Original -- Photophobia (Part 3)
Title: Photophobia (Part 3)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,050
Warnings: language, references to sexytimes, angstpocalypse, AU
Summary: Saving Vincent from the threat of starvation does not go according to plan.
Author's Note: Sooooo… Part 1! Part 2! I'm currently stuck in the middle of Part 5, because of school and the liberal helping of failsauce that I have drizzled on my life sundae. And because of the Best RP Ever. Nothing.
I don’t care if you hurt me some more
I don’t care if you even the score
Well, you can knock me, and I don’t care
Well, you can mock me-I don’t care
You can rock me just ’bout anywhere
It’s all right
’Cause you’re all I’ve got tonight
You’re all I’ve got tonight
You’re all I’ve got tonight
I need you
Tonight
I need you
Tonight
- “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” - The Cars -
PHOTOPHOBIA - PART 3
Maybe it’s the fever and the near-starvation and the general angelic superiority, or maybe Maion always tastes like a wet dream. Either way, Vincent is not about to complain.
Since he’s never met a vampire involved in healthy relationship-which is not quite as disconcerting a statistic once one considers that he’s only ever met two other vampires, and Alistair is apparently celibate-he doesn’t know whether or not it’s strange that he never bit Maion while they were together. Emotionally, sexually, as part of the bond of intimacy they’d established, was that something he should have done? The question stands-or, more accurately, wanders aimlessly around the corridors of Vincent’s brain that are not occupied with the overwhelmingly explosive sensations of heat and sweetness; with tightening his two-handed grip and drawing Maion’s creamy skin closer; with the soothing darkness as his eyes slide shut, reducing the universe to the soft pulse, the softer breath, the warmth, the smoothness, the metal; and it’s so fine-
The fingers of Maion’s free hand tug on the end of Vincent’s ponytail, which would be an affront worthy of a swift death if not for the fact that it’s an old, old ritual of theirs-they would both shift silently through the apartment more often than not; when Vincent was reading or meddling at the kitchen counter or otherwise unaware, Maion would pull gently, Hey, I’m here. (Then the faux-innocent, seductive little bastard would almost invariably trail a fingertip down Vincent’s spine and hook it into his back pocket.) Vincent should have killed him the first time and been done with it, but he’d been so shocked that Maion had interpreted his silence as permission, and then it had been established, and he’d been doomed.
It’s the cold ripple of the memory more than the action itself that sobers him suddenly, and he withdraws, licking at the smears on Maion’s skin, trying to get the wound to start to knit. He’s still so intoxicated with the rush of the blood and the inpouring of general healthfulness that it takes him a moment to hear the sizzling.
He looks up. The lock on the bathroom door is melting in a way that would tickle Dalí a radioactive shade of pink.
“Oh,” Maion says, which sounds distressingly unlike Don’t worry; I’ll save us from the obliterative rage of my protective older brother, who happens to be an archangel capable of turning reinforced metal into dripping goo. “I’d forgotten how good he is with locks.”
“What was it I said?” Vincent manages.
Maion bites his lip, which is not helping Vincent to focus on the task of saving his sorry ass from getting beaten on a Biblical scale. “You mean ‘this cannot end in anything other than unmitigated disaster’?”
“That’s the one,” Vincent says.
Maion slides his wrist out of Vincent’s grip and cradles it to his chest. It’s still oozing damningly, and Vincent can feel a wet spot on his cheek that must be another smudge.
“In retrospect,” he says, “I think it was an understatement.”
The door blasts open, and Vincent sees a flickering hint of something in the category of a fireball-a hint being more than enough to send him diving into the bathtub.
Whatever Maion was saying to slander the shower-head earlier was probably accurate; the bath tap smacks sharply into Vincent’s forehead with an unmistakable vindictiveness, and the porcelain is remarkably unforgiving. It’s also still wet, and it won’t accommodate his knees.
“Michael!” Maion cries, and Vincent instinctively throws an arm over his head at the the intense crackling and the flaring heat that follow. He dares to peek in time to see the ashes that remain of the shower curtain twirling down towards him like snow.
