Light My Way Back Home •Patrick Stump+Fall Out Boy•

Chapter Six: And It's Just A Spark, But It's Enough

||Cole Wentz|| First Person||

I raise my fist to the wooden door separating the publicity of the carpeted and wallpapered hallway and the comfort of my own home. My keys were somewhere at the bottom of my bag, but people were home, so there wasn't much of a point to bother retrieving it. The scratchy material of the waistband on my jeans burns the sharp slits on my hips, and my mind is so foggy that I almost forget why they're there or how they're there. My heart thuds a thousand times over as I hear the locks being undone, the door pulling back and revealing my big brother standing there. His eyes are red and bags hang under his eyes. My chest tightens and my ribcage constricts painfully around my lungs.

"Cole," he breathes my name out under his breath. I smile dryly at him, nothing happy or enthusiastic about the gesture, and take a step closer,

"Something stopped me." I shrug my shoulders, the words escaping my lips and hanging out in the air with more meaning than I give it credit for. Pete looks at me with dismay for just a short moment before he's reaching out and pulling me into the apartment, barely locking the door behind us before his arms are wrapping around me and pulling me into his warm embrace. I inhale his scent and let out a shuddering breath as his body quakes with sobs racking his body.

"I thought that Vancouver was going to happen all over again." Pete tells me, and I almost forget to suck in oxygen. That was three years ago. "We didn't know where you were and you stopped picking up... Patrick was about to call the police."

"Where is he?" I ask Pete, and he jerks his head to the stairs.

"With Saint and Maya. Brendon is up there too," Pete tells me, and I almost think that he'll let me be on my way, but then he's pushing up my sleeves gently, the sweater and the jacket alike moving up and brushing against the fresh and burning marks. The friction makes me gasp in pain, and Pete looks like he might pass out at the sight. "What is that?"

"What's what?" I whisper, but when I look down, I almost vomit.

I can't believe it. I can't believe that I-

"I don't even know what happened." I promise my brother, because in all honesty, everything was a blur of red and metal and tears after I hung up on Patrick. But there it is, jagged lines still bleeding that form all sorts of shapes. And the scary part is that I don't recall making these elaborate cuts. The first few on my wrist were normal slits, but then some started criss-crossing and overlapping each other in a mess.

"Cover these," Pete says, tugging my sleeves down. "Bronx is in the living room." Pete adds, implying that the little boy does not need to see this by accident.

"I need to talk to Patrick," I say.

"Upstairs," Pete says, his hands shaking and twitching at his sides. He's looking at me like I just murdered somebody, so I spin on my heel and let my Converse laced feet guide me up the stairs.

"Patrick?" I say, and not a second passes before a teary eyed Patrick is throwing open the door to Maya's room and gasping. He stands there and just looks at me, his jaw slightly hanging as his full, pink lips part in shock. His blue eyes are searching my own, looking for a sign that I'm not real and that I'm a figment of his imagination. But I'm not, and he's immediately closing the distance between us and crashing his lips to mine. He holds me to his body and tries to hold back the sobs rattling his body.

"You- you," Patrick breathes out. "You did not-" Patrick gives up on trying to form a coherent sentence before he's taking my hand and leading us in the direction of our room. He closes the door softly behind us before turning to look at me. "All of them."

"What?" I ask.

"I wan- I want to see all of them." Patrick says, his hands clasped together as he twiddles his thumbs. I look away from him and inhale sharply, peeling my leather jacket away from my body, wincing along the way. I drop the jacket to the ground, and Patrick gasps when he sees the red soaked sleeves of my sweater. I yank the sweater up and over my head, standing in front of him with just my bra and the skinny jeans.