Gabriel's knees are always (skinned) wrote in repose,
Re: board to Death/consumed
He wasn't bothered by the layers of sweat and grime, even though he was coated from his forehead down to the exposed strips of ankle beneath the cuffs of jeans that were both too tight and too short. Besides having experienced what it was like to have no skin at all (that had been a whole other type of trauma, on a night so far gone the memory was starting to lose focus), he'd also spent summers on his family's fishing boats, and the combined filth of guts and little glory where a far sight worse than a little mud.
It was all the rest of it that had Ronan wanting to recoil, except the subject of his ire was his own skin. The sensation of the needle nipping at the smooth skin of his arm's crook. An expert thumb pressing down, holding the vein so that it wouldn't blow and bruise if he twitched. His body sinking into waves of warm, enveloping bliss, welcome surrender. Escape from the endless barrage of voices in his head.
Ronan mirrored the other, glancing down at his arm - there was the mark of an injection there, nestled just below the line of his elbow. No missing it, already bruising a faint red. He was too preoccupied to gather that he was projecting loud enough for the other to have heard his unspoken gratitude.
Clean. He nodded numbly, pressing his hand against the inside of his arm as if he could erase it, just by hiding it from sight. Winced, when the other told him to stop - it echoed tenfold in his head. Frank. He needed to find Frank, except - except that he had no idea who the hell Frank even was, so that one didn't really belong to him. Ronan heaved a sigh and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his closed eyelids with his free hand, pressing harder and harder until he saw fireworks explode over blackness.
"Yeah, go -" he bit out, shuffling backward on the slick ground until his back found purchase against the building once more. "You should - you should go. Find Frank. I'll be okay. I can call - I'll be okay." He dropped his hand from his eyes and squinted up in the other's direction, trying for reassuring and knowing he was failing miserably. He'd started to shiver, and he pulled down the sleeves of his shirt, trying to wrap the material tighter around his body. He didn't know who he was pretending he could call. But he had his phone, could feel it in the back pocket of the jeans that didn't fit. He'd figure something out, if he could just get some quiet for a minute.
He gave the other an approximation of a smile, wan though it was. "I'll get a ride." And with that, he managed to slam a door shut somewhere around the front of his mind, causing the bubble to burst like someone had stabbed it with a fork. The connection between them broke, and Ronan breathed another sigh, this one half relief, and half agony.