[ it’s harder for bob to identify the distinct aspects of armand’s reaction, but he follows the rhythm of it, like tiny blips and a singular spike on his heart monitor. the image imprinted on the backs of eyelids, when he closes them now. the pattern steadies as armand solidifies around him. instinctively, trustingly, bob leans into him in turn. he folds a hand over armand’s bicep, fingers sliding to feel the tendons in his wrist. the other reaches backwards to skim his curls. as real as everything else in this room.
so i rush to your side, huh. ]
You just saw me.
[ with the rumble in his voice that comes from bottled laughter. said even though he knows he felt it, thought it, shared it first. when was the last time he wanted something and got it? he can’t remember. ]
— I like what you’ve done with the place.
[ is what he says at the same time he thinks, nobody ever comes here. the light never clicks on, no matter how many times he twists the knob. there’s never music, in place of seething whispers or shouted warnings. he sways a little, with the music — with armand. ]
[ It's a dream or a memory made tangible, both more and less than reality, an art that Armand doesn't get to practice often. But something can't be made out of nothing, skeins of thought and imagination from both of their minds knitted together. Somewhat be more of Bob than of himself, in this case. ]
It's yours. I only embellished it.
[ He says it matter-of-factly, cheek against the side of Bob's head as they move together, side to side, to the slow melody. His hand moves idly, stroking up and down Bob's belly, enjoying the shape of him.
His gaze wanders over the wallpaper, the wooden eaves. ]
Where are we?
[ He could go and look, could open that door, but he wants to hear it from him. ]
[ another unfamiliar intimacy, this dance. these tender touches. the press of armand top-to-toe, cheek-to-cheek.
at the blurred edges of the space: stacks of books, blankets, a rubik’s cube he managed to solve. ]
Mm. [ he drops his lifted arm, instead following the line of armand’s to his middle. his gaze chases the motion and walks past it, down to the wooden slats that gap ever so slightly. enough to glimpse the mundanity of the empty living room and kitchen below. ] It’s my house in Sarasota Springs. My parents’ house.
[ which is funny-sad in and of itself, right, when he ought to have moved well past this place. thirty-odd and still upright, instead of dead in a ditch like he — like oxe — figured. the age at which one gets over these things, perhaps, and shuts the door on them evermore. ]
But it’s not just that. [ he pushes through the thickness in his voice, his throat. ] It’s — the least worst room of all the rooms you can get in here. [ not the house, but his head. a place where the door behind them doesn’t always lead to the squeaky topmost step he so dreaded creeping over. sometimes, the threshold opens on the principal’s office at his high school. the miami gas station bathroom where he thought he was going to die. the laboratory that he tells the others he barely remembers. ]
[ simply, ] I’d hide up here a lot. [ when he really needed to, and sometimes when he didn’t, just in case. it was hard to know when he would be damned for doing something as often as he was for not doing it. ] Still do, I guess.
[ The memory-space firms around them the more Bob concentrates on it, taking on fine details. Scattered belongings, dust motes turning in a column of light in their own stately dance. The faint ghosts of parental arguments, fried onions and meatloaf dinners.
Armand turns his head to nose over Bob's ear, letting his voice and his memories move around them as they move within it. He spreads his fingers a little, inviting Bob's into the gaps between, so their hands are joined over his sternum. Protective. His hold tightens a little.
He understands. He has his own rooms, his own labyrinthine memories spiralling down into the darkness. Most of them bad, some of them worse.
From the speakers, the Platters fade into Édith Piaf singing 'Hymne A L’Amour'. ]
You were afraid. [ Armand says it softly, without judgement. Fear is a state of being, a natural reaction to the violent world around them, and to the violent things that they are. He loosens his arms, letting go of Bob enough to encourage him to turn around within his embrace so he can look at him, studying him carefully. He's dressed simply, in an old fashioned style.
Gently, he drapes his arms over Bob's shoulders. ]
[ it’s easier with armand. the light and the warmth in the space come from his presence, not bob’s. here, his dead hands aren’t cold — not when bob thinks of them as a balm, marvelling at how his fingers slot into place between armand’s own. ]
Yeah.
