Strawberry Panic {TomTord}

Let me be ((Frank)) with you

"Together."

Whispered with baited breath, the word barely seemed audible against the constant steady thrum of background noise, and yet startlingly loud to come out of his chewed lips. All of the air sucked out of the room, leaving him gasping uselessly, mouth pursed and tongue heavy, a strange hollow feeling gaping widely in his chest.

Opening up to people was hard.

Between finding the right words to say, to the uneasy wobble of his watery, upset voice, to the shameful bright red flush of his ears, exposing his soul to another person wasn't a practice he was very well versed with. Keeping his mouth shut and his secrets locked behind his eyes became a survival strategy that helped to keep him relatively unnoticed, a cry for help that was learnt to be violently smothered under years of repression and denial.

It kept everyone close to him in the dark- safe, and out of the creeping, snarling clutches of his fathers legacy. Entangled in the web of lies of his own design, he sat laying in the centre, strung out and waiting to be caught.

Tord had caught him.

Now what?

He could tell him everything- every pain suffered, and every tear shed, all wrapped in a pretty bow of cynical irony and wet, stained cheeks. Free himself of the hollowness, to share the burden of the crushing weight of knowledge he was forced to grow up with, shackled to the memories that still caused him to wake up in a cold sweat.

Did he deserve to be that selfish?

Tord had his own burdens- either placed upon him by his own merit or had them violently thrust into his life by Tom's irreversible actions. Fried nerves, a backwards plan and an arm that doesn't function- he had his own problems to deal with, and to place any more unnecessary weight on his shoulders would be cruel.

But he encouraged it.

History was doomed to be repeated if not learned from previous mistakes. It would be painfully pathetic and ridiculously stupid if he jumped in, feet first, all of his fucks left to be swept up into the wind if he didn't consider the consequence of his future actions.

Nothing could heal the deeply engrained wounds that he had left on Matt, but maybe, just maybe, he could hold on long enough for the storm to pass, and to save Tord the agony of rehearsing the bloody dance of cowardice.

Tord encouraged him to open up, but so did Matt; and look what happened.

Truthfully, Matt had been the only person to really know and understand the magnitude of his fathers' actions. Over the years of their friendship, he had slowly whittled away at his defences with his adorable dimpled smiles and thoughtful gestures- pulling down the walls that he had built for himself for his own preservation, desperate to know and desperate to help. After the dust had settled and the truth had been spilt- nothing had really been the same again, his guilty conscious, neither his itchy trigger finger.

"Tom, please-"

Children of abuse share the same pattern of behaviour. Established relationships were plastic and hollow- trust hard to gain. Breaking his internal wiring like that would be difficult, to fight against instincts that came as naturally as breathing.

"Tord- I." A heavy sigh, an endless scrolling monologue clogging in his throat, bitter phrases scratched insistently into the walls of his skull, "I don't think-"

Hot breath ghosted over his lips, warm and achingly close- a shiver ran down his spine, cold branches of electricity curving around his shoulders in long sweeps of goosebumps. Bright silver eyes stared into his own, half-lidded and sincere, noses brushing as his mouth moved.