Challenge Fic: "Watershed" (RPS)
Title: Watershed
Pairing or Characters: Noel/Julian
Summary: In June, 2007, half the country is underwater, and they are writing.
Word Count: 1,374
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Brief mentions of preadolescent sexuality
Challenge: No. 21, “tangents”
Disclaimer: No ownership is implied, no profit made, and no offense intended
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to eggshellseas for looking this over. Um, I told myself I was never going to write RPS, but here I am, so . . . Comments and critiques are always much appreciated.
Half the country is underwater, and they are writing. There is a strange, frantic kind of alchemy that goes on in their windowless office. They intuit the weather together, voice to voice, call and answer concurrent.
Noel cannot help feeling as if at any moment the flood will come crashing down around him and bear him away. Maybe this is what it means when they call something a watershed moment-not the sedate, proud enactment of reform, but change born of roiling confusion, treasure springing from the churning sea of milk-that’s something, isn’t it? Sometimes Noel has a hard time paring his fantasy from real life. He could have dreamed that white foaming ocean.
Mostly, though, Noel dreams boring things, tedious things a little too much like reality. He dreamed once he owed Mike five quid. Another time, it was that Dave had left his trainers in Noel’s refrigerator, but Noel was out of town and couldn’t return them. Last week, he dreamed he was carrying a school of baby fish in his mouth, but he kept swallowing them. He asked Julian in the dream for a glass to put the fish babies in, but Julian simply shook his head in that slow, indulgent way, and told him he had to be more careful. That’s the problem with dreams. You never escape, not really. You’re on the moon and you’re worried you won’t be able to get back in time to turn in your script edits.
Julian’s own babies are just born, mere days old. Noel finds it hard to believe they are even real, but he has seen them, has clasped their fragile, fat fingers, pressed his lips to their warm, smooth, milk-scented foreheads. There is a strange potential in them, years and years of life spooled up inside their tiny bodies. They are beautiful, but also obscure.
Julian seems like a sleepwalker standing at the edge of a very high cliff. He has all the motions of a waking man, but is lax, poised somewhere between awe and terror. Noel wants to reach out and draw him back from that ledge, but there’s no going back. He’s always known that.
He can remember seeing that look on his father’s face when Mike was born. It was as if the whole world stretched itself thin to accommodate his younger brother. He remembers standing in the doorway to the living room, watching the crowd of people there, all of them turned away, and willing them to turn and look at him, to see, to notice him, but they did not. Noel spent a lot of time during those first few months hidden in the cavern between his bed and the wall, drawing. At some point, things must have gotten easier, but he does not remember this. He just remembers the dusty smell of his carpet and the blank newsprint.
He remembers “Jealous Guy” on the radio, and “Tainted Love” and “Under Pressure.” That was the year he stood in front of the mirror for hours, with one of his mother’s scarves around his neck, trying to imagine what Bette Davis Eyes actually looked like. It was also the year he slipped his hands down between his legs while looking at a picture in a magazine of Chrissie Hynde. Or maybe that was later, another dismal winter, another flash of startling desire sparking down his forearms. Maybe it wasn’t Chrissie Hynde at all.
But Noel isn’t afraid, not really. He’s not the type. Julian makes jokes to obscure himself, but Noel does it to prove he’s still there. And he knows better now. There is enough room in the world for all of them. He will not have less.
They lean on each other. That is how it’s always been. It’s the essence of the perfect double act: the give-and-take, the line between where Julian ends and Noel begins that isn’t really a line at all but more of a seismic region. Noel’s voice in Julian’s mouth. The next time someone asks how they met, Noel is going to tell them Julian fashioned him out of his rib-bone, for company.
Noel’s neck is cradled on the white lip of the tub, and he lingers on the edge of sleep, eyes closed, lulled by the incessant jungle heat of the steaming water. He hears the door move on its hinges, and opens his eyes just enough to see. It is Julian, of course, moving slowly through the pale humid air. It is as if Noel has summoned him up by wishing.
He sits on the edge of the tub, shoulders curved forward. His hair is damp from the rain. “Couldn’t sleep?” His fingers trail in the water by Noel’s knees.
“Mm,” Noel replies. He never can when the house is empty. “Everything OK?”
“Yeah.”
Noel breathes out until his lungs are empty and the muscles of his stomach begin to strain, then inhales, tasting the chlorine in the air. “Think I could live in here forever?” he asks.
“In the tub?”
Noel nods.
“Sure.” Julian’s voice is quiet, soothing. “Knock up a shelf for your turntable, a pulley system to deliver the flying saucers. I’ll come visit of a Sunday, we’ll do a bit of writing with waterproof markers.”