“What are you doing?” Michael’s voice howls. “This is what I get for opening my home to y-”
All of the air leaps out of Vincent’s lungs as Maion lands on top of him.
“Sorry,” Maion says distractedly. Another furious orange fireball slams into the tile above them, hissing and dissipating into tiny snakes of smoke. A charred blast crater marks its resting place, and Vincent’s fairly sure the soap dish wasn’t full of steaming liquid before. “He’ll calm down in a little while,” Maion says. His knee has come to rest between Vincent’s thighs, and their chests are pressed together; their faces are so close that Vincent’s counting golden eyebrow hairs. Maion blinks, blinks again, and brightens. “Can I stay with you?”
Mayday. Maion’s eyes are the precise color of shallow water around the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, if the travel sites that Vincent frequents during bouts of depression are to be believed. He gasps in enough air for a “What?”
“Well, I’m going to need somewhere else to crash while he cools off-” That is eminently unfunny given the third fireball that narrowly misses Maion’s exposed feet; Vincent can feel the searing trajectory that leaves another splash of charcoal on the wall. “-and I don’t have any friends, and…”
“And I owe you one,” Vincent says flatly.
He’d forgotten how much he hates that wounded look that Maion gets the moment you impugn his morals in the slightest. He also can’t believe he ever even once found it convincing.
“That’s not why I-” Maion ducks another fireball, and his damp hair brushes all over Vincent’s cheeks, his face pressed so closely into Vincent’s neck that the contours of his lips-
Maion pops up like a jack-in-the-box after that, and Vincent grips the edge of the tub and chances another look. Michael appears to be gathering energy for his next assault, if the swirling flames coagulating in a sphere above his palm are anything to judge by.
“Time out!” Maion says. “I’m going to take my things and stay with Vincent for a couple days, and-”
To be honest, Maion’s lucky that Michael’s aim is off; he was asking for a half-formed spurt of fire to the face, and most people would count escaping with a few singed hairs as a victory.
Then again, Maion is definitively not most people. Then again, Maion takes everything personally. Then again, Maion has always had a little bit of a very creative vengeful streak.
Hence the grabbing of the defamed shower-head, the tearing it out of the wall, the wrenching the plumbing line out in a rain of tile shards and plaster and a scream from the pipe, and the summoning a massive stream of water to flood across the bathroom and soak the Archangel Michael from head to toe.
Suddenly Vincent’s incident with the flower-box seems like a small offense. In light of this new standard for criminal behavior, maybe Michael will just remove his liver without administering anesthesia, and he’ll be allowed to live.
“Now I’m going to go pack my bag,” Maion says sternly, “and then we’ll be leaving. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow if you’re being more reasonable.”
Michael stands in the doorway, thoroughly doused, staring at Maion in sheer, silent disbelief. Vincent does not blame him in the least. An extremely dignified Maion climbs out of the bathtub, sidles past him, and starts making unobtrusive packing noises in the next room.
“I don’t know why either of us puts up with him,” Michael says faintly after a long, long moment of extremely awkward silence.
“I heard that,” Maion calls.
Michael shakes his head, spraying droplets, turns, and slogs off down the hall. A door shuts, and Vincent sits all the way up in the bathtub, attempting to figure out when everything went apeshit.
Living with Michael made it easy to forget how taxing frenetic activity can be for ordinary beings. Admittedly, watching undergraduates’ caffeine crashes helped to remind Maion this year, but he’s still a bit surprised when Vincent lets them in, collapses onto the bed-that same old creaky, lumpy, wonderful bed-and passes out almost instantaneously. Maion hesitates, unlaces Vincent’s shoes, removes them, sets them by the door, and then comes back to considers him. Vincent’s cheek is crushed into the pillow, his unbound hair spilt beside him-an inkblot, or some elegant sea creature, or a delicate shadow. He looks young. He looks thin. He looks exhausted. He looks lovely. His eyelashes are very long, and his cheekbones stand out.
