Vintage SN fic rec: Sleeping City by Kristophine; Casey/Dan; Rating: 15
Title: Sleeping City
Author: Kristophine
Author's website: No current information
Pairing: Casey/Dan
Rating: 15
Category: Slash
Sleeping City
By Kristophine
He’s awake.
He’s been awake a lot lately; really, on a surprisingly regular basis. He keeps thinking, which is the problem, and he wishes nothing quite so much as to be able to stop it. Repression is, after all, a beautiful thing when done well. His mental blocks had been quite firmly established a number of years ago, thank you very much, and these recent developments were doing nothing whatsoever to help him maintain their structural integrity.
To be specific, Casey. Casey isn’t helping at all with that most vital process of making sure that repressed things stay repressed. Casey is, instead, making him think things he thought he’d gotten over thinking a long time ago.
Although repression isn’t really the issue. He isn’t repressed. He knows exactly what he wants. And here, in the depths of cool nights where he can hear the city stirring outside, the sounds of nocturnal creatures conducting their business, he knows that he is spending an irrational amount of time and energy on leashing them. This usually involves getting angry at Casey for stupid, small things.
Standing in his personal space, for example. He’s fairly sure Casey didn’t mean it, didn’t mean to crowd him. Casey was just being Casey. Casey does that on a depressingly regular basis.
Which may be why he can’t push this back into his subconscious, where it belongs; where it can’t hurt anyone or anything he loves. It’s been a while since he’s felt this dark, this angry and brittle, but he knows exactly how it feels and in a way it’s a relief. Sanity always makes him feel just a little panicked, just a little trapped. The long slow slide into depression has no walls, nothing to run into, nothing to hang onto. Depression knows why he’s awake at this hour, watching the patterns the not-quite-darkness outside his window is casting on the ceiling, long horizontal beams of not-quite-light. Everything is dim. He knows, rationally, that the reason everything looks black and white is because the receptors on his retinas that perceive color become virtually useless in darkness and therefore bow to those that perceive light. This is why the world looks bleached and drained.
This does not explain how still everything feels.
This is New York City, where silence doesn’t happen, where quiet is a dream. New York never sleeps.
He loves this city for more than one reason. One of those reasons is that he sometimes feels that it knows him better than he does, and generates this ceaseless rattle and chatter just to keep him occupied with it. If he concentrates on the sound of cars, the swift rush towards the looming dawn, he doesn’t have to think about other things nearly so much.
Like Casey.
Just for example.
And repression. And why he wants the things he does, and how really painfully unfair it is for him to be treating Casey like this when all Casey has does, in fact, is be beautiful.
He wonders, briefly, if Hell is a place where no one can ever sleep.
"Danny?"
He lifts his head, considers for an instant the fact that Casey is wearing a giant white rabbit costume, and decides that this must be a dream. "Yeah, Casey?"
"Dana’s taken a nasty fall off the side of an omnibus." Casey’s face is creased in comical concern.
He is all set to explain why that is impossible when he wakes up and discovers that the lurking light has, in fact, crept well over the horizon, and it is now time for him to get up and face the music.
In reality, walking into their office is much less dramatic than a grieving Casey in a bunny suit. Casey glances up from where he’s huddled on the couch with a pad of paper and pen, mutters something that could be "Good morning" or "The sky is burning," and goes back to scrawling cautiously between the printed blue lines.
"Casey?"
Casey looks up, eyes slightly unfocused. "Yeah, Danny?"
"Never mind."
Casey’s eyes clear a little as a look of vague worry crosses his face, but after a moment of silence, studying Danny’s profile, he drops his gaze back to the paper and resuming the anxious scratching with his pen.
"Why the paper?" He feels it is a reasonable question. Casey usually works on the computer, but not, evidently, today.
Casey makes a nebulous gesture with the pen. "Thought it might help the creative juices flow. Keep me on my toes."
"Ah." He turns on the computer and watches, numbly, as the narrow space that will be his world for the next small eternity comes to life with a whine and a grumble.
He can’t hear much any more. It all seems to rush past him in a supersonic wave, and all he can pick up on is their faces: Dana’s, framed in that pretty gold hair that she keeps changing; Natalie, pixie-like and vibrant; Jeremy, dark and strange, in a good way. Sometimes Isaac, sometimes Kim or someone else. He can’t tell anymore. Sight is starting to go around the edges, too.
He takes a vicious pleasure in wondering if he has a neurological disorder, but he knows, the way the city knows. This is just what it has always been.
He doesn’t really want to hear.
"Danny? Danny?"
