Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s been two weeks since the last time Pico spoke to Keith. Since the last time he even thought of that stupid blue-haired bucket-headed bitch.

(Because he knows that if he stops and thinks about it for a second, he’ll break.)

This way, he can at least pretend to be over it. He can pretend that waking up alone every morning doesn’t make him sick, he can pretend that his heart doesn’t race every time someone mentions that new bitch he’s been replaced with, how he fights for her. He can pretend that his gun hasn’t been looking an awful lot like a way out recently.

He knew it was coming. That’s the worst part. Keith moved on before it was even over, leaving him in pieces without a second thought. It makes him wonder, really, if they even would’ve broken up if he hadn’t asked him about it. If he would’ve just carried on being cold, being with her, texting her about how stupid and clingy his little boyfriend was. Wonders how long it would've taken him to connect the dots. He takes a walk to clear his head, which is really just another excuse to walk down to the liquor store down on the westside. Drinking is the only way to get himself to some semblance of peace nowadays, and he’s not proud of that. Five years sober, gone. He got sober for Keith, wasted his time getting clean and working on himself and ignoring his own friends and his own life and his own needs, all for nothing. He balls his fists as his sneakers thunk against the pavement. It’s ridiculous. This is what he gets for getting attached.

“You’re acting different, and you think I can’t see it,” He shouts, knuckles white with the effort it takes not to just punch him. The way Keith looks at him, that cold, unfeeling glare, it shoots a visceral pain through his chest, worse than a thousand bullets could ever feel.

“I met a girl, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?”

His heart stops, chest tightening in shock. A girl? He met a girl, so what? He doesn’t love him anymore?

“You- What?” He stammers, gagging on his own words, stomach in knots as Keith rolls his eyes once again.

“I was at a bar, doing promo stuff, and- She was pretty, okay? She was- is- one of the most beautiful women i’ve ever met.”

Pico really does throw a punch then, his fist slamming right into the drywall beside him.

“You’re fucking kidding, right? Right? You cheated on me?!” He screams, the other man flinching from across the room.

“I didn’t cheat! I gave her my number, and we’ve been talking, but I never cheated-”

“You gave a woman your number, you’ve been talking- You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” Pico hisses, tears filling his eyes and he pulls his bleeding hand from the hole in the wall. He hasn’t done something like that in years. He hasn’t even threatened violence, not even as a joke.

“Baby, please just calm down-”

“Calm down? You want me to calm down?!” 

He doesn’t even feel bad about it. He’s over there making excuses for himself, like he’s not the bad guy- why should Pico have to be calm?
“

I’m leaving,” He huffs, storming away. Keith, in a panic, runs after him, grabbing his wrist tight, pulling him back.
“Baby, please wait- I’m sorry, I’m seriously so sorry-”

“You’re not fucking sorry, ” he snarls, snapping his hand out of Keith’s grip with arguably too much force. His head is spinning as he screams, tears beginning to stream down his face.

“You’re just sorry that you got caught! If you cared, you wouldn’t have done it at all. You wouldn’t have talked to her! You don’t- You don’t care!”
He sobs, covering his face with his hands as he bawls. He shoves Keith away when he tries to comfort him, so forcefully that he nearly sends him to the floor.
“You don’t get to tell me to calm down, you don’t get to pretend, you don’t get to act like you care!”

Keith looks like a wounded puppy when Pico meets his eyes again, all watery and withdrawn when he opens his stupid mouth to argue.

“I wanted to tell you, okay? I wanted you to meet her, to be friends, like adults! But I knew you would freak out!”

“So you just didn’t tell me? Like that makes it better!?”

He’s so dangerously close to making it physical at that, but he can’t go to jail again. He was doing so good, everything was so good. ‘Like adults’, he says. Ugh.

“You shouldn’t even be looking at other bitches, and you thought it was a-okay to go and give out your number like it’s candy? I should fucking kill you!”
His voice is shaky and loud and venomous, hands white-knuckling at his sides, struggling every second to keep them to himself.

