- (sonrisa) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-11-05 21:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | !wonderland, *log, daniel webster, lin alesi |
Wonderland, log: Daniel W & Lin A (backdated)
Who: Daniel Webster & Lin Alesi
What: who's JB?
Where: Daniel's Victorian Dom
When: backdated: pre-plot
Warnings/Rating: swears, mentions of violence/sex, wigged out servants
Daniel didn’t remember how he’d ended up in the study. This was a common occurrence these days, and if it were not the appearance of Lin to break up the long stream of blurry time, Daniel probably wouldn’t have made such an attempt at placing himself in reality. His stomach hurt--really hurt, not just sour grumbles of whiskey and overcooked gravy, but a burn down on the bottom of it that stabbed like a knife. Daniel rolled off the armchair he was sprawled against, collapsing slowly onto the rug next to the fireplace, eyes dull and the back of his throat stinging with the memory of too many cigarettes. He wanted to be sick, but his stomach kept screaming while it roiled around, and his hangover was catching up to him with a vengeance, sealing in cotton made of steel wool around his brain. Knocking over an ashtray that had been balancing on the edge of his chair, Daniel curled over onto his side and tried not to moan. He wasn’t sure if Lin was still around, and it might--no, it would have been nice to see him, but he didn’t feel good at the moment. He was still drunk, because the room was rocking, and he wanted… what? Something for his stomach, or his head, or his tongue. But he didn’t want to talk to anyone, and they didn’t have fucking aspirin here. Or maybe they did… Daniel didn’t know what they had. The “wish I was dead” thought floated up into the scummy surface of his memory, like the bloated corpse of a fish, and he curled an arm over his stomach. At least it wasn’t bright. But it was hot in that room. Did someone light a damned fire, or something? England didn’t have seasons. Just gray, and rain, and gray. It wasn’t hot all that much, not like this. Fucking hangover. Unsure if it had been hours or days since Lin had first arrived, Daniel cracked one sandy eye to look around the room, catching the carved chair leg and a few scattered books in his line of sight. It was black when Lin woke up. Heavy India silk buffeted in whispers of wind, quietly, dainty outline stitches bursting floral in rich colors, brushing against snakeshead wallpaper. French polished wood, shellacked into a split halo of chatoyancy, glinted, cut like gemstones en chabochon from some lamp burning blind outside under the epiasterism of a full moon. Lin sat up in a bed stripped of everything but the tuck of a flat sheet done in Egyptian cloth, but long unchanged. He blinked owlishly, his hair a black starburst, his very modern clothing gone—squirreled away somewhere in the room?—and his shoulders a narrow stoop of gold in the limned light. The coldness of the space beside him told him he was alone and had been for some time. There was no panic yet, though his throat tightened, and he squinted against the suffusion of nighttime that poured in like ink from the cracked window, lime glass panes warped and bullseyed. Nothing but shadows populated Daniel's room. The house settled around him as if he was nothing more than an extra fine (winky face) churchmouse, ribs creaking under floorboards and doors shut tight in spirit-varnished jambs. He slid from the warm clutch of the bed, feet cold as soon as they reached the floor. He was entirely naked, because, well, he didn't want any of the service staff to come in and see him in boxer briefs and wonder if the world was ending, and not bc of his MASSIVE DONG™, but bc, what was that strange fabric that held the shit up without a button? It would blow their minds, and Lin wasn't about that life. Not right now.—He honestly didn't remember falling asleep, but such was his retroactive understanding of why he was fucking naked in a bed alone when Daniel's dick didn't work. Really, he didn't even remember what he'd been dreaming, if anything, and Lin always remembered his dreams. The static of sleep had him muddling around the room a moment until he found the nearest merino nightshirt and a pair of short calico drawers, and tugged both on clumsily with fingers bloodless. The boy moved then, from the shuttered night of Daniel's bedroom to the hallway; his feet shuffed, grainhead in breeze. And as the study was the room most likely to find the drunk in, that was where he checked first.