there’s something about him that makes brontë want to sit straighter; mend the fisherman hook of his spine and correct a posture that’s long become bent and obdurate. it must be the acuity of his eyes, quick to cut like black-handled blades and it’s unnerving to a boy who’d only possessed half his senses for more time than he’d like to equate, spent his teenage years balancing a precarious edge with his back to the world and his eyes somewhere in space.

it nearly makes him resentful – the last man who’d given brontë reason to doubt was his father and he’ll always be the sore thumb to a boy with no ostensible concerns, wasting his life half-drunk or hallucinogenic and failing his classes when he’s lucid enough to attend them: he’s going nowhere and doesn’t he know it, hasn’t he been told enough that it’s become a mantra he can recite without it scalding him, mouthfuls of boiling water that blister his insides.

but –

he’s too buzzed to resent him now, the drugs a slow and leaping wave he’s riding with his hands to the sky and when the stranger comes closer and settles beside him he offers him little but a curious turn of head, a lethargic smile that pinches the sharp shape of his cheeks. the boy smells like smoke and ash and brontë’s dizzied by how pretty he looks up close, like a statue or maybe a portrait of these people hundreds of years ago with their hair done in curls and their eyes dark and solemn that peer at him from the staircase walls.

(they sneer at him, too, though often he’s too undone to care – remembers being fourteen years old and a monitor escorting him)

there’s something about him that makes brontë want to sit straighter; mend the fisherman hook of his spine and correct a posture that’s long become bent and obdurate. it must be the acuity of his eyes, quick to cut like black-handled blades and it’s unnerving to a boy who’d only possessed half his senses for more time than he’d like to equate, spent his teenage years balancing a precarious edge with his back to the world and his eyes somewhere in space.

it nearly makes him resentful – the last man who’d given brontë reason to doubt was his father and he’ll always be the sore thumb to a boy with no ostensible concerns, wasting his life half-drunk or hallucinogenic and failing his classes when he’s lucid enough to attend them: he’s going nowhere and doesn’t he know it, hasn’t he been told enough that it’s become a mantra he can recite without it scalding him, mouthfuls of boiling water that blister his insides.

but –

he’s too buzzed to resent him now, the drugs a slow and leaping wave he’s riding with his hands to the sky and when the stranger comes closer and settles beside him he offers him little but a curious turn of head, a lethargic smile that pinches the sharp shape of his cheeks. the boy smells like smoke and ash and brontë’s dizzied by how pretty he looks up close, like a statue or maybe a portrait of these people hundreds of years ago with their hair done in curls and their eyes dark and solemn that peer at him from the staircase walls.

(they sneer at him, too, though often he’s too undone to care – remembers being fourteen years old and a monitor escorting him)