Chapter Text
what most people don’t realize about drugs, is that they’re everywhere. most people, normal people, wouldn’t really know the first thing to do about looking for drugs. what most people don’t know is, that when you spend your whole life looking for something, you tend to find it. eventually. and not just once, but over, and over, and over again. and if you’re really unlucky, it starts looking for you, too, after a while.
but yuta didn’t know that, not when he was fifteen, staring at the slide of dirty bills from palm to palm, a powdery plastic bag shortly following. he was fascinated. he wanted to know everything about these people, he wanted to know how much money was exchanged, what exactly was in the bag, the circumstances surrounding it. this, this was the world in which he belonged, surely, somewhere a little bit grimy, a little bit darker, somewhere fast and exciting and real.
he felt almost stupid, standing a few paces away, clutching the straps of his backpack as he waited for the light to tell him he could walk. he felt extremely uncool, like if the people looked over, met his eyes, they’d assume he was a narc. give him dirty looks and maybe threaten him, if they really wanted trouble. he shivered at the thought of it.
but they didn’t look over. and then the light changed. and yuta walked away.
but not for very long.
+
when yuta was sixteen, his parents got divorced. when yuta was sixteen, his friend offered him a white pill from an orange bottle; his sister had broken her leg that summer, and she didn’t finish the painkillers.
“like tylenol?” yuta asks, wrinkling his nose as he examines the fairly large tablet. his friend laughs, points to the letters engraved in the talcum.
“what does that say, nakamoto?”
yuta squints, sounding out the word.
“um. p… perc-oh-cet.”
“perc-uh-cet. it’s not like tylenol. like… if tylenol was apricot la croix, percocet is the apricot. you know?”
yuta doesn’t know. his heart is beating too fast in his chest, and he’s thinking about standing five paces from a drug deal last year, about white powder in a bag. also about his mom crying in her bedroom, and his little sister calling him last night from dad’s house. and he takes the pill.
at first it’s nothing, he’s just nervously shaking his leg for twenty minutes and half-watching an episode of spongebob his friend put on, but then it’s… good. like a warm, weighted blanket settled over his entire body. it’s like being bone-deep exhausted, except he’s not really tired. just… slow. he blinks and the sun’s gone down, and now they’re watching something else, but he can’t really remember when that happened.
“you should probably get home, right?” his friend says, and yuta blinks again, and another hour has passed, and his phone is ringing.
“hello?”
“yuta, get home, now. dinner’s gone cold.”
“oh… alright.”
a pause.
“are you ok? were you asleep?”
“no… not really,” he says, and his tongue feels like a dead fish in his mouth.
“just get home,” his mom says, and then hangs up.
the drive back is treacherous at best, and he just got his driver’s license last month, anyway, so this is a very, very bad idea, but he thinks he doesn’t feel as heavy as before, and it’s only a five minute drive back. he parks crooked in the driveway.
“there you are,” his mom says once he gets inside, sitting at the dining table with one of the scrapbooks in front of her.
“the soup’s in the fridge.”
“hmm,” yuta says, and goes to his room instead of the fridge, and sleeps for ten hours.
+
when yuta was seventeen, he didn’t know the science. there are people who would say he has the “addict gene,” and there are people who would say he’s just unlucky, and there are people who would say it’s because his mom and dad got divorced, but when yuta is seventeen, he sees the reason. deep down, in a very very dark place he’s never been to before. it’s the first time he does ecstasy.
