FMA -- Tell Me That We'll Always Be Together [1/2]
Title: Tell Me That We'll Always Be Together
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Miles/Alfons, Roy/Al, ???? Ed/Lan Fan ????
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 14,175
Warnings: language; more language; Al being seriously questionable and slightly illegal; kicking Alfons while he's down/angstorms with a chance of absolute destruction; modern!AU
Summary: In which the best thing that has ever happened to Alfons goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Author's Note: This is based on two sorta-separate headcanons Phindus mentioned almost a year ago - I instantly fell in love with both but just never quite got to writing them, 'cause I'm lame. So now I've combined them, but the thing is that Phin told me it all ended okay but at the time didn't specify how, so I had to improvise. Which never goes well. :| tl;dr, I just… miss this 'verse, and everything it meant, and everything we built, and I got so emotional about it that this fic got really emotional, too. Also I listened to the song you'll get to in about 10,000 words on repeat at lunch for three days straight, which… wow, Tierfal. Wow. Anyway, this one's set soon after The Christmas One - Alfons still has a cast on, and there's a month left until Al is legal. OH, THE HUMANITY. Extra special thank you to the lovely powdered_opium for helping me with the end! Ilu, sweetie. ♥
'Cause, boy, I feel that men are meant to be
More than the shadows of each other
- "The Great Escape" - Woodkid -
TELL ME THAT WE'LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER
[PART I]
If laptops weren’t so damned expensive that they might as well be made of gold and diamonds with unicorn-hoof plating, Alfons would have thrown his at Al’s head about five minutes ago. As it is, the stupid thing is sort of pinning him to the couch, which is the worst possible place on the planet Earth to be right about now.
“I mean,” Al is saying, swilling his mug of spearmint tea, the migrating steam of which is not having the intended calming effect on Alfons; “I know it’s illegal for me to touch him, and vice versa-which is completely ridiculous, for the record; how in the world is an arbitrary tally of days of existence supposed to function as a reliable gauge of maturity?-but… what if… you know. We didn’t… quite.”
Alfons should not say anything. Alfons should shut his damn mouth and pretend his ears have sealed up, because Miles is going to be done with the gig and texting him in just a couple minutes, and he really shouldn’t jeopardize his own mental health in the meantime.
He’s such an idiot.
“Are you talking about coating yourself in plastic wrap and then getting your hands all over him?” he asks, trying-and failing-to find a more comfortable angle for his cast-bound arm that keeps his fingers in typing range. “Because first off, I think you’d suffocate; and second, I think it’s still freaking illegal.”
“I saw that on Pushing Daisies and thought about it for a moment,” Al says, entirely seriously, “but you’re right; I rejected it for those reasons. And others. Including the cost of brand-name Saran Wrap. You wouldn’t want to risk the store-brand stuff for something that important.” He clears his throat and then sips his tea. “And that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Alfons does not want to know. He does not want to know. He already knows far too much; he already knows enough to haunt his nightmares for the next decade or two. The mere abstract concept of Al-to put it delicately-getting jiggy with it and getting all over his surprisingly likable and dignified thirty-year-old stalkee-turned-unofficially-official-boyfriend is enough to turn Alfons’s stomach as it is. The last thing he wants is details.
Well-the second-to-last thing he wants is details. The last thing he wants is to walk in on that shit one of these days.
Jesus. That doesn’t even bear thinking about.
“I mean,” Al is saying before Alfons can flee the premises and possibly the country, “is it technically still a violation of the age of consent laws if… you know. We’re only touching ourselves, but in the same room?”
The sudden constricting heat rising in Alfons’s chest seems to be bile. How curious.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he chokes out around it. “I’m not a freakin’ lawyer, Al.” And, frankly, if these are the kinds of questions they have to answer, he’ll die before he ever even considers becoming one. “Why don’t you-I dunno-freakin’ Google it. On private browsing. So the FBI doesn’t come down on our heads next week, ’cause I really don’t have time for an inquest.”
It’s true. Five classes, a job, a blog, and a boyfriend doesn’t exactly leave him with a whole lot of downtime for dodging the Feds.
“Don’t worry,” Al says, apparently not noticing how flipping ridiculous that sentence is in the context of this entire conversation. Also, in the context of Alfons’s entire life, but that’s a different problem. “I’m very familiar with the myriad benefits of covert internet research.”
“Thanks,” Alfons says. “Now I’m definitely not worrying.”
Al sips his tea serenely. Either he didn’t hear that, or he doesn’t especially care about Alfons’s blood pressure. “The thing that’s unfair is that the letter of the law is always going to bring the axe down on him no matter how much of the fault should rightfully be mine.”
“That’s not unfair,” Alfons says. “It’s for your protection. He’s literally twice your age-I mean, yeah, maybe the cutoff seems sort of nit-picky when the difference is a matter of thirty days-”
“Twenty-eight,” Al mutters. “And a third.”
“-but the line has to get drawn somewhere, and it’s there for your safety. I think Roy understands that.”
Al manages to tear his eyes away from the surface of the tea long enough to frown at Alfons. “You’re supposed to be helping me find a loophole.”
Alfons stares back. “…I… am?”
“You are,” Al says. “Because obviously Ed would castrate Roy if he even knew we were having this conversation, but you’re supposed to be the cool one and help me.”
“I’m cool,” Alfons says instantly. “I’m super-cool.”
Oh, God. Only the loser-est of losers have to say shit like that. He’s doomed.
Even worse, Al knows it, too, judging by the slightly pitying look he shoots Alfons’s way. “Well-anyway.”
Alfons is not going to help his underage cousin get illicitly laid just to reestablish his cool status. He is not. A man has to have some kind of moral foundation in this world, and he’s putting his foot down on this one.
“Anyway,” he says firmly, “why don’t you-I don’t know, make an advent calendar, or something? I bet all the old Christmas ones are dirt-cheap on clearance right now, and if you didn’t want chocolate, you could probably make one out of cardboard in about twenty minutes and fill it with whatever you wanted. Like-you could pick out poems, or songs, or something, that reminded you of him, and put a different one in each day, and then you and Roy could open them. That’d help the time go faster, wouldn’t it? Make a reward system.”
Sometimes Alfons impresses himself with his own rationality.
