Operation Sal | Sally Face x Travis Phelps

37

Returning from Todd's place, Sal finds that the firm, green couch pushed up against his living room wall is unattended.

    He tries not to mind the way his heart instantaneously sinks with premature fear upon realizing that the fleece blanket he'd laid over Travis's sleeping body had been thrown aside hastily. The pillow he'd been using was still pressed into the arm of the couch, sporting a faint dent from where his head had been.

    And Travis himself — nowhere to be found.

      Sal holds his head up, ignoring the racing thoughts flooding into his skull, ignoring his imagination, which makes him contemplate all the most horrible reasons why Travis is no longer where he once was.

     He stares at the couch for a moment more, as if gazing upon it firmly will mean that he'll find the blonde still laying there, peacefully asleep, and then he turns down the hall, towards his bedroom. It's perfectly sensible to think that Travis may have just gotten up to look for him, or to get something from his bag, or to simply walk around.

   Sal pushes the door, finding hope in the fact that it's already somewhat open, but the room is just how he left it — no blonde boys, no fathers of blonde boys.

    His stomach churns, "Travis?" he tries to call out, but the tightness of his throat won't allow him to be as loud as he'd like.

     He should never have left. He should have been here. What if something had happened? What if Travis was in very real trouble?

     No, he couldn't jump to such drastic conclusions yet. 

   He turns on his heel and heads back down the hallway, which seems to become more marrow but the second, closing him in, suffocating him. Travis may have been hungry, he hadn't eaten very much recently. He could be in the kitchen.

     Of course, in the back of his mind, Sal knows that the kitchen and the living room are directly next to one another and he thinks that Travis likely would have heard him come in and made his presence known if he really was in there.

    He checks anyway, peering around the corner to stare into an empty beige kitchen.

   Sally Face's anxiety only grows, a cold chill rushing up his spine. With a pounding, fearful heart, he briskly walks down the adjacent hall, where he stumbles upon a door, thrown wide open.

     Walking towards the yellow light of the bathroom, Sal lets out a relieved, slightly shaky breath.

      Travis sat against the wall, a few inches from the door, with his head turned and lowered. His arms, long and careful, are rested atop his bent knees.

   "Hey," Sal says, causing his head to turn just a bit away from where his gaze is focused on the tile floor, "you okay? I didn't know where you were," there's a slight crackle in his voice when he speaks, a tightness in his throat that signifies, most prominently, that he's trying not to let Travis know just how afraid he had become.

      It's then that Travis's jaw raises to him, just by a few inches, and Sal catches a glimpse of a maroon streak glinting at the edge of his lip.

     He merely blinks at it for a moment, surprised and caught off guard and concerned. All the while, his white, slate-like prosthetic remains emotionless.

     Travis's pitiful brown eyes pause on him. He looks drained, melancholy, like he was embarrassed to even be sitting there, in the state that he's in. "Hey," is all he says back.

     "What happened?" Sal asks, unable to hold back, speaking in the quiet, raspy way that he always did, "I think you're bleeding."