“it’s not laced, promise,” krystal says with a wink, rhinestones and glitter around her eyes catching the lights again and again as she does it. yuta gives her a dazzling grin, taking the pill from her palm and tossing it easily into his mouth. he grabs one of the drinks she’s holding to wash it down, and the vodka burns his throat, but the pill goes down smooth.
he’s never been to a rave before, but he’s having the time of his life. people will just introduce themselves, make out with you, and you’ll never see them again. krystal is a senior at his high school, like him, and she loves raves. and she wears body glitter to school sometimes, so you know she’s legit.
time passes, and yuta thinks he dances with every single person in the world, and all of them are so much fun, and he doesn’t know it’s hitting until he can barely see and everything is like one thousand times more sparkly than it had been. he doesn’t realize he’s stopped dancing until the song changes, and he thinks he must have been standing here looking up at the pulsing colored lights for hours. he blinks, and he thinks he must have been forgetting to do that, too; he can feel his eyeliner thick between his lashes, running down his cheeks with sweat. that’s the other thing, he’s sweating more than every time he’s sweat in his life, combined. he doesn’t feel gross or sticky, though, everything feels like silk on his skin, it’s almost like swimming. he wants to dance again, but falls immediately backwards when he tries. someone catches him, asks if he’s ok, and he’s so, so grateful, this person just saved his life, holy shit, and they say,
“i mean, i don’t think you would’ve died,” and yuta realizes he said that out loud and laughs so loud his own ears ring. the music isn’t even music anymore, it’s just these huge tidal waves that crash through yuta’s being, swaying him.
the stranger stays with him, and he keeps thanking them profusely, and they ask how old he is at some point, and he says, “i’m immortal and always will be!” and then he’s on his knees in a different place that’s even darker than the dance floor with a dick in his mouth, and everything’s still very sparkly.
he tries to talk but only rounded sounds come out, and he remembers what he’s doing, and laughs, but there’s a hand in his hair pulling hard, so he stops. he sits there on his knees for time that is uncountable, an imaginary number of minutes, and then there’s a lack of motion and no one’s touching him, so he lays down on the floor, sweat slipping sideways over the bridge of his nose.
time.
“oh my god, what are you doing!” krystal says, sort of giggling, and then he’s being hauled up back onto his feet. his head fucking hurts.
“what,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“oh, sweet boy, you’re so fucked up—here, my friend’s coming to pick us up, drink some water, ok?”
yuta takes the bottle and chugs about half, but immediately regrets it because his stomach is churning uncomfortably.
krystal’s friend is called luna, and yuta’s obsessed with that name, won’t stop saying it like a prayer into the upholstery of the backseat, until his stomach churns again.
“ugh,” he says, and miraculously krystal understands because she shoves a plastic bag in front of his face just in time for him to puke up every single one of his internal organs.
luna makes a noise of disapproval, and yuta is so embarrassed, but he can’t even apologize because everything sucks so bad now, and he can feel the mesh of his shirt on his chest and he can feel the motion of the car and he can see the familiar street names that lead back to his house, and he’s so goddamn sad.
he starts crying, couldn’t stop himself if he wanted, but he bites his lips hard and doesn’t make any noise. his tears are fucking endless, but the drive is fucking fast, and he walks into his bedroom at five in the morning sobbing, because his chest hurts and his head hurts and he doesn’t know why but he’s sadder than anyone has ever been in the history of the entire universe, and he doesn’t know how to stop.
he cries, and keeps crying, and it won’t stop, and it’s only when the sun is all the way up, burning his back through the mesh he’s still wearing, that he comes up with an answer.
he’s sad because that was the first time, maybe in his life, that he’s been happy.
he was so fucking happy. and it ended. and he looks down, down, into that uncharted darkness inside of him, and he knows, more sure of this than he’s been of anything, that this is what he’s always wanted. that everything in his life has been leading up to this, that when the big bang happened and all those atoms scattered across the universe, the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and plasma that make him up were already headed here. it’s bigger than his dna, a chemical imbalance.
he looks into the darkness and the cold, cold eye of fate looks back, and he knows there’s no return. that he will find this feeling again, and again, and he cries so hard. he sobs for himself and for his mother and for his sister and for everyone he knows he will hurt, and he sobs for eve, of course, because now he knows, he knows that the apple was just too sweet. that the other fruits in the garden simply could not compare, that the skin was so dazzlingly red and the flesh was so terribly crisp that it wasn’t even a choice.
his mother comes in to say goodbye before work, and he hasn’t stopped crying, and he can’t answer her questions, he can’t tell her what’s wrong. he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. she holds him until she’s late for work, and she puts cash on the table for dinner, and yuta cries until the sun goes back down, until the world stops staring at him, until the endlessness ends.