…except when he forgets about that horrifyingly lustful gleam that Al’s eyes get sometimes when he’s thinking about Roy, which makes it terrifying to think about what kind of “prizes” he might pick.
Sometimes Alfons impresses himself with his own rationality and his own naïveté.
“That,” Al says, slowly and so ominously that Alfons can’t help cringing hard, “is a fine idea. See? This is why I ask you this stuff instead of Brother. He’d just put his hands over his ears and start singing ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ at the top of his lungs.”
“Glad to help,” Alfons manages.
The pure evil in Al’s beaming grin might bring a lesser man to tears. “You’re the best, Alfons. You want to help me pick some songs?”
Alfons’s phone buzzes loudly where he left it on the coffee table. Thank sweet baby Jesus, hallelujah; Alfons can bring himself to believe in miracles for at least the rest of the day.
“Oh, darn,” he says as he scrambles for the phone, “that’s Miles. Gotta go.”
“What’s the opposite of an Oscar?” Al asks as Alfons closes his laptop, stashes it atop the bookshelf where Ed won’t be able to reach it and mess with it no matter how hard he tries, and grabs up his bag.
Alfons pauses in fleeing for long enough to blink at Al. “Huh?”
“I’ll call it the Racso,” Al says. “The anti-Oscar. That’s the acting award you should get.”
“You’re so adorable,” Alfons says. Miles’s text says Hey babe gigs over and theres big news, because apparently apostrophes are passé. “No wonder Roy likes you. Look, I might be-”
“‘Out late’,” Al says, rolling his outstretched hand in a get-on-with-it sort of motion, which is a little bit insulting, thank you very much; “‘but not, like, late-late, because I have class tomorrow, and if you come down to the car and interrupt anything again, Ed, I swear to God I will shut off the internet in this apartment and make sure the neighbors password-lock their wifi, don’t think I won’t.’”
Alfons scowls.
Al grins.
“Have fun,” he says.
“Whatever,” Alfons says, and he thinks about slamming the door-but he doesn’t, because the neighbors already hate them, and besides, he’s not really mad. He’s sort of incapable of anger when he’s about to get to see Miles, to be honest; he’s tried. It’s like all of the contours of the world just sort of… soften… when you’re in the proximity of somebody you love.
Maybe that’s part of where Al’s coming from-maybe his feelings are a hell of a lot deeper and more sincere than any of them have realized; maybe it’s not just lust-addled swooning over a guy fifteen years his senior who happens to look even more legitimately fine in uniform. (Alfons has seen pictures, and. Well. Nobody with eyes would argue. Well. Nobody with eyes who’s attracted to guys, anyway.) Maybe Al always feels safe with Roy, and guts-and-bones happy, down to the core. Maybe he’s at peace with the world when Roy’s fingertips graze his skin. Maybe he gets it. Maybe the scandal they’ve been skirting around has put down genuine roots while they were all complaining about the leaves.
Well-who knows. Time will unravel that mystery, as time tends to do; meanwhile, Alfons’s obscenely hot boyfriend is going to be soaring on a successful gig high. Alfons doesn’t know what “big news” entails, exactly, but he can’t say he’s anything less than eager to find out.
The stoplights always seem disproportionately long when you’re excited or late-Alfons can only imagine how many eternities pass in intersections on occasions when you’re both at once. Has he ever been late to anything? Probably not. He did have to call in to work and bail out of his shift twenty minutes before it started that one time the car broke down, but he would have been on time.
Oh, well. He’ll get there. As long as he doesn’t get too distracted daydreaming about the way Miles’s grin looks first thing in the morning, when it starts out hazy and literally comes into focus as Alfons puts his glasses on, and then how it widens when Miles realizes Alfons can see him…
…not getting distracted. Right.
For all that he’s one big mess of delight and anticipation-which is almost, but not quite enough to bleach the last of the gory details of Al’s nefarious plans out of his tragically absorptive brain-time has no choice but to pass with every heartbeat, and in a matter of minutes, he’s pulling up in front of Whippersnapper. It’s been a grand total of about fifteen minutes since Miles texted to herald the end of the gig, so even the hardcorest moshers and the most dedicated Olivier devotees have mostly straggled off: there’s a parking space wide open about twenty steps from the front doors. Alfons tucks his car right into it and fishes out his phone.
I’m here!
His phone buzzes almost instantaneously:
<3
But there isn’t much time to melt into goo before he can see, in the right mirror, a solitary figure starting down the sidewalk towards his car-all lean lines and jet of pale hair and impossible, mouth-watering, throat-drying shoulder-to-hip ratio. Oh, and combat boots, and ripped-up jeans, and almost-too-tight T-shirt, and God, how did Alfons fucking Heiderich ever get so lucky? He always figured his guardian angel-not that he believes in guardian angels, but his conceptual guardian angel, at least-was the kind that the other angels sort of shunned and shook their heads at, because the bastard spent ninety percent of his designated protection time off in an angel-bar getting angel-wasted.
He glances down to make sure that the passenger-side door is unlocked-because that’s exactly the sort of awkward-ass thing he’d forget about, and then Miles would be stuck out there in the cold, pulling on the handle and pulling faces-and looks up again just as Miles steps into the glow of a streetlamp and then opens the door.
Miles slides into the passenger seat. He shuts the door. He grins. He leans over the center console, threads his fingers into Alfons’s hair, murmurs “Hey, babe”, and kisses him with every bit as much gorgeous care and thrilling intent as the first time their mouths ever met.
“Hey,” Alfons says, chasing the little aftershock kisses, feeling faintly weak and overpoweringly happy as they rake their eyes over each other for a second, like they always do, like neither of them can believe this is not a dream. “Went okay? I’m guessing Olivier told laryngitis it could go fuck itself, and it listened.”
Miles’s grin is too bright to bear. He loves that band so much-loves the people in it, loves the stuff they do, loves the way they matter to people, loves what the whole thing means to him. Alfons doesn’t know if he’s ever seen somebody so fulfilled.
