A/N: there will be some harmful terminology in this chapter, if you are triggered I have a star at where you can skip it.

Matthew

I wonder how many shades of crimson rested on my tongue those days. If I tasted the remnant of blood on my throat from a hand grasping my tongue, silence. I spoke to the demon in my head, I laughed with sin, I danced with self-loathing.

People would stare at me more, eyes lingering over my iniquities. They could tell of the sins I had committed, what else was that tint in their iris.

Mal stopped bothering, so did Faye, so did James. Looks hovering in the humid air was supposed to satisfy their questions of why, my eyes sunken and tears dried.

I wondered what was wrong with me, why that aching guilt stopped me. Why I had to be born this way, if I fasted another day would it go away. Would I become normal like all the others?

Taste blueberries and wedding dresses, lust over women a decade older than me like the boys. Would I taste a chuckle of soft angelic, coke figures? Would I ever manage to marry a woman and fall for her, tell her that every star I kissed at her neck was God's promises of kids beautiful.

Could I just be normal.

No, I remember I fasted for a week. Until dizziness gripped my stomach but never as tight as that bible grasped between my knuckles.

"Matthew are you okay," brother sympathetic tones of fear grasped his tongue.

"Yes," my bed was so comfortable it felt like it could swallow me whole. I sat up in it this time, facing him.

"You look pale, your eyes are sunken. When was the last time you ate?" Three days ago but who was I to start telling the truth today.

"Yesterday night"

He looked me in my eyes, that usual jokester that coloured his iris purple left and was replaced by the darkness of his pupils. I swear the colour had drained from his face more so than mine. I swear he wanted to cry, to beg for be to unlock the four chambers of my heart and leave them at his fingertips.

Somewhere he could gaze at them with sympathy. I rather look at him and tell him.

"Is there anything else that you need?" He was still looking at me, attempting to read me but I was a canvas.

"No, but just know you can talk to me. I'm your brother."

"Okay," I rested my head back into those pillows. The ricochet of footsteps becoming silent is what left me in peace. Sometimes I wonder if he ever cried over me.

Sunday, I saw him sat further up his mother & father one side his sister the other. He would so often pluck back strands behind his ear, their colours shining so bright and yet all I saw was the dancing of sodom sat atop his head. I saw those tomato vines, the ink slowly spilling down his neck.

His letter was intact and yet I felt those words I wrote to him becoming blurred with sweat, blood and his tears.

"Hey sweetie how are you doing, you don't look too well," his mother was like chocolate-dipped strawberries, simple and yet so sweet.

"Yes, I'm just a bit ill" he was staring at me from across the cafe. He was talking to my brother and the twins but not twins. Two girls who had been in our church for years with barely a year age difference, and quite similar faces.

They went to different school to us, one a junior the other a senior.

"Ok, I pray you get better soon," I did two.

His eyes pierced the crowd between us, the congregation watered to him and I. My gaze seeking to go everywhere else, but as though a hand were at my neck, I looked at only him.

It was almost pitiful.

He saw through it so easily because he didn't differ. We were birds of a feather, no.

His eyes eventually locked with the older twin her curls pulled back her glasses suiting her medium brown tone. You wouldn't never thought her to be mixed, she took after her mother so much.

Monday, I showered that morning hardly. Rocks pulling my ankles to stay in bed, let it engulf me. Let the sheets I hadn't washed in almost a month smell like memories and taste like wet dog.

I stared out the car as those same places that I snapshot into my memory passed by. My mother asked a question I pretended as though it was my blasting earphones stopping her soothing voice from encompassing my heart.

That morning had gone as the weeks before had, Faye, staring at me wanting to approach but deciding not to. James pulling back blueberries at his tongue, smiling in the face of Faye she knew he was lying. She knew us better than she let on.

She cared too much to make us too uncomfortable, she thought things would pass as they usually did. She thought.

Lunch came around I walked toward the restroom, I tasted muck between my fingertips and axe in my pores.

A hand grasped at my wrist, I turned.

"Matthew" he looked me in my eyes. Had he been crying?

"What"

"Why are you avoiding me?"

He looked broken, I couldn't believe I did that to him. After all those kisses I left at his doorstep.