—And what timing! Lin made a sound of surprise, horror, and irritation mixed into a guttural grunt at the sight of the man prone, curled fetal. He could tell immediately from the slight lift of head, the slit of blurry blue eye that Daniel was conscious, if only just. The mummy-wrap of arm over stomach indicated pain. He didn't know he was sucking on his bottom lip, but he was as he crossed the room, hurdling stupid books, to land on his knees behind Daniel. (He could have told the man in a matter of seconds the state of painkillers as far as salicylate medicines went—aspirin existed in that salicin had existed (and had been used extensively) since ancient times. Willow bark and Spiraea broke down to salicin and were metabolized into salicylic acid. As of right now, Charles Frédéric Gerhardt had done some shit and come up with acetylsalicylic acid, which some ppl were pretty into. There existed a few forms of salicylate medicines in use, but all of them, currently, had unpleasant side effects, so, yk, laudanum was where it was at. Was it the best time for painkillers? That depends on if you wanted an addiction that turned your teeth to tar or not.) Lin looked at the wet smear of ash on his fingers, but just briefly, as he sat in the upturned wake of the ashtray. He pushed back Daniel's hair. He was unsure if he should help the man up, worried that maybe he was injured. The boy decided first he would figure out what was going on. "Hey," his voice was uncharacteristically soft. His knees, sooty now, butted against Daniel's spine. His hand moved from those dusty, lusterless curls to the flat of the man's forehead. It burned under his touch. "Do you want some water?" Daniel was amazed that he could be so happy to see a person, while at the same time feeling that he preferred being dead to feeling like he did. More sour twisting in his stomach made him grimace, and the taste on the back of his throat was a roiling blend of tar and alcohol left out so long that it had become the kind of sludge made for pickling scientific specimens. He made a gagging sound at the idea of drinking pickled flesh. He closed lips again, and it was a near thing. When his blurry eye shifted to take in Lin's face, there was only disgust there at the idea there was another person seeing him like this. It was worse than embarrassing, it was humiliating. Thank god he hadn't seen a mirror in months. A second later and he forgot to care how he looked. Fuck it. "I'm fine," Daniel said, in the voice of a dead smoker left out of the grave too long. He was starting to remember last night (or the night before? something). He'd had a bad dream with the dead boy in it, and there was all that blood and the garbage smell of a back alley that stuck with him through an endless circle of intervening time. He was never going to beat that memory. It took him two drinks to feel something better than despair, three to forget, and four to sleep a dreamless few hours. And the cigarettes, well, he was on a steady diet of those. Kept the normal thread of his thoughts bearable. Daniel rolled onto his shoulder. His stomach hurt. It burned. His eyes were sandy and his lashes were sticking together as he glanced at Lin out of the corner of his eye. Daniel sat up. He wore a shirt stained with the night previous, loose at his neck and dull with loose buttons. The cuffs were hanging open, and there was no waistcoat or trace of elegant fabric. "Water. Percocet if you got it." He smiled clumsily. Words, Lin's lifesblood, moved as cold creosote in veins, yellowish, slow and greasy, almost sweep-sooty in the lungs and against the bottom of the tongue, and he heard, just then, nothing of what Daniel said outside of a cottony formation of syllables. He was instead, with the entirety of his attention, watching the thumbed wax of Daniel's face, the smile that hung like loose thread, the contorted expression of disgust, the seal of lips against a rise of bile, even the dry tension that tugged at the corners of the man's mouth as he made some sort of dry joke—unheard, but seen. He watched Daniel give him a glance and sit up, his shirt gaping at the collar, discolored, ugly. Because even more so than words, Lin noticed details. He collected them, catalogued them, and never fucking forgot them. Everything seeped in in time, garbled letters moving straight. I'm fine. The sounds of breathing, but heard from the cushion of brain matter, skull, skin. Water. Percocet if you got it. It was in Lin's nature to be flippant, to be surface, to take moments like these that were so, so heavy and to fling them aside like it was nothing. He lived, it felt at times, to make things easy. But right now, that old habit died hard in the gutter between hemispheres of his brain, and he felt his mouth water, pytalism preempting emesis. His breathing quickened. Lin could feel his body responding, thrown into overdrive, as his mind idled. "I thought you were hurt," he said almost robotically, eyes wide and face expressionless. He pushed himself to his feet sloppily, every part of him employed, too