[ bob looses a soft sound and squeezes back. no denial of it, when he would describe himself as so fucking scared or numb or stupid-angry enough to fight back and make things worse. an endless loop.
not so, with the addition of an untempered variable. given space, bob turns, head ducked out of habit, the romeo cut of his hair falling in his face. dressed in dark corduroys and a burgundy jumper, too big even for the broad set of his shoulders. a mimicry of the hand-me-downs he would wear, if he were in this time and place. as he lifts his gaze, he notes the classical silhouette armand takes (like the music that must be his, too). his hands hover, confused and out-of-place until armand takes his shoulders. right. a step closer, and bob loops both hands around his waist, fingers interlocked at the small of his back. shy, maybe, but not afraid. ]
Most people just say “that sucks, man.”
[ but then, they don’t have armand’s curiosity or intensity, carrying them deeper in the quagmire. in any case, bob knows his answer immediately. ]
Myself. [ even when it’s reynolds senior out there, it’s still bob. he glances sideways. ] You miss old music, Armand?
[ when armand is older still than these melodies. ]
[ Armand hums thoughtfully, resuming their swaying dance, like two teenagers in a gymnasium on a Friday night. As Bob glances away, his gaze lingers, an artist's eye taking loving note over and over of the details: the angle of his jaw and nose; the fine, thick sweep of his eyelashes; the faint lines of tension around his eyes which will deepen with age. ]
I miss the old world, sometimes. [ He lifts a hand from where they're loosely tangled behind Bob's head, stroking over his nape and into his curls, watching his expression. ] The quiet. The darkness of a night unblemished by sodium bulbs. Skies which had never known jet engines. Watching the ships arrive in harbour, not knowing what they might contain, where they might have been. The discoveries in science and art and philosophy, each waking up the world anew. A sense of wonder and excitement. It's still like that, a little, but it's.. noisier, now. Even the quiet places are full of chatter.
[ He pauses briefly, then continues. ]
I grew up in Venice, in the 1500's. I remember more of it now than I once did. How it felt to be a young man, in that time. To have freedom of a kind. I loved to go out drinking and gambling, to cause my Master to worry about me, only to be glad when he discovered my mischief. [ A smile, somewhat distant, over those memories. ] I would go to the great cathedrals and spent hours gazing upon the faces of the icons, the saints and the angels. I wanted to know what they saw. How they could gaze upon us in such beauty and calm. What it would be like to be one of them, cast in eternal beauty.
[ bob nods first, at the acknowledgement of missing what came before. it must be a lonely kind of nostalgia, when no other remembers all you do. armand himself seems out-of-time, with the voice and bearing of an actor in a film he’d surely never recognise. do they make people like this anymore?
his lashes flutter, when armand drags nails from his nape to his curls. ultimately, bob can’t help but look back to him as he talks, drawn in by his strange rhythms. the turns of phrase that would make him hold his place in a novel, committing the shape and structure of the page to memory. maybe you have to learn to tell your stories, when no other can. and so bob tries to catch the details that might matter later in the book. the weight of modernity. freedom of a kind. a master. the seeds of the religious interest armand retains, if those who testified against him are to be believed.
even so, he finds he relates to pieces of it. the noise that drives him inward. here. an attic in the suburbs, where you can still hear the cicadas and the lovebugs at night, or venture into the true dark of the neighbouring green to see the fireflies. there’s the loneliness, too, and the dream of being more that still haunts him. ]
The 1500s. [ blowing out a breath. the library must have good books on the subject, and he makes a mental note to pull them next time. ] I haven’t even been to regular Venice. [ meaning “modern.” his family didn’t really travel abroad, even if he managed to by his lonesome eventually. mostly southeast asia. though he also inter-railed through europe for a spell. places where a little cash and a backpack are enough. ]
It sounds nice, in some ways. [ the quiet and wonder, especially. ] And a little lonely. [ both life in a crowded city and the exalted role of the icons, above others. ] Is it?
[ it would have been for him, if he’d accepted val’s first offer to play the golden god. ]
[ With so little space between their minds, it's easy to pick up on the turn of Bob's thoughts. Armand smiles fondly at his notion of doing research, fingers still gently carding through his curls, alternately rubbing his thumb lightly up and down the back of his neck. Édith Piaf has turned back into The Platters, now singing 'Only You'. ]
Yes.
