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Theon sweats through another drag of his cigarette after coming up from over the toilet, wiping his nose habitually with the back of his hand, sniffs once, twice.
Robb’s there with him, but he hasn’t scolded him yet for the heap of coke Theon just lifted his face from. Robb had always preferred the straight lines, the sorted cleanliness only a starting addict would care about. But those remarks quickly vanished along with the remaining powder that they rubbed into their gums.
It doesn’t burn as much as it probably should. Theon stopped picking his nose months ago.
He should take a piss now that he’s here, go and order another drink; he couldn’t remember the last time he did either of those things.
But Robb’s there to break his train of thought again. That face like a harrowing fate that kept following him around, except those eyes are meaningless now, without relation to him. He saw nothing more in them than what he would have seen had he looked at a hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. Theon felt a painful wrench in his chest.
Robb wasn’t even thin anymore, passed that weeks ago. His jaw was razor sharp, his face gaunt, shoulders grossly prominent and his collarbones jutting. Forever rubbing his hands together. It looked good on him, of course. The unkept hair, the stained jeans, the worn-down shirt, the hollowing of his cheeks that amplified the clear distress of his body and those bloodshot eyes.
Robb shakes him roughly with a strength like never before.
His voice of reason, whispering something. His voice grew softer every day, almost as though it was vanishing from existence. Theon has to strain more every time, holding on tight to whatever it was that Robb was telling him.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?”
Theon shuts his eyes tight—it helped before, he just has to keep trying—opening them again to see Robb, once more. Still there, at least. His concerned face, drawn up eyebrows, that little frown creasing his forehead. His hand feel lifeless around Theon’s arms now, starting to let go.
His smile feels hollow, his hand cold, but Theon grabs it anyway, fumbling with the lock of the stall-door and pulling Robb after him, towards the dance floor, the middle of the crowd. Where he doesn’t have to face the disappearance of Robb’s voice, where there’s no reality into it starting to fade.
The bass is loud, envelops him, like the mass of people that part for them as they start to make their way through. Standing turns into swaying, bodies push against him from the side, don’t let them pass.
They don’t understand, no one here understands—bounce them along in their place. Theon looks back, checks to see if Robb’s still behind him. He can hardly feel his own hand, grasping Robb’s tight, it seems.
His mouth moves, just like Robb’s, but there’s no way to distinguish what’s being said with the music thrumming through them. It’s the lights that distort his face, blur it, make him look like someone else, a cold-blue electrical brightness that disfigures, the fog of the room clogging up Theon’s lungs.
Theon glances over to his right, catches the stare of someone who pretends he wasn’t looking. If Robb would be here—which he is, he is—he would chastise him right now. Your nose is red, blurted in his ear. There would be that glare, after which he would take Theon’s face in his hands, reel him in for a deep kiss. His lips would be wet, just like his kiss, warm and sweet. The kind he’d have to wipe his face from afterwards, that makes his skin tingle, red and soft.
Somebody jumps against them from the left, clarity leaving the room as it starts to tilt. Someone steps on his toes, elbows him in the ribs, pushes. Theon’s hand reaches for support when he starts to topple, but Robb’s there, of course, faithful shoulder to help catch him—stabilize him once more.
Theon grabs it, wants to laugh for Robb starting to turn his head but his jaw hurts too much, cramps his face into something distorted. Eyes moving over to the bounce of Robb’s curls as his head turns, awaiting those blue eyes on him. Except those don’t appear. The face that looks back isn’t Robb. It glares, judges and shoves Theon’s hand away.
Wouldn’t be an issue if Theon would just be able to keep his balance, but that’s been a growing problem the past few weeks—months—tripping over his feet when someone jumps against him from the left once more.
He doesn’t hear the thud when his body crashes against someone else, hot, sweaty. He gets pushed off with another shove, his feet staggering beneath him to scramble for purchase where there is none. The floor is just as wet, the impact of hitting it soaring through his bones, ugly and heavy.
The lights don’t stop for him, flashing bright and blinding, even in the abyss of the floor, between and underneath those feet and dark slacks and skirts. The earth gravitating beneath him with a certain desire the sea never had.
Theon blinks slowly, eyes unseeing towards the ceiling.
Robb wasn’t there.
The varnish of his casket had been so overwhelmingly shiny, mirror-like. Theon hadn’t been able to look for fear of what he would see, hadn’t needed a mirror to tell how ill-fitting his suit rested over his bony shoulders. Always on the side of Robb’s perfection. It felt like a final sneer—an insult to plunge at his heart, pulping his already bruised flesh.
