Original -- Photophobia (Part 2)
Title: Photophobia (Part 2)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,112
Warnings: language, references to sexytimes, angstpocalypse, AU
Summary: Delivering Maion's belongings does not go according to plan.
Author's Note: Took me long enough after Part 1! Fear not, Duvaltees and Maioneers! (I made those up in the shower. Pretty good, right?) I've finished Parts 3 and 4, out of… Idunnohowmany. Maybe five, or possibly six…? …okay, fear a little.
You walk a little bit curious
You look a little bit happy
You play a little bit sensitive
You stay a little bit beautiful
You’re just a little bit ridiculous
Sometimes a little bit off-the-wall
You are a little bit t-t-tight
Sometimes when you-you take the fall, fall
Ooh, how you shake me up and down
When we’re here-the nightspots on the town
- “Nightspots (Early Version)” - The Cars -
PHOTOPHOBIA - PART 2
No one answered the door when Vincent made a very Samaritan attempt to deliver Maion’s personal effects last night, which has, in a typical twist of the unmapped highways and byways of existence, left him nursing a third cup of coffee after a largely sleepless day.
He should be plotting out the phone calls and emails that need to be made and sent to interest groups and investors; his mind should be tracing out manipulations, wrapping sinuous tendrils around his targets and cinching in its grip; the work should be soothing and thrilling at once, because he’s a born predator slipping into his natural habitat.
Unfortunately, the events of last night shook his resolve to its foundations and scattered several thousand shoulds to the winds. Unfortunately, the events of last night solidified every specter that’s been flitting at the corners of Vincent’s vision for three years of looking straight ahead. Unfortunately, the events of last night turned each familiar object in the apartment that he couldn’t afford to move out of into a portal to the past.
If he had a purpose, perhaps it would be easier to don the aegis again-to sequester himself in the safety of denial, of refusal, of conscious repression-but with the ludicrous ritual tossing of the tassled caps, his clockwork schedule has opened into an unblinking void. He is at loose ends, like a tapestry pulled too soon from the loom, trailing and unfinished, indistinct. He is a tangle of threads with an intention of a pattern.
He is also staring into his coffee mug, powerless-or perhaps just not quite strong enough-to resist the associations. He’s remembering the first (and only) time he was late to one of his undergraduate classes, which was the first time he’d made coffee for Maion, a few spare hours after the first time they’d had mind-blowing, back-arching, universe-obliterating sex in the stagnant heat of the afternoon. They’d passed out tangled together, and Vincent’s just-in-case alarm had roused him with plenty of time to shower, mainline some caffeine, and walk to class as night fell. Maion had immediately become too overwhelmingly cheerful for any awkwardness to get a word in edgewise, and Vincent’s usual routine had progressed reasonably smoothly (but for the slightly bewildered assessment, in the bathroom mirror, of the gray-violet marks along his shoulders and his collarbones) up until he handed Maion a brimming porcelain mug. As Vincent quickly discovered, Maion drank his coffee in small, wide-eyed, pursed-lipped sips, which left wet imprints of his mouth. The imprints dripped, at which point Maion tilted the mug and carefully licked them off, at which point Vincent took the mug, set it down on the table, fisted a hand in Maion’s wrongly-buttoned shirt, and dragged him back to bed. He might still have made it to class on time except that Maion had joined him for the reprise of the requisite shower.
Evening has settled, and Vincent’s nerves have not. He washes out the mug, sets it in the drying rack, struggles to be interested in the question of what he’ll eat when he gets back, gathers Maion’s orphaned bag, and starts out for the townhouse with the doorbell that echoes back.
Maion is very old, and he has a perfect memory. Sometimes, both of these things still feel like gifts.
Not right now. But sometimes. Maybe he’ll get another one of those times soon. He’s a finely-crafted being; angels are balanced, more than all but the finest of humans, sad but true. Sometimes-increasingly often-it’s hard to contain all that he does, to carry the weight of what he’s witnessed, to bear the whole of history, but Maion is hard-wired for hope.