concerned with something else to tighten muscles appropriately as he stepped out of the room in a haphazard hail of footsteps to find water. He came back with water in the patterned china of an ill-used teacup, bone chipped on some errant tooth, and he pressed the little thing into Daniel's palm. Take it, take it. The gears caught, stalled, accelerated, and found traction. Lin blinked. The mechanical aspect wore off in a shedding of rust and metal, and he became at once present, his calm buttoned down hard. He worked his hands as he stood, jumpstarting his sluggish circulation. He sucked on his bottom lip. He sat again in the ashes. Slowly, he resurrected a conversation had over a year and a half ago. There was no chanting, no pentagram in stubby chalk on the floorboards of someone's grandma's attic. Just the hard-knuckled prying of sentences from the grip of the grave and a certainty that this was all a Bad Fucking Idea, but Necessary—Lin's worst enemy. He tried to remember to have a hilarious inner monologue, but it was forgotten as soon as it was brought up. He envisioned the black of Daniel's Dom's bed. He could smell the stale lick of whiskey, could remember the horror laid open like the blue belly of an eyeball sliced open as the spirits of Daniel's past rose in pallid membrane around Lin himself, and he hadn't wanted to prod for fear of this. Fuck. There was no easy way to stab someone, so he simply plunged the knife into ulcerous memory with a grimace flattened into a blink. His voice was even, deep, normal, with no trace of a supposed Italian accent. "Daniel," the name was meant to pin attention. He blinked again. He spoke sparsely. "Do you want to tell me who J.B. is?" It was a morning after to Daniel, regardless of what time it was. It was like the hundreds of other morning-afters on hundreds of other days. Back when he’d first started drinking, a lot of those morning-afters had been in strange places, foreign beds and public bathrooms, cold streets and hot bars. A lot of it was the same, though. The disorientation, that fucking disgusting taste in the back of his mouth, like vomit was on its way but never quite got there. Daniel had time to pick up the gun-shy look in Lin’s eyes and his flat tone before the boy was moving away. He felt like shit about it, and sighed through the nausea. Fuck, he was a real worthless bastard. Breathing through his mouth, Daniel tipped his head back and willed the room to stop whirling. The air felt sticky even as it moved over his lower lip, which felt fat and cold and not at all his. It was almost no time at all before suddenly Lin reappeared, and Daniel blinked blearily at him, still drunk enough to have some difficulty with words. “Sorry.” He blinked rapidly, eyes watering, and then fumbled with the cup enough to slop some of it on the fine rug covered with ash. It turned to mud almost immediately. Daniel didn’t bother trying to roll out of it, and drank the rest of the water. He immediately felt sick again. He couldn’t remember what he’d been doing to get where he was, and there was always a hint of childish bewilderment that took him in such times. He had this ridiculous urge to look around for someone to tell him what had happened, and what to do now. It would pass in a few minutes, probably, when the memories came back. That was why Lin’s question came entirely out of the clear blue (muggy shadow). A fresh wash of acid coated the inside of Daniel’s stomach and he took a quick inhale like somebody had just stabbed him in the guts with a particularly wide knife. Daniel dropped the cup. His expression was suddenly hunted, as if Lin had just suggested that they go for a walk outside. He desperately tried to remember the last twelve hours, hell, the last twelve minutes. Had he brought it up? No, he wouldn’t. Had he talked in his sleep? He’d done that before. Hadn’t he been having nightmares? He couldn’t remember. “What about him? He’s dead.” Daniel tried to get up with limited success. Lin remembered the sinuous, catlike quirk of his curiosity so long ago in the dregs of that bed, everything slipping around him as he sloughed the skin of the comforter to get a closer look at the unseeing cataracts of Daniel's drunken memories lived out. J.B.—now what could that mean? He remembered the mental thumbing of initialisms, the instant, inside sheaf of his skull, moving tape, indented by armature urging stylus onto it as aroused by electricity, the current flowing and interrupted in intervals appropriate, . - - - - . . . And he'd wondered what it meant. Only to be surprised by the simple idea of another person, some stranger, identified only through letters from alcohol-peeling lips. He'd let it lie then, uncertain, knowing he'd all but pressed the halos of his fingertips to the butt of whatever bottle Daniel had been suckling. And he'd thought, at the time, that was for the best—the leaving it lie, because, baby Jesus knew he didn't want to send the man into some sort of spiral. Ha ha. Look at them now. Now, it didn't fucking matter. Now they were at the bottom, 5700 K NiFe bubbling the hard tongue-split leather of Cuban heels, and, maybe if he'd had any amount of fucking guts, balls, or other body parts meant to signify courage, and had just forced discomfort to be endured to clear the rancor of a cavity, this shit wouldn't be fucking happening.