- (sonrisa) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-09-04 23:59:00 |
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Entry tags: | !wonderland, *log, daniel webster, lin alesi |
log, Alice's London: Daniel W & Lin A
Who: Daniel Webster & Lin Alesi
What: reunion
Where: Daniel's Victorian Dom
When: recently
Warnings/Rating: sweet, sweet feels
It wasn’t quiet, but there was no music. In the winter, semi-respectable vendors of hot chestnuts bellowed from the street corners of the thoroughfare a few hundred yards down the road, but now that it was summer there were occasional offers of cold ices through the shouts of the small children that darted out to sweep the cobblestones between passing carriages, whose big wheels rattled harshly on the rough streets. The neighing of the horses, the calling of the drivers, the creaking start and stop of the vehicles were the primary soundtrack of the front step of the bowfront house. Inside, it was different. Daniel’s apartment in Las Vegas had been an air conditioned cocoon of his own design, and rarely did a human voice intrude. This house was occupied by six other people, not counting the people delivering various goods including coal, milk, ice and eggs. The housemaid sang to herself while she worked, nursery rhymes that echoed through the old chimneys while she cleaned hearths and carpets, a consistent low warble without tune. Downstairs, the cook was always calling out for something or another to the scullery maid, and the butler and the valet were consulting on this or that in the downstairs kitchen. Most of the sound was muted in the sitting room, the library and the bedroom, the places where Daniel typically was to be found, but he could hear the rest of it as a dull hum, like an old ache. The brandy here was enough to silence the thoughts, even the ringing in his ears, but the dull hum was almost intolerable. At least in Vegas he’d had his music, his Verdi, his Chopin, his Brahms. With Lin gone, Daniel mourned the loss of music and attempted to ignore the other feelings. Now there was nothing, and he couldn’t sober up long enough to even consider conquering his hesitation to show himself to the outside world, unfamiliar and judgmental as it was. Daniel saw hatred everywhere these days, in the eyes of the servants, in every misty window pane, even in scattered ash of discarded cigarettes. He wanted it to be over so strongly that his efforts to drown the silence grew more consistent and determined. Days blurred together, and he kept track only when the valet, a new man whose name Daniel could not remember, forced the library door. He only did this every three days if Daniel didn’t open it, probably just to make sure the man wasn’t dead. Life would have been a lot easier if Daniel wasn’t so accustomed to being clean. Bath water had to be ordered, bedpans were carried off, and water had to be boiled over a literal fire. All those things were done by people, and those people that grew to understand “the Italian” very well. (Daniel had stuck to the Italian story, even if he bled into English often enough when he was drunk that the servants stopped believing he couldn’t understand it ages ago.) All of them knew about the drinking within ten minutes of being in the house, but all of them were paid very well by Victorian standards to stay the hell out of his way. He only saw the valet these days, for which he suspected the rest of the staff was grateful, because Daniel’s mood worsened as steadily as his health. He’d already been sick three or four times, cigarette coughs and summer flu, probably, not that he bothered to try to treat it except with more brandy and some foul tasting tea the cook kept sending. Daniel thought for sure that some obscure Victorian illness was going to take him off any time now, but the flu left behind a lingering cough that tasted like smoke and a perfectly live Daniel, who screamed in various languages at the unfortunate valet, who could hardly tell the difference between the three. At least the man could read. Drunk or sober (but more often drunk) Daniel kept sending him out for more books, mostly to get rid of him. The man was on orders not to disturb Daniel in the morning (something he, Daniel, was told repeatedly was “most irregular” and he subsequently insisted on with the single-minded determination), so when a weight dropped onto the mattress, shaking Daniel out of one of his drunken stupors, he tried to wake up long enough to see what it was, muttering and rolling onto his side. (lbr here, it was probably Daniel's modern habit of cleanliness that kept those "obscure Victorian illnesses" away from him, drink or no. Hell, in this time, even the fucking flu could kill you, because Pasteur was still figuring his shit out when it came to spontaneous generation vs. biogenesis in Paris, and Koch was, like, graduating medical school or something. And, sure, John Snow (this one was somewhat knowledgeable at least, as well as fond of h's as a rule) had done his whole spiel years prior, like, "uh, guys, don't dig wells next to cesspits leaking literal shit, here is proof of why that is bad"—but you also had the local government deeming that transmission of illness too depressing—ugh, it makes us sad! No!. Which is a totally legitimate reason to tell reason and science to fuck off, if you asked Lin, rhetorically speaking. Which, also, is a totally sarcastic, rhetorical response. Anyway, how's that for a parenthetical aside to begin a bit of writing? You're welcome.) The door, guttered inward from the red throat of the hotel corridor, ziggurat and starbursts in Bakelite swallowing