Riven learned quickly that sobriety was louder than pain.
It made everything sharper — the buzz of streetlights, the distant arguments through thin apartment walls, the way his phone felt heavier in his pocket even when it didn't vibrate. Sobriety brought Lucien back in fragments he didn't ask for: the pressure of fingers at his chin, the controlled disgust in his eyes, the certainty with which he had said I don't want you.
So Riven stopped letting himself stay sober for long.
The pills came first. Familiar, small, easy to pretend were temporary. He told himself they were just to sleep, just to stop thinking, just to slow his heartbeat when it felt like it was going to tear him open from the inside. He stopped counting how many he took. Numbers required honesty, and honesty was dangerous.
Days blurred.
Suspension meant freedom in the ugliest sense of the word. No structure. No teachers pretending to care. No bell to tell him when to move. His mother left before dawn and came home exhausted, the lines in her face deepening every week. She didn't notice the way Riven avoided her eyes or how his hands shook when he poured himself water.
"Elena," the neighbor said once, catching her in the hallway. "Your son—"
"He's fine," his mother replied automatically.
Riven listened from inside the apartment, jaw clenched, something bitter blooming in his chest. Fine was the lie people told themselves when they couldn't afford the truth.
At night, he lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, counting cracks, counting breaths, counting how many seconds passed without Lucien invading his thoughts. It was never many. His phone buzzed more often now — always the same number, always short messages that felt too precise to be accidental.
You don't sleep much.
You fight like someone who wants to be seen.
You're wasting yourself on people who don't deserve you.
Riven never asked who it was again.
He didn't need to.
Whoever was on the other end understood something Lucien hadn't — or had refused to acknowledge. Riven didn't want saving. He wanted recognition. He wanted someone to look at the mess he was becoming and say it mattered.
The pills dulled the ache, but they didn't fill the space.
So he escalated.
⸻
The first time he crossed that line, it wasn't dramatic.
It was a bathroom at a friend-of-a-friend's place, cracked mirror, flickering light, music thumping faintly through the walls. Someone handed him something without asking his name. Riven didn't hesitate. Hesitation meant thinking, and thinking led back to Lucien.
The high didn't feel like happiness.
It felt like silence.
His thoughts stretched thin, unraveling, drifting just far enough away that Lucien's face blurred at the edges. Riven leaned against the sink, breathing slow, letting the numbness creep in like a tide. This — this was survivable.
He told himself he was in control.
He told himself a lot of things.
After that, it became easier to say yes. Easier to accept whatever was offered without asking questions. Easier to stop caring about the way time slipped through his fingers like something alive and laughing at him.
Jax stopped texting.
Riven noticed eventually, distantly, the way you noticed a bruise only after it turned yellow. He didn't reach out. He didn't want concern. He didn't want lectures about self-destruction delivered by someone who still believed in exits.
There was no exit.
There was only forward.
⸻
The city changed when you stopped sleeping.
Streetlights grew halos. Shadows stretched too long. Sounds echoed when they shouldn't. Riven wandered through it all like a ghost wearing his own face, drifting from place to place without intention. He fought less now — not because the anger was gone, but because it had turned inward, sour and corrosive.
Sometimes he thought he saw Lucien's car.
It was never there.
That was worse.
One night, he ended up on the floor of a stranger's apartment, back against the couch, knees pulled tight to his chest. Someone laughed too loudly nearby. Someone else cried in the bathroom. Riven stared at the ceiling fan spinning slowly overhead, wondering how many rotations it would take before his heart gave out.
Would Lucien notice then?
The thought startled him.
He hated that part of himself — the part that still wanted Lucien's attention even like this. Especially like this. There was something obscene about the idea of being ruined and still reaching for the man who had refused him clean.
His phone buzzed.
You're spiraling, the message read.
Riven barked out a laugh. "No shit," he muttered.
Another message followed almost immediately.
He won't come back because you disappear. He'll come back when you become unavoidable.
