Christopher Warrington (waltzlikeanarmy) wrote in regulation, @ 2008-04-19 23:42:00 |
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Current mood: | cautious |
Current music: | "Slide" - Goo Goo Dolls |
Entry tags: | christopher warrington, narrative, zacharias smith |
...i'll do anything you ever dreamed to be complete - little pieces of the nothing that fall...
Who: Christopher Warrington & Zacharias Smith
What: A meeting?
When: Sunday, April 20, 2008 - sometime after 9:30PM.
Where: Zach's studio/flat/warehouse thing.
Rating: PG (*gasp* I know you're shocked.)
Status: Closed, complete.
Note: This is the piece of glass/art that Zach shows Chris. :)
Chris worked for most of the day, only stopping long enough to take Andrea to a park down the road so Jac could have a bit of time to herself. He entertained his niece throughout the afternoon, making sand-people dance for her when the park was empty and pushing her on the swings when it wasn't. By the time they got home, she was ready for a nap and he was ready for dinner, so he asked the House Elves to make something up. It was a standard meal - Jac joined him early on and Andrea came in halfway through, asking for waffles of all things.
He went back to work afterward, concentrating on legal documents, the new pile of cases he'd been handed Friday afternoon. Most of them could be handed off to others, but some of them would need his personal attention. The clock in his office chimed at nine and he stood, readying himself to leave. By the time the clock itself red half nine, he'd pulled his robes about his shoulders and told Jac where he was going. She gave him an almost suspicious look before picking up a book and curling into one of the chairs in their back parlour.
A moment later and he was standing outside Smith's home, staring at the worn, peeling paint covering the door before raising his hand to knock, knuckles rapping smartly, if softly.
The knock startled Zach from where he was, standing in front of three burning furnaces. His skin was hot, echoing the flames in its feverish intensity and he could feel the sweat dripping down his back, pooling beneath the thin fabric of his shirt as he gripped the taper. It, too, felt warm under his reach and he realized, as he looked down at it, that he was trembling.
This was fucking insane.
But it was better to know. To get it out of his system and move on with it. Opening the door, he stood there, bearing the brunt of a cold, clear wind as it stung his chest, shivering as the blast hit the moisture on his body, prickling every pore. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with wind, at all, and everything to do with the man standing in front of him with a face that he couldn't read.
"Set your watch," was all Zach said.
"Consider it set," Chris answered, the reply coming easily enough despite the sight of the man before him as he pulled his pocket watch free of his waistcoat. He wasn't sure what to make of Smith, all things considered - not at all. He could smell the heat coming from the room behind the other man, wasn't sure what to make of it. Four minutes and forty-five seconds. Your self-imposed time limit is quickly coming to a close. He didn't say it, just stood there and waited for Smith to do something - say something.
It was strange, more than anything else, the calm that had settled over him. He didn't know what to expect, he didn't know what the younger man wanted. So he tried to brace himself for anything but that left him holding on to so many possibilities that he found it difficult to simply stand. Still, he was prepared, he hoped. And if not... well then.
Zach wanted to reach out and take Warrington's hand but he stopped himself.
"Follow me." Turning without saying anything more, he led Christopher down through the hallway. Four minutes, twenty seconds. They went through stairs into the caverns of the warehouse until they found the heart of his work, the furnaces that were not for practice but for the melding of art, the pieces in progress that rested on broken workbenches. The room was so hot it sweltered and Zach continued to keep his silence although his heart was beating so hard that his head throbbed with it.
His finger touched the inside of the other man's wrist for just a moment, the callouses grazing delicate flesh, then he led him to the far wall.
A panel hung there. It was nothing but color, the greens and greys and blue melding into one, but the fusing of the glass had taken hours. The harnessing of the ghosts, the haunting that had refused to leave him when he recalled Christopher's eyes. They were here, their color, the depths of the irises a poem that he had given to the glass. And it thrummed lightly, the colors shifting despite his vow not to weave any magic in glass any longer, the shifting matching the beating of his heart, hard and heavy where it pounded against his chest.
"Look." He said, his eyes on the watch. "Just look. You've got three fucking minutes and forty-five seconds." And with that, Zach went back to the furnaces, his head bent as he stared down at the workbench, forcing his gaze to trace the wood, to count the grains.
