Kit had only been home a couple of days (a ‘couple of days' didn't feel like a long time when you thought about infinity, after all) when the knock on his door came. Kit slowly pulled the lollipop-he-imagined-was-a-cigarette-so-it-was-a-cigarette-for-now out of his mouth and absently chucked it behind the sofa, where it would sit sticky and fluffy, forever.
He stretched and clicked as he stood, working off the feeling of heavy joints and aching bones, before he meandered to the front door and, without as much as checking the peephole, yanked it open. He didn't really worry about visitors, not anymore.
But he worried about Gabriel. Gabriel wasn't the sort of guy who was a visitor, much less a visitor who looked unfamiliar with a place they had visited probably tens of times before.
So, Kit let him in, and Gabriel was holding this plastic bag which he wordlessly held up, and Kit wordlessly took, and shut the door behind him, and waited, but Gabriel was tense and silent and anxious and bad emotions ebbed and flowed off of him.
Kit would stand in silence for a long time. Kit would stand and be yelled at for a long time. Kit would stand and vow to fight for someone who hurt those he loved, and right now – it felt like Gabriel needed a fight.
But the way he was looking at Kit, the exhausted, hopeless desperation, well, Gabriel wasn't going to try to talk a gun into Kit's hand.
He was trying to get Kit to talk one out of his.
Kit says…

“Do you ever, um, think about the fact that heavy metal fans have to die, too?”

That caused Gabriel pause in whatever his mind was spinning through and he just stared at Kit. Kit's words were royal purple, and cut through the tense air.
Kit says…

“Like, sometimes, I'll be walking and… out of no-where, this funeral possession will appear. It's not for me, it's for someone else, I normally don't know who it is. But I have headphones on, and I have my hoody with the grim reaper on, and sometimes there's heavy metal and sometimes it's pirate heavy metal and I think… sometimes I turn it down because I feel disrespectful.”

He stood closer to Gabriel, even though he flinched as if Kit were a spirit, reached out, touched his shoulder.
Kit says…

“And then I was there the other day, on that road, where dark vehicles appear and I rarely know their genesis, let alone their passengers, and I thought about that guy, Tattoo Tim, who did tattoos, and how he died, and that he always liked my hoody, and his shop always blared heavy metal, and I thought… well, everyone has to die. Heavy metal fans have to die. So, this time, I didn't turn my music down and I've thought about that ever since.”

Kit chewed at his lip; tried to pick a point out of his muddled thoughts.
Kit says…

“I guess what I'm trying to say is… we're both here now, right? And who knows when we're going to die, and what our farewells are going to be like, but they probably won't be what we want, if we're looking down or up or straight on from where we end up, we'll probably think it's too stiff and weird and just not us, so we've gotta be us as long as we're here, y'know? We've got to take chances. I'll be a heavy metal fan who dies. You'll be this beautiful, nerdy guy who dies. But I'd rather take a chance on you now, then take a chance that I plan your funeral right, or that I get to plan it at all.”

Gabriel couldn't really say he knew. He didn't really understand. And he couldn't tell Kit he had already seen him dead.
But he could open up his arms, he could let Kit embrace him and hold him, and his body was warm – Gabriel could feel the blood rushing through him, the squeeze that Kit pressed around his chest, and it was so different from the cold corpse he had danced with not so long ago.
Gabriel says…

“…We'll take a chance on each other.”

Gabriel found himself whispering in a deep blue, suffocated colour, even though a thousand other voices screamed he shouldn't talk at all.
Kit was a specimen. Kit was an experiment. Kit was a missing puzzle piece. Kit was to be studied, not loved.
But right then, Gabriel couldn't pull away.
Kit says…

"Suicide and heavy metal fans are the two most misunderstood things in the world."

And Gabriel agrees.

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