"What do mean?"

His soft now a glare, his grip tightened ever so slightly.

"You know what I mean"

"I've been avoiding you because," spit it out, maybe he'll forget us after " I'm not"

* "You're not what?" He knew what I was going to say, saddening forest skies painted the night of his irises.

"I'm not a faggot, I'm normal" maybe he would lose hope in that second. Maybe he would stop caring so that I could let go.

* I was wrong as tears gripped his iris, a single droplet falling before getting rubbed away until the very skin was bruising red. His grip faulted, loosening at the words I spat.

I hurt him, why did I hurt him.

"Then why did you do that me, hmm, no tell me" his hand was still wrapped around my wrist, he feared if he let go now that would be the last of us "Why did you kiss me every morning and tell my how beautiful I was to you, why did you ask to..."

He stopped himself barely as those last words he wanted to spit would be a grenade for the both of us. We were to at the very least to forget the time I painted burning cities on his neck and chest, the time I wove linen and silk between his limbs.

I couldn't respond because he was right, he knew I was lying but I had to make him forget me.

"Look at me and tell me that all those words, they were lies, look. At. Me."

I didn't look, I tasted shame in my inner cheek. Pulling back my own tears.

"You know what you're right, why should I bother with someone like you."

My breath hitched in my throat, water lamenting on the ground, regret.

"Look at me"

I did so, to feel a hand drift up my arm to my cheek. He leaned in before I could realise leaving a peck upon my lip, a farewell. Or better yet an Ode to crimson covered bodies and ink splattered walls.

He left my wrist to my side and turned on his heals, I missed staring at that. I watched him become distant in the hallway maybe I was forgetting he existed. Maybe not because stifled cries hit the four corners of a bathroom stall.

Chuckles of regret in my head, was I really disgusting for wanting to kiss him again. To make memories in sweat, laugher and Italian spices between those few atoms clutching him closer to me.

Maybe not, but that thing told me I was. It painted a new image in my head of those turning scowls, looks of disgusts as my parents caught us kissing. Caught us, or worse I told them they kicked, no they kick me out. He will one day forget me, I will have no family left.

What if he just wanted momentary satisfaction, what if one day I saw the gates of heaven shut before my eyes. What if one day he no longer tasted like cherries upon a basket of flowers, he would become like everyone else.

So why waste that energy, for all that pain in the end.

I didn't go to school the next day, nor the day after. It was Thursday, my room tasting of sweat, the scent of musty despair, those clothes and shoes and what else had been accumulating for weeks leaving me nearly no mobility. Well aside from that corner in which I rested my head and soulless body.

Why had I become so dependant on him, or was it rather the reality of those kisses I gave him being true. That I meant every word that I swore upon the holy bible with blood seeping down my lips that I would never utter to a boy.

That I would utter to the woman who I would love as much as she loved me and yet woman never tasted good between my teeth. Only he did, in that moment.

So I rested until I could forget because forgetting meant healing. It meant that one day after prayers, lies and the wrecking of art I would fall upon one knee and ask a woman of sensual morning kisses and blue lakes,

"Will you-"

"Matthew get up,"

I turned seeing my brother, what was that at the corner of his eye, looking down then across my room with disgust and hurt.

"Why"

"Your room's a mess, you haven't eaten in like a week and you probably smell like dead rat"

He wasn't all to wrong but I didn't want to listen, rather go into hibernation. Maybe sink somewhere where his kisses tasted sweet again.

"It doesn't matter"

I didn't know what I meant by that, was it my life that only mattered when I was to become normal or was it my hygiene tasting the flames of despair first.

He hugged me, a dead rat covered in a thick layer of oiled tears.

"What's going on with you, you can tell me anything"

I stayed silent as an arm wrapped around my waist and back over my duvet. He barely drags me up so that my back was to his chest, hugged me once more not seeing those tears.

It hurt. So much.

What was I to do but taste purple, within my floor that I couldn't see anymore and my body fermenting like cow dung? He left, sniffing his fear through a nostril, I was so lucky to have a brother who cared but what was care to the careless.

I just wanted to be normal.

And kiss him, normal.

I wanted him to love me, normal.