
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1034284.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      AFI
  Relationship:
      Davey_Havok/Jade_Puget
  Additional Tags:
      highschool_fic, college_fic, baby_punk_Davey_and_Jade, Angst
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-11-06 Words: 4380
****** The Useless Seed is Sown ******
by orphan_account
Summary
     You haven't seen each other like this in four years.
Notes
     This story might as well be called Intervention part deux. It's not a
     sequel, though, just another example of my glorious ability to
     recycle themes about the past because of my glorious ability to
     recycle my own past. I'll probably be writing and writing this theme
     as long as I live, though. Because we're constantly writing our
     pasts. It's the only thing we can write. This is about the liminal
     space between having once known someone and knowing them again, when
     you're shoring up your past conception of them with the new thing
     they are.
     I don't own them and none of this ever happened.
He has somewhere to be at six. You don’t think much of it when he tells you,
but now you know that is the variable that changes everything.
“Some family dinner bullshit,” he explains when you’re still skating at the new
park at Western and Fifth, trying to replicate the things you used to do
together even though the years have changed you and you’re different people
now. “I don’t want to go, but I have to.” He says.
You know you’re a sucker for expiration dates, but it’s too hot for you to
really put any weight on this one, not right now anyway. The sun beats down on
your like angry palms, and you think about how little you’re feeling, how
little his presence stirs up in you. His presence once longed for and then
forcefully forgotten when two years turned into three and you decided you were
too old to be pining after Jade Puget.
You wipe sweat from your brow with a bandanna, knowing your face is bright red
and there’s a mustache of perspiration beading on your upper lip.
“Yeah, okay.” You tell him, shrugging, kicking your skate up into your dirty
hand.
---
He says he doesn’t trust you to drive, that he never will, but he’s the one who
keeps getting lost. It’s like college filled his brain up with so many facts
and statistics and radical ideas that he just lost the room for Ukiah street
names. For North, South, East, West, basic stuff.
“You can let me, you know. I come home more often than you do,” You remind him,
but he shakes his head, grinning at you.
“Not in a million years.” He brakes too hard, then holds his arm out across the
passenger side to keep you from slamming into the dashboard.
“Safety arm,” you say automatically, because it was a thing you both used to
say together whenever he braked too hard, back before you drove and you were
both just kids. He doesn’t say it with you, just looks at you with wide eyes,
startled.
---
You sometimes wonder if he even remembers the shit that happened between you,
or if college took that, too. For the last four years you’ve both been living
in Berkeley, you making music, breathingliving music while he finished his
degree and you hardly talked because it felt like you were living in parallel
but separate dimensions, the same city, different worlds. And you would think,
wonder, does he even remember me? Does he know that I loved him? That I still
think about him?
But now, today, you can feel it crackling between you, the secret-quiet shared
history. And you can sense its potential the second you climb into the car with
him and he reaches for you, holds you tight and pushes his face into your neck
in hug and you wonder god, when was the last time we hugged like this? Have we
ever hugged like this? You feel it, but you don’t let yourself think about what
it could mean. You refuse to have expectations. You refuse everything but
whatever is happening in this moment. This is the safest way to exist around
him, you think.
---
But then, you can’t help but notice. The whole day the way you touch each other
is strange. Your knees slide together when you sit on the half-pipe and watch
the kids wipeout. You keep reaching over and smoothing his hair in back, and he
let you. The whole thing is a pretend game. It seems playful, friendly. Or, it
would be if you weren’t you and he wasn’t Jade. It wold be normal between you
and some other old friend, you touch your friends a lot, you’re a hugger and a
cuddler and all that. Now you’re both acting like he’s some other old friend
but you also both know he’s not.
So when he says “It’s too hot to do anything but swim. Let’s go back to my
place,” you know he remembers. He looks at you sidelong, a terrible impression
of nonchalance, the the truth, bright and unnamed, shining through the cracks
like molten lava through tectonic plates.
---
The last time you were at Jade’s house was the last time you kissed him. Some
high school graduation pool party. People dared you to do that shit together
all the time, and you did, and maybe it wasn’t a big deal for him but it was
for you. And then that night, when everyone was drinking inside and playing
nintendo but you two were still outside for some reason, alone, he pinned you
to the edge of the pool and kissed you when no one was watching. It felt like a
dam breaking. Like an avalanche.