—Ah, but Lin knew he was reaching. Because, as much as it pained his selfish little heart, the shit wasn't about him. He could be anyone right now and everything would play out the same. Thin fingers wrapped around Daniel's arm as the man struggled to find his feet and Lin tugged him back down, insistent, like a ball and chain dogging a prisoner and his stripes. The stupid little China bone cup cracked, soft-paste porcelain, bone ash, feldspathic, and kaolin breaching in a fissure that separated the gold gilding that rimed the rim. The boy kicked the dumb, distracting teacup away, somewhere under the chintz camel-back sofa, and he all but dragged the poor drunk man to him, through the sift of now-wet ash. Lin opened his mouth, a parting of lips and a drawing of black brows, when it occurred to him—the answer to his not-yet-asked question. Stunned, he blinked at Daniel, and he twisted closer, more or less forcing the other man into an enveloping embrace. "You—" Suddenly breathless, Lin forced himself to stop. Words, chaining and arranging themselves already in a myriad of sentences and sentiments, were immediately suffocated—and that, my friend, was no small feat. Not for someone like Lin, someone whose mind moved ahead of their mouth, even while both worked at enviable speeds. He tried to dust at Daniel's hair again, to move lank curls back from paste of face, completely distracted. But he was earnest, and maybe that was the worst part. "What happened to him?" Daniel gave to the inconsiderable force as if he was nothing but a new corpse just planted. Only the movement of his chest and the twitch of his eyes indicated that the earthworms weren’t already working. His eyes were bloody balls of white fear and little pinpricks of the anger he tried to find in the stew of his stomach, and they rolled back in his head as he tipped back against the chair and fell sideways in the wake of the skittering teacup. It echoed like the fall of metal on concrete in the rotting vaults of Daniel’s mind, and he pressed his teeth together over his tongue, lips sealed, to keep himself from throwing up. Daniel didn’t recoil from the gesture of mindless affection, because his fear was not at all external. He was remembering that he’d come down to the library with the stray thought that he might like to read, but he hadn’t been able to keep his mind on it. He wanted his own books, not the ones he’d written but ones he’d possessed, and he missed the quick-tumble edge of his own modern tongue. Then he’d managed to get depressed about the fucking house, and he’d had hit the booze with more than his usual determination. Eyes glassy, Daniel blinked dully, and then slumped in a gesture of complete defeat. “I killed him. I think. I was drunk. It was an accident.” Daniel shut his eyes and worked his fingers into his soft stomach over his hip. When he next opened them, he tried to clean up his speech and right his head on his spine, even if it felt like it was coming off. He attempted to sound normal and sane. “Lin, I’m fucked up right now. Let’s talk about this later, okay?” Have you ever seen the cross-stitch of train tracks from above, as they wind and work like the roughspun thread Dr. Frankenstein used to keep his monster's head on, over the patterned quilt of landscape below? Have you ever followed a particular line, finger nearly blotting it out, as small as it is down there,—and you know, even before you see it, that there's a station coming up. There are signs, after all. More tracks begin to run parallel, you see the caterpillar husks of cars forgotten, until it all merges and brick rises. But you knew, even before you saw it, where it would be, what it was.