you are nothing more than a ghost to me, a presence i feel occasionally. love me and keep me happy with empty space, empty space
The Undercamp was quiet at this time of night. The echos of the Libertine's Loop filtered down into the stillness of the night, but otherwise the alleys were quiet save the slow footsteps of a warlord and the trail of smoke he offered to the sky.
When he came to a shack, not yet fixed to entire perfection, but still passable as a shelter. It was a place that someone would someday call a home. Somewhere that someone, someday, would be happy to have waiting for them, filled with familiar things. Warmth. Comfort.
But now, the windows seemed cold. He wondered, then, if anyone was even inside the structure of cracked stone, iron beams, clouded windows.
It wouldn't surprise him if no one was home. Still, he hesitated to knock and he stood on the first step to the door, dragging deeply on that half burnt cigarette, rolling over what had to be done in his head.
He swallowed. He passed his tongue over his teeth and listened for breathing, listened for the creak of a snake in this lifeless house.
Listened, the scent of breathless smoke permeating the air.
Something shattered inside, curses filling the shack with venemous wrath. Beyond the door, Lazarus picked up another bottle and slung it at the wall.
It was a foolish thing to do, having few bottles and needing to scavenge for them himself, but he was angry. He always felt angry anymore.
The snake he had rescued curled tighter in the corner, watching his master struggle with an empty lighter and threw that at the wall too.
God, Lazarus wished he was drunk. It would make it easier to explain his pointless rage. The snake watched him judgementally as Lazarus stood slowly, picking his way through broken glass to find the discarded lighter and search for the bottle of butane that was somewhere in the unsorted gear scattered around the makeshift house.
"What are you looking at," Lazarus scowled, but reached out a second later to smooth his hand over the snake's body.
"Sorry, buddy. It's not your fault. I'll clean up the glass so you don't get sliced up when I'm not looking."
The snake just watched, expressionless, and wagged its forked tongue at him.
Outside, Jhator was not moved by the audible display, the sudden fit of anger that ended with so many tiny shards of glass. He understood anger. He understood rage.
Other emotions were really the foreign thing, the scary bit.
He pulled on that cigarette again before he called to the man on the other side.
"Lazarus." The name on the warlord's tongue was soft, just speaking level, but he knew the other man heard.
Tonight, maybe a long run of leavings would end with getting left. But it had to be done.
All sound stopped, like death had suddenly moved over the house. Hesitant.
Boots crunched over broken glass and the door opened, the unlit cigarette hanging from Lazarus' lips like punctuation.
"What," he grunted, immediately followed by a slightly more congenial, "Hi."
The sight of him made Lazarus' anger spike abruptly and then go quiet. "Sorry about the mess," he left the door open and took a makeshift broom in his hand, sweeping the glass up. He learned a long time ago not to invite Jhator in. He didn't like being disappointed when he was told he wasn't staying. Instead the doorway stood, unobstructed, for him to come in or stay out as he liked.
"If you don't want me to come around, you don't have to make it dangerous," the warlord replied as he stepped inside. "All you have to do is ask."
"Don't be an idiot," Lazarus put the glass in a corner and stood the broom over it. "Not everything I do is about you."
Jhator took a drag of the cigarette, crossed his arms over his chest and watched. He was always defiant, always petulant. Even now, he had that arrogant air of that fifteen year old spine thief Lazarus first knew.
He always waited for his opponent to show their cards, for his lovers to break first.
This was no different.
He canted his head to the side as he watched, resting his face on the indifference it relied on.
Lazarus pretended not to care, struggling again to light his own cigarette before he tossed the dead lighter to the side. "Let me borrow yours for a sec," he said, never asking, and looked around for something to offer to drink. "So what's up? Just come over to hang out or what? Don't tell me you're going to ask to move in or something and you've come to scope out the place."
Inflammatory, looking for a response. Lazarus did not like breaking first, though he usually did.
The Warlord simply lifted his head slightly, jutting that jaw just so that the burning cherry was accessible from the cigarette still held between his lips. He said nothing as he offered this option, lifting his eyes to survey the other man's response.
Lazarus balked.
"How romantic," he snorted, but stepped closer as nonchalantly as he could to steal a burning kiss. The flame caught and spread orange, putting life into the other.
[i]Symbolic[/i], thought Lazarus as he breathed out smoke in Jhator's face, locking eyes. He wasn't as angry as he pretended to be, no. He was wanting.
"Thanks," the tattooed man slunk back a bit, momentarily uncombative.