Theon blinks slowly, he’s almost being trampled, mist of dark shadows above him when nobody bothers enough to stop, stall, extend a hand. Above, the lights keep flashing, the bass keeps drumming, like a rumble of thunder that screamed its hostility at him.
Getting up used to be easier, just as walking used to be. The crowd nowhere near parted after all when he can so easily reach the wall for support, haul himself up on unsteady feet.
His breath comes strained after the tenth step, it used to take longer, or at least he thinks it did.
The hinges of the bathroom door are broken, heavy when he pushes against it. There’s no one there to see him stumbling over to the nearest urinal, one hand against the wall and the other across his stomach as he pukes up his liquid diet.
There’s no reflection when he looks in the mirror, no way to see how erratic his eyes look. The walls don’t shine in here, and if they do there’s always someone in front of them.
Right on cue he’s himself again—that thinly veiled person he was trying his best to evade. He stared at the mirror as scattered thoughts raced through his head. None stayed long enough to complete themselves. It was all a case of nothingness, paper thin walls build up and around, now yanked down, thrown over, left to a heap of nothing. And it took only one person.
He imagines his death sometimes, how empty and void it would be, how senseless, how little people he would move with his own passing. Words spoken on his funeral concealed by thinly veiled lies, and he couldn’t even be mad about it. Theon had never been sincere, not even when he forgot who he was.
It’s like reaching out in to the darkness but never actually touching anything, forgetting that there was a tomorrow, that the night wasn’t endless—that he hadn’t reached the answer.
Theon set his jaw. At least he knew what to do when he became like this.
***
He’s had too much time to practice, think of those words until they fit, until he was able to convey its emotion. It almost blends with his wallpaper attire. Still the first knock on that front door is too soft—couldn’t practice that one—not enough. He’s too sober to knock again, last remains of happiness flushed down the drain back at the club.
The sun was struggling rather hopelessly through a wet haze.
No time left to contemplate, for the door already swings open.
Ramsay looks as bad as ever, greasy hair sticking to his face, unwashed clothing hanging loose around his thinning frame. A red-stained hand reaches over towards the cigarette that dangles between his lips, puffing nonchalantly.
Ramsay’s eyes sometimes look as void as Theon’s, but in a different way, perhaps.
There’s no exchange of words. There never was. Ramsay just turns around, leaves the door open for Theon to step inside. He didn’t like to force people, liked it better when they were desperate enough to come to him. Like a last resort.
The boarded windows don’t allow any light inside, blur Theon’s vision with darkness as he closes the door behind himself. He’s made enough mental pictures of the curve of the pathway. Doesn’t need that minute of time anymore for his eyes to adjust, no more rapid blinking before he can settle his first foot down through the mess of clutter that surrounds him.
He’s used to the feeling of his airways clogging up with how heavy and compressed the air feels here. Musty, like cigarettes and filth and decay.
Ramsay sat with splayed knees in his usual place on the couch. Surrounding him are bags and boxes of clothes piled high. Theon never dared ask who it belonged to.
It’s the same as ever, but still Ramsay beckons him to sit down on the stained couch. Theon sits, puts his hands in between his knees and waits for the next drag on that cigarette—those blackened fingernails gripping it tight between his puckering lips.
It’s no surprise Ramsay looks at him the way he does, those eyes pinning him into place like they always would. “Back already,” he says, voice hoarse. From disuse maybe, or chain-smoking. Theon didn’t know how many other people he’d see. If he even saw anyone besides Theon. Probably. “What happened to never wanting to see me again?”
He had felt the question creep up, of course—practiced this one, too. There’s few things he didn’t practice these days. Theon licks his lip underneath Ramsay’s gaze. Doesn’t dare to avert eye-contact. Says, “Things change.”
Ramsay laughs at that, all nasal, blowing smoke from his nose. “I bet they do.”
“I’m sorry,” Theon says, “about last time.” Stammering a little, inadvertently, just as anybody might stammer under the circumstances. He needs to remember this is just business. He laughed a little. That was the reality of it, making it silly, like that would compose everything again. Kiss his wounds better like Ramsay did last time.
But it doesn’t seem to work, Ramsay just keeps staring at him, doesn’t even seem to notice the ash that’s steadily building, threatening to fall—doesn’t tap it away—doesn’t see it getting ready to burn his fingers. The scorching must be settling in against the sides of Ramsay’s calloused skin.
Theon doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Knows at least not to say anything. Just waits it out, like always—waiting for solutions to come to him, for others to fix his mistakes.
He fights off the thought of getting sent away.
Ramsay looked at him with a certain distaste, finally moving over to the overflowing ashtray that’s next to him on the couch.
“Does that even matter?” Ramsay asks at last.