He’s also convinced that Michael’s shower still hates him through and through, which is a fairly impressive grudge for a plumbing fixture to hold for almost three years. He forgives it, though, as he has forgiven or reconciled with every flaw of Michael’s house, because quibbling about charity is not to be found in his nature. Overall, despite the fact that both of them were quite accustomed to living alone and had developed habits accordingly, their lives meshed with very little strife when Michael finally melted the lock on Maion’s front door, sorted him out from the mountain of used tissues on the living room carpet, picked him up, and brought him here. There was a nasty fight on the one-year anniversary of the Bad Day, on which occasion Maion brought home a white toaster with black cow spots, hoof-shaped feet to raise it from the countertop, and a cord for a tail, which was not allowed to stay in Michael’s gleaming black-and-chrome-and-pale-green kitchen. Maion probably wouldn’t have been so upset about Bessie’s relegation to the top of his dresser if it hadn’t been the day that it was, which Michael later realized and apologized about, although Bessie still isn’t allowed in the kitchen for any longer than it takes to make toast.
In any case, it has by and large been very tranquil, which is what Maion needed after the whirlwind of emotions that might, for a lesser mind, have obscured the realities of Vincent Duval.
But Maion has a perfect memory.
His first impression was that Vincent was both attractive and off-putting, because he was cold-thermodynamically speaking, he might as well have been inanimate (which was Maion’s initial clue that Vincent was, in fact, deceased), but it was more than that; it was the colors and the angles and the way that he held himself. There was a wall around the young man with the long, jet-black hair and the sharp, arresting dark blue eyes-a distance between him and the ordinary beings that milled around him where he sat in the library’s grandest reading room, the only one there who belonged.
Maion’s second impression was based off of the subtle wear on the collar of the shirt and on the cuffs and elbows of the jacket, and it was that Vincent was poor.
Maion’s third impression, as Vincent packed his things meticulously, hung his backpack over one shoulder, and cast a startlingly vicious glare at a cluster of giggling girls, was that he was a little bit of a dick.
Likely that should have stopped him, but he followed the strange, heatless curiosity down the curving marble staircase, out of the library, and up the hill to the edge of campus, staying a safe and silent space behind. Winter evenings like this one, as Maion would later understand, opened up a lot more library time for a studious member of the undead, but they also exposed Vincent to larger numbers of normal students, who tended to take their privileges for granted. Maion could sense the bitter cynicism seeping from the individual he had already pinned as extraordinary, but it was the undercurrent of wistfulness that kept him following. It was the small but excruciatingly potent hint of misery that made him catch up when Vincent stopped in front of a French bakery and looked through the front window like there was something beyond it that he’d lost.
When Maion paused with his right shoulder two feet and two inches from Vincent’s left, he saw that the small café still seemed to be open. After a moment of contemplating the comestibles and attempting to gauge the dark-haired young man’s expression, he cleared his throat.
“Can I get you anything?”
“You can get lost,” the young man said, but it wasn’t too hostile.
Maion very much wanted to say something about already being lost-in Vincent’s eyes, of course-but he was fairly sure that was the romance novels talking, and they were usually best ignored.
“I promise I’m not creepy,” Maion said-which was perhaps not scintillating, but at least it wasn’t stolen Suzanne Storen dialogue. “Can I please buy you a croissant?”
The young man eyed him sidelong, and Maion tried to look as not-creepy as possible.
“Fine,” the young man said at last. “One croissant.”
He said the word the French way, in a native’s accent that confirmed the slight taint Maion had heard on his English, and Maion’s insides went kind of melty, and he couldn’t resist holding the door even though it earned him a little bit of a glare.
Maion bought them each a croissant. Then he had to buy them each some tea. Then they got kicked out when the place closed, and there was a moment on the sidewalk where Vincent-Vincent Duval; Maion savored the way it curled on his tongue, tasting better than the pastry-looked at him for a long moment and didn’t speak. Maion had learned a lot of things about Vincent already, one of the most prominent and unequivocal being that he wasn’t usually shy.
Maion peered into the shop window again, putting the tip of a finger to the glass.