You remember everything about it. How it seemed like a mistake, something he
didn’t want to do but couldn’t stop himself from doing anyway. You remember the
rush of control, the way his skin felt in the water, the smell of the
sprinklers on his front lawn, the night blooming jasmine creeping up the
concrete wall behind you, the endlessness you felt from knowing it was probably
the end.
That night you stayed over after everyone else was gone, and things that
weren’t sex but were almost sex happened. There were a few other times after
that, during the summer. All isolated, unplanned for, life-changing. He was
always freaked out and trying to stop himself, you always wanted more. Then, in
August, Jade left.
A few years later, you learned to stop feeling feelings about that.
---
Now. “I haven’t been to your house in like...four years.” You say. “It’s weird.
Old memories.”
You’re talking without actually talking, saying things under the surface. He
nods, eyes sparkling and you wonder how this can be happening now when you
already decided it wasn’t a thing you could think about, when you already
killed it, cut it out of your stupid young body.
“Yeah,” He answers, braking too hard and reaching for you with an open palm.
“No problem. We’ll just make new memories.”
You don’t want new memories. You’re satisfied with the incomplete tragedy of
your youth together, the heartbreak and the way you’ve come to terms with this
new Jade who is nothing like the old Jade, changed by college and the city and
all the girls he’s probably fucked. You don’t need to rewrite history, but you
wonder if he does. If leaving someone is different than being left.
---
You borrow swim trucks from him; they’re too big. He double knots the draw
string for you upstairs, his hands close enough to your body that you should be
feeling something, but you’re not.It’s dead you think. Heart’s stopped.
His house isn’t big but it feels that way when no one’s home, and your voices
echo in the kitchen. It reminds you of the nights you slept over four years
ago, when he would quit kissing you in his bed to run downstairs and check his
sister’s and his parent’s rooms to make sure no one was home, because he was
that paranoid.
Now, he bends down over the eight track player, trying to decide that to play.
“Hey, we can put on your band,” he says, raising his eyebrows.
You shake your head. You hate the sound of your own voice on the recordings.
“No. Bad idea.”
He shrugs, and throws on Neurosis. You watch him unguardedly for a few moments
while he fiddles with the needle, and notice all the ways he’s different. His
thrown back shoulders, his general air of confidence, the hatred of his skin
somehow gone, the constant shifty awkwardness you remember from high school
lost along with the extra teenage-weight. He’s lanky and adult now, graceful
and unafraid of you. All the power you remember having is gone, too.
You wonder if you actually killed everything you felt for him, or if he’s just
so unrecognizable your body thinks this is a new person.
---
You jump in the pool, and he follows, almost landing on you. You drown a little
as he surfaces, waves licking nervously at the cement sides. Then his hands are
on your shoulders, pushing you under.
Skin slides together, wet and slick, and you’re not yet sure if this is
something you remember. Every other person you’ve kissed since you were sixteen
has reminded you distantly of kissing Jade. You wonder if kissing Jade will
remind you distantly of these other people. You realize as you kick above water
and see his laughing mouth, that you are thinking about kissing him. You decide
it’s okay because thinking about something is different than expecting it.
You’re both touching the other too much. He wraps his awkwardly long legs
around your waist even though you’re shorter than him, makes you carry him.
Your hand instinctively stabilizes him on the underside of his thigh, and you
apologize for touching him there in this white, hairy, intimate place you have
never before touched someone you weren’t about to blow. He laughs again, shakes
his head.
He lets you go, swims away, and you don’t know why, but you follow him.
---
His little brother’s pool toys are floating half-deflated in the water, and he
swims between them, blowing them up. You stare at the back of his head, his
wet, messy dark hair with the gel dribbling out of it. Once the dolphin is back
to its rightful shape you paddle it to the stairs and climb on, clumsy and
awkward. It’s colder outside the water than in it.
Now that you’re not touching him, you want to be. You kick water at him,
feeling stupid for pushing this not-imaginary thing between you when it’s so
obvious, it’s so clearly going to happen. You wonder if you’ll have to start
it, or if he will. You wonder why you want it to happen, it if it’s just
something to do or if there is some truly genuine desire inside you, four years
old and shaped like the summer before Jade left. You kick some more water, and
he reaches back with those insanely long arms, huge hands, and capsizes your
dolphin.