He comes awake to the feeling of someone shaking his shoulder, gently. "What?" he manages to mumble blearily, his eyes dry and hurting, his throat raw with breathing.
Casey’s face comes into view, the few strange lines that worry brings all crinkling like roadmaps. He thinks, for a moment, giddily, that he could follow those lines-follow them, and go somewhere. Really go somewhere this time, instead of just running away. "You fell asleep on our couch."
"Oh." He pauses, takes in the location. "Right. Sorry."
"You’ve been acting strangely lately," says Casey, looking pained. He hates that look. He can feel a dull hurt start to flame up in his chest, but chokes it down. Not Casey’s fault, now. His. All his. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah." Liar. "Just having some trouble sleeping."
Casey doesn’t believe him, but is too much of a gentleman to press the issue, and maybe a little afraid of what would happen if he did. Danny knows he can be sharp and unreasonable, and no doubt Casey knows it too.
He wonders sometimes if Casey feels the same thing he does. This sense of inevitability.
He knows, all at once, that whatever it is that is inevitable, it is coming whether or not he does anything. All he has to do is to keep doing nothing, and it will arrive at its own speed. Take action and hurry it.
Despite the fact that the last thing in the world he wants is change, he can feel its cold breath on the back of his neck.
He doesn’t sleep that night.
He doesn’t sleep much any more.
It’s loud in the bar. He knows that because everyone else looks like it’s loud; they have their mouths open wide to speak, the glass in front of him shakes occasionally with the force of it. He can’t hear it, though. Can’t hear anything these days. Only Casey. He turns, follows a stranger to a stranger’s apartment, fucks or maybe gets fucked, can’t tell, doesn’t care. He wonders why no one can feel the deadly chill in him, this killing frost that lurks in his chest and numbs him to the tips of his fingers. More people should feel it and be afraid.
Casey isn’t the only one who’s started to notice. Jeremy’s starting to watch him out of the corner of his eyes, and Natalie’s taken to bringing him cups of tea as he sits, works.
He’s stopped talking. He wonders if they’ve noticed that, too. Or if he’s not the only one who hears the silence.
He showers in strangers' bathroom and leaves, smelling of some other man’s soap. He knows Casey won’t notice that. Casey never has. Not in, what is it, ten years, twelve, thirteen, it doesn’t matter. Casey probably never will.
This huge and silent thing inside him is stealing him away. For the first time, he can feel the walls, and they terrify them. This is what he always forgets when he’s going insane. How it feels to be walled up inside himself, no way out. Trapped in here with nothing but his thoughts for company.
They aren’t very good company.
Which is maybe why one night, after the show, Casey finds him sitting on the steps of his apartment building without a coat or jacket. Casey’s looking good these days, wearing leather of all things, which shouldn’t surprise Danny but does. Casey’s looking really very good, in fact. The lights of the city that never sleeps are gilding his hair, making his face a geometric playground for various colors.
Casey’s voice is gentle, and for the first time, Danny can’t hear it.
All he catches are fragments.
"danny"
"so worried"
"damn it"
"tell me"
"... everyone’s noticed"
"think they wouldn’t?"
"seeing Abby?"
"talk to me"
"you’re scaring me"
Fragments
"please"
"so worried, so"
"love"
And then a full sentence, so clear and sharp it hurts, and all at once he can hear the entire city, hear it screaming its beautiful love song to the night and the sex/death/violence/life/love/hope that lives in it
"I care so much it hurts sometimes. I want you to be happy. I tried - I wanted you to be - I stayed away - damn it, this is hard to say. Danny, I. I. Shit. I love you."
And Danny has his head buried in Casey’s shoulder, out of nowhere, and tears are streaming from his eyes-when did that happen? but he isn’t sobbing, his voice is clear and whisper-soft, a stream of nearly incomprehensible things - "don’teverleaveme loveyousomuch wantneed hope dreamed thoughtwanted couldn’thearanyoneanymore justyou and then I everything wentaway" and he knows, somehow, that he is saying much more than that and then even he himself is back in stereo sound, full surround-sound system here, because he is kissing Casey.
He. Is kissing. Casey.
Just in case Casey wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, maybe, or just because Casey’s face was so tantalizingly near after all this time, his lips - eyes - there is nothing Danny wants more at this moment. He would go blind and deaf for the rest of his life to have this. Even for a moment.
It looks, though, like Casey isn’t thinking in terms of moments, because Casey is wrapping warm solid arms around Danny and saying things that start with I want and ending with forever.
And he is surfacing.