“I like the look of their tarts,” he said, “but I don’t think I could finish one all by myself. Would you like to join me sometime?”
He caught sight of Vincent’s small, contented smile just before the employees killed the lights.
This time, upon ringing the doorbell, Vincent barely has time to glance around him at the darkening street before the other angel opens the door.
Figures.
Somewhat bizarrely, Vincent recovers from the onslaught of awkwardness first.
“Here,” he says, holding out Maion’s bag as a peace offering in the interest of not getting his facial features rearranged. “Your address was inside.”
The angel takes it by the fraying strap to avoid any danger of brushing Vincent’s hands, which makes him feel more like a plague victim than a pariah, though he’s not sure which was the intent.
“Thank you,” the angel says in the way most people would say Fuck you; go die in a gutter. “Is that all?”
Before Vincent can reply-possibly with “Fuck you; go die in a gutter”-there’s a shift in the light behind the angel, and a figure he knows down to the last fingernail wanders out of the hall.
“Michael, you really need to have a word with that shower-head,” the figure says. “Who’s at the-”
He looks up from toweling at his hair, and then they’re all frozen, like some extremely implausible tableau to illustrate the contrast of private and public spaces, to demonstrate liminality, to epitomize schadenfreude in the crystallizing silence.
Maion’s wearing a pair of jeans Vincent doesn’t recognize and the white-washed-almost-to-translucent T-shirt with the yellow smiley face, which is sticking to a damp spot on his chest. He’s barefoot and bright-eyed and so fucking gorgeous that Vincent may throw up in the Archangel Michael’s gardenias.
Maion goes completely still without lowering the intensely fluffy blue towel he’d raised halfway to his hair. “What are you doing here?”
“He brought your bag,” Michael says, in the way most people would say He has advanced syphilis. “And now he’s leaving.”
Maion glances at the responsible article, which is dangling from Michael’s white-knuckled hand, and then cautiously turns his gaze back to Vincent, shifting the towel and hugging it to his chest.
“That was nice of you,” he offers.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair; it’s not fair; it’s not fair. Sure, the world isn’t and never has been, but this one thing-this one small, stupid thing; this one uninhibited joy-was it really too much to ask? Has Vincent really been so wrong that he deserved not just to have it flipped around, not just to have it torn away, but to have to watch it fester and rot in a matter of moments, and then to have his face rubbed into the maggoty remains when he’d finally almost succeeded in sealing off the pain?
His stomach turns suddenly and heaves hard, and then he is throwing up in the Archangel Michael’s gardenias, which he himself had assumed was a sarcastic exaggeration. All he’s had today is the coffee, which burns mightily as it comes back up.
“What are you doing?” Michael asks in horror.
Vomiting, you literally-holier-than-thou asshole-
“Hey-” One of Maion’s hands curls around his wrist, and the other arm slides across his shoulders, and that’s not fair either. “Come on, let’s get you insi-”
“Oh, like hell!”
“Michael, be charitable. I won’t let him ruin your coordinated bath-mats.”
Vincent gets a brief, slightly blurry glimpse of Michael’s furious expression as Maion hauls him through the doorway. “This isn’t about my bath-mats.”
“It’s always a little bit about your bath-mats,” Maion says calmly, dragging Vincent through a living room like something out of the IKEA magazine and past a kitchen from a Better Homes & Gardens two-page spread. Then Maion is sitting him down on the edge of a bathtub, his back grazing a damp shower curtain that matches more of the fluffy blue towels. Maion lifts the toilet seat for him and then starts rummaging through a drawer beneath the sink.
Vincent finds himself staring at the bath-mats, which also match the towels. “These are pretty nice,” his voice decides to say.
“I suppose,” Maion says. “But he doesn’t even like them to get too wet, which is the entire point of bath-mats, isn’t it? Anyway, yellow or orange?”
Vincent manages to focus on Maion’s outstretched hands, which are proffering a pair of toothbrushes. “I… don’t…”
Maion sets them both down on the countertop, hesitates, and then approaches slowly. Vincent manages only to stare blankly as his ex-boyfriend puts a cool hand to his forehead.
