francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-25 00:39:00 |
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Thomas Pynchon. 'Entropy.' Aubade. She perceived all sensory input as sound. Lin’s eyes popped open, coffee-brown spilled on white. He was Aubade, it occurred to him then for no discernible reason; only, rather than sound, he perceived all sensory input as touch. He was a live wire then, bright and hot with electricity, with flushed lips tingling as if from a soft shower of sparks, as if he was still being kissed.—But, Daniel was not Callisto. Or... well, perhaps he was. Lin couldn’t say whether or not the man believed in the idea of order being an illusion, or in the idea of ‘heat death,’ the eventual, inevitable loss of energy suffered by every closed system over time, variation to homogeneity (offered in the story as an analogy to modern consumer culture)—but he’d certainly created his own isolated system up here on the 30th floor. He blinked. The fuck? He needed to stop thinking about fucking Thomas Pynchon. Jesus. The men were still close, Daniel’s mouth was no longer on Lin’s, but he was still there—he hadn’t moved, and Lin wasn’t sure he knew what was happening. His mind, uh, obviously, was still reeling, and attempting to come to grips with the fact that it was needed again so soon. The boy breathed lightly, his narrow chest pressing against Daniel’s as it rose and fell. At no point did it occur to him to release his hold on the man. Of course, this meant they were still standing near the counters in a weird, frozen sort of embrace, but Lin didn’t notice. He was waiting to see if Daniel was going to say something—if he was going to finally announce his dismissal of the boy by way of caustic remark, with some flippant mention of a choice personal failing that would send Lin running. When it became clear that, actually, Daniel wasn’t going to say anything, a real, live and definitely earnest look of worry creased Lin’s brow. He didn’t understand. Because if they hadn’t stopped so he could be insulted, then—what? “Um, Daniel. Are you okay?” It was a sincere question, asked in a tone of voice not often heard coming from Lin, a little soft and a little lilting. Dangerous. It was only once the words were out of his mouth that the boy wished he had said something different. Even if Sam was right, and Daniel was far more invulnerable than Lin generally thought of him as and/or if he actually did more than just endure the boy, the man still wasn’t going to like the blatant display of concern, Lin knew that much. (Right?) Welp, the shovel had already been thrust into the dirt, he might as well keep on digging if he wanted to get this grave done sometime soon. Or, more accurately if he was Aubade, he had already smashed the glass from the windows and air was flowing in. Now to wait for the moment of equilibrium. Daniel completed what he had begun, recovering some sense of distance only with a faint shift of his hips, very small but unmistakable. He pulled back. He opened the soft cage of his sleeve on Lin’s elbow and they were in the kitchen again, and the tile was unyielding and cold. Daniel looked tired. “No. But you knew that.” He lifted one hand and spread the backs of his fingers down the side of Lin’s neck, smooth skin and black wire curls. Daniel unwound a few threads at Lin’s spine as he pulled his hand away and moved, sidestepping to retrieve his glass. He poured it full, set the dark bottle down heavily, and curled the tumbler into the base of his palm. When he turned his body was set precisely as it had been before Lin approached, one hip, the absence of weight and yet the influence of gravity. The blue eyes were dull, as if Daniel’s mind had strayed. He took a drink that hit his stomach hard enough to make him wince. Nobody thought of the cat, but it was occupying itself in the attempt to dig a hole to China in the curve of its new box, using one white paw, obviously used to an oblivion of sound. Daniel lifted one hand and pushed at the bridge of his nose, trying to distribute the dull of ache that was moving back toward his brain. There it was. The moment. 37 degrees, inside and out. Lin welcomed it by doing nothing as Daniel removed himself from his arms. ‘No. But you knew that.’ All at once Lin was unbearably cold. The electricity fizzled out of him, escaping through his fingertips; he was a downed wire. Lin dropped his hands to his sides and canted his head forward a degree or two as Daniel's cool fingers drifted down his neck and tangled themselves in his hair like an afterthought, before withdrawing altogether. It grew colder still and Lin was struck with that uncomfortable sense of déjà vu uncurling in his brain. There was the sound of glass on marble countertop. His heart thumped loudly, a fist on the front door. Unconsciously, Lin's own hand went to take up where Daniel's had left off. It twisted the downy hair at the nape absently, looping locks around thin fingertips in another pattern—hold steady, once, hold longer, once and once again, hold... Once, a long time ago before he had friends, Lin had memorized how to spell his name (and the word ‘fuck’) in binary, just ‘cause. As soon as he realized what he was doing, he stopped and instead chose to wring his hands together. Daniel’s grimace as he threw his head back in a brief cascade of brown curls and a splash of liquor did not go unnoticed—mostly because there was nothing else to watch (QP was digging around in the litter. The rattling of corn pellets on plastic was enough to tell that story, and, you know, Daniel had no TV) and because they were still close. Lin didn’t know what the man was thinking about, but it didn’t look good. Not good at all. The blue eyes went glassy and faraway, like that wavering strip of lakes you see above the horizon on hot days, and they seemed to forget to see. Daniel looked tired as balls. Lin was tired too. Weariness draped back over him like a blanket. A demanding blanket. But he didn’t lean, he just teetered on his feet, nervous, rocking slowly back and forth, from his heels to the balls of his feet and back, closer to Daniel and then farther. He creaked to a halt when the man pinched the bridge of his nose—the universal gesture of ‘fuuuuuuuuuuuuu stahp.’ He settled back onto the flats of his feet with a squeak of rubber on tile. Lin peered intently at Daniel, at his sweater, at the drink, at the arch of his eyebrows—they were elliptical, Lin decided (he often compared eyebrows to actual types of arches, so what. His own were triumphal arches. srs.)—and the shape of his eyes. His own black-fringed eyes widened as if some slippery answer had suddenly, finally revealed itself to him in a stunning display. Then he snapped closed. The boy’s usually open expression rearranged into a puzzle, and his tone of voice was stuck somewhere between serious and mocking, flitting too quickly between the two to be pinned as one or the other. “You’re doing it wrong. The Thinker uses his fist. And he’s naked. He is in ‘sober meditation’ though, so, you’re not wholly off. Though you will be in a minute.” It wasn’t meant to be helpful, it was meant to be annoying. Lin cocked his head like a small, dark bird in a yellow t-shirt. “Do you want me to leave?” Caught in a dark circle of stolidity and restlessness, Daniel stood still for a whole thirty seconds and then obviously decided to move again. He opened his eyes and took in the change in Lin’s position, imagining all those rustling sounds as the boy orbiting him in the same finicky way he was pulling at his hair. Daniel needed a few minutes to get drunk here, and he knew exactly what Lin’s thoughtless motion was filling in for. Again Daniel heard Lin’s casual comment about his adoptive parents and a nauseating spread of unease moved back into his stomach. Daniel clung to the glass and blamed it on the booze. The man in the old blue cotton sat heavily on one of his kitchen chairs. Newspapers littered the top of the table, all delivered in the last three days, each one a world or a times, represented in four languages. All of them had been pulled apart and then badly reassembled. There wasn’t a phone, computer, or tv screen in sight. Daniel pushed at the mess with the elbow and then slumped back in his chair with his hand curved around the glass. “No,” he said, finally, staring at the cat because he didn’t want to see Lin’s face. “But that doesn’t mean you should stay. This isn’t the place for you. You’re not just cold. You’re scared, you’re angry, and you’re nervous. You don’t even like it in here. And you shouldn’t. It’s not made for you.” Daniel lifted the glass to his mouth and breathed against the surface of the liquid before drinking again. The shadows that cascaded around the room, haphazardly skirting the few shivering fingers of light that streamed from the small window, were strongly reminiscent of German expressionist film of the silent era, Lin thought. Like, some serious Dr. Caligari shit was going on right now. The blacks were thick and wet, as unforgiving as oil stage makeup, and they carved the kitchen into hard, sharp angles and crept up Daniel’s body, idling in the hollows under his eyes. The subjective made real. Lin remained where he was, only he turned away, toward the counter, to snatch up a pen and a scrap of paper. Once Daniel was done speaking, there was a minute of semi-silence as Lin wrote. He was left-handed. The boy created a series of black dots and lines, each deliberate, carefully placed, the sounds of which were distinct as he penned them—long and short, long, long, and short. It was the same non-musical rhythm as before.