“Wouldn’t you?” Miles asks. “Viral infections don’t risk pissing her off, either. But-babe-”
They’re kissing again, and Alfons has to plant a hand on the cupholder to steady himself; there’s a tingling urgency to it, and a shiver runs through him hard, shimmying up his spine and jittering out between his well-attended lips as a shaky sort of gasp-sigh-something.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Miles said, breath catching, fever heat between them, “in case nothing happened, but-Olivier’s been talking to some guy who’s worked with acts you wouldn’t believe-Green Day and shit, like, ‘Dookie’-era, real shit-and-he wants to get us on tour. East Coast. He thinks there’s enough demand; he says he’s been watching the airwaves and the online sales, and he thinks we can fill fucking venues, and-just-huge.”
Alfons’s head spins. He thinks of children’s tops-the ones that can’t really balance unless they’re spinning, and when they stop, they go tumbling down, and the momentum makes them skitter away and ricochet off other objects, and…
“That’s amazing,” he says, and he means it, but his voice kind of trembles, which is stupid; and his right hand sort of curls itself into the front of Miles’s T-shirt, which is… also stupid. “That’s amazing; that’s really great; that’s-I mean, obviously rock-star is a state of mind-”
Buck actually says that. Constantly. He should get it tattooed on his forehead to save them all some time.
“-but this is-monumental; it’s so great-”
“I know,” Miles whispers, and he’s kissing fervently at Alfons’s cheek, his jaw, his ear, his neck- “I know; I can’t believe it’s fucking real-”
Alfons figures out where the frigid draft of the reservations is coming from as he gives voice to the chill: “How long?”
“Touring, probably three months,” Miles says into his throat. There’s an edge of laughter on his voice; he’s so happy. Alfons’s ribcage is made of stone. “Whole thing, recording some shit while we’re there, all the prep and stuff-five? Maybe six?”
Alfons runs his fingertip around the curve of Miles’s ear and through the wispy white hair at his temple. He tries so, so hard to smile. “That’s-kind of a long time.”
“Well, yeah,” Miles says, and he’s grinning so broadly his cheeks must hurt, his jaw must ache- “That’s why I want you to come with me.”
Stones.
Everything is stones-those words, that smile, his heart, his lungs, his stomach. Stones, falling, and they shatter where they land.
“I can’t,” he says.
Miles’s unapologetic joy evaporates. It feels like a cold knife in the diaphragm-like a bullet through the center of the chest. Alfons did that to him-Alfons took that away. Alfons is a piece of shit.
“I just-” There’s nothing to say, nothing in the world. “The quarter just started-and I finally got into that basic astronomy class I need to transfer-and I can’t-I can’t lose this job-”
Miles is staring at him like he’s started speaking in tongues. He has to make this simple, somehow; he has to make it undeniable; how is it possible that someone who owns his heart completely doesn’t understand?
“I can’t leave,” Alfons says around the panic fluttering upwards in his throat.
“But-babe,” Miles says. The confusion is swirling; there’s a strain of… hurt. “I mean-Niagara Falls. You’d love New York. Boston, Providence-you could check out Harvard; you wanna see Harvard? I know you’ve got shit tying you down here, but-I thought-that was what you’d always dreamed about. Getting up and going somewhere and leaving all this boring stuff behind.”
Alfons can hear his own breathing redoubling in his ears-like it’s happening once inside his chest and then again as an external force, air moving and heat traveling and soundwaves rippling outward in the frozen space.
“You think I’m boring,” he says.
Miles’s face crumples into frustration. “No, babe, come on-I didn’t sa-”
“You said my life is boring,” Alfons says. “My life is boring shit.”
Miles sets his jaw; half a sigh huffs out through his clenched teeth. “I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t; I just meant ordinary stuff. All the ordinary stuff gets in the way. For fuck’s sake, I know that better than anybody; I know what it feels like being trapped, and-that’s why I want to cut you free, don’t you-”
“No,” Alfons says, and his voice shakes like there’s a record-setting earthquake starting in his bones. “You don’t get it. Because it was always just obligations and shit to you-wasn’t it? You don’t have any fucking idea what it’s like not having anything else. When it’s a fucking privilege to get to drag your tired ass in to classes at a crappy community college, because you fought for that. When it’s a fucking privilege to work stupid hours at your stupid job, and then come back to leaky faucets and mildew on the walls and pay your stupid rent-because you built that, from nothing, from dust and fucking misery; you made it. They can’t pay the rent without me-Ed and Al. They don’t make enough. And they’re my family. They’re all I’ve ever had; they’re all I’ve got left. And if you think I’m going to fucking-what, drop everything and go swanning off to God only knows what cities on the other side of the country just so you can run around twanging your fucking guitar-”
“Stop,” Miles says.
“No,” Alfons says. “Because you don’t know-you don’t know what ‘nothing’ means. Did you really-you really think so little of me that I’d just abandon all of this and go off with you like some fucking groupie? Is that it? You want to make sure your favorite fan to fuck comes with you, right?”
“You don’t think that,” Miles says, and his voice quavers, almost fails; and Alfons is almost-but the fear’s built to fury, and he can’t breathe out anything but vitriol- “You don’t think that, because you know me so much fucking better tha-”
“I exist outside you,” Alfons says over him. “I exist, and I care about my shitty-ass life, and if you can’t respect a fundamental part of who I am-”
“I’m not doing this,” Miles says. He opens the door. “I’m not doing this anymore.” He steps out. “I’ll get a cab.” He slams it; he strides away down the sidewalk; he disappears.
Alfons is trembling so hard that the first time he reaches for the gearshift, he misses it. It’s a miracle that he pulls out of the parking spot without bashing one of the cars on either side; it’s a miracle that he moves out into the lane without getting sideswiped; it’s a miracle that he gets halfway home before one of the lights turns yellow on him, and he jams his foot down on the brake. He jars his own neck; the seatbelt gets stuck and starts to constrict his chest; he bangs both hands against the steering wheel, including the one in the stupid cast, and pain blasts through his stupid wrist, and-
And that’s when he starts crying so hard he can’t fucking see, and his contacts feel like shards of glass just swimming in the saltwater, and he can’t even breathe.
He doesn’t know how he makes it home; he doesn’t remember anything but a couple seconds of blurred streetlights and a sharp turn or two. One second he’s bursting into tears; and the next he’s in his car, lined up on the curb in front of the complex, trying-and failing-to stop sobbing into his hands. He feels like he’s falling. He feels like he’s lost it. He feels so fucking empty he thinks he’s imploding; he thinks he’s broken; something in him is unhinged, unmoored, shattered, splintered, gone-
That didn’t just happen. Did it? It couldn’t have; he couldn’t have let it; this is a shitty fucking dream.
