francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-20 20:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, hoban washburne |
Who: Daniel Webster & Lin Alesi
What: Breaking and entering; Lin takes Daniel up on his word. (Part I of - yep! - III.)
Where: Daniel’s apartment, Turnberry Towers
When: Not long after this
Warnings/Rating: Swears and UST.
The quiet of the elevator was going to crack him. He was going to lose it and punch the operator in the face, then get dragged away by security, he was fairly sure of it. The drive over had been bad enough. He didn’t need time to fucking think about things. Why wasn’t there cheesy ass muzak playing? Fucking something? Anything! Lin had already spent a good forty minutes before leaving second-guessing himself. He thought about Sam and her fucking 'love connection' bullshit, about Olivia and her fucking 'manning up' bullshit. And fucking Daniel. The jackass was right, of course. Lin did wear his heart on his sleeve, very much so, just out there for the world to see - which meant it was in the open for spitting and stomping upon as well. Which happened sometimes. But, he had crushes on people all the time and he was alive, so, it couldn’t be too bad. What was wrong with a little vulnerability? He really was a supreme idiot. Lin groaned and closed his eyes, as he leaned back against the wall of the elevator, feeling the almost imperceptible vibrations that accompanied its ascent as they jogged through his head and chattered his teeth together. The floor hummed under purple PF Flyers that ought to have been thrown out a long time ago. He sighed. Then again, the last time he’d technically seen Daniel, he’d been a monster, so. This could only go better. He had no fucking idea what he was doing anymore. Daniel had said he would drop him harder this time. No words had been minced. He had invited the boy around on that very premise, sideways handwriting or not. (He had invited him, right?) And, uh, Lin did not doubt him one bit. Maybe he was a masochist. He was, after all, willingly, happily walking into something that he knew was only going to end the way it had the first time - with him on his back on the freezing ass floor, trying to fight back tears of humiliation, and Daniel impervious on the sofa, all pretty blue eyes and coldness. That was just about the textbook definition of 'masochist,' minus the deets about the eyes, wasn't it? And for what? The promise of another kiss? The elevator trundled to a stop. When the boy’s eyes fluttered opened a second later, they were wide, not yet ready to face what was coming. He mumbled something resembling a ‘thank you’ to the operator, then took a deep breath and stepped out into the disgustingly rococo hallway. He pushed the sleeves of his cardigan up to his elbows nervously and tried not to think about anything as he moved closer to Daniel’s door. Once in front of it, Lin did what came naturally to him. He reached out and he turned the knob - the door was unlocked! No surprise there; then he let himself in. Because knocking was for Mormons and Girl Scouts. And, at least currently and as far as he knew, Lin was neither. So, in he went. The door closed behind him quietly. During his occupation, Henry had done strange things to Daniel’s apartment. He’d obviously gone through and cataloged the contents, something Daniel had analyzed as an extremely cat-like thing to do, turning the place inside out so he could see everything it had to offer. Henry had been good at putting things back where they had been before, but Daniel spent most waking minutes in the apartment, and he knew it very well despite its comparative size. He noticed the disarranged lines of dust, and he noticed when his books were moved and replaced. Daniel knew Henry couldn't read, and that the journal they shared compensated for that lack in different ways, so it was obvious to him why the books with obviously different colors and covers (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Dante's Inferno) were still in their proper places, but members of book sets with several volumes had exchanged places in line. Henry had not precisely tidied the place, but he also spent a great deal of time in Daniel's kitchen eating him out of the contents of his cupboard and restocking with things he obviously felt to be standard. (A short stretch of Henry’s focused attention must be behind the soup pot simmering in the kitchen, and it filled the apartment with a conservative hint of slow-cooked tomato stock and spices.) The result was therefore order where chaos had