Work Text:
In the putrid greenhouse of the basement, the future swells. Plans are laid, in the margins of notebooks, but also in people. They’re both scamps. Always soaked with something. Always coming in from the cold.
His scarf around his neck. Whose scarf around whose neck? Referred to in the third-person, they collapse into one. Coughs blend. The same pills down the same throat. Tattoos melt Dali-style, hair is chopped. Wrists are sliced in silence, because they’re grown ups now, evidence tucked under sweatbands or shirt-cuffs.
The sex predates the first kiss. The sex predates seeing each other completely naked. He thinks that’s how it went. No one takes off all of his clothes when he fucks.
Outside the van, the sunlight is mocking him. The ladder up is also the ladder down. His hands under his armpits. The kind of pain that at least gives you a cave to set up shop in. Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
He knows them so well that they end up on the same cliff, staring down the same ending, like how your eyes skip to the last panel on the page, zing. He thinks of the way the grass felt, swears it pulsed underneath him, pushing a weak, fizzing body into his arms. Love received, love rejected. Corpses reanimated or scrapped from the series.
Like a natural disaster, like war, they win. It’s binary, an easy decision for fate. The music is maniacally glamorous. Titrated violence.
And, he decides to drop alcohol, seemingly on a whim. A bud of doubt, a cracked knuckle: what other guilts can be discarded? A selfish, private anxiety, but at least his sobriety means that he really wants this, right? The touch is so sure and soothing. I’m here. I, we, you, us. The touch tethers him to his body and his own.
After especially killer shows, he fucks him dry. Tear down this wall. When he tries to look back, the hand of God palms his scalp. Then, the taste of questionable sheets. Then, a loving feeling on his back, thumbs on twin triggers. Then, harsh fingers creeping past his hips to his stomach, wringing the necks of birds. Then, they come apart. The ceiling becomes incredibly interesting. His load leaks out too fast and suddenly he’s too cold to fall sleep. When their feet touch under the covers, his heartbeat slows, like he’s been poisoned. It’s pleasant.
They take a hiatus from fucking. He can’t bear to be inside him, lest they be trapped, lest the world end and suspend them just like that, joint forever. Their dicks still spring out of their jeans, though, denim cluttering around their ankles, motel A/C gelling their sweat together. On good days, he says his name. On bad days, he says someone else’s. They fight about it, sometimes, about who is bad for who. He’s never the problem.
When the first kiss finally comes, they are in Hell together. Snowed in by sheets of printer paper, armed with cramped fingers and his doctor’s scrawl. It happens up against a massive oak door. His little brother is slumped outside, sniffling. It’s almost like he’s a part of it. Perhaps he always has been. Maybe that’s who he practiced all of this shit on.
The next time he gets fucked in the ass, fucked on the floor, blood leaks out, a soft, almost childlike smear across a sheet that reads “HOW I DISAPPEAR”. He folds it up and tucks it into his sketchbook. More kisses now, this time pressed to the throat, behind the ear, lovers’ lanes. The morning after, he retreats, withdraws, withholds. He barricades the door with the heavy chairs they lounged on the day before. He presses his back to the wall outside anyway and plays some riffs, all of them sounding thick and dirge-like in such a hopeless environment. He pushes hard with his fingers on his flush of souvenir bruises to keep them fresh. He digs his nails into them to extend their lifespan, leaving shallow graves, so they can last him until he gets another round.
Who knows who said it first? The early days were so disjointed that the memories feel made up, but he’s pretty sure that he did. He tucked his hair behind his ears and squeezed his beer and it was true.
Things keep going until they don’t. Tear down this wall. Then, there’s no one at the head of the table holding court. Then, there’s no one side-saddle in the passenger seat, stealing glances at backseat sketchbooks. By the end of it all, he had nearly finished drawing all of his ink. He stopped before he got to the neck.
He finds him in the dressing room, which is an amalgamation of all the dressing rooms leading up to this one. Two mirrors face each other, and looking down that glossy, false hallway, he sees himself shrinking, going back to the beginning. He shakes the silt from his memory, bunches the timeline like a ribbon. Maybe he said it first.
Maybe he said it much earlier than either of them thought to, when he was sleeping something off on the couch, in that pot-fogged basement, when his skin was emptier but his heart was just as heavy. The light that morning was so lucid it pushed the hair out of his eyes. He wanted to be there when he woke up.
He looks so young down there on the floor. Like a little kid in a collar of vomit. Blue-fingered, ashen, frozen just this way, alone. There’s no note, of course. He always pictured a note, that he’d somehow always find a way to get the last word in. Past the disbelief is belief, and beyond that, a wonder if this is the first thing he’s ever done on accident. Clinking bottles, snapped strings, little teeth clicking against each other. Someone is knocking on the door. If grass could grow here, it would bully its way past the linoleum and lift him up.