CLOSER
Hi!
Um, its me again and I hope its ok to post two fics one after the other.
Title: CLOSER
Pairing: Nathan/Caleb
Disclaimer: This didn't happen. I'm a liar. Please don't sue.
Summary: Set in 2009 and 2030. So they would really be quite old. Reflections on Caleb's death, at the end of times, and that which he left behind.
2030:
They bellow grace on an unripe day and bare their heads under the grey-green poplar where the day is plucked and tastes sour, summer drained to pulp. Black is everywhere: in the skeleton trees that stand like executioners on the horizon, branchless. The black silt loam that is dug down six feet to the firm and brittle fragipan of subsoil. The suits they have all bought, pressed, and starched. Lily’s eyes buried under large sunglasses. She keeps her small weight on Nathan’s arm, clinging desperately with her tiny-gloved hands like a sparrow in a tree, facing a hurricane.
The short day is bright against the black, listening to the sounds of the cuckoo and mocking-bird. So they moved in a formal pattern, alternately looking down into the dug abyss and also refusing to look, alternately crying and refusing to sob. Nathan steps forward to speak, leaving Lily behind, bedded in the mud. He unfolds a small piece of yellow paper, clears his throat of phlegm and grinds out,
“All my life I have been a cuckoo and you, Caleb, have been a mocking-bird.” he says. And that is all.
He steps back. This time Lily does not take his arm, but watches his face as it moves quietly, quietly, in the dim light that invests all their emotion with form. She watches that face breaks like a vase, splitting under the pressure of the loss. Lily wonders how she arrived here. How, she thinks, did I become here in this world of drunken men and songs, whirled by the hateful wind and unhealthy lungs? Not here, not here in the darkness and echoes. She throws a white rose down, turns away, and cannot bear to look again.
2009:
Slowly light fortified itself and the room took shape. Nathan watched Caleb, breathless, as his brother stood naked at the door, plain and obvious as the wardrobe. Naked and real, really breathing, really there and needing. There would be no thought now, there could be none otherwise this would never have happened. If the blood rushed back into the room, if the dreamlike quality or the webby softness enveloping the scene were broken, this could never happen.
There was no thought, just Nathan throwing back the blanket from the bed and lying on his back, waiting. He spoke - no, he didn’t speak, what he said was only the noise of an arachnid, meaningless, nothing more inside it than the noise it makes when you pull a leg from a spider - “What’ll I say?” The question slipped out of him like a shrug. The stone movement of a body that had stopped fighting. Suddenly he realized too that he could tell the difference between each disconcertingly long and dark hair running down Caleb’s thighs, crawling towards scarred knees.
Caleb moved imperceptibly closer, “Say to who?” he asked, “And does it matter? Say what you like,” He moved still closer, in increments, always a statue but always coming closer, and closer, “Or maybe say you overslept, or were sick in bed.”
“Not this bed?”
His brother laughed, the sharp bark of the mocking-bird, “sure as hell not this bed,” and finally he was sitting on the edge of this bed, the salmon pink single bed in the middle of momma’s spare room, all done up neatly for guests and smelling of synthetic air freshener. Caleb began to reach, with his long shaking fingers, reaching towards Nathan’s shoulder, through the laziness of the air, then stopped and said quietly, “Don’t look so scared … your choice y’know.”
Nathan frowned at that word, choice. He didn’t really know what it meant anymore. Not with Caleb here, naked and so near, and the house so quiet. He sighed, and let his head fall forwards to nudge the still hanging hand, “No. I’m fine.” and so Caleb moved still closer, cupping and cradling Nathan’s skull in his palms, grasping his hair and winding it around his fingers, raking his nails across his earlobes and temples until blood rushed under the thin casing of skin.
“Oh, Caleb,” Nathan whispered, pushing his mouth against the palm of Caleb’s hand until he couldn’t breathe, until Caleb moved his hand, now wet, along his jaw and slid is fingers over his lips, til Nathan had Caleb’s thumb against his tongue and could not escape the allusion, grazing it with his teeth and holding Caleb’s arm in place, pressed against his chest. Then there’s Caleb, with a wicked gleam in his eye, using his thumb as a hook to pull Nathan mouth-first towards his own mouth, dragging him in until they sat on the edge of the bed, lip to lip - and then - with teeth and tongue in their first biting, scraping, eventually bloodied kiss.
They kissed with a slow kind of violence, the violence of letting go, of making insides out, Caleb sliding on his stomach down to the foot of the bed. There he sat back on his heels; knees spread, and looked Nathan over - his legs, the muscles of his arms, the loll of his head, and the burgeoning interest from the dark between his legs. The gaze flickered over his navel, stopped at his inner thigh and quested forward to his crotch. Caleb’s fingers follow.