Maion looks around to assess his options and elects to set his duffel bag next to the bedroom doorway. It seems like less of an assertion of belonging than putting it near the dresser, somehow; and since it would have been strange to leave it in the kitchen, and there isn’t really any space in the bathroom, his options are somewhat limited.
Is it creepy to keep looking at Vincent while he’s sleeping? It’s just-this is the first chance Maion’s had to get a good look, uninterrupted, on his own terms, at his own leisure, with the light no worse than it has been during any of the other encounters. This is the first moment of stillness, and there’s something engrossing about that, something with a gravitational pull. Maybe it’s just that they used to have so many of those, back when they both knew how to relax. Back when they were each other’s sanctuaries. Back when Vincent Duval was the antidote to anything, the panacea, the Paradise.
Maion has a perfect memory, of course. Paradise didn’t look like this, but it felt very much the same. It felt safe; and the weather was immaterial, because you were always warm on the inside, radiating. That’s what being close to Vincent was like, which is the thing he could never make Michael understand.
Duly, Maion also remembers that Vincent was sick in Michael’s flowers less than an hour ago and has very possibly been draining squirrels and-worse-pigeons, which are not exactly known for the purity of their bodily fluids. Carefully, he climbs up onto the bed (it creaks) and settles next to Vincent (it creaks again) in order to monitor him. Perhaps monitoring an invalid does not traditionally involve tentatively extending a hand to touch said invalid’s still-just-as-silky hair, but Maion prefers not to fuss about the details. Especially when the details involve unauthorized advances upon unconscious ex-lovers.
After ninety-seven minutes of monitoring, during which Vincent’s condition does not noticeably change, Maion hears some commotion on the doorstep, followed by a brisk knock, which probably means that Vincent’s doorbell has not been fixed in the three years since Maion used to peek through the letterbox, which brought Vincent to literal tears of laughter the first time and never failed to summon a smile on subsequent…
Well, there’s someone at the door.
Maion sits up (the bed creaks), slides to the edge (it creaks again), and stands (has this mattress sustained some kind of serious dama… they weren’t that athletic; it must just be showing its age). Then he proceeds to the door and opens it, at which point he realizes that he is, as they say, not terribly bright.
“Um,” he says to the two brown-haired men on the doorstep, both of whom are staring at him in disbelief, “good evening.”
“Oh, my God,” the one holding the wide box says. “It’s Tapioca.”
The one with the glasses looks like he wants to die. “Connor.”
“Because I’d tap you,” Connor tells Maion contentedly. “Good, right? Holy shit, you’re even hotter up close. Wait-what are you doing here?”
“Um,” Maion says again. “I’m-”
“Hold this,” Connor says, shoving the box at the man with the glasses, who fumbles to hold it level, and then patting at all of his pockets until he turns up a pen. He removes the cap by pinning it between his teeth and applies the tip to the back of his hand. As far as Maion can tell given the way the cap garbles his speech, he then says, “I need to remember this for when I write that soap opera; you know the one.”
“Unfortunately,” the other man says. He attempts to balance the box on one open palm in order to offer the other hand for Maion to shake. “I’m John. And I’m sorry to intrude. And I’m even sorrier that the men in white coats let Connor out early today.”
Maion shakes, because the offer of a familiar greeting is the only part of this conversation that has made any sense thus far.
“You’re not sorry,” Connor says, finishing whatever he was jotting down with a flourish. “You love me more than your own life. You have a name, Tapioca? Damn, I’d lick you off the spoon, if you know wh-”
“We know what you mean,” John says.
Maion’s perfect recall is required to sort through the stream of words and determine which ones may have been directed at him. “I’m… Maion. Maion Deus.” It’s a bit transparent, but he and Michael have been using it for forty-six years or so, and no one’s ever bothered them over it. “It’s nice to meet y-”
“Shit,” Connor says, which is somewhat startling. “If you’re at his place… besides, even I couldn’t hook up with his ex; he’d kill me with his mind. Do you have a brother?”
“Um,” Maion says, “yes, although I’m not sure what that has to do with anyth-”
“Really,” Connor purrs.