“I think you have a fever,” Maion says. “Can you get fevers?” He frowns. “Have you been eating well enough? You know what happens when you subsist on coffee and squirrels for a few weeks at a stretch.”
“This isn’t happening,” Vincent says faintly. “I’m hallucinating.” He finds his tongue and bites it in time to cut off Or having one of those sex dreams where you come back and grovel and then overpower me when I’m too proud, and right as we start to do it on the kitchen floor, I wake up. “I should… go.”
“You’re sick,” Maion says more gently, and the weight of his hands on Vincent’s shoulders is enough to stymie an attempt to stand.
“Only in the head,” Vincent says, although he knows quite well in which organ the illness began.
Maion looks down at him for a long moment, and his extremely expressive eyes are cloudier than Vincent’s ever seen them. “I… I read that the woman from the blood bank got arrested a couple months ago.”
“As far as I understand it,” Vincent says, trying not to grit his teeth, “some imbecile reported her to the police after he contracted something from one of the packets she sold him. Imagine that-disease in a pint of blood that failed the bank’s purity tests. That’s the name of the damn game.”
Maion swallows, not that Vincent just found himself looking intently at the angel’s throat. “I’m glad she didn’t see fit to sell out all of her previous clients, at the least.”
“Honor among thieves, etcetera,” Vincent says. “She only accepted cash, and she never took down names-probably to remove the temptation; I think she knew what was coming eventually. That said, she made a killing while it held out.”
Maion has the grace to look slightly scandalized at the turn of phrase. “Well… how have you been feeding since?”
Vincent gives him a dark look. It’s childish, even by Maion’s standards, to play like he doesn’t know-and to play like he won’t pitch a fit if Vincent waxes lyrical about the various occasions upon which impending malnutrition has driven him to ambush undergraduates after midnight. In the old days, Maion probably would have mustered a little bit of jealousy at the fact that Vincent’s necessary victims are almost exclusively male-whether or not that’s because society discourages the ones sober enough to remember from reporting a quasi-sexual assault.
Predictably, Maion scowls at him for a moment. Less-predictably, the moment shortly peters out, at which point Maion sighs and sits down next to Vincent on the side of the tub.
“Please tell me you haven’t had to eat any squirrels,” Maion says.
“Still in the habit of honesty,” Vincent says. “Additionally, still in the habit of avoiding starvation.”
Maion is now looking down at his own wrists, and Vincent blames the way his head is whirling for the fact that it took him this long to catch up. It’s still somehow easier than addressing the simple truths of separation.
“No,” he says as firmly as his voice will allow. “Absolutely not.”
Maion glances at the door. “You’re starving.”
Vincent fists both hands in his faded black jeans. “I’ve had worse.”
“You could be dying.”
“I’ll definitely be dying when your brother rips out my esophagus and jams it up m-”
“He won’t find out.”
“You’re a maniac,” Vincent says.
“Oh, hush,” Maion says, and then he gets up, crosses the room, closes the door, locks it, opens the medicine cabinet, and starts setting things on the counter-mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and a tiny pair of scissors.
Maion holds the bottle of mouthwash out to Vincent, and the pocket of coffee-bile under his tongue is so unbearable that he’s taken a swig, swilled, and spat into the toilet bowl before he realizes that this may qualify as consent later when Michael stages a short trial and then feeds him his own pancreas.
“For the record,” Vincent says, “this cannot end in anything other than unmitigated disaster.”
Maion wipes the blades of the scissors and then selects a second scrap of cotton with which to swab the inside of his wrist. “I believe I told you to hush.”
“Merde,” Vincent says.
Without further ado, Maion stabs the scissors into his arm, and the scent of the welling blood fills the small room so fast that Vincent has to cling to the edge of the bathtub before dizziness unseats him. There isn’t time to steel himself, let alone to rebuild his long-since-crumbled resolve, before Maion’s beside him again, shoving a freshly-broken vein into his face.
Vincent would like the record to show that none of this was his fault. He would rather that the record didn’t register the soft sound of pleasure that he makes as Maion’s hot blood starts to slide past his lips.
