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The circles under Pete's eyes have been extra dark lately. His voice has been raw, his words clipped. He hides under his hoodies and scarves and blankets, small under the weight of them as the bus travels on. The pills in the bottles in his bag are untouched, caps screwed tightly on. Patrick is forced to slip them, one by one, into Pete's coffees and soups and foods that he refuses to eat.
The stretch of road seems to go on forever, nowhere to stop, no place but the too small bunks and cramped spaces filled with too many elbows and knees and mouths, all hot air and voices Patrick's getting sick of. He's been dreaming in nightmares, and his bruised eyes match Pete's, his sallow face akin to Andy and Joe's.
Sleep catches him night after night, no matter how hard he evades it, how many coffees he drinks, how many caffeine pills he pops. On the couch, in his bunk, on the floor, he loses the battle time and again, and the dreams come to suck out his insides, drain him worse than the time before.
They're filled with toxic greens and acidic yellows and pain in his chest where his heartbeat should be. The world spins and he falls into consciousness, eyes wide and breath short and mouth powdery. He tastes like Pete's pills inside.
The road stretches on.
Pete sleeps more than he's awake for a few days. It's rare and unusual, but Patrick lets it slide, slips Pete's pills into water bottles and feeds them to him in sips and kisses that hurt him all over. Pete clings on to him when he's awake, refuses to let him go when he's asleep. Patrick fights sleep with him, but still falls victim, slumped against Pete's back.
The river is flowing, bubbling madly, reaching for him as he tries to leave. His hands are not his own, filled with vials and pills and syringes, his legs carrying him where they will, even as he screams for them to turn. The world ahead is dark, filled with places that are meant to hurt him, meant to tear him apart. There's a face in front of his, pulled too tight around too many teeth, eyes blank and dark and so, so afraid.
"I will be your downfall," he says, and Patrick can see Pete inside of him, screaming, screaming, screaming. He throws his pills and vials and syringes into his open arms.
"I was on my way down already."
There's a bottle of Ativan in Patrick's hand when he jerks awake, the pills scattered across the bunk, under the curve Pete's hip, stuck in the greasy clumps of his dirty hair. Patrick throws the bottle to the ground, sparks of putrid yellow behind his eyes, and breathes in claustrophobic air. His mouth feels too large across his face, fingers numb as he slides the pill on Pete's pillow past his open lips, onto his dry tongue.
Pete sleeps. The road stretches on.
Andy and Joe's voices are hushed in the front, and Patrick hasn't seen them in days, tucked away into the corner of Pete's bunk, stroking the dirty hair from his cold forehead, singing him lullabies until he feels sick with it. The hands on his thighs are limp, the breath on his bare stomach strained and uneven. Pete swallows every drink Patrick gives him, returns every hazy kiss. His eyes stay shut and his mouth stays open.
Patrick isn't sure of what he's dreaming, of when the world is his and when the world is not. It blurs and spins, nothing but neon heartache and teeth on his lips and the constant stench of chemicals raw on his skin. The curl of pain leaving through his chest, into his voice that booms like thunder over the sick, sick grasslands. The Pete that is not Pete at all sits at his feet and sobs, his mouth open for every pill Patrick, who is not Patrick at all, feeds him.
"You're killing me," Pete says as Patrick places something viciously blue on his tongue.
"I'm dying with you."
Pete's breathing on Patrick's stomach has stopped, the fall of his chest against Patrick's thighs still. Patrick slips an Ativan past his slack lips. Another. Another. They pile in his mouth, spill out as the bus jostles. Patrick places them back inside, one by one. When Pete doesn't swallow, he presses them in with his tongue, feels them dissolve in his mouth as he slips back to sleep.
"We can't leave again," Pete says, his sunken eyes dark and dead and foreign. Patrick presses a kiss to his stretched lower lip, shares the overflow of toxins in his body, and listens to the roar of the river below them. The world is toxic, but he contols the poisons.