John elbows him rather hard and then holds the box out to Maion. “We popped by this afternoon, but no one was in. These are for Vincent.”
They must-they must not know. He must not have told them. For these are his friends from the bar (perfect memory: gift/curse/thing making Maion’s head spin), from last night, people he chose to associate with… and if they looked for him in daylight, they must not know.
He didn’t hide himself, before-not like this. Not this much. They’d only been splitting croissants and Oranginas in the park like shy schoolboys for three weeks before Vincent stopped Maion’s hand, met his eyes, and gave him a look so intent that his spine twinged.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Vincent said, and Vincent rarely was; “this is becoming something-more-than I expected, and there’s no point founding it on a very basic lie. I hope you can tell by now that I am entirely mentally sound, and although it’s probably impossible to believe, I can and will present evidence, and then it’s your choice whether you want to contin-”
“You really are a vampire?” Maion asked delightedly. “I thought so, but I didn’t want to ask, because it’s not much of a conversation starter, is it?”
Vincent stared at him.
Maion stared back. “But you shouldn’t be drinking Orangina if you’re a vampire, should you? Won’t it give you a tummyache?”
Thus it was also the day that Maion discovered how adorable Vincent was when reduced to slightly hysterical laughter.
In the meantime, John is still offering him a large white box, which has a number of things scrawled on the top in Sharpie.
Connor is smiling at Maion in a way that makes him vaguely uncomfortable. “They’re Sorry-Your-Party-Sucked-slash-Congratulations-Again-slash-Apparently-You-Have-Major-Unplumbed-Emotional-Depths cupcakes.”
Maion only processed one word out of all of those, but it was the important one. “Cupcakes?”
Connor winks in a way that makes Maion much more distinctly uncomfortable.
John looks like a nice person, though. He also looks resigned, in a manner that speaks of having pried Connor off of prey on many separate occasions, so Maion supposes that he’ll be safe as long as he keeps both of them in one place.
“Would you like to come in?” he asks. “I could make some tea.” He pauses. “If… he has tea. I’m fairly certain I can get you some tap water, at the very least.”
“Baby,” Connor says, eyes shining, “I would drink your sweat.”
Maion regrets this already.
When Vincent wakes up, almost fully-clothed, on top of his own bed, all he remembers at first is fire and fearing for his life. Then he hears the voices in the kitchen and realizes that what he remembers is irrelevant.
“Out,” he says to Connor before he’s even stepped all the way into the kitchen. “You are Satan. Leave.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard that,” Connor says. “Your delivery lacks conviction-I give it a seven; at most a seven-point-five. May I suggest a public speaking seminar?”
“They brought cupcakes,” Maion says, as if that makes it okay that he’s sitting at Vincent’s kitchen table drinking tea with the Enemy.
And with John, of course, but John seems to end up in situations like this so regularly that he wouldn’t bat an eyelash if a meteor crashed through the roof.
Vincent could do with a meteor crashing through the roof, preferably one that succinctly ended either his existence or Connor’s and then just sort of smoldered for a while.
“Sit down,” Connor says. “Have a cupcake. Tell me why the man who puts the ‘ex’ in ‘sexy’ is loitering around your apartment, and don’t omit any of the salacious details.”
“There will be salacious details in your obituary tomorrow if you don’t get your ass out of my kitchen,” Vincent says.
“Cupcakes,” Maion says, and Vincent turns to look at him in order to gauge his sanity, forgetting that-and then it’s too late.
Fuck Maion’s puppy eyes. Fuck them.
He sits down. He spends a moment hating the rental company for furnishing this apartment with four chairs. He selects a cupcake.
“John was just telling me about some of the classes you all took,” Maion says, sipping serenely at his tea. “Connor was just interrupting to discuss some very impressive sexual conquests, most of which I suspect are entirely fictional.”
Connor looks distraught. Vincent is so in love with Maion in this moment that it feels like his heart has outgrown his ribcage.
But he can’t. He can’t ever do that again, can’t ever feel that again, not wholly, not purely, because it will always bear the poison scars.