—He considered his handiwork, checked his spelling, then discarded pen and paper both atop the marble as he left the counter for the ...um, well-read table. Daniel could figure out the note himself. Confused, Lin hardly heard the words that followed the ‘no’. That wasn’t the right answer. His eyes focused carefully on the man’s shoulders moving beneath the thin sweater like twigs and on the curl of his blunt fingers around the dark glass. “I think you should be the somnambulist and I the doctor. Because I’m prettier and Werner Krauss is my boy. Also, hypnosis is more my thing, lbr.” He smiled—a playful little thing, like he hadn’t just been pared down to a handful of strong, uncomfortable emotions. His slow blink alone, his eyelids leaden, belied his exhaustion. “Okay, Cesare, you can stay here and drink and do your crosswords or prophesize or whatever.” One hand waved at the newspapers. Lin inched to the kitchen’s entryway, glanced quickly to QP, then to his abandoned hat and sunglasses, then back to Daniel. “I’m gonna go get my motherfucking nap on.” By which he meant, if he wasn’t getting officially kicked out and if no one was going to stop him, he was going to go sleep in Daniel’s bed, crypt or no crypt, black hole or no. Because if there was one thing Lin didn’t do, it was leave before he’d overstayed his welcome. Surely Daniel could have guessed that. Daniel could have, and he should have, but he was more firmly stuck in his own point of view in that moment than most days. All thoughts were of himself, and of himself alone, amber-dulled thoughts though they were. Usually the journal hidden under the heap of black and white leaves offered more to him than the blatantly uncharacteristic teal-striped cloth and the coffin black wood. He sunk heavily into other people’s lives, anyone that offered the words to read, and few understood just how rarely it was that Daniel said a word--when he read every lick of ink that crossed the time-chewed pages. He surfaced when Lin spoke, letting the rhythmic repetition of the familiar pat of ink on paper wash through his thoughts and empty them out entirely. Dark lashes whisked once over the old blue. “Krauss,” Daniel repeated, switching thoughtlessly to German. “Krauss would have hated everything about you. Skin to bones.” Daniel couldn’t have been much of journalist if he wasn’t thoroughly conversant in European culture, and he knew who Werner was, even if he didn’t know what the hell Lin meant by Cesare. Or “ehl-bee-arr.” Daniel only cared that he liked the name better of all the ones that had been provided so far. (Upon reflection, Daniel thought Lin was avoiding using his name on purpose. This thought preceded a heavy drink from the glass.) Daniel incorrectly assumed that Lin was leaving. He stood up--a serious accomplishment, because he had nearly emptied that glass, building on a previous morning of indulgence, and it was starting to show. He went a shade paler as the room sagged and twisted. His equilibrium regained simply from habit, Daniel moved around the table, letting the glass dangle weakly from the tips of his fingers. “Try not to crash into anything on the way home,” Daniel said, obviously stuck in German the way old cars sometimes resisted shifting gears. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Lin incorrectly assumed, was a film Daniel would have seen and, perhaps, even liked. After all, it came out before 1950, it was artsy, German, and renowned. It never occurred to him that someone’s preference toward one medium might be so strong as to drown out others, especially film. And he remained oblivious. “Nee. Just skin, I think you mean. It need not go further than that,” corrected Lin cockily with a seamless transition into German. He had one finger upheld as he stood in the doorway, half of him still in the kitchen, the other not. The boy shrugged. “He was a Nazi.” A beat, a grin, eyebrows high as Daniel got to his feet with supreme effort. (There was some relief there. This was the Daniel he knew.) “He would’ve loved you though.” Lin turned as if to walk out. He glanced over his shoulder and offered his sweetest smile, and quickly spoke in Italian, just to buy himself time to escape. “Minus the whole sexuality thing.” And then he scurried out through the doorway and into the arctic wasteland