“So I'm not allowed to make friends? Are you that paranoid?” Keith retorts, expression turning from sadness to anger on a dime. Paranoid. It echoes around his head, bounces off the walls around him, sticks deep into his heart like a thousand daggers.

“You’re not ‘allowed’ to keep secrets. You’re not allowed to treat me like I ’m being unreasonable when you won’t communicate!”

He needs to get out of this situation before he runs out of willpower, runs out of the strength to stay calm. But deep in his chest, he knows this can’t be it. He can’t just be talking to a girl. That little (paranoid) voice in the back of his head screams at him, harsh and grating and louder than his reason.

“Why can’t you just trust me, Pico? What did I do to break your trust?”

“Show me your phone,” He sharply spits out, halfway to dodge the question and halfway out of desperation. Because deep down, he’d truly prefer to believe his boyfriend- but god, that torturous voice, he can’t leave it alone. The lack of medication in his system truly doesn’t help in this either. Fear and panic run rampant in his head, spiking his heart rate as Keith crosses his arms.

“Why should I have to? Why can’t you just believe me?”

‘ Because your word isn’t enough, because this has happened a million times before, because i can’t trust anyone, because my prescriptions keep getting denied, because I haven’t slept in days, because my friends don’t check in unless they think i’m dead, because i would be dead without you, please, keith, i would be dead without you-’

What he ends up with is “Because I don’t fucking trust you.”
(Which, yeah, works well enough.)

The silence in the apartment is drowning him, watching as Keith visibly struggles for another excuse. It says all he needs it to say. The way he glances around the room like he expects someone else to answer this for him, to solve the puzzle so he doesn’t have to. The way he starts sweating. The nervous shakes in his hands. The way he doesn’t look angry anymore, color draining from his face like a mouse in a glue trap, fighting to get away. Every second they spend in this limbo feels like an hour, breaking Pico just a little more with every passing moment. Disbelief turns to panic turns to anger and back again, an endless and inescapable ouroboros of emotion that he really just wants to run from, but he’s glued to the spot. 

There’s nowhere to run.

Keith holds his phone out with a pale, shaky hand. Time stops. Pico can’t feel anything other than the painful hammering of his heart in his chest. 

The liquor store is empty. Thank God for that, if he’s up there. He’s too deep in his head already, he can hardly muster a  ‘you too’ when the cashier tells him to have a nice day. He laughs it off when the same cashier asks him if he’s doing alright. Feels it in his chest when they mention that he’s been dropping crazy amounts of money on hard liquor for the past two weeks, and that they see that a lot, but it’s still concerning. He shakes his head and tells them that it’s none of their business. It really isn’t, but he still feels guilty about how sharp it comes out. At least someone out here cares about him. They ask if everything is okay at home. He tells them to fuck off. He doesn’t care enough to apologize for it. He’s here for alcohol, not a therapy session (not that he’s been going to many of those recently anyways, what’s the point?). They say sorry in a meek voice that almost makes him say it back. Luckily, he already had one foot out the door by then. 

Broken glass litters the hardwood floor. Some of it digs into the rubber soles of his sneakers as he brings his foot down onto the tiny former-Iphone, meshing it into the floorboards and reducing it to a perfect picture of how his brain feels. Keith makes no moves to stop him, says nothing. He just stands there, shocked, silent, stupid. Stupid stupid stupid- there are tears coming down his face by the 15th stomp he lands. He can’t even feel it. He can’t feel anything. 

He walks himself all the way down to their apartment complex before he realizes where he’s going. Stares emptily at the front door. Kicks a rock at the front steps, an empty and painless gesture of spite-less aggression. 

‘Extreme mood swings, sudden outbursts; typical symptoms’, his brain mumbles to him, heartless. Another reminder that he’s sick. Whatever.

The next thing he remembers is Keith leaving.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” he had screamed, “Come back and i’ll fucking shoot you!”