[ Agreement with his words and the thoughts in him, the notion of allowing oneself to be used for a great cause. He remembers a wooden throne above a burning pyre, the moans of his poor doomed coven as he dispatched another heretic on their behalf. He remembers watching Marius one night before he was turned, happening upon him on a balcony during a celebration for one of his patrons, a rare moment of catching his Master lost in private thought as he gazed out at the city. How terrible and beautiful and alien he'd looked, a creature from another age.
Outside, the light shifts, the sun glowing in the windows of the attic taking on a different hue. From somewhere comes the raucous cries of gulls and the ringing of bells that's also somehow the hush-hush of traffic on a rainy day. A faint voice singing in Italian. Swaying into it, into the memories and the music, Armand closes his eyes.
Footsteps thumping up the stairs. An argument outside the door, men's voices raised in different languages. The light from the lamp shudders. A woman's drunken laugh --
Armand opens his eyes. The room settles back to how it was. He lets out a breath. ]
[ maybe he could have been the type of boy you picked up at the door or danced with at homecoming before the accident — before the drip, drip, drip into his veins, the first thing to ever make him feel better — but that isn’t his story. or it wasn’t, until the thunderbolts found him. until he awoke in this place. or in armand’s arms.
bob has always given more of himself than asked. than wanted, sometimes. but this is a two-way street, information and sentiment flowing back from armand. an intentional allowance, he assumes, from one in greater control of his power.
his eyes flit around them as the light shifts. as armand’s world bleeds into his own, lightening the floorboards and altering the soundscape. bob unlocks his hands to splay them at the small of armand’s back, pressing him closer. safer. here or wherever they are. attention back to armand in the end, as if pulled by a string. drawn in by the sweep of ink-dark eyelashes. the flash of firelit eyes, in the dim of the room. ]
Me, too.
[ in the matter of loneliness, perhaps, or the need to be set apart, despite that. on armand’s exhale, bob noses over the apple of his cheek. a check-in, of sorts, before he goes for the kiss. ]
[ A memory of a kiss, or a wish for one, but it feels as real as it can in this place. Armand closes his eyes again, gladly, as Bob's mouth meets his. His arms tighten around him, snugged in close, lips parting as he lets out a shallow breath into the kiss, a sigh of release. Safe. Wanted.
Me, too. Understanding like hands on him, holding him, pressing together the parts of himself he doesn't understand. The shadow and the boy that looks at him in worshipful pleasure. A boy who hides in an attic and will dance with him. ]
Bobby. [ A soft noise between them. He kisses him again, then again, pressed into the corner of Bob's mouth. ] I'll come to you. Outside. Help you with your bow ties.
[ I'll stay, thinking it into the walls around them, into the glow of the lamp. I don't want to leave you. ]
[ in the room that isn’t a room (the memory that isn’t a memory), he feels armand give into his hold — into the moment they’ve built together. armand’s affection floods through every point of taction, into the very floor and air in the room. the fabric of its unreality ripples with it.
where he might normally hear the voices rise below them or a whisper from the darkest corner of the space, there’s only armand’s breath — an affectation? a habit? — and the gentle thrum of the record. ]
Outside. [ agreed warmly, against armand’s lips. trying to steal one last kiss for the road. ]
[ but for once, he feels assured. no doubt in his mind that armand will come find him and stay and be happier for it. it rings too clear, too true. all around him. so his answer comes, suffused with gratitude and appreciation. i know. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
so i rush to your side, huh. ]
You just saw me.
[ with the rumble in his voice that comes from bottled laughter. said even though he knows he felt it, thought it, shared it first. when was the last time he wanted something and got it? he can’t remember. ]
— I like what you’ve done with the place.
[ is what he says at the same time he thinks, nobody ever comes here. the light never clicks on, no matter how many times he twists the knob. there’s never music, in place of seething whispers or shouted warnings. he sways a little, with the music — with armand. ]
no subject
It's yours. I only embellished it.
[ He says it matter-of-factly, cheek against the side of Bob's head as they move together, side to side, to the slow melody. His hand moves idly, stroking up and down Bob's belly, enjoying the shape of him.
His gaze wanders over the wallpaper, the wooden eaves. ]
Where are we?