[Part 3]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,112
Warnings: language, references to sexytimes, angstpocalypse, AU
Summary: Delivering Maion's belongings does not go according to plan.
Author's Note: Took me long enough after Part 1! Fear not, Duvaltees and Maioneers! (I made those up in the shower. Pretty good, right?) I've finished Parts 3 and 4, out of… Idunnohowmany. Maybe five, or possibly six…? …okay, fear a little.
You walk a little bit curious
You look a little bit happy
You play a little bit sensitive
You stay a little bit beautiful
You’re just a little bit ridiculous
Sometimes a little bit off-the-wall
You are a little bit t-t-tight
Sometimes when you-you take the fall, fall
Ooh, how you shake me up and down
When we’re here-the nightspots on the town
- “Nightspots (Early Version)” - The Cars -
PHOTOPHOBIA - PART 2
No one answered the door when Vincent made a very Samaritan attempt to deliver Maion’s personal effects last night, which has, in a typical twist of the unmapped highways and byways of existence, left him nursing a third cup of coffee after a largely sleepless day.
He should be plotting out the phone calls and emails that need to be made and sent to interest groups and investors; his mind should be tracing out manipulations, wrapping sinuous tendrils around his targets and cinching in its grip; the work should be soothing and thrilling at once, because he’s a born predator slipping into his natural habitat.
Unfortunately, the events of last night shook his resolve to its foundations and scattered several thousand shoulds to the winds. Unfortunately, the events of last night solidified every specter that’s been flitting at the corners of Vincent’s vision for three years of looking straight ahead. Unfortunately, the events of last night turned each familiar object in the apartment that he couldn’t afford to move out of into a portal to the past.
If he had a purpose, perhaps it would be easier to don the aegis again-to sequester himself in the safety of denial, of refusal, of conscious repression-but with the ludicrous ritual tossing of the tassled caps, his clockwork schedule has opened into an unblinking void. He is at loose ends, like a tapestry pulled too soon from the loom, trailing and unfinished, indistinct. He is a tangle of threads with an intention of a pattern.
He is also staring into his coffee mug, powerless-or perhaps just not quite strong enough-to resist the associations. He’s remembering the first (and only) time he was late to one of his undergraduate classes, which was the first time he’d made coffee for Maion, a few spare hours after the first time they’d had mind-blowing, back-arching, universe-obliterating sex in the stagnant heat of the afternoon. They’d passed out tangled together, and Vincent’s just-in-case alarm had roused him with plenty of time to shower, mainline some caffeine, and walk to class as night fell. Maion had immediately become too overwhelmingly cheerful for any awkwardness to get a word in edgewise, and Vincent’s usual routine had progressed reasonably smoothly (but for the slightly bewildered assessment, in the bathroom mirror, of the gray-violet marks along his shoulders and his collarbones) up until he handed Maion a brimming porcelain mug. As Vincent quickly discovered, Maion drank his coffee in small, wide-eyed, pursed-lipped sips, which left wet imprints of his mouth. The imprints dripped, at which point Maion tilted the mug and carefully licked them off, at which point Vincent took the mug, set it down on the table, fisted a hand in Maion’s wrongly-buttoned shirt, and dragged him back to bed. He might still have made it to class on time except that Maion had joined him for the reprise of the requisite shower.
Evening has settled, and Vincent’s nerves have not. He washes out the mug, sets it in the drying rack, struggles to be interested in the question of what he’ll eat when he gets back, gathers Maion’s orphaned bag, and starts out for the townhouse with the doorbell that echoes back.
Maion is very old, and he has a perfect memory. Sometimes, both of these things still feel like gifts.
Not right now. But sometimes. Maybe he’ll get another one of those times soon. He’s a finely-crafted being; angels are balanced, more than all but the finest of humans, sad but true. Sometimes-increasingly often-it’s hard to contain all that he does, to carry the weight of what he’s witnessed, to bear the whole of history, but Maion is hard-wired for hope.