—That was where Lin was right now. Metaphorically speaking obviously. Before the tools of language caged themselves into action in Daniel's mind, he knew. The answer was simple confirmation. He noticed, somehow, his fingers were cold. Bloodless and pale. The boy squeezed them to his palm in a fist, even as his arms draped the waste-width of Daniel's shoulders. He didn't do much of anything else, but sit there as the answer tumbled, words clasped together like verbal monkeys in a voiceless velar plosive barrel, from Daniel's lips. Even then, his expression neither cleared nor darkened, but remained one of puzzlement burnished onto bronze features. But he didn't let go of the poor man on the ground. "If it was an accident, it's not your fault, you idiot," Lin reminded Daniel, the more familiar façade of brattiness resurrected and reanimated in a pert pout of lips. He even went so far as to lightly shake the other man as he wrapped around him. He bristled with secondhand incredulity. He didn't think this was the seed and root of all the other man's problems, but clearly a compounding of guilt had festered into this pus-wet wound of a man by playing a big-ass, stupid-ass part in his life. "Well, it is, but only tangentially. You're responsible for your actions, even when wasted, but even still, girl, accidents happen. You can't drown yourself in bullshit because you fucked up. Like, sure, it's a big-ass fuck-up. Like, life-altering—haha. Yeah, that's not funny. I mean, yeah, poor J.B. It's sad. It's unfair. But that's never going to change, yk? That's fucking life in a shitty, absurd, consequentialist universe. People die every day because of accidents. They're born because of them too. Yadda yadda.—There's nothing you can do about it." Lin shifted to press the cold crease of palms to either side of Daniel's face, pushing through now-wet ash to face him, while not allowing him to totter away like the fucking scaredy cat he knew he was. (Lin was aware this was pot-calling-the-kettle-a-wimp-and-a-cowa The boy considered going on, continuing his useless explanation, but he decided against it. He looked hard at Daniel.—All at once, he softened again; childlike petulance erased as he felt sad. Like fucking heartbroken sad for the man in front of him. It wasn't pity. It was empathy. Though, baby J knew Daniel couldn't tell the difference. Lin felt rather suddenly like he was going to start crying. Instead, he pushed Daniel down, until he could lie himself practically atop the man, head on bony shoulder, nose to throat, entirely comfort-seeking (while also, potench being comfort-giving! Yay for killing—er, cuddling… two birds with one stone). He didn't even offer the option of anything else. "Tell me what happened." Daniel’s stomach was heaving up now, burning away at him, but that sharp pain from before, it seemed to nearly fade. All the awful nightmares of years on years, the endless circle of thoughts that chewed up into bloody pieces at the back of his throat. He could still make out the hangover he’d woken up to that morning after, the same one he had now, stomach-churning and pieces of star flint on the back of his eyes. Daniel made an effort to pull away from Lin, bringing both his fleshy hands up in front of his face to see if the dried up streaks of J.B. were still pressed into his lifelines. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident.” Daniel put his hands away. “I hated the son of a bitch. If someone else had done it, I would have…” What? Pretended to be pleased? Thought about his ugly jealousy and gone on with the torrent of his life? Daniel had never been a violent person, not physically. He wasn’t aggressive enough, powerful enough. He attacked with words and snide, sharp observations. Daniel took apart his enemies by eroding the social links that held them together, not by cutting them up in alleys. “It didn’t just happen.” Daniel cut his bloodshot eyes back up to Lin’s face, twisting painfully and ignoring his discomfort so he could drag a blunt nail under Lin’s chin. “You like thinking it was some kind of fucked up, cosmic accident? Good for you.” Daniel brought his arm up to break Lin’s grip on his face, his skin damp with sweat that smelled like sour poison. “Get off me, Lin.” He knew that a physical repulsion would hurt Lin more than passing words, taking a palm to wrap it around the boy’s shoulder so he could attempt to pull him off. “Or I’m going to fucking be sick on you.” Daniel underestimated the boy currently prone atop him—physically and emotionally. Not only was Lin a good deal stronger than he looked (and that much stronger when pitted against a man literally wasting away), but he was desperate, and desperation bred a breed of strength ugly, but hard. He let his grip be broken, hands shoved from Daniel's face, but he clung on like some calcareous macrofouling organism, slicked and sessile—a barnacle maybe. Yeah, that. Better that than a limpet. Plus, barnacles' penis ratio to their size: hella accurate in this analogy. Also, they were hermaphroditic, which was actually—well, it wasn't hella accurate, but, anyway, whatever, this wasn't the important part. What mattered was he held on. Hard. Yeah, physical repulsion did hurt, Daniel was right about that—it was worse for a boy so used to the barb of words. But it had been there all along, hadn't it? Metastasizing, a gross expansionism scabrous, gangrenous, with roots deep in the ventricles of the heart—Daniel was already fucking repulsed by him, a conclusion drawn in ink, even with knowledge of the physical ravages of the man's chosen vices. Lin knew the man's dick didn't work, but it translated, bumpily, in his mind, from rational understanding of effects of alcohol dependence, to the selfish confusion of the unwanted, almost expected, from a man like Daniel. He was straight after all, maybe. Or whatever. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that had scarred over in a raised bolt along skin, the open wound having been stitched up sloppily by a series of encounters, with Louis and otherwise.—And what mattered was Lin was over it. He had (more or less) moved on. Maybe Daniel didn't want to fuck him, didn't want him, yk, lying on top of him as he tried to escape (so strange!), but the stupid boy stupidly loved him all the same, like the idiot he was, and his determination ran deeper than the fracture of pain. So he held on, despite the reptilian red of Daniel's eyes on him. (Did I mention how dumb he was?) "Go ahead," was all he said, modern meter muffled against the man's shirt, linen sour and musty in his nose. "I'm classy as fuck, but I fuck people in the bathrooms of clubs, girl, and my job is—was literally watching shit decay. You think I care about vomit? Especially that of a dehydrated man with a sip of water in his stomach?" There was no follow-up laugh, no indicator of levity whatsoever, just the dig of fingerbones into the loose meat of Daniel's back. "I already told you. I don't care if you hate me anymore." Maybe that was pathetic. Lin's chin bit into Daniel's chest as he looked at the man through dark lashes. The boy's youthful face was openly curious, the ancient flame stolen by Prometheus still somehow undamped in eyes that bled black. "Why'd you hate him? Was it because of a woman?" With straight dudes, it always was. In reality, Daniel didn’t want to be sick on Lin. He didn’t want Lin to know he was sick, and he didn’t want Lin present for the hellish life he was living. Lin made it worse, the observing eyes of someone rational and sane, who could tell him he was been a fucking idiot and to get over it. Daniel couldn’t, wouldn’t, and believed that he shouldn’t. He wanted it to be over, too; it was all about what Daniel wanted, because he’d given up trying to figure out Lin. He brushed a tangle of dusty curls with the flat of his fingers, almost against his will. “All the reasons you hate somebody. He owed me favors he never paid. Took things I wanted. He had one of those faces, you know. He could have anything and anyone, just smile at them, and they’d roll over.” Daniel had too. You couldn’t ignore J.B.’s charm. The flash of his smile, the very idea that he didn’t need you at all. Daniel didn’t like being on the other end of that mirror. A flicker smell of garbage and new blood filled Daniel up. He hadn’t been so pretty in that alley, had he? All Daniel’s muscles tightened under Lin as his stomach contracted and tried to get rid of poison that had long ago sunk in beyond its reach to expel. Nothing came out, Lin was right about that, but the pain redoubled. God, he felt awful. His head was screaming, and it looked like he’d finally done something his stomach wouldn’t forgive. The nausea kept coming in waves, and the burn was crawling up his stomach toward his chest. It felt like a rat was trying to claw its way out of him. “Christ, Lin, I’m begging you, let me go.” Maybe finding out someone you knew had killed someone else—not just wished them dead, but had beaten them bloody or gutted them or however it was done, until there was nothing left but a husk, brain black in death, the electricity sputtering out—maybe that knowledge was supposed to change how you thought about the murderer. Maybe it was supposed to shine the lime of some light upon, not only the loose jangle of morals or their rage, but on the nature of secrecy and potentiality, on the basic understanding of man as capable of all—man as monster. Maybe finding out Daniel had killed JB should have scared Lin or confused him or even have slotted sense into a series of past experiences, now viewed with clarity of completion. Maybe the boy ought to have recoiled, maybe he was supposed to value human life enough to find the snuffing out of one too much, one too many. Instead, all he felt was alone. Aubrey had killed people too, hadn't he? The boy felt himself in a wasteland of blackness, spread out around him in digital expanse, cold, electronic, vast. He felt lonely. Like there was nothing in the known universe that could even partially fill the chasm of loss that collapsed his heart on itself in a stellar suck of star dust. But that had been there for a while, that loneliness. It