Your Heart is an Empty Room (5/5)
This… pattern that you and Derek have fallen into, you think that it can be labeled as a kind of domesticity.
It doesn’t quite fit all of the definitions, most of them saying that it’s a state reached between a couple, people very much in love, but it’s close enough. Plus, you like all the other notions that it brings up. With domesticity comes quiet mornings, easy affection, happy endings. That’s what you want all of this to be, even if that’s not, conventionally, what it’s supposed to be.
You don’t bring it up with Derek, you know how you have to walk on egg shells around him in this regard. The attraction between the two of you isn’t as electric as it used to be. Not that it’s waned, but rather taken on a different form. Before, you wanted Derek because you were programmed for it, because he was new and fresh, because he was one more puzzle that you had to get your hands on. That’s become so much different now, acquired a depth and complex need that makes it so much greater.
You still want to get to see those parts of him, but the need to catalogue and discover and know have lost that clinical edge. You don’t want it because it’s part of the other, the parts of you that you shy away from. You want to have these things because it would mean Derek has let you in, has desired the same things, has seen you not as a tool, but as a companion.
You know that this isn’t something that you can take or force, that, with him, it might not even be something you can ask for, but you’re more than willing to wait, to just continue to try. You don’t make any advances - try to keep your touches and looks and words careful. He sees that you’re holding something back, you’re sure of it, but hasn’t chosen to act on it or even acknowledge its existence. It can make your time together uncomfortable sometimes, can set the both of you on edge and spark an argument. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but mostly it just makes you feel that terrible melancholy. Over history, many humans have described it as a kind of heart sickness, and though it’s wildly inaccurate, you’re inclined to agree with the name.
You get what you can out of the moments you share. When he lights up, you wonder what it would be like to share his air, to curl around his tongue and lips the way the smoke does, to be as addictive as the nicotine beneath his fingers. When he cooks, you imagine being the object of his attention - brought to heat, tended and season, sampled over and over and when you are just right - devoured. When he signs, you envision his hands making a new language across your skin. ‘I love you’ is the digging of fingertips into your jaw. ‘I want you.’ as nails scraping down your back, lust seeping out their trail. ‘I need you’ is when palms rest on your hips, cradling.
Tonight, it is harder to keep it at bay than usual. It’s been one of the rare moments when all the clouds have cleared from the sky and the stars are shining bright against the midnight blue of their canvas. Derek had hurried you inside the lookout when he noticed it, set up his telescope, and asked you to bring up maps of the constellations. Together you’ve been searching them out, making a game of it. You don’t use the alien brain so the odds are evened, so you have to hunt just as studiously as Derek and look for the shapes and patterns imagined overhead.
It has the both of you almost-smiling and jostling each other for turns at the telescope - one of those instances where everything between the both of you is easy and uncomplicated. For this quiet, little moment, neither of you are broken or set apart, fitting just perfectly in the world that you have created together. It makes you feel like you’re out of yourself, watching it all from this lofty, tranquil place. It’s that feeling referred to as “floating on cloud nine.” You’d never quite understood the expression until just now.
You don’t want it to stop, want this to be the life that you and Derek share, want this slice of domesticity. It goes against everything you’ve been telling yourself, all the careful planning you’ve done, but in this second you cannot deny yourself just this one little gesture; and so you place a hand on Derek’s shoulder, turn him to face you, and press your lips against the corner of his mouth, soft and sweet and slow and short. You can tell that you’ve caught him off guard by the way he stiffens, but take it as a good sign when he doesn’t pull away, lets you nose across his cheekbones to place another peck against his temple.
Not wanting to push your luck, you pull back after that, closing your eyes to guard yourself against whatever reaction he might have. While you wait for it, you wonder at how it’s still possible to feel his skin beneath your lips even when it’s not there, how you imagine you can feel the beat of his heart alongside yours. It’s miraculous, this electricity coursing through you. At once you want to squirm out of your skin but also sit inside this bundle of lit up nerves, feeling every sound and touch and taste amplified tenfold.
It’s been exactly 13.675 seconds since you kissed him, when you feel fingertips pressing against your eyelids, and you can’t help the stuttered breath that you release at the sensation. Slowly, you let your eyes flutter open, following their behest, and are met with the endless green of Derek’s own - that particular shade of seafoam that puts the rest of the colors on this Earth to shame. They are searching your face, never staying too long on any one part, but never shifting away from you.