Please let this be a shitty dream.
He knows it’s not.
He should have seen this coming from the very beginning. Good things don’t happen to him-or they do, and they wind him up to real joy, to wondrousness, before they cut the cord and drop him, so that he plummets twice as far.
There are old napkins in the center console. He’s distantly glad he can’t read whatever’s written on them through the prism of the unending tears; Miles probably shoved them in there after they got takeout somewhere, because Alfons had grabbed a handful of napkins without realizing there were already some in the bag, and they parked in some empty lot and ate there and tried to see stars through the streaks on the windshield, and Miles whispered “Gorgeous” and kissed him and kissed him like it was the only thing that made sense-
He has soaked all of the napkins. The only thing left is his sleeves.
He clenches his hands around the steering wheel-sort of; the left has a little strip of cast-thing going between his thumb and the rest of his fingers, so its clenching capacity is greatly reduced-and looks out at the road. Everything is where he left it. Cars flit past at intervals-tunnels of light and a growl of an engine and then silence again. The world is still moving, and it’ll keep moving without him if he lets it. The world doesn’t give a shit if he fucked up the closest thing to happiness that he’s ever had. And the world is going to eat him alive and spit out the fragments of his crunchy little bones if he tries to take a breather for self-pity.
He scrubs at his eyes with the forearm that isn’t hiding a cast underneath his sweater and tries to force himself to breathe evenly. The world has never slowed down for Alfons Heiderich. It never will. It’s his choice whether he keeps up or gets run over.
He leans back against the headrest, drags in a shaking deep breath, swipes a mostly-dry spot on his sleeve over his face one more time, and gets out of the car.
He locks it. He keeps his keys in his hand but holds them tightly so they won’t jingle; he doesn’t want to drown out other noises in case… in case. He goes up to the lobby door, sorts the right key out of the cluster, and unlocks it; he pulls it shut behind him and walks down the hall to the elevator. He presses the button. He waits.
The doors open. He steps inside; he presses the 6 and then Door Close. He looks up at the deeply disturbing asbestos ceiling. He waits.
The elevator dings. The doors open again. He steps out and goes to their door; he selects the appropriate key from the bundle and puts it into the lock. He turns.
If there is anything, anything, like a God out there-if there is any greater kindness in the universe; if there is any guiding force with any sort of compassion-Ed and Al will be in one of their rooms, arguing loudly about a second cat, or they’ll be in the kitchen squabbling over ice cream, or wherever, arguing about whatever; and Alfons will be able to slip by unnoticed and crumble into misery in peace.
He opens the door.
Ed, Al, and Lan Fan look up from where they’re all sitting on the couch, Ed and Lan Fan with laptops on their laps; Al with Pumpkin on his, using one hand to pet her and the other to read some trashy novel.
They all stare like they’re frozen in place-like they don’t even have a choice; like he’s mesmerizing.
“Holy shit,” Ed says at last. “What happened?”
“Are you okay?” Al asks, looking so crushed already that he must know the answer.
Lan Fan just says, “Dude.”
“I’ll be right back,” Alfons says, and the wetness is creeping into his voice again; it’s climbing up his throat. “I need a f-fucking c-cigarette; I’ll-”
He dodges the end of the couch, fishing the pack out of his pocket; he pushes up the windowpane and climbs out onto the fire escape and sits down on the cold wrought-iron steps, and he buries his face in his hands. Which is stupid, because one of them has a scratchy cast partway across it, and the other one is holding a pack of cigarettes, and neither of those feels particularly good crushed against a cheekbone.
His breath hitches, and his chest jumps, and he feels like the tears are just seeping out-it’s not even that he’s crying, anymore; it’s not active enough for that; he’s just dripping. He’s oozing. There’s too much unhappiness inside of him to hold in, and it’s forcing its way out. That’s just basic fucking density dynamics; the concentration of unhappiness outside of his eyes is so much lower that he couldn’t stop the flow of it if he tried. He won’t be able to until it’s equalized. He’ll just have to keep letting himself cry until then-letting himself cry so hard it’s jarring his spine and shaking the fire escape, but he can barely hear the rattle of the metal over the sound of his own stupid fucking sobs.
He’s better than this. He’s stronger than this. Nothing he said wasn’t true; why does he feel like shit? He was right-wasn’t he? Fuck it. It doesn’t matter who was right, or what was, or-anything. He has to get through this; that’s the only part he needs to care about. That’s the part he has to focus on. He has to swallow this fucking monster in his throat and stop fucking weeping like a four-year-old getting sent to bed without dinner and move on. That’s the only choice he’s ever had. That’s the only thing he’s ever known how to do, and it’s gotten him this far, and fuck anybody who tries to hold him back, or hold him down, or control his trajectory; fuck them; he doesn’t need that-
But he needed to be loved. He let himself need it.
He’d been fine, before. He’d just-done his thing, just ducked his head down and pushed on from one day to the next. He had Ed, and Al, and all their dumb shenanigans; and they had his back, and he had theirs; and he had his blog and stupid coworkers like weirdo Russell; and it was enough. He made it enough. He got by.
So the thing with Miles started out like a gift-like something fantastic, obviously, but something extra, something on top; something great and special and exhilarating, yeah, but an addition to a neatly-categorized little life that was already complete.
Except it’s not, anymore.
Miles wormed his way in like a fucking vine of ivy-twisted into the cracks in Alfons’s fucked-up, shaky little psyche and filled them all with warmth and greenery-turned the half-shattered stone in the core of him into a garden where things grew and flourished and bloomed; turned him into a different person; turned him into someone who relied on that. Miles treated him so fucking well he started to believe he deserved it. Miles made him feel so fucking special that he started to normalize it. Miles loved him so much he started to love himself.
And now-
God. He has to stop crying; he can’t smoke and cry at the same time. His hands are shaking so hard he can’t get a cigarette out of the package, and his sleeves are so wet he’s trying to wipe his eyes on his shoulder, which he’s not really flexible enough to do very well-
Please let this not be happening. Please. Let him wake up in bed and panic for a second believing it’s real, then sit up and center himself and laugh weakly in relief, because it was just his brain tormenting him, because his brain is a douchebag, and life is still good, it’s fine, everything is fine-
Oh, God.
