A Promise Fulfilled [WattyAwards#2012]

Drabbles: Little Things About Love -ραят ιι-

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"We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that  perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I  with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely  sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its  colors and textures and sounds, I felt-I felt the way you thought,  hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted-and then I realized that truly I just wanted you."

― Cassandra Clare, Clorkwork Prince.

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One of the problems that Dex had always brought to mind was that he and Timmy began as a sadist's karmic wet dream, at the point that all sh*t seemed to happen first, to the point that it just kept going right on over the good stuff.

He brought it up, one night, lying there in bed with Timmy tucked into his side, and Timmy just giggled and hummed and kissed his way down Dex's body because they'd been fighting for three days now and Timmy tended to be insatiable when it came to make-up sex. And Dex understood. In many ways, Timmy was still getting used to this life, shrugging normalcy up around his little shoulders and pretending it fitted. He lived moment by moment in a way that Dex couldn't, because there was a time that Timmy believed a moment was all he had.

It was the source of a lot of the fighting.

And Timmy couldn't kiss away the fact that he was flunking out of college.

Dex had tried to explain it to him, explain that he just didn't make as much money as he used to, that savings account dry up and they couldn't afford to waste twenty thousand dollars on a failed launch, but Timmy just brushed it off like always, because after having nothing for so long, something was everything to him, and he wouldn't even notice when something turned into nothing.

Fairytales never talked about after the 'happily ever after'. It's a major design flaw, Dex decided.  How did Rapunzel pay the bills? How did Prince Charming deal with the way Cinderella woke up shivering at night, surfacing from dreams that she refused to talk about? Did Ariel and Eric feel the tension building between them over the stupidest, smallest things, and at least snap, and yell, and cry, and fall into silence for days until the guilt grew too much and they returned to each other's arms out of necessity more than actual apology? Those were the stories that Dex was actually interested in, now. Those stories that could somehow explain to him how it was possible to be so impossibly furious with someone yet impossibly, irrefutably, hopelessly in love with them all at once.

"I'll work harder," Timmy promised, pausing to run his tongue along Dex's skin, tracing a trail from hipbone to hipbone. "I swear I will."

He wouldn't though, and they both knew it by now. They knew that Timmy got too easily frustrated with himself, felt so out of place at times, as the person who'd lived things beyond his years, yet was thrown into the mix with children fresh out of high school, naïve and selfish and utterly unlearned about life even though they might be full of knowledge. And they both knew that when Timmy got frustrated, his first route of escape was to give up, and pretend that it didn't really matter to him anyway, because if he could convince others, then maybe he could convince himself that it was alright to lose another dream by the wayside.

It wouldn't work this time though.

"Come here," Dex murmured, and waited for Timmy to shuffle back up the bed before wrapping his arms around him and kissing his forehead. "You need to talk to you professor. Ask about extra credit or something."