There's a sound of breaking glass. And a boy pressed against him. The momentum with which Eddie always shoves him back falters. Stops completely.
Steve doesn't even touch the wall.
Eddie'd dropped the bottle. And his hands are on Steve's face, caressing, touching, feeling.
"Steve."
He doesn't move. Eddie does, though, pulling him into the hug of all hugs, his lithe body shuddering.
He remembers. Eddie remembers.
"You're okay." Eddie breathes. "It restarted. You're okay."
And then Steve's hugging him back. Clutching at Eddie's leather jacket, fingers digging in. Eddie's skin is warm beneath it. His pulse thrumming in his throat, a steady beat against the edge of Steve's nose.
she told me that her and her siblings used to tiptoe around the house listening intently to the tone of the floorboards, terrified of inciting my grandmothers furious rage
they'd whisper to eachother "is mum in a bad mood"
"i promised myself that my children would never say those words to eachother" she recollected, watching the stars as she puffed her cigarette
I nodded silently, it was rare that my mother was vulnerable in this way. I couldn't bring myself to point out the irony, it felt cruel. Her selective memory of my own childhood used to anger me, these days I understand.
I fall backwards ten years into the past. Huddling by my bedroom door with my brother, ears pressed to the crack. Waiting to hear those decisive footsteps, our little hearts thumping in our chests.
The idea of return is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.
— Hexagram #24 from the I Ching · Return · via Ask The Oracle
"What did it feel like?" Steve asks sometime later, a new day ahead of them both. "Dying, I mean. Being dead."
Eddie pauses, dog-earing the page on his book to look up at Steve. He places it down on the couch beside him, scooting closer to lean his head down against Steve's shoulder.
"Not sure I remember, really." Eddie says. "I think it was dark. Like a big void. I'd be there in the real world and something would hurt, hurt bad, and then it'd just...stop. It'd go dark, and then I'd be slamming you into the wall again."
Steve hums thoughtfully. He'd died a few times, too. But he'd mostly just gone to that in-between place as the loops started up again. "You think that's what waits for us?" Steve asks. "When we do die?"
Eddie's quiet, his hand finding Steve's and lacing their fingers together, bringing it to his lips to press a kiss to his knuckles. "I don't think so," Eddie says finally. "I don't think I was ever really dead."
excerpt from the last chapter of my newly completed fic, cyclical❤️
"Aerial photographer Colin Leonhardt photographed a circular rainbow while flying around a rain shower above Cottesloe Beach in western Australia in 2013. Birdseye View/Caters News Agency"
"The rare phenomenon of a circular rainbow can only be seen from the air, when the sun is shining from behind the observer through droplets of rain."
This was one of the prompts suggested to me by a friend when I was making the list, originally as "Ouroboros". Considered a few different approaches to it, settled on a day and night cycle.
There’s no spiritual bypass surgery to unclog the arteries of time; Trauma must be ventilated from the psyche the way a stuffy room requires a cool breeze.