“So this brother of yours,” Connor says to Maion. “Any chance Advanced Statistics turns him on?”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,050
Warnings: language, references to sexytimes, angstpocalypse, AU
Summary: Saving Vincent from the threat of starvation does not go according to plan.
Author's Note: Sooooo… Part 1! Part 2! I'm currently stuck in the middle of Part 5, because of school and the liberal helping of failsauce that I have drizzled on my life sundae. And because of the Best RP Ever. Nothing.
I don’t care if you hurt me some more
I don’t care if you even the score
Well, you can knock me, and I don’t care
Well, you can mock me-I don’t care
You can rock me just ’bout anywhere
It’s all right
’Cause you’re all I’ve got tonight
You’re all I’ve got tonight
You’re all I’ve got tonight
I need you
Tonight
I need you
Tonight
- “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” - The Cars -
PHOTOPHOBIA - PART 3
Maybe it’s the fever and the near-starvation and the general angelic superiority, or maybe Maion always tastes like a wet dream. Either way, Vincent is not about to complain.
Since he’s never met a vampire involved in healthy relationship-which is not quite as disconcerting a statistic once one considers that he’s only ever met two other vampires, and Alistair is apparently celibate-he doesn’t know whether or not it’s strange that he never bit Maion while they were together. Emotionally, sexually, as part of the bond of intimacy they’d established, was that something he should have done? The question stands-or, more accurately, wanders aimlessly around the corridors of Vincent’s brain that are not occupied with the overwhelmingly explosive sensations of heat and sweetness; with tightening his two-handed grip and drawing Maion’s creamy skin closer; with the soothing darkness as his eyes slide shut, reducing the universe to the soft pulse, the softer breath, the warmth, the smoothness, the metal; and it’s so fine-
The fingers of Maion’s free hand tug on the end of Vincent’s ponytail, which would be an affront worthy of a swift death if not for the fact that it’s an old, old ritual of theirs-they would both shift silently through the apartment more often than not; when Vincent was reading or meddling at the kitchen counter or otherwise unaware, Maion would pull gently, Hey, I’m here. (Then the faux-innocent, seductive little bastard would almost invariably trail a fingertip down Vincent’s spine and hook it into his back pocket.) Vincent should have killed him the first time and been done with it, but he’d been so shocked that Maion had interpreted his silence as permission, and then it had been established, and he’d been doomed.
It’s the cold ripple of the memory more than the action itself that sobers him suddenly, and he withdraws, licking at the smears on Maion’s skin, trying to get the wound to start to knit. He’s still so intoxicated with the rush of the blood and the inpouring of general healthfulness that it takes him a moment to hear the sizzling.
He looks up. The lock on the bathroom door is melting in a way that would tickle Dalí a radioactive shade of pink.
“Oh,” Maion says, which sounds distressingly unlike Don’t worry; I’ll save us from the obliterative rage of my protective older brother, who happens to be an archangel capable of turning reinforced metal into dripping goo. “I’d forgotten how good he is with locks.”
“What was it I said?” Vincent manages.
Maion bites his lip, which is not helping Vincent to focus on the task of saving his sorry ass from getting beaten on a Biblical scale. “You mean ‘this cannot end in anything other than unmitigated disaster’?”
“That’s the one,” Vincent says.
Maion slides his wrist out of Vincent’s grip and cradles it to his chest. It’s still oozing damningly, and Vincent can feel a wet spot on his cheek that must be another smudge.
“In retrospect,” he says, “I think it was an understatement.”
The door blasts open, and Vincent sees a flickering hint of something in the category of a fireball-a hint being more than enough to send him diving into the bathtub.
Whatever Maion was saying to slander the shower-head earlier was probably accurate; the bath tap smacks sharply into Vincent’s forehead with an unmistakable vindictiveness, and the porcelain is remarkably unforgiving. It’s also still wet, and it won’t accommodate his knees.
“Michael!” Maion cries, and Vincent instinctively throws an arm over his head at the the intense crackling and the flaring heat that follow. He dares to peek in time to see the ashes that remain of the shower curtain twirling down towards him like snow.
