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Sweat clings to a warm body. The body belongs to Simon, no matter how far his senses feel from the hands and arms, legs moving at trudging pace. He’s moving like he’s digging through snow and flitting around to muddled surroundings with eyes that have to be his, just aware enough to confuse mind-ridden dreams with reality.
Reality grabs him by the wrist and drags him through the opened door of an apartment on the second floor, sandwiched between the same shoddy one-bedroom apartments making up an entire complex. Encased within the room’s suffocating walls lies a destroyed interior. Broken shards of glass scatter around the floor, covering the blood spattered on the wood panels and leading up to messy streaks on drywall. Each step creaks loud, at least as much as his mind’s willing to convince him it is—regardless of the empty shell of its noise, the world simultaneously sits still and grasps at his ankles to pull him into a sinking, deep hole.
He could be running. From something, someone, it didn’t matter anymore. Simon’s had enough of unmoving things remaining behind metal poles or cornered-in alleyways or unintelligible corners of every room he walks into, but they could always be following him. He wouldn’t be shocked if he was escaping the hold of one of those things, unbeknownst to the rest of the world of their existence. In nightmares like these Simon’s like a drowning victim kicking to the surface of waters he found himself in from one second to the next, unsure of how he ever got there. Maybe he was searching. He must be, if he found himself here again.
His feet bring about the rest of the body through the door and moves his back to slam it shut behind him, a soundless click. What’s once a couch with scattered about snacks and controlled is now an overturned mess, cushions gutted of their insides and thrown about the floor like it was turned a feral animal’s entertainment.
His hands reach forward—too far to be a part of his own body, too close to belong to something else—on doorknobs. Searching for signs of life to quell the anxiety bursting out of his chest in heart palpitations. The open kitchen sits still, sink full to the brim with dishes and counters otherwise empty. The bedroom, a bed sitting without a mattress on the blood-smearing floor was empty. Simon continues to search and he’s not even sure why; sometimes he never finds anything. But there’s a faint scratching and knocking and pleading on the door and something’s begging to be let in, and he needs something. A weapon. A friend. Something to make sense of the turned-desolate streets of Stockholm he always finds himself in. Sweat clings to a warm body. It’s not his, because he can barely feel it, and this isn’t what it feels like to be real. His hands reach and touch and pull until they wrap around the doorknob of the bathroom door and open.
And then the world stops spinning, centering around the heart of the bathroom.
Simon clutches the edge of the doorframe and gives pause, eyes widening. He becomes the only witness to the sound of running water and the soft trickling of blood soaked water reaching his boots, trailing around them and escaping out of the bathroom into the house. A path of blood and water and musky dirt leads to decay. Inside the tub, water hugs around a corpse leaning against the edge and staring directly at him, barely concealed by hair falling just over the eyes. But he can see the fearfulness of it all, wide, a breathless carcass not ready to die yet. One arm hangs over the edge, holding the body above the water. He meets direct eye contact with David Leatherhoff.
David.
It’s David. Simon can feel the wobbling of his knees and the collapse to the ground. His mouth opens and moves but the words don’t really come out. David can’t hear them regardless.
A dull coldness touches his fingertips as he holds what he can of the body and pulls him closer. His throat doesn’t strain under the weight of wordless yelling, something about getting David to wake up, wake up, wake up. The body doesn’t move. He’s found what he was mindlessly looking for: blood’s drawn from the carcass out of aggressive wounds peaking out at him in shades of bright red. An ambulance siren sounds in the distance, or maybe it doesn’t, because he can barely hear it. If it’s that far, it’ll never reach him. His body tremors with the weight of a violent loss. Simon shares warmth with the freezing cold of David, slamming his eyes shut and returning to the void of empty, disjointed trains of thought until he shakes himself awake.
Between an aversion to anything vaguely threatening and a shaking terror for the uncanny, Simon has his fair share of nightmares. So it’s a familiar but unwelcoming feeling to wrench blankets from a sweaty-scared boy and hoist himself up into a sitting position, forcing himself to blink away bleary eyes and deny the fit of sleep any longer.