Riven stared at the screen, pulse quickening.
Unavoidable.
The word settled into him, heavy and deliberate. He thought of Lucien's controlled distance, the way he had watched from behind glass and tinted windows. He thought of how Lucien valued control above all else.
Maybe this wasn't disappearing.
Maybe this was becoming something Lucien couldn't ignore.
The idea was dangerous.
Riven liked it.
⸻
His mother cried the night she finally noticed.
He came home too late, pupils blown wide, jacket stained with something dark he didn't bother identifying. She was waiting at the table, hands folded, eyes rimmed red. For a moment, Riven didn't recognize her — not as his mother, but as another fragile thing he was about to break.
"Riven," she whispered. "What are you doing to yourself?"
He shrugged, kicking his shoes off. "Living."
"That's not living," she said, standing abruptly. "You're scaring me."
Good, he thought distantly.
"Did someone hurt you?" she asked, reaching for his face.
Riven flinched away instinctively, the movement too sharp, too fast. Her hand dropped.
"Don't," he snapped. "Just—don't."
Silence stretched between them, brittle and cracking. His mother looked at him like she was trying to recognize a stranger wearing her son's skin.
"I work so hard," she said quietly. "I do everything I can for you."
"I didn't ask you to," Riven replied, immediately regretting it and not caring at all.
Her face crumpled.
Riven turned away before the guilt could settle. Guilt was a luxury he couldn't afford. Guilt led to reflection, and reflection led to stopping.
He locked himself in his room and swallowed whatever he had left without counting.
⸻
Lucien didn't reach out.
That was the cruelest part.
Riven knew — knew — that Lucien was aware something was wrong. Men like Lucien didn't miss patterns breaking. And still, there was nothing. No warning. No command to stop. No cold lecture delivered with that maddening calm.
The absence gnawed at him.
Riven stopped pretending the drugs were about escape.
They were about endurance.
About surviving the waiting.
⸻
It happened on a Wednesday.
Riven wasn't sure how he got there. An alley behind a closed bar, rain slicking the pavement, neon bleeding down brick walls like open wounds. His hands shook violently, body screaming for something he had taught it to expect.
He slid down the wall and sat hard on the ground, breath coming too fast, chest tight, vision narrowing. Panic surged, sharp and merciless.
This was different.
This wasn't numbness.
This was his body turning on him.
Riven laughed weakly, pressing his forehead to his knees. "You win," he whispered to no one. "Okay. You win."
For a terrifying moment, he thought this might be it. That he'd die here, anonymous and small, just another cautionary headline no one read past the first paragraph.
Low-income youth found unresponsive.
Lucien wouldn't even see his name.
The thought hurt more than the panic.
His phone slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the pavement. The screen lit up.
An incoming call.
Unknown number.
Riven stared at it, vision swimming.
He answered.
"Stay awake," a voice said calmly on the other end. Not kind. Not panicked. Controlled. "Help is already on the way."
Riven frowned. "Who...?"
"That doesn't matter," the voice replied. "Breathe. Slow. In through your nose."
Riven obeyed without thinking, lungs burning.
"You don't get to die like this," the voice continued. "Not yet."
Something in that phrasing sent a chill down Riven's spine.
"Why?" he croaked.
A pause.
"Because you haven't been properly used yet."
The line went dead.
Minutes later, headlights flooded the alley.
Riven blacked out before he could decide whether to be afraid.
⸻
When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed.
White walls. Beeping machines. An IV in his arm. His mother asleep in a chair beside him, head tilted awkwardly, face streaked with dried tears.
Riven stared at the ceiling, hollow.
He had survived.
Again.
And somewhere, in the city beyond these walls, Lucien Crowe still hadn't come back.
Riven turned his head slowly, a bitter smile ghosting across his lips.
Fine.
If Lucien wanted distance—
Riven would make himself impossible to ignore.
Even if it killed him.