Chris resisted the urge to twist his wrist, flex his fingers after Smith released him, left him standing before a piece of glass. It was beautiful, he could see that. He watched the patterns shift and his mind flew - inevitably - to the realisation that he'd been right all along. Magic - Wild Magic. In glass - contained in a perfect, looping cycle, shifting - it pulsed with a life of its own. No, it thrummed to the rhythm of someone else's life.
There was something to this, some beat he understood - he could see it, it felt like breathing, but he couldn't place it, couldn't put it together. And then it hit him.
You're like a puzzle and when I put words to the pieces, none of them fit. I can't form a cohesive you.
Raphael said that to him once, a very long time ago. He wasn't even entirely sure why he remembered it, but it hit him in that moment that Smith - whatever this was, whatever he did... he wasn't trying to use words. He was using something else and this was him, this was Chris... a cohesive him made up of glass and saluter.
The hair along the nape of his neck stood on end despite the heat and he turned to look at Smith, a question in the line of his body though he didn't say anything at all.
"You've got ninety seconds," Zach said quietly. "If your watch is right."
A minute and a half wasn't nearly long enough to ask all the questions he had. Chris just shook his head. "What did you do?"
"All art is... all it ever fucking is, is someone's dream." Good or bad. His hand was trembling as he picked up a sliver of glass, cradling it in his palm so his eyes had something to look at that wasn't the other man.
Turning back toward the piece of glass, the work of art, Chris reached out, his fingertips hovering less than a centimetre from the surface for a long moment before he withdrew them without actually touching it. Too close, too much - what in Merlin's name was he supposed to do with this? What was there for him to do? "I still don't know you," he said, voice soft, looking at the saluter lines that divided the glass into three uneven sections.
"Don't know you either," Zach muttered. "But I want to. Or thought I did." He let his hands drop then, pressing them against the edge of the table until they turned red. Before he could reach out to touch the other man, before he could run a finger against his jaw, to see whether he was as hard as he looked. As cold.
The heat of the other man's eyes, of the room around them and the entire situation settled over Chris much the way the calm had blanketed him earlier. He stepped forward, brows drawing down carefully, and reached out to run a fingertip along the outside of Smith's forefinger, keeping it light and slow as it reached the base of the other man's thumb. "You thought you did?"
"Don't." He didn't move, his hands still pressed hard against the wood. "Yeah, I did." His muscles were tense, hardened by the gentle touch, blood rushing to the back of his neck and making the fever spread further. He refused to move, forcing his body to remain clenched, knowing that to move would be to break. And he couldn't do that. Not with the delicate balance that hung between them, the sound of Christopher's breathing near his ear.
Chris looked at the line of the other man's jaw, watched the tightly coiled muscles of his arms, his shoulders, and let his fingertips dance over the backs of Smith's knuckles. The pads of his fingers flitted over scars too numerous to count, traced tendons, sinew, veins - all beneath skin pulled taut, and he said, "My middle name is Benjamin, most of my family is dead, I work for the Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and Unexplained Phenomena as a legal consultant, I haven't been this close to another person who wasn't family in over four years. I want to know you."
He was shivering hard as he felt that touch, dancing against his knuckles, felt an arousal that he hadn't felt in years from the simplicity of it, the fact that it did not shy from the scars on his hands but rather caressed them. "Why? Why do you fucking care now? Why didn't this matter when I was asking for it?"
"Because you didn't ask me before," Chris said, his voice still quiet as his fingertips grazed the back of the younger man's hand, moved toward his wrist. "You gave me riddles and half-truths. I couldn't understand what you were asking for until it was too late and even now I'm not sure what the consequences of my confusion were."
"What do you fucking want?" Thirty seconds. If Warrington held him to the promise.
"Speak plainly, honestly, when you speak to me," Chris said, feeling a bead of sweat roll down the side of his neck, watching a mirror image slide over the skin just below and behind the younger man's ear. "I've had enough of running around in circles trying to figure out what you want me to do, what you want me to say."
Fifteen seconds. Chris slipped his fingers into the dips between the other man's knuckles, his palm covering the scars that criss-crossed Smith's hand for a moment as he tried to absorb the heat in the room. And then he stepped back, away. Less than ten seconds. Looking at his watch, the gold warm against the palm of his other hand, he swallowed and Disapparated precisely as their five minutes ended.