themselves, opened into the terracotta brickwork of balustrades and cusped Tudor arches, Jacobethan with loggias glazed Italianate, a passage of time told in the braille of architecture; it breathed into the solid squareness of Lin's, uh, quarters—his room, with the bed buttered in handsome Egyptian cloth, cream and fine, he never slept in and the wardrobe he kept a key to, because half of the shit in it was women's dresses and paraphernalia, from etamine petticoats to farthingales to whatever the fuck other bullshit ladies had to pile on themselves to step outside, and he really didn't need a maid to discover the stash and draw conclusions from it (i.e., he is a crossdresser (by their own terms)—even though the following conclusion to be drawn would be, most assuredly, 'I bet he a fine one'), and the other half of the shit was electronic or from about 200 years in the future. tbh, it made Lin all the more glad for the immediate connection from hotel to private space, because then he didn't have to change in some shadowy nook and have some perverted fuck call him gay for wearing purple boxer briefs. Instead, he was able to transition from the blacktop, oil-belched grit of Gotham to the dusty, paper-sand thickness of a Victorian house no one had opened the windows in in at least a month. In flat Nike Blazer Mids, green and starstruck with geometric color in the abstract suggestion of a flower, a tomato red ringer tee with a white collar, and gray jeans, a decided snapshot of Not Victorian At Fucking All, without even the black of his hair combed, Lin made a mad dash down the broken neck of the hall, from his room to Daniel's, at top speed. He didn't so much as think about stopping. And lucky for him, no one was about to catch him as an adorable anachronism in action, so no one had to start questioning God or any of that. Whatever else was on his mind, from the quantum conundrum of Louis Donovan and his very pretty face, to the black hole of time and surliness, Lin didn't have to break a smile in on his face; not in this moment, anyway. No, he he was happy to be back, and it showed in a cotton-turn of white teeth as he flopped, bodily, onto the bed next to a sleeping and/or not-sober Daniel.—He paused, however, a second before the flop, breathing hard, to look down at the man twined in Bolton sheeting and to consider him with something that could only be called affection, like, if you were a nerd about it. If his guts twisted up in themselves, a fisherman's bend of entrails veined in nauseous ecru, or his tongue thickened against the roof of his mouth from an expression of nerves that couldn't be evolutionarily advantageous, really, he tore it all away with that grin. He didn't do the stupid brushing-hair-from-the-eyes romantic bullshit, though, Lin didn't. No. He flopped. As rudely and belligerently as he could, and he rolled to throw an arm around the soft round of Daniel's shoulders, his skin dark on the doughy white. Maybe it was a little sappy, (though not as sappy as that hair shit, k?) but nothing could stop him from pressing a kiss to the dullness of the man's curls, heady with sweet opium smoke and rosewater dried. "Herr Puntila," Lin cooed, "Ihr Knecht Matti ist wieder da." Daniel shifted in his tangle of sheets. It was cool enough in London that week to warrant a blanket, though no fires, but Daniel didn’t have either. He always felt like he was running a fever these days, and the corpse-like touch of old was replaced with the dry scrape of square fingers as he set his hand along Lin’s side and squeezed, unsure if he was real. “Are you quoting old German lit at me?” Daniel rasped, voice heavy with amusement and slow with oak and poppy. “Only you.” Gratefully, Daniel rolled onto his back and kept Lin’s arm as he moved, pulling him closer with a (extremely, unapologetically sappy) murmur of pleasure. “I missed you.” He didn’t bother trying to hide his affection. He’d given up on that. Lin had the chance to leave, and he hadn’t. Daniel was afraid of death, and even when he was angry at that damned servant for interrupting him every other minute, he was grateful that in that minute, he didn’t die alone. Daniel touched a whiskery set of chapped lips against Lin’s chin, and then his cheek. “Where have you been?” His hands slid down around Lin’s neck, fingering the cotton collar pale in the dull light. “The hell are you wearing?” Daniel smiled sleepily, his breath astringent from his poison of choice. Lin was real. He had no immediate or present desire to get into Hans Moravec simulated reality bs, simulacra vs. a lacking point of reference (his counter-argument, anyway, would be something along the lines of: who cares? So you can't be sure, in the purest sense of the word, that what you experience is 'reality,' whatever that means, so the fuck what? What does that change, really?), so, as far as he was concerned—and as far as Daniel was concerned, the boy was real. He was the heat of kinetic energy transfer, chemical energy inefficiently translating to mechanical, with a loss of seeping warmth that tingled along skin and underneath that ring of a white collar as he rolled against Daniel, a minor collision as seen in the silver geodesic of Newton's cradle. "It's AU though. You might not know what slash is, but I can show you," the boy practically purred, the lift of black eyebrows playful. He noted the styptic slant of the man's breath, witch grass and witch hazel, and he was, um, hella aware that nothing was, like, going to happen at all in that arena—the slash arena. That was okay by him. It was just a joke. So, he settled down happily, a sunbeam on a lunar curve, letting