been, and a shocking lack of dirty glasses and empty whiskey bottles. Daniel was obviously doing his best to remedy the unnatural spate of housekeeping. The apartment windows were covered, the temperature moderated, and a smothering sense of isolation was well on its way to a return. The winding, agonized notes of a French soprano's Samson and Delilah colored the refrigerated air even from the threshold of the front door, which was a minefield of discarded newspapers in four languages. A gold label bottle was sitting two-thirds empty on the living room table, sparkling in the yellow light of every lamp in the apartment. Daniel's journal was open next to it, the curve of glass holding up one gilt-leather edge, and partially obscuring that view was Daniel's dark curly head and a pale bare shoulder lit by an open computer screen. He was typing rapidly and it would have taken more than the door closing to make it over the belting soprano. The sleeves of the cardigan were tugged back down to his wrists as the sudden cold prickled whatever skin was unfortunate enough to be left bare. It felt like he was walking into the fucking Kölner Dom, huge, chasmal and rigid, except the rows of (uncomfortable) pews had been exchanged for unwieldy stacks of books, Winifred Bönig had been displaced by a mezzo-soprano being dramatic about something, and the windows were smudged out. There was none of the airiness of the cathedral either, with its bars of light streaming in intricate patterns above the heads of all the tourists. No. Here, instead of rising to the ceiling, the light had settled around on the floor in pools of gold. The room yawned beyond too, Lin knew from his last visit, as well as just the oppressive feeling of vastness that existed in empty spaces. He hugged himself. If this was like the Kölner Dom, then maybe Daniel was Joachim Kardinal Meisner, the dick of an archbishop who’d refused to go to the unveiling of the Dom’s new stained glass window in, like, 2005 or something, because it was a computer generated mosaic, and he was a fucking snob. That seemed accurate and made Lin smile, even if he’d forgotten what the original metaphor was. Dark eyes swept the room as he gingerly stepped over a drift of newspapers. Things seemed a little more orderly than last time. The towers were straighter, some of the dust gone, less alcoholic paraphernalia littered about, and - what the fuck? Was someone making fucking soup? Whatever. He wasn’t even going to ask. Daniel was on the same sofa as before. Uh, shirtless... Okay. His back was to the boy, white washed in a rainbow of light, yellow and blue. And he was ...typing. On a computer. Oh, wow. Lin raised his eyebrows. It was certainly a day of firsts, wasn’t it? Color him impressed. (Though, to be fair, he would’ve been impressed had he simply seen the man hit the power button on any kind of electronic whatsoever, so.) He skirted a column of books and, without taking his eyes off of the scene in front of him, drew up to the back of the teal-and-black sofa and rested his folded arms atop it. His chin met his arms as he leaned in. He didn’t say anything. Not yet. This was a rare moment, one that necessitated a bit of contemplation and a keen anthropological eye. Lin wondered what was so urgent that it had Daniel typing away like his fingers were on fire (also impressive: the man’s wpm; truly sexy, that). His gaze moved to the bottle and the journal, then migrated back to the pale shoulder. Deep breath, Lin. Lifting his left leg first and finding purchase on the top of the sofa with one knee and hands gripping the cushion tightly, the boy climbed up and over the back of the couch with surprising finesse (this was how he usually got onto his own sofa). He slid down the front to land, only a little crookedly, but still upright, next to Daniel, their shoulders bumping. "You’re not writing a ransom note, are you, Joachim?" Anthropological intent forgotten, Lin spoke, if not quietly because of the opera, then in a low voice, apparently unaware of the fact that he had just vaulted a couch. The boy cocked his head. His words were light and blithe. "My parents already bought me once, I don’t think they’ll do it again. And it certainly won’t get your stained glass window back." For a few seconds the dust motes floated slowly, easing through the cool air, and Daniel's bent head was silhouetted in the glare of the computer screen. He worked on a blank space, typing furiously in long black lines, his expression smooth and without conflict. The scene described made little sense, something about