---
You feel him pushing you towards the wall, both of your bodies made buoyant by
water, and you surface near the edge where he pins you, laughing like this is a
game, like he has no ulterior motives. Your bodies are close and slick and you
can’t even tell if you’re turned on yet because that’s how insane you are, how
out of touch, how unsure about everything now that he’s this new person with
eyes unclouded by fear. You wonder if you really did love him that summer, or
if you just loved his terror.
Somehow the laughter fades and then you’re holding each other, which is
definitely weird. You wouldn’t even do this with your other friends, and
definitely not this long, and in silence. But you’re doing it with him,
wondering if you’re both still playing at that charade of normalcy. Your heads
nod together, wet hair and ears touching, skin to skin and he feels so
different under your hands, in the water. He smells different, too, a new
cologne or deodorant or sunscreen or something. You inhale him, trying to find
notes that make you feel, but inside you’re still a vacancy.
You both stay like that, paralyzed, arms around one another, legs twined. And
then his mouth opens on your shoulder.
---
There are freckles, and white, and the water eddying between you, warm and wet.
And then you’re looking at each other, and then you’re kissing. Neither of you
starts or leans in or anything. Just one second you’re not kissing, then you
are. His lips are warm and sweet and not how you remember because you realize
with a brilliant clarity that don’t really remember anymore, even though it
used to be the clearest thing in your memory, before it was replaced with this
strange new reality, before you killed it until it was dead.
His tongue. Your teeth. It’s all so easy and unmessy, this stylized, clean,
sugar-glass version of the filthy desperate kissing you remember from when you
were teenagers. His hands claw all over your bare back and thighs, his tongue
hungrier and more insistent than you can make yours. You let him do whatever he
wants to you.
---
You want it to mean something, to be like a dam breaking, but it’s not anymore.
It will probably never be. You don’t feel the way you used to, like an
avalanche under his hands, like this is could be the last time so you have to
get your fill. You say his name in your head, you remind the shriveled shell of
a sixteen year old inside of you that this is him, it’s Jade, dreamed of,
longed for, loved, never forgotten even though you tried/. And that used to
mean something.
But nothing changes. You keep kissing, easy, unmessy, unbeautiful and pool-wet.
It’s better than kissing anyone else has been because he knows what he’s doing,
but it’s not as perfect as you imagined it because nothing ever is.
Still, the water keeps trying to take him away from you, but you don’t let it.
---
Your bodies grind together like two stones tumbling downstream. You touch him
all over, trying hard to find a familiar stretch of skin but he’s lost so much
weight in the last four years that every centimeter is new and uncharted. There
are smooth planes and bones and muscles where you remember only fear, its
hollowed out longing. His hair is long enough to pull, but not short enough to
get in your mouth. It doesn’t feel like a memory. It doesn’t feel like
anything. It is too natural to be exciting, and your hips lock like something
old and known, antique keys in some almost forgotten attic.
He picks you up and puts you on the edge of the pool like you’re made of air.
Then you’re tilted back, scapula scraping against burning hot pavement as he
pushes you into the ground, covers your body with his. And there, on the
cement, you thrust against each other in your borrowed swimming trunks, grit
sticking to wet skin, sun in your eyes. You drip, making a dark spot where
you’re lying, and the licks your stomach, just above the waistband. It feels
good, but not like magic, not like the world is ending.
---
Even though he’s on top and he’s the one whose driving this thing to wherever
it’s going to go, he keeps saying “wait,” “wait” in a tiny, unconvincing
voice.You’re not doing anything but lying underneath him getting sunburnt so
you don’t know what you’re supposed to be waiting for. He’s kissing you
everywhere, a tremor in his toned, freckled arms saying “wait.”
“Okay,” you finally tell him, and he looks up at you, eyes stricken and not
brown but nearly amber, flecked with green. You reach for his tattooed bicep
with one hand, move his hair off his brow with the other. You are still stunned
to know he can look at you this long without his face getting twisted with self
doubt. “Okay.”
---
You’re back to holding each other, and you notice that you’re shaking, too.
Your hair drips down your back, and you shiver. “Are you alright?” you ask,
wondering if you broke something.
