BOYS OF SUBURBIA [boy x boy] [Wattys 2018]

✗ SEVEN ✗

Sebastian wanted to punch a wall.

Or a person.

Anything would be brilliant, but the anger's been building for half an hour already when Sebastian stormed out of his house into the dark mass of night and slammed the front door, hearing the clank of the door's gears impacting the hinges and his stepfather yelling at the door, his mother trying to calm his stepfather down to avoid any breakage of cheap wine glasses and ceramic dinner plates and Violet- his older sister- creeping up back into her room for a smoke to avoid the damage.

Sebastian needed to get away, away from all the havoc, away from his miserable bastard of a stepfather, away from his weakling of a mother, away from his self-destructive wreckage of a sister, before his mind exploded.

The joints in his fingers were locking and unlocking without his permission and his teeth ground grooves in one another as he jogged down the path of houses, pants of breath fanning out before him like crystallising mists of clouds. Sebastian doesn't think twice about where he was going or how he was going to survive in this ridiculous 'summer' cold and all he cared about was moving. His shoes were carving down the familiar roads into the soles as Sebastian he ran through the night like a knife cutting through the air, not even thinking about directions. His feet hammered against the pavement in time with his ragged breathing, now borderline painful as he sucked the frigid cold into his lungs. He gritted his teeth, dug his nails into his skin and forced himself to go faster.

When he pivoted sharply off the main road and broke through the first line of trees into the woods, the muscles in his legs were screaming in agony from the exertion. He halted as his whole body became part of the trees, melting into the world of silhouettes. Sebastian hunched himself over by the rock, shaking in bottled-up anger, teeth bared and lips twitching. His clenched teeth rattled his gums sore. Sebastian felt weak, tired and drained but that searing white hot anger was still throbbing inside him like a cage of prodded bears fighting to be released, so he pushed himself further. Faster.

After a few minutes of sprinting, he came to a halt of a comparatively small clearing, maybe twenty or thirty feet in diameter, encircled by a ring of dense trees that speared the night on their stalks. It wasn't anything special- most of the ground was bare and the grassy patches was thin and dry, not to mention the weak stream was only a stone's throw from the perimeter. But something was different, Sebastian observed, as he approached. There was smoke emitting from the centre of the clearing and a masculine figure hunched over an emblazon of flames. As Sebastian neared the area, Sebastian realised the boy had a patch of dark, dark hair just like-

"Sebastian?" The figure rose into a stand as Sebastian's face became recognisable due to the light provided by the fire when he stepped closer and registered the boy by the fire. The boy was Niko.

"Niko?" Sebastian retreated with shock. "Um, what are you..." As Sebastian recovered by coming forward, he saw stashes of white powder in small little plastic bags, as well as stacks of rolled-up joints sprawled over the floor in front of the campfire. It was all type of drugs, much to the fantasy of Sebastian's imagination, like a scene from a crime movie of some sort- pills, cocaine, weed and God knows what else. Sebastian watched crime shows like those since he was six and his parents sat him down in front of the tv and forgot about him, due to their constant fights and settlements over the divorce papers, coming back for him minutes, hours, days later and finding him staring at the television, eyes wide, head swimming with drugs, sex, alcohol abuse, gunshots echoing in his ears instead of nursery rhymes. Pictures of colourful drugs on pretty women's breasts were not unfamiliar to Sebastian's eyes, as he was well aware of some of the shitty wankers at his school were recreationally using, but there was something about the reality of looking at those small demons captured in bottles of pills and rolled-up joints that were too bizarre to digest.

"I deal," confessed Niko as Sebastian's eyes widened at the sheer amount of illicit substances just out in the open- well not really, they were hidden from plain sight by the dead log Niko was sitting on but still, Sebastian figured if you were ought to take out that much drugs, you might as well do it somewhere more sheltered. "To make a bit of money. I was just sorting them out."

"Sorting them out?" repeated Sebastian, still amazed at how casually Niko just put that out there. "But-"

"What?" Niko's smirk emerged. "You're going to rat me to the police? I think my boss would kill you before you have the chance."

"No, I'm not just going to..." began Sebastian, but changed his mind as he shook his head. "It's just- I thought you would be a little more discreet about it."

Niko laughed throatily as he waved a cigarette out and placed it between his lips. Sebastian swore he couldn't remember an instance where Niko Salinger would be without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his lips, the same corner that quirked up whenever he performed that seductive, condescending smirk, the same smirk that didn't quite reach his dead brown eyes. "Mate, I'm in the middle of the bloody forest at the dead of night. How much more discreet do you want me to be? Besides," Niko twirled the cigarette in his mouth and eyed the boy suspiciously. "What are you doing here? Want another hit?"

Niko gestured to the bags of weed lying by his feet. Sebastian's mouth went dry at the memory of his first joint. How the tantalising sweet scent coiled up into his nostrils, intoxicating his brain with that high and his whole vision became spotty with lights. Just in that single electrifying moment alone, Sebastian felt his whole body lighting up and hooking itself to a terrifying addiction Sebastian knew if he didn't watch the ledge, he would find himself plummeting down towards it.

Sebastian knew he was directing himself to his own grave when he said, "Why not?"

________________________________________________________________

listening to some trap soul and this is <3 <3