Usually, it takes more than that to wake himself up. Simon will close his eyes and scream at himself to get up and then he’ll be in another dream, a facade of his bedroom breaking into a thousand different scenarios, all ending awoken in just as much of a cold sweat as the last time he woke up. It’s this never-ending cycle that culminates in the rising sun when he actually stirs, and by then he’s called it a night.
He’s early tonight. The night continues on in pitch-black, the hum of ambience a threatening sound in the ears. It climbs into the eardrums and he swears it’s about to burst. Simon blinks, and he’s dragging himself over to the wall-mounted phone.
Fingers ghost over the worn-down numbers of the telephone, brain stumbling over its words and thoughts to make sense of the numbers, then pressing in a frantic motion. Simon leans against the wall on his side, looking down.
The phone rings in his ear, clutched by both hands. The first time it rings until it reaches voicemail, to which Simon immediately hangs up and calls again. This time, a satisfying click sounds, and the other end crackles to life. “Simon?”
Simon releases the bearings of a bated breath, “David, thank hell. Where—where are you, right now?”
He can hear David’s skepticism from the other end of the line. “In my apartment?”
“Just… watching something?” asks Simon, haphazardly covering up the anxious drop of weight he has to imagine now lies on David’s shoulders. A breathless little excuse was also known as an escape for David to crawl out of confrontation neither of them wanted. This isn’t the night to step around words that’ll buzz vulnerable emotions cold through the veins. He’s had enough of them for the night.
A shuffling. “Yeah, just watching…whatever’s on the TV, man. Are you good? What’d you steal?”
“What did I steal?”
“Sounds like you’ve been running a fuckin’ marathon. What, what’d you steal? Antidepressants?”
David doesn’t take the cop-out of the conversation. That’s new. “I wasn’t- stealing anything,” Simon defends, half-scoffing. His chest heaves with the panic and vents it out the longer he speaks. “God, fuck you, actually. Don’t even know why I’m checking in on you.”
“Checking in on me?” He can see David’s grin from here.
“You kn-know what I mean.” And he does, and that’s what he hates about things like this. It bears a little too close to the vulnerable side of things that they just can’t avoid no matter how long they’ve kept the silent-pact of turning a blind eye. Simon’s always the one drawing too close to the line for his own good, wings burning beneath a searing-cold sun, and David’s always the one that has to deal with it. There’s an unmatched sense of guilt there he’s not ready to take care of. “Seeing what you were doing. Why– aren’t you sleeping?”
David yawns through the phone. “Should be asking you that question.”
“I can’t sleep,” Simon fesses vaguely, covering up the uglier parts of the truth in a thin blanket. It’s better just to dodge the question, but he knows David by now. No use in a back-and-forth game they’re both too stubborn to truly win.
“You know I’m not stupid, ja ? Si, come on.” An uncomfortable beat of silence follows.
Simon hugs the phone and slumps against the wall. David’s given him a thousand chances to be half as open as he can get with Simon (though usually David gets it wrenched out of him, Simon just happens to be the more stubborn of the two) and he’s never budged. He doesn’t plan on it. One too many mistakes were made with Sophie, and he’s not interested in repeating history with David.
He doesn’t know what he’d do if he made the same mistake with David. Got too close to him.
He gives pause for a little too long, because David comes in to fill the silence. “You don’t have’ta answer, I was just asking.”
“Yeah, I know, I just.” Simon trails off again, swallows anything hard to stomach and bites back the taste of bile. “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”
The sound of the television cracks into David’s line, and then stops. Sounds like a videogame. He’s making himself busy. “As long as you’re okay.” Simon bites down on the back of his teeth.
“I am.” He’s gotten better at lying lately. “I wouldn’t be calling you of all people for help even if I wasn’t.”
“I don’t make a good therapist?”