No. It didn’t.
“Ramsay,” Theon says with that pleading undertone that he knows would do the trick. “Please.” Way sooner than he’d like to. Because that’s always where he ended up again.
Ramsay stood, wordless—their agreement reached. Theon followed him like a dog.
***
It never made sense how Ramsay does it, exactly how he gets him there over and over again—but Theon accepted it nonetheless, welcomed it even.
The only thing he can do is stand there, idly, wondering when it will hit and then, once he’s in it, yearning for it to pass again. For his heart to stop hammering against the inside of his rib-cage, his brain realizing that he’s fine here, dare he say safe.
It builds up like a fire might spread, smears his airways with grease, pushes against his chest like some heavy weight to announce itself. His skin shivers, spine rocking with the first of many tremors.
One synaps firing at the other and there it is, awful resurfacing memory that’s there to haunt him once more, it seems. Thick half-hearted breaths cram down his throat now, but his chest won’t expand the same way anymore; not when he’s like this. Now it’s lungfuls of air that don’t amount to anything, no oxygen, useless as much as he renders himself standing there.
Won’t be long until he falls anyway, until his knees give out. Something on the end of his arm twists, shakes. Theon fights every instinct inside his body. The prongs of the collar stand at ready around his neck, his bared throat.
His gut stirs and twists, throat clogging up and expanding, warmth flooding through his flesh all of a sudden with that overbearing sense of nausea—but nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. He has to remind himself every time, but it’s always too late, difficult as well with the plasticity of whatever he’s experiencing right now so well ingrained, deep down.
Curated and fixed. He never dared to give it a name, because so long as there was none it was as though it didn’t exist—and things that don’t exist don’t trouble the mind, the body. And a peaceful mind is a healthy mind.
Except there’s those things that slip through. But. And but’s are what always do you in. But this is just a temporary fix. But after this he’ll return back to his waste of a life where there’s no more relief from the aggravating reality that keeps punishing him. But certain things always slip through the conscious mind, without Ramsay being there, down into that deeper layer, beyond the hairs and fat and muscle and skull and meninges.
Unbidden. Like some unwanted guest, and it renders him completely immobile. Made to stand there, gawk, overflowing all at once with those memories. And the thing was that those were never happy ones, about what it was like when he learned to ride his bike with his mother, or when he had his first kiss, but those that would sneer at him, unwanted.
Remember when dad forced the end of a broomstick up your ass when you cried about mom getting sick and called you a sissy? Or, remember when dad held you upside down over the stairwell and threatened to drop you?
It’s no use to think of what may have triggered it, what has been used on him this time. It could have been anything—a scent, a smile, a look, the redness and stale smell of iron cramping up a heated room, the temperature overbearing and those hands too hot, sweaty and clinging to his pre-adolescence skin—and it stings, burns his skin alive like it did back then.
Either way he’s got enough brain to realize that this is wrong, not what he asked for.
The next breath is as painful as it was back then, Theon’s voice younger again, his scream cut off once more when he tries to beg—just like back then, getting startled silent, the hand around his ankle groping, hot and clammy. Theon loses his footing, finally, feels himself toppling over, distantly, body inept—unable to respond in any way. His heartbeat races alive. He knows how this one ends, cries and whines and begs for it all to stop. To snap back alive, out.
He shuts up when he feels something crack against the back of his skull, opening his eyes to a turning room, the heat sweltering around him like it’s on fire, like he’s on fire. Fluids rush down his head, trace a line over his face, hot, sickly-sickly hot, the mere sight of it makes him lightheaded.
His hand catches on to something sharp, shiny, cuts into his skin when he tries to scamper up. He gurgles something, saliva thick in the back of his throat when he touches his little hand to his head, feeling his still-intact skull that feels like it’s fractured in a thousand places.
His eyes pound along with his heartbeat, head starting to thrum to that same rhythm. He needs to get up or else it’s gonna be bad, worse than it already is. Head starting to pound now with an unbearable headache settling in, dragging himself up off the floor where he must have fallen ages ago.
Any second now and Robb would barge in on him, tumble over the furniture to kiss his forehead. There wasn’t any alcohol-soaked breaths in the earlier stages, before everything started to get sour, bad. It’ll distract him from his usual repetition. He would say something, so gentle and thoughtless, that it would lull him to sleep. And that’s what they’d do, forever—sleep together, wasting time in this tight embrace Theon regretted not sharing more often. Safety, behind Robb’s bedroom door.
Theon’s heartbeat calms down a bit. He thinks he smiles, vacant, hand opening and closing in what might have been an embrace.