He’s also convinced that Michael’s shower still hates him through and through, which is a fairly impressive grudge for a plumbing fixture to hold for almost three years. He forgives it, though, as he has forgiven or reconciled with every flaw of Michael’s house, because quibbling about charity is not to be found in his nature. Overall, despite the fact that both of them were quite accustomed to living alone and had developed habits accordingly, their lives meshed with very little strife when Michael finally melted the lock on Maion’s front door, sorted him out from the mountain of used tissues on the living room carpet, picked him up, and brought him here. There was a nasty fight on the one-year anniversary of the Bad Day, on which occasion Maion brought home a white toaster with black cow spots, hoof-shaped feet to raise it from the countertop, and a cord for a tail, which was not allowed to stay in Michael’s gleaming black-and-chrome-and-pale-green kitchen. Maion probably wouldn’t have been so upset about Bessie’s relegation to the top of his dresser if it hadn’t been the day that it was, which Michael later realized and apologized about, although Bessie still isn’t allowed in the kitchen for any longer than it takes to make toast.
In any case, it has by and large been very tranquil, which is what Maion needed after the whirlwind of emotions that might, for a lesser mind, have obscured the realities of Vincent Duval.
But Maion has a perfect memory.
His first impression was that Vincent was both attractive and off-putting, because he was cold-thermodynamically speaking, he might as well have been inanimate (which was Maion’s initial clue that Vincent was, in fact, deceased), but it was more than that; it was the colors and the angles and the way that he held himself. There was a wall around the young man with the long, jet-black hair and the sharp, arresting dark blue eyes-a distance between him and the ordinary beings that milled around him where he sat in the library’s grandest reading room, the only one there who belonged.
Maion’s second impression was based off of the subtle wear on the collar of the shirt and on the cuffs and elbows of the jacket, and it was that Vincent was poor.
Maion’s third impression, as Vincent packed his things meticulously, hung his backpack over one shoulder, and cast a startlingly vicious glare at a cluster of giggling girls, was that he was a little bit of a dick.
Likely that should have stopped him, but he followed the strange, heatless curiosity down the curving marble staircase, out of the library, and up the hill to the edge of campus, staying a safe and silent space behind. Winter evenings like this one, as Maion would later understand, opened up a lot more library time for a studious member of the undead, but they also exposed Vincent to larger numbers of normal students, who tended to take their privileges for granted. Maion could sense the bitter cynicism seeping from the individual he had already pinned as extraordinary, but it was the undercurrent of wistfulness that kept him following. It was the small but excruciatingly potent hint of misery that made him catch up when Vincent stopped in front of a French bakery and looked through the front window like there was something beyond it that he’d lost.
When Maion paused with his right shoulder two feet and two inches from Vincent’s left, he saw that the small café still seemed to be open. After a moment of contemplating the comestibles and attempting to gauge the dark-haired young man’s expression, he cleared his throat.
“Can I get you anything?”
“You can get lost,” the young man said, but it wasn’t too hostile.
Maion very much wanted to say something about already being lost-in Vincent’s eyes, of course-but he was fairly sure that was the romance novels talking, and they were usually best ignored.
“I promise I’m not creepy,” Maion said-which was perhaps not scintillating, but at least it wasn’t stolen Suzanne Storen dialogue. “Can I please buy you a croissant?”
The young man eyed him sidelong, and Maion tried to look as not-creepy as possible.
“Fine,” the young man said at last. “One croissant.”
He said the word the French way, in a native’s accent that confirmed the slight taint Maion had heard on his English, and Maion’s insides went kind of melty, and he couldn’t resist holding the door even though it earned him a little bit of a glare.
Maion bought them each a croissant. Then he had to buy them each some tea. Then they got kicked out when the place closed, and there was a moment on the sidewalk where Vincent-Vincent Duval; Maion savored the way it curled on his tongue, tasting better than the pastry-looked at him for a long moment and didn’t speak. Maion had learned a lot of things about Vincent already, one of the most prominent and unequivocal being that he wasn’t usually shy.
Maion peered into the shop window again, putting the tip of a finger to the glass.
“I like the look of their tarts,” he said, “but I don’t think I could finish one all by myself. Would you like to join me sometime?”