Not even a blink. He inhaled again and pulled the cigarette away from his lips, closing the distance between them slightly with the shift in his weight, one leg to the other, the angling of his hips.
"You know I didn't choose to leave you the first time." His eyes fell slightly to study the other man's features. The twitch of his mouth, the sillhouette of his nose, the tension in his jaw, the strain in his throat. Any give. All gives.
"Stop acting like I did."
There was no give in that hard voice, that iron whisper. His words were monoxide and the chill of him irreverent, controlling. He didn't give an inch, remaining in the space he took, the place he chose to occupy,
too close for rivals, just barely too far for lovers.
Lazarus' back arched up, shoulders back, a slight surprise in his eyes. "Maybe you don't know, since you haven't really seen me in a while," he put his hands on the other's waist, pulling himself in abruptly so they were only the length of his cigarette from each other. "But this is how I am. You're the one bringing it up, not me. And, since you wanna talk about it so much, no you didn't leave me on purpose the first time."
He pulled the cigarette away from his own lips. "But after that? Who decided it then? Not the cops. So own up to your shit, and after you do that why don't you realize that maybe I'm capable of having feelings independent of you."
Even though most of them, the good and the bad, wasn't. At least, for the moment.
"You're angry with me whenever I come by," Jhator replied, unflinching. His voice remained even, stinging, calm. He did nothing to alter their distances, their position, their posturing. "I know it's me-- it comes and goes with me. It falters when you're distracted and it returns after you've come." He took one final drag, dropping the cigarette to the concrete floor.
He turned, then. Hands glided up the other man's back before he tangled in his hair and yanked his head back,
exposing his throat to his breath sliding his mouth to his ear.
"I left you many times in our many lifetimes, Lazarus," he said as he nipped his jugular, clipped his skin with his canines even as he heard the blood of the throat hum and tremble in those traitor veins. "I'll leave you again, someday." He smoothed the wound with his tongue. Pulled his lover's head back just a little bit farther to leave him breathless.
To make him beg a little with the heaving of his chest, the strain of oxygen tight in his drum lungs.
"But that's what we are. Comings and goings. That's all anybody is now."
He kissed the corner of his mouth, left of center, in that face that rested skyward.
"So either take this moment, these moments we've collected, and the moments we've got left, or you can go. I'll let it be you this time."
He released his stone grip on the other man's hair but didn't move otherwise.
Lazarus' breath came in shallow pants, but he covered up the gasp from Jhator's bite fairly well. It was, at least, only slightly louder than the sound of his heart hammering so hard his fingers shook.
He swallowed and kept staring at some point to his extreme left, lips pursed, hurt obvious. He could never go. His submission, his lack of fight against the aggression, proved it. He was addicted to whatever doses he could get of this feeling, no matter how far between the fixes came.
Lazarus put his hands on the other's chest, looking like he was going to pull them close again--be close and hurt again--before he dropped them to his sides. He took a defeated drag of his cigarette.
"Can't get rid of me that easily," he said, but there were no teeth in it anymore. Lazarus broke. He always broke first.
What would come would perhaps test that statement.
His words came in whispers to the other's jaw.
"I have a confession to make. Do you want it now or later?"
Lazarus stiffened, wanting to stop talking, wanting to be skin close again and uncomplicated. "I don't like waiting. Now," he said quietly but with some backbone.
Jhator pulled away, slightly, connecting eye to eye with that poison hearted man, that viper wrapped around him. He licked his teeth and spoke.
"There's a woman in my life now. And she's not someone I can leave for you."
"Oh."
Lazarus' blood turned to ice and his stomach exploded into prickly acid. He took a step back and turned away. "Oh. Well. Isn't that just... good for you. And shit."
He picked up a metal canteen and put it down again. "That just... that figures."
He felt like throwing up. How typical, for him to come back like this and for it all to mean northing. For Lazarus to be a side thing, whenever it was convenient. To be unimportant. He was an idiot to have let his hopes get up.
Again.
"It fucking figures."
Jhator gave the man his thirty seconds of space as he pulled out a new cigarette, lit it, took it deep into his artificial body, filled his false lungs with thoughts of true promises, lightened words.
But what could he say--
All his heart wanted were selfish things, and here he was: no better than Blanca and the empty place she could only fill with anonymous cocks. no better than Lazarus who needed to be left to feel anything at all.
He came to the man's turned back, placed his hand on his spine.
"If you stay, if you love me enough to stay, I want you to share her with me."