balding carpet and roses, but the winding, poetic prose was nothing like journalistic editorials that had been published in the months before Daniel Webster's byline had ceased existence. A body dropping down next to him into a space that Daniel's mind had labeled permanently empty jarred his sense of self and rattled him like a cymbal crashing through the otherwise occupied the vaults of his mind. His body yanked harshly to one side in a spasm of horror, and the heavy laptop slid off his worn white knees, the thin jeans hardly much protection against unexpected attack. The machine bounced off the edge of the table with a molar-cracking snap and went black. The cut-glass whiskey tumbler sitting next to the journal spilled all over the flat of the table, pooling on the green-edged glass. "Fuck!" Daniel said, swearing in his native tongue and then switching to a storm of German and Italian that came out in black speech that would have burned him at the stake two hundred years ago. He stood up. He'd never been possessed of much muscle, and he was thin but soft, the press of his ribs against his skin prominent without definition. The jeans looked like they hadn't been that loose when they'd come off the shelf. The hard-water scent of the shower hung off him from the shower that left his hair slick and dark against his neck. Daniel lashed out one palm that would have caught Lin upside the head if it had landed, but he wasn't anywhere close. "Fuck, Lin!" he repeated, shouting and retreating at the same time, as if Lin's appearance was supernatural. "Did you fucking break into my house?" Exaggeration, maybe slightly. A little. This was going well. Really, really well. Lin was the smoothest of the smooth, so slick, so charming. Yep. This was exactly how it was done, wooing. He was sure of it. No one would be able to resist him now, not after he smashed their laptop to smithereens. Look out, world, Lin Alesi is on the prowl. Fuck. Apparently, he hadn’t been expected. When Daniel jerked away from Lin in an explosion of limbs and muscle, and when the man’s laptop gracefully arced and smashed into the edge of table with a sickening snap, just before its transformation into a useless hunk of plastic, glass, resin, and metal, and the tumbler the journal had been propped against spilled over and wet drops pit-patted off the lip of the table, the boy just sat there on that big sofa, almost on his side, looking horror-struck. His eyes were round and his mouth partially open. And people fucking wondered why he didn’t believe in God. The swearing didn’t stir him. He didn’t even hear it. The dizzying notes of the opera spiraled around the room, undisturbed. Lin continued to stare down at the broken computer. It was only when Daniel’s hand whipped toward him like a snake that his muscles unclenched from their protective freeze and made him flinch. (Very useful, that. Especially if that had actually been a snake. Thanks, evolution. You did good.) But there was no connection of any kind of phalange or carpal (it was the metas he didn’t want) to temporal fossa, so that was something. The boy’s eyes opened again, like twin moons, wide and dark, and they immediately turned on the shirtless man hurrying away, then fell once again to the technological carnage that lay spread between them. Lin bent forward to turn the glass upright on the table. Because he had to do something. There was nowhere to put it that wasn’t wet. He held it, almost looked back over to Daniel, then remembered. The journal. Taking the book by the corner of its cover, the boy removed it from the table and let it drop onto the cushion next to him. Okay. Now he had no choice but to make eye contact again, which he did - slowly. Pretending not to notice the lack of shirt, or the curve of ribs beneath white skin, contrasting with the darkness of damp hair, Lin smiled weakly, uncomfortably, doubtfully. One hand went up to rub at the back of his neck. "Uh, surprise?" Yep. Smooth. Daniel’s heart finished hammering at him in pointless panic, and irritation suffused his face, the pale lines creasing and stretching. He hadn’t bothered shaving in the shower, and dark shadows painted pictures of fatigue into his cheeks and under his eyes as he turned away, and then forward again, seemingly unable to make up his mind what to do next. "Don’t you fucking knock?" he said, his voice falling out of the range of anger and more into annoyed resignation. Daniel lifted a shaking hand and shoved it through the wet tangle of his curls. His fingers caught halfway to the back of his neck and