nysalogs | And if you don't love me now (Closed)

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And if you don't love me now (Closed)

Who: Richie Tozier (

summertimeblues) & Others
What: Catch-all for September!
When: Throughout the Month
Where: Mostly Olympia, maybe Wyver or other places if questing takes them there
Warning(s): Light NSFW in one, will warn for other stuff in threads

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Foolhardy of him to still think of his home as a sanctuary. He ought to know better by now. The riots had taken out the apartment next door and robbed him of his neighbours (though deciding to move was for the best, once Ann joined in the teeny pad was getting too small for three teens, two adults and a ghost in a glass ball), then mere weeks later a hot date he'd brought home gagged him to sleep with a chloroform rag. He'd knocked half his shit over in the graceless struggle and upon returning to life, had found the place in the same disarray he'd left it. The sanctity of his shelter had been desecrated again and again.

Yet the wandering spirits rose strictly in the streets, in the public spaces and the wilds, the ruins. There was no need to worry about his own place. He could sink into his sofa with a bourbon in hand and a cool track on, riding on the jetstreams of Jefferson Airplane crooning through Today without a fret on his mind.

Until the lamplight gives rise to shape. A hollow outline, wispy at first, sepia seeping in. Richie has a book in his lap, soaking up the words and swishing his drink idly. He doesn't notice until it's reaching for his chin.

He gets a sharp intake of breath. A brief instant of clarity where he can see the soul plain, not as it was in life and not exactly in his eyes. Just the ache, the yearning, a chasm of missed chances and love still burning on the ashes of a life snuffed out.

Richie's jaw drops. The hand sinks into him, and his insides swell and numb. The apparition swirls like smoke, and then it's gone.

He sets his drink down. Claps the book shut and slips it to the coffee table. His feet take him from the sofa to the door opposite, laying knuckles soft across the wood. He holds a moment, breathing, light headed.

Raps the bone against the door, one two three. His head dips low as he listens for movement inside. Silent, all silent, the music may as well be doing his talking for him.

"Today, you'll look into my eyes
I'm just not the same
To be any more than all I am
Would be a lie
I'm so full of love
I could burst apart
And start to cry—"]

Edited 2018-09-12 19:50 (UTC)

[For all their points of difference, the musical commonality Prior shares with Richie is something he's come to quietly treasure (or loudly treasure, on the rare occasions that the right drink mixes with the right track listing). He knew he'd missed music but, before he'd moved in here, not quite how much, nor how many aches the right song could settle.

Sure, Richie's got some painful duds in his collection, but they're worth suffering through for the snatches of some forgotten moment of his youth: a refrain his mother sang along to when she thought there was no one to hear, or something that could be won from the jukebox at the gleaming new malt shop in town. There's a kind of peace to be had from it – peace being a sorely needed commodity in these troubled times.

Prior's past the initial conniptions had when the apparitions first started to stalk the streets. Weak excuses for ghosts, most of them. Not the stuff of his nightmares. These were pitiful creatures, not an otherworldy herald among them.

Though, more painful for that. He's helped what few he can, where he can, and come inside before his skin could be too chilled by the grip of misty fingertips.

Now he sits on the edge of his bed, stripped to the waist, a full length mirror opposite sparing any soft-focus kindliness in what it reflects. He tilts his head and traces a new bruise pressing its purple bloom through the surface of the skin that (too closely) covers his ribcage. And he thinks he should get them to look into his medication again.

And then he thinks them who?

If the Natha are gone, who'll continue to provide it? Who'll keep their vague promises of trying for a cure?

He closes his eyes and breathes slowly, letting the drift-through of familliar music untwist his nerves. Until the knock.]

A minute–

[Reaching for a robe thrown across the back of his chair, Prior wraps and belts it as he goes to the window and draws it back down. His room's full of shadows and candle light (a small attempt of his own to make things appear less harsh), and the largest flame sputters and gasps in the updraft.

Then he turns and walks to the door.]

You wanted me?

[He smiles, it's veracity uncertain as Richie somehow looks the same as always and nothing like himself in the same moment. Just a trick of the light.

Prior never sees the delicate form that rose from the bed and has been trailing him, but he gasps at the sudden chill once she steps forward and vanishes under his skin.]

[Richie is a man frozen in time when that door opens. He looks up to Prior's eyes and makes no further motion or address.

Not until that chill careens with and conquers Prior's own flesh. Then his head shifts, a tilt in the slightest of fractions as his gaze flicks down and up. Seeing something beyond the rail-thin form in loose robes paused in the doorframe.

He reaches forward. Those knuckles that clacked a greeting through the door now trace the line of Prior's cheek to his jaw.

whatareyoudoing]

I've waited for you.

[It's not Richie's voice, nor is it one of his many personas. It's a soft rasp, gone near inaudible with disuse. The face that lights up and stretches so broad with every joke and snide aside is equally muted. This is a man of soft and steady stoicism. The heat lays all in his eyes. They bore into Prior's like blue ringed drills, ferociously intent on drinking in the sight of him.]

I wish it wasn't this way.

[You waited. Prior's head lifts: a flower to the sun, leaning in to the trace of warmth left in Richie's skin. Heat: a half remembered thing, but the mind riding pillion with Prior's sparks with flashes of the heat signatures of other fingertip touches: how his hands felt grasping her hips, splayed in the small of her back, curled in close at the back of her neck. She waited.]

You promised not to leave me.

[But there's no anger held for his attempts to sweeten a pill he'd hoped she never had to swallow. She turns to press a kiss to his hand, voice tight with hope and hope-held-back. If she should grieve for a future lost then she's made wrongly. Time has only shown there was no future without him. With him, the future no longer matters.]

I wanted to follow then. I should have followed you sooner.

[Always the more impetuous, she steps close enough to fit within the circle of his arms, hands reaching to frame his face, to tilt it toward her and find the planes and lines she knows beneath its temporary housing.]

Is this all we have? [This small window of time and opportunity, when even a lifetime proved not to be enough.]

It was a promise Thesa saw fit to break, dear heart.

[Her anguish had not been observed in solitude. He'd chased after her while she lived as a walking wound, sitting inert and in sorrow with the shadows. A confession like this is to be expected, yet the rumble of hurt that sends his innards writhing belies how painful the thought still is. He takes her, each hand clasping at the bridge of her body's ear, the thick nest of hair, and puts his forehead to her own as if to press the pustule of pain through to her.]

Don't speak of such things. [But they are both gone now. Will'o'wisps in lamplight, forced to float on the unseen currents that bridge this world and the next. Evidenced now by the guises they take on just to feel once more.

Their choice had not been planned. It fell into them, pulled by the similarities between these two lonely men and the people they once had been. She, in her most resplendent living self, had been a dark-eyed beauty, thick of hair and wide in the mouth, an artistic soul who shone in humble glamour. Yet she had her tortures, much like this Prior. He hadn't the slim frame of his own vessel nor his tirelessly glib tongue. But the base all that yammer shrouded, that open heart and wonder at the workings of life and the fragile networks of people — those were his thoughts, his pains and prides. A house of brick or a house of sticks, the same man could live in either.

Their shared sorrow, too. The men both pined. The people they yearned for were dead, were sleeping, were vanished by smoke or darkness or godly works. That yearning could be turned back to earth. To one another. Just for the night, just as long as these shadows are permitted to last.]

Moments. [He takes his lips to hers then (his), a soft kiss, aching in its care to draw out every sensation. Take the beats one by one and drag the touch along by fractions, never wasting a single motion.] So we must make them last.

[He kisses her again, one hand drifting to find the small of her back and morosely caressing the bumps of a too sharp spine. Alike and unlike. But he can feel her through this shroud. She's alive in there, and her shape comes to meet his hand against the railing protests of reason. His kiss deepens. Hungry.

Not a moment to waste.]

[True, she'd been drawn to claim this too-mortal form without conscious choice, but easily found things she recognised within it. The young man's frailty an outward expression of what she had felt break and refuse to heal within herself. Death seems too early an inevitability for him, as it had for her. But, taking his frame for her own, she'd found more of a fight than she'd expected. There's something in here that knits its broken pieces together with a furious determination to live. She feels it infecting her.

Moments. So she must fit a lifetime into those. Tangle herself into him so closely that when whatever comes for them reaches out its hand at last, they'll tumble together into its palm.

She presses up against him as though she could push their two borrowed hearts into meeting through their skin. The narrow, concave chest of her body, the frame of her lover missing its heft and reliable solidity only makes her feel as through the trick has worked. Two pulses race against each other. His mouth open against hers, catching breaths from each other, the same air in both their lungs. Hers ache with each new intake and fight to fill again. She's never felt so weak and so strong.]