of bergs of books and white drifts of paper. He didn’t pause to look around. He simply pushed into the bedroom and made for the heavy, black comforter that laid at the foot of the bed like so much dirty snow. Daniel’s fond farewell made Lin laugh. He paid it no heed. If the man thought it was that easy to get rid of the kid after everything—that all he had to do was make some ominous kind of warning without ever actually telling him to gtfo, he was living in a fantasy land and, kind-hearted as he was, Lin didn’t want to rob him of that. Nope. That was fine. In fact, there wasn’t much he wanted besides warmth at the moment. (Maybe a hug, but that was currently less likely than spontaneous combustion.) Looping the blanket over his head, appearing as an over-puffy dementor, Lin dragged the 12-ton thing onto the wide-ass mattress, which he was now perched on on his knees. He kicked off his shoes thoughtlessly and laid down. He didn’t think about Daniel, he didn’t think about how the pillow smelled like Daniel, he didn’t think about QP, he didn’t think about the sweat that had stained the sheets the last time he had been on the bed, he just closed his eyes. Daniel was obviously temporarily stunned by the proclamation that a Nazi would dislike him for some other reason than the fact that he was an American obviously named after some ex-pat Brit who skipped out on taxes a few generations ago. Daniel was used to considering himself elite and yet majority, a contradiction that amused him simply because it allowed him to mock anyone who shared the same background. He did not like the idea that some curly-haired encyclopedia with a German tongue could turn that kind of superiority around in one sweaty hour. (None of this means Daniel would have given a flying fuck what some ex-Nazi thought. It was just that some attitudes died hard.) By the time he thought to pursue, the kitten had barrelled out of the kitchen in pursuit of Curling the cat up thoughtlessly into the curve of his arm, Daniel turned around and went back to his bottle. It took about two-thirds of the bottle for Daniel to forget what he’d been thinking about three hours before. Another glass and Daniel went on autopilot, dragging himself out of a chair, and toward the bedroom. He abandoned the living room, letting the old German strings of a classical recording play out into the empty air, and the kitten complained so bitterly about being left behind that he brought it with him into his bedroom. The springs bounced as Daniel rolled onto the edge of his bed, completely ignoring the heap of blankets already existent there. He stretched out one arm over his ear and head and muttered something in quiet French to the white fluff ball that settled on his stomach. Lin didn’t care. About anything. Within all of five minutes, he was completely asleep in the soft, man-made womb (gross) on the bed the size of his own apartment. The world went flickering out around him, like that scene in the movies whenever they show the power grid of a city blacking out block by block, and then there was nothing. Normally, he was plagued with extremely vivid, multi-reel dreams, night after night, bizarre scenario after bizarre scenario, courtesy of his anti-depressants, but the alcohol from earlier and the unacknowledged emotional exhaustion tag-teamed and had him in a state more near death than REM cycle in a snap. At least for a couple hours. Then his eyes opened, creaking like the hinges of an old traveling trunk, slow, slow, slow, and he had no idea where he was. There was a good second and a half of panic. The bed moving had stirred him—jarred him, his groggy mind told him. There was soft, murmuring French coming from somewhere. Lin blinked. Then it all came back. Daniel’s. Right. Shit. Lin scrubbed his face with his hands and attempted to find some way out of his cocoon. Chrysalis was over. It was time to become a beautiful~ butterfly. Time for the imago. And also, freeze to death again.