he yanked them out ruthlessly, shaking away rough cold drops and finally deciding to circle the back of the couch in search of a shirt before he did anything else. "What the hell you think the door is closed for?" Avoiding Lin’s eyes with singular determination, Daniel tramped on bare feet toward one corner, where a full cloth bag full of soft squares indicated he didn’t do his own laundry. Bending, he dug out a shirt and snapped the worn cloth open before yanking it over his head. The process seemed to steady him somewhat, and when he turned he swayed gently, not dangerously. With Daniel, the whiskey seemed to hit his balance before it hit his handwriting, long before anything became evident in his speech. There wasn't even that much of a mess, because most of the whiskey was already in him. Probably fortunate he hadn't drowned himself in the shower. Returning to the couch and the table, Daniel stared down at the whiskey soup and the bottle standing guard. Far delayed, he looked at the computer. His expression was somewhat dull. Not slow, just lacking. "It done?" he asked of the machine. Lin's hand dropped from his neck into his lap, and as Daniel ...spun around or completed his confused jig or whatever the fuck he was doing, the boy took the time to draw his legs up onto the sofa, shoes and all, and curl his arm around his knees. (The glass was left to sink to the dip between cushion and arm.) It was an easy, familiar position, spine pressing into the back of the sofa, chin and head resting on the knees, everything cradled and held. Sure, it probably made him look even smaller than he was, even more childlike, but oh, well. For all the comfort it afforded, it was also way of sitting that he found he adopted more often as a defensive measure, and it served to make him feel a little safer, even if his heart was still pounding, beating now against his thigh. Nervous though he was, because he'd just fucking trashed someone else's laptop and all - and as he'd seen the way the man's hand was shaking as he raked his fingers through his still-wet hair (what did that mean?), Lin couldn't help but smile, kittenish and light, as Daniel swore at him, much like his parents used to when he would barge into their room in the middle of the night to find them tangled up together, all arms and legs and long torsos, on their bed and then start crying - it was a curse of defeat. Which made Lin the winner. He watched quietly too, smile dissolved, not giving voice to the retorts that crowded on his tongue, as Daniel trudged away and around the couch, a little unsteady on his feet, to dress himself, like he was fucking ashamed or something. Well, that was disappointing. Lin's eyes narrowed. Oh, right. Riiiight. The Gay Gaze. Because he was so very, very predatory. Like a fucking gay shark drawn to straight blood, he would find confused, shirtless, alcoholic men who lived alone and convert them with a single touch of his fabulous gay magic wand. Everyone, watch out. Lin rolled his eyes. "You afraid I'm going to jump you or something? Think I can't handle the heat?" Asked the boy, with no particular intonation to offer context as whether he was simply curious or if he was irritated or challenging the decision. A finger, nail painted a deep teal, scratched at the side of his head. He'd considered not saying anything, letting the man get away with his so subtle re-dressing, but what was the point? Anyway, he wanted to know. He twisted to peep over the back of the sofa. His eyebrows arched with incredulity. "You know I've been to public pools before, right? You know, where people aren't fully clothed?" Daniel returned to the scene of the crime then, shirt, 5 o'clock shadow, and all, and Lin just glanced up at him. For some reason, the expression on the older man's face, or lack thereof (expression, not face), subdued and hazy, reminded him of... a silver spoon. But, one that had gone years without being polished and was dull with disuse and that maybe just laid in the dark of the drawer, crying itself to sleep at night and drinking. Shifting on the sofa, releasing his knees, the boy rid his mind of the runaway analogy and peered over the edge of the striped couch cushion at the laptop in question. Pieces of it hadn't fallen off, so that was good. But the sound it had made hitting the table - like a bone breaking, well, that didn't bode well. "Gimme it, Joachim, and I'll look," he stated simply, half-commanding, half-suggesting. He stretched out his hands, steady and open, to take it should it come his way, but he didn't so much as turn