Empty threats. He couldn't do that if he wanted to. The safety would always click at the last second, no matter how hard he tried to stop it. His things ended up thrown out onto the sidewalk out front, or in various states of disrepair. So many bullets ended up lodged into picture frames, clothes burned, valuables smashed. But even as he was all but thrown out, Keith couldn’t help but hesitate. They had fought before. Pico had told him to leave before. You can’t date for five years without fighting at least once. But it had never happened like this. They had never screamed like this, never caused a scene, never made threats. He’s never felt unsafe. Then, Pico had never been unmedicated before, and Keith had never cheated.

It was cheating. The nudes from her confirmed that enough.

The story gets all tangled in his mind, skipping and burning and sputtering out like a shitty VHS tape.

He can’t be alone anymore. He’s close enough to the subway to head down south, setting a destination in his head and working out a mental map  before he drinks his brain cells away. 

Norristown high speed line, then take the Market Frankfort line to the broad street line… Walk to Eastwick from the station while he can still move his legs.

He hopes that her apartment building doesn’t still have him blacklisted.

to be continued....

Chapter Text

Turns out, the Eastwick Central Apartment Complex does have him blacklisted. However, Pico is two entire bottles of tequila deep at this point, (they wouldn’t let him bring them both on the train), and that’s really not such an issue for him.

Nene moved to the south-side after the shooting in senior year, taking two years off with her complimentary high school diploma before shipping off to the University Of Philadelphia, working tirelessly for her psychology PHD in spite of her lack of funds and the issues caused by everything. In many ways, he wishes he was as strong as Nene. He wishes he kept fighting after senior year. He often wonders what it could’ve been like, going off to college with her, finding his own strengths aside from violence, instead of being locked in psych for half a year and being put through counseling hell. He blames the state more than he blames anyone else. Hell, he blames Cassandra more than anyone else....

He sets to scaling the side of the building before he can have another flashback, grabbing at the thick vines of ivy that sprawl out across the side of the building.  

She lives on the third floor, if he recalls correctly, so he stops at the third window he finds. He almost loses his balance as he presses and knocks at the glass, searching for any movement on the inside or give on the outside. He finds neither. The curtains are shut anyway. Oh well… desperate times, desperate measures… he pulls his MAC-10 from the holster on his thigh, popping a cap in the approximate location of the window’s lock. If the sudden budging and sliding-open of the window is anything to go on, he succeeded. Clumsily, he pulls himself through, tumbling to the hard wooden floors with an audible thunk. The sudden dizziness swirling in his head prevents him from making an attempt at standing, taking in the dimly lit room the best he can through bleary eyes.

It’s… so pink. He knows he must be in the right place, because the bedroom looks like it belongs to a nine-year-old girl. Posters and trinkets line the walls, shelves of books and a cluttered desk taking up most of the space beside him. The door seems to be at the other end of the room, a mostly empty wall behind him, and across from him, the bed. He watches as the dark mass of blankets and hair he finds there snores softly, shoulders rising and falling peacefully. He doesn’t know how she managed to sleep through him shooting her window open, but he supposes that most people aren’t as easily triggered as him. She’s always been a heavy sleeper anyways, as far as he can remember. He watches her in silence for a few more minutes, curbing the dizziness and nausea rising in his stomach enough to pull himself up to his feet. It only takes another few seconds before he’s falling again, this time directly onto her bed.

Now she snaps awake. More specifically, she shoots up  as she wakes, screaming bloody murder, like he shot her or something. But her shrill screams scare him more than they hurt his head, so he puts his hands up instinctively.

“Nay, Nay, Chill! It’s- It’s Pico! It’s me!!” He shouts, which does nothing to stop her from yelling, just changes the reasoning from fear to anger.

“How the fuck did you get in here?!” She screeches, and he quietly points across the room.

“Window.”

