"he was my home. and i made him leave." 

the words dripped from dan's mouth like a venomous rhapsody; seeping out from the bitter taste of frostbite and ashen cigarette embers that coated his velvet tongue. the words had drifted from his shattered, whiskey-hazed mind and blended out into the ice-cold crystallization of greys and blues and cheap exhales of nicotine that made up the wintry winds that whipped past his pale skin.

tae clenched his jaw as his blackened eyes darted to the shadowed cement, dan's words painting an abstract reality drawn by the bitter colors that painted the brunette's lilac undereyes and the crimson that had once slashed at his fragile wrists. after all, life imitated art, right?

"dan, come on. let me take you home," he exhaled, the torn luminescence that flickered in the blackness of his irises glimmering against the yellowed street lights cast upon him. dan shook his head, his skin blending to primrose as the cold ate away at his shivering body, but he didn't even seem to notice. he turned, walking away through the mist of regret and aging cigarette smoke that dragged him down like tar.

he didn't turn to look, but he knew tae wasn't chasing after him. tae wanted dan to be happy more than most things, but even he knew that it was no use to chase down a lost boy who was addicted to being lost. no use trying to be a savior to a boy who was so far gone, only he could bring himself serenity.

only he could quiet the skin-singeing winds that spiraled him farther and farther away and cease the storm of his twisting mind.

dan walked, his curly hair tangling in the wind that whipped at his bitten skin as he ambled forward, the sense of how long he had been alone unknown to him.

granted, if he wasn't talking physically, dan had been alone for a long time. forever, perhaps. his distrusting mind has been as vacant as his heart, and dan couldn't remember a time he didn't feel like that. he couldn't remember a time he felt, at all.

there were times he thought he was feeling, the times carter's velvet fingertips brushed against his bruised bottom lip and then travelled around his delicate neck, holding the lost boy in his sculpturesque arms. it was just a dream, the hickory-haired boy thought, a delusion that i could be loved. or that i could love.

vodka-scented fragments of carter's voice swam in the shadowed oceans of dan's mind, like sharks attracted to the blood rushing to his head and chewing away at his ruptured heartstrings.

the lavender bite marks on bottom lips and smiling while kissing and lilac-blending-to-azure veins flooding with cognac and euphoria were what dan liked remembering about carter; about love.

but love is only an illusion. the calm before the storm.

he couldn't remember when he had stopped walking as he noticed he was a stand-still with the wintry weather that chewed at his velvet skin and the deathly vacancy of a neighborhood at 1am. he exhaled as his oxygen evaporated in a clouded fog, disappearing to reveal a giant, hickory house with emerald ivy clawing it's viridescence up the seemingly-abandoned walls.

it looked unnervingly familiar as dan's eyes narrowed, trying to imagine what the house would look like in the sunlight. with every timid step he took forward, his mind was overcome with the anxiety-weighted feeling that he had done this all before. it was like every nerve in his body was telling him to turn back. every hair on his body standing up in a fear-ridden defiance of entering the abandoned home.

the gate lock was gashed in and swung open as he reached it with a creak that sent chills sinking their teeth into dan's skin. jaw clenched and dirty fingernails digging into bruised palms, the sudden feeling of terror seeped into the very veins of his body, and yet he couldn't stop his feet from walking up the shadowed steps that led to the haunting door.

he stood in front of the door, his wrist hanging in front of the doorknob as his heartbeat quickened as if the tainted fingertips of anxiety were holding it hostage. it was as if the milky haze of fog stirring hauntingly with the dusty hickories and greys of the crackling wood had lulled the brunette until he was standing on death's door.

he turned the handle, his body melting into the rhapsodic horror of the bone-chilling atmosphere as he ambled inside, somehow feeling as if it had gotten even colder inside. a cheap exhale of cigarette embers and the metallic toxicity of blood stirred in the air's pungent scent, and with footsteps floating in the upstairs above him, dan suddenly became aware that he was no longer alone.

voices laced in rage and liquored vendettas hung in the thick air as they drifted through the creaking floorboards, wooden hisses shrieking when dan crawled towards the voices. he went unnoticed as his wiry body seemed to melt into the nicotine-tasting fog that suffocated his shadowed silhouette.