—A head of black hair peeped out of an opening at the top. The boy squinted at the man next to him—far enough away to tell him Daniel wasn’t pleased with his surprise guest. (Big surprise there.) QP was curled on his stomach. (Okay, that actually was a surprise, and it was adorable.) Lin listened to the drunken mutterings a moment, pretty as they were, attempting to parse meaning from the honeycombed words. Ultimately, he gave up, because he had no fucking idea. Aubrey used to speak French to him all the time. It was a joke of theirs that it ramped Lin up something fierce. And while he did enjoy the sound of it, truthfully, French just made him think of stars being strung together like Christmas lights. Blame it on Rimbaud or blame it on Duchamp and Anémic Cinéma. With effort, Lin managed to clear his face of the blankets. His hair was a mess of elflocks, but whatever. It wasn’t as if it made him any less pretty, right? Right. “I can’t do that one.” His voice was sleep-rough and quiet, but audible all the same, even over the distant crying of classical music. He blinked sleepily, but didn’t move otherwise. Daniel was dead drunk and mumbling unintelligible thing, slurring syllables in foreign tongues and generally incapable of higher thought. You could smell the alcohol coming off his skin from across the bed, sharp waves of eye-watering poison, and though the cat was curled up in the stretch of sweatshirt closest to the stretch of pale skin visible above the hem of his loose jeans, it kept sneezing in its sleep, shaking overlarge ears and hiding a pink nose under the flat of its paw in exact imitation of its master. Daniel rolled over when he heard a voice. That was all it was to him, some voice, and it could have been past or future. He couldn't even tell what language it was, only that he understood it, and when he was this drunk Daniel was used to stray memories blurring in the outlines of his consciousness. The blue eyes were nearly unrecognizable under the assault of blood red lines, dominated by large pupils under old light. He stared for a very long second at the dark eyes and curling hair, and nothing about his expression spelled out an understanding of who he was talking to. His face was slack with drink, mouth pink with new liquor, and his eyes bulged in almost comic lack of speed. Daniel saw a warm body where he thought an old corpse should be, and not Lin at all. Such dark skin and such dark eyes, interrupted by a low voice, Daniel's mind fumbled for someone and came up with a set of eyes nearest to the surface. The whiskey threatened to turn the fear into panic, clawing at his throat, but Daniel didn't move. He stared another second, brows flexing with flawed recognition and disbelieving quiet. "J.B.?" he asked, not wanting an answer. Daniel pulled his arm off his face and blinked twice to try to force his eyes to focus. "No," he said, thickly. No it was…Lin. Oh, God. If Lin hadn’t already been burrowed into the blanket, stuck fast, he might have recoiled at the sight of those red-blue eyes opening on him as in a horror movie, slow motion and with no trace of recognition behind their glassy veneer. They reminded him of an animal.—No. Of the Beast.—Lin’s lips parted, then pressed together into a frown of mingled confusion and concern and fear. He forgot the kitten. He just moved away. ‘J.B.’ meant nothing to the boy, but it obviously meant something to Daniel. Something bad? J.B., J.B.—Johor Bahru, Journal of Bacteriology, Jim Beam, Johannes Brahms. Lin’s mind tried to make sense of the letters, but nothing clicked. It was a name, that was all he knew. Lin saw the strangled disbelief, he caught the over-clean scent of whiskey that rolled off the man in a series of overwhelming Gaussian (dispersive) wave packets, and something small and tucked away inside of the boy told him this was partly his fault. He should have gone earlier. And he shouldn’t have pushed. What the fuck was wrong with him? “No, Daniel,” the sable boy in the blanket replied firmly (in English) by way of reassurance. He struggled to smile and eventually just gave up. It didn’t matter. Daniel couldn’t even tell who he was. Lin sighed and attempted to extract himself from his soon-to-be exuvia. Somehow he’d gotten tangled. Only a little bit desperate, he kicked the black blanket off with a weak stream of expletives and rolled onto his knees, clothing sleep-twisted. Lin pulled hard at the bottom of his shirt, attempting to straighten it while eyeing the man warily. The cold hit him full-on and ruthlessly tore the few scraps of warmth he’d kept close. Lin shuffled nearer to Daniel on the bed with shifting, sinking knees, and rubbed an eye with his palm. His hair stood up in shocked patches. Now that he was free of the blanket’s confines, he wasn’t so scared. Lin gazed down darkly at the prone Daniel. The room was so quiet. “I’m going to go,” he said softly, before he tilted his head to the side. “I thought you didn’t like acronyms. What’s ‘J.B.’