She glances over to where he’s pointing, spotting the broken lock and tightening her hands around the sheets to prevent herself from knocking him out cold. 

“You broke my window ?” She hisses, and stupidly, he giggles.

“No, silly,” He laughs, completely oblivious to the rage seething from her.

“I shot the lock . The window , that’s fine.”

It’s actually kind of astounding, how he managed to break the lock from the inside without damaging the outside ….. It almost fascinates her more than it pisses her off. Almost. He’s not lucky enough for her to forget about it.

“You’re paying for that.”

“I can’t… spent all my money on tequila.”  

The frustration eases from her face as the weight of that statement hits her. Obviously she could smell it on him, and he wouldn’t just show up at her apartment in the middle of the night for no reason; she just didn’t connect those dots until he did. He wouldn’t break his sobriety for nothing. Worry fills her freshly awakened mind as he idly fidgets with the corner of her comforter, pinching the soft fabric between his fingers, self-soothing.

“Is there… a reason for that?” She asks softly, trying her best to word it right. It doesn’t really seem like he cares about her wording right now, though, much more interested in the intricate textures of her sheets. He hardly even noticed that she asked him something until he glanced up at her, words clicking with the worried, waiting look in her eyes. 

“Oh, yeah… Funny story, really, uh… Keith cheated on me.”

He says it so casually, like it hasn’t been literally destroying him from the inside out for the last two weeks. Like it doesn’t even matter. Nene aches to tell him ‘I told you so’ , but she holds it in. He doesn’t need to hear that now, not when he’s like this. More so than the sweet satisfaction of being right, rage takes over her mind, gritting her razor-sharp teeth so she doesn’t flip out and go looking for that fucker right now. She still has class in the morning, after all.

“You don’t say…”

“I do say, though… Cuz it did happen.”

Oh right. He’s stupid when he’s wasted. How could she forget? 

So she nods, solemnly, and looks over him like he’s a pitiful little abandoned kitten, all alone in the rain, all scraggly and damp and flea-ridden. (He sort of fits that bill, minus the fleas.)

She can tell that he’s thinking about him, behind that disconnected smile on his face. His eyebrows carry this sort of storm-cloud tension- something that could break into violent thunderstorms, sobbing and kicking and itching to cause pain to anyone around him, flashes of volatile lightning. But that absence in his eyes very well could break into something much more somber, the heavy winds just before it begins to snow, a quiet and self-contained kind of hurt that could harm him even more. She’s seen both storms weather his frail frame before, and this definitely won't be the last time that she has to play meteorologist with him. She doesn’t miss the bruises that linger on his knuckles, the deep purples that linger beneath his eyes, the way he avoids looking at her because he can read her mind just as well as she reads his when they’re this close. Because they’ve got some kind of crazy stupid twin ESP shit going on, and they really always have. They never had to talk, after the incident. She always just knew what he needed, what he wanted to talk about, where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do, better than he did sometimes.

He’s got a lot of messy stuff on his mind, a lot to sort through, but one thing is clear: someone has to die about it.

That’s less her psychic-ness, though, and more her natural human conscious (and her frightening homicidal ideation).

Someone hurt her friend, hurt him deep, and that someone will have to hurt ten times more before it’s right again.

She has half a mind to tell him this, but his eyes are already slipping shut as he inches up the twin-sized mattress, curling up beside her.

“You haven’t slept since it happened, huh?” She whispers, and he nods softly.

Sympathy overtakes her, holding out her arms, an open invitation as she lays back down. He takes the opportunity eagerly, snuggling comfortably into her warm embrace. It’s almost funny, the way this would feel awkward with any other man. But Pico is drunk, and he’s going through it, and he’s just different, okay? It’s different when it’s him.

“I will make him hurt for this, sunshine, you know that?” She murmurs, staring sharply into the ceiling tiles above her. She cards her fingers through his soft orange locks without a second thought to it, and he leans into her hand, the physical intimacy of it lulling him right to sleep.