was just that Lin quite suddenly recognized the shadow that had been lurking at the edges of his vision as not the blockage of light, but as an absence—an abscess of self. He should have held on. His self-awareness noted this moment, this here, wasn't about him. This was some terrible seed, some truth that stood in no relation to him. Why would he feel lonely now? It urged empathy for the man whose abdominal muscles began the tidal shift of sickness, some ulcer lanced by memory bleeding pain. Lin pushed himself off of Daniel and it felt like a cavern opened up in a split of earth. The room was so cold. He climbed to his feet. "Were you fucking him or was he fucking someone you wanted to fuck?" Daniel wasn’t sure what he expected from Lin after the confession, because he’d been doing his best not to think about it for years. His behavior was that of a dead man in a hurry, expression slack, limbs askew, eyes desperate. He did everything he could to avoid looking at Lin, not wanting to see the look on his face, frightened that it might be disgust, anger, or that terrifying mix of mocking pity that he sometimes wore when he was around people that he found boring or pathetic. Daniel was having difficulty trying to not think about J.B. while trying to not think about Lin thinking about J.B. He didn’t have that much control over his thoughts, to be honest, but he thought for a mad split second that he would kill J.B. again just to vanquish the fucking ghost that lingered on in the back of his mind, overshadowing everything he did. Then he felt worse for thinking it. God, he was an asshole. Daniel rubbed his face again, and lurched out of the room, still talking to the boy with the full expectation (pointless hope?) he might follow. “Guess I did want to. Didn’t know at the time. You hadn’t come along yet. I didn’t notice.” Daniel let a sour smile twist his lips, and the dried, cracked surface split and bled under his teeth. His stomach was murder, and he barely felt it. He turned into the hall blindly and dragged his hand along the wall, trailing his wretched fingers over fine paintings and dusty wallpaper, before his palm plunged into empty space and he found his way down a servants’ staircase that barely fit his shoulders. “I got a lot of attention back then. I didn’t think I needed anyone in particular. Gambled a lot, too. I had the money.” A riot of smells from the kitchen greeted them as they stepped down off the landing, Daniel still with his hand on the wall. The winter was near enough that the door was shut to keep the room warm with the morning fire, and the three people present--cook at the hearth, man at the table with a cup, and the maid with her hands elbow deep in sudsy water, stared at them like they’d grown horns. Daniel ignored the lot of them, too drunk, angry, and tired to remember the role he was supposed to be playing. He lurched over toward the laundry tub, and the maid beat a hasty retreat as the man tried to stand and say something. Daniel stuck his head and shoulders under the water, and came up cursing the lye and sputtering. He turned right around and started out again without any comment to the servants, who were gaping at his soggy shirt and barely-dressed companion on the stair. “I fucking miss running water,” Daniel said to Lin, in German, as he weaved toward the stair again. Lin did follow. And for once, he was kind. He didn't force Daniel to look at him, he didn't demand attention. He knew the man wanted to all but forget the stubborn, idiot of a boy was there. He walked on bare feet, slipping easily into that narrow staircase, and feeling all the better for it, safer. He wasn't used to ringing spaces and vaulted walls, rooms blossoming wide, unwelcoming, and cold. No, he'd grown up in a house old and close-boned. The cramped, almost claustrophobic servants' staircase offered a sort of… um, structural hug, and Lin took it willingly, exalting in the funneled chute of warmth from the stove below. His toes curled over the last step, but he lingered on the landing as Daniel blundered through the kitchen and, like, dunked himself in a vat of what was essentially a diluted corrosive. That shit burned the eyes. The boy had spent enough time around caustic potash to know that. (Resomation ftw! (Never thought I'd be writing that, but here I am.)) He hoped it helped Daniel with… well, whatever it was meant to help him with. Lin gave the maid, the cook, and the man at the table all a congenial smile, unashamed and unworried as to what they might be thinking. "Have a good night," he said to them with an impeccable Italian accent, cut thick on the tongue but with that sea-washed warmth the Mediterranean lent, before turning to fulfill again the not-pointless hope and full expectation of Following Daniel after the man scraped past in his dripping, soapy shirt. There was a small gap, however, as Lin twisted to trail. He wasn't surprised at the admission of missing. He was sure there were a lot of modern (future?) luxuries missed, even when someone, yk, hardly knew how to use a seven-year-old laptop. He responded in matching German (with appropriate English loanwords), sounding sad. "I miss moonshoes." For all his brief levity, Lin grew quiet as they made their way back upstairs. It was only once the corridor'd chimney gave way, walls falling outward in an onslaught of cold, that he spoke again. "Ah, yes. I am like a gay light switch, it's true. I am here to bring gay light. And God saw that it was good.