“Yeah,” he says, voice still small, but shaped the way words are shaped when
they[re shaped around a smile. His hands trace your ribs, your jawline, smooth
your hair. None of it feels desperate,or urgent, because you think that the
desperation of your youth was a product of his fear. “Is this actually
happening,” he says without a question mark tilting the end of it. He laughs
hollowly, awed. Then, he says your name, which makes your stomach turn with the
ghost of arousal more than anything else has. “We should wait,” he says, thumb
on your lower lip
You wonder what he means, and if he means sex. And if he does mean sex, why he
wants to wait. If it’s because he has somewhere to be at six, or if it’s
because this actually means something to him, that you actually mean something
to him, beyond loyalty to a four year old memory.
You’re kind of touched by this maybe-reason, in spite of yourself.
---
Amazed, you notice you’re half hard even in your wet shorts, and you feel a
little put out by this waiting shit only because you’ve been psyching yourself
out for the last few minutes, telling yourself it’s not the end of the world if
you fuck, it doesn’t make you pathetic or a bad person, but apparently you’re
not fucking so that was all in vain.
It’s okay though, because you’re not supposed to have expectations about this.
You’re not driving. You’re letting this happen.
He pulls back and studies your face, looking beautiful because this might not
be the same, and it might not be what you remember or what you want, but he
will always be beautiful because he just is.“You keep looking at me,” you
observe.
“Yeah,” he says, and smiles, face bright and unafraid and you almost want him
to not want to want this, so that he will look terrified, and you’ll feel
something beyond this wall, this dam, this dead thing.
---
And again, you are kissing. Rolling around, burning your arms on the pavement,
licking the dips and hollows of his clavicles and throat. His necklace, a thin
silver chain with a saint christopher medal on it, keeps hitting your teeth.
There are parts of your body that had fallen asleep that he’s waking up with
his own skin, and you hurt as you come back to life under him.
Then, his hand is sliding beneath the waistband of his shorts on your body,
too-big with the knotted drawstring and his fingers are still chlorine-cold on
your hot skin. He’s touching you there, and you’re hard. You don’t know how
long you’ve been than way, but you are.
You still, lying flat under his palm, panting. “What about waiting?” struggles
out of your tight throat.
“Pfft,” he says, and waves his free hand through the air between you like he’s
brushing something away, eyes heavy lidded. “Can’t.”
---
And you think this is what you wanted. Not him to fuck you, (although his hand
feels perfect and practiced where it’s touching you, jerking your dick like
he’s jerked lots of dicks before) but him not being able to keep himself from
fucking you. His inability to resist you, once in in spite of fear, now in
spite of former protest, reminds you more of Old Jade than New Jade does. You
wonder about all the guys he’s evidently fucked in college, what that means, if
he told them about you, if they scared him as much as you did or if the fear
was localized here, at home, in his backyard.
Because you’re fair, you struggle with his swim trunks until you’re underneath,
touching him where he’s warm, steel-hard, narrow. It’s not how you imagined he
would feel here, four years ago when you still only had your own body for
reference. He’s older and taller and back then you thought he would be bigger
than you, but he’s not. You feel like you could close your entire hand around
him. Everything moves in slow motion. His pendant rocks above you, catching
sunlight, and you close your eyes.
---
Your breath is coming short and fast; you’re sweating because you’re under the
sun and on top of scalding cement and there’s this lithe, toned body working
above you, groaning and flickering like a flame in the wind. You remind
yourself. You say his name in your head.
And suddenly, you’re feeling. Too much. It hits you like a punch, heavy and
solid in the gut and then you realize you could cry right now, cry on his pale
sweating shoulder, cry with his fingers around you and his dick spasming in
your palm.
Fuck you think wildly, desperately. Your nails tighten on his back, and now
you’re the one whose scared.
---
Maybe it’s the angle or maybe it’s the sudden tide of unexpected sensation
crashing over your head, but your hands are going numb. Your legs are going
numb. Your lungs are working harder than they need to and you’re a picture of
arousal, the thrown back head, the red face, the body out of control. But
you’re not aroused, or not only aroused. You’re lost. You’re not sure what’s
happening, with his hips humping his dick into the pins and needles in your
palm, with the small, high-pitched noises falling from his lips in your hair.
This is what you wanted your mind reminds you, and you correct it, not really.
You come anyway.