“You and me both, sister,” he whispers back, before falling into the deepest sleep he’s managed in the last 6 years.

Chapter Text

The room is much darker than he remembers it being. In fact, it doesn’t really look like the room he fell asleep in, the pink-tinted walls seeming to turn a deep red as his eyes open. Shadows crawl from the edges of his vision, floorboards creaking quietly as something, someone, draws closer. The figure has no need to introduce itself, placing its shocking cold hands down on his shoulders and pulling him close. The touch feels like hell, sending shivers down his spine, his entire body shaking as the shadow swallows him up. He can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t fight it. The later stages of panic set into his nervous system, the deep pit that forms in your stomach when you know that you’re about to meet your end. Don’t they say that if you hit the ground while falling in your dreams, you die in real life? He doesn’t think he fears death, not anymore. Death feels like a warm and welcome thing from where he’s laying, wrapped in the cool and suffocating tendrils of something he loved and lost. It whispers to him in words that only he can understand, things that won’t stick with him when he wakes up. Nothing ever sticks with him when he wakes up. Not even the important things. The lucidity and sharpness of the dream stakes no claim on clinging to the information given to him. None of it is real, after all. 

None of this is real. 

The pounding in his head is what wakes him, not the residual fear the dreams would usually leave him with. He’s past the point of fearing them. He can just barely get his eyes open enough to remember where he is, who he’s with. The sun gleams violently off the light pink walls, confirming that where he fell asleep is the same place he lays now. Confirming that it was all a dream, no matter how vivid it was. Some part of his brain will always crave that soothing information, even if he truly doesn’t need it anymore. He snaps his eyes back shut as soon as he can, the heavy feeling of regret filling his chest as the room spins around him. He curls into himself, a tight little ball of emotional pain and hangover symptoms, just like he’s been doing nearly every morning for the last 2 weeks.
The bed is startlingly cold and empty when he stretches his hand out to check, alarming him more than it probably should. He’s used to waking up alone, but he swears there was someone there when he fell asleep. Maybe it was part of the dream… He sighs heavy as he considers it. Drunk hallucinations are a bitch. Maybe he did break into an empty apartment.
Just as he begins to think of what he might say in an apology note, a loud humming comes from the hall, rhythmic and sweet and doing nothing to aid his throbbing headache. He hears the door open, eyes still screwed shut, as the humming gets closer and closer.

“Hey, dickweed. You awake yet?”

He has never been more relieved to hear someone call him ‘dickweed’ in his life. 

“Hardly. Not even sure if I’m alive yet.”

She sighs softly, leaning on the edge of the bed. His entire body feels 10 degrees warmer in an instant, a welcome sensation as her weight dips the mattress.

“Well, my condolences if you decide to be dead… but there’s some pretty sick pancakes in the kitchen for your ghost to enjoy.” 

He shoots up at that, ignoring the way his entire body screams at him for it. 

Breakfast conversation is few and far between, and mostly exists in the way she looks at him. She sort of looks at him like he’s the breakfast, sipping her little cup of green tea like she does every morning, legs crossed.

“I canceled my first couple of classes, by the way. So you can stay until 11.”

He’s not entirely sure what time it is now, but he lacks the brain-mouth connection to ask, much more one-track focused on the food in front of him. She rolls her eyes before he makes any motion to convey this, ESP kicking in.

“It’s 9 now. No, you can’t go back to sleep, and if you start crying again, i will lovingly kick you to the goddamned curb.”

He chokes on his pancakes a little then, coughing stupidly as she sips her tea. He doesn’t even have an argument, because he would kick himself to the curb too, but still, he’s wounded.

“I’m offended, Nene!” 

“Mmmhm.”

“Hurt, Nene!”

She huffs in frustration, banging her fist dangerously against the hardwood table.

“Look, dude, I’m not just going to sit here and watch you tear yourself apart over some stupid man! And I can’t stand seeing you cry about it!"

