Who: Joseph and Trystan What: Sightseeing Where: Neon Museum When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope
Finding somewhere to take Trystan that didn't involve food was harder than Joseph thought it would be. Hadn't been out in years. Didn't know places that weren't on his beat. Didn't want a club or bar or anywhere Trystan could get in trouble. Loud music gave him a headache. Didn't want something boring like a museum or gallery. Casino was out of the question. He'd almost given up when he overheard a rookie talking about taking a girl to the graveyard. Turned out it was a museum, but it didn't look like one (Joseph checked). It would do.
Late at night, and the lights from the signs were all lit down the long walk past Fremont. Was a strange thing to call a museum, Joseph thought, but who was he to question? Was crowded, but not too much, and he waited with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. His cream, cable-knit sweater was all fisherman, stiff in places and worn at the elbows, but Joseph didn't notice those things. Didn't have a woman to notice them either. Two tickets were crumbled in his pocket, purchased days earlier. He pulled one hand out and scratched at the back of his neck. Felt like a bad idea. Most things did since Thanksgiving.
"All dressed up and out of uniform on my account? You shouldn't have." A droll little hum marked the whore's presence, slunk up sneaky behind the man he kept coming back to with a shocking regularity. He appeared no different than ordinary -- still eversick, everlong in bone and flesh, still encased in suggestive black that tugged taut in all the right ways. But still, past the snorted bump in the back alley on the way to the show and the smoke pluming from a half-suffered cigarette he smiled, a ghost of verity gracing those honeyslick lips.
"What made you decide this place?" The question was vacant of any scrutiny -- uncharacteristically, it hung instead with a genuine curiosity between them, suspended clearly amidst the cardamom waste expelled from his lungs. He looked up to the neon bright awaiting them with eyes unaccustomed to the light.
Joseph was used to Trystan now. Nothing like that meeting in middle America all that time ago. He didn't run. Didn't flinch. Didn't even feel the need to. He looked over his shoulder. He smiled a little, a hint of a grin at the corner of his chapped lips.
"No food. No loud music. Not boring. Not locked away somewhere." That was as close as Joseph could come to a reason for his selection. "Seemed you." That was an addition, but it was a true one. It was gritty. Dirty, while still being pretty, this place. Dirt and grit underfoot and bright bulbs, and a lot of people might not see the beauty in it, but Joseph did. Like the ocean, even when it was different.
Joseph fished the crumbled tickets out of his pocket, and he handed one to Trystan.
Plucking the devastated cardstock from the cop's fingers, Trystan inspected the ticket with a vacant expression -- that grin still ghosting his lips. With a filter resigned to the curb, he looked to his companion, the ticket inclined towards the entrance of the graveyard.
"So is this a tour, or do you just go in and stare of your own volition?" He took a step forward, tentative and slight. "I didn't even know this was here."
"Not a tour tonight. We can walk," Joseph said, nodding toward the guide that was wandering along the dirt paths between the signs. "Can ask questions, if you want. Can just walk, otherwise," he explained, holding his ticket out to the taker, and then stepped out in front of the first sign. The lights were blinding. Eyes had to adjust, but that was part of the allure.
Joseph waited for Trystan to join him. His hands were back in his pockets, and his old boots scuffed at the ground. He was older than the teens and twenty-somethings on the dirt path. Felt it too. Noticed how young Trystan was for the first time since a roadside years back.
"Thanksgiving? Really didn't do anything?" Joseph asked.
Trystan shook his head, drawing near enough to lay waste to the air with his cheap perfume. He squinted up to the sign, his hands hooked in belt-loops as he stared, hip cocked&loaded, weight along one spindlesick leg.
"I didn't even remember there'd been a holiday until you said something in the journals," he admitted, bangs obscuring that envy gaze.
"It makes sense, though. It was slow that night."
"Last Thanksgiving you remember?" Joseph asked, moving ahead to the next sign in the neon wasteland. The lights were red, yellow, and they alternated in flashes that splashed color along his face. "Slow that night?" he finally added, belatedly. "Still working? Won't let me find you new work?" He would, if Trystan would let him. Didn't think Trystan would.
Again, the blonde shook his head. In the next expanse he drew a bit closer -- a secondary impulse that had gone unheeded by the whore and all too observed by his creature. The Caterpillar grinned sickly as Trystan grimaced, his fingers coming to toil at an inner-elbow belied by years of trackmarks.
"We've discussed this," he said, cold and oh so contrary to his usual purrs. His eyes remained fixed upon the bright lights -- anything but the beat cop's face,
anything but that weathered, seasalt expression.
"If all you see me as is some project, just leave me here right now." But it had lost some of the fight -- the vitriol had been swept up by the air, evaporated in the post-holiday heat. And the rest -- that first question lingering in the periphery -- was wholly ignored, diverted and swept under their shoes that knew nothing but how to run.
