Separated.

“Love as long as you live, eh...” Cole muttered to himself. He was plopped on the floor, his head leaning against the wall. He looked up; his blue-green orbs lingered on whatever was above him - the sight of cobwebbed ceilings and dying lights? No, he was gazing beyond that; in his eyes was the world above, the way he pictured it.

‘Magical’? No, more like ‘unrealistic’.

He breathed another puff of his cigarette before spitting it out onto the cold, hard concrete. Crushing it as he stood, he walked out of the abandoned, empty room; flashbacks replaying in his mind as he left the building.

What was love, anyway?

Cole hid his face with his hoodie, quickening his pace down the pavement. This place was dangerous, this setting from his very own horror movie. He knew it all too well; every detail had been imprinted in his memories to last him a lifetime of fear and misery.

The people around him were freaks; their lecherous glares and cynical grins. They were horny, they wanted sex, and they didn’t care how they got it or who they traumatized in the process. They didn’t care who they killed in the process.

Kidnap. Rape. Murder.

They weren’t desperate; they were sadistic. They weren’t guilty; they were proud. They weren’t believers; they were sinners. They weren’t weird; they were plain-old sick.

They weren’t just despised; they were feared.

Cole’s apartment was a long walk away, but the security provided was worth it; he’d learned not to take risks like that from experience. He skillfully maneuvered his way down the street, careful not as to gain any pursuers, and managed to make it back to hishome house before it was too dark out.

Your home is where your heart is, someone had once told him.

Cole’s home was with him; the one who wasn’t with him right now. The one he’d bought that house with - that house Cole abandoned after his death, but visited every once in a while to clear his thoughts. The one who loved him; the one who protected him; the one who risked his life to save him.

If that was the case, his home must’ve been in heaven; or maybe even hell, for all he knew. After all, premarital sex and homosexuality were condemned somewhere in the Bible, right? Besides the rape he’d gone through, Cole and him had done it out of their own free will, so...

Cole shook the thought out of his head - thinking it over would be a waste of time. Whatever happened up there was not for him to know; not until he made it up there on his own - without the help of a blade, a tall building, a gun, a rope, a drug or a car.

He knew every suicidal method better than the back of his hand; how he could plan each and every step so perfectly that nothing could possibly go wrong. He could kill himself in any way he wanted to without fail; without having to accidentally survive it in the end.

But as much as it tempted him, and as much as he wanted to, he knew he couldn’t. He’d made a promise, after all. He knew the consequences, he knew the risk.

In some kind of weird commotion with suicide being a sin, he could end up lost from his lover forever. Unable to see him or touch him or hear his voice any last time; separated by the boundaries of heaven and hell - by that one little sin. If he let temptation get the best of him, he might never get to be with him again for an eternity, in the afterlife.

He was already going through so much - being destined to rot on this earth alone. Suicide would be an escape from the world that now meant nothing to him, but he knew that Kayden didn’t want that for him. He wanted Cole to live his life just like it was before; pleasant, peaceful... happy.

“Love as long as you live, eh...” Cole fingered at the scar on his arm he’d once made when he wasn’t thinking straight; when he was young, naive and lost.

“Wait for me, Kay,” he whispered, gazing up at the world above him; the way he liked to imagine it.

The world that could exist, if not anywhere else, in his dreams, at least.

His world.

Their world.

Where nothing could drift them apart.