+
when yuta was eighteen, he met sicheng.
yuta is at college, now, in the big city, and there is a boy named sicheng in his modern media class. and yuta wants to have him.
love is nearly the only drug yuta hasn’t tried, at this point, and when it hits, he is completely unprepared.
sicheng is so perfect, he’s handsome and talks slow and low and one of his ears is pointier than the other, and, the most perfect thing of all, he loves yuta. and suddenly, yuta’s whole philosophy is crumbling under his feet, because look at him! he’s happy, and he’s sober (sometimes), and he’s loved, and he hasn’t stopped doing lines on the weekends, but it doesn’t fucking matter, because sicheng is kissing him, sicheng is telling him he loves him, sicheng is moaning into his ear in the alcove that everyone has sex in in the student union, and yuta is happy?!
he truly can’t get enough.
perhaps this should be the first warning sign, but he’s running, now, because he’s found it, and it doesn’t have to ruin his life, and each time he’s with sicheng he’s thinking about how wrong he was, when he was seventeen, about how he’s found a loophole in the tightly woven fabric of his doom. he’s cheated the universe, and he won’t be caught, he’ll run and he’ll run and drag sicheng along with him, and no one has to know about the other stuff.
he even starts to think, perhaps, that he was never doomed, that he was just a stupid teenager, that everyone feels like that at some point.
then, they go home for the holidays.
which is fine, yuta expects it, he’s been preparing. they’ll facetime every day and yuta will get good morning and good night texts, and it’ll be fine.
what he doesn’t expect, though, is his appendix deciding to commit ritual suicide inside his body four days before christmas.
it’s fine—the surgery goes fine, he only stays in the hospital one night, sicheng is worried as hell, and yuta gets ice cream on the way back home; it’s fine.
but then, as he methodically takes the assortment of prescribed antibiotics and painkillers the doctors prescribed, the last one’s name looks familiar. he tips the bottle, and a large, white pill falls into his hand. on it, a word is engraved.
percocet.
now, yuta’s not an idiot.
but also, yuta is kind of an idiot. and he misses sicheng. and, technically, if a doctor gives it to you, you're supposed to take it. he swallows it dry.
+
when yuta was nineteen, he ran out of his percocet prescription. when yuta was nineteen, he found out you can inject heroin instead of just smoking it.
it goes like this: yuta kisses sicheng goodbye on friday night. on saturday morning, he texts one jung jaehyun, the campus weed dealer, asking if he has anything else besides that kind kind bud. jaehyun tells him no, he doesn’t, but he knows of a party tonight where people will be selling harder stuff, but to be careful; it’s not a college party. yuta scoffs, reassures jaehyun that he’s been to every kind of party there is, and puts together an outfit.
ok, so, maybe he hasn’t been to every kind of party.
first of all, it’s really more of an orgy, and yuta spots at least four questionably consensual things happening as soon as he walks in. there’s a bong and lines on the table, tin foil and a pipe on the kitchen counter. also, two of the guys here are strapped.
yuta is going to leave, honestly, hand to god, he is. he’s way fucking out of his depth here, and not really trying to get arrested. but then, he sees krystal.
he stops in his tracks, on his way back to the front door. he hasn’t seen her since graduation, he didn’t even know she was in town. she’s blonde, now, and beautiful as ever, but something’s… not. quite right. it could be the angle, the light, but—she turns, and no, no, it’s something else. her face is all wrong—tired and gaunt and sharp. her skin, always flushed with life in high school, is sallow. she’s smiling, but it’s… strange.
(what they don’t tell you is how the shadows creep in. how cheekbones can get so sharp and eyes can get so hollow that there are parts of the face that light simply refuses to hit anymore. no matter which way they turn, no matter if it’s the sunniest summer day, there are these parts of the face—the temples, the dips in cheeks where perhaps dimples used to be—that shadows remain, moved in to stay.
it is not just the weight loss. it is something else. something evil that finds you and curls up in your bones when you are destroying yourself so quickly. but yuta doesn’t know that yet.)
