Attachments (Tronnor AU)

Agitate

transitive verb

       • to shake, move; to disturb or excite the emotions of.

intransitive verb

       • to stir up public interest for a cause, etc.

Troye doesn't stick around long after the fact. He goes dead silent, turns storming blue eyes away and just as Connor's about to take a breath of freshly wind-whipped air, he mutters something and turns to pull his shoes back on. Connor doesn't catch what he says. He's not sure he wants to.

The door slams more violently than a car crash, shaking the walls of his fancy apartment in one of the nicer neighbourhoods of the uptown cityscape. Connor stands in the middle of his fancy kitchen in his fancy apartment in his fancy complex in his fancy neighbourhood and, for the first time in his life, the perfection around him is unsettling to the deepest hollows of his bones. He stares at the stupid coffee press and his stupid clean counters and his stupid coats on their stupid coat-rack and he hates himself for only now seeing how fortunate he really is.

Connor never thought he was one to take things for granted. He tells his mother he loves her every time they talk and he knows he's lucky to have a family as supportive as they are. He thanks his friends honestly when they buy him lunch, smiling gratefully even as they wave their hands in dismissal. He prays every night to gods he doesn't believe in that his sister will be gifted many more years of harmless health. He's happy with what he has, he really is, and he would never trade it for the world.

But- but -he realizes now that he was also never one to acknowledge that others are often not gifted the same endowments as he is.

Connor's always foolishly believed the best in humanity and seen only the realities that suited his preconceived notions of the world. He's smiled at strangers and assumed they'd know how to smile back, assumed they'd simply been having a bad day if they didn't and naively wished them better times. He's written off news castings of brutal assaults as over-played or inaccurate, dramatic retellings of misunderstandings or simply one slightly less shiny apple in a basket of seven billion.

He's assumed, God he's assumed, that everyone knows love and grace and happiness of some sort, fortune and good times and positive feelings to counter any bad they might fall on.

But Troye is made of torn grey canvases speckled in white-lightning scars and guarded blue hurricanes. He flinches at unexpected touches, radiates iron-clad defensiveness at every small misstep, and believes more firmly in his own inevitable abandonment than he does in most tangible things.

Connor feels like an entitled asshole. He's not, he knows that, but he can't shake the way the title settles uncomfortably in his gut.

He sucks in a breath.

The apartment feels too quiet with just him in it.

The world feels too loud through the walls of his trembling glass house.