You finally have his sole attention, and it’s almost too much. Your lips tremble into a weak semblance of a smile and you can’t handle it, have to let your head hang, press your brow down onto his shoulder and get away from all the things that gaze could mean. A hand comes up to run through your hair, gentle but firm, giving you just the space of a second, before pulling your head back up.
You close your eyes again, well and truly petrified for only the second time in your short life. That first time, you were terrified of the darkness, of not being able to see and know, but this time, you hide in it, take refuge in the deprivation. The hand comes down from your hair, around your neck, against your throat, become fingers gripping your chin and lifting it high. You feel his breath first, ghosting across your top lip in huffs, tickling your skin and sending a thrill down your spine. Then the tip of his nose slides against the length of yours, stopping between your eyes, giving way to a pause so pregnant you’re choking on it. And then, finally then, his lips press against your left eye, dry, scratching, but caring.
A whimper bubbles up out of your throat as it feels like that single point of connection has been set aflame, growing hotter with every second. You bring your own hands up to the front of his shirt, holding on for dear life, unconsciously pulling him closer. His free hand settles on your hip, pushes you back, makes you stumble backwards, hitting the edge of the bed and letting yourself go down.
When you bounce on the mattress, your eyes fly open, and at the sight of Derek crawling over you, eyes searching out all the places of you that he has just received permission to travel, you feel yourself glitch. Your ears and cheeks burn - you are mortified like you never have been and your stomach drops out. This was the worst of moments to remind him, to remind yourself, that you’re not real. You’re lines of code downloaded to this artificial frame, and Derek - Derek’s more human than anyone. You feel like you’re going to be sick.
You noticed, that first day, the disgust that Derek felt when Peter had told him of your uses, that you not only had the capacity, but the inclination to be taken as a lover. You feel like you can’t breathe, can’t force yourself to swallow. Derek had wanted something true, had been looking for something pure, and you’ve just reminded him - at his most vulnerable - that that’s not something you can be. Your eyes start to prick, hot tears gathering, and you have to bite your fist to keep from making a sound.
Derek - he’s still hovering just above you, eyes still searching, and you can’t get an accurate read. You don’t know what that expression on his face could be, have never seen it before. His legs straddle your stomach and he sits back on them, pulls up so that his arms aren’t supporting him. This is it, you think, this is the start of the steady withdrawal that’s bound to happen. And then - he signs.
‘One step at a time.’
Your eyebrows knit it confusion, you pull your hand away, moving to sign, but you don’t know what to say. He places his hands over yours, saving you from having to flail and babble, and he pushes them down until they’re above your head, wrists crossed, leaving you open. He scoots back, leans down, and kisses you.
It’s the first time your lips touch, questioning. You’re still in a kind of shock and for the first few seconds it’s just his lips moving against yours, but he coaxes you back to awareness, makes you push back, and soon enough you’re mewling beneath him, delighted, curious, hungry. His tongue glides across the seam of your mouth, looking for more, and you let him have it, let him in to take whatever he needs.
His hips undulate, grind down into your own, and you gasp, arch into them, strain against his hold. He chuckles against your mouth, rolls them again, and pulls back to scrape his teeth along your jaw. After that, he lets go of your wrists, hands eager to roam across your chest, your stomach, pushing down into the waistband of your pants.
It’s all so much to take in at once - the sensations of him against you, the sounds of his breathing and stuttering heart, the tastes of his lips and tongue, the smell of his hair and skin. You were built to process information at an alarming rate, to be able to sift through data fast as a super computer, but this is threatening to overload.
You can’t take it all in, can’t possibly get a grip on it all. You can feel your eyes burning bright, your body is wracked with spasms, and you wonder if you would have the misfortune to be defective in this area, if the cost of your consciousness was the inability to have this. Surely it’s the only explanation for how you feel ready to burst, for why there’s a pressure building inside you that’s threatening to rip you apart.
You want to scream, want to let it out somehow, but you can’t. You’re scrabbling at Derek’s back, pulling at his hair, gripping him tight with your legs. You can’t - you can’t - you can’t - you have to let go. You… explode. There’s no other way to explain it. Every muscle in your body pulls taut, straining, your heart thunders and then stops, and that low pressure bursts, throwing flames across your whole frame. It lasts the space of a second, this supernova, and then you break back down, collapsing in on yourself.