Daniel kiss on him without bothering to mute the stupid smile on his face. He lifted his chin, just in case the man felt like the slick of his throat deserved some attention too. It was a synaptic lapse of a moment until he spoke again, his eyes opening in the blackness of oil, fringed. The room smelled familiar in its mustiness, the damp pages of a book left to rot. Lin took a deep breath. He glanced at Daniel and sucked on his bottom lip. "I was in Gotham." Another flick of eyebrow. A bit of hyperbolic rapture accompanied the deep burr of the boy's voice. "The future." He turned onto his side, tugging his arm off of Daniel to prop up his own head as he faced the drunk. He smiled again, looking down at himself with his usual pleasure. "Do you like it?" The boy knew he didn't, so he didn't wait for an answer. He pressed fingers to Daniel's chest like three springs. "This is called fashion, my friend. You might not recognize it, so just take my word for it." He hummed lightly as he bore closer, nuzzling close and letting his arm be a thin pillow. His grin lit like the Cat's and he kicked his feet. "Did I wake you up?" Daniel did, in fact, know what slash was. He'd read an article in the New Yorker about it last year, but he didn't say that out loud, because he liked to listen to Lin describe things. He assumed he'd learn (and no doubt then promptly forget) what "AU" stood for. Daniel spent most of his time reading, and he was always looking for new material. True, the material here wasn't technically "new," but Daniel kept up a steady diet of published literature, just to keep his mind halfway active. Even dying slowly from various chemical assaults and relentless ennui, Daniel's mind never really stopped. Maybe that was why it took so much alcohol to slow it down. Daniel let his hand slide off the blurred red of Lin's shirt, probably the brightest thing in the entire room. He threw one hand up and pulled at the hangings around the bed. The windows were closed, of course, but Daniel hauled a little on the bed hangings, and the slightest bit of grim light filtered across the pillows. He made an amused sound at the mention of "fashion." "People like putting on clothes and pretending its fashion," he said, just to needle Lin a little bit. "Gotham." Daniel's faded eyes narrowed, and he pushed his hand over his forehead to free his gaze from sticky curls. A half-hearted effort to push himself into a sitting position followed, but he ended up with shoulders slumped and most of his spine loose, like a broken doll. "Batman or New York?" Daniel saw enough shit on the journal to know that Batman's Gotham was a crap place. "You know you did," Daniel commented, smiling slightly and conquering entirely the impulse to pretend to be annoyed. He slid his hand down Lin's shoulder, curling his fingers around it in a vaguely chaste but extremely familiar gesture. Lin understood a mind set, not only in perpetual motion, Archimedes screw upturning the consolidated torrent of water, but one set at such a speed, undaunted, as to be dizzying at times. If you so much as stopped for breath, inertia and energy pedaled thoughts onward, out of reach, until that blossom of a headache burst and you had to go lie down, the leakage of missed connections draining into fluid that surrounded and cradled the brain. It was the reason he had trouble sleeping, or one of them, he supposed. The click-clack of a Galilean cannon a racket in the dome of skull as everything expanded outward rapaciously. But he didn't try to dull that tremor or blunt the lex parsimoniae of his own mind, not with a barrage of alcohol or the solvent of time, money, and hedonism. Instead, he bent it often to the grindstone, just to see the sparks fly, and as much as he suffered because of it, as much as it caused friction between his reality and that of others, Lin liked it all the same. He supposed that couldn't be said for Daniel. He rolled his eyes at the man in the bed, but the bud of a grin was on his spit-wet lips. Daniel wouldn't know fashion if it called itself Lin and he fucked it in the ass, so the boy in his red-and-white gave him an 'oh, you!' sort of pinch to the wet clay of bicep, and then that green bud of a smile flowered in under the sun of Daniel's scowl. "Batman." For the moment, he didn't understand the nature of that expression, but he did enjoy the trials and tribulations of Daniel as the man struggled to sit up. Lin pushed himself to his knees, facing the other man, and then he draped himself unceremoniously over Daniel's stomach, uncaring as to the distribution of weight. The clammy pressure of the man's hand tightened on Lin's shoulder, but there was nothing behind, besides, perhaps, a sort of muddled affection born of brine and loneliness. Lin played with his own hair, finger twisting and untwisting around black curl in a show of nerves. "I stayed at Sam's with Louis. Idk. It's kind of like here though. Dullish. But at least there's internet and rampant street crime without crinoline." Lin patted Daniel's chest fondly, but let his eyes round to watch his own hand. "I missed you too." The smile lost some of its brightness, beaten gold under soot. He seemed to think a moment. He exhaled and moved off of Daniel, drawing himself up. Lin propped his cheek on a cradled knee. He blinked slowly. He nudged the man in sunken ribs with his foot. "How was your visit with Sam?" “It went alright. She made the servants nervous.” Daniel smiled vaguely, and lifted a hand to press his fingers into his eyelids. He missed the first time, tapping his browbone with his thumb and shifting off his temple. He always felt a little