?” Far from chilled, Daniel felt hot as the liquor rushed old blood up to the surface of his skin. A faint sweat made the dark curls tighter against the top of his head and the back of his neck as he turned his head. It was like lifting an anvil off his shoulders, and he rolled his spine so he could shove the pillow down to prop himself up. It was an obvious effort. “Lin.” It came out as a distracted confirmation, a recognition. Daniel was aware he probably looked like a coma patient. He was still too drunk to feel anything like his stomach churning or his head pounding, but his face had gone wan and the blush of drink was slow to return. “Ahforgot you were in there.” Daniel turned his head and looked blankly at the twisted mess of dark blankets. He started to roll over and the cat complained in a high-pitched wail, digging claws into Daniel’s skin and propelling off the edge of the bed to bound off around the closet door. “Merde,” Daniel slurred, rubbing at his eyes. He focused again on Lin, belated... and smiled. It was a beatific smile, obviously relieved beyond words to have Lin sitting there. He rolled over and curled slightly so his knee tapped on Lin’s. It was contact, anyway. “I didn’t know you wanted to stay.” And here he frowned, shook his head. He was obviously slow to catch up on the things Lin was saying. “You know him?” Daniel slurred blankly, squinting at Lin’s face. His name fell from Daniel’s lips, slow, heavy, a single syllable, carrying with it the kind of plodding satisfaction that comes from resolving presque vu, and the bearer of said name smiled a little at that, relieved. Daniel was drunker than Lin had ever seen him, and while that worried him greatly and inspired a whole new cult of guilt, it was still kind of funny. The man moved as if trapped in heated amber, only where he ought to have been glowing gold, he was sheets of white, black, brown, red, and blue. There was no more razor wire laid out to snag Lin as he tried to creep past defenses, no more cutting observations. “I know. You think I shouldn’t want to.” Lin shrugged, speaking with words checked and measured, unworried by the cat’s loud-ass departure. Black eyes settled on Daniel. They idled on the smile, not quite sure to glean from it, translating the serene stretch of teeth into a mixed message; next they touched on the kissing knees. Back up to the man’s face they went. Lin bit his bottom lip at the frown and finally looked away, his hands plucking at the hem of his shirt suddenly infinitely more interesting. “No, I don’t know him.” Lin lifted his left hand very, very carefully from his lap and studied the cross-hatched structure of his own palm and the offshoot of twiggy fingers. He asked himself what he should do—not what he wanted to do, but what he should do. If it was relentless prodding that had gotten him here, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to continue asking questions that, sober, Daniel might not answer. Fuckin’ ethics. At the same time, he was torn about whether to stay or go. He wanted to leave, because if he wasn’t there, he couldn’t fuck the dude up (more) by accidentally asking the wrong question or stirring up ...whatever, memories of whoever the hell J.B. was. But then again, what if -...ugh, God. He put his face in his hands. “I should go. You are not going to want me here when you wake up.” With Daniel soused and smiling/...frowning, it was easier to speak plainly, certain as he was that the man wouldn’t remember a word. He didn’t even make a joke about Cosmo’s relationship tips like he normally would’ve. Lin dropped his hands. Daniel was too far gone to notice the importance of Lin’s shirt or how much it may or may not have needed to be arranged properly. All he cared about was that it was Lin, and not another of his horrible ghosts, sitting in his bed. As much as Lin scared and worried Daniel on the best days, just then Lin was a welcome distraction. When Lin proclaimed ignorance, Daniel nodded grimly into the sheets. His eyes stopped trying so hard to stay open. “Nobody does,” Daniel said, obviously to himself. Daniel was drunk enough to not only be lonely, but to admit that he was lonely. He curled an arm around the pillow under his head and faced Lin, like some child at a sleepover. The smile was that of a much younger man, loose and small. He noticed that Lin was upset about something (hiding one’s face was an obvious hint that even someone as drunk as Daniel could see and remember longer than thirty seconds). “Hey,” Daniel said, reaching up and curving a sweaty palm along Lin’s elbow. He gave a quick squeeze, a movement that was astonishingly casual for Daniel considering that it wasn’t sexual in nature. “Don’t be like that. You’re mad about the...” Daniel tried that syllable three times and frowned when it didn’t cooperate. “The cat,” he finished, awkwardly. “Or,” Daniel’s eyes brightened in obvious inspiration from above, “you’re mad about the...” Daniel trailed off. He forgot what he was trying to