He's supposed to forget things. He's supposed to let the past be in the past and focus on the future. He's not supposed to hold a grudge for nearly a year. He's especially not supposed to be thinking about it and feel more passionate about it than he does Frank.
That's almost too ridiculous to think about.
Yet he does. Almost weekly, now that the sudden appearance of an old nemesis shot up like a weed in the middle of his life, he sits and rummages through Jack's scrap booking materials. He knows Jack won't use the old notes.
Actually, he doesn't. He only hopes. Because he's precious Avery, almost a hindrance, and it's obvious that the second he was out of the way he'd be forgotten about; why he couldn't have seen that at the time, well, perhaps his bruised and broken body had something to do with that. Or the distance when he was finally kicked back home. The notes were things he saw much later, and they had obviously been stuffed back in a trouser pocket after being slipped under a door.
The only notes Avery found were ones on napkins at the hospital, a pitiful testament to what made Jack...
Avery shakes his head to clear his mind, but it does little good. It's late at night, the sky is lit by city lights and smog, but darkness still blankets the flats and shops and doesn't budge for all the city noise and traffic.
It's all colours, all blurs and shapes and abstract images that mean nothing in the dark, and Avery, for a minute, closes his eyes to lose himself in it. In the swirling afterimages of car headlamps there are no notes, no memories, no one siding against him, no one reminding him how pitiful he is. Jake isn't telling him to stop, Jack isn't backing Clydai up. Avery isn't wallowing in the panic when he found out about it all, almost a year ago.
A year.
By all rights he should have forgotten. He opens his eyes into the vast cityscape, to Regent's Park which lies a little ahead of him. He always goes there. People find him there.
For the first time, he doesn't want to be found. Why? Because Jack has apologised again and again, blamed it on the drugs, the seduction, everything. Even just himself. Avery has accepted it, accepts that he'll never get anything from Clydai (doesn't want anything from Clydai), and accepts that they've moved on.
But his mind is stuck like a record scratched, repeating the abuse of trust, remembering that it only took two weeks (barely) for Jack to betray him in every way he could have, reminding himself that he wasn't good for Jack--he held the boy back. Avery wanted a relationship, something monagamous, something deep and theirs. Jack...
Avery wipes his eyes. He's not crying; he has shed his tears for this, and shed them time and time again. He's attempted to end his life over this. He's attempted to hide, to hurt, to lash out, to recoil, to seek someone else. He's attempted to heal, he's attempted to forget, he's attempted to wish it all away.
He's already forgiven. Or has he?
In his mind, Avery had never even been betrayed like that with Frank. Avery was never left for dead and sent home only to find out Frank was having it off with some other lad whom he'd been eyeing publicly for days and days. Weeks?
Avery wipes his eyes. He's crying this time, but it's for himself. For his inability to let shit go. For his inability to look at a note that condescendingly called him "precious Avery." Avery can hear Jack saying it mockingly in his head, trying to play off a boyfriend as a nothing so that Clydai would find him more appealing.
Avery knows. He knows. He was let go so easily before... What about again? Clydai and Jack never saw an end. Clydai left Eton. Jack couldn't see him again.
He stops at an intersection where the lights tell him not to walk. But he walks. There are no cars for several dozen metres, but Avery has no fear. He walks down the next street, finding a darkened alley, barely lit, and covers himself with white.