like he was swimming in honey these days. The vague smile shifted up and down on his face, and then his expression went slack again. He relaxed into the pillows and dropped his hands all at once. His fingers slid upward to brush the top of Lin’s foot where it dug into his body. He collapsed slightly sideways, unresisting, still smiling vaguely. His good mood lingered in the front of his eyes, cataract-thin. “That’s why you went to Gotham? She’s there?” Daniel’s eyebrows lowered and he closed his eyes halfway as he slid his hand up Lin’s ankle, exploratory, enjoying the disconnected sensation from hand to brain. Once he had liked to the sparks, sandstone on sulfur, but only in those days when brilliance was nothing but a game, literature not livelihood but an obsessive hobby. It all came so easily to him that even the sparks were routine, just more certainty he was a superior reaction, a flame in dull minds that read only dull things and knew only idiots. He’d been young then, so young, but he’d been happy. It’s true what they say about bliss and oblivion. “Her and her brother. He never liked me much.” Daniel’s thin mouth curled up in sour amusement, envisioning Sam in her improbable Victorian finery talked to the brother that bore her no particular resemblance. “But then I’m a bad influence. Though if the man never got up the balls to stab that fucker that called himself her boyfriend in the throat before, I can’t imagine why he’s all that interesting now.” Polyneuropathy or neuritis. Lin blinked at that blunt, blind bump of square thumb to brow, clumsy as it was, a confusion of spatial awareness, a motor malfunction made manifest. Fuck. Concern shaded sharp features black and blacker as his mind opened in a furl of branches of possibilities, symptoms, meanings, complications, statistics, facts in barebones that led out from a scythe-cut stock of roots—roots that were, in truth, but branches themselves, all sprouting off of one long-dead, spotted trunk that smelled bile-rank, like yellowed, cirrhotic liver under swampy sun. Lin felt his stomach turn. He only half-heard what Daniel was saying about Sam. Instead, he tracked the acute movement and coordination of weak, spindling muscles, mimetic choreography of a smile that bobbed, lost at sea under dull sky. He watched the spread of body gone soft, the indolent dance of fingers as they spidered up, over Lin's own ankle. (The touch was light, pleasant on his flushed skin.) There was the black back-and-forth of cunning pupils, intent, until he blinked, and, even as the mechanical churn of his mind continued production, he tried to listen. He tried to suffocate the primordial blackhole of worry that tore open in the pit of his stomach, initial density perturbations growing like tumors under their own gravity, spores and splotches of organs squirming, as Lin's nerves clacked together. There was no way to know what was going on inside of Daniel's cotton'd mind, and, honestly, the boy didn't want to know, fearing the truth such knowledge would provide, but one thing was clear: whatever was going on, it wasn't much. It was the bare minimum required for continued bodily functions (most of which appeared to fail with alarming regularity), and no matter how happy Lin was to be back, his purpose as a tool in the extrication and detoxification of Daniel Webster remained with him, carried close at the base of his skull. "Louis?" The boy scoffed as he pushed his way back into the conversation with gusto. He retracted his foot from Daniel and moved to self-containment, arms around knees tugged to chest. He pontificated very dramatically, his hands moving with his words. "Okay, firstly, he's Neil's brother too, dumbass, so I'm about to bet that's why he hasn't 'gotten the up the balls to stab that fucker that calls himself Sam's boyfriend in the throat before.' And before you say that's fucked up, yes, I know it is. But it's an adoption thing. And, secondly, he's plenty interesting. For example, his hair is blond and very curly and also soft. Also, his nose is very aristocratic, and with his accent, he can say pretty much anything and not sound hella fucking stupid. So too is he kind as balls. And also hella gay." Lin smiled sweetly then. He moved for reaction, not wanting to watch Daniel waste away beside him, unable to fucking keep his eyes open long enough to have a conversation. "I went to Gotham to see him." Daniel didn't really understand the complexities of Sam's family, but he knew damn well that it was a social mess with everybody knowing each other through various fucked up childhood associations with social services. He hadn't really been clearly aware of Neil and Louis' association until that moment, and his dull eyes flared with annoyance verging on hatred. Daniel couldn't stand Neil. The man represented everything Daniel thought he could be if he had the fucking energy to give a damn, and yet he did fuckall. The things Sam said about him made Daniel aware that Neil was as much of a drunk as he was anything else (though Daniel couldn't imagine the man was as much of a drunk as he, Daniel, was). Maybe it was just the uncomfortable mirror. And now he had siblings, a weird, indeterminate number of them, and he was wasting those too. Daniel muttered to himself in distaste, and only realized that Lin was still talking halfway through the sentence about Louis' hair. He blinked, slow, the spider's legs of his eyelashes bent at a strange angle from the assault of the pillow, the disarray of his curls even more dull than his eyes. The opium tobacco was ten times more effective than the liquor alone, and it lingered longer. Daniel