“What are you doing?” Michael’s voice howls. “This is what I get for opening my home to y-”
All of the air leaps out of Vincent’s lungs as Maion lands on top of him.
“Sorry,” Maion says distractedly. Another furious orange fireball slams into the tile above them, hissing and dissipating into tiny snakes of smoke. A charred blast crater marks its resting place, and Vincent’s fairly sure the soap dish wasn’t full of steaming liquid before. “He’ll calm down in a little while,” Maion says. His knee has come to rest between Vincent’s thighs, and their chests are pressed together; their faces are so close that Vincent’s counting golden eyebrow hairs. Maion blinks, blinks again, and brightens. “Can I stay with you?”
Mayday. Maion’s eyes are the precise color of shallow water around the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, if the travel sites that Vincent frequents during bouts of depression are to be believed. He gasps in enough air for a “What?”
“Well, I’m going to need somewhere else to crash while he cools off-” That is eminently unfunny given the third fireball that narrowly misses Maion’s exposed feet; Vincent can feel the searing trajectory that leaves another splash of charcoal on the wall. “-and I don’t have any friends, and…”
“And I owe you one,” Vincent says flatly.
He’d forgotten how much he hates that wounded look that Maion gets the moment you impugn his morals in the slightest. He also can’t believe he ever even once found it convincing.
“That’s not why I-” Maion ducks another fireball, and his damp hair brushes all over Vincent’s cheeks, his face pressed so closely into Vincent’s neck that the contours of his lips-
Maion pops up like a jack-in-the-box after that, and Vincent grips the edge of the tub and chances another look. Michael appears to be gathering energy for his next assault, if the swirling flames coagulating in a sphere above his palm are anything to judge by.
“Time out!” Maion says. “I’m going to take my things and stay with Vincent for a couple days, and-”
To be honest, Maion’s lucky that Michael’s aim is off; he was asking for a half-formed spurt of fire to the face, and most people would count escaping with a few singed hairs as a victory.
Then again, Maion is definitively not most people. Then again, Maion takes everything personally. Then again, Maion has always had a little bit of a very creative vengeful streak.
Hence the grabbing of the defamed shower-head, the tearing it out of the wall, the wrenching the plumbing line out in a rain of tile shards and plaster and a scream from the pipe, and the summoning a massive stream of water to flood across the bathroom and soak the Archangel Michael from head to toe.
Suddenly Vincent’s incident with the flower-box seems like a small offense. In light of this new standard for criminal behavior, maybe Michael will just remove his liver without administering anesthesia, and he’ll be allowed to live.
“Now I’m going to go pack my bag,” Maion says sternly, “and then we’ll be leaving. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow if you’re being more reasonable.”
Michael stands in the doorway, thoroughly doused, staring at Maion in sheer, silent disbelief. Vincent does not blame him in the least. An extremely dignified Maion climbs out of the bathtub, sidles past him, and starts making unobtrusive packing noises in the next room.
“I don’t know why either of us puts up with him,” Michael says faintly after a long, long moment of extremely awkward silence.
“I heard that,” Maion calls.
Michael shakes his head, spraying droplets, turns, and slogs off down the hall. A door shuts, and Vincent sits all the way up in the bathtub, attempting to figure out when everything went apeshit.
Living with Michael made it easy to forget how taxing frenetic activity can be for ordinary beings. Admittedly, watching undergraduates’ caffeine crashes helped to remind Maion this year, but he’s still a bit surprised when Vincent lets them in, collapses onto the bed-that same old creaky, lumpy, wonderful bed-and passes out almost instantaneously. Maion hesitates, unlaces Vincent’s shoes, removes them, sets them by the door, and then comes back to considers him. Vincent’s cheek is crushed into the pillow, his unbound hair spilt beside him-an inkblot, or some elegant sea creature, or a delicate shadow. He looks young. He looks thin. He looks exhausted. He looks lovely. His eyelashes are very long, and his cheekbones stand out.
