Angel Eyes.

Tom’s shivering against the wall and his brain won’t tell his body to stop. He’s pressed silently against the oak of the doorframe, a clenched ball of bones fisted up against his lips as his personal quake continues to cause havoc. It’s sending out impulses of emotions his brain can’t fathom; his own personal seismometer is broken from the continuous stream of words and images cracking his skull. Over and over he lets the thoughts crash into his head, and he can’t stop them. His barriers are non existent, his dikes down and his walls unconstructed – but he’s determined to pull himself together, even if the string he’s tied with could snap at any moment.

He’s used to having to be the strong one, but never before has a weight crashed upon his shoulders with such shattering force. It fell from a dizzying height; Tom knew it was coming and he could see it cascade from the clouds – they all could – but there was no shelter to soften the blow. He was knocked flat on his back, air squashed from his lungs like a beaten accordion and ribcage splintered like loose piano keys, and he still hasn’t gotten up. He remains face down in the dirt, too powerless to even attempt recovery. It’s something he knows he has to do instead of dousing his fiery feelings with cheap beer and rotten cider, but he thinks he’s slipping under and he doesn’t know how to cry for help.

So he’s paused at the door, and he’s looking in on a stupidly bright room. The rays of light craft paths between the dust particles suspended in a peaceful equilibrium, bathing the whole studio in the afternoon sun that seems to wash away familiarity every time it comes around. He blinks, taking in the grey shapes formed when music stands and guitar necks and chair legs prevent buttercup beams from shining any further, as if he has never seen a shadow before. He takes a deep breath, closing his weighted lids over wooden eyes and feeling damp lashes come together, daring to take one step forward into the room.

By the wide window sits a figure, hunched over as if weights of solitude were strung about his collarbones. He faces out into the sun, back turned upon the rest of the room, including Tom. Loose, unkempt curls hang like wind chimes as the soft breeze that ventures in through the one opened pane dances with them round his neck and cheeks, and his forehead presses on the other half of the glass as if to try and catch as much light as it can. His hands are knotted together, the only part of his body to show any tension whatsoever, and as Tom slowly advances upon him, not one part of Dougie moves.

He’s been there for days, and if he sits there any longer Tom’s worried that he’ll fade away like a picture left in the light. The colours of his clothing will desaturate, dissolving into the air as he slumps at the light source, doing nothing. Occasionally, Tom will hear soft thunking notes of a bass guitar that’s not hooked to an amplifier to purify the sound; the lone tunes are desolate foundations of unwritten tragedies and woeful ballads. Shakespeare himself couldn’t tug at heartstrings the way Dougie does with actions Tom can only hear. But there always seems to be some unspoken symmetry between the pair of them – the former’s never happy when there’s no dimple upon Tom’s cheek and the other can never smile when Dougie is sad. And it just so happens that the past few weeks have seen no sunshine upon either face, both stricken with clouds and thunder instead.

The oldest of the pair wonders if the other is unaware of his presence, or is simply not choosing to acknowledge it. Should he clear his throat, choke out an attempt at Dougie’s name to get his attention? His cotton-clad feet make no sound on the fresh floor, treading softly on fibres of neutral carpet. He squints, the image his eyes depicting being a badly taken photograph, blurs of light and colour smudging across his senses even though the tears stopped some while ago. The straw-haired boy halts in the centre of the room as if a force field was preventing him going any further, and his figure sways like a punch bag in the wind. He’s beaten and broken and the bruises still remain, and no matter how many plasters he slaps over his skin, everybody can see straight through them.

“What’s the matter?”

The words pass over Dougie’s lips like a breeze over cracked land, the desert shattered into segments by neglect from the clouds. They themselves are just as broken; a hoarse verbal effort from a throat that’s sore due to lack of nutrition, lack of water. They raise the hairs on Tom’s arms like a magnet hovering over iron filings, and his lips part in surprise. The question is the first utterance to come from Dougie in weeks.

He takes a few steps forward, squinting in the harsh sunlight. He’s still presented with the whole of Dougie’s hunched back; the solid turquoise sweatshirt stares at him defiantly, daring him to come closer - and he complies. Within a few seconds he stands directly over the seated teenager, and he doesn’t know how to reply to his question. The answer’s drowned in the clogged emotion in his throat, bunging up at his epiglottis. He can’t tell whether the lack of a response is due to not knowing or not being able to speak, so he just sits down on the deep windowsill and looks at his lap.