Then don't speak at all. Only tell me you love me.

[Her mouth is on his again to say the same in every way beside words. And then her hands are pressed to his chest, hitching, tugging the cloth that keeps skin from skin upwards and out of her way.

Sight is an extraneous sense, in this state. Replacing it is an awareness that spreads through everything around her, proprioception that extends to the universe. She's aware of her lover more than the temporary casement housing him. Aware where their bodies used to fit, and where they do now, stripped of curve and weight. She's aware of the bed behind them, not theirs but there to be borrowed too, and walks him with her toward it, switching their positions only to press him backwards and herself into his lap.]

[If it strikes as greedy of him to steal this morsel of time from the hands and mouths of these two conduits, then he's going to pay the price and pay it gladly. After, though, after. Death wasn't their punishment, it was the cleaving of their marriage in two. That they did not take the same steps together was the true punishment. He'd fallen prey to a soaring vulture during the riots, the same ones that viciously clawed after refugees and their strange ways, stranger magics. He'd had spells but not enough to siphon the blood back into him once the talons struck his neck and collar, nor to knit the ravaged threads of his throat back together.

He'd died within an instant.

She'd been left behind, and he thrust forward. Wasn't that greedy of fate? Of sin and misery and all the wicked forces in the world? This time should have been his. This love and her touch. You might better name it recompense than repugnant, amoral greed.

He lifts his arms and lets the shirt fall, fabric of a just as foreign nature as this skin (cotton-polyester blend that he'd woken with, Calvin Klein or some such, and the pale underneath a scarless canvas where there ought to be blooms of color from the liln, ragged scrapes where the skin sloughed off at the slightest provocation, but resurrection took care of that Prior my boy, oh didn't it just?), but her fingers tickle the same paths down ribs and the flat planes of shoulder bones just as they did many months ago. There's no difference at all. Not one bit.

He follows her to the bed and takes his seat when she presses him down. The weight is curiously light when she takes her place atop him, his hands holding steady at her now boyish hips.]

I do. I've shirked salvation for you. [He begs the favor be returned with nimble fingers at her collar. The robe parts like the split halves of fruit over her shoulders. The body she's taken has waned through ravaging sickness. There, at her side. A bruise, purpling and festering. He draws the pads of his fingers over her sides and down her back.] I'll take damnation with you over heaven without.

[He kisses at her collar, the bone sharper than most. At the middle of her sternum. Over her breast.

At the bruise. Soft but still sharp on those pinned and needled nerves. He pulls the rest of the robe clear of her arms, shucks it to the floor to lay as offal.

He wraps her tight and buries his face to the cords of her neck. Her scent can be found there when he breathes tightly of her skin.]

I wanted to bring you happiness. Never pain.

[Yet that's all he'd done. Excruciating and insurmountable. The most unforgivable act he's ever committed. She's asked for his silence, but he's needed to make peace since the moment he passed.]

Edited 2018-09-14 10:46 (UTC)

[Resurrection hasn't come for the body held in his arms, and who knows what it would make of Prior Walter if it tried. He's been resurrected once, here, still trailing the aches and scars of what was killing him. To die here and come back? He'd be fearful of what kind of mess might escape their chambers.

So this body is a trail map, marking places both sickness and depravity have left their calling cards. Thumbprint bruises pressed into his skin from the embrace of a sadistic fate - that newest one: there's a start and a shiver when his lips brush it, accept it as part of her without judgement, that isn't a reaction of her own mind but an override from the one she's borrowed. Rainbow shimmers trace over the veins in one arm in a manner a stranger might almost call pretty, without knowing what inscribed them there.

And none of it makes her feel less beautiful in his arms. Less wanted, as his lips follow old paths from a torn and abandoned map. She feels her eyes sting with tears at the same moment that she finds herself laughing (voice soft, barely too deep this way), peppering kisses into hair soft and thick as his.]

You are my happiness. [What a dolt to have watched her these past months and not to know. It's never made her feel weak, that so much of her joy resides with him. For some people it seems as though a part of them is made separately and placed into strange hands: they're only complete upon finding it.] You are. So look, look.

[Look at her, please, her smile that tugs full lips into a joyful curve. Dark eyes that dance with strange, warm light.]

I have it back. Now have your salvation [Who could be damned for wanting this?] I won't be without you again.

[Only with him in every way it's allowed. He hands curl over his shoulders but can't be kept there, too greedy to hold and keep and remember him. Palms splay over his back, press him closer to her, as she straddles his lap and rocks in closer. It's not so different a dance from the one they know. Her nails drag over the flat of his abdomen, gentle as they dip lower.]

[Look he does.

For a moment, he can see her plain. None of this Walter man in the way. Her rounded edges and glittering eyes, hair wild and loose from the tight braids it was locked in every day.

He smiles up at her. Goddess, through and through, sacrilegious though it may be to think in such terms. But for her, it's simple truth.

The embrace is returned when she presses so close to his skin, jutting her hips closer. Heat pools in the crux between his legs. He kisses at her neck, her jaw, her lips when he can catch them. His own hands roam and find the rounds of her backside, relishing them with a squeeze as her own reach trails further down.

no

He moves his attentions the to front, popping the button of her host's trousers and working the zip down.

hessick

The gentle fabric melts under his touch, down the bone of her hips, unveiling.

stopthisforgodssakehesillhesdyingicantcatchitIWONT

He rattles in his own skin. A shake from head to toe that sends his gooseflesh high and every hair on end.

The lamplight flickers.

The body falls back with an inhuman wheeze, seizing underneath Prior with wide eyed terror and noiseless struggle.

Then it falls limp. But breathing. Hard and fast, like he'd just peeled off a marathon track. Sweat prickles up and runs cold down his temple as he calls out with a high, rasping.]

Get off, Prior—

Don't–

[It isn't Prior's plea: one to match Richie's fear and distaste. This voice comes from somewhere deeper than his own lungs, though their limited air leaves it incomplete.

Don't leave me. He's flung forward in the same moment that Richie pitches back, an arm thrown out to reach into empty air, fingers clasping into nothingness. Nothingness. Which his fingers lock tight around. A woman not willing to be abandoned again tugs at her lover's hand and pulls him forward, Prior's body the meeting place for not one but two souls now. Something that brushes as light as a feather, as cold as the first December snow moves against his skin. Something else burns under it.

For one second he thinks he sees them, outlined in smoke from the guttering candles, two forms twisting into one wispy column, dissipating into air. Together. Prior comes back to himself in a brief moment of inexplicable joy.

The candle on beside the window snuffs out.

And joy is crept up on and overwhelmed by darker things. He's pulled back by his own name, scratched out from underneath him. And by the not-supernatual chill in the room. And by – oh, shit. Shit. Hand pressing over his chest and not covering nearly as much as he'd like it to, the other gropes out sideways over the crumpled plains of his bedsheets, looking for a robe he's forgotten got tossed to the ground.] Jesus-fucking-christ what was...

[Shit. Crawling off Richie, he shifts himself enough to drag a sleepshirt from under the pillow and drag it over his head: damage done, no doubt. The spirit that possessed him hadn't blinded him during the process, he knows Richie's more intimately now than he ever has and there's no way to pretend the same isn't true in reverse. But he pulls the shirt on anyway, hugging his arms round his waist.]

What the fuck?

[The specters fuck off without so much as a sorry or a thank you. The woman, whoever she'd been, screamed and stretched to reach for her lover through Prior in a way that should have evoked sympathy. There's still that longing and lust buzzing in his chest, physical affectations stoked by emotions not his own.

It doesn't endear him to shit.

He lays with his chest heaving and his mind racing, tight lipped as Prior abandons his seat in Richie's lap for a mad dash to decency. Richie's eyes flick over as he catches the whip of fabric and notes each of the blotches painting Prior's skin. Sick spots, diseased dollops of leaking blood under a shrinking skin. There's the one he'd pressed a kiss to.

Richie looks the other way. The vice on his lungs tightens by another notch, click click click, just try to breathe through this chokehold buddy. He rises, hunching over his own knees with a hand clasped to his head. It tosses the thick bangs up like a cartoon flip. He's got a chubby pushing at the zipper of his jeans, close enough to where Prior had his ass planted just moments before. There's still the tingles of his phantom weight over Richie's thighs.

He wants to say something clever. Whenever the worst comes around to knock at his door, he's found smothering it with words made the ordeal more palatable.

And through an open window
Where no curtain hung
I saw you, I saw you
Comin' back to me...]

Oh fuck off.