Hears above him, somewhere, “What a mess.” He recognizes that voice, loud, grating into his consciousness again, slipping him from his reverie. Theon listened to the echo of the words in his ears, searching their tone. “What a waste of a beautiful mess.”
His vision comes back into focus, the room stops turning, his face doesn’t seem to swell any further than it did last time. But he’s not finished yet, it’s not done.
A hand circles around his jaw, turns his head. Theon doesn’t want it to happen, but he’s still too far gone, too tired to raise his arm, fight the intruder off. Unable to blink the tears away with how rapidly they keep streaming down his cheeks. When he’s well beyond the initial first tear, there’s no stopping them anymore.
The realization tastes sour, bitter, just like the stale blood in his mouth. Can’t catch his breath just yet, but that finger caresses over his cheek slowly, only it’s the wrong finger, too rough and wet. “You withheld,” Theon puffs, sharply inhaling once more.
A grating laugh from above ripples him from his shattered memory, “Withheld?” That hand forces his head up more, blinds him with the superficial lighting overhead. Theon squints up at the shadow that looms over him, addresses him, “Just look at yourself. Where’s your limit? If I didn’t stop myself you would have been dead years ago.”
Theon moans with realization, his brain thumping against the inside of his skull, wanting out just as badly as him. “Please,” he wails. “You promised me.”
He had. Robb’s embrace still tingled his skin.
“Look what you made me do, Greyjoy.”
Theon shakes his head, he’s not ready for that yet. Ramsay always kept insisting, but last time was too difficult, too harsh, the video footage more barbaric than he remembered that distorted memory to be. Theon avoided mirrors and shiny surfaces for the next two months, until the sight of him became more bearable.
Something tugs at his throat, and Theon cries out at the pain, collapsing, whining and screaming stop-stop-stop. Trying now to pry his hand in between the collar—the one with the spikes that maims his neck, the one that Ramsay always boasts about having, about not being safe—but it’s not doing anything. Ramsay made sure it was tight enough because he asked him to, begged him to—the strain on his neck only growing more. He swears the spikes are going to punctuate his throat any minute, spill his blood, kill him.
“No. Please.” Because they were already way beyond the point where it didn’t matter anymore.
Someone—Ramsay, that’s Ramsay, he must remember that this is all part of it—laughs. It’s a pitiful one, the kind that stabs deep into the organ that keeps trying to circulate his tainted blood, the thing that doesn’t seem to give up on him no matter how hard he tries sometimes.
For a moment the room goes quiet, the light growing more and more dim. Everything had drained away, absorbed in the wet carpet underneath him. Ramsay’s hand lets go, and Theon’s body goes slack, sack of meat towards the ground.
His arm hangs limply at his side like a dead member, flopping over when Ramsay’s foot nudges him in his side, turns him over.
“Look,” Ramsay sneers above him.
He opens his eyes involuntarily, groggy and unseeing, blinking the blurriness away. Two pitiful eyes stare back at him.
He’s fine. Not even a cut on his face. What streams down his face are hot tears.
He couldn’t possibly voice his betrayal.
“Unbelievable.” He’s heard that one before. “You’re screwed, Greyjoy. One day you’re gonna make me kill you and even that won’t be enough for you.” Theon sobs at the broken promise. “Just look at yourself. All teary-eyed when you’re inducing yourself into your own perverted pleasure world.”
He might as well have gotten a kick in his stomach, but Ramsay isn’t nearly done, spits, “More, Ramsay, more.” With a mocking tone. “Try beer next time because that makes me remember. Try warming your hands over the fire, smother my face in the bed like my father did, hit me, gut me—but it will never be enough for you because you’re sick, Theon. Sick in the head to think you can keep going like this.”
He is. He is.
“When are you finally going to face the truth, Greyjoy? Stop hiding behind those awful memories to pretend you can keep running away.”
His frailly no longer a performance, his flesh practically began to walk on his bones, the truth will come off it like a scent, albeit rotten and distorted.
“I’m s-sorry,” he gasps. He is. Sorry. Another big rush of air. “I just—I,” he gasps. “I don’t know what-what to d-do anymore,” Theon said in a miserable, wailing tone. His head rigidly bent down.
That might have been the first real thing he’s said in the past few months. Because acknowledging that meant that Robb was actually gone. As was the absurdity that he could still daydream so vividly with him there, touch and kiss him, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. He regretted every day that he never put into words how much he meant to him.
He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall through the ground. It was too much, the foreignness around him, the failure, the fact that Robb ended up dead. He felt surrounded by strangeness, by hostility.
The worst, maybe, was that there always would be the illusion, for a time, that they were alike, in harmony. Together.