But what can he say? He can’t offer that false promise to make it all better. He can’t say anything that will make the situation seem any brighter. He can’t tell him that he’s there for him, because honestly, as much as he would try to make it true, it would just seem fake. Tom hasn’t heard Dougie say anything this past month because he hasn’t been around to hear it. The only face he’s seen is his own, because between he and Dougie have been locked doors and thick floors and mirrors so deep he’s forgotten where to find himself in them. He became too tired and too cowardly to go and drag the torn up boy from the wastepaper basket where he still lies, because each time he drew near him Dougie would curl and crinkle even more.

“Tom?”

Tom still doesn’t know which construction of meaningless sounds to offer Dougie as he sits there, all golden waves and shining skin beneath the layers of matte clothing. He can barely see his face, but years of knowing each other have informed him that gemstones couldn’t match his splendour. Tom sits like a dull lump of coal next to a diamond that catches the light, being outshined and outsparkled in every way by this reluctant beauty who’s been plucked from the soil and thrust in full view for everyone to gaze upon. This light is his cave, the place he can hide away, where nobody can find him and nobody can touch him. Nobody even dared before today.

“Doug…” is the first shattered word, the opening to what Tom wants to be a confession, but he’s scared to make it so. “I – I don’t know where I went wrong, but I’m sorry.”

It was hard enough for them all to stay together when their household was flooded with either tears and screaming or sudden, sullen silences. At first Dougie coped using everyday life as a screen, propping it up for him and the others to lean on when it got too tough. Jokes and banter decorated early unmentioned pain and discomfort, but they soon wore thin as time passed. With each phone call and discreet outing the others got more suspicious, and that’s when the holes appeared. Rough, frayed strands of abnormality were easy to set on fire; intrusions caused arguments and arguments caused separation.

Tom remembers the first night in this new house he spent alone. Treading on oaken boards so as not to disturb the huddled jewel twisted in the sheets, he’d slid into the bed he’d come to call theirs and felt the cold that never normally cocooned him grasp at his limbs. Dougie twitched, awake and clutched to the edge of the mattress, as if there was no space of his behind him. The half-moon of his spine poked jaggedly through the sheets, and Tom saw the perfection in every vertebrae. The wide mirror that hung on the wall opposite was always there to offer an accurate picture of reality; Tom had gazed at both of them until his cheeks were almost as shiny as Dougie’s eyes and the pillow beneath his cheek was drenched with jealousy, gratitude and wonder. He still can’t believe how a lacklustre copper chunk like him ended up with the most beautiful golden coin in the land, crafted for someone richer and beauteous and deserving, Tom is sure – but as he stared into the mirror that night, he didn’t believe the sentiments reciprocated. For as he reached out to run a hand over the shadowed bones of his prize, one touch sent Dougie toppling out of view, shivering and shaking as he gathered himself up in a velvet bundle and hurried from the room, leaving Tom in darkness.

Right now, maybe Tom is lying a little. Maybe he knows exactly where he went wrong, but he wants the words to tumble from the lips of his lover instead of from the snarling voice of his own conscience. He knows it’d hurt more than the last few months, more than hidden appointments and hidden fears and hidden defects all scrambled together. He just wants Dougie to say it. I didn’t confide because you were never good enough. Tom refuses to believe Dougie could be shallow and cruel, but it’s the only answer his mind has been able to reach these days.

He didn’t know if they were more than just a quick fumble every couple of days, but even though he was unworthy to touch this ray of personified sunshine he wanted to claim Dougie as his own so badly. Somehow sleepless nights in separate beds turned into sleepless nights in the same bed; worry and band strain morphed into comforting whispers and hands in hair and cries that made the jagged points of the stars curl in on themselves. And they never spoke about it to anyone for weeks, not even each other, yet the mirror by Tom’s bed never lied in what it reflected and the objects in the bedroom could tell a thousand stories for them if anyone dared ask. This was their therapy, their method of release, until one day it all fell apart and it was no use to either of them.

“You never went wrong, Tom. I did.” Dougie whispers against the glass, still not turning his head. This isn’t what Tom expected to hear. Weeks of being shut up in their own separate universes has told him different.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Tom mumbles. “It’s not like you could have stopped –”

“It’s not about that,” is the porcelain reply. “I meant - I took myself away b-because I was scared.”

Scared? Of Tom? When has anybody felt such an emotion deserving mockery before? Dougie was never frightened to curl up in Tom’s embrace and whisper the words that haunted his happiness until the night was drained away. He’d confess those tragedies, laced with glitter despite the mood of their content, and then once they were out in the open they’d never be heard of again.

“What were you scared, of, Doug?”

There’s a long not-quite silence, during which clocks tick and birds sing their life away – all meaningless elements of the world compared to the boy sat in front of Tom.