[He quits the bed and swings out of the room. His shirt remains littered on Prior's floor. The music dies, snuffed out by a furious press of the button and further stifled with the rustle of a cardboard sleeve, swallowed whole in the cover and possibly never to resurface again. The quiet blankets all, and Richie's need to fill the air swells like a burgeoning balloon but there's a stopper in his throat.

Let his mind do the racing for now.

If Prior follows, he'll find him with his forehead pressed to one arm, which is pressed to the wall, leaning over the turntable and absent of motion. He's locked in a precariously contained panic.

Where does one find a clinic at this hour?]

Edited 2018-09-15 18:43 (UTC)

[Prior wants Richie to say anything at all, do anything other than turn a hard stare anywhere but at him, curling into himself, back knotted with the kind of tension that only works its way out through piling a fist hard into something unyielding. Say anything at all, except the couple of words he spits out before he vanishes, an utter lack of acknowledgement.

Prior sits where he is a moment, watching the door, until the music snaps off and nothing replaces it but the sound of his own too-quick breathing, the faint rasp as air drags through his lungs. Steady those. Breathe. He closes his eyes and tries to focus. Breathe.

Fuck this shit. With a sudden scrabble he's off the bed and stands in front of the mirror again, pressing his fingers hard into his face, pulling the skin taut as if to somehow check there's nothing still lurking under there. His hands drag over his arms, push up and across his chest, his neck (still damp with the heat of Richie's mouth), reclaiming the sensation for his own. He's been here before: arms pinned, trapped by a force with uninvited access to his body and a will to use it to their full advantage. Fuck this shit.

Staring into the mirror he wipes the sweat away from his forehead and thinks -imagines - knows he can feel the pages of a heavy book fluttering under his ribcage.

Put on a face, Prior. A little psychological powder and blush. Put on a face and face the world.

He snags that shirt up from the floor and stalks out. He's not hard: one advantage of being famously slow to arousal - but there's a heat running through his veins that can't be pinned to anger.

Though he is angry, a thick coil of it in his stomach that tightens when he sees Richie. He could be charitable and pin it to the hijack of their bodies, could be kind and call it revulsion at being used. God knows, there would be reason for it. But it doesn't take a prophet to know the things this is not a response to.]

Have you washed your mouth out, yet? There's bleach under the sink.

[Only two parts to the problem at hand have vanished. Ripping out the puppet strings was step one, and the hows of accomplishing it are mysterious to Richie himself. Was it repulsion? Fear? Strength of mind? Indignation? He's only inoculated against one kind of supernatural force, and flimsily so at that.

If only those nebulous forces would make contending with the third component easier. The footsteps and thin breaths bang like gongs at his ear as Prior makes his approach. His wit is still playing hooky, fair weathered friend that it is, and he's not fit to temper his words.

He would have to. This is Prior. A friend. A dying man. They'd clung together in a torture pit and saw each other as earlier iterations when time rolled backwards and forwards like a pin pressing out dough. They've staved off the isolation by taking shelter together. They share an origin. They've seen the last bits of their worlds in the interstellar mausoleum. Maybe they lived together in a seesaw situation, mostly because of Richie's jumpiness and he damn well knows it. The first week or two he'd been scared to be thought of as some kind of boyfriend, or be seen indecently lest it seem like an invitation, and only Prior's lack of attention soothed his nerves. On the other end of the saw was the disease, and as scared as he had been of catching it (consulting the new Shades Darker doctor had told him that no, a shared toilet wouldn't send the virus crawling up his asshole), there is the greater fear of watching it worsen. That one day he'd wake up and Prior wouldn't, leaving behind a wasted skeleton where a vivacious and warm-hearted man once lay.

Prior is an entity that can't be dismissed, can't be bruised, can't be faulted.

Still his skin crawls at the sound of his voice. His heart ups the beat. Richie needs to be careful. It would be easier if the terror could loosen its grip.]

Is that how it's done? [His voice is thin. His smile a touch odd, pinned in place by thumbtacks on a pale bulletin. He pulls off the wall, hand tangled and tugging at the top crop of his hair. His gaze is stuck to the window now. Curtains open, indecent, but he needs the sight of that pitchy sky and the glimmer of lights to tease him out of this room. He wishes he could pop out there like Rosalind used to do. Bibbidy bobbidy boo, gone.]

I haven't heard that one before. Maybe the folks that tried kept swallowing. Should I ask the doc? Wonder if they take house calls here. Do you...

[Have any spare meds? They don't cure a thing do they, but maybe a placebo would be enough to stave off dear Mr. Reaper.

Do you feel okay? Ha ha, what a laugh.

Did you want it? No no, his rational mind cuts in, but he remembers how the younger Prior had reached for the brim of his pants, willing to pleasure a stranger who'd shown him kindness in a time where he'd see none.

Did I hurt you?

Did it?

But moreover, most crushingly, he can see this as what it is, and the question he should be asking is looping across his mind in neon cursive, blinking bright with gaudy Vegas excess.

Is this the end?

He's not brave enough to ask it. Ah, but his mouth feels better after a wee warm up. He laughs and cups his face into his hands, petrified and still not facing Prior.]

I guess the only mystery left between us is the color of our assholes.

Mm. Well, let me know when you're done shitting yourself before I ask to check.

[Prior's been more careful, living here, than he's had to be in years. Laid out all the eggshells when he arrived and walked softly over them ever since: no, he won't tone himself down to some tedious shade of taupe to be more easily digestible to Richie's delicate constitution but there are ways in which he's considerate, as a roommate. He keeps the lid mostly down on the natural degree of affection with which most of his friendships grow. Keeps to his own room more often than not when Richie's sprawled on the couch with his music, because it's somehow more comfortable than attempting to sprawl at a safely heterosexual distance.

He notes small things. A mild discomfort at the idea of Prior offering to rub his feet (as if that's how you catch it: not the disease, the inclination - smoothed in with the press of thumbs and a little fragranced lotion). The fresh-rubbed red to his lips when Prior had glanced back after catching a corner of them with the most chaste of kisses.

The closest Prior's been to Richie in any physical sense was holding a half-sized version close through his tears.

He's got a similar air to him, now, as the kid who snotted on Prior's shirt. A snarl to his sinews that speaks of things held in so tight they're making him shake. Afraid of things that could kill him. And Prior knows that fear more than anyone, but the strain's starting to tell of trying to live with his own fears and someone else's too.]

You want to call the doctor about kissing me?

[He doesn't laugh but there's a rush and a weight to his breathing that sounds like a raspy attempt, or like someone trying to catch some air after having it punched out of them. Because it was a joke, right Richie? And it wasn't, too.

Kissing me.

He makes that personal, even if it wasn't them kissing each other but another pair of lovebirds holding the reigns. He makes that personal because it feels it.]

Oh, because god knows what you could pick up from these lips. Quelle horreur, indeed. It must just be a nightmare for you living in such close proximity. Do you pick up a plate and wonder what you could catch if we've used the same cutlery? Whether we've shared a glass? Is that something you think about? How about when you fucked my fucking boyfriend, did you wonder about it then?

[Richie looks now. Hands dropping off and blue eyes wild as he spears Prior with his fury, his horror.]

Is that a fucking joke to you?

[Doctor says the virus rides on body fluids. Isn't spit one of those, my good man? Was Richie's fear so laughable in the face of Prior's own hurt?

Then he goes on.

Yes, the cutlery. Yes to the dinner plates and the glass, yes, so what? Was he not allowed to wonder? If there ever was a need for sanitary caution it was living with a terminal case. Patient Zero of Nysa was sleeping in the room next door, how was he supposed to shrug off a suffocating fog like that?

It's the last barb that blows his fuse. Prior can't laugh but Richie can, loud and hollow and catastrophically enraged.

Yes to that too: he hadn't known they were together, but he'd gone to a doc soon after anyhow. Byerly had worked for Shades Darker as a main attraction. It would have been easier to count the people he hadn't fucked than those he did.

Not to mention the circumstances it happened under were wounds still stubbornly festering. Prior knew that, the bastard, he knew it and he was still jabbing his own knife in there to carve a space for himself.]

That's it?! That's where the tether to your discretion ends? You know damn well it wasn't my idea! I came to him for a fix, like fuck I was taking powders off the natives after what they did to us. Nothing more! Not my wicked design, oh no, you can put a fifty on that!

You want to point some fingers, point them at your precious boyfriend! All the mention he ever made of you was that you were sleeping! How's that do you for decency?!