Her voice hurts his head, wincing at the volume as he tries to contain his feelings on the matter. (He’d love to just say he had been joking and leave it at that, but we all know it goes deeper. Everything goes much much deeper.)

The words she’s hurling at him don’t exactly help either. Escalating the situation wouldn’t help anybody, especially not him, so he keeps his cool. Tries to, at least.

“What else am I supposed to do? Am I just supposed to get over it ?” 

She takes a sharp little breath, another sip of her tea. It had been so long since he had last had a breakup, she forgot how sensitive he gets about it. How bitchy he gets when it’s mentioned. It would be irritating if it was anyone else, but luckily he’s Pico, and she has a higher Pico tolerance than most people should. She pinches the bridge of her nose.

“There are other solutions. Better solutions,” She sighs, and it truly does nothing to make him any less offended.

“Oh? Like what? Enlighten me!” He huffs, his arms crossed tightly. Little does he know, she’s fully loaded with fucked up little fantasies at all times. Little does he know that she stayed up quite late last night, staring up at the ceiling, thinking her dark thoughts. She clasps her hands, a dramatic shine in her eyes. He knows that smile all too well.

“I’m not going to kill him, Nene.”
Her smile drops.

“And why not?”

“Because I’m not going to fucking prison over this!” 

She rolls her eyes clearly not impressed with his answer. Still, there’s always a plan B in her head… and a plan C, and plan D, E, F, G, so on, et cetera.

“Do you know who he was cheating with?” She innocently asks, and he sighs yet again.

“I’m not killing his new girlfriend either!”

“UGHHH!!!! You’re no fucking fun anymore,” She scoffs, finishing up her tea and wandering off to the sink to wash the mug, leaving him to stew in silence.

She was right. God, is Nene ever wrong? He did want to kill someone. That itch in his brain would never be fully scratched, not until everyone on this earth was dead and buried. Or until he himself was. It’s not like he has any moral issue with killing Keith or this girl he’s with, it’s just… Fuck. He feels like it’s too dramatic. He’s too dramatic. That’s what started this in the first place, isn’t it? His own dramatics? That’s what made Keith sick of him. He didn’t even have to say it. If he kills anyone over this, it’ll just be further proof that not only is he overly emotional, but he’s also fucking insane about it. He’d rather just cut his losses and shoot himself.
He pushes his unfinished plate away from him, gathering up his gun and his phone.

“You’re leaving?” She asks, though she knows the answer already. He nods silently, and of course, she catches that look in his eyes. ESP. She shuts the sink off, dries off her hands, makes her way to him.

“Stay safe out there, sweetheart,” She mutters, taking him into her arms. He doesn’t reciprocate the gesture, just allows her to hold him. It’s nice, he guesses, to still be cared about.

“Cherry,” He says, quietly, into her shoulder.

“That’s the girl’s name. Cherry De’Mon.”

Nene perks up at that, recognizing the name almost instantly… Cherry. They had dated- dated, who was she kidding…. They fucked in high school. She still follows the girl on Instagram, she knows where she lives…

“....Dually noted.”

Chapter Text

hey, I really didn't want to do this but. to tell the truth everyone, I truly just can't finish this fic in good conscious.

as you may know, this fic was mostly based on a roleplay I did with my (at the time) girlfriend. she helped me with all the writing, beta read for me, and gave me inspiration to write it and finish it.
we broke up 2 months ago now. she was... not very nice to me, to say the least, and this fic is truly just one big reminder of that. I don't want to go into detail for fear of turning this into one of those stupid internet callout things, but suffice to say I have reasons for not wanting to interact with this anymore.

I'm likely going to orphan this too, so if you want to save it before it's off my profile, make sure you do that now.

I'm really sorry everyone :( I wanted to pull through and finish this for all of you, but I just. can't do it. not without hurting myself and my mental health.

thank you all for reading and enjoying the fic, and again, I'm so deeply sorry for not giving y'all the ending you deserve 3