 building and shatters into a mess of blood and bones in the road. Looking for something to love. 
Weirdly enough, it feels good to tear that particular tin out. It’s full of too many things to count, of cyanide, lilacs, russet apples, pale skin, cassettes loaded with piracy. The contents swirl into a seething mess for him to shake about, to hear its viscosity splashing against the sides like absinthe in a silver flask. He empties it over the exterior of the motel, and it makes his mind feel a hundred pounds lighter.
Now his heart is empty, perhaps he can begin rebuilding the insides. It’s no good trying to erect substance upon shaky ground, it’s no good constructing his identity on toxic wet sand. The sea will wash it away before long, take apart the bricks and mortar piece by piece until he’s left barren and desolate. But with his song of nightcry crashing down around him, Dream thinks he might’ve found some stable foundation.
They scream until they’re crying, until their cheeks glimmer with salt. Sapnap lets go of the barrier and grabs hold of his hands instead, aged palms not so different from that of two ten year olds torn apart by forces outside their control. They’re still the same behind the eyes, lost in the world, drifting like tumbleweed. And they’ll be torn apart again in one way or another before long, ripped into a thousand mismatched jigsaw pieces. It’s up to Dream to decide which will hurt less.
 Bile scalds the back of his throat.
And Sapnap is laughing now, pushing tears aside as he laughs and laughs and laughs. “It’s good, isn’t it? It’s like the stars care about us.” He has to shout over the evening breeze because the sound of junipers rustling is too loud to bear.
 Some of them are already dead, you know? We’re looking at the light, but the star doesn’t exist anymore.” George told him that last summer, before he’d learnt how his tongue tasted. What his skin was like, pulled between his teeth. Before George started gazing off into space instead of meeting his meadow stare.
It warms Dream’s chest with whiskey and campfire. He’s reminded of the water tower close to his mom’s apartment, the one they’d sit under during the day when they were hiding away from the brutalism of the world. The joints were rusting and it creaked alarmingly every time the wind blew, but it protected them from the glare of the sun nonetheless. They’d stay there until the sun dipped too far and Sapnap had to bike back home, pedalling fast enough his face turned pink with exertion. It was better than what would happen were he late.
“Ain’t that the truth.” His cheeks feel tight as the tears dry, and he’s sure his eyes are as blotchy as Sapnap’s. 
It’s no surprise when they cry themselves to sleep on the rooftop, hands clasped and skin dotted with tears as the tide of grief crests and falls over and over. Every time Dream’s reserves are empty, they seem to refill, until he’s dry-sobbing, clutching onto Sapnap with white knuckles because he never, ever wants to let go.
George wakes them in the morning with cold hands and eyes rolled skywards.

He’s the moon—pale and covered in shadowy potholes, refracting sunlight with softer hands, gentler fingers than blazing fire. Blue strokes and anglican features. And the lines might be blurred a little at the moment, might be torn into ashy shreds by fennel and shamrock sprites, but luna glow conquers wormwood nonetheless.
The Atlantic churns, a glitter of seas.
“Come on, let’s go inside. What’s the worst that could happen?” George is saying, every last word illustrious.
 The padlock on the door doesn’t last long. It springs open beneath bloodless fingers and an army knife, arms with equations smudged all over the insides, veins pulsing indigo underneath chamomile linen.
Sunlight spills over George, runs its boughs along the deck until he’s glimmering with it. Armfuls clutched to his chest. In a crowd full of brown and blue and beige people, George would stick out in luminescent splendour, haloed with his purple cloud of petals, adorned by wicked hyssop horns.
Dream stands on the grass like a lunatic.
"Never. My tolerance is pretty high," George says, wiggling his blade around in the keyhole. There must be some art to it, but from where he stands on a yellow lawn it looks pretty random to Dream.
"We all know why that is," Sapnap mutters.
George chooses this moment to pick the deadlock, knife twisting with a precision that makes Dream's ribs sting. “In you come,” he says, vanishing into the depths without so much as a glance back outside.
Dream tries to walk forwards, and finds himself standing in the entryway with a mile of grass behind him.
The house is about as dusty and dirt covered as Dream expected.
They traipse through the rooms in their odd procession, two eyes curious, two bright, two flickering astray at even the most infinitesimal of sounds. Plaster litters the floor, mould grows from the ceiling, emitting toxic spores Dream is certain they shouldn’t be inhaling, but they do it anyway. Half the balusters are snapped, leading him to believe something’s been hurled down the stairs at high velocity and left to die at the bottom. Surprisingly, there are no bloodstains on the steps.
Then he blinks, and there’s crimson all over the floorboards, pills cascading in waterfalls. It’s unsettling, so he looks away.
Sapnap jumps fifty feet when the kitchen door slams, yanked by the draft blowing through the front of the house. A cloud of dust kicks up in their faces. “Who’s idea was it to break into the creepy abandoned house again?” he asks, scowl tugging onto his face while Dream and George piss themselves laughing.
“Listen, it’s a change from- wait, what are we doing?” Dream says, lifting his camera to nudge the shutter before Sapnap has time to reactively shove his arms over his face.
The photo develops quickly, putting the instant in instant photography. It displays a disgruntled Sapnap, eyebrows furrowed due to the freshly slammed door, lips parted in horror, a weaver spider chilling out in the corner, barely visible. Eight eyes blink up from the back of Dream’s hand. A white blur sits at the edge of the picture, a stroke of desaturation in amongst the dust colours of the abandoned house. He swears it’s wearing fuzzy slippers.
“I’m not listening!” Sapnap calls. He’s already back on the deck somehow, standing among the kudzu with his arms crossed over his chest. Dream doesn’t remember him moving. Pampas shudders around him, and the peeling wicker set on the porch groans with every movement he makes. Seems like he won’t be returning to the house anytime soon.
Wandering around a boarded house with George doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea, not when George prods at faded upholstery with nimble fingers, stares at rain damaged floorboards with glimmering wonder, and looks between dusty books abandoned in locked cabinets. There’s nothing on the pages, so Dream isn’t sure why he bothers. He’s picking the leaves off a dead ivy plant now, scattering them like a breadcrumb trail as he pokes around the drawing room. George seems to have a thing for rifling through phone directories and poetry books, for shoving his knife into deadlocks. Information he’s not supposed to have, stored in the middle of a black hole.
His head jerks up when Dream clicks the camera again.
And sure enough, the developed photo is enough to shoot Dream in the stomach, leave him to bleed out for hours and hours while he dreams of a bullet to the brain.
He’s abysmally, tragically in love with George.
There’s nothing on the film.
Cold hands wrap around his ankle and set him down on a motel rooftop.
The clock falls closer to midnight.
They’ve stopped because Dream is just about ready to slam his head against the dash, cover it in pink flesh so he doesn’t have to stare at the interstate anymore. It’s drilling into his head, peck peck pecking with a sharpened beak. Ironic, that he dreams of driving further, all the way up the west coast with Sapnap and George in tow, eyes greyed by road and shoulders burnt under the weight of the sun.
Pale limbs and legs vanish through the sunroof, elegant fingers curling over the lip of it and red knees swinging up to rest upon the metal top. The van groans under George’s weight.
The smell of oudh phases to cedar when he follows. His hands grab at Sapnap’s to help him onto the roof, until the three of them sit in their odd trio at the top of the world. Draft flutters around