---
He rolls off, wiping your jizz all over your own stomach, and it’s disgusting
and burning hot so you stagger up, standing and shuddering, seeing stars in the
glittery daylight. He follows you, eyes dark and dangerous-hungry. You’re
backing away from him on weak legs but he moves faster until he’s pressing you
against the wooden deck table. It bites into your back, scraping and splintery.
You hold him off, palms open flat on his hard stomach, visibly shaking against
his skin. “What time is it.” You say, hoarse.
“I don’t want to think about that,” he says, hands all in your hair, on your
cheeks, turning your flushed face back and forth like he’s surveying a piece of
meat, some animal at an auction. “God you’re crazy beautiful,” he says in a low
voice, and no one has ever called you that before, let alone the Jade you
remember, the one who was mute and dark and violent when he looked at you.
“Yeah, but. You have somewhere to be,” you remind him, breath still fast and
terrifying in its lack of control, elbows bucking as he presses into you. Your
stomachs are sticky with your come, smeared between your bodies like a sealant.
“God. Yeah. You’re right. You’re responsible,” he says, reeling back a little,
unconvincing. “Yeah, okay,” he says quietly, under his breath, to himself. And
he can’t stop touching you, even though he’s clearly trying. He puts his hands,
huge and white, on your shoulders and peels your torsos apart, braced an arm’s
length away from you for around two seconds until he’s kissing you blind again,
tonguing the roof of your mouth as you fall apart, dissolving into pool water
and not memories, but a new thing.
---
“Fuck,” he says, wrenching away from your swollen, unbreathing mouth. There’s
the bracing again, the stiff shuddering arms and the hands on the shoulders and
the desperate tension stretched between the two of you like a desert. “We
should really stop.” He looks straight at you. Sincere, unwavering. And there’s
nothing left of the old Jade in his eyes.
“Yeah,” you say, shakily, fists closing around this stranger’s forearms, making
him keep his distance. The breath feels ripped out of your lungs and you
stumble, light headed, turning around so you’re doubled over the deck table,
heaving with your sweating palms flat. You don’t know why, but you can’t stop
smiling. Your mouth convulses up at the corners, and up to the elbow you’re
numb still, tingling and bloodless. He rubs his hard dick into the crack of
your ass, hands roving up your chest, mouth all over your neck and shoulder,
biting and fearless.
---
You smile and shake and sob as he comes against your back, shooting ribbons of
white-wet fire onto your spine. His mouth is all over your ear and he groans
into it, making you shiver and your knees buckle halfway to the ground,
crumbling against the arm he has around your ribcage. And this is a storm, but
it’s not the storm you wondered about, expected. You don’t know who you are
right now, or who he is.
Head bent, you stay that way for too long, thinking that things wouldn’t have
happened like this is he didn’t have somewhere to be at six. You’re a sucker
for expiration dates; the impending end makes mundane, normal things like sex
desperate, rushed, feel like the last time. When things feel like they’re the
last time, they bring back memories.
“Fuck, he says again, and a rumble echoes through your empty self.
---
You’re not ruined because of him, or for him. He’s a stranger. You’re ruined
because this feels like the last time, and that’s what breaks the dam, incites
the avalanche. You wonder if there is such a thing as love, or only fucked up
people with chemicals firing in their brains, fighting their tiny wars. You
choke on chlorine, grinning in this crazy way that’s the farthest thing from
funny. And he looks at you, and looks at you, eyes burning acid holes into your
scapula, looking at you like you might leave, like you’re the one who leaves.
He rubs a hand up your back, smearing his load. “We should stop,” he says again
maybe just to say it, before spinning your dizzy body around and sealing your
mouths together like he doesn’t know how to stop and he needs you to do it for
him.
---
But you’re not sure you know how to, either. Not when it feels like the last
time, and your body remembers what happened four years ago, and what it felt
like to be left. You’re kissing back, because it’s better than smiling, or
laughing, or crying, or whatever your flesh is trying to do.
No, you think, this isn’t what I wanted. Then you must admit that you didn’t
know what you wanted. You never did. That is what it means to relinquish all
expectations, to render yourself numb to something that was once everything.
His hands dig trenches in your body. They plant new seeds. You wonder if you
will water them, expose them to sunlight. You wonder if you even can. Still, he
covers what he unearths, and you cling to him like you were clinging to the
past.
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