—Or maybe I'm a gay vampire, except I suck dick and not blood. Perfect." Whether the series of statements was said with pride or derision was unclear, couched as they were in the coldness of the house, and Lin sighed anyway, waving a hand to clear the words from where they froze in the air. "So, you resented him. He was hot as eff and got what he wanted. He owed you shit. You killed him, accidentally or not. And now—what? You're going to pay with your own life by eking out the barest bones of an existence and denying yourself everything you might ever fucking want that doesn't come in a bottle or pipe? Because, I'll tell you now, that sounds like so four centuries ago." He slumped against the nearest wall, not caring to keep himself propped up. He folded his arms and stared at Daniel, his black eyes steely in the low light. "Does that about sum it up? You're a fucking idiot." Back in the drafty bedroom, Daniel changed shirts, leaving the wet one on the floor, and then he changed into a particularly ridiculous set of linen underwear that strongly resembled a castaway’s torn slacks. This was all automatic, and he kicked the debris of his life out of his way as he went, stumbling along. He kept one hand pressed against his stomach for most of the time, nursing this pain that wouldn’t go away, wondering that it neither weakened or strengthened as the conversation went on. Lin’s moonshoes and his lightswitch made Daniel smile. The fact was one of the reasons that Lin always managed to find his way through the motheaten book covers of Daniel’s outer self, chunky syllables in other languages and his dusky sylvan face in the shadows. It was a weak smile, but at least it wasn’t one of those horrible nasty ones that looked like he was about to tear someone’s throat out, or one of the sour ones that savored of broken hearts. He touched him, in passing, perhaps the first time he had willingly done so that evening. It was brief, a strange, proprietary touch on Lin’s forearm where it crossed over the narrow chest. He did not explain himself, and turned away almost immediately to curl up under the heavy tapestry of the bed covers. He hadn’t made it to this bed in several days, and it was still made. “I know. I can tell you because you can’t call the cops and tell them. And you don’t know… what it was like. I can’t remember--I fill it in when I can’t remember, I think.” Daniel’s words were muffled, and he buried his face in the pillow, exhausted, not much visible except a few brown curls. ”It’s fucking awful. You don’t know. You can just say that, but you weren’t there, you didn’t see him. You didn’t see what I did.” He kept muttering along this vein, eyes closed, burrowing ever deeper into the thick brocade as if he could wait for the lye to sift down and dissolve what was left of him. Lin was surprised by the contact. He'd thought touch was past, something he would have to find elsewhere. His eyes were wide, more concern there now than at the admission of murder, but he didn't say anything either, the icy cut of Daniel's bloodless fingers trailing away as the man stumbled into his bed. He watched, listening, as the man mumbled into down and shuttle-woven silk made thick. But, he didn't remain there long. He considered crawling back to his own room, salvaging his so-called dignity and maybe reading a book, but this was the easy choice—he was already here, in this room, and that brush, that sliver of touch that had broken against the skin of his forearm, had pricked him. Fuck it, right? He hadn't had a goddamn shred of dignity since he sent that letter to the idiot man in the bed all those months ago. He dragged himself into the bed after kicking the door closed. He curled behind Daniel, knees meeting the man's calves. He didn't bother burrowing beneath the quilts. He just leaned his cheek against Daniel's back. "I don't care what you did, asshole," was all he said, muffled against rough underclothes, before the cold slowed the blood in his veins, shut his breathing down to minimum, and lulled him into a fitful, dreamless sleep, his arm thrown around the middle of a murderer. |