Noel laughs, closing his eyes, his lips curling up. “Brilliant.”
The first time he got drunk, really properly drunk, he was twelve or thirteen, and they were all crammed in somebody’s bedroom with a couple of bottles of Sainsbury’s brand Buck’s Fizz liberated from the kitchen stockpile. It was Christmastime, the air was flattened with cold, the smell of wool drying on radiators in his nostrils. The adults were downstairs, having a party. Fleetwood Mac on the stereo. He remembers going to the window and pressing his face to the chilled glass, and wishing he could throw it open and jump out, only in his mind’s eye, there was no gravity that could hold him, and he floated up into the stars, which were not burning gas at all but millions of tiny faceted sapphires.
They rode a bicycle once, Noel balancing in that awkward phantom-limb position, his chest pressed to Julian’s back. The streets were dark, it was night, the street lamps threw pale ovals of light on the pavement as they sailed forward through whatever quiet stretch of suburban tract housing it was. Everything flew back behind them like a comet’s tail, and Noel lifted his voice in triumph.
Or maybe Noel dreamed that. He made it up. Woke in the bathtub one day with his heart racing, the feel of autumn wind on his scalp, and thought he remembered where he’d been. And maybe he got up, got dressed, and went out to find Julian, who was only one in a city full of figures with their backs turned to him, and he found him, there, on the sidewalk, near the Tesco Express, passing an old woman eating crisps as she walked, one at a time, and licking her fingers in between.
The best feeling is being onstage next to Julian. Noel feels at those moments as if there is no gravity, after all, as if they are not acting but levitating. He spends entire shows in a state of ecstatic wonder. It is conjuring, what they do together, enchantment.
Noel feels sure there is a silent chord that shivers between them. In the held-breath moments when Julian has him pressed against the mattress, radiant with anticipation, he feels it reverberate over his skin. When it is over, and they lie exhausted on the sheets, Julian will put an ear to his chest and listen, and Noel does not know for sure what he hears.
Inside him, maybe, there is an ocean. Oceans are good. Everything is alive in the ocean, everything simmering and giving birth. He likes that.
That is what love is like, Noel thinks. Love is the ocean, the beginning of everything, the churning sea of milk. Rubies and lesser gods pour forth. Love makes things, that’s Noel’s opinion. He knows when to hang onto a good thing when he has it.
Outside, the rain is still coming down. Half of the country is under water, and they are writing.
Pairing or Characters: Noel/Julian
Summary: In June, 2007, half the country is underwater, and they are writing.
Word Count: 1,374
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Brief mentions of preadolescent sexuality
Challenge: No. 21, “tangents”
Disclaimer: No ownership is implied, no profit made, and no offense intended
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to eggshellseas for looking this over. Um, I told myself I was never going to write RPS, but here I am, so . . . Comments and critiques are always much appreciated.
Half the country is underwater, and they are writing. There is a strange, frantic kind of alchemy that goes on in their windowless office. They intuit the weather together, voice to voice, call and answer concurrent.
Noel cannot help feeling as if at any moment the flood will come crashing down around him and bear him away. Maybe this is what it means when they call something a watershed moment-not the sedate, proud enactment of reform, but change born of roiling confusion, treasure springing from the churning sea of milk-that’s something, isn’t it? Sometimes Noel has a hard time paring his fantasy from real life. He could have dreamed that white foaming ocean.
Mostly, though, Noel dreams boring things, tedious things a little too much like reality. He dreamed once he owed Mike five quid. Another time, it was that Dave had left his trainers in Noel’s refrigerator, but Noel was out of town and couldn’t return them. Last week, he dreamed he was carrying a school of baby fish in his mouth, but he kept swallowing them. He asked Julian in the dream for a glass to put the fish babies in, but Julian simply shook his head in that slow, indulgent way, and told him he had to be more careful. That’s the problem with dreams. You never escape, not really. You’re on the moon and you’re worried you won’t be able to get back in time to turn in your script edits.
Julian’s own babies are just born, mere days old. Noel finds it hard to believe they are even real, but he has seen them, has clasped their fragile, fat fingers, pressed his lips to their warm, smooth, milk-scented foreheads. There is a strange potential in them, years and years of life spooled up inside their tiny bodies. They are beautiful, but also obscure.
Julian seems like a sleepwalker standing at the edge of a very high cliff. He has all the motions of a waking man, but is lax, poised somewhere between awe and terror. Noel wants to reach out and draw him back from that ledge, but there’s no going back. He’s always known that.