fought his way through the sticky tar of old thoughts that tasted like cloying chemicals, and surfaced in a pool that had turned suddenly acidic. He stiffened as if he'd been struck, and if Lin was looking for a reaction, he got one. Daniel pulled his body away from Lin's where it was curled in his fetal position on the end of the mattress. The beds in that house were almost too soft to be comfortable, no expensive springs or tempur-pedic here. Daniel almost had to fight to pull himself up off the side of it, again with the aid of the bed curtains and squinting at the negligible light. "You went to Gotham to see Louis?" he asked, a sneer pulling at his lips and the disgust almost patently false over poorly-concealed betrayal. "Do I need to ask why?" There was no facility of electricity behind the scudding, sudsy black of Daniel's pinned pupils, nothing that jolted—Lin could see some oily turmoil turning, but it was scummy surface, some old, rotted dislike for Neil remembering its old strength and lumbering through synaptic connections stupidly. The boy chattered on as if he didn't notice, because, not to be a dick or anything, but he didn't give a fuck about Neil at the moment, and he didn't have much interest in dissecting Daniel's self-hatred-turned-outward-complex/frate Well, he did. But not really. It was complicated. He didn't want to know only because he was feeling bad about himself and hearing about how Sam made shit better, even if he was glad for it—and he was, wasn't going to help him deal with his shit. It was selfish, but Lin had learned to cling to whatever fucking life rafts came his way, because, well, until he had his feet solid on some other metaphorical deck in this analogy, he couldn't really fucking help anyone. So, he didn't mind much as Daniel curled into himself, pulling contact away, because it was a reaction, wasn't it? And it was a reaction to Lin, not to some membrane-memory of Neil caught in the toxic waste of Daniel's mind. (This is your mind on drugs, kids. Remembering sort-of-lovers sort-of-boyfriends and not-at-all-sort-of-but-fully fucking hating them, in some weird, fossilized moment, even while you had another sort-of-lover, who—totally objectively—was funnier, okay, and smarter, and at least as attractive, sitting right there.) "Do I need to remind you what friends are?" The boy scoffed, his smile apparent even in the dimness as Daniel forced himself upright. Did it matter than Lin's definition of friends was sort of like, "well, 'bedfellows' has 'fellows' in it!"? No. And any etymologists in the room can just sit down. Lin put on his most grating voice. "See, it's like this. We're friends. And friends, they do this thing where they want to see each other sometimes. And it makes them happy when they do. Weird, I know, but there it is." It was true that Daniel had a strangely proprietary reaction to almost anything concerning Sam. It was a peculiar reaction, even for a lover (which he had not been for some time, if he ever had been at all) or a friend (which he was, though the word seemed almost too distant to be sufficient). Daniel used the people around him to distract himself from the interiminable internal monologue that made up his hated life, and at times Daniel’s relationship with Sam greatly resembled that of his relationship to the missing white cat. He liked to keep her nice and warm and safe because then he didn’t feel like quite so much of a fucking failure. It was very elementary, in the end. And she amused him. Daniel didn’t keep anyone or anything that didn’t amuse, entertain, or (and it was primarily this) distract. Lin was different. Daniel did not feel compelled to care for Lin, because he had the idea in his head that the boy (so he called him, sometimes, though not as often as he used to) was sufficiently independent not to need Daniel’s protection anymore. The first crisis of potential parting was simply an acknowledgement that Lin would not necessarily be hunted down and murdered the second he left Daniel’s doorstep, after all. It was probably Lin’s intelligence. Daniel assumed that anyone as smart as Lin could do very well for himself in almost every sphere of life. It was only Lin’s rare deviations from fast-talking thesaurus mode that made Daniel sometimes think otherwise. His strange little performance in the sitting room a few weeks (months? years?) ago, for example. That made Daniel want to shut Lin into one of his dark rooms and make sure nothing dangerous could touch him. Now Lin was talking about Louis. Daniel was far too gone on his vices to notice that Lin was putting on a performance. He hadn’t seen Lin in what felt like years (months? weeks?) and it would probably take a freight train and a parade together to really sink any concept so many-sided as Lin’s polyhedral concern into Daniel’s shallow consciousness. Daniel half-fell, half-slid off the bed, lurching up into standing and seeking out the pitcher in the bowl on the stand not far from the bed. “Friends,” Daniel said, imbuing the echo with all his doubt. He caught his palms on the edge of the square of wood that made up the bedstand and tried to make the room stop whirling as he hid his face. “You never mentioned him as a friend before. Did you make such a big deal about fucking him before, and I missed it?” Lin smiled. It was pleased and smug and cued youthful in the corners of black eyes, and he tracked the halting, uncertain movement of fishbelly muscles wasted as Daniel shuffled a few feet away. He settled his chin comfortably between the peaks of his knees, but briefly. Because he then moved, feline and long for such a short form, to