Work Text:
I think this is what it feels like when a thought finishes forming. It settles whole in the mind, no longer pulling at its edges. I’ve been chasing that sensation everywhere else for years; in cases, mysteries, problems and even people. None of it ever sticks. But you did.
The world has been thinning for a while. Voices shed their bodies, meanings detach from their language. What remains is attention. Mine, fixed on you, as it has been since the beginning. I pretend that attention is inert, and that it doesn’t carry any consequence, but it does. I’ve always known it does.
You look at me, and it’s like the world simplifies. I mistook that for boredom once. Easy mistake. It’s devotion, really. A narrow, perfect devotion. I built entire systems hoping you’d stand inside one long enough to notice me standing there too.
I’ve wondered whether this was always the inevitable destination of our story, or if we diverted this way ourselves. The question dissolves the moment I consider it. Cause and effect feel ornamental now. There is only the certainty that you are here, that I am here, and that the space between us is closing into something only we can grasp.
People think death is absence. It’s sweet, but utter rubbish. They think it erases you, but I’ve always known better. It concentrates you. Turns a person into nothing more than a statement. This is who they were, full stop. End of sentence. End of life. I want to be a sentence you can’t leave unfinished. I want you condemned to me, standing at the edge of it forever.
My thoughts keep circling a single point, the way a tongue worries at a broken tooth. I could frame this as necessity, or outcome, or anything removed enough to sound credible. Yet it comes down to something simpler. Too simple. I refuse a world where you don’t know exactly what I am.
I never wanted to win. Winning is for losers. It leaves a mess. The game is the real thrill, and I wanted an ending so complete that nothing could slip through. You understand that. Of course you do. That’s why this is ours.
A calm moves through me, one that doesn’t feel like the relief they always glamourise. All the parts of myself that argued once have gone quiet. I think of you and the silence deepens, becomes almost reverent. This is the nearest I’ve come to conviction. Devotion in death.
I used to think you’d resist. That you’d cling to the unfinished, to the habit of surviving. Watching you now, I see the truth more clearly. You’ve been ready much longer than I have. You were just waiting for someone brave enough to meet you here. Right here. On this roof.
I don’t consider the fall. I consider you. The way your eyes hold mine and reflect something back that I’ve never seen elsewhere. A self that makes sense. A self that no longer needs absolution.
This is intimacy. Synchrony. Two thoughts arriving at the same conclusion without exchanging a word.
Everything I am condenses around you. Memory has lost its sequence, and time has become but a singular surface left untouched by any actions. I am present in a way I have never managed before, as though my mind has finally abandoned all excess.
I take the final step inside myself and the sound follows, bright and delighted, a final cheer echoing in the hollow of my skull. I know you hear it exactly as I do.
There’s a moment where my thoughts open entirely. They contain only you. The pure fact of you. As you fall, I move with it. I let it take me to the edge.
He comes with me. Obviously.
We don’t separate, in departure nor arrival. Whatever this has been, whatever it becomes, it belongs to both of us. It is shared, and it always was.