say halfway through saying it. A crease deepened between his eyes. “You do keep coming back.” No segue. “You don’t know things.” Daniel curled his knees up to his chest, let his eyes close. He kept talking. “Are you hiding here from something else? That makes sense. Nobody would come looking for anything here. It’s kind of safe. But not good for you.” Conversational. Lin let the thread of conversation regarding J.B. fall to the wayside, certain that it led nowhere good. He would simply save the initials for another time—like for when he needed to shock Daniel into shutting the fuck up or something. Until then, he chose to forget the odd comments and the way they pricked at his curiosity, for once doing the ‘should,’ rather than the ‘want.’ And, God, did it suck ass. Seconds later, however, it was less of a conscious choice and more of just something that happened because Daniel’s warm hand was on Lin’s elbow (which was probably the strangest thing that had happened since he’d arrived; Lin only realized then how little there was to Daniel that was thoughtless), and the man was on his side, the eyes that had been so frightening moments before smoother now, safer, brighter than he’d ever seen them before, despite the running web of red throughout. Okay. Lin smiled, though his eyebrows remained knit together over his eyes in an expression of befuddlement. He sifted through Daniel’s fragmented thoughts and tried to find a place to start. “What things don’t I know?” Lin did the best he could to not move, to not encourage the want inside of himself that insisted he just lie down too and shut up because he could probably get away with it. He brought his knees up and hugged them to keep his hands occupied. God, he was a moron. He need to go home where it was safe. Finally, he said: “I’m not hiding.” Unable to stop himself, Lin reached over Daniel’s body for the discarded blanket, his old cocoon, and he dragged it over to put it over his own shoulders in the manner of donning a cloak. And then he set his face on his knees. “Things. Me.” Daniel shifted, stretching one ankle out and wetting dry lips with the end of his tongue. “It’s good, though. You have your... your people. People for you. Happy people, right?” Daniel nodded slowly to himself, hair thick as he rolled slightly and buried one cheek entirely into a pillow. The effort required to touch Lin’s elbow seemed to have expended itself entirely, and now his hands flopped loosely where they had fallen, fingers loosely curled into the edge of the blanket. “And not around me, there’s nothing to hurt you, really. Except the normal shit. Lin and Aubrey...” Daniel seemed to think that the last three words were one long phrase, the syllables sticking to his tongue like old honey. “Arguing and flirting. Best soap opera in the book.” A sliver of sea glass appeared under Daniel’s lowered lashes. He half-expected J.B. again, the sodden brain somehow calling up the situation as an expected jump in a B horror film. Roll over, dead man watching. Nothing worse than staring eyes and blood. He focused on Lin, who moved, breathed, wound himself into a ball. The expected sight slowly moved away until it was only a memory, and Daniel felt safe shutting his eyes once more. “Come on. You’re hiding a little bit.” Daniel abruptly let out a faint chuckle from low under his ribs. “Under the blanket.” Lin didn’t answer. He said nothing of people. He only breathed against his knees in the inkling of warmth and he listened, letting Daniel’s slurring words slip around him as a rock in a particularly drunken stream. It was as near to what he did when he was alone as anyone was ever going to see. The boy shook his head, just barely, keeping his eyes closed, at hearing his name strung together with Aubrey’s, hooked like something you’d find stretched on an embroidery hoop, cross-stitched and counted in spring colors. He moved a stockinged foot and poked Daniel in the side with his toes—lightly—and offered a muffled, “Shut the fuck up, you fucking ass.” He lifted his head enough to wedge his chin between his knees and peer out from the protection of the comforter at Daniel with eyes only differentiated from the black within by the squares of light that shined off of them. He hadn’t forgotten that he was leaving. “Yeah, I guess.” Lin shifted a little closer in spite of himself, to lean against Daniel’s legs. He let the makeshift hood of the blanket fall from his head, and froze, rethinking his words. He closed his mouth a moment, frowned, and then continued. “Are you cold?” Daniel was belatedly pleased that his joke was as funny as he thought it had been a few minutes before. He left