Kill This Love [MeanPlan - COMPLETE]

I Won't Hold You Back, Beloved

Plan did not cry when Mean gave him back his ring.

They stayed in the hotel that night, left with no other choice than to see the trip out and catch their return flight to Thailand together the following day. They slept separately in each of the twin beds, the love of Plan's life facing away from him. He did not know at what time dreams had lulled Mean, extending a gentle hand and guiding him towards peace. All he knew was that they had to be dreams because their reality had proved enough of a nightmare.

Plan's brain granted him no such mercy. He lay curled up on his side well into the early hours of the morning, watching Mean sleep from across the room and wondering how he was ever going to say goodbye. In the end he gave up, getting out of bed and fumbling his way through the darkness. Trying not to wake him, he carefully pulled back the covers, climbing in next to his favourite boy. As if the world was offering him one small consolation, the tiniest of silver linings, Mean didn't push away.

Plan had been lucky enough to lie there with him.

One last time.

Unconscious Mean seemed to forget their predicament, rolling over and enveloping strong arms around the elder instinctively. Plan settled his head underneath his chin, nose pressed up against his shoulder, breathing him in deep. He tried to engrain his scent to memory, the grapefruits and the remnants of cologne and the indescribable notes of something so homely, something so Mean that it made his heart fragment into pieces.

Plan held him like that all night, frightened to fall asleep, reminded every time heavy lids fell shut that he would never get to again. He stared through the blackness, eyes wide and alert and trying to make out every outline of Mean's face.

The face he didn't recall how to live without.

Despite the bestest of efforts, tiredness must have gripped him sometime around four because he remembered dawn breaking through open shutters when he stirred at half nine the next morning. The space next to him had been empty, all those precious hours together lost. Hours that he would never get to relive again other than from memory.

Plan would forever hate himself for that.

Mean had left a note beside him on the pillow to say that he had gone for breakfast with P'Zannook, that he'd thought it best to let him rest. Plan turned it over, half expecting to find an 'I love you' there somewhere but the back was blank. He screwed it up in his hands, tempted to throw it against the far wall and well out of sight before thinking better of it. Instead, he clutched the words to his chest as if by holding Mean's messy scrawl there he held the boy himself too.

Plan had found the ring on the bedside table.

*

Plan did not cry during the journey home.

He sat by the window in his allocated space next to Mean, grateful that the plane had been full so the younger could not ask to move seats.

Stuck in the middle, Mean had done his usual, plugging his earphones in and reclining the chair back as soon as they'd safely taken off. He crossed his arms over himself, eyes closed but not asleep, the elder could tell.

Plan hadn't been able to relax the entire journey, dread rising when in what felt like a heartbeat the thick clouds they had been engulfed in suddenly began to dissipate, revealing the outskirts of their birthplace beneath them. Usually they were always pleased to return home but now Plan wanted nothing less.

He'd had big plans for the flight, his phone still in hand from where he'd pulled up the notes app thirty minutes in. There were things he wanted to say, just like Mean had after their very first broom cupboard tryst. The problem was that every time his thumbs had hovered over the screen, the right words wouldn't come. The drafts he kept typing were nothing Mean didn't already know nor things that were going to make any difference.