He caught sight of Vincent’s small, contented smile just before the employees killed the lights.
This time, upon ringing the doorbell, Vincent barely has time to glance around him at the darkening street before the other angel opens the door.
Figures.
Somewhat bizarrely, Vincent recovers from the onslaught of awkwardness first.
“Here,” he says, holding out Maion’s bag as a peace offering in the interest of not getting his facial features rearranged. “Your address was inside.”
The angel takes it by the fraying strap to avoid any danger of brushing Vincent’s hands, which makes him feel more like a plague victim than a pariah, though he’s not sure which was the intent.
“Thank you,” the angel says in the way most people would say Fuck you; go die in a gutter. “Is that all?”
Before Vincent can reply-possibly with “Fuck you; go die in a gutter”-there’s a shift in the light behind the angel, and a figure he knows down to the last fingernail wanders out of the hall.
“Michael, you really need to have a word with that shower-head,” the figure says. “Who’s at the-”
He looks up from toweling at his hair, and then they’re all frozen, like some extremely implausible tableau to illustrate the contrast of private and public spaces, to demonstrate liminality, to epitomize schadenfreude in the crystallizing silence.
Maion’s wearing a pair of jeans Vincent doesn’t recognize and the white-washed-almost-to-translucent T-shirt with the yellow smiley face, which is sticking to a damp spot on his chest. He’s barefoot and bright-eyed and so fucking gorgeous that Vincent may throw up in the Archangel Michael’s gardenias.
Maion goes completely still without lowering the intensely fluffy blue towel he’d raised halfway to his hair. “What are you doing here?”
“He brought your bag,” Michael says, in the way most people would say He has advanced syphilis. “And now he’s leaving.”
Maion glances at the responsible article, which is dangling from Michael’s white-knuckled hand, and then cautiously turns his gaze back to Vincent, shifting the towel and hugging it to his chest.
“That was nice of you,” he offers.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair; it’s not fair; it’s not fair. Sure, the world isn’t and never has been, but this one thing-this one small, stupid thing; this one uninhibited joy-was it really too much to ask? Has Vincent really been so wrong that he deserved not just to have it flipped around, not just to have it torn away, but to have to watch it fester and rot in a matter of moments, and then to have his face rubbed into the maggoty remains when he’d finally almost succeeded in sealing off the pain?
His stomach turns suddenly and heaves hard, and then he is throwing up in the Archangel Michael’s gardenias, which he himself had assumed was a sarcastic exaggeration. All he’s had today is the coffee, which burns mightily as it comes back up.
“What are you doing?” Michael asks in horror.
Vomiting, you literally-holier-than-thou asshole-
“Hey-” One of Maion’s hands curls around his wrist, and the other arm slides across his shoulders, and that’s not fair either. “Come on, let’s get you insi-”
“Oh, like hell!”
“Michael, be charitable. I won’t let him ruin your coordinated bath-mats.”
Vincent gets a brief, slightly blurry glimpse of Michael’s furious expression as Maion hauls him through the doorway. “This isn’t about my bath-mats.”
“It’s always a little bit about your bath-mats,” Maion says calmly, dragging Vincent through a living room like something out of the IKEA magazine and past a kitchen from a Better Homes & Gardens two-page spread. Then Maion is sitting him down on the edge of a bathtub, his back grazing a damp shower curtain that matches more of the fluffy blue towels. Maion lifts the toilet seat for him and then starts rummaging through a drawer beneath the sink.
Vincent finds himself staring at the bath-mats, which also match the towels. “These are pretty nice,” his voice decides to say.
“I suppose,” Maion says. “But he doesn’t even like them to get too wet, which is the entire point of bath-mats, isn’t it? Anyway, yellow or orange?”
Vincent manages to focus on Maion’s outstretched hands, which are proffering a pair of toothbrushes. “I… don’t…”
Maion sets them both down on the countertop, hesitates, and then approaches slowly. Vincent manages only to stare blankly as his ex-boyfriend puts a cool hand to his forehead.