“yuta?!” krystal says, wide-eyed, turned away from whatever conversation she’d been having. she makes her way over, and yuta forces himself not to look at her legs, at how the joints of her knees are bigger than her thighs.
“krystal,” he says, echoing her surprise. she grips his forearms, and she’s so—cold.
“what the fuck are you doing here?!” she says, at the same volume she’d used when across the room.
“i—krystal, i—what the fuck are you doing here?” he asks, eyes darting to another girl on one of the couches, completely out of it, men around her. krystal follows his gaze, and her smile falls.
“i’m… hey,” she says suddenly, icy hands coming up to frame his face.
“do you wanna go in the back? we’ll catch up.”
and it all sounds so simple, put like that. yuta is at this place he doesn’t know, with people he doesn’t like, and here’s krystal, krystal who wore body glitter into advanced algebra and stuck her tongue out at the vice principal during a pep rally.
and yuta thinks that surely whatever follows can’t be all bad.
(there are moments, probably, that are meant to happen. things that are immutable in this universe. yuta thinks krystal being at this party was probably one of those things.)
it happens like this: yuta follows krystal to the back, and this room is very much darker than the rest of the house. there’s a lava lamp on the floor and needles on the table. and in the dim orange glow of that fucking lava lamp, yuta sees them. track marks in krystal’s arms. it’s fucking scary. he’s scared. but he’s also out of percocet.
krystal says, “ever shot up before?”
and yuta says, “no,”
and despite the circumstances, it’s probably krystal that saves his life that night, because she doesn’t let any of the other people in the room measure the hit, and she ties the strip of latex around his arm very loosely, and she kisses his cheek and tells him to “relax, nakamoto yuta, keep those eyes open for me,” and she sits next to him the whole time, never leaving, just gently carding her cool fingers through his hair.
at some point she asks him, “are you living on campus now, sweet boy?” and yuta must say something back, because she hums and removes his phone from his pocket.
“who do you want to pick you up? i’ll just say the names and you give me a yes or no, alright?”
yuta says, “hm,” and krystal lists off a few contacts—people from his classes, his sister.
“how about this sicheng person?” and yuta blinks hard and clears his throat, and carefully says, “nuh-uh,” and krystal frowns.
“why not? seems like he loves you something fierce, if these texts are anything to go by,” and she’s smiling, he can tell, but he gives the best shake of his head he can. the thought of sicheng—of sicheng, who is perfect, of sicheng who loves him, picking up his limp and heavy body, seeing the irritated skin at the pit of his elbow—yuta feels nauseous.
“how about jaehyun?”
and so, this is how yuta ends up, high out of his mind, in the passenger seat of jung jaehyun’s two-thousand-and-seventeen lexus lc. it absolutely reeks of weed in here, and yuta worries about a contact high for a moment before remembering he was just injected with literal poison.
jaehyun keeps casting him worried looks when they’re stopped at red lights, and he stops at a taco bell to get yuta something to drink. it’s a fucking baja blast, for some reason, but yuta sips it diligently once he can feel his hands again.
“i told you to be careful, man,” jaehyun says, slinging yuta’s arm around his shoulders and bodily lifting him out of the car.
“was careful,” yuta mumbles, even though he wasn’t. he stumbles, but gets his bearings after a moment.
“i’m—i really shouldn’t have told you about that party, god, you—you can’t be messing with injectables like this. it’s—you’ll,” he stops, swallowing hard. there are a couple minutes of silence as they make their way to the dorms.
“what,” yuta says, once they’re in the elevator to his floor.
jaehyun doesn’t say anything, and yuta almost thinks he didn’t actually get his words out, but then the doors slide open and jaehyun leans him against the wall while he fiddles with the unfamiliar keys.
the lock slides back and jaehyun says, very quietly, “you can’t feel like this forever, yuta.”
and then the door opens, and there’s sicheng, brows furrowed in concern, hair mussed like from sleeping.