And he can hear and he can breathe and he can see, this is a miracle, he suddenly believes like he has never believed before. The traffic rushing by roars in his ears, and his heart is thundering, and he can hear voices and the raucous noise of the wind, and he can smell food and life and offal, and this city has never been so beautiful. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s cold where he’s not touching Casey; he hasn’t felt heat or chill in months.
There is wind in his hair, ripping at his already-watering eyes, and Casey’s hand is on the back of his neck, and they are kissing, with tongue, wet blissful heat, on the front steps of Danny’s apartment building, and they are public figures. At that moment Danny could not care that they were public figures, not even if a horde of paparazzi with their flash-glitter photography and scandalmongering surrounded him.
This, this is freedom. This is what that starless void inside of him never was.
Eventually Casey’s reason begins to return, and he gasps, pulls back, lips leaving Danny’s with an audible wet sound that makes Danny dizzy. "Inside," he says, half command and half plea, and they make it through Danny’s door before they’re all over each other again, Danny up against the door, holding on for dear life. The kisses are drugged, sweet, slow and starry, and Danny can feel the blood pooling in his body.
Casey finally draws back, stares at him for a long minute so that Danny starts to wonder if something’s starting to go wrong, has enough time for panic to start in his gut before Casey says, "Is this what that was?"
He nods, past words, wanting - wanting so much.
"Well, good. In a way." Casey is decisive and half-embarrassed at once, and pulls Danny forward for another hard, gorgeous kiss.
Danny knows a lot of words for things like this.
He didn’t know he’d want to use them so soon.
Casey’s head between his legs.
This is Heaven.
Tasting him, so sharp and bright on his tongue.
This, this is so far removed from the emptiness that has filled this room for so long. This is different to the extreme. This is dazzling warmth, and he wants to live like this forever, the sun in his mouth.
Danny realizes, with a small jolt of surprise, that he is rapidly slipping into sleep. He can’t seem to stop, though he doesn’t particularly want to. Casey’s body twines with his almost unconsciously, the two of them neither entirely fair nor entirely dark.
On the ceiling, the pattern of not-quite-light sits, the way it does every night, a focus for his self-destructive meditations.
He closes his eyes, breathes the scent of musk, salt and sweat and sex. His eyes blink open again and all he can see is Casey’s hair, an inch below his nose.
Sleep is welcoming and kind.
Waking up, he knows, will be the most beautiful thing in the world.
Author: Kristophine
Author's website: No current information
Pairing: Casey/Dan
Rating: 15
Category: Slash
Sleeping City
By Kristophine
He’s awake.
He’s been awake a lot lately; really, on a surprisingly regular basis. He keeps thinking, which is the problem, and he wishes nothing quite so much as to be able to stop it. Repression is, after all, a beautiful thing when done well. His mental blocks had been quite firmly established a number of years ago, thank you very much, and these recent developments were doing nothing whatsoever to help him maintain their structural integrity.
To be specific, Casey. Casey isn’t helping at all with that most vital process of making sure that repressed things stay repressed. Casey is, instead, making him think things he thought he’d gotten over thinking a long time ago.
Although repression isn’t really the issue. He isn’t repressed. He knows exactly what he wants. And here, in the depths of cool nights where he can hear the city stirring outside, the sounds of nocturnal creatures conducting their business, he knows that he is spending an irrational amount of time and energy on leashing them. This usually involves getting angry at Casey for stupid, small things.
Standing in his personal space, for example. He’s fairly sure Casey didn’t mean it, didn’t mean to crowd him. Casey was just being Casey. Casey does that on a depressingly regular basis.
Which may be why he can’t push this back into his subconscious, where it belongs; where it can’t hurt anyone or anything he loves. It’s been a while since he’s felt this dark, this angry and brittle, but he knows exactly how it feels and in a way it’s a relief. Sanity always makes him feel just a little panicked, just a little trapped. The long slow slide into depression has no walls, nothing to run into, nothing to hang onto. Depression knows why he’s awake at this hour, watching the patterns the not-quite-darkness outside his window is casting on the ceiling, long horizontal beams of not-quite-light. Everything is dim. He knows, rationally, that the reason everything looks black and white is because the receptors on his retinas that perceive color become virtually useless in darkness and therefore bow to those that perceive light. This is why the world looks bleached and drained.
This does not explain how still everything feels.
This is New York City, where silence doesn’t happen, where quiet is a dream. New York never sleeps.
He loves this city for more than one reason. One of those reasons is that he sometimes feels that it knows him better than he does, and generates this ceaseless rattle and chatter just to keep him occupied with it. If he concentrates on the sound of cars, the swift rush towards the looming dawn, he doesn’t have to think about other things nearly so much.