“This …” his fingers trailed over the rise of flesh, once, uncertainly, then again, until he’s gripping Nathan’s cock with both hands, and watching Nathan’s face as he stroked. Every moment is new and shocking, every downward motion sent a shudder through Nathan’s ribcage and sent him ricocheting off the bed until finally, finally, Caleb’s mouth came sinking down, obscenely round and red, onto him. When Caleb sucked him it was not tentative but desperate, unleashed on his cock, his balls, the incredibly thin skin there. Caleb’s head heavy against him, his lips stretched wide, his breathing heavy through his nose and his entire body bowed down long, long and pale and bobbing. Nathan attempted to move but was helpless, his legs trapped under strong, warm thighs, and heard himself whimper like a dog before Caleb’s hand flashed up to push three fingers firmly into his mouth.
“Suck,” he ordered, “and shut up.” Nathan lay staring in blindness at the ceiling, tasting the slow thrust of fingers in his mouth that he couldn’t help but suck against, the simmering heat of Caleb’s mouth working him below and that other, ominous, husky heat of Caleb’s cock against his knee. And there, Caleb thrusting against him too, with angled hips that should hurt but can only made it more real. He looks into Caleb’s determined, sullen eyes and wonders just what is there, even as he comes, he cannot quite place that expression. Even as he comes, Nathan cannot scream.
They lie there for minutes maybe, unmoving, unable to move because moving would be to admit the position they were in. With Caleb’s fingers slipping very slowly from his mouth, Nathan made the mistake of speaking.
“Um … ‘Leb?”
And suddenly found himself caught in a crashing of white light and pain, then alone in the room, nursing a bleeding nose and the imprint from a fist in his cheek. Laughing high and thin as a reed, drenched in his own sweat and Caleb’s, halfway between melting and freezing. Later they would descend the stairs, as the dark dove in with its flickering tongue, and be purposefully ignored by Jessie and Lily, and mama and the boys. They joined the game of poker and sat legs folded, remarkably like each other, drenched in the same lamplight.
Before bed Nathan found Lily with her hands pruning in the wash basin. She was crying and singing into the bubbles, her breath disturbing the dust on a bowl of potpourri behind the sink. Even standing almost a meter away, Nathan's existence made too much noise and she stopped and turned, to meet his scrutiny.
“Hi Nathan,” she gave him a look. Her words, even after speech, grasped into the silence, clutching for knowledge, answers, anything. In the other room, words scolding, shrieking and chattering made a tomb of the silence of the kitchen.
“Hey Lil, what’s up?” Nathan nodded in acknowledgement, slowly gathering his cardigan around himself as they watched each other like wolves that come across one another on a moonless night in the deepwood, staring down through the tall trees for long minutes trying to decide whether to attack each other or continue the lone hunt. Lily sighed and slumped forward, hands drifting over the water,
“You done with Caleb now? I could really use him,” she flew her gaze from her hands to his face, “it’d be nice, you know?” she muttered.
“Uh, done with him?”
Lily’s hands were suddenly out of the water, red, clutching the edge of the sink, “Done writing songs or … whatever,” she said; voice grating, “just … done,” her voice sullen and intractable. The voice of watching and waiting, calculating the future. Nathan felt so uncomfortable, knowing that he had taken that slice of Lily’s future and selfishly spirited it away.
“Sure,” he confirmed, deliberately letting the strain out of his face and neck, determined to misunderstand, “You ok?”
Lily sighed heavily, “Nothing you can fix,” she whispered, as if her voice box had been cracked. And she left the kitchen, dishes still dirty, without another word. Her words echoed like this, in his mind, all night. Nothing you can fix, nothing you can fix. Nothing you can fix.
Upstairs, alone in the dark bedroom she shared with her husband, Lily choked herself with tears. She wondered why she even tried sometimes, if she should feel incredibly stupid for the situation she had found herself in. “Oh God Caleb … I wanted it to be you … just one word, one word …” as she heard strange noises and scuffles from the spare bedroom, and wished that just for once there could be some goddamn quiet in this house.
2030:
Now he is that which they cannot think alive, only a name that sings occasionally - an old belief in a deep, provincial past. And beyond Caleb, thinks Nathan, and beyond the tree there is nothing but the shallow blue air and I, which shows nothing, and is nobody, and is endless. Time has buried the day. Now the watery sun sinks over the open land and leaks into the deep lane by which they stumble home, each imagining a man they desperately want to exist. Nathan has to feel some sorrow for Lily. She won the marriage, the house, the space next to Caleb in the pew of a Sunday without ever really knowing what it was she was trying to win. But really, she was the illegitimate ghost of Caleb’s life, bloodless and quiet. And Nathan’s only source of life through this new and irrepressible grief is that he, at the very end of things, had always been its crooked heart, its resonating darkness.
Out of the sorrow someone says, “Time.” And the company leaves, murmuring desolation. Afterwards, those who remain are silent. Nathan paces the room. Beyond this step, and this step and this one, Nathan worries, how can I return to my house on the other side of death? How can I wake him? Which of us is alive now? Traitor and betrayed become one, floating in halos of dust. There is nothing to do but try and fail to sleep, toss, kick the blankets away and lie on his back, waiting, such animal cries of brokenness waiting. And the dawn, passing over forever.