“hey, i waited for you,” he says, eyeing jaehyun. yuta shakes himself a little, taking an unsteady step forward and letting sicheng catch him.
“hey, cheng,” yuta says, making sure he uses his tongue to enunciate. sicheng looks down at him, expression unreadable.
“are… you ok? what… what happened?” the second question is directed at jaehyun, who wrings his hands, shifting between feet.
“uh, yeah, he’ll be fine, um…” he says, and then bites his lip and hands sicheng yuta’s keys and takes off, down the stairwell.
sicheng helps yuta into his room, and yuta, still warm and happy, tries to kiss him.
“babe—no, here,” he lowers yuta carefully onto his bed, settling next to him and putting the back of his hand to yuta’s forehead.
“what’s wrong? tell me, please?”
yuta buries his face in sicheng’s shoulder, inhaling, fading fast.
“mmm just so tired,” he says, and the next memory he has is sicheng holding him close under the covers, telling him that he loves him so much, and please don’t die, and wake up soon.
+
when yuta was twenty, he overdosed for the first time.
he’s on the couch again, staring at that damn lava lamp, and it’s not that his heart stops, but it just… takes a break. for a second.
krystal saves his life for the second time, and when yuta comes to, his nose is burning and she’s leaning over him, pupils blown, narcan cradled in her cold, cold hands.
yuta doesn’t tell sicheng, but he finds out anyway.
+
when yuta was twenty-one, sicheng broke up with him.
“no,” sicheng says.
yuta, hands shaking, knees scuffed red, scoffs.
“no, what do you mean ‘no,’ sicheng?” he says, contemptuous, marching over to the jacket slung over the computer chair, hands reaching into the pockets.
“i mean no, yuta. i won’t. i won’t.”
yuta’s nails scrape the seam of the pocket, and he tries the other one, fingers closing around air. he sighs, frustrated, straightens up and puts his hands on his hips.
“so what is this, huh?” he runs his tongue over his teeth, foot rabbiting against the carpet.
“some last ditch effort to get on your high fucking horse? ‘cause that ship sailed, sicheng. and sunk. give me the money.”
sicheng swallows, his hands are in fists.
“i won’t.”
yuta blinks hard, rubs his thumb over his brow. he glances around, but sicheng’s brown leather wallet is nowhere.
“why not?” but he doesn’t really want to know, he’s just stalling, stalling before sicheng gets the nerve up and actually-for-real kicks him out.
“you know why,” sicheng says, and his voice breaks over that second word, and yuta dully feels the pain of it somewhere in his chest, but his headache is getting worse. with sweat blurring his vision and cramps locking up his muscles, this looks like a good thing. sicheng will break, and yuta just has to focus on applying the pressure correctly.
he lets himself soften, just barely, allows the tears already built up from the pain to well at the corners of his eyes. he swallows and makes his voice go soft, so soft for sicheng.
“you’re right,” he says, and sicheng’s eyebrows draw together, he looks so worried, he’s going to break. yuta takes a slow step forward.
“you’re right, baby, i’m so sorry,” he says, forcing his shoulders down, letting sicheng see where his collarbones stick out too far, showing off his weakness, his desperation.
“please forgive me, i know i’m being so horrible to you,” and it’s just a whisper, now that he’s up close, now that sicheng looks down at him with so much emotion it burns in yuta’s already burning body. just a little bit more. god forgive him.
“you know i’m so sorry, right? you know how bad it hurts for me? i wanna die for doing this, baby.”
sicheng’s lips part almost involuntarily, a wet, shaking sound falling from his mouth.
“it’s ok,” he says, and yuta lets him pull him close, heart beating much too fast, he barely remembers to put his arms around sicheng’s waist.