his head to look up. Now was probably the time to apologize, right? "Honestly though, let's be real, it's probably a good thing it fell. Going from Windows 95 to a laptop from 2004 might be a bit of a leap, especially for someone like you. Not to mention, those bastards at Microsoft didn't include SkiFree in XP, which is just dumb as fuck, so, hey, silver lining." Now Lin's dark eyes, bright and expectant as ever, creased with amusement, eyes that caught most everything, but gave away just as much, met Daniel's. He smiled. Daniel’s previous occupation put him in the way of a lot of people-watching. Before novelist he was journalist, and before journalist he’d been an ignored rich kid digging out secrets because he didn’t have anything better to do with this time. He watched Lin fold up like a fan, and he felt guilty for almost-hitting him. It didn’t look like the kind of flinch that meant abuse, but all the same, Daniel was in the business of emotional abuse, not physical. And only that for people who showed up and asked for it. Daniel hadn’t the slightest idea what he had done to invite the angry eyes and the sardonic irritation. Daniel had never seen Lin angry about anything, not in person, and it made him a little uncomfortable. His fingers left the hem of the thin white shirt and he stared back at Lin with a squint of his own, as if to say what? in the most aggressive way possible. "I don’t know," he snapped back, like a rubber band stretched to its limit. "You’re the one breaking into my house. You that hard up?" Daniel was under the impression that Lin and Aubrey had a nice place somewhere with curtains, and generally he took Lin’s continued prying to be something like a hobby. The way some kids volunteered at dog shelters. After a moment’s pause, Daniel circled the couch again and returned to the spot he’d had before. If he was worried about Lin doing any gay magic, it wasn’t apparent, because there were ten other seats to choose from. From this place he could pick up the laptop easily, and he passed it over to Lin without taking a second look at it. The machine was about five years old and weighed more than three of those skinny silver models so popular today. It wasn’t made with shock absorbers and the spider cracks running through the casing weren’t a good sign. "As if, jackass." Cher Horowitz, eat your heart out. Girl couldn’t work like Lin worked it. The boy’s irritation at the shirt and at Daniel in the shirt and the things it told him gave way to peppy indignation, piped to the lilting tune of Valley Girls everywhere. He rolled his eyes again, turning away on the sofa. Fuck Daniel and his ornery response. It was true. As fucking if he’d ever been hard up. (Or at least, that fucking hard up.) Lin was quality, okay. Daniel rejoined him on the sofa then (well, maybe just ‘joined.’ Since they hadn’t actually sat together for more than a tenth of a second before), no comment given to his guest’s hilarious taunt. He parked his beshirted ass close by, too. Enough so, that the cushion dipped inward from the new weight and Lin had to steady himself, so as not to tip over. He scooched backward and toward the arm. Well, at least the man didn’t seem afraid of being gay-ified anymore. Baby steps, right? (Next: glitterbomb the bitch.) "I study fossils," he said, just, you know, like he was letting the world know. (Though by now, perhaps Daniel knew the kid hardly said anything that wasn’t a reference to something.) And then he took the sad ass, five ton computer that was handed to him. The fuck year was this from? His arms were going fall off. The boy grimaced. Oh, yep. Nope. This one was done for. Things were making weird, loose sounds inside of it. Lin laughed, because, lol, no. There was no saving this shit. Honestly, if Daniel hadn’t exploded everywhere and the machine had just dropped to the ground, it probably would have been fine. If anything, it looked like it was the back of the case behind the screen that had taken most of the damage. - But, nope. He had to act like straight boys in movies do when the gay kids come out in the locker room: spazz and run. Spiking the thing like a fucking volleyball hadn’t helped it either. Lin lifted the computer to pass it back to Daniel. "And this one? Dead as balls. Requiescat in pace, computer." The ceremony for the laptop was brief. There was a slight pause then as the boy shifted to scrutinize the man next to him, now that he was close enough to do so. It was obvious that Lin was much less afraid now than he had been the first time he’d visited. (Blame it on the