Oh, my discretion's been pretty generous so far, Richie, give me some credit for that. Don't you think it was discrete of me to sit there and listen to you clutching your goddamn pearls at the very idea that your lips might stretch to fit another man's cock without it making you sick? Wasn't it discrete not to mention it again, not once? Not when you wiped your mouth at the barest brush from mine? I don't know, I'd call that pretty fucking discrete, but then I've fucked enough straight men to know I never tripped and fell into a single one of them by accident.

[He keeps his voice stony cold but there are too many tells in his face for him to come across as frosty as he's pretending. Because hasn't Richie got a point, too? And hasn't Prior known it all along? But Byerly never claimed to be decent, and Prior took him for what he was, even so. Loneliness will fuck you up and over that way.

Jaw clenching in a too-obvious effort to maintain control (stay cold enough and maybe the tears will freeze before they get loose) Prior's the one who forgoes eye contact this time, blinking first to look away.]

I wasn't asleep. [Would it be worse if he was? Maybe, but there aren't many situations where it would feel better.] Whatever he told you. I wasn't there, I was going crazy and he didn't know how to

[What? Help? Cope? Be there? Richie had tracked Prior down first, in fact. On the space station, both of them oblivious.]

I never said anything because what right did I have? And I knew, I knew you both went through hell. But I went through hell too. [And no one helped him through so he's shoved it deep, but apparently not as deep as he'd like.] I went through hell and came back to that.

[He's not spitting the words anymore. Whatever fire fueled that onslaught's already guttering in it's grate, and he looks worn out by it, dragging himself across to the couch and all but falling into it to recoup some breaths before he can look up at Richie again, considering him. His olive branch of an offer to live here. The stupid, tacky shoes Prior's stuck on a shelf in his bedroom that still make him smile. What a fucking tangle, it would be easier if he could just be furious and uncomplicated.

He tilts his head back, traces a finger up his throat.]

I don't blame you for being scared. I'm poison, who's going to want to drink that? I don't blame you for screwing him, either. It's you hating yourself for it. For being anything like me.

[For every arrow he notches and twangs into the fray, Prior's got another load for his trebuchet. Total decimation. Even through his indignation, his spluttering half-cocked interruptions—]

That's not what it's like!

[—Richie knows he's right.

He's not religious anymore. He's grown, he's worldly, he knows there's no more infinite ammo than slurs and bigotry and he knows there are sly ways it can be taught to you, ones that don't show until they were slipping out to sting the people around you. He thought he was fair-minded. He gets people calling him out when his jokes go too far, so he's aware the lines are there and that his habit of crossing them is a problem — when it's a joke. The more difficult sell is when he errs in sincerity. That's the look in the mirror that sends you scrambling, a misshapen cretin staring back in loathsome mouth-breathing ignorance.

He'd had a fair few moments of disgust, he'll cop to that. Hunching over the bathroom sink with a toothbrush in hand and wondering if he just threw some CLR on there he could wipe the taste of cock out for good. More common and more frightening are the times where he'd lay sleepless in bed, the safety of darkness permitting him to wonder at how it had hardly been a trial at all. Awkward and terrifying and questionably motived on both parts, you bet, but the act hadn't ripped him in two. They'd both gotten their fill and been blearily blissful in the wake. He'd never run back for seconds. But if the opportunity presented itself, sans drugs or drink, with this singular man who both enraged and intrigued him in equal measure, would he turn it down?

That's an answer he'd never get. No man since has pulled at him the way By could, and Richie half suspects it's because of the antagonism. Or, more likely, that the gate had been broken open already. The mistletoe outside the gala was a playground fling compared to the ghosts that paid visit tonight, but it had forced a carnal knowledge upon them both that would never have come otherwise.

None of this can be expressed through the boil of indignation. It's all stuff for times of solitude. Prior wouldn't understand, and he doesn't want to enlighten him. Bad enough that he'd found out at all.

The fight leaks out of Prior. Not Richie's doing, lord knows anything that came out of his mouth next would have been gasoline spraying on a bonfire. It's the chains that linked the shitty mistake he'd made with Prior's own narrative. That's right, he'd been shouting to the gods on the ship above. Not the same day, but soon after Richie had met him there. They'd spoken as friends and fellow survivors.

So he hadn't been home at all.

Richie watches Prior slink down to the couch. It's like watching a light dim. His own throat is drawing up the bridges, shuddering the blinds with a thick soreness that wriggles of guilt and pity and the need to scream sorry, so sorry! Can't you feel it? Can't you see it sloughing off me, can't you see it raking me to slivers?

It hadn't occurred to him in full what must have been going on with Prior in the aftermath, not outside their spaceship chat. He'd had some time to wonder whether Prior held the affair against him, a dim sort of hindsight often assuaged by the ease with which they held onto their friendship. Prior had moved in. He'd made merry, accompanied him around the chilly halls of stasis. Listened to his fretting and probably pretended not to hear if he talked or whimpered in his sleep.

It turns out that yes, he was raw about it. Stupid of Richie to think otherwise. Wouldn't it tear him up too?

Then Prior lays out the problem at its most plain. Shame gobbles him whole. He wilts some against the console table and poses it like a purposeful lean, each hand bracing on the wood a foot from his seated hips. His head is bowed. He's back to willful avoidance now too.]

I don't hate... [Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. Isn't that Fleetwood Mac propped up on standby? That would have queued next after Jefferson Airplane if he had kept on reading tonight. Richie twists his lips and tries again. He goes for the other point, equally salient and hurtful.] You're not poison. You aren't the sickness, it's just — just a sick cosmic joke, made to punish people who've already taken their floggings and their days in the stocks.

[He holds out a moment. He can't dodge the issue. Not when it's the very thing that's gutting Prior like an upturned bovine at the butcher's.]

I didn't know it was working you up so bad, Pry.

Oh it doesn't. [That kicks in as an automatic response. Show your achilles heel if you have to, but make sure to point out that you're not stupid enough to go out in sandals. Prior throws up the usual hand to one side of his face, a dismissive little sweep of a gesture. But then he curls his fingers back against his palm and completes the sentence.] Well, only some days.

[Byerly was the grenade Prior pulled the pin on because it was the only weapon he had to hand, and he knew Richie would still be riddled with schrapnel. But there was never really any fair justification to pinning Richie with any hurt he'd felt over that. Byerly screwed around by profession, and Prior struggled with the idea that anyone would ever want to touch him again, and whatever they found with each other it seemed to be the perfect length of rope to both hold onto or hang themselves with.

My fucking boyfriend. Not something he'd said out loud when Byerly was awake to hear it, as though the admission would have made the act unbearable for him. Their relationship was always keeping balance on a precipice.

But it's not his fucking boyfriend he's hurt over. It's the fucking isolation. It's living in such close quarters with someone who flinches over his touch the second he suspects he's not looking. Even without malice to it - and Prior hasn't really suspected there was, not for a long time now, and not at all with the memory of Richie walking an eighteen-year-old ingenue home. But what's ingrained into Richie by the malice of society at large presses on sore spots, all the same. Homophobia, they named it well.]

Anyway, you're right. [Drawing his knees up to his chest, Prior folds his arms across them and settles his chin on that bridge.] I'm more venomous than poisonous really. Do you know the difference? Swallowing poison will kill you, but venom has to get into the blood. Even then, I'm told I'm neutralized now. Didn't I say? New pills. They don't make me better - in fact they fuck my kidneys for the privilege - but they make me safer. I'm not a vector anymore. So try not to worry about the plates. And as for Byerly... well, him you may have needed to worry about. Just not on my account.

...I've never been a wildlife fanatic, no.

[Good to know. Fun fact for the day, slip that in with how a ghost will use you to work in one last hard dicking before passing over. What he's learning about Prior belongs on a shelf of its own.

Richie's fingers rap on the wooden shelf.

Not contagious. How about that?

Has the sweat lifted out of his scalp? No. Do the dried presses of where Prior's lips met his flesh feel any less prickly? Not really. He wants to ask how he can know for sure, but wasn't Byerly himself a testament to that? If Prior was still hazardous, it would have passed on to him and then to every Sue and Bobby that swung through the bar doors for a rollicking good time with Mr. Vorrutyer.

It hadn't shown on his own test. Weren't there greater miracles afoot? He'd come back from the fucking dead. Red had regained speech just before she fell asleep. Boxer had been granted a flesh body for hours at a time, before he'd get kicked back to life as a soul in a sword. Shouldn't keeping AIDS at bay be an easier buy than all that?