Maion looks around to assess his options and elects to set his duffel bag next to the bedroom doorway. It seems like less of an assertion of belonging than putting it near the dresser, somehow; and since it would have been strange to leave it in the kitchen, and there isn’t really any space in the bathroom, his options are somewhat limited.
Is it creepy to keep looking at Vincent while he’s sleeping? It’s just-this is the first chance Maion’s had to get a good look, uninterrupted, on his own terms, at his own leisure, with the light no worse than it has been during any of the other encounters. This is the first moment of stillness, and there’s something engrossing about that, something with a gravitational pull. Maybe it’s just that they used to have so many of those, back when they both knew how to relax. Back when they were each other’s sanctuaries. Back when Vincent Duval was the antidote to anything, the panacea, the Paradise.
Maion has a perfect memory, of course. Paradise didn’t look like this, but it felt very much the same. It felt safe; and the weather was immaterial, because you were always warm on the inside, radiating. That’s what being close to Vincent was like, which is the thing he could never make Michael understand.
Duly, Maion also remembers that Vincent was sick in Michael’s flowers less than an hour ago and has very possibly been draining squirrels and-worse-pigeons, which are not exactly known for the purity of their bodily fluids. Carefully, he climbs up onto the bed (it creaks) and settles next to Vincent (it creaks again) in order to monitor him. Perhaps monitoring an invalid does not traditionally involve tentatively extending a hand to touch said invalid’s still-just-as-silky hair, but Maion prefers not to fuss about the details. Especially when the details involve unauthorized advances upon unconscious ex-lovers.
After ninety-seven minutes of monitoring, during which Vincent’s condition does not noticeably change, Maion hears some commotion on the doorstep, followed by a brisk knock, which probably means that Vincent’s doorbell has not been fixed in the three years since Maion used to peek through the letterbox, which brought Vincent to literal tears of laughter the first time and never failed to summon a smile on subsequent…
Well, there’s someone at the door.
Maion sits up (the bed creaks), slides to the edge (it creaks again), and stands (has this mattress sustained some kind of serious dama… they weren’t that athletic; it must just be showing its age). Then he proceeds to the door and opens it, at which point he realizes that he is, as they say, not terribly bright.
“Um,” he says to the two brown-haired men on the doorstep, both of whom are staring at him in disbelief, “good evening.”
“Oh, my God,” the one holding the wide box says. “It’s Tapioca.”
The one with the glasses looks like he wants to die. “Connor.”
“Because I’d tap you,” Connor tells Maion contentedly. “Good, right? Holy shit, you’re even hotter up close. Wait-what are you doing here?”
“Um,” Maion says again. “I’m-”
“Hold this,” Connor says, shoving the box at the man with the glasses, who fumbles to hold it level, and then patting at all of his pockets until he turns up a pen. He removes the cap by pinning it between his teeth and applies the tip to the back of his hand. As far as Maion can tell given the way the cap garbles his speech, he then says, “I need to remember this for when I write that soap opera; you know the one.”
“Unfortunately,” the other man says. He attempts to balance the box on one open palm in order to offer the other hand for Maion to shake. “I’m John. And I’m sorry to intrude. And I’m even sorrier that the men in white coats let Connor out early today.”
Maion shakes, because the offer of a familiar greeting is the only part of this conversation that has made any sense thus far.
“You’re not sorry,” Connor says, finishing whatever he was jotting down with a flourish. “You love me more than your own life. You have a name, Tapioca? Damn, I’d lick you off the spoon, if you know wh-”
“We know what you mean,” John says.
Maion’s perfect recall is required to sort through the stream of words and determine which ones may have been directed at him. “I’m… Maion. Maion Deus.” It’s a bit transparent, but he and Michael have been using it for forty-six years or so, and no one’s ever bothered them over it. “It’s nice to meet y-”
“Shit,” Connor says, which is somewhat startling. “If you’re at his place… besides, even I couldn’t hook up with his ex; he’d kill me with his mind. Do you have a brother?”
“Um,” Maion says, “yes, although I’m not sure what that has to do with anyth-”
“Really,” Connor purrs.
John elbows him rather hard and then holds the box out to Maion. “We popped by this afternoon, but no one was in. These are for Vincent.”
