature. He would find a way. He always did.

He looked out at the city sprawled below, a galaxy of lights—the same lights Pip saw from his small, shabby bedroom. Somewhere down there, Pip was reading his words, his thin fingers tracing the screen, a confusing mix of fear and comfort twisting in his stomach.

And Damien smiled, a hollow, terrible smile in the darkness. He owned that boy. Heart, mind, and brittle body. And in a world that constantly sought to strip him of everything, this absolute possession was the only thing that felt real.

Even if the price was the ruin of them both.

--------

The morning light didn't so much enter Damien's room as it invaded, a hostile force slicing through the gap in the heavy drapes and landing directly on his skull with the force of a physical blow. Each heartbeat was a dull, punishing thud behind his eyes, a physical hangover that was merely the crude echo of a far more profound emotional one.

He didn't remember finishing the bottle. He remembered the taste of peat smoke and a deep, cellular despair. He remembered the texts to Pip—those stark, controlling messages that now, in the unforgiving clarity of day, seemed not like exertions of power, but like the pathetic, desperate scrabblings of a child. He remembered, with a lurch of his stomach, driving to Pip's street and sitting there in the idling car for twenty minutes, staring up at the dark window of his room like some common voyeur, wondering if he was asleep, or crying, or simply lying there in the dark, thinking of him.

Now, lying in the expansive emptiness of his canopied bed, he felt the silence of the mansion pressing down on him. It was a different silence than before. It wasn't the silence of order. It was the silence of absence. The permanent absence of his mother. The looming, temporary absence of Pip. The absence of anything resembling warmth or unpredictability, replaced only by the crushing, omnipresent weight of his father's expectations.

He rolled over, burying his face in the goose-down pillow that smelled of a lavender linen spray he detested. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that only made it worse. The darkness behind his lids became a screen for a relentless slideshow.

Bones.

He was seven years old. He'd found the skeleton of a small bird in the manicured hedges of the garden. He remembered crouching down, fascinated, carefully picking up the delicate, light-as-air structure. He remembered the awe he felt at its perfection, and the simultaneous, chilling understanding of how easily it could be crushed to powder in his small hand.

Now, in his mind's eye, those tiny, white bones seamlessly transformed into Pip's.

He saw the sharp, elegant line of Pip's clavicle, pushing against skin that was too pale, too thin, like parchment stretched over a fine frame. He saw the stark outline of his hip bones, two sharp crests rising from the flat plane of his stomach, visible even through layers of clothing. He saw his wrists, so slender that Damien's fingers could encircle them completely, his thumb and middle finger meeting with ease—a silent, morbid measurement he found himself performing constantly in his mind, a gauge of Pip's fragility.

It was wrong. He knew it was morally, ethically wrong. He knew the appropriate response should be concern, alarm, a desperate urge to fix this, to nourish and strengthen. But what rose in him, from some deep, shameful place the whiskey had unearthed, was a sense of profound, terrifying possession. Pip's extreme fragility was the ultimate testament to his control. Every protruding bone was a monument to his influence—or a stark reminder of his failure to exert it completely. It was a paradox that tormented him. He wanted Pip to eat, to be strong, to be healthy... and yet, Pip's weakness was the very thing that made him so utterly dependent, so perfectly his. If Pip were strong, if he were whole and independent, if he didn't need Damien to remind him to exist... what purpose would Damien serve?

The ghost of his mother haunted these thoughts. She had been thin at the end, too. But her thinness had been a kind of fierce, tragic armor, a bid for a perfection that would finally win approval. Pip's thinness was a surrender. A disappearance. It was an offering of his very substance.

Damien shoved himself out of bed too quickly, and the room tilted violently. He stumbled into the marble en suite and vomited into the gold-leafed toilet, a painful convulsion that brought up mostly burning acid and the ghost of expensive whiskey. His hands shook as he braced himself against the icy marble of the sink.

He forced himself to look up into the mirror. The face that stared back was pale, eyes bloodshot, hair disheveled. The perfect heir. The profound disappointment.

He is ill, a small, sane voice whispered from the depths of his hangover. He has a sickness, and you are using it as a leash. You are his illness.

He is mine, another voice, stronger, darker, and far more compelling, roared back. And I take care of what is mine. I decide what is best. In my way.

The memory of last night's text returned to him: "Drink a full glass of milk. You need the calcium for your bones. Do not make me ask you again."

It had not been a suggestion. It had been a command disguised as benevolence, a threat veiled in concern. It was the exact same cadence, the same psychological architecture, his father used. "Your behavior is unacceptable. Do not force me to take corrective measures."

The realization hit him with a fresh wave of nausea—this one born of pure horror, untouched by alcohol. He was replicating his father's patterns. He was becoming the very thing he loathed. He was using the same tools of control, the same emotional manipulation.

He splashed cold water on his face, the droplets running down his neck like the tears he was incapable of shedding. The plan was in motion. He would be removed from South Park High. He would be torn away from Pip.

What would happen then? Without his directives, without his constant, demanding presence, without the twisted framework of "care" he provided, what would become of Pip? Would he simply unravel completely, like a knot coming undone?

The image of the bird's skeleton returned, scattered across the manicured lawn, forgotten, being ground into the dirt under the careless foot of a gardener.

Damien leaned his forehead against the cold, mirror, the water soaking into his shirt. He had to find a way. He had to maintain his control, even from a distance. He had to ensure that Pip didn't disintegrate without him.

It was a selfish, monstrous thought.
It was the only thought he had.
Because the alternative—the idea of Pip learning to live without him, of Pip being saved by someone else, of Pip being fixed by anyone but him—was utterly, completely unacceptable.

If Pip were to be made whole, it would be Damien who did it. On his own terms. In his own time.

Until then, the bones would have to wait.

Notes:

Damien, it's so difficult to think from his point of view. Thank you for reading
REVISED

Notes:

the next chapter coming out Wednesday or Thursday. Thank you for reading!

REVISED

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Dip in english