Except outside of Red kicking her muteness, none of those things had been prospects before the apocalypse. The news called it GRID at first, gay-something immune deficiency, then AIDS proper. Then it was the gay bug, the gay plague, gay cancer. He remembered headlines about bathhouses shuddered in LA and walking past those ghost blocks, frowning in his curiosity and worry. Secondhand stories of tragic passings, televised updates on the deadly stages, bulletins on what to watch for. Water cooler talk about which toilet stalls in restaurants were to be avoided, which bars the queers colluded at. He'd ragged on the boys for being so fucking paranoid, told them not to worry, the shovels they'd hit their faces with were all the vaccine they'd need. But then, he'd avoided the slandered joints too. Just to be safe.

It's not that he thinks Prior would lie, or that Prior's been had. Staving the disease was well within the Natha's capabilities (yet they haven't cured him either, and that should be a cinch compared to the other miracles they've worked). It's more that shaking loose some five years of prepackaged hysteria was going to take a lot more than placid explanations.]

I got checked after. When I was all dried out. Figured that was a good idea after the week-long party I'd had. [It wasn't just the sex, or sex with a man. He had gotten drugs from elsewhere in the days after, desperate to disappear again but too fearful to go back to the only known refugee supplier. Better get the works in that case, who knows what he could have come down with. All was well in the end with an impossibly clean bill of health.

Nothing that he has to worry about now, there's already here plenty. Richie has chanced eye contact again. Suddenly he's aware of his missing shirt. It's chilly. It would be a bit callous to run off and clothe himself now, wouldn't it? Like he was hiding more of himself from the deadly man-lover hugging his knees atop his couch. Prior looks like a child. Soft bellied and coiling up to cover it, unable to contend with the sensation.

He folds his arms over his chest. Not the boyish squeeze for decency, but tense. He'd be mirroring Prior's pose if he could, or were ten or twenty or thirty years younger.]

But you're not feeling better. Are you? And I'm making it worse. [Richie wets his lips.] This is...fair enough reason as any, if you want to call it. I won't argue.

[He snorts apropos of nothing. Laughs as he looks to the ceiling.] Here was I, congratulating my little self on being so damn magnanimous and being all respectful. Turns out I was doubling up on the bullshit and dumping it all on your lap.

[Prior has Richie's shirt with him, still. Bunched up in the gap between his arms and his chest like a perverse twist to a security blanket. They say people can smell certain emotions on each other, fear and lust being particular olfactory delights. This shirt's soaked in the moment before one bled into the other. Not that Prior's about to bury his face in the thing: although if Richie were being worse about all this maybe it would be worth the freaking him further before storming from the place.

That's the problem, he's not being worse about any of it, just reacting the way he's been all but trained.]

Oh, as if I like you because you're respectful.

[And like him he does - always has, though more distantly at first. Enjoying the ease to his conversations (set him off and let him go) and the jokes just the right side of crass to make a person wince before they smile. Prior may not be feeling better in this minute but there's no mistaking that there are some days Richie can be a tonic.]

Do you want to call it? It's your place.

[And Prior has that big old house still he could rattle around in for a while. More likely he'd haunt work and the spare beds of friends until he could face being alone again. Solitude is hard work, but so is inflicting himself on the mercy of others - alone would likely be his only choice in the end.]

I gave you the disclaimers before I said yes, didn't I? I'm sick, it's not always pretty. I'm hard to get rid of. But we're in the honeymoon period. [His voice lifts a little under the irony.] Warranty's still intact if you want to take it back. If you're... going to be afraid.

[There's the rub.]

I'm not the delicate flower I look. There isn't a fag joke I haven't made myself. But I can't live with that.

[Prior throws out a lasso and tugs him clear out of his sulking chagrin before it can get a real bop going. Richie's laughter isn't so dry or self pitying any more.] It is out of character for me, isn't it?

[No one dared accuse him of good grace.

He pulls a face at the suggestion. The sheer gall! Honestly.]

I'm not kicking you out over my own damn stupidity! Christ. [He works a hand over his hair.] And I know what death is. I've done this before and I made it through without skinning my balls. And that was with worse odds on Earth than Olympia's giving you.

[He'd mentioned it over small talk before. Wentworth Tozier, cancer of the larynx, 1973. Maggie Tozier, cancer of the lungs, 1975. His mid-twenties had shut the draw bridge on the siege of parties, girls, and good times young men should be having. He's seen how a body could be whittled and withered into fragile sticks, and all it took was a single breath to take that final snap. There had been the murders before, but that was a wound of differing nature.

He may not like the prospect. Might fear it, might dread it, might scream and rail and shake whoever came close enough for a better answer than the diagnosis Prior's lived with for years. But he knows the pattern. Prior's not at his end yet. It could come any time. He shouldn't be alone for it.

And by now, Richie would crumble letting him go.

His caveat is clear, however. Richie nods stiffly. He spots his bourbon abandoned on the coffee table and frowns, then quits the console to go fetch Prior a matching glass. Or close to it. He knows his drinks by now, the banal necessity of slumming it as a bartender made it second nature.]

Then what should I do? Is that why you're always clammed up in your room? [The glassware clinks as he sorts it through for a Collins.]

Am I bad enough company you gotta hide from me? Because I'd rather not be. Man ought to feel welcome in his own home.

I said I'm sick, not tugging the lid down on my coffin. And don't break out the rosary yet, baby, I'm not asking you to do anything. Believe me, I have no intention of consumptively fading away right here on the carpet. If and when that particular time comes you can guarantee I'll lay me down to rest on something with fewer man-made fibers and a less peculiar smell.

[Richie's done this before? Prior's never buried family but back home there was a funeral every week, and twice a week after the holidays. Men - friends - half of them younger than him. Some of them outrageous send offs: going out the way they'd have wanted, as if any twenty-four-year-old wants to go out at all. Some sombre affairs starring mothers shellshocked at the swift and silent loss of their sons to... pneumonia, usually. Mothers wondering why their boy's funerals were packed out with somber faced, slight-bodied soldiers. Why they hadn't picked up a girl in all their time in the big city to cry over their coffin. Fathers in stony faced denial, or not there to pull up a pew at all.

He knows what death is. Endless, remorseless. He knows people who keep checklists of regulars at bars and clubs, striking a line through them as they're put in the dirt. Every week, a funeral, every week an empty space somewhere.

But knowing him isn't knowing death at all. He pulls himself to his feet as if in protest at the very notion. If sitting around makes him look like an invalid then he'll stand 'til he shakes. Fuck death. As long as he can run he's not making plans for that.]

It's a funny thing. Somebody tells you you're terminal and you've barely straightened up from that sledgehammer to the face before - wham - you realize you've never felt as alive as you do right now. Remember taking tests, when you wrote three times as fast in the last ten minutes? That's how my mind wants to live, now. If my body could only keep up with it I'd be a wreck.

[He grins a little, at the irony. It's a cruel kind: give him this urge to live and whip his strength and safety out from under him at the same time. Give him a craving for human contact like nothing he's ever known (and he's always been a touchy little creature, the elevator can attest) right when people are at their most afraid of touching him - of hurting him or hurting themselves. Mother Nature's a malicious bitch.]

The point is, if it bothers you, I'd rather lose a place to stay than a friend. Though if the queer thing's going to be a problem, well.

[With timing precise to when Richie's got his hands too full to protect himself, Prior tosses that shirt straight at his face.] Put this on, for pity's sake. I don't know how I've controlled myself so long.

[It's a ridiculous move, and it isn't. There's still a tension about all this not quite resolved, so why not prod it with a stick and watch whether it snaps or tickles.]

[All right, so he'd been patronizing. Richie lets his lips purse while his his back is turned and his head is stuck in the cupboard, but the flicker of irritation is granted no voice. It's silly. He's trying to say he understands but it's never with the right words. Prior tells as much him with that vivaciously cutting tongue of his, painting him all the more a fool.

If you're so adept at missing the point maybe he'd be better off without you after all.

Petulant thoughts. Self serving too, they exist because he's bruised and guilty and still some irrational sect of his brain wants to protest that nothing is his fault. He dispels them, then they whip back in after he chucks them out on a boomerang arc, swish swish swoosh.

He doesn't interject. Prior rises as he monologues, Richie makes him a drink. Clinking and a double shot, lime, mix. He doesn't have the spread of full liqueurs or spirits at every price point to truly pamper it up, but he makes due.

Then when he turns to pass it off his own shirt slaps him in the face. He jolts and the drink sloshes, losing a good ounce to the kitchen tile and slobbering over his knuckles. The shirt rumples to the ground and soaks it up on impact.

Well then.]

What? Don't you like the view?