They must-they must not know. He must not have told them. For these are his friends from the bar (perfect memory: gift/curse/thing making Maion’s head spin), from last night, people he chose to associate with… and if they looked for him in daylight, they must not know.
He didn’t hide himself, before-not like this. Not this much. They’d only been splitting croissants and Oranginas in the park like shy schoolboys for three weeks before Vincent stopped Maion’s hand, met his eyes, and gave him a look so intent that his spine twinged.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Vincent said, and Vincent rarely was; “this is becoming something-more-than I expected, and there’s no point founding it on a very basic lie. I hope you can tell by now that I am entirely mentally sound, and although it’s probably impossible to believe, I can and will present evidence, and then it’s your choice whether you want to contin-”
“You really are a vampire?” Maion asked delightedly. “I thought so, but I didn’t want to ask, because it’s not much of a conversation starter, is it?”
Vincent stared at him.
Maion stared back. “But you shouldn’t be drinking Orangina if you’re a vampire, should you? Won’t it give you a tummyache?”
Thus it was also the day that Maion discovered how adorable Vincent was when reduced to slightly hysterical laughter.
In the meantime, John is still offering him a large white box, which has a number of things scrawled on the top in Sharpie.
Connor is smiling at Maion in a way that makes him vaguely uncomfortable. “They’re Sorry-Your-Party-Sucked-slash-Congratulations-Again-slash-Apparently-You-Have-Major-Unplumbed-Emotional-Depths cupcakes.”
Maion only processed one word out of all of those, but it was the important one. “Cupcakes?”
Connor winks in a way that makes Maion much more distinctly uncomfortable.
John looks like a nice person, though. He also looks resigned, in a manner that speaks of having pried Connor off of prey on many separate occasions, so Maion supposes that he’ll be safe as long as he keeps both of them in one place.
“Would you like to come in?” he asks. “I could make some tea.” He pauses. “If… he has tea. I’m fairly certain I can get you some tap water, at the very least.”
“Baby,” Connor says, eyes shining, “I would drink your sweat.”
Maion regrets this already.
When Vincent wakes up, almost fully-clothed, on top of his own bed, all he remembers at first is fire and fearing for his life. Then he hears the voices in the kitchen and realizes that what he remembers is irrelevant.
“Out,” he says to Connor before he’s even stepped all the way into the kitchen. “You are Satan. Leave.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard that,” Connor says. “Your delivery lacks conviction-I give it a seven; at most a seven-point-five. May I suggest a public speaking seminar?”
“They brought cupcakes,” Maion says, as if that makes it okay that he’s sitting at Vincent’s kitchen table drinking tea with the Enemy.
And with John, of course, but John seems to end up in situations like this so regularly that he wouldn’t bat an eyelash if a meteor crashed through the roof.
Vincent could do with a meteor crashing through the roof, preferably one that succinctly ended either his existence or Connor’s and then just sort of smoldered for a while.
“Sit down,” Connor says. “Have a cupcake. Tell me why the man who puts the ‘ex’ in ‘sexy’ is loitering around your apartment, and don’t omit any of the salacious details.”
“There will be salacious details in your obituary tomorrow if you don’t get your ass out of my kitchen,” Vincent says.
“Cupcakes,” Maion says, and Vincent turns to look at him in order to gauge his sanity, forgetting that-and then it’s too late.
Fuck Maion’s puppy eyes. Fuck them.
He sits down. He spends a moment hating the rental company for furnishing this apartment with four chairs. He selects a cupcake.
“John was just telling me about some of the classes you all took,” Maion says, sipping serenely at his tea. “Connor was just interrupting to discuss some very impressive sexual conquests, most of which I suspect are entirely fictional.”
Connor looks distraught. Vincent is so in love with Maion in this moment that it feels like his heart has outgrown his ribcage.
But he can’t. He can’t ever do that again, can’t ever feel that again, not wholly, not purely, because it will always bear the poison scars.
“So this brother of yours,” Connor says to Maion. “Any chance Advanced Statistics turns him on?”