Beast outweighing everything in terms of pure terror.) He did a little less shrinking away and a little more slapping back, figuratively speaking. That is to say, he was more or less his usual bratty, entitled self. Whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen. He observed Daniel for a moment, as if trying to read something in his face - eyes, nose, mouth, all of it - that wasn’t quite clear, some kind of blurred message left behind by a people long dead or some deep shit. Lin really looked, eyes squinting and brow furrowed, bottom lip doing that pouting thing it did when he was thinking hard. He read the eyes of chipped ice and the darkness underneath them, and the (pardon me for saying so) churlish set of the man’s jaw, the way he held his shoulders just so - all of it. Like a fucking book. "Oh. I see how it is," Lin said finally, a flop of a Eureka moment. And he did see. His expression smoothed, he nodded. Idly, he straightened his spine enough to gather his legs in his arms a second time. He wasn’t angry or upset, mostly just disappointed, though he supposed, he had known it to be the truth all along. The nearly empty glass of whatever drink, the journal that had been propped against it, the re-shirting, all of it told him what, maybe, the boy hadn’t wanted to hear, but was there all the same. His tone was more challenging than he intended, but there was little to be done about it. "You’re just full of shit." Daniel had the majority of a bottle of whiskey in him, and considering the state of the apartment hadn’t quite reached the level of nuclear devastation, he hadn’t been there for more than four or five hours. His blood alcohol content should therefore be enough to level most college-age idiots who couldn’t find a metaphor with two hands in a bright box. Daniel caught Lin’s reference to computers--fossils--in about two seconds, with no apparent effort, and he flashed a lazy grin of half teeth. His hair was drying rapidly and the curls were getting aggressive, corkscrewing against his ears and the rough line of his chin. They took about five years off him, and he looked dangerously unassuming, slumped into the couch in his old white shirt. For his part, Daniel was reassured by Lin’s apparent normalcy. He would never admit it, but the violence and destruction he had unintentionally wrought in the monster’s form had not faded to vague nightmares for him, and he was weighed too easily by guilt of any kind. He had been afraid that Lin and Sam would not recover, and he hadn’t gone out of his way to see if his worries were real. Daniel habitually took people apart with his eyes and his columns. When he was sober the shrewd understanding of character turned fast and sharp, leaving cuts so thin they weren’t noticed until they bled. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t like it when the tables were turned. He stared back at Lin’s face. He identified the disappointment, and Daniel disappointed people on a regular basis, going so far as to make sure it would happen to avoid any question that defenses were necessary. His chin came up and he leaned away from Lin to find the tumbler and see if anything could be saved of the whiskey now dripping on the carpet. "You’re just now noticing?" Alright, so this wasn't what he wanted to happen. At all. But, really, honestly, deep down, he wasn't surprised, was he? - Well, okay. Maybe he was a little bit. But most of that was aimed at himself and his willingness to gloss over hints that he didn't want to see. And, hey, at least, maybe his original assessment had been correct. Daniel was straight. So Sam could suck it. (It was soothing to his intellect, if nothing else.) Oh, well. He could cry about it later. Lin shrugged to himself, a small hiccup of the shoulders, sitting back as the man went in search of his glass. "And here I was hoping you'd be like, -" Lin thought a moment, smiling as he did so. His eyes swept to the ceiling, just briefly, then back to the man next to him. Him and all his curls. With a small sound of annoyance, the boy rearranged himself. He moved and sat with his shoulder against Daniel's, letting the man prop him up. He didn't even pretend to ask for permission, because he didn't care. Personal space, schmersonal schmace. (And, since Daniel hadn't thrown him out for ruining a laptop, he figured he was mostly in the clear.) It meant he was facing more of the large room - the Dom - than the person he was talking to, but oh well. "Zeus. But, not in the crazy, murderous, I-eat-my-own-children way, because I've seen you like that, and