“Hell no.” That’s David’s way of changing the topic to something lighter, a distraction for him. Simon slumps until he’s sitting against the wall and takes the phone with him, one hand curled around it and the other leaning against one propped up leg, wrist on the knee. Their conversations like this are few, but needed.
Usually, the exchange is missed calls with messy voicemails they don’t acknowledge in the morning. Mostly from David. There’s still a few sitting in his voicemail box he hasn’t deleted yet. It’s a type of choice of words from David that’s like reopening healed-over wounds. Not like Simon’s not familiar with that sensation, but he’s sure as hell not used to it. “Jesus christ, Simon, I’m getting dogged on at 2 in the morning.”
Right. David’s awake at this time, too. “Why the hell are you even awake?”
“My sleep schedule gets worse than this, don’t be surprised I’m up at only 2.”
Simon rolls his eyes. David can’t see it, but he swears it’s his intention to force a small frown-smile on his face, because suddenly it’s there and it doesn’t fade. “Since when?”
“Since fuckin’ forever.” He snorts. “You’re the only one that sleeps twelve hours a day.”
“Fuck off.” Simon breathes out, expelling the anxiety prickling through the system.
Despite the nature of their lopsided conversations, they’re good at reeling him back to, and this was a comforting reminder that David was still here. “Speaking of which,” He drawls. “I’m going to a basement concert tomorrow. You should come.”
The buzz of deafening life coupled with the sound of guitar hums in his ears. It’s not his favorite thing to do with his time. “Aaah, I don’t know.”
“Relax. We’d only be there for a few numbers.”
“Then what?”
“They’ve got food at the venue. Could grab some of that.”
David’s got a certain way of making otherwise miserable events sound slightly tempting. It’d also be nice to see him in person again, know he’s really there, satisfy the more paranoid crevices at the back of the mind. “I’ll think about it.”
The other man sighs. “Aw, come on. What else are you doing tomorrow?”
Sometimes he wonders if David invites him to events like these to get each other out of the house. It’s not surprising that Simon’s only gone out on the days he has to get his college campus; and even then the ones he actually manages to get out and attend class are sparse. “...Alright. Fine, I’ll go with you.”
“Awesome. Thanks, Si. I wasn’t going to go if you weren’t.”
Maybe Simon’s right. “You call me that so often I’m starting to think it’s my name.”
“Now I’m just going to start calling you by your last name.”
Simon huffs, “I’ll come over there.” David’s laugh comes through faintly on the phone, followed by this soft silence Simon indulges in for just a second. His eyes stay on the window in the kitchen, watching the pitch-darkness outside for any shifting. “...Um. Thanks for talking.”
“Anytime. Go get some actual sleep.”
“I might.” At least that’s the truth. “You should go get sleep, too.”
David snickers. “No promises, but I’ll try.”
Better than nothing, he almost says. He’s not sure why he doesn’t. “Goodnight, Vi.”
“Goodnight. See you tomorrow, alright? Call me if you need anything else.”
“Yeah, okay. See you tomorrow.” There’s a brief pause that almost begs for him to say something else, offer an explanation of sorts, but nothing comes out. Simon slowly raises the phone from his ear and hangs it up, and then silence fills the room once again.
He doesn’t think he’ll go back to bed. Now that his head’s wandering to the worst he’ll never be able to sleep peacefully, even if he was still tired as ever. Half-lidded eyes wander towards the cracks beneath doors and the windows and wonder if something’s after him, forcing him awake, things in the closet making him all too aware of eyes on him.
If nothing else, David’s alright. Simon doesn’t raise himself from his sitting position against the wall, sighing softly. Both legs curled up, his arms cross against his knees and he watches over the designs imprinted onto false wood beneath his feet. Nights like these are the coldest, the ache of an empty house crawling underneath his skin. The sweat against his body’s long gone, replaced by nothing. He’ll wait until tomorrow to feel slightly more whole and play the silent game with his only friend left. Keep your friends close and enemies closer; and nobody can be as close to Simon as he is to himself.