Re: [misha & jude: the capital]
[Jude remembered the show. He remembered the figure in the ring who'd summoned music and made people forget they were there for any other reason to listen: hadn't he his own self been there to compare and contrast, to hold the boy up to the light and see why this one had crossed the divide or Oliver had spanned the chasm himself for? But he remembered the show better than anything else, and if anything the love that was sustained all the months afterward was Misha's for music. Everything else had fallen by the wayside.
He exchanged one smile for another, Jude's wholly lacking in complication until Misha traded views on what mattered and what did not.] Do you mean feeling it, sunshine, as opposed to just copying it? I can feel it very much but I can't make it up. It's a comfort, to play. You can climb inside and forget there's anything else.
[But Misha looked at him as startled as if he'd said Oliver had grown horns and sprouted a tail and what, precisely, had Oliver been telling him? They'd been here long enough now that the time before was beginning to fade in Jude's own memory from crisply-defined by cortisol to the washed-out sepia of trauma long since over and ended. Oliver had made brisk trade in the big wide world on cons of being harmless, of being easily harmed.]
He went for months. To art school, he couldn't get any better at home. [And he'd been left behind and perhaps that had been the fault-line invisible for years. He'd learned the how, after years of being paired, of not-being. And then Oli had come back.] It went badly at the end, I think. He came back. But it was long enough. [Long enough that they both knew how to operate independently and perhaps that was news for Misha. But the boy was speaking of places that were mine and segued into the truth at last, cracked open with albumen thin and binding.
Jude did not know Damian - the briefest of interludes with Misha as translator did not count in any way that was real but he could believe him cleaving to this boy and holding him fast. He listened, his face thoughtful and quiet and when Misha stopped, he absorbed on the very threshold of the Piano bar itself.]
It sounds like it's been difficult for you, sunshine. [It sounded terribly sad, and like putting a wild bird behind bars: confines that couldn't make sense even if it preserved order.] Did they mix up the between-realities and the sex or does the between-realities part mean the sex? I don't suppose it makes much difference, you don't have to answer that. [Belatedly. And Jude could understand why Oliver had felt it necessary to keep this from Jude: it was an imperfection. It was not polished facade, it was human and yet would the boy in the henley have understood anything of Oliver without imperfection somewhere?]
I think it would have been better if he'd loved you enough to be truthful about who you were. [Quiet, and he pushed into the door to open it.]