[ He could go and look, could open that door, but he wants to hear it from him. ]
cw refs to child abuse
at the blurred edges of the space: stacks of books, blankets, a rubik’s cube he managed to solve. ]
Mm. [ he drops his lifted arm, instead following the line of armand’s to his middle. his gaze chases the motion and walks past it, down to the wooden slats that gap ever so slightly. enough to glimpse the mundanity of the empty living room and kitchen below. ] It’s my house in Sarasota Springs. My parents’ house.
[ which is funny-sad in and of itself, right, when he ought to have moved well past this place. thirty-odd and still upright, instead of dead in a ditch like he — like oxe — figured. the age at which one gets over these things, perhaps, and shuts the door on them evermore. ]
But it’s not just that. [ he pushes through the thickness in his voice, his throat. ] It’s — the least worst room of all the rooms you can get in here. [ not the house, but his head. a place where the door behind them doesn’t always lead to the squeaky topmost step he so dreaded creeping over. sometimes, the threshold opens on the principal’s office at his high school. the miami gas station bathroom where he thought he was going to die. the laboratory that he tells the others he barely remembers. ]
[ simply, ] I’d hide up here a lot. [ when he really needed to, and sometimes when he didn’t, just in case. it was hard to know when he would be damned for doing something as often as he was for not doing it. ] Still do, I guess.
no subject
Armand turns his head to nose over Bob's ear, letting his voice and his memories move around them as they move within it. He spreads his fingers a little, inviting Bob's into the gaps between, so their hands are joined over his sternum. Protective. His hold tightens a little.
He understands. He has his own rooms, his own labyrinthine memories spiralling down into the darkness. Most of them bad, some of them worse.
From the speakers, the Platters fade into Édith Piaf singing 'Hymne A L’Amour'. ]
You were afraid. [ Armand says it softly, without judgement. Fear is a state of being, a natural reaction to the violent world around them, and to the violent things that they are. He loosens his arms, letting go of Bob enough to encourage him to turn around within his embrace so he can look at him, studying him carefully. He's dressed simply, in an old fashioned style.
Gently, he drapes his arms over Bob's shoulders. ]
Do you hide from them, or from yourself?
no subject
Yeah.
[ bob looses a soft sound and squeezes back. no denial of it, when he would describe himself as so fucking scared or numb or stupid-angry enough to fight back and make things worse. an endless loop.
not so, with the addition of an untempered variable. given space, bob turns, head ducked out of habit, the romeo cut of his hair falling in his face. dressed in dark corduroys and a burgundy jumper, too big even for the broad set of his shoulders. a mimicry of the hand-me-downs he would wear, if he were in this time and place. as he lifts his gaze, he notes the classical silhouette armand takes (like the music that must be his, too). his hands hover, confused and out-of-place until armand takes his shoulders. right. a step closer, and bob loops both hands around his waist, fingers interlocked at the small of his back. shy, maybe, but not afraid. ]
Most people just say “that sucks, man.”
[ but then, they don’t have armand’s curiosity or intensity, carrying them deeper in the quagmire. in any case, bob knows his answer immediately. ]
Myself. [ even when it’s reynolds senior out there, it’s still bob. he glances sideways. ] You miss old music, Armand?
[ when armand is older still than these melodies. ]
no subject
[ Armand hums thoughtfully, resuming their swaying dance, like two teenagers in a gymnasium on a Friday night. As Bob glances away, his gaze lingers, an artist's eye taking loving note over and over of the details: the angle of his jaw and nose; the fine, thick sweep of his eyelashes; the faint lines of tension around his eyes which will deepen with age. ]
I miss the old world, sometimes. [ He lifts a hand from where they're loosely tangled behind Bob's head, stroking over his nape and into his curls, watching his expression. ] The quiet. The darkness of a night unblemished by sodium bulbs. Skies which had never known jet engines. Watching the ships arrive in harbour, not knowing what they might contain, where they might have been. The discoveries in science and art and philosophy, each waking up the world anew. A sense of wonder and excitement. It's still like that, a little, but it's.. noisier, now. Even the quiet places are full of chatter.