“You’ve always managed to fix me before. But somehow I d-don’t think it was ever going to work, not this time. I couldn’t watch you t-try and patch me up, just for you to run out of thread and sink with me.”

The tears are falling from Tom’s shivering cheeks before the sentence is even complete. “How c-could you think that? I know I couldn’t have made it any better but you p-pushed us all into darkness, Doug, and I c-can’t take it anymore. You’re the only light I have, and no matter how you are I want to be there with you. Didn’t you see that f-from all those nights we spent together?”

“I - I’m selfish, I’m selfish, I know,” Dougie moans, his utterance adhered to his lips with the tears that lie upon them. “I – I just – the most beautiful thing in the world was being taken from me more and more with each passing day, and I couldn’t stand to watch it fade away. I thought it would be better to just cut it out completely.”

The feeble muscle under Tom’s ribs is working so hard that it’s tripping and stumbling over his breathing, leaving his sighs sore and broken. “W-what?”

And then Dougie finally turns away from the window, and for the first time in what seems like forever Tom’s greeted with the physical evidence of what this has all been born from. The sunlight can’t strike a lick of warm colour into those innocent features, those pale ghosts of pupils that once faced the world. Glazed over by opaque disease, Tom would both curse and kiss that pair of wide irises, for no matter how much pain they’re causing they still belong to the one true seraph he has in the world. That blank stare once held laughter and memories, love and lust, happiness and anxiety – and now, all that’s left is a useless gaze that lies victim to the world, the colour of the clouds upon which it’s owner was born. White, weak, innocent angel eyes.

“I didn’t want your face tainted with this – this horrid black blur,” Dougie cries, as the sunlight outside slowly becomes smothered with cloud. “Every day I’d w-wake up and there’d be more of you gone, lost to this sick, sick b-blindness that’s past its cure. I couldn’t – couldn’t take it! And knowing that you all felt sorry for me - it made it worse. I had to get away; I had to p-preserve you in my m-memory until you were totally out of reach, Tom…”

The sun and the moon could have collided in midair and Tom wouldn’t have cared. His whole world was shaking up, two massive hands tipping his cage and now he’s upside down and doesn’t know what to feel anymore. He reaches out and touches Dougie for the first time in what seems like eternity, tucking a never-fading curl behind his ear and torturing himself with the sensation of his fingers on Dougie’s face, feeling something far more exquisite than his own muddy features.

“Th-this makes no sense,” Tom stutters, cursing himself, because he’s meant to be the unbreakable one. “You can’t possibly think – I mean, me…”

“Your face is the thing I miss most,” Dougie replies in some sort of broken assertiveness, leaning closer as if trying to depict every line and shadow before him. “Don’t you ever – don’t think for once second that I don’t m-mean it. I never said it, I know… but you were always my saviour and I didn’t want such a fickle thing as mutual love to take that away. I thought that as soon as we became a functioning couple, it’d break somehow… you were always b-beautiful, and it broke me because I knew deep down you never believed it… I don’t deserve you, no matter what you think of me, and I hid away so that maybe I could part from your image more easily, and now… now I want it back so much it - it hurts.”

It’s an incoherent ramble of phrases, and even though Tom has no idea what sense this makes, his heart swells up dangerously.

“You can’t tell me you never deserved me…” he chokes. “No – no, you just – don’t do this to me…”

And even though those milky eyes can’t see Tom’s tears, he knows they’re whispering I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry a thousand times over. There’s a silk touch on his face, and painfully Tom closes his eyes as Dougie’s only method of sight left runs over his lips. Fingers trail round his chin, up the crook of his nose and over his eyebrows, collecting tears as they go.

“It’s totally gone, now,” Dougie whispers, his voice a little stronger as he runs the most feathery touch through Tom’s hair. “All I see is a blur of light and darkness, that’s why I’ve been sitting in the sun these past few days… but I can still picture your face. I’ll never let myself forget it, even if you forget me.”

“I won’t. I promise you that.” Tom whispers, knowing that even if he tried he couldn’t banish this heartbreakingly beautiful boy from his life. As he guides their lips in a meeting once, twice, three times before resting their foreheads together, he thinks to himself that even though it meant he could never lay eyes on this angel again, he’d give his sight to Dougie in an instant just as long as he got to keep him his arms for eternity. There’s a flutter of pride and recognition of worth in his chest, as what’s left of the light bounces off sunflower cheeks and a rose petal pout and those white dandelion-wisp eyes that just wait for the wind of the world to take Dougie somewhere new, where Tom knows he will be his ever-present guardian.