the smile on his face until it bled away like ink in rain, a natural victim of gravity and alcohol working through abused liver cells. His gaze moved to stare up at the ceiling, a graceful curve of expensive plaster colored gray by the lack of light. “I don’t know what is so bad about you and your drama,” he continued, using a distinctly youthful phrase with the wrong inflection entirely. “The rest of us like it. I keep waiting for one of you to proclaim undying love.” Daniel was not especially articulate when he was this drunk, but he did put together sentences that made decent sense, and that was fairly impressive in and of itself. He had convinced himself fairly thoroughly that Lin and Aubrey were practically under a pink roof with a fire in the hearth, despite Lin’s occasional half-hearted protests. It made him feel that he could be responsible for far less damage than was actually the case. Daniel made a faint pleased sound at the shift of weight. Presence, living presence, was good. Lin was good. Lin said he was okay. “I’m not.” He said of temperature. “I’m hot, see?” He sat up abruptly and shifted his weight forward on his hips. The room spun and he said something vaguely like whoo gently under his breath before he fastened his fingers around the curve that he assumed to be Lin’s shoulder. Daniel’s hand wasn’t as hot as he thought it was, but it wasn’t as icy cold as usual. Daniel pulled the blanket and its warm, breathing contents down against him, assuming he would not be unwanted. “Oh my fucking God. I said shut the fuck up, jackass. There is no undying love,” Lin grunted with another dusting kick-poke to the drunk’s lower ribs before the hand was on his shoulder. His protest was whole-hearted as fuck, no halves about it, okay? Daniel’s hand was lukewarm at best where it rested on the narrow shelf of the boy’s shoulder. It was heavy, but it wasn’t hot. False advertising. —Lin prepared to tell Daniel this, adopting an appropriately skeptical, ‘oh, you silly lush’ expression and everything, when he was bundled into the man’s arms and pulled close. The whiskey reeked stronger now. And after a sharp intake of breath from sheer surprise, the harsh scent filled Lin’s nose, close as it was to the man’s white throat, bringing with it too the extremely out-of-place hint of agar from earlier. Of course, the boy didn’t fight the embrace—Daniel’s assumption was correct—and after a blink, he found himself horizontal and resting atop the man’s chest—or so he thought. He couldn’t really see. Whatever. “Yes. I see now,” he murmured against Daniel, his own breath tickling his face as it curved back toward him. He was comfortable. Lin laid still and pondered a moment, running through the mental VHS of his visit with his finger on the FF button, and he quickly indexed the differences between the present Daniel and the one from earlier with the ghost-pale eyes. He tallied the off remarks he would need to remember for later. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. Jesus, had it been a weird-ass day. Even looking back, he was dumbfounded by 90% of what had happened. “Do you know the poem 'Vom armen B.B.'?” Lin licked his lips and attempted to tip his head back to glance up at Daniel. He decided he’d just wait it out—he wasn’t sure he had the heart to brush the sot off, even if it was a definite ‘should’. He was warm, anyway. His head felt weirdly empty. Once Daniel fell asleep, which he had to do eventually, the boy figured he could make his escape. Until then, he’d just... play the part of black-haired, black-trussed glowworm. Daniel didn’t feel the prod to his ribs. It was a safe bet that Daniel probably wouldn’t feel an anvil falling on him at this point, not unless it was warm and said clever things to him in German. While obviously more physical than he was usually, Daniel was not making any attempt to strip off clothing, or even unwrap Lin from his safe little cocoon of blankets. Sex, while a pleasant diversion and a pathetically obvious escape that Daniel used when he could be troubled to clean himself up, was obviously not on the menu at the moment. Daniel’s chest rose and fell in shallow, thoughtless breaths. The pillow was lost somewhere far above his head, and all of his limbs condensed closer together. He warded off any serious thoughts, any stray sadness. He tried to think of nothing and float a little on the top of his brain, as far away from the cold darkness at the bottom of his consciousness, where guilt kept scraping the old sea bed and stirring up particles of despair. “No.” Daniel replied, slow and thick. “Why is B.B. poor?” But he was asleep before Lin could answer. |