[Jokes. He's no Adonis, and humor in poor taste is his specialty. Richie passes off the drink, puts down the bottle he'd been topping it off with and scoffs as he rescues his shirt. He shakes it out. The wet spot is broad and interspersed with dry streaks where wrinkles had kept patches out of reach.] Tsk tsk, looks like my only shirt is ruined and I'll have to keep flexing pecs at you all evening.

[Yet he makes for his room, snagging the first thing he finds off the rack and tosses the cast off into the hamper. He's buttoning his new pick as he emerges.]

Look, I'm saying I fucked up. I get that, I can see it, but I also don't know all the particulars. I don't want either to be a problem, Pry. I don't want to make you feel like a pariah. [He goes for his own bourbon. The couch remains untouched. You bet there's lingering tension. He's gone up and down and all around, felt like both a woeful hound dog and a snapping rottweiler in the span of mere minutes, and that livewire buzz hasn't dissipated yet. There's still a high chance this could go tits up before the night is over.

He grimaces. Shame reads plain in him. He takes an uneasy lean against the side of the fridge not more than four feet from Prior.]

Yeah, sure, I wiped my mouth after you kissed me. As far as I know — knew — it was better safe than sorry. I was told spit was chancy. I should have asked you instead of going off second hand bullshit, and I should have trusted that you wouldn't be so stupid as to risk infecting me.

[He swirls his drink. The cubes of ice have disintegrated to pebbles. Watery slosh, paler amber than he usually likes. Richie takes a drink anyway. He needs a bit of steel to push through.]

As for...God help me, how am I supposed to keep from crossing lines if I don't know where they're drawn? I am afraid, I admit it. I keep fucking it up. Look at what happened when you went all baby faced on me. Look at what happened with Byerly! I'd hate to do that all over again. We might have been friends, him and I. [No, no. Richie chuckles sourly.] All right, friendlier. But I'd stood under that hexed mistletoe at the Gala and I suppose whatever I'd said and done before that, he thought that me planting one on him wasn't out of character. From there on out everything was a forest fire and I had nothing but a half-empty pasta pot to fight it with. I've thought about it. With you, I shouldn't have bought the shoes or tried to shepherd you back to our place, but with him? I don't know. I can't think of anything I'd done or said that I wouldn't with a regular pal.

And then you go the other way around, and I'm standing off enough that you're thinking the notion makes my skin scrawl.

[He stops. Mouth twisting and a head dipping left to right. Much like it had upstairs, speaking of the murders in carefully measured words while the killer lay around the bed. He's never spoken aloud about that night. None knew, save this unholy trinity of basket cases. The thought of articulating all his misgivings is giving him palpitations that would send paramedics in a tizzy.

Richie takes another drink. He can't feel the wash of bliss, it's too weak and it's his first drink of the night. No shelter there. The booze even showcases the baby tremors rocking his hands as he circles that cataclysmic point. Traitorous slop.]

I can't say I feel a pull to try it again. It was a very...very strange time. My memory's patchy, Pry, we'd taken a lot in a very short time, and neither one of us was in fighting shape so the buzz hit quick as a whip. But I know part of it was this— [His hand rises, flexes to knead a surly ball of who-knows-what out of the static air between them. The gesture turns to a flippant toss, who-even-fucking-knows.] —need of sorts. To choose something. To make a swerve off the freeway and go kick up dust in the Arizona off-roads. Everything was out of my power and I didn't know what to make of what I remembered when I was gone. I was stuck and they wouldn't let me go. Not even death could do me part. I wanted to cut my brain out and put it on ice. I didn't expect he'd offer, I thought the bridge was all but burned to crisps and cinders, but he did and I guess I...

[Guess you what? There were leading questions, he remembers that. Oh, why are you afraid? Are you sure you wouldn't enjoy it? Good little boy too afraid to break the rules.

That's not enough to goad someone into abandoning women. The wrongness of man to man has been threaded deep in every facet of his living from 1948 to 1985. Even if he'd grown to see the people behind the propaganda trying to bury them, venturing to bat for the other team is not so much a leap as it is a flight from LAX to Waikiki. So why had Richie bought the ticket?]

...I mean, I don't look at a fellow now and catch myself checking his ass. I don't know what to think. It was a mess from start to finish, and I didn't come out any more enlightened than I was going in. I even passed out in the street not two days after, courtesy of a different pack of pills. It's wrapped up in that mess with the needles and the wipe out and the godless kick-back from the grave, and it's rooted in the way we chilluns was raised. I can't work out what to untangle or whether to toss it in the trash and forget it ever happened.

[Well. If Prior thought he'd spoken too long, Richie comes back with a full radio serial of a reply. It sounds like him, too, none of the usual cast of characters and stolen turns of phrase that let the man beat a hasty retreat behind his own red curtain, communicating with the room via the boom of a microphone that makes him sound twice the man he is.

Prior almost thinks its done when Richie goes for a new shirt. Maybe tossing the first one at him had been a bad move, too much of an attempt to be playful when nobody's playing here. But Richie doesn't growl over it. Doesn't laugh, either. Just tries to roll some of the tension off his shoulders, and when he comes back some dam's giving at the seams and all these fears and regrets, backtracks and should haves come out like the proverbial flood.

Prior's left with his fingertips pressing circles into the moisture round the edge of a glass, just listening. Here and there he takes a breath as if he might interject something, but a breath's too long - the chance is gone.

He can't say he follows half of it. Byerly. Mistletoe? Pasta pots and who the fuck knows what, but it all keeps skimming around to a couple of points. He was fucked up.

He's still fucked up.

Sometimes Prior forgets that Richie died in that godforsaken hole that left its rainbow track marks in his skin. Died. The term loses its impact when someone comes back pristine, three days later. If there was just one like Richie he'd have a cult built around him now, they'd be calling out miracles from his tears and kissing his hands. But there are plenty who've been knocked down and got back up now, a couple more than once, and death's starting to feel like nothing more than the jail square on a monopoly board: most people win a get-out card in the end.

Prior's even wondered if that might be his cure. Maybe dying's the only way to kill the parasite hitching in his blood. Maybe he could come back pristine too.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be worse. Maybe he wouldn't wake at all. For a prophet, he's lacking enough insight to take the leap. Instead he takes the Tom Collins Richie's mixed him, crosses the four feet between the two of them, and sleight-of-hand switches it out with the empty glass in Richie's hand. Raises his eyebrows. Smiles. Take a fucking drink for fucks sake and breathe.

Prior doesn't cut in a response right away. He considers first.]

So you're saying you took it up the ass [Wait, wait, give him a moment here, he's a step ahead and interrupting himself with a light protest of] Or wherever - and you didn't hear a hallelujah chorus or get dragged into the eternal flames? Well I guess you found the secret my people have been keeping all this time: its not that big a deal.

[He's not lecturing. This is sympathy doused in a sardonic twist of something sharper, to keep it from seeming too soft.]

They're just bodies. It's just sex. We all feel good the same way, and if it weren't for the centuries of guilt people managed to work into the process I can't imagine anyone would care who fucks who. So stop torturing yourself over where you found some release.

[Over why it happened with Byerly, of all people, as if there needed to be some magic involved when it came to laying him. Like sleeping with someone he thought might hate him wasn't a self-flagellator's dream. Or over a teenager with all that entails getting the wrong impression.

It's stupid, but Prior kind of wants to reach out a hand to one of Richie's. Find a pulse point and smooth his thumb over it. Soothe the ways he knows how, with touches and

And maybe that thing from before hasn't quite shaken out of his head, that's all.

Still, he finds himself reaching anyway, holding back enough that he's just taken the sleeve of Richie's shirt and smoothed the fabric, instead.]

I understand the urge. The panic. Panicking when the world gets tumbled over, or you look in the mirror and don't quite see yourself anymore's the kind of uselessly impractical response to crisis that makes us human. And when both those things come at once? Well, it doesn't make things easier.

[Whoever wrote the one about setting yourself on fire to keep another guy warm must have been thinking of Prior Walter. Richie had fixed him the damn drink and now he's pressing it into his palm like a baby bottle. Got to soothe Richie's screaming colic and stuff his own ire back down.

He still drinks it. The need is real. Another three shots down and he'll be whistling dixie.

Except the guy follows up with an offhand, "You took it up the ass." Five brusque words is all it takes to put a rose red bloom in Richie's ears and cheeks. If his confession had been curiously stripped of pizzazz, he rushes to make up for it now. Don Knotts does his bidding while Richie shakes his head and splits into a grin, wholly embarrassed.]

Golly, I'd remember if the party got that wacky, now wouldn't I?

[Not that he isn't taking the words to heart. Richie stills, eyes locked to Prior's with a dreadful stiffness, earnest and guarded and bleeding open from a fresh picked scab all at once.