lie on his stomach, feet pricking the air and arms crossed in front of him, chin now there, looking up at Daniel's rumpled shade with so much delight in the face of that disgust rigid on fine features. "No." He laughed and rolled onto his back, his head nearer Daniel so he had to kind of bend his neck weirdly and uncomfortably to keep looking at him. (See how dedicated he is?) "I just wanted to see how many, if any, fucks you gave. Turns out it's like, two." (He made no joke about how, actually, Daniel gave none, because, well, he couldn't. Ha ha. Wide-spectrum sexual dysfunction due to alcohol dependence. What a hilarious joke.) Brown-black eyes slid to the stand, where white hands gripped cherrywood, then flicked as light on a mirror—angle of incidence, angle of reflection—back to Daniel. Lin kept his concern from his face, well-practiced as he was, and splayed out wide on the too-soft bed, quiet. He knew he wasn't healthy—himself (Daniel too, but.)—he knew he shouldn't want someone to care the way he did. He wasn't jealous often himself and it wasn't because he didn't care. It just didn't occur to him that shit was finite, it didn't occur to him that if someone fucked him and fucked someone else that the two were connected in terms of demand and supply. Because they weren't. But with Daniel, the concept of scarcity, however artificial, was prominent. And he knew wasn't healthy because he knew he shouldn't conflate the sexual aversion of a drunk, a thing that happened with high-ass incidence in various studies of alcohol-dependent men, which he did not look up bc of Daniel, but bc he read that shit sometimes, okay, with anything resembling malformed affection, but he did. It all sort of fell together in an ugly stack of cards, soft from the oil of so many fingers and hands, sticky with sugar and soda, and it filled the boy up, leaning dangerously against the pillars of his anxiety.—And he was cursed, cursed to see the shit happening, rather than remain blissfully unaware. So he hated himself for it. Even as he wanted everyone—or certain people—to like him. Even as he was purposefully abrasive. He was fucked up. Fine. Point proven. Moving on. Lin sighed. He considered the sadness Daniel must feel, the kind that developed into buboes of anger turned inward, ecchymotic and ugly, a solvent of soul. He did it in the span of a second he wished he could have back. He thought about Sam. He thought about the lack of music, of sound in this house of sawdust. "Come back to the bed. Please?" Lin blinked long lashes together, but he didn't put upon any mimicry or magnification of any one manipulative emotion. He was earnest then, in 21st century clothes slashed neon against organic, pastel backdrop. He held out a hand toward the man. The laugh actually hurt worse than the ugly imaginings the conversation had already stirred up in Daniel's slow, sticky thoughts. He turned sharply, the quickest movement that he had managed since Lin's arrival, and gave the boy a baleful glare that was more resentment than anger. He didn't even come close to laughing, and it was obvious that he didn't believe him or his catlike roll in the covers. Daniel's dark eyes were a permanent narrow of wasted vulnerability, and he stared at him through the sigh. He turned back toward the pitcher and bowl after that, showing Lin the narrow, bony lines of his back through the rumpled linen undershirt. He blocked Lin's view as he lifted the pitcher and the crockery cracked against the side of the bowl under the weight of the water inside. Daniel took a deep breath, poured clean water into the bowl, and then pushed the pitcher to one side before he managed to drop it. "No, you didn't. You were serious about going to see him. You wouldn't have thought of it. Why didn't you stay there, if he's so wonderful?" It was such a childish thing to say that even Daniel noticed it, and he cut off the sound of any immediate response by taking a handful of water and splashing it on his face. He scrubbed the drops through his curls and then stood up, wobbling a little in bad balance before dropping into one of the heavy armchairs upholstered in busy green vines against one wall. The back was higher than Daniel's head and he looked small and crumpled in it. He used the tail of his shirt to dry his face, a defiant gesture that revealed a soft, unappetizing white stomach and the improbable lines of his ribs. Finally, Daniel glanced up at Lin on the bed, afraid of what he might see. He made no move to return to it, and if the hand was still there, he spurned it with a spasm of distrust on his pale face. It was childish, like, childish enough to deflate Lin—and you need to consider the fact that this was Lin Alesi, the boy who revelled in such behavior, mostly because it was annoying and, hey, it came easily; this was the boy who liked picking at people and pushing them and declining them what they wanted just because he could. So, yk, just keep that in mind. Lin let his hand hang limp and he turned his head on the bed to ease pressure off his chin, and he stared at the wall, at the delicate scrollwork of gold and cream melias stamped on paper, a fine product of the birth of manufacturing. He let his eyes following the syrupy strands of color, ogee arches turned on their heads, flowering as sigmoid curves, tracing the design quietly as Daniel barely propped himself up and dumped water all over himself like an idiot. (So maybe Daniel gave like, three fucks.) The boy continued even as he heard the man shift through the room, the sigh of fabric offering punctuation, suggesting he'd sat in the green chair Lin knew stood just there. It