I'm just not into it. I like my men rabies-free." The boy laughed at himself and fiddled with a button on his cardigan. (Not that it mattered, but he wasn’t actually 100% okay with the whole getting-attacked-by-Chloe-and-Daniel-thi "Let’s be real here, I am probably the most attractive, most intelligent, and funniest person you will ever meet, and if that isn’t enough, well, then, I just don’t know." Lin shook his head against Daniel’s shoulder, being intentionally irritating, and heaved a mock sigh. "And here Sam -" Uh. Now that was a mistake. He pressed his lips together and folded his arms, preempting any questions. "No." Daniel emptied the remains of the bottle into the tumbler, which continued to drip. Then he literally used the side of his hand to sweep another few mouthfuls into the glass, putting on an expression of vague concentration that was well aware of his audience. He shook his hand and then sat back with the glass, eyes hooded and head loose on his neck. "Zeus," Daniel repeated. He knew all kinds of things about Zeus, being a continent hopping rich kid with a literary background and a journalism career, but he failed to see how he was the least bit Zeus-like. He didn’t have the temper. He watched Lin’s profile, not commenting on the fidgeting. "Womanizing, you mean." Then his eyebrows twitched, and he got the reference to not just women a second later. He didn’t immediately get the chance to say anything about it, though. His tone went dangerous. "Sam what?" He honestly had nothing to say about Daniel ...pushing(?) whiskey(?) into his glass. Like, okay. A little desperate, a little lazy, but, uh, whatever. Lin didn’t know enough about the man’s alcoholism or his problems to be judgemental, he didn’t think. That, and he was well aware of his audience, in that he knew what Daniel expected from him. And so he wasn’t going to give it. No. He was just going to recline here against his host’s comfortable, if clothed shoulder and talk about Zeus and pederasty. It wasn’t sex, no, but it was fun too. At least for someone like him. Lin was shaking his head again, this time at the ‘womanizing’ suggestion. He was probably forming an answer (something along the lines of "no, you dumbass. Does that even make sense?") just as one dawned on Daniel. But, there wasn’t time for him to voice his either. He heard the plummeting there, the danger and warning, in Daniel’s voice and that was enough for him. He couldn’t even play it cool. Pretend nothing had happened. Nope. Lin laughed forcefully, much in the manner of someone glancing at their watch and saying, ‘oh, would you look at the time!’, and pushed himself off the couch, off of Daniel, with rough hands and complete disregard. "I’m just going to -..." A half gesture, one hand pointing forward. That was it. All he could manage. He didn’t look at the man. He just rounded the sofa and wound back towards the door, threading through stacks of books with quick, sure steps (sobriety rocked). And though, he got close, he wasn’t actually intending to go. That’d be boring. The same teal nail from before came up to scratch his ear and then, without pausing or the least bit of hesitance, Lin walked through the nearest door like he was absolutely not suspicious or running away at all. Might as well get his jailtime’s worth and see the rest of Daniel’s Dom, right? Breaking and entering and all. Daniel was too slow to figure out that Lin was making a run for it until the boy was entirely out of reach. He was quick to assume that Sam’s opinion of him was very low, and he thought that she would orchestrate all kinds of unfortunate disasters in the idea that she was helping. This was a fairly female thing to do, and while Sam was perhaps not frippery-feminine to the untrained eye, to Daniel she couldn’t possibly be more female. Probably had something to do with the sex. "Hey, get out of there." Swearing, Daniel finished the makeshift glass in one swig that tasted like dust and well-aged oak before hauling himself upright. Locking yourself away in an apartment didn’t do much for your physical stamina, and it was only turning into the Beast every three days that kept Daniel from a yellowing mess in a hospital bed. Henry had felt Daniel’s bedroom to be sacrosanct, and it was more of a mess than the rest of the apartment. It was also darker and colder; the expensive drapes kept all hints of weather and sun firmly beyond the glass armor. There were fewer books here, no leaning towers of forgotten literature, no shelves, just a few abused covers lying in abandonment in various