"stop acting like you know shit about me, so drop the bullshit and get your ass over here!" the voice raged, spitting every word with sizzling rage as dan assumed the pacing man must've been on a phone call. "drop it on the front step unless you want to leave with a knife in your throat."

the words sunk their needlelike teeth into dan's pallid skin as his shoulder blades accidentally fell into a crumbling staircase, causing the man above him to halt his pacing. the brunette held his breath as his nerves raced through his sweat-laced body until the man continued to hiss into his phone.

"what do you mean, how am i gonna pay for it?! you owe me," the man growled, dan's gaze locking onto a vacant sliver of space where he spotted the chiseled silhouette of the shadowed man, maybe boy, crack a crooked grin. his moonlit fingertips twirled a glinting switchblade in between them as his ebony hair melted in with the shadows cast from the pallid moon peeking out from the intrusive pockets of open ceiling no one had bothered to fix. a murderous laugh sounded from his gravelly throat as he held the phone in front of him.

"maybe next time you shouldn't make deals with the devil."

dan didn't know if up until it was the hazel alcohol still stirring in the vacancy of his mind that had held him hostage to the staircase, or if it was the unnerving solitude of both horror and familiarity that had ghosted his body from the moment he had walked through the door. all he knew was of the sweat-laced chills that scraped down his shoulder blades as he felt overtaken with a whiplashing wave of realization of his deadly situation.

his glossy eyes were wide as he numbly scrambled for an escape, the moonlight that had once shed a colorless illumination on the raven-haired boy's physique seeming to have vanished into the haunting clouds.

"you're not one of tate's," the boy spoke under his jagged breath from an unknown distance behind dan, ceasing all movement in the brunette's body as he felt the ice-cold touch of the switchblade to the back of his throat. "if you were, you would've known better than to be caught crossing me."

dan felt his chin cupped and turned around as he met the azure-viridescent illumination of the boy's gleaming irises, as if every mellifluous nebula and rhapsodized comet in the entire galaxy had been captured and was held hostage in his the shadows of his eyes.

it was his eyes that dragged together the puzzle pieces of the boy throwing up at the party only hours before with the armed boy gripping his jaw now.

"so what's a pretty boy like you doing in a place like this?" he murmured, his voice somehow blending together the mellifluousness of melting honey and the rasp of vodka-tainted vendettas. "i-i, uh," dan stumbled as his heart raced, his obvious state of fragility earning a smirk from the hooded boy as he leant back, his arms crossed with a twisted satisfaction as his eyes glinted in the pallid moonlight.

"what's your name?" he cut off his stammering, quirking an eyebrow expectantly as he slipped the blade into his pocket as smoothly as the clouded fog that floated around their skeletons. "dan."

"well, dan, i'm phil. do you believe in ghosts?"

dan's eyebrows furrowed confusedly as phil stared at him in an unnerving expectancy that forced dan to swallow the anxiety clawing it's way from his lungs to his throat anticipating that a wrong answer might be what sends the knife through his tightened chest. "uh, i-i don't know. why?"

"in some religions, ghosts are believed to be wicked people who, after facing punishment for their sins, are reborn as demons. but i don't believe the people have to die first to become demons," phil explained with an unsettling nonchalance.

"why are you telling me this?" dan shook his head, the darker-haired boy shooting him a crooked grin as if the bronze-haired boy was missing something. "because i want you to give me a reason as to why i shouldn't slit your pretty throat right now. and it better be a damn good one."

enamored thoughts raced through the drops of sweat that trickled down the brunette's shivering skeleton as he chewed on his bottom lip, earning an eye roll from phil. "whoops, time's up-"

"i heard you talking up there," dan said, his voice smooth as trickling rainfall as he forced his jagged lungs to steady their breathing.

"i wanna make a deal with the devil."

it was then that dan realized love was never really the storm, nor was the aftermath of a shattered heart. it wasn't carter, or his family, or even the ticking time bomb of being alive.

the storm was dan himself, and the winds hadn't really picked up until that moment.

-

hey !! how was your guys' day?

please comment/vote it motivates me to write more & thank you for reading!!!

-ashton