"I'm tired," he said, hearing his voice as if it were someone else speaking entirely. He laid there, feeling his heart beat in his chest with the same steady rhythm it always had. Only this time, it felt a little like someone else's heart. He didn't know when the cocaine stopped giving him the high he wanted, but it must have been recent. He wasn't even sure why he still tried, honestly. Maybe it was just a sheer need to blunt everything else out, and not knowing how else to try. "I just...want it to stop."

Slowly he turned his head slightly, looking up at Carlos with those same empty eyes that he'd long given up on hiding from everyone else. People didn't like him as much, he realized, when his eyes didn't sparkle with mischievousness. When his smile was too easy to see through. And none of them realized, it seemed, that it had always been a lie. In a way, his happiness had always been the lie he told the world. Himself.

"Make it stop," he breathed out in a plea, gazing up at Carlos. "Please, just...make it stop....I-I can't take it any more. I...don't have it in me." His voice was a whisper, really. Like much of Gael himself, it was a ghost of the man he'd been.