It's exactly as he dubs it for any other person. No big deal. And it isn't, nohow, yet spinning that around and putting it back on himself seems a task insurmountable. Time is the key, he thinks as his mouth dries out all over again. You've spat it out and now it won't have to fester in there all lonesome, so you can get used to it. Just like anything else old boy, this is no different than putting up with the pegasus and the time warps and the malleable mortality.

It still feels like cold comfort to him.

Their closeness tugs like magnets on the brink of linking. Prior goes for his sleeve. The electric sparks the spooks left in their wake is potent enough to raise tingles even now. A split second is lost to a flicking glance at Prior's lips.

It hadn't been a trial to kiss him. Hold him, thrust the button of his jeans open.

For God's sake, if he doesn't stop turning every man's touch to mythology he's going to need six shrinks and a thousand volts to screw his head back on straight. Richie just reaches up and grips his wrist. Not prying. Reassuring. A squeeze of solidarity and nothing more, lingering until Pry sees fit to shake him loose.

His gut flips around like a ornery walrus, all bloat and heated nerves. He'd said so much on the subject and now he doesn't want to deal with it any longer.]

Really made a snatch for your thunder, didn't I? Turned it all back around and now you're patting my poor ass. It's gonna be okay ya big baby. [He laughs, nose crinkled up at the bridge and batting back the wet rims of his eyes. He's still shook up like a martini.

The sound dries up, slow and soft as disappearing dew. The smile stays on. It's just meek, an ill match for the steady voice he pulls to ask:]

So you will stay?

[Please.]

Edited 2018-09-23 07:13 (UTC)

[He's not setting himself on fire for anybody. The drink would have burned in his stomach anyway and for little notable effect. If Prior wants a chemical calm to his nerves these days he inhales it - it does neater work at easing all manner of aches.

Prior hadn't sugared the pill, because somebody needed to say it. Though graphic and probably inaccurate in its specifics, the alternative: tiptoeing around the words of it, laid what was a miserable, needy little fuck into a sepulcher, something a little sacrosanct, a little scary, the kind of monolith around which one is encouraged to whisper. And Prior's never been much of a fan of that. Irreverence is what's required in the face of fear. It's been the key to survival for a whole queer community, so it'll do for someone who's barely dipped a toe into the pool.

And if it sets Richie on fire a little (there's something helplessly endearing about a person who flushes to the tips of his ears), then he deserves that, at least.

Prior draws in a little breath as Richie catches his wrist - loud enough to betray him. It's not just their recent bedfellows that distract his focus. He can remember, too, bumping up against Richie's shoulder (a shoebox under one arm) and studying his profile in secret, finding enough to be pleased with in the quirks of his features, the knots of his wrists. He's looked, before. That first video connection. Dark mussy curls and those glasses he'd had for a brief while.

And he's asking if he'll stay and it sounds like it matters, and Prior dips his head so the answer won't be read from his face.

He slips his arm free.]

Well I don't know that I see the point.

[It sounds chilly, but there's a wry little smile working its way across his mouth, if Richie looks below the spill of his hair enough to see. The hint of it has crept into his voice as he goes on.]

Now that you've told me I won't get anymore shoes out of the arrangement.

[He'd have to be deaf, dumb, and some thirty blocks away to miss a gasp like that. Oh sure, it'd be lost by sound alone if he backed up any more than ten feet. What hones him in are the thin tethers that still tie them together, remnants of the torrential yearning their dearly departed painted them with. The strain of this conversation and its murky matters, all their tender spots cattle-prodded into searing blights. It's the seedy question still lingering over Richie's head — and he guesses Prior's too — that turns microscopic sound and movement into an IMAX experience.

It's too soon, he thinks quickly. It's the jitters left behind by the ghosts and what they'd done to them, done with their bodies. He can't fault Prior for that, can't fault himself for how he stops breathing in turn, shutting off air as Prior sucks it in too strongly.

Prior pulls loose. His head dips away, and for a second Richie's ripping in two. He'd said he wouldn't fight it before but now he knows he'd tape his knuckles and bolt the door if the other man packed his bags. So many people are gone, and he'd never say it aloud but there are times when he's sure that this one, this man is the last straw.

But maybe there's mercy left in the cosmos yet.

Richie is silent.

Then he's a bolt of lightning shackled in man's flimsy skin. He latches onto Prior's shoulders, even with one hand still cupping the glass. The ice clacks against the sides but he'd taken a good slurp before, and so it fails to spill.]

Shoes? Shoes?! By gum, I'll get you shoes! What do you need? Galoshes? Loafers? Moccasins? Ruby slippers? Glass ones? I'll call the Wicked Witches of the East and West, I'll raise Salvatore Ferragamo from the dead for you! Son, I'll get you shoes! You'll be so clodhoppered up you'll forget you even had other limbs to begin with! I swears it, I say! On me mother's grave, I do!

Edited (shoe history) 2018-10-07 01:46 (UTC)

Oh, no more raising from the dead, please, there's been enough of that for one night.

[The full, playful affectation's back in Prior's voice, a sign at least that if he's not quite recovered he's doing well enough to fake it. And it's unfair really, how easily Richie makes him laugh when by all rights one or both of them should still be in the blank staring phase of the evening, perhaps a precursor to slammed doors and anger stirred under the ice of a whiskey glass.

Not to say Prior won't slip out later to catch some time to process this alone. There's an atmosphere here that's wrapped round his shoulders like a mink stole, but he couldn't say if it's a lingering tie to the spirit world, or the physical aftereffects that still feel tangible on his skin (his mouth was here, and fingertips dragged there, and lower, and lower). Or if it's just that the longing he stuffs down day by day's been unpacked and it'll take him a while to seal the box back up and be able to carry it around less precariously again.

Or, maybe, it's the quick stick shift from all that to being looked at like the short straw drawn from a sweaty palm: the least wanted prize at the tombola. For all the crinkle at the corner of Richie's eyes now, it'll take a while to look at him and not be able to picture that.

But look long enough and it eases away. There's a pinch of humor at the corner of Prior's mouth as he tilts his head back up.]

But galoshes, well sweet merciful heaven, never let it be said that you don't know what a lady wants. Gumboots if we're feeling fancy. [He sets a palm lightly over the scaffolding of Richie's collarbone. Tell your piteous heart there's no harm done.] I'll stay, no bribery needed. Though gifts, of course, can't be included in the category.

John doesn't really know why he agreed to this, but he's glad on some level he'll at least have Richie with him because Richie is better at the quick-talking bit. John can punch anyone who needs punching, but talking? To people? Small talk? Bluffing?

Technically, he can do that but that doesn't mean he's the best person for it. He can do intimidation bluffing, but not the kind that gets you left alone and forgotten.

In an attempt to continue to blend in and not be noticed, John is waiting outside Shades Darker for his supposed partner in crime dressed in his best attempt at 'being a local'. His gun is hidden under the jacket he's wearing, because it has a stun setting and he has this feeling (no idea why, surely pure paranoia) that he might end up needing to stun somewhere before the day is out. Whatever it is they're collecting and bringing back into Olympia, they're seemingly doing so in a way that avoids legal ramifications and that is sure to mean they're going to encounter friendly folk who like to calmly discuss things with weapons drawn.

When the door opens a gun and he spots a familiar thin figure topped by dark hair John does his best attempt at a faux John Wayne drawl. It isn't even 20% as good as Richie's:

"Hey, pard-ner."

Points for effort at least, surely?

Edited (oh apparently the quest is called this) 2018-09-25 15:51 (UTC)

Conversely, Richie feels twice as good about slipping back into business if he's got back up on his heels. John's got a reliable track record as a bouncer, tossing out mooks and upstarts without taking too much shit in blow back. And let's not forget — when it comes to the refugees, if they didn't whip out wands and guns on first meeting they were holding out for later. John's cagey for a guy who's already copped to an Air Force education, and that machine talk seems like the tip of some hulking iceberg.

If there's trouble, Richie's in good hands. Probably.

Richie himself has made similar efforts to dress appropriately. Nothing flashy or foreign about it, good American boy begone. For his own peace of mind he's eschewed firearms. He's more likely to shoot his eye out than clip the broad side of a barn. The merits of a pig-sticker sounded mighty good, so he left the apartment with a kitchen knife slid into his belt. Then he'd doubled back and put it away, the weight of it dragging him down like an anvil. On his first week planet-side he'd stabbed a sea serpent to death, blind with panic and going ham with a sharpened oar. Even that feat had been accomplished solely because the work on the beast was half done and it was pinned in place. He had barely kept from puking up in front of the kid sailing with him.