You tremble and ache and are more raw than ever before. You feel as though you’ve literally crash landed, but somehow you’ve never been happier. Derek’s still got you caged beneath him and you curl up into it, pressing kisses to his throat. He’s whispering to you, things that are forgotten as soon as they are thought over. They are called “sweet-nothings” and they are the penultimate gesture of contentedness. It makes you feel warm and liquid tranquil - suspended.
Broken never felt so good.
~~~
From then on, there’re more good days than bad, more easy times than hard, more nights spent shared than alone.
The both of you are happiest when you can forget what came before, when the house seems less like a haunting and more like a sanctuary, though neither of you are able to believe that it is anything but a gilded cage. Half of the rooms are still closed off, mausoleums in the middle of the life that you are trying to make. They are an ever-present source of darkness, individual black holes whittling away at the brightness.
You can see the way that Derek gravitates towards them, how they catch his eye every time he walks past. You think he never would have the strength to move past them on his own, without someone coming in to bring him away, he would stay here with them forever. He has all the entrapments of a sentinel, determined to watch over these makeshift graves until he is called away to be with them.
You don’t know how to help him with this, can’t bring it up - even acknowledge the presence of the problem. It’s just one more piece of your free-will stripped away, one more fault that you have to live with. The both of you feel better in the lookout, surrounded by the open sky, but kept safe by the shelter of the trees. There, all the rest of it feels a world away. You can pretend that stepping in here is like moving to a different dimension, a space where it can all be better.
Inevitably, he always goes back. As long as it’s there, he will always be compelled; will be unable to keep himself from it. You can’t possibly imagine what that grief means to him, how it has shaped, blown, burned, and made him into something new, but you know that this kind of dwelling on it just can’t continue, will swallow the both of you whole. You’ve come up with a solution, after dozens of nights spent awake, trying to divine an answer.
It’s radical, you know, but for a wound as deep as this - a desperate plan calls for desperate measures. You’ve adopted the saying as reassurance that it’s the right thing to do, that when you present the idea to Derek, he’ll understand where it is you’re coming from. At this point, you’re just waiting for the right time, for when he’s ready to leave it all behind, when he’s brave.
Then, and only then, you’ll tell him that you want to burn it all down. It might seem drastic at first, but you’ve really thought it out, examined it from every angle possible. You don’t want him to look at this as violent, but instead cleansing. Being reborn from the flames is a popular motif in human history and fiction, and you can see the merits of it.
Burning the place down is the best way for Derek to move past it all. You don’t think that he’d be ever to revisit those rooms, to clean them out and purge the toxicity. There’re too many memories - too many pieces of himself and them. Even trying to would probably set him back, undo all this progress he’s made and you couldn’t stand to see that happen. With this, he could lay the groundwork, drop the match, and leave it to burn clean.
There’s a ceremony to it, a ritual that has a history for saying goodbye. It’s the send-off of warriors and heroes - those who’ve earned it.
~~~
It’s been almost a year.
It’s hard to mark the passage of time, to really notice it slipping by when the weather hardly changes, when they see no one but each other. Peter is the one who brings it up, during one of his monthly calls to make sure that Derek hasn’t let himself wither away in this place. Neither of them had noticed, but when he brings it up you share a glance, and smile.
Even now it’s tentative, but growing familiar. When Derek hangs up, he crosses over to you, pulls you close and kisses you deep. Your eyes glitch, but you don’t hide it anymore. There’s something you’ve never seen before written on Derek’s face and you quirk an eyebrow at him, swat at his shoulder. Chuckling, he brings up his hands, and signs, ‘I love you.’
It’s usually one of the first gestures that people learn when studying sign language, but you never taught it to Derek, didn’t want to assume that he’d need to use it. It sounds silly when you think about it, sometimes, but back when you first started, things had always been so tentative, you were still trying to just keep it all from falling apart. Here, now, learning this fact- that Derek looked it up all by himself, searched out this way to tell you - you can’t hold back the hundred watt smile, the bone-crushing hug, the peppering of kisses that follow.
It’s time.
~~~
Flames and smoke climb out of every window, the smoke disappearing into the eerie pink of the clouds- tinted by the setting sun. Carried with it all are the things that most people would think you needed, the items that humans have convinced themselves are necessary to make a life. The house, and everything inside is being consumed, remade, left behind. Thing is, you didn't need any of them in the end. Derek's standing next to you, stoic as ever, and he's the only thing you could have possibly thought to bring. There aren't any tears shed, though the atmosphere is heavy. Burning this place down, letting it have all those twisted fragments, it's finally gonna set the both of you free.