He draws his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them instead of in his wet fucking sleeves. His eyes just keep leaking like a fucking hose with a fucking hole in it, and he’s so carved-out-hollow that he can’t remember what to do to try to stop them.
There’s a little bit of commotion at the window, and then Al climbs out onto the fire escape with Pumpkin in one arm. Alfons looks up, as much as he’s capable of looking with his stupid eyes still streaming like the famous waterfall he’s never going to see with the man he’s going to love more than he thought he was capable of until the day he dies.
“Here,” Al says, depositing a very warm cat on Alfons’s lap. Then he leans against the railing, hugging himself with his arms against the chill up here. Alfons can sort of feel that it’s cold, in a distant, who-gives-a-shit kind of way. “So what happened?”
“They’re g-going on t-t-tour,” Alfons says. He tries to take a breath that doesn’t catch eight times on the way in and just as many on the way back out, and… fails. “S-six months, p-probably, and he asked me to leave my b-boring f-fucking life and c-c-come, and I s-said if I was boring, why d-did he want me there anyway?”
“He loves you,” Al says.
Alfons’s whole body convulses so hard with the next sob that Pumpkin startles and jumps down off of his knees, coiling around Al’s ankles where it’s safe.
“He does,” Al says. “If he thought you were boring, he wouldn’t be so devoted to you that it’s like he’s got little stars in his eyes all the time. He wouldn’t bring cupcakes. He wouldn’t put up with Ed.”
“I heard that!” Ed calls.
“But you agree,” Al says.
“…maybe.”
Lan Fan snickers.
“Point is,” Al says, “having a fight about the future doesn’t mean it’s over.”
“He s-said ‘I’m n-not d-d-doing this anymore’,” Alfons says.
Al’s eyes narrow a little bit. Pumpkin meows loudly, staring up at him. His body language has gone… different. Threatening. Ed would probably say ‘evil’, because Ed is a drama queen. “The conversation, or the relationship?”
“I d-dunno,” Alfons says. “Both?”
Al’s eyes are little slits. They look black in the dim light from the other side of the window. “Can I talk to him?”
Ed clambers over the sill and drops down onto the grating. Pumpkin makes a disgruntled noise and winds herself tighter around Al’s right foot. Alfons wonders idly how much weight this fire escape can hold, and what will happen if the supports break. Presumably they’ll all plummet to their deaths.
“Don’t get involved, Al,” Ed says. “If Band Dude has a pair of balls and a pair of eyes, he’s gonna be here with his boom-box on his shoulder blasting some cheesy ballad shit to apologize in T-minus half an hour, because he knows he’s never going to do better than Alfons, and saying that shit was the stupidest thing he’s ever done.”
Alfons grinds his face into his knees a little. He has no idea how all this moisture arrived in his tear ducts; he hasn’t drunk this much water in his entire life.
“And if he doesn’t,” Ed says, “then we know he’s a worthless fuck, and his opinion doesn’t matter anyway.”
It’s always so simple, to Ed. Life, love, people, what’s worth the time investment, what you should reject. Happiness. Feeling whole.
Alfons has always felt he could stand to learn something from the way Ed analyzes the world, but right now there’s no room left in him for anything but this gaping void.
“C’mon, both of you,” Ed says. “You’re gonna get pneumonia. The cat can stay.”
“You’re horrible,” Al says, scooping up his precious furball in both arms.
“Whatever,” Ed says.
And Alfons watches a one-armed boy-another kid who’s never caught a break he hasn’t fought for tooth and nail, with one less hand and a little brother he has volunteered to carry every staggering step of the way-vault over the windowsill and back into the warmth of the living room. Ed never, ever quits; Ed never, ever accepts failure, or roadblocks, or defeat. He just finds a new tactic and keeps on working. He never gives up on what he believes in-and what he believes in is himself. Himself, his life, his family, his brother, little stair-step hopes like a bigger apartment where Al can have another cat he’ll claim to hate, big cumulous-cloud hopes like being rich and comfortable someday. He’ll talk about it, if you catch him in the right moment, when he’s too sleepy to have his guard up and his expectations down. He’ll tell you about the library he wants. He’ll tell you about the charities he’d start for single moms. He’ll tell you about the dreams he won’t surrender, because the world took a shit-ton from him, but it can’t take that.
Alfons crams the pack of cigarettes into his pocket and climbs back over the windowsill.
The tears seem to have stopped. He can still feel a reservoir of them behind his eyes-which, again, what the fuck; where does it all come from?-but they aren’t overflowing anymore. His eyes are burning, though, and his skin around them must be red and puffed to shit; it’s sore, and his head is banging, and he wants to bury himself in some dark corner and sleep until this never happened. He can’t tell if the shaking is from the aftershocks of the sobs, or a nicotine withdrawal, or from the cold out on the fire escape. He can’t tell much of anything.
Ed sits him down at the kitchen table, and Al puts the cat in his lap again (she eyes him in a manner he would characterize as less-than-trusting) and makes him some herbal tea. Ed disappears and then returns with the extra-fuzzy blanket his mom made for him, which almost never leaves his bed, and drapes it over Alfons’s shoulders.
It’s nice of them. It’s really, really nice, and maybe when he doesn’t have this soul-sucking emptiness eating at him from the inside of his chest, he’ll find the words to thank them for it.
This is what he meant, though, in case some higher being has kept count-this is what he meant when he was turning down that chance, that opportunity, the offer of adventure with a person that he…
This is why he won’t leave them-not can’t; won’t, will not, would not, won’t ever. These are the two other lost, lonely souls who have always, always had his back, and here they are, raising him-this is what family means, bloodlines all aside. This is where he belongs. And anyone who says this is boring-
He needs to take his contacts out; they’re probably crusted with salt by now or something. That can’t be good for his corneas.
The tea steadies his machine-gun-rattling nerves a little bit, and Ed and Al get into a very subdued, half-volume version of the usual Pumpkin-is-lonely-and-needs-a-friend fight to distract him, and Lan Fan plunks down in the next chair at the table and starts showing him a ton of pictures from the Mars Rover that he hadn’t seen before, and by eleven, he’s so exhausted he doesn’t think even the throbbing ache in his chest will stop him from passing out.