The ring of a siren blasts through Theon’s head. He watches the blood trickle down now, his chest synching with the rise and fall of Robb’s breath dying down, gasping, once, twice—again and again. His chest compresses more, hands reaching up towards where his chest was heaving, limbs flailing, tensing, relaxing again as his throat contracts harshly with every miserable attempt to breathe.
He distantly hears that last horrendous gasp, the expelling of that last breath. His arm twitches, shoots up like Robb’s had.
A weight crunches down on his ribcage, stocks his troubling heart. Something inside him cracks, succumbs, breaks down offensively loud.
Someone pulls his eyelid down now, the light above him bright, but Theon cannot respond to it, body twisted in the heap where it fell, gave up, stopped existing. He’ll never forget how easily that chest—his chest now, squishes underneath that weight, doesn’t remember how long it took for the ambulance to finally arrive.
There’s a whisper next to his ear, a warm hushed breath. “Stay with me now.”
He hadn’t let go of Robb’s hand once on the drive to the hospital.
Ned and Cat had begged the doctors to keep trying, even after eighty minutes of useless compressions and unavoidable brain-damage with no way back—because what else were they supposed to do? Just stop trying—give up their son like that? Useless atropine and epinephrine shots flushed through Robb’s mutilated veins for nothing. Because it hadn’t helped, hadn’t brought him back. Had only stalled the inevitable.
Theon’s breathing picks up again, like coming up from the sea after too long.
It’s like missing a step the way the world seems to halt.
“It’s my fault.” It comes out too small, broken.
“So you keep saying.”
“It is,” Theon wails. “It should have been me. Not him.” Theon’s head gave a shake and dropped back down like he’d been shot.
“Get off your high horse, Greyjoy. Your dirty conscience is as boring as anyone’s.”
Theon closes his eyes, tears slipping out from underneath his eyelids. “I’m sorry,” he said. He said so before, but there was never anyone to listen. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t start with that,” Ramsay says. “I should be the one apologizing to you. I never should have gotten started with you. Some dogs are just too sick. Only putting them down would help those like you.”
“Please.”
Ramsay grabs his hands, warm and wet just like his own. “But some dogs just have that special soft spot in your heart, don’t they? To see them hurt…”
They didn’t discuss any of this, Theon’s arm moves involuntarily down, down, his fingers limp without strength within Ramsay’s grasp, the first stroke soft, languid.
“No.” Theon was too far down on the ground, twisted, twisting. “Stop. Please.”
“Listen baby,” Ramsay says, moving his face against Theon’s ear. “Keep your mouth shut. You’re just making up lie after lie to draw people’s attention. But you’ve already had mine all along.”
Ramsay encourages Theon’s hand to move, those dirty fingers tight around his own. The smell of cigarettes close, overwhelming his senses once that other hand bends his head back, sloppy tongue down his throat, and Theon kisses back, of course.
He tensed until his thighs ached, his nails cutting red scallops in his skin. That hand—and his own, he’s falling to his own demise here—strokes leisurely. There’s a certain comfort in how Ramsay’s fingers tighten around his own, tighten, loosen, tighten, tighten, tighten.
Like Theon’s hand around Robb’s wrist, neck, chest.
Something wet squelches. Theon’s mind freezes over, hurtles alive again.
“You’re incredibly beautiful,” Ramsay whispers, and Theon might just be going under, insincere or not.
Sweating, naked and cold.
Robb’s body pales underneath his fingertips. His hand dead weight in Theon’s.
Theon refuses to acknowledge what’s happening in between his own grasp, what fiddle of movement he feels. Focusses instead on how incredibly hot Ramsay’s skin feels against his back, how wet his lips are when they press against his own again, strangling a moan in the back of his throat.
Robb’s chest rises, falls again when Theon pulls back. He doesn’t think about the blood he wipes off his mouth, bends down again instead.
He doesn't recognize that look in Ramsay’s eyes when he opens his own, jerking his head, eyes flicking over the room.
Robb’s were still open, vacant.
He feels as though he’s at the end, something shoots through him, some inexplicable and wanton waste. Theon gave a real laugh at Ramsay starting to move, gently putting Theon’s head down. His chest aching from the tension.
He ignores the moving shape in the reflection of the mirror as he’s sitting up, on his knees now. Thin and angular, Theon sways, grateful for Ramsay blocking his view.
He’s not himself. Never has been. A part of him died in that same room along with Robb.
The hand offered is sticky. It’s only natural Theon accepts, licks at it.
Ramsay’s voice fades out as if drowned in a deep sea, but he hears nonetheless.
“Thank me.”
Theon looks up as best as he can. Ready for the final blow.
“Thank you, master.”