Like Casey.
Just for example.
And repression. And why he wants the things he does, and how really painfully unfair it is for him to be treating Casey like this when all Casey has does, in fact, is be beautiful.
He wonders, briefly, if Hell is a place where no one can ever sleep.
"Danny?"
He lifts his head, considers for an instant the fact that Casey is wearing a giant white rabbit costume, and decides that this must be a dream. "Yeah, Casey?"
"Dana’s taken a nasty fall off the side of an omnibus." Casey’s face is creased in comical concern.
He is all set to explain why that is impossible when he wakes up and discovers that the lurking light has, in fact, crept well over the horizon, and it is now time for him to get up and face the music.
In reality, walking into their office is much less dramatic than a grieving Casey in a bunny suit. Casey glances up from where he’s huddled on the couch with a pad of paper and pen, mutters something that could be "Good morning" or "The sky is burning," and goes back to scrawling cautiously between the printed blue lines.
"Casey?"
Casey looks up, eyes slightly unfocused. "Yeah, Danny?"
"Never mind."
Casey’s eyes clear a little as a look of vague worry crosses his face, but after a moment of silence, studying Danny’s profile, he drops his gaze back to the paper and resuming the anxious scratching with his pen.
"Why the paper?" He feels it is a reasonable question. Casey usually works on the computer, but not, evidently, today.
Casey makes a nebulous gesture with the pen. "Thought it might help the creative juices flow. Keep me on my toes."
"Ah." He turns on the computer and watches, numbly, as the narrow space that will be his world for the next small eternity comes to life with a whine and a grumble.
He can’t hear much any more. It all seems to rush past him in a supersonic wave, and all he can pick up on is their faces: Dana’s, framed in that pretty gold hair that she keeps changing; Natalie, pixie-like and vibrant; Jeremy, dark and strange, in a good way. Sometimes Isaac, sometimes Kim or someone else. He can’t tell anymore. Sight is starting to go around the edges, too.
He takes a vicious pleasure in wondering if he has a neurological disorder, but he knows, the way the city knows. This is just what it has always been.
He doesn’t really want to hear.
"Danny? Danny?"
He comes awake to the feeling of someone shaking his shoulder, gently. "What?" he manages to mumble blearily, his eyes dry and hurting, his throat raw with breathing.
Casey’s face comes into view, the few strange lines that worry brings all crinkling like roadmaps. He thinks, for a moment, giddily, that he could follow those lines-follow them, and go somewhere. Really go somewhere this time, instead of just running away. "You fell asleep on our couch."
"Oh." He pauses, takes in the location. "Right. Sorry."
"You’ve been acting strangely lately," says Casey, looking pained. He hates that look. He can feel a dull hurt start to flame up in his chest, but chokes it down. Not Casey’s fault, now. His. All his. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah." Liar. "Just having some trouble sleeping."
Casey doesn’t believe him, but is too much of a gentleman to press the issue, and maybe a little afraid of what would happen if he did. Danny knows he can be sharp and unreasonable, and no doubt Casey knows it too.
He wonders sometimes if Casey feels the same thing he does. This sense of inevitability.
He knows, all at once, that whatever it is that is inevitable, it is coming whether or not he does anything. All he has to do is to keep doing nothing, and it will arrive at its own speed. Take action and hurry it.
Despite the fact that the last thing in the world he wants is change, he can feel its cold breath on the back of his neck.
He doesn’t sleep that night.
He doesn’t sleep much any more.
It’s loud in the bar. He knows that because everyone else looks like it’s loud; they have their mouths open wide to speak, the glass in front of him shakes occasionally with the force of it. He can’t hear it, though. Can’t hear anything these days. Only Casey. He turns, follows a stranger to a stranger’s apartment, fucks or maybe gets fucked, can’t tell, doesn’t care. He wonders why no one can feel the deadly chill in him, this killing frost that lurks in his chest and numbs him to the tips of his fingers. More people should feel it and be afraid.
Casey isn’t the only one who’s started to notice. Jeremy’s starting to watch him out of the corner of his eyes, and Natalie’s taken to bringing him cups of tea as he sits, works.
He’s stopped talking. He wonders if they’ve noticed that, too. Or if he’s not the only one who hears the silence.
He showers in strangers' bathroom and leaves, smelling of some other man’s soap. He knows Casey won’t notice that. Casey never has. Not in, what is it, ten years, twelve, thirteen, it doesn’t matter. Casey probably never will.