"Not a project," Joseph said, and for once he didn't back away. "Can't pretend not to be worried. Can't pretend not to want better for you. Won't." Simple as that. Day he stopped envisioning a better life for Trystan was the day he stopped talking to him. Just that way. Couldn't fix his own stuff, but he saw kids everyday that he wanted better for. Might not happen. Didn't stop wishing for it.
He looked up at the bulbs. Blink. Blink. And then he looked at Trystan again. "Ever see someone and want more for them?" He asked. Trystan might lie. Might say no. But Joseph knew better. He nodded at the lights immediately after, almost making the question rhetorical. "Like?"
"People have decided exactly how much to be on their own." The blonde considered the lights, as dilapidated and broke-down as the structures before them. His weight shifted, rocked from one foot to the other in an insurmountable gesture, and this close -- this far away -- he could smell the sea, that beast of a woman who wouldn't let go of Joseph despite the distance and the dustbaths meant to wash him clean of the salt and sand.
"I don't want more for people because they've decided what they deserve for themselves." He looked to Joseph, but in that moment he could have been pleading to Jesus fucking Christ. But still -- ever present -- that ghost of a smile, ghost of verity, clung to his features in half-earnest retreat, paired with a blink and a shifted perspective.
"Don't you think?"
"No," Joseph said, and it was paired with a sound that said the same thing. No. "Want better than you think you deserve," he said plainly, stepping over to another sign, one made entirely of red. "Allowed to," he added with a grin, a smile that was too wry and knowing to actually be called a smile.
Joseph pulled a hand out of his pocket, jerked a thumb at the new sign. "Like?" he asked, mirroring the unanswered question from the previous sign. "Like these better down, like this," he said, answering the question himself. He didn't care much for Vegas' lights up high, but he liked them broken down and at his level.
"Still would rather see you up high than down here," Joseph completed, nodding at the sign one last time. "Plans for Christmas?"
Trystan listened raptly, a grin breaking the sallow features of his face. He considered the lights carefully before offering response, sheepish in the wake of Joseph's admissions.
"I like them better broken down." Whether it was euphemism, it couldn't be said, but the whore indicated the lights that had crashed to earth -- that had been thrown down and beaten raw by circumstance and misfortune.
"As for Christmas," he slowly made his way to the next display, letting Joseph remain in his wake.
"Just pray it doesn't get slow. You have to figure there will still be people who need someone, even if it's anyone -- right?" He looked back, a heartbreaking understanding hanging in the syllables dripping from his lips like honey. He knew -- perhaps too well -- the cost of the holidays, a greater loss than what he left behind for solitude -- for easy money and safety in nothing.
Joseph made a sound of agreement. Broken down was better. Didn't ever like things that were high up very much. He turned away from the red-on-red, and he followed in Trystan's footsteps, scuffing the marks on the ground as he followed.
"Have dinner?" Joseph asked of Christmas. He hadn't had one since his kid. Times, Joseph understood, were changing. Could invite Cory. Could invite Louis. Could talk to Winnie. Could do things. Might be time to. "Nothing fancy," he added sheepishly. "Live in an RV." Shrug. No turkey or dressing. But a diner or buffet, that could do.
Joseph quirked a brow as he passed Trystan to the last sign. "Can't say no," he told him. "Won't take it for an answer."
The blonde laughed.
"Then I don't have much of an option, do I?" The suggestion fell strange upon him -- washed over clean with a sense of absolute dread. Still, the suggestion of Christmas in an RV was the only concrete option he'd been offered in quite a long time -- better than one in a hospital with threats to weave Christmas lights about his throat, and better still than a sideshow prayer that he'd catch a car to take him ever further -- ever deeper out of the Midwestern town from whence he came.
"As long as you mean it," he responded, the verity settling strange on his tongue.
"No option," Joseph agreed.
Joseph stopped moving when Trystan asked if he meant it. "Wouldn't lie to you." That was something he'd never done here, and he wasn't going to stop now. Didn't mean Eames wouldn't get him killed, or that the hotel wouldn't play some trick on all of them for the holiday, but he meant the invitation. Wasn't lying. Wouldn't lie. Especially not to Trystan, whose trust was so hard to come by.
Joseph moved again, shoulder bumping Trystan's intentionally. "Coffee after this," he said, motioning to the end of the walk, where a stand was lit up a few feet beyond.
That shoulder bristled electric against the brittle man. His gaze settled on the cop -- indeterminate and lost in an entirely different sea -- and when Joseph gestured to the stand at the end of that neon stretch of road, Trystan found himself slowing, hands lining those pockets of sin once more.
"Baby, I've got all the time in the world."
And in this -- in the slips beyond honeyed lies and sugared fabrication -- in each shuffled step and cocked shoulder, there was truth.