Chapter Text
It was a chilly November day when Lukas saw the young man kill himself.
He didn’t know why he tried to stop him. In his opinion, the world was going to shit and it wasn’t like there was anything keeping him from doing the same thing except for his guilt, which was what made the whole thing confusing as hell.
Maybe it was how the guy, about the same age as himself, had spotted him staring.
How he turned his head and grinned, his bloodshot green eyes meeting his own.
He vaguely remembered diving forward, filled with a strange, unnameable urge, shouting “ WAIT!”
But then he stepped off the bridge.
Lukas gritted his teeth, turning around, not bothering to try and spot the aftermath. He’d tried the same thing a year ago.
Only to wake up in the hospital hours later with broken bones and water in his lungs, and the only person by his side to greet him being his only friend, a recovering drug addict, not his long-gone family.
The only person he was keeping himself alive for nowadays.
It was a big fucking joke, that’s what his existence was.
Growling in irritation, Lukas walked away, shoving his hands into his pockets and shuffling away. He wondered what kind of journal entry this would make.
Dear diary, today I saw a guy like me do something I’ve wanted to do for years, and failed at. I tried to stop him. I think he succeeded.
He sighed, trying to push his angry thoughts out of his mind as he put his headphones back on and scrolled through his music library, finally settling on a song and walking towards the bus stop.
Morning In America.
He mouthed the lyrics to himself, rubbing his left forearm, the one covered in countless scars. That song had been in his head for awhile. The song he’d listened to on repeat for weeks, at its loudest while his foster parents argued outside his bedroom, at its quietest when he laid in bed, trying to sleep. He’d woken up to that song, too, staring into the freezing and broken storm-blue eyes of his best friend. He remembered her angry sobbing and gripping his hand in her fist, mingling with the far-away strains of music from underneath a dense layer of dull aching, painkillers, and delirium.
It wasn’t like Petra didn’t hate everything any less than he did.
He was still around because she was in a worse situation than he was.
With a sigh, Lukas boarded the bus, the final chords of the song fading away, followed by the familiar opening of Bohemian Rhapsody .
It seemed like today was going to be just another shitty day of self-loathing.
<~>
When he saw him in calculus class, Lukas froze.
Damnit, I’m seeing shit again.
He’d seen those bloodshot green eyes not five hours ago.
The guy must’ve sensed he was staring, because his gaze flitted to his face, and he smirked, exactly how he had when he’d jumped.
Lukas blinked.
This couldn’t be real.
Muttering irritably, he turned back to his worksheet.
But then, once the bell rang and he got up, stuffing his pencils and notebook back into his bag, a pair of paint-splattered and bruised hands snatched it away from him.
“Hey!” Lukas hissed. “Give me th—“
It was him .
“Gee, Blondie, looks like your handwriting isn't terrible,” the green-eyed guy remarked, flipping through the pages seemingly at random. “Y’know, if I weren’t such a fucking terrible artist, or the sun set in the goddamn east sometimes, we’d be popular people. Maybe even famous.”
Lukas just stared at him. “But… but I—I saw you jump!” He blurted.
The guy chuckled, snapping his notebook shut and dropping it into Lukas’s open backpack. “I’ve got a hideout under there, dumbass,” he remarked. “There’s a rope that you hold onto. Really gives you a taste of what it would be like, ya’know? To fall from up there and just end it all? I mean, from the way you look, it seems like you’d enjoy a little death, huh?”
Lukas frowned, giving him a once-over.
This guy was a bit shorter than he was, his tanned brown skin covered in countless freckles. A slim, yet pleasant face, also covered in freckles, a small scar marring the corner of his mouth. Small yet tough build. The guy could’ve probably been a football player, but the paint stains on his clothes and hands said otherwise. Dark, wavy brown hair, cropped short in an undercut at some point but now tangled and unkempt up top, spilled down into his eyes.
Those bloodshot, luminous green eyes, filled with an angry turbulence that could only be described as crashing waves, underlined by dark shadows from sleep deprivation.
“I don’t recall ever seeing you here before,” Lukas grumbled, hefting his backpack onto his shoulders and trotting out of the room.
Green Eyes followed, still grinning. “I normally skip this class,” he said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about calculus, you see. Science, either. I just want to go to art class and paint, but have you heard that the school’s running low on money so they’re cutting the art program next semester? Why not pour less money into our shitty football team that hasn’t even made the regionals in what, eight years?”
Lukas scoffed in amusement. “Yeah, but they like huge, muscley assholes with dudebro syndrome kicking the shit out of each other more than they like creative writing,” he replied. “Now, do you have a name, or am I gonna have to call you Green Eyes?”
The guy let out a loud laugh that echoed in the empty hallway.
“Jesse,” he said, holding out a hand, and as he did so, Lukas saw the angry red lines in his brown skin peeking out the end of his sleeve.
So much like his own.
And in that moment, Lukas felt something, like a spark of electricity connecting them by the very similar self-inflicted wounds on their forearms.
He shook his hand.
“We’re one and the same, Jesse,” Lukas said. “I’m Lukas.”