[ He pauses briefly, then continues. ]
I grew up in Venice, in the 1500's. I remember more of it now than I once did. How it felt to be a young man, in that time. To have freedom of a kind. I loved to go out drinking and gambling, to cause my Master to worry about me, only to be glad when he discovered my mischief. [ A smile, somewhat distant, over those memories. ] I would go to the great cathedrals and spent hours gazing upon the faces of the icons, the saints and the angels. I wanted to know what they saw. How they could gaze upon us in such beauty and calm. What it would be like to be one of them, cast in eternal beauty.
no subject
his lashes flutter, when armand drags nails from his nape to his curls. ultimately, bob can’t help but look back to him as he talks, drawn in by his strange rhythms. the turns of phrase that would make him hold his place in a novel, committing the shape and structure of the page to memory. maybe you have to learn to tell your stories, when no other can. and so bob tries to catch the details that might matter later in the book. the weight of modernity. freedom of a kind. a master. the seeds of the religious interest armand retains, if those who testified against him are to be believed.
even so, he finds he relates to pieces of it. the noise that drives him inward. here. an attic in the suburbs, where you can still hear the cicadas and the lovebugs at night, or venture into the true dark of the neighbouring green to see the fireflies. there’s the loneliness, too, and the dream of being more that still haunts him. ]
The 1500s. [ blowing out a breath. the library must have good books on the subject, and he makes a mental note to pull them next time. ] I haven’t even been to regular Venice. [ meaning “modern.” his family didn’t really travel abroad, even if he managed to by his lonesome eventually. mostly southeast asia. though he also inter-railed through europe for a spell. places where a little cash and a backpack are enough. ]
It sounds nice, in some ways. [ the quiet and wonder, especially. ] And a little lonely. [ both life in a crowded city and the exalted role of the icons, above others. ] Is it?
[ it would have been for him, if he’d accepted val’s first offer to play the golden god. ]
no subject
Yes.
[ Agreement with his words and the thoughts in him, the notion of allowing oneself to be used for a great cause. He remembers a wooden throne above a burning pyre, the moans of his poor doomed coven as he dispatched another heretic on their behalf. He remembers watching Marius one night before he was turned, happening upon him on a balcony during a celebration for one of his patrons, a rare moment of catching his Master lost in private thought as he gazed out at the city. How terrible and beautiful and alien he'd looked, a creature from another age.
Outside, the light shifts, the sun glowing in the windows of the attic taking on a different hue. From somewhere comes the raucous cries of gulls and the ringing of bells that's also somehow the hush-hush of traffic on a rainy day. A faint voice singing in Italian. Swaying into it, into the memories and the music, Armand closes his eyes.
Footsteps thumping up the stairs. An argument outside the door, men's voices raised in different languages. The light from the lamp shudders. A woman's drunken laugh --
Armand opens his eyes. The room settles back to how it was. He lets out a breath. ]
no subject
bob has always given more of himself than asked. than wanted, sometimes. but this is a two-way street, information and sentiment flowing back from armand. an intentional allowance, he assumes, from one in greater control of his power.
his eyes flit around them as the light shifts. as armand’s world bleeds into his own, lightening the floorboards and altering the soundscape. bob unlocks his hands to splay them at the small of armand’s back, pressing him closer. safer. here or wherever they are. attention back to armand in the end, as if pulled by a string. drawn in by the sweep of ink-dark eyelashes. the flash of firelit eyes, in the dim of the room. ]
Me, too.
[ in the matter of loneliness, perhaps, or the need to be set apart, despite that. on armand’s exhale, bob noses over the apple of his cheek. a check-in, of sorts, before he goes for the kiss. ]
no subject
Me, too. Understanding like hands on him, holding him, pressing together the parts of himself he doesn't understand. The shadow and the boy that looks at him in worshipful pleasure. A boy who hides in an attic and will dance with him. ]
Bobby. [ A soft noise between them. He kisses him again, then again, pressed into the corner of Bob's mouth. ] I'll come to you. Outside. Help you with your bow ties.
[ I'll stay, thinking it into the walls around them, into the glow of the lamp. I don't want to leave you. ]
no subject
where he might normally hear the voices rise below them or a whisper from the darkest corner of the space, there’s only armand’s breath — an affectation? a habit? — and the gentle thrum of the record. ]
Outside. [ agreed warmly, against armand’s lips. trying to steal one last kiss for the road. ]
[ but for once, he feels assured. no doubt in his mind that armand will come find him and stay and be happier for it. it rings too clear, too true. all around him. so his answer comes, suffused with gratitude and appreciation. i know. ]