Lazarus laughed manically. "What are you saying? You think you can have your cake and eat it too?" he picked up an aluminum bowl and looked like he wanted to throw it, but he put it down again with obvious effort. "You replaced me and you want me to just join in?"
His voice echoed off the shack's walls as it raised, pitch tightening around his wounded vocals. "How do you think this is going to work, Indriya? You think, you think..."
Lazarus put his back to his lover again. "What do I even mean to you? Just a side dish? What does this," he moved his hand angrily in the space to his side as if it were between them, "mean to you?"
"If I didn't feel something, I would've killed you when you came to town," Jhator murmured, lost somewhere between thought and the moment, racing quickly through arsenic breaths and flashes of cyanide behind his eyes. He closed them, to organize his head.
"Look. I don't know what I'm asking." The teeth were gone. The barbs were lowered. That stone face, that steel gate was lowered, defenseless if only for the moment. "But this is the only time I'll ask it. If you want me, want me to stay, then you'll have to take the me that has her attached." He swallowed. "You've never been an afterthought, but it's been thirty years, Lazarus. Thirty years, at least. Things happen."
Another drag, another exhale.
"You don't mean the world to me, you aren't my universe. You can't be. I run this camp of survivors, I run this military outfit trying to reclaim the old city. That is the most important thing to me." He let the viper have his space, took a step back and eased back, slightly.
Entirely sure he'd be going soon.
"But you mean something to me. And after thirty years, I can still feel it."
Lazarus felt like he might have cried if he were younger and stupider and less accomplished at keeping his shit together.
"Why didn't you tell me in the first place?" he bit the filter hard. "When I first got here?"
"I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I was just... happy to see you again, I guess. And I just reacted to you." He shook his head. "Look, I can go if it'd be better, if you want me gone."
Lazarus found he had somehow leaned against a wall and rubbed his eyes.
"I don't want you to go," he mumbled into his hand. "I want you to make things better, you fucking idiot. I want to..."
He couldn't say it. His inky fingers grasped at the air in search of a better way to word things, a less desperate way.
"I want to be around you even if it means I don't get everything I want. I want to be important to you. I want to stop being the one who watches your back as you walk away from me like I'm disposable."
When he finally looked at Jhator again his face was an opening to all the wounds. "And now you've dragged someone else into this shit? What will she do when you ditch again? Does she get to go with you when I get left behind, or do I get to help put her back together again when you leave us both?"
He lit a new cigarette with his old one just before it went out. "I wish you weren't so complicated and selfish. I wish we both were better people."
"I've been putting this city back together for fifteen years," the old bounty hunter replied, almost a mumble, weary. "I'm not going anywhere except into the ground when someone finally manages to kill me."
Which could be happening sooner rather than later when it came to proposing this whole idea to Blanca.
"We're all damaged goods. It's just a matter of if you think you can live with the shitty parts-- because I know that I'm shitty. No one knows the extent of my shittiness better than me." He even managed to smirk a little, then. The span of their combined years together was dwarfed by the span of their years and years and years apart.
When it came down to it, they were different people now. Emotionally, they reacted to the unchanged faces they saw, the familiarity of unchanging bodies, but on the inside they were rotten.
Each and every one of them, depraved, desperate, unworthy.
"Way to dodge everything I said," he laughed bitterly.
Lazarus pushed off the wall and gripped Jhator by his waist. "I'll meet your chick. And I'll take the you that comes with her. And her. If that's what happens."
He stared somberly into the other's face. "But you gotta not be a shithead. You have to actually try to stay this time. I can't... I won't do this again. I lived through too much to be ditched like a next-day hooker."
Lazarus paused. "Do you remember the first time we realized we might get caught when we were young? We huddled together in a little shack and stayed there for two days before we dared to come out and run like little roaches back to where we were safe. Before we knew nowhere was safe."
He smiled sadly. "But you know what? I always felt safe as long as you were with me. Because if you were there, what else was important? You were the only thing in my life that I couldn't replace."
Jhator's face settled on that indifferent resting phase, somber and reticent in the other man's acceptance of his deal.
"I remember," he said, quietly, pulling his hands across the others ribs, up his back, to his neck.
I never replaced you.
"I'm tired of talking." Old world hunter bones creaked as he pulled the viper to his mouth to shut him the fuck up. His lips parted in their thank you, to ease whatever regrets were to come,
whatever regrets would dare come.
you haunt me, ghost, you’re the one that I loved most.