was only after the silence—or near-silence—had settled in the room like dust that he rolled back onto his knees capped in gray denim. He didn't look up, but instead, focused on the starfish spread of his fingers dark against the bed as he pushed himself off and to his feet. Some knob here or there had been jiggled inside of him, tweaking his anxiety up a notch and insisting he start busying himself with the hem of his shirt, long, brown fingers twisting in sea-serpent red. He moved toward that godforsaken chair, forcing himself back into Daniel's purview. He sat at the man's feet, not wanting to like, crush him or whatever. He pulled his knees up and hunched forward, his spine meeting the leg of the chair was it blossomed in obsequious ornamentation. "He is wonderful," he admitted, probably stupidly. His shoulders lifted and fell. Lin squinted at where the colorful nodes of his feet stuck out at the edge of his vision before he twisted where he sat, glancing backwards and up at Daniel. He curled his toes in his shoes, his stomach clenching. His hand came up to compulsively twist in erratic black hair. "But—" He felt like he was going to puke, and wasn't that fucking stupid? It fell like his entire… group… of guts... was like, floating, some Thomas Willis bullshit translated sloppily on the digestive tract. Which is to say, yes. To answer the question. Yes, it was very stupid. Lin blinked. He knew this was going to make Daniel angry as fuck. He smiled then, jittery brightness slight. "—I love you." Okay, so he made a mistake. Daniel watched Lin’s fingers tangle in the modern fabric with a concentration that came from low energy, finding it easy to think of nothing when there was something distracting to occupy his eyes. That color wasn’t much available here, something about that particular shade being too much expensive springtime to ship quite so far, or maybe it was the material, machine-fed spiderwebs that held dye better, who knew. Daniel watched Lin slide off the bed, waiting for more flippant comments, maybe a description of the encounter in detail. The drunk was reminded strongly of the times Lin had reappeared in the apartment, clearly straight off some dance floor or bar stool, smelling of sweat and liquor and glimmering with cheap glitter. He tried to reassure himself that Lin was too ridiculous to care about, too gay to be interested in someone as dull as Daniel, especially when he was ensconced deep in a world without batteries or music. God, the lack of music was killing him. It was no wonder Lin went and found it somewhere else. Daniel slid fingers still wet from the bedstand down into the cushions of the chair, questing vaguely until he found the spine of a book, and then the cool metal of a cigarette case. He wanted this conversation to end desperately. It surprised him when Lin sat down so close, and reminded Daniel uncomfortably of the cold feeling that had turned over in his stomach when he thought Lin was on the verge of departure a second ago. Daniel’s fingers paused against the dry bodies of rolled paper in the case as Lin spoke again. He pulled his knee away from Lin to anticipate the separation and spread out the dread so it didn’t weigh on him so thickly. He was thinking about what ways Louis could be wonderful (leavened heavily with resentment and black anger) when Lin’s last words dropped like pebbles in a still pond. Daniel’s hand clenched on the cigarette case and he let it slide off his palm, spilling paper and sweet tobacco onto his lap. He still had one of the parchment-pale tubes clutched between two fingers when he slid abruptly off the chair and took Lin by the shoulders. “I told you not to do that,” Daniel said, teeth clenched and eyes wild, as if sanity had completely left him. Daniel couldn’t actually remember what he had and hadn’t said. His knees crumpled under his weight and he refused to let Lin go as both of them dragged sideways into the legs of the armchair. His hands slid up to grip Lin’s jaw on either side under his ears, and the tips of his fingers pressed deeply into the dark curls. He shook him, and not gently. “You stupid-I told you! I said I didn’t want-“ Words failed him. It was entirely possible that Lin was too ridiculous to care about—he was abrasive, irreverent, more child than adult, had a serious affair with pop culture going on, thought he was very funny, taught himself useless skills because he could, and on and on and on—he wasn't what anyone would call a a catch—, but the part about him being too gay to be interested in someone as dull as Daniel was a two-part mistake on the man's part, as the boy wasn't gay (exclusively) and he didn't find Daniel dull.—No, because in Lin's mind, the tight-cornered maze (not a labyrinth; labyrinths differentiate from mazes in that they are unicursal and Lin's shit was most definitely multicursal) that it was, the difficult was interesting, just by nature of fact. It wasn't that there was no wonder to be found in simplicity, bc there was, but there just wasn't much someone like Lin found truly dull. He devoured observations, facts, knowledge, perspectives, hints, shadows, implications—all of it, anything he could get his hands on was interesting to him. Some things more so than others, and Daniel was up near the top of the list, if, yk, there was a list. Which there wasn't. But, it was whatever, right? Because no matter the reason(s), Lin had just spilled his stupid guts in a gross, stupid, slimy, steaming pile and he felt himself go rigid after the fact, bracing for the impact of whatever the fuck it was Daniel was going to do—because logic dictated, he wasn't going