This huge and silent thing inside him is stealing him away. For the first time, he can feel the walls, and they terrify them. This is what he always forgets when he’s going insane. How it feels to be walled up inside himself, no way out. Trapped in here with nothing but his thoughts for company.
They aren’t very good company.
Which is maybe why one night, after the show, Casey finds him sitting on the steps of his apartment building without a coat or jacket. Casey’s looking good these days, wearing leather of all things, which shouldn’t surprise Danny but does. Casey’s looking really very good, in fact. The lights of the city that never sleeps are gilding his hair, making his face a geometric playground for various colors.
Casey’s voice is gentle, and for the first time, Danny can’t hear it.
All he catches are fragments.
"danny"
"so worried"
"damn it"
"tell me"
"... everyone’s noticed"
"think they wouldn’t?"
"seeing Abby?"
"talk to me"
"you’re scaring me"
Fragments
"please"
"so worried, so"
"love"
And then a full sentence, so clear and sharp it hurts, and all at once he can hear the entire city, hear it screaming its beautiful love song to the night and the sex/death/violence/life/love/hope that lives in it
"I care so much it hurts sometimes. I want you to be happy. I tried - I wanted you to be - I stayed away - damn it, this is hard to say. Danny, I. I. Shit. I love you."
And Danny has his head buried in Casey’s shoulder, out of nowhere, and tears are streaming from his eyes-when did that happen? but he isn’t sobbing, his voice is clear and whisper-soft, a stream of nearly incomprehensible things - "don’teverleaveme loveyousomuch wantneed hope dreamed thoughtwanted couldn’thearanyoneanymore justyou and then I everything wentaway" and he knows, somehow, that he is saying much more than that and then even he himself is back in stereo sound, full surround-sound system here, because he is kissing Casey.
He. Is kissing. Casey.
Just in case Casey wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, maybe, or just because Casey’s face was so tantalizingly near after all this time, his lips - eyes - there is nothing Danny wants more at this moment. He would go blind and deaf for the rest of his life to have this. Even for a moment.
It looks, though, like Casey isn’t thinking in terms of moments, because Casey is wrapping warm solid arms around Danny and saying things that start with I want and ending with forever.
And he is surfacing.
And he can hear and he can breathe and he can see, this is a miracle, he suddenly believes like he has never believed before. The traffic rushing by roars in his ears, and his heart is thundering, and he can hear voices and the raucous noise of the wind, and he can smell food and life and offal, and this city has never been so beautiful. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s cold where he’s not touching Casey; he hasn’t felt heat or chill in months.
There is wind in his hair, ripping at his already-watering eyes, and Casey’s hand is on the back of his neck, and they are kissing, with tongue, wet blissful heat, on the front steps of Danny’s apartment building, and they are public figures. At that moment Danny could not care that they were public figures, not even if a horde of paparazzi with their flash-glitter photography and scandalmongering surrounded him.
This, this is freedom. This is what that starless void inside of him never was.
Eventually Casey’s reason begins to return, and he gasps, pulls back, lips leaving Danny’s with an audible wet sound that makes Danny dizzy. "Inside," he says, half command and half plea, and they make it through Danny’s door before they’re all over each other again, Danny up against the door, holding on for dear life. The kisses are drugged, sweet, slow and starry, and Danny can feel the blood pooling in his body.
Casey finally draws back, stares at him for a long minute so that Danny starts to wonder if something’s starting to go wrong, has enough time for panic to start in his gut before Casey says, "Is this what that was?"
He nods, past words, wanting - wanting so much.
"Well, good. In a way." Casey is decisive and half-embarrassed at once, and pulls Danny forward for another hard, gorgeous kiss.
Danny knows a lot of words for things like this.
He didn’t know he’d want to use them so soon.
Casey’s head between his legs.
This is Heaven.
Tasting him, so sharp and bright on his tongue.
This, this is so far removed from the emptiness that has filled this room for so long. This is different to the extreme. This is dazzling warmth, and he wants to live like this forever, the sun in his mouth.
Danny realizes, with a small jolt of surprise, that he is rapidly slipping into sleep. He can’t seem to stop, though he doesn’t particularly want to. Casey’s body twines with his almost unconsciously, the two of them neither entirely fair nor entirely dark.
On the ceiling, the pattern of not-quite-light sits, the way it does every night, a focus for his self-destructive meditations.
He closes his eyes, breathes the scent of musk, salt and sweat and sex. His eyes blink open again and all he can see is Casey’s hair, an inch below his nose.
Sleep is welcoming and kind.
Waking up, he knows, will be the most beautiful thing in the world.