He can remember seeing that look on his father’s face when Mike was born. It was as if the whole world stretched itself thin to accommodate his younger brother. He remembers standing in the doorway to the living room, watching the crowd of people there, all of them turned away, and willing them to turn and look at him, to see, to notice him, but they did not. Noel spent a lot of time during those first few months hidden in the cavern between his bed and the wall, drawing. At some point, things must have gotten easier, but he does not remember this. He just remembers the dusty smell of his carpet and the blank newsprint.
He remembers “Jealous Guy” on the radio, and “Tainted Love” and “Under Pressure.” That was the year he stood in front of the mirror for hours, with one of his mother’s scarves around his neck, trying to imagine what Bette Davis Eyes actually looked like. It was also the year he slipped his hands down between his legs while looking at a picture in a magazine of Chrissie Hynde. Or maybe that was later, another dismal winter, another flash of startling desire sparking down his forearms. Maybe it wasn’t Chrissie Hynde at all.
But Noel isn’t afraid, not really. He’s not the type. Julian makes jokes to obscure himself, but Noel does it to prove he’s still there. And he knows better now. There is enough room in the world for all of them. He will not have less.
They lean on each other. That is how it’s always been. It’s the essence of the perfect double act: the give-and-take, the line between where Julian ends and Noel begins that isn’t really a line at all but more of a seismic region. Noel’s voice in Julian’s mouth. The next time someone asks how they met, Noel is going to tell them Julian fashioned him out of his rib-bone, for company.
Noel’s neck is cradled on the white lip of the tub, and he lingers on the edge of sleep, eyes closed, lulled by the incessant jungle heat of the steaming water. He hears the door move on its hinges, and opens his eyes just enough to see. It is Julian, of course, moving slowly through the pale humid air. It is as if Noel has summoned him up by wishing.
He sits on the edge of the tub, shoulders curved forward. His hair is damp from the rain. “Couldn’t sleep?” His fingers trail in the water by Noel’s knees.
“Mm,” Noel replies. He never can when the house is empty. “Everything OK?”
“Yeah.”
Noel breathes out until his lungs are empty and the muscles of his stomach begin to strain, then inhales, tasting the chlorine in the air. “Think I could live in here forever?” he asks.
“In the tub?”
Noel nods.
“Sure.” Julian’s voice is quiet, soothing. “Knock up a shelf for your turntable, a pulley system to deliver the flying saucers. I’ll come visit of a Sunday, we’ll do a bit of writing with waterproof markers.”
Noel laughs, closing his eyes, his lips curling up. “Brilliant.”
The first time he got drunk, really properly drunk, he was twelve or thirteen, and they were all crammed in somebody’s bedroom with a couple of bottles of Sainsbury’s brand Buck’s Fizz liberated from the kitchen stockpile. It was Christmastime, the air was flattened with cold, the smell of wool drying on radiators in his nostrils. The adults were downstairs, having a party. Fleetwood Mac on the stereo. He remembers going to the window and pressing his face to the chilled glass, and wishing he could throw it open and jump out, only in his mind’s eye, there was no gravity that could hold him, and he floated up into the stars, which were not burning gas at all but millions of tiny faceted sapphires.
They rode a bicycle once, Noel balancing in that awkward phantom-limb position, his chest pressed to Julian’s back. The streets were dark, it was night, the street lamps threw pale ovals of light on the pavement as they sailed forward through whatever quiet stretch of suburban tract housing it was. Everything flew back behind them like a comet’s tail, and Noel lifted his voice in triumph.
Or maybe Noel dreamed that. He made it up. Woke in the bathtub one day with his heart racing, the feel of autumn wind on his scalp, and thought he remembered where he’d been. And maybe he got up, got dressed, and went out to find Julian, who was only one in a city full of figures with their backs turned to him, and he found him, there, on the sidewalk, near the Tesco Express, passing an old woman eating crisps as she walked, one at a time, and licking her fingers in between.
The best feeling is being onstage next to Julian. Noel feels at those moments as if there is no gravity, after all, as if they are not acting but levitating. He spends entire shows in a state of ecstatic wonder. It is conjuring, what they do together, enchantment.
Noel feels sure there is a silent chord that shivers between them. In the held-breath moments when Julian has him pressed against the mattress, radiant with anticipation, he feels it reverberate over his skin. When it is over, and they lie exhausted on the sheets, Julian will put an ear to his chest and listen, and Noel does not know for sure what he hears.
Inside him, maybe, there is an ocean. Oceans are good. Everything is alive in the ocean, everything simmering and giving birth. He likes that.
That is what love is like, Noel thinks. Love is the ocean, the beginning of everything, the churning sea of milk. Rubies and lesser gods pour forth. Love makes things, that’s Noel’s opinion. He knows when to hang onto a good thing when he has it.
Outside, the rain is still coming down. Half of the country is under water, and they are writing.