locations. The cleaning crew apparently didn’t get this far, and there was a considerable amount of dust and more of the white shirts piling up on the carpet and on the ebony wood. The room was lit by the bathroom, which stood open and gleamed in pale marble imitation of the sun. It smelled strongly of Daniel, a musky male smell without anything like sweat or sex to get in the way. It seemed Daniel generally only came in this room to sleep, and Sam had been the only other person in it until Lin stepped past the threshold. Daniel wavered up behind him in a cloud of bitterness and liquor. "Did Sam send you here again?" The suspicion was dark and black, burnt into the edge of his tongue, which was loosening fast. Oh, yes. Of course it would be the fucking bedroom. Of course. And why the fuck not? It couldn’t be a closet he could hole up in until Daniel passed out or a bathroom or maybe even a kitchen where he could find some food. No, it had to be a bedroom. Correction - the bedroom. Suddenly back on uncertain footing (Daniel probably wasn’t about to take kindly to him bouncing, for example), Lin stalled a few feet over the threshold to try to gather his bearings. He squinted in the semi-darkness. And, you know, if the other room was the Dom, airy and cold, then this shit was the motherfucking crypt. Lin was fairly certain that his breath was misting in front of his face. Large though the room was, it felt smaller, closer and darker, the end of the cave. Miniature pyramids of clothing dotted the carpeted floor and a book or two, lonely without their stackmates, sat forlorn and forgotten. Now, Lin hadn’t spent any real time considering or dreaming up what Daniel’s bedroom might have looked like, contrary to the beliefs of some, but now that he was here - in it - he couldn’t picture it being any different. For some reason, the scent of the room - and all bedrooms had them - reminded Lin of an old bookstore, but ...headier? Whatever. All he knew was that it obviously was the analog to his own geeky ass lair, but you know, goth and black and broody for Daniel. It was only the wide band of light that shone from the room past the hulking shadow of a bed that brought Lin back to reality. The yellow reached out to him. He blinked at its brilliance and had started to move toward it, a prettier version of a positively phototactic moth. But then, as soon as he realized he was no longer alone and Daniel’s voice and the smell of alcohol reached him, he stopped again, somewhere in the middle of the room. "No. You invited me." The words were simple, without any of the boy’s usual over-the-top expressions or intonations. He turned where he stood, pulling uselessly on his sleeves for something to do, and peered up at Daniel, who, funnily enough, came across as a lot fucking more terrifying in the darkness of his bedroom. Daniel blinked. His back was to the rest of the apartment, and the bathroom light didn’t provide very much for his expression, but it was safe to say that he was surprised. He put one hand up and leaned a little heavily into the doorframe, scanning his fuzzy mind and trying to remember all the shit he’d scribbled down in the last few hours. "Into my bedroom?" Daniel asked, blankly, sounding unsure of himself and worried at the same time, as if he wasn’t sure what he was hearing. By this time he thought he knew Lin’s tone fairly well, though, and he thought Lin would be more smug if he was making it up. Daniel pushed away from the doorframe, forcing himself upright and continuing into the room, which he prowled as if it was simply an extension of himself. Eyes mostly closed, steps wavering. "Okay. So if we fuck, you’ll go away?" Generally, Daniel was not a very complex man. He had done no hiding, no secrets, when he was growing up. It had been quite the opposite; he had used truths to hurt the people that ignored him, and when the truths weren’t readily apparent, he dug them up and turned them out to the cold air. He was generally terrible at poker and played blackjack odds instead, because the house didn’t care if you had the cards or not. When he liked something he had no reason to hide it, and when he disliked something he had every reason to show it. Right now, the dark helped his cause. Not a lot to see in the dark. Then there was the fact he wasn’t doing much lying. He did want Lin to go away, because he was sure the kid was going to get hurt again one way or another. And finally, probably the most helpful, was that he didn’t find the idea of Lin in his bedroom all that disgusting. Daniel was simple that way, too. |