Inhale and let the smoke hit the back his throat, let it stroke the nerve endings awake with a paradoxical impertinence as it simultaneously cauterizes the delicate flesh until it bubbles and sloughs off. Saccharine fumes filter into his lungs, leaving crystalized sugar stalactites dripping down his esophagus, sharp and puncturing small holes so the blood could stain everything vermilion. 

He exhales sulfuric gas, copper oxide thick and red on his tongue. It flicks behind his teeth, plays over chapped lips, muscles moving slickly and shining in the dingy lighting. His pupils are blown out, glossy and fathomless, a malignancy bright in the depths as he smirks cruelly around the pipe in his mouth. 

Euphoria hits him like a derailed train, peeling the skin back from his bones until muscle is open to the air, bones snapping and raining shards like iron shrapnel and - hide as you try in the trenches - they would pierce into your skin and dig through your limbs to drain the poison into your blood. Roxas rolls his head back, feeling every single click in his vertebrae and when he rights himself everything is falling around him, colours and textures bleeding together until his hands find fleshy hips. His fingers slip under rough denim and find damp skin, soft against the calluses as he presses them inside and his smirk widens and it isn’t until then that Roxas realizes there is a girl in his lap, riding his hand and fighting with his belt. 

His heart is pounding in his chest like an angry fist, beating against him until the wood splinters and slivers worked their way into his intercostal muscle tissue and the blackened sponginess of his lungs. They fuck right there on the couch, Roxas biting into nameless flesh as he pumps-pumps-pumps his hips, everything heightened, everything good despite the way he can smell her snatch, probably three days away from soap and water in search of a better high, but she’s tight and that’s all Roxas needs. 

He comes inside, too fucked out to realize they hadn’t bothered with condoms, before he pushes her out of his lap, a string of come stretching and snapping between them as she falls to the ground and lays there for a moment, skirt rucked up around her waist and breathlessly laughing at some unheard joke. 

Roxas doesn’t care. His exaltation has passed in the time it has taken to get off. 

He takes the pipe full of sweet, chemical bliss and places it at his lips.

The whir of the lighter.

One, Two, Three. 

Dissolve.

————————————————————————————————-

He’s pretty sure that every problem in his life could boil down to the simple fact that he’s a parasite. 

His parent’s death was a fucking cataclysm. The pain ripped open his ribcage, pulling up until it opened like the door of a bird cage; agony trilled through his nerves as despair moved aside his organs, settling down underneath his left lung, nestled against his diaphragm. It was a constant reminder, an uncomfortable lump that branded him from the inside as he breathed, poisonous shrapnel tainting his blood, making it run black, atramentous in his veins. Roxas drew into himself, trying to exist on his own emotions, unaccustomed to having such a small pool to draw off of. He was a husk, cut off from his two greatest sources of nourishment.

The thing about parasites is that they’re versatile. 

It didn’t take long for Roxas to turn it around, feeding off the lack of emotion rather than the plethora of it, fascinated in everything false. He groaned when his hips slid between some chick’s thighs in a public bathroom, listening to her high pitched moans, ignoring her squirming because something was obviously hurting but she continued to pant, act like it there was nothing she’d rather be doing than getting fucked against a dirty, tiled wall with the grout digging into her back and the heels on her stilettos cutting into the back of Roxas’ thighs. Her moans spurred him on, fabricated to make him believe, though the imitation of desire, pseudo affection echoing through his ears, that’s what gets him going, what gets him hard. 

He rolls out of sex rumpled beds before his cock’s gone completely soft afterwards, away from warm, sexless bodies that grab at his limbs, try to curl around him. It makes the bile rise in his throat, makes the moment of calm he’d found with orgasm start up again, crashing against the sides of his skull as he pulls his jeans on, grabs his coat and his cigarettes and his wallet as he walks away. Roxas is good at the abandonment routine because he doesn’t care, he burns his bridges like they’re made of paper, watches them drift away on the tumultuous river, smoldering ashes caught and dragged beneath the transient surface, down to desolate, aphotic depths. 

He’s a parasite. He lives off of other people, be it their emotion or their absence of it, their falseness or their never ending verisimilitude. 

And sometimes, he wants nothing more than to cut off from it all. 

There really can’t be anything worse than being a breathing embodiment of the human condition.