In the end, though, he doesn’t really sleep-he drifts; he dozes; he walks the hazy line between dream and reality, arms out to either side, toes on the divider-he fades in and out, sometimes for almost an hour at a time, but it isn’t sleeping, really, and it doesn’t offer any solace or any rest.
When he went to set his alarm, his lock screen was that terrible failed selfie at the park, where Miles was trying to kiss him, and he was wriggling away, and what ended up in the photo was half of his grin and all of Miles’s bright-eyed, delighted laughter. His shaking hands considered hurling the phone across the room, watching that taunting image shatter against the wall-but he can’t afford a new phone, and he’s not really that type, and he was so tired. He just wanted it to be over, and the anger was a low-burning ember underneath the furnace of the other pain. He wasn’t angry, not really. Just-lost. Lost, abandoned, broken up and scattered over miles of space. Humpty Dumpty shit. Humpty Dumpty wasn’t pissed off; he didn’t throw the shards of himself at the king’s men and curse them out just for being in the blast radius; he begged, because he was in fucking pieces, and he didn’t know where to start rebuilding.
So he changed the picture to one of Ed and Al pulling faces at the charity carnival a couple years ago, which was one of the first ones that his trembling fingertips found on the camera roll, and which was also-sort of the point.
Tomorrow he’ll have to… finish the job, right? Fucking hell. He’s had breakups before, obviously, but never… quite like this. Never someone who had wriggled into every single nook and cranny of his goddamn existence and left a fingerprint that wouldn’t just wash away; never someone who was fucking indelible on the pattern of his own life; never someone he was going to have to tear out one bleeding fiber at a time. Never someone he would never go a single day without thinking about, no matter how much time, no matter how he tried, no matter how many stupid inexhaustible tears he choked on as he flipped the pillow to the cold side and succumbed to the trademark putty-skin sensation of a failure to sleep. Never someone he didn’t want to lose. Never someone he’d loved more than almost anything.
Just not enough.
[Part II]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Miles/Alfons, Roy/Al, ???? Ed/Lan Fan ????
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 14,175
Warnings: language; more language; Al being seriously questionable and slightly illegal; kicking Alfons while he's down/angstorms with a chance of absolute destruction; modern!AU
Summary: In which the best thing that has ever happened to Alfons goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Author's Note: This is based on two sorta-separate headcanons Phindus mentioned almost a year ago - I instantly fell in love with both but just never quite got to writing them, 'cause I'm lame. So now I've combined them, but the thing is that Phin told me it all ended okay but at the time didn't specify how, so I had to improvise. Which never goes well. :| tl;dr, I just… miss this 'verse, and everything it meant, and everything we built, and I got so emotional about it that this fic got really emotional, too. Also I listened to the song you'll get to in about 10,000 words on repeat at lunch for three days straight, which… wow, Tierfal. Wow. Anyway, this one's set soon after The Christmas One - Alfons still has a cast on, and there's a month left until Al is legal. OH, THE HUMANITY. Extra special thank you to the lovely powdered_opium for helping me with the end! Ilu, sweetie. ♥
'Cause, boy, I feel that men are meant to be
More than the shadows of each other
- "The Great Escape" - Woodkid -
TELL ME THAT WE'LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER
[PART I]
If laptops weren’t so damned expensive that they might as well be made of gold and diamonds with unicorn-hoof plating, Alfons would have thrown his at Al’s head about five minutes ago. As it is, the stupid thing is sort of pinning him to the couch, which is the worst possible place on the planet Earth to be right about now.
“I mean,” Al is saying, swilling his mug of spearmint tea, the migrating steam of which is not having the intended calming effect on Alfons; “I know it’s illegal for me to touch him, and vice versa-which is completely ridiculous, for the record; how in the world is an arbitrary tally of days of existence supposed to function as a reliable gauge of maturity?-but… what if… you know. We didn’t… quite.”
Alfons should not say anything. Alfons should shut his damn mouth and pretend his ears have sealed up, because Miles is going to be done with the gig and texting him in just a couple minutes, and he really shouldn’t jeopardize his own mental health in the meantime.
He’s such an idiot.
“Are you talking about coating yourself in plastic wrap and then getting your hands all over him?” he asks, trying-and failing-to find a more comfortable angle for his cast-bound arm that keeps his fingers in typing range. “Because first off, I think you’d suffocate; and second, I think it’s still freaking illegal.”
“I saw that on Pushing Daisies and thought about it for a moment,” Al says, entirely seriously, “but you’re right; I rejected it for those reasons. And others. Including the cost of brand-name Saran Wrap. You wouldn’t want to risk the store-brand stuff for something that important.” He clears his throat and then sips his tea. “And that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Alfons does not want to know. He does not want to know. He already knows far too much; he already knows enough to haunt his nightmares for the next decade or two. The mere abstract concept of Al-to put it delicately-getting jiggy with it and getting all over his surprisingly likable and dignified thirty-year-old stalkee-turned-unofficially-official-boyfriend is enough to turn Alfons’s stomach as it is. The last thing he wants is details.
Well-the second-to-last thing he wants is details. The last thing he wants is to walk in on that shit one of these days.
Jesus. That doesn’t even bear thinking about.
“I mean,” Al is saying before Alfons can flee the premises and possibly the country, “is it technically still a violation of the age of consent laws if… you know. We’re only touching ourselves, but in the same room?”
The sudden constricting heat rising in Alfons’s chest seems to be bile. How curious.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he chokes out around it. “I’m not a freakin’ lawyer, Al.” And, frankly, if these are the kinds of questions they have to answer, he’ll die before he ever even considers becoming one. “Why don’t you-I dunno-freakin’ Google it. On private browsing. So the FBI doesn’t come down on our heads next week, ’cause I really don’t have time for an inquest.”
It’s true. Five classes, a job, a blog, and a boyfriend doesn’t exactly leave him with a whole lot of downtime for dodging the Feds.
“Don’t worry,” Al says, apparently not noticing how flipping ridiculous that sentence is in the context of this entire conversation. Also, in the context of Alfons’s entire life, but that’s a different problem. “I’m very familiar with the myriad benefits of covert internet research.”
“Thanks,” Alfons says. “Now I’m definitely not worrying.”