You turn to Derek, search out his attention, grab his hand. He hasn't said a word, not since you calmly suggested the arson while you shared a smoke out back. You're worried about what this might mean, but you had no part in the destruction save for the idea of it. You told him it was his house, his memories, his pain, only he could know how to set it to rest. He'd sat stock still, for a few minutes - eyes and mind far off - and then started about the dark business with an unexpected level of concentration. There's gasoline in the garage, lighters from your cigarettes. He unlocks and disappears into the bedrooms, probably for the first time since the death of their occupants, but doesn't stay long, isn't deterred.
You can make out the Polaroid's stuffed in his back pocket, can see the outline of a small jewelry box in his jacket, and are glad he actually kept some mementos. There can't be any regret from it if this is to be the rebirth you want from it. When the glass shatters and the flames feed higher, brighter, hotter, Derek pulls you close. His hands constantly travel the length of your torso, come up to brush along your neck. It's as if, every few seconds, he has to remind himself that you are still there, that he didn't leave you with everything else inside. Or perhaps to even make sure that you're actually there, not some fever dream from a man turned mad.
You press kisses to his temple, entwine your fingers, bump shoulders just to let him know that you're there. Eventually he faces you, brings you further away from the crackling heat. He smiles, sadly, but genuine. 'It's funny. I don't even feel bad.' He shrugs, looking back at the house and furrowing his brows. 'It's... different from how I see it in my memory. I feel like I'm burning something completely separate, setting the real thing free.' As if to illustrate his point, the wood groans, a terrible sound, like a dying specter.
It takes hours, the smoke eventually growing too thick to stick around. You stay with him and watch, until you can notice the struggle it takes for him to draw breath. You usher him away, to the path the both of you take into town. With luck, the local bed and breakfast will be open still, and the owner won't question why you're both covered in soot, followed by an acrid cloud of smoke. The walk is silent as ever, but it's hand in hand. You cannot sing for him, still, and probably never will, but you make do. It takes a few seconds to get right, but you test your vocal chords, trick them into letting you hum.
It's not speech, so you convince the order embedded in your mind to let you have it. You'd gotten the idea that first night Derek had you, when you made noise for the first time since Peter shut that part of you away. It was unconscious, but still allowed, and since then you've been pushing forward, making squeaks and grunts and going further each day. You are happy for your diligence because now, now Derek's eyes lighten up, as does his step, and he looks at you with such wonder and fondness that you lose your place in the melody, instead producing random, haphazard notes and smiling so wide your cheeks start to hurt.
You tug on his hand, pull him to a stop, suddenly eager to say something, to share this elation that is filling you up. Elation - the kind of happiness tightly interwoven with relief, a kind of enlightening. 'You make me feel alive.' You squirm in place when you sign it, always incapable of holding still beneath the full focus of Derek's attention. You hope that he understands the full meaning of that, that when you say it, it means something different from what it would coming from a human. It means that he makes you forget all your limitations, all the things you don't have, all the shackles that come with being an android. You don't have any family like he did, you don't have a past - better times, you don't have old traditions and wisdoms and stories. You are incomplete. All you have is him, but that's so much more than it appears to be. Because when you're with him, you don't think about all the things that are missing. When you're with him, there isn't anything else you could want. Just being there - it is enough.
The look on his face, when he lets it sink in, when he catches some inkling of your meaning, is something close to pained. Pained, in so many instances, has only bad connotations, but here, this one time, you know that it can't be. 'Stiles - you have more life than anyone I've ever known... You gave me mine back.' This might be the most you two have ever shared, the deepest beneath the surface you can manage to delve. It's hardly three sentences, but there's just SO much there. For the both of you, this relationship was built on all the silences between, on the things left unsaid, on the smallest of gestures and actions and a silent knowing. There were no grand declarations, no sweeping romantic gesticulations, no whirlwind adventures to get caught up in. They just… grew together, clung to each other, fought against the current and survived.
So what if you’re not the kind to be constantly spouting 'I love you?', to have to reaffirm your affections first thing in the morning and after breakfast, during the lunch hour and the commute home, and again at night. So what if there's more shoving and tackling, playful wrestling and jabbing than hugs and lingering touches? It’s so easy to get caught up in the appearance of things, the expectations and imaginings, instead of what’s real. The point is that whatever you have, even if it's not what most people would expect, is true. You don't know what's ahead, where to go from here, but you don't have to. You're starting over, one step at a time.