to just sit on his ass and accept it like a normal (dull) person. The cigarettes and associated paraphernalia tipped, and as a tickle of tobacco trickled against the nape of Lin's neck, he started to shift—wanting to move to a more comfortable position where drugs would not tumble onto his head, when Daniel moved with more speed than the boy had seen in a long time. The man grabbed onto Lin's shoulders, soft hands gone hard against the wings of clavicles under cotton blend. The boy's lips were wet with spit, as he'd been habitually sucking on them, and his hands were jarred to his sides from the curls of his hair. Eyes were dark and wide on Daniel as the man's knees gave out and the pair of them went sideways and down. Then he was shaken, in pool of palms under chattering jaw. "Jesus Christ!" Lin's fingers curled around the flat scrapes of Daniel's hands against his cheeks and he held on. (He was thankful that the man's muscles had atrophied enough to make the shaking not as hard as it could have been. But then he realized how fucked up that was and closed it down.) He managed to quip, with words jerked out of his mouth with force of contradictory physics. "You know I do exactly the opposite of what you say—" He wriggled against the grip, peeling the hands off of him, until he could put his arms around Daniel's neck for support. He didn't give a fuck about that wild-eyed look. The sliver of a smile that came with wit was lost. "I know I'm stupid—" He knew that all too well, even through grit teeth. Black eyebrows crashed into one another and Lin blinked hard, fast. He struggled to keep his (poor excuse for) composure, and he fought, inwardly, tooth and fucking painted nail, to keep the heat that rimmed on red inside the line of his eyelashes from spilling over. "But it's still true! You can hate me! I don't fucking care!" Daniel still had a tendency to imagine sexuality as an on/off switch, and he imagined that people had preferences for other people the same way they had preferences for cars and hair color. Sometimes they changed their minds, but at the core, there were things they liked and didn’t like, and those things didn’t change. Daniel actively refused to meditate on his own sexuality, preferring to think of the present as much as possible in this (as in every) aspect of his life, and he was fairly successful at it. It was especially easy when there were very few people around to notice or even comment, as if the entirety of human society outside of Daniel’s mind simply did not exist except as fleeting entertainment’s in his ink-stained notebook. Daniel was sure that he himself, in the present, could not possibly be engaging enough for Lin, and that attitude disregarded anything he’d done in the past, learned, experienced, acquired, or planned. It took serious effort on Lin’s part to dislodge Daniel’s hands. He gripped Lin wherever he could reach with no energy or enthusiasm; he was motivated by pure desperation that spread out of his fingers and made itself clearly visible in his eyes even as they went glassy with emotion. Daniel swore under his breath, hoarse and slow, choosing a language at random and letting the words run together like pollution in a stream. Finally Lin peeled his fingers away, and the fight went out of Daniel, leaving him soft and pliant and shell-shocked. “I couldn’t hate you, you little bastard,” he said, roughly, sighing into Lin’s arms and curling his elbow around the stretch of angry red and modern agonies. “Even if you were sleeping around. Even if you left me. And you should, I keep telling you. But you know… about that.” A sound escaped Daniel’s throat, like a torn cord, a weak muscle stretching too far. It sounded like it hurt, and it did. It pressed in on Daniel’s chest and the guilt was almost overwhelming. “Don’t you hate me, yet? That kind of love can’t be the good one. I’m going to take you apart.” His voice grew more agonized and the words came quicker. “Then what are you going to do?!” Daniel’s arms tightened around Lin and he avoided the boy’s gaze by dropping his chin on Lin’s shoulder and closing his eyes. “I shouldn’t let you.” Lin was a terrible swimmer. As a child, he was too afraid of pools to venture far into their depths—once the chlorine-blue slapped against little bronze knees, he retreated, immediately, with wide, white eyes. He was fascinated by oceanography, by marine biology, but he couldn't swim to save his life. It didn't occur to him to think of Daniel as a drowning man, and it didn't occur to him to approach from behind, as one ought someone so desperate. He didn't avoid the grip of panic, but stepped right into it, no palms to chest, to generation of downward thrust. As Daniel slumped into his arms, Lin moved to support him with knees tipi'd. He didn't care for that lustless desperation evident in bruising grip, but he accepted it. There came a soft sound at that snap of cord and Lin pushed his fingers up like daisies through the thicket of Daniel's lusterless hair as he held the man close. He tucked his own nose into the corner of Daniel's shoulder, where it met the cut of his jaw. It made him queasy but he spoke firmly, with only the slightest thickness of tears running down the back of his throat. "I don't hate you." Lin breathed in the scent of opium, poppies tickling red in haze of amber. He pressed a chaste kiss there. There was no water to tread. He let himself be pulled under, plunged into the blackness of depths unexplored. "Admit it. You can't stop me from doing anything. Pull me apart, but as long as I have my fucking larynx and lungs, I'll just fucking say it again. Just to make you mad." |