Al sips his tea serenely. Either he didn’t hear that, or he doesn’t especially care about Alfons’s blood pressure. “The thing that’s unfair is that the letter of the law is always going to bring the axe down on him no matter how much of the fault should rightfully be mine.”
“That’s not unfair,” Alfons says. “It’s for your protection. He’s literally twice your age-I mean, yeah, maybe the cutoff seems sort of nit-picky when the difference is a matter of thirty days-”
“Twenty-eight,” Al mutters. “And a third.”
“-but the line has to get drawn somewhere, and it’s there for your safety. I think Roy understands that.”
Al manages to tear his eyes away from the surface of the tea long enough to frown at Alfons. “You’re supposed to be helping me find a loophole.”
Alfons stares back. “…I… am?”
“You are,” Al says. “Because obviously Ed would castrate Roy if he even knew we were having this conversation, but you’re supposed to be the cool one and help me.”
“I’m cool,” Alfons says instantly. “I’m super-cool.”
Oh, God. Only the loser-est of losers have to say shit like that. He’s doomed.
Even worse, Al knows it, too, judging by the slightly pitying look he shoots Alfons’s way. “Well-anyway.”
Alfons is not going to help his underage cousin get illicitly laid just to reestablish his cool status. He is not. A man has to have some kind of moral foundation in this world, and he’s putting his foot down on this one.
“Anyway,” he says firmly, “why don’t you-I don’t know, make an advent calendar, or something? I bet all the old Christmas ones are dirt-cheap on clearance right now, and if you didn’t want chocolate, you could probably make one out of cardboard in about twenty minutes and fill it with whatever you wanted. Like-you could pick out poems, or songs, or something, that reminded you of him, and put a different one in each day, and then you and Roy could open them. That’d help the time go faster, wouldn’t it? Make a reward system.”
Sometimes Alfons impresses himself with his own rationality.
…except when he forgets about that horrifyingly lustful gleam that Al’s eyes get sometimes when he’s thinking about Roy, which makes it terrifying to think about what kind of “prizes” he might pick.
Sometimes Alfons impresses himself with his own rationality and his own naïveté.
“That,” Al says, slowly and so ominously that Alfons can’t help cringing hard, “is a fine idea. See? This is why I ask you this stuff instead of Brother. He’d just put his hands over his ears and start singing ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ at the top of his lungs.”
“Glad to help,” Alfons manages.
The pure evil in Al’s beaming grin might bring a lesser man to tears. “You’re the best, Alfons. You want to help me pick some songs?”
Alfons’s phone buzzes loudly where he left it on the coffee table. Thank sweet baby Jesus, hallelujah; Alfons can bring himself to believe in miracles for at least the rest of the day.
“Oh, darn,” he says as he scrambles for the phone, “that’s Miles. Gotta go.”
“What’s the opposite of an Oscar?” Al asks as Alfons closes his laptop, stashes it atop the bookshelf where Ed won’t be able to reach it and mess with it no matter how hard he tries, and grabs up his bag.
Alfons pauses in fleeing for long enough to blink at Al. “Huh?”
“I’ll call it the Racso,” Al says. “The anti-Oscar. That’s the acting award you should get.”
“You’re so adorable,” Alfons says. Miles’s text says Hey babe gigs over and theres big news, because apparently apostrophes are passé. “No wonder Roy likes you. Look, I might be-”
“‘Out late’,” Al says, rolling his outstretched hand in a get-on-with-it sort of motion, which is a little bit insulting, thank you very much; “‘but not, like, late-late, because I have class tomorrow, and if you come down to the car and interrupt anything again, Ed, I swear to God I will shut off the internet in this apartment and make sure the neighbors password-lock their wifi, don’t think I won’t.’”
Alfons scowls.
Al grins.
“Have fun,” he says.
“Whatever,” Alfons says, and he thinks about slamming the door-but he doesn’t, because the neighbors already hate them, and besides, he’s not really mad. He’s sort of incapable of anger when he’s about to get to see Miles, to be honest; he’s tried. It’s like all of the contours of the world just sort of… soften… when you’re in the proximity of somebody you love.
Maybe that’s part of where Al’s coming from-maybe his feelings are a hell of a lot deeper and more sincere than any of them have realized; maybe it’s not just lust-addled swooning over a guy fifteen years his senior who happens to look even more legitimately fine in uniform. (Alfons has seen pictures, and. Well. Nobody with eyes would argue. Well. Nobody with eyes who’s attracted to guys, anyway.) Maybe Al always feels safe with Roy, and guts-and-bones happy, down to the core. Maybe he’s at peace with the world when Roy’s fingertips graze his skin. Maybe he gets it. Maybe the scandal they’ve been skirting around has put down genuine roots while they were all complaining about the leaves.
Well-who knows. Time will unravel that mystery, as time tends to do; meanwhile, Alfons’s obscenely hot boyfriend is going to be soaring on a successful gig high. Alfons doesn’t know what “big news” entails, exactly, but he can’t say he’s anything less than eager to find out.
The stoplights always seem disproportionately long when you’re excited or late-Alfons can only imagine how many eternities pass in intersections on occasions when you’re both at once. Has he ever been late to anything? Probably not. He did have to call in to work and bail out of his shift twenty minutes before it started that one time the car broke down, but he would have been on time.
Oh, well. He’ll get there. As long as he doesn’t get too distracted daydreaming about the way Miles’s grin looks first thing in the morning, when it starts out hazy and literally comes into focus as Alfons puts his glasses on, and then how it widens when Miles realizes Alfons can see him…
…not getting distracted. Right.
For all that he’s one big mess of delight and anticipation-which is almost, but not quite enough to bleach the last of the gory details of Al’s nefarious plans out of his tragically absorptive brain-time has no choice but to pass with every heartbeat, and in a matter of minutes, he’s pulling up in front of Whippersnapper. It’s been a grand total of about fifteen minutes since Miles texted to herald the end of the gig, so even the hardcorest moshers and the most dedicated Olivier devotees have mostly straggled off: there’s a parking space wide open about twenty steps from the front doors. Alfons tucks his car right into it and fishes out his phone.
I’m here!