His lips thin as he puts tucks the knife back in the drawer, knowing full well that said kid would say to keep the blade no matter how messy he was with it. Richie had died slung over his shoulder months later, perhaps an indirect result of his lack of vigilance.

Still he comes empty handed. He's not a fighter, never has been, and now he's feeling superstitious about coming by overly prepped. Almost like bringing a weapon was begging for a bruising. He has other strengths to boast of.

John's trying out one of them right now. Richie halts up, bewildered.

"Who's that supposed to be? Your mom?" No points at all, sorry pal. Here's a proper John Wayne for you. "Put it back where you found it, Pilgrim, you're gonna cause a lot of trouble talking hooey like that."

Well, fine. It wasn't a competition, Richie, but he supposes you'd win if it was.

"My mother's voice was not nearly that deep," John protests, and pushes away from the wall he was propping up. "But I'll leave the accents to you. We ready to roll or do you need to pick anything up?"

You know, supplies. A drink. A bribe. Whatever else it is you might need for a smuggling operation that John hasn't though of. He has a bag loosely slung around himself, but a large part of that is so people will be more interested in the bag than the gun under his jacket. There's barely anything in it aside from some water and a snack. Don't keep things you'd care about losing in a bag you carry, kids.

ALL MATTERS ARE COMPETITION and he loses in every single category save for this one. Pity him, think of all the times he spent being a loser practicing his Don Corleone in the mirror instead of doing literally anything else.

"I'm ready. I prefer doing this kind of shit with light pockets anyhow. Especially when we're hauling all of Santa's goodies on the way back." He hails down a cab, horse and buggy edition because Olympia was good enough for electric lights and prescription contacts (sitting on his eyeballs now, so he could leave his ghastly specs in the bedside drawer where they belonged) but it had yet to embrace the automobile. Richie suspects that the new exposure to Nadril might change that, but progress takes time.

For now he must find something endearing about the ride. It's a closed carriage, thank fuck. When you're hitching it sleigh style and the horse grazed a bad batch of hay you paid the price for it the whole ride through, basking in the luxury of a personal methane cloud until you were close to tears.

Besides, they need a touch of privacy about this work. He tells the driver to pitch them at a spot none too far from their connection, slips him coins and shuffles into his seat. Easy peasy.

"Did they tell you anything more specific about what we're buying?"

Taking a cab, Richie? What luxury! John normally walks everywhere, since that's basically what he did during his day job. Hours and hours of walking, sometimes, while all the other kids bickered over if they were going the right way or not. Then sometimes there was the shooting at the end of it. Oh, what fun they had.

"I think the idea is we stay blissfully ignorant, for our own good as much as anything else."

Can mess up a lie if 'I don't know' is the truth, after all! Still, John's reasonably creative imagination can supply a few possibilities considering who they're buying for.

"We could guess," he offers lightly, "or put a wager on it."

When you've lived as a soft city boy with loads of money for how many years, the concept of hiking when there's a ride ready and waiting seems like sheer lunacy. Maybe once the whole city structure is razed for good Richie will embrace wilderness and rugged sporting like the next guy. For now? Sit your butt down on some cushion and let the horses do the trotting.

He's sliding the carriage windows shut as John makes his case, trusting in what little privacy lived in the thin canvas and fragile glass. God willing the cabbie wasn't some radical. "Blissful ignorance sounds like a great way to trip a curse on an antique dildo."

His guess for the wild supplies. John is speaking his language as usual, which is often why he looks forward to shifts when their hours coincide. They're tethered to their posts but both make time to shoot shit and talk Earth and music. What better boon can he ask for?

"A wager, eh?" Richie lights up with a satyr's delight. "What are you putting down? I'll say it's...hum..." He leans his head back, finger tapping on the armrest. "Space ecstacy. Probably some blend. What's your guess?"

Space Ecstasy? John lofts his eyebrows at that, then frowns in deep thought.

What would be valuable enough to someone that they'd smuggle it in? Someone who runs a brothel, specifically? It's gotta be something to help people have a good time, right?

"A round of drinks says it's some sort of aphrodisiac," he says finally, "get people in the mood to front money for a private room for longer."

You know, to have a lengthy and enthusiastic good time involving an extremely expensive bill.

"Either that or smuggled dragon-bone dildos."

Is dragon bone illegal? Who knows, but if it isn't it probably should be after the last dragon-related body part incident. Wyverns were one thing, big dragons entirely another.

"Bone dildos?" He barks out a laugh through his wince. "Jesus come please us, I pity the son of a bitch on the pushing end of that. Deal, though. I see your round of drinks and I'll throw in two ounces of green for good measure."

He reaches out to give a sporting shake. "We have an accord."

The ride is long enough. They make idle chatter for the bulk of it and Richie opts to tip the driver when they've reached the prudent limits of horse travel. Discretion is key too, considering their dark purposes. Dranbu's outskirts weren't far, and neither was the outpost they were marked to meet their traders at.

"You good to hoof it from here on out? Army kid you are, I bet this'll be a cake-walk for you."

"Well I wouldn't want you to hurt your feet, think you can make it that far in those stilettos?"

He shoots Richie an idly amused loft of his eyebrows, then scans the area before turning to begin walking.

"I'm Air Force, not Army. We're the prettier, more generally annoying ones."

This is important, Richie! You're offending Army folk with that kind of mix-up. Not really John, though, who despite his mildly chiding tone doesn't seem especially bothered.

"I've done a lot of walking, though, my day job used to involve a lot of reconnaissance."

"You're right, I should have gone for a sensible pair of pumps. How foolish of me."

Excuuuuuse him! Richie playacts the recoil. "Is this the prettier option? I'm glad I stayed in radio." He thrusts his hands in his pockets, keeping pace with ease. For the moment. Maybe once the going gets rough or the hours wear long his smoker's lungs will catch up to him. "Recon. You know, it's a touch worrying to know there was some new tiff waiting for us in the next two decades. Did it have anything to do with your..." He waggles his fingers in an abstract, unsure how to mime what he'd done on Thesa. "Techno-babble?"

Techno-babble. John scrunches up his face at that, shooting Richie a sideways look.

"In a manner of speaking. It's what got me assigned into it all, I guess. Nothing to do with my good looks and charming personality, everything to do with my ability to make stuff light up."

Nothing to do with his record, either, which is abysmal -- but let's not talk about that right now. Let's re-focus, shall we?

"My techno-babble isn't going to keep you safe if this goes south. We need a solid plan."

One that both of the know, and one that -- preferably -- both of them stick to if it comes to it.

"I can see it would be a crucial skill," he remarks drolly. But really, he can't help his curiosity. There were the people that where all flash and sparkle, so big in their strangeness that it superseded logic and at times, most of his interest. There was a point where your eyes just glazed over. Can you blame him?

But what John did was too close to flying under the radar, yet so radically not. That's a fascinating juxtaposition.

Richie stops up at once, snatching John by the sleeve. "What?! No! I was counting on it! I thought our contacts were all robots! Oh god — we have to go back at once!" He polishes the panic with a good shake.

Then he's all pearly whites, grinning wide. "Ain't that still your expertise, buddy ol' pal? I'm just a regular joe with a free afternoon. Are you packing heat?"

Is he packing heat? John squints sideways at Richie and lofts an eyebrow.

"Yes," he allows, "I am packing heat. So what's your angle, you just dive behind cover at the first sign of danger?"

Since this is his area of expertise, apparently? Which John assumes means he will be handling anything that happens, and Richie will be leaving him to it. Which is... fine, honestly, John is pretty used to that kind of thing. He just needs to be clear on what to expect.

He relents on the sleeve, shrugging airily.

"I'm more of an improviser, truth be told. And if shit isn't hitting the fan I'd say I'm a fair negotiator. Good distraction, done pretty well at picking brains for details. I didn't flirt with much danger before landing on Nysa I'm afraid. So I'm still finding my stride." He thrusts his hands into his pockets. "Besides, I'd be a bigger pain in the ass if I tried to compensate. You'd have better odds sticking your head in an alligator's mouth than giving me a pistol. I can't aim for shit, never have and probably never will.

"That said, I've made due until now. I won't leave you hanging. I've outdone monsters and bandits already, what's one more smuggler?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And if you don't love me now (Closed)

Prior Walter - Slight NSFW

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CW: AIDS panic/stigma, internalised homophobia from here on out. Gotta love the 80s

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OLYMPIA; SHADES LIGHTER QUEST

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if you wanted to abandon this for greener pastures i understand, sorry dude

You're safe with me friend

u da best

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