“I think you have a fever,” Maion says. “Can you get fevers?” He frowns. “Have you been eating well enough? You know what happens when you subsist on coffee and squirrels for a few weeks at a stretch.”
“This isn’t happening,” Vincent says faintly. “I’m hallucinating.” He finds his tongue and bites it in time to cut off Or having one of those sex dreams where you come back and grovel and then overpower me when I’m too proud, and right as we start to do it on the kitchen floor, I wake up. “I should… go.”
“You’re sick,” Maion says more gently, and the weight of his hands on Vincent’s shoulders is enough to stymie an attempt to stand.
“Only in the head,” Vincent says, although he knows quite well in which organ the illness began.
Maion looks down at him for a long moment, and his extremely expressive eyes are cloudier than Vincent’s ever seen them. “I… I read that the woman from the blood bank got arrested a couple months ago.”
“As far as I understand it,” Vincent says, trying not to grit his teeth, “some imbecile reported her to the police after he contracted something from one of the packets she sold him. Imagine that-disease in a pint of blood that failed the bank’s purity tests. That’s the name of the damn game.”
Maion swallows, not that Vincent just found himself looking intently at the angel’s throat. “I’m glad she didn’t see fit to sell out all of her previous clients, at the least.”
“Honor among thieves, etcetera,” Vincent says. “She only accepted cash, and she never took down names-probably to remove the temptation; I think she knew what was coming eventually. That said, she made a killing while it held out.”
Maion has the grace to look slightly scandalized at the turn of phrase. “Well… how have you been feeding since?”
Vincent gives him a dark look. It’s childish, even by Maion’s standards, to play like he doesn’t know-and to play like he won’t pitch a fit if Vincent waxes lyrical about the various occasions upon which impending malnutrition has driven him to ambush undergraduates after midnight. In the old days, Maion probably would have mustered a little bit of jealousy at the fact that Vincent’s necessary victims are almost exclusively male-whether or not that’s because society discourages the ones sober enough to remember from reporting a quasi-sexual assault.
Predictably, Maion scowls at him for a moment. Less-predictably, the moment shortly peters out, at which point Maion sighs and sits down next to Vincent on the side of the tub.
“Please tell me you haven’t had to eat any squirrels,” Maion says.
“Still in the habit of honesty,” Vincent says. “Additionally, still in the habit of avoiding starvation.”
Maion is now looking down at his own wrists, and Vincent blames the way his head is whirling for the fact that it took him this long to catch up. It’s still somehow easier than addressing the simple truths of separation.
“No,” he says as firmly as his voice will allow. “Absolutely not.”
Maion glances at the door. “You’re starving.”
Vincent fists both hands in his faded black jeans. “I’ve had worse.”
“You could be dying.”
“I’ll definitely be dying when your brother rips out my esophagus and jams it up m-”
“He won’t find out.”
“You’re a maniac,” Vincent says.
“Oh, hush,” Maion says, and then he gets up, crosses the room, closes the door, locks it, opens the medicine cabinet, and starts setting things on the counter-mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and a tiny pair of scissors.
Maion holds the bottle of mouthwash out to Vincent, and the pocket of coffee-bile under his tongue is so unbearable that he’s taken a swig, swilled, and spat into the toilet bowl before he realizes that this may qualify as consent later when Michael stages a short trial and then feeds him his own pancreas.
“For the record,” Vincent says, “this cannot end in anything other than unmitigated disaster.”
Maion wipes the blades of the scissors and then selects a second scrap of cotton with which to swab the inside of his wrist. “I believe I told you to hush.”
“Merde,” Vincent says.
Without further ado, Maion stabs the scissors into his arm, and the scent of the welling blood fills the small room so fast that Vincent has to cling to the edge of the bathtub before dizziness unseats him. There isn’t time to steel himself, let alone to rebuild his long-since-crumbled resolve, before Maion’s beside him again, shoving a freshly-broken vein into his face.
Vincent would like the record to show that none of this was his fault. He would rather that the record didn’t register the soft sound of pleasure that he makes as Maion’s hot blood starts to slide past his lips.
[Part 3]