“it’s ok, i’m so sorry, i know, i know, i just want to help you but—but you keep getting worse,” he says, so lost, so sad. here it is. god fucking forgive him.
yuta pulls back, just a little, so he can see sicheng’s face, and forces his hand still so he can put it on sicheng’s cheek.
“i know, and i promise, i swear to god, i’m gonna get help soon, i promise, ok? but, but for right now i just—i can’t handle it anymore it hurts so bad,” he says, nearly wailing, letting his knees shake, making sicheng support him more fully around the waist.
“you know i wouldn’t ask, not you, not you baby, if it wasn’t so bad but it is and i just need it, ok?” he wipes a tear as it falls from sicheng’s lash line, letting it run into his palm, dry skin sucking it up and keeping it forever.
“it’s just, it’s just two seconds, you know? two seconds where i don’t have to think about how fucking miserable i am. how fucking much i hurt. please, baby, please, i’ll never ask again, please.”
sicheng looks into his eyes, and yuta buries the lies deep inside, makes himself believe it, too, a sparkling crystalline illusion.
yes, sicheng, i would never lie to you, i won’t ask again, i really will get help, it’s all true, you know it is, you love me, you love me still, right?
and sicheng cups yuta’s jaw in his hands, so gentle, so terrified, like holding a bomb, like holding a rabid dog gone docile for the moment. yuta makes his eyes shine, the only part of him not yet deteriorated, the part that sicheng will recognize, and he parts his lips, and hopes to god that he looks a little bit pretty, willing whatever beauty is left there to last just a moment longer.
yuta isn’t expecting it, but sicheng kisses him, and it only takes him a moment to part his lips, to move closer, to put some strength back into his legs and push himself up onto his toes. yuta knows this kiss. it’s their first kiss. sicheng puts his hands at the small of his back, and yuta is there again, outside the dorms, crickets chirping, moon shining down on them. all sweet, no tongue, though they both want to, but it’s only their second date, and it’s still so special, so quiet between them.
(yuta will invite him up next week after seeing a concert at the bar down the street, but he didn't know that, not yet, so he savored it all.)
he kisses sicheng, on that night, and remembers how his lips feel, what he tastes like, the smooth of his cheek on yuta’s nose, because he needs to save it for later, he needs to keep these things forever, the idea of forgetting this is worse than dying.
and all at once, yuta realizes that he needs to do the same thing, right now, in sicheng’s dorm room. because sicheng isn’t giving him their first kiss again, he’s giving him their last.
but it’s too late, now, sicheng is pulling away, turning his face too quickly for yuta to catch his expression, and it’s over.
yuta barely registers the dry slide of cash into his palm, but his fingers automatically hold it tight, as if they’re still accounting for what yuta’s momentarily forgotten.
sicheng says, “this is the last time,” and yuta can’t even look at him. he glances down at the bills, knowing it’s enough, knowing sicheng knows how much it is, by now. hates himself.
he says, “thanks,” but he doesn’t even know if his voice comes out.
he walks out of the dorm, makes it five paces down the street. stops. hates himself. counts the money again. he’s dissociating, he knows, probably gone before sicheng even opened the door, in some way.
he waits on the corner in a daze, follows krystal to their dealer and then back to her car, vaguely registers it’s raining.
she wraps the latex around his bicep, puts one end of it between his teeth, and he automatically pulls. the needle is nothing. but when the tourniquet comes off, it’s everything.
he can breathe. he doesn’t have to think about breathing, his chest just does it. his muscles unclench. he thinks that there isn’t anything like this feeling, but immediately knows that’s not true, like a reflex. his heart beating in protest—no, that’s not right. sicheng’s a pretty good dupe, after all.
one of the first times he’d done this, the guy sitting next to him caught him when he started to fall, lowered him horizontal onto the dirty couch. he asked, “how do you feel?”
and yuta vaguely remembers looking at the lava lamp and mumbling something so juvenile; “cool,” or something like it.
but now, as krystal puts her cold hand through his matted, unwashed hair, someone on the radio telling him the forecast of cloudy skies this week, the only word for this feeling that comes to mind is
lonely.