His phone buzzes almost instantaneously:
<3
But there isn’t much time to melt into goo before he can see, in the right mirror, a solitary figure starting down the sidewalk towards his car-all lean lines and jet of pale hair and impossible, mouth-watering, throat-drying shoulder-to-hip ratio. Oh, and combat boots, and ripped-up jeans, and almost-too-tight T-shirt, and God, how did Alfons fucking Heiderich ever get so lucky? He always figured his guardian angel-not that he believes in guardian angels, but his conceptual guardian angel, at least-was the kind that the other angels sort of shunned and shook their heads at, because the bastard spent ninety percent of his designated protection time off in an angel-bar getting angel-wasted.
He glances down to make sure that the passenger-side door is unlocked-because that’s exactly the sort of awkward-ass thing he’d forget about, and then Miles would be stuck out there in the cold, pulling on the handle and pulling faces-and looks up again just as Miles steps into the glow of a streetlamp and then opens the door.
Miles slides into the passenger seat. He shuts the door. He grins. He leans over the center console, threads his fingers into Alfons’s hair, murmurs “Hey, babe”, and kisses him with every bit as much gorgeous care and thrilling intent as the first time their mouths ever met.
“Hey,” Alfons says, chasing the little aftershock kisses, feeling faintly weak and overpoweringly happy as they rake their eyes over each other for a second, like they always do, like neither of them can believe this is not a dream. “Went okay? I’m guessing Olivier told laryngitis it could go fuck itself, and it listened.”
Miles’s grin is too bright to bear. He loves that band so much-loves the people in it, loves the stuff they do, loves the way they matter to people, loves what the whole thing means to him. Alfons doesn’t know if he’s ever seen somebody so fulfilled.
“Wouldn’t you?” Miles asks. “Viral infections don’t risk pissing her off, either. But-babe-”
They’re kissing again, and Alfons has to plant a hand on the cupholder to steady himself; there’s a tingling urgency to it, and a shiver runs through him hard, shimmying up his spine and jittering out between his well-attended lips as a shaky sort of gasp-sigh-something.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Miles said, breath catching, fever heat between them, “in case nothing happened, but-Olivier’s been talking to some guy who’s worked with acts you wouldn’t believe-Green Day and shit, like, ‘Dookie’-era, real shit-and-he wants to get us on tour. East Coast. He thinks there’s enough demand; he says he’s been watching the airwaves and the online sales, and he thinks we can fill fucking venues, and-just-huge.”
Alfons’s head spins. He thinks of children’s tops-the ones that can’t really balance unless they’re spinning, and when they stop, they go tumbling down, and the momentum makes them skitter away and ricochet off other objects, and…
“That’s amazing,” he says, and he means it, but his voice kind of trembles, which is stupid; and his right hand sort of curls itself into the front of Miles’s T-shirt, which is… also stupid. “That’s amazing; that’s really great; that’s-I mean, obviously rock-star is a state of mind-”
Buck actually says that. Constantly. He should get it tattooed on his forehead to save them all some time.
“-but this is-monumental; it’s so great-”
“I know,” Miles whispers, and he’s kissing fervently at Alfons’s cheek, his jaw, his ear, his neck- “I know; I can’t believe it’s fucking real-”
Alfons figures out where the frigid draft of the reservations is coming from as he gives voice to the chill: “How long?”
“Touring, probably three months,” Miles says into his throat. There’s an edge of laughter on his voice; he’s so happy. Alfons’s ribcage is made of stone. “Whole thing, recording some shit while we’re there, all the prep and stuff-five? Maybe six?”
Alfons runs his fingertip around the curve of Miles’s ear and through the wispy white hair at his temple. He tries so, so hard to smile. “That’s-kind of a long time.”
“Well, yeah,” Miles says, and he’s grinning so broadly his cheeks must hurt, his jaw must ache- “That’s why I want you to come with me.”
Stones.
Everything is stones-those words, that smile, his heart, his lungs, his stomach. Stones, falling, and they shatter where they land.
“I can’t,” he says.
Miles’s unapologetic joy evaporates. It feels like a cold knife in the diaphragm-like a bullet through the center of the chest. Alfons did that to him-Alfons took that away. Alfons is a piece of shit.
“I just-” There’s nothing to say, nothing in the world. “The quarter just started-and I finally got into that basic astronomy class I need to transfer-and I can’t-I can’t lose this job-”
Miles is staring at him like he’s started speaking in tongues. He has to make this simple, somehow; he has to make it undeniable; how is it possible that someone who owns his heart completely doesn’t understand?
“I can’t leave,” Alfons says around the panic fluttering upwards in his throat.
“But-babe,” Miles says. The confusion is swirling; there’s a strain of… hurt. “I mean-Niagara Falls. You’d love New York. Boston, Providence-you could check out Harvard; you wanna see Harvard? I know you’ve got shit tying you down here, but-I thought-that was what you’d always dreamed about. Getting up and going somewhere and leaving all this boring stuff behind.”
Alfons can hear his own breathing redoubling in his ears-like it’s happening once inside his chest and then again as an external force, air moving and heat traveling and soundwaves rippling outward in the frozen space.
“You think I’m boring,” he says.
Miles’s face crumples into frustration. “No, babe, come on-I didn’t sa-”
“You said my life is boring,” Alfons says. “My life is boring shit.”
Miles sets his jaw; half a sigh huffs out through his clenched teeth. “I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t; I just meant ordinary stuff. All the ordinary stuff gets in the way. For fuck’s sake, I know that better than anybody; I know what it feels like being trapped, and-that’s why I want to cut you free, don’t you-”
“No,” Alfons says, and his voice shakes like there’s a record-setting earthquake starting in his bones. “You don’t get it. Because it was always just obligations and shit to you-wasn’t it? You don’t have any fucking idea what it’s like not having anything else. When it’s a fucking privilege to get to drag your tired ass in to classes at a crappy community college, because you fought for that. When it’s a fucking privilege to work stupid hours at your stupid job, and then come back to leaky faucets and mildew on the walls and pay your stupid rent-because you built that, from nothing, from dust and fucking misery; you made it. They can’t pay the rent without me-Ed and Al. They don’t make enough. And they’re my family. They’re all I’ve ever had; they’re all I’ve got left. And if you think I’m going to fucking-what, drop everything and go swanning off to God only knows what cities on the other side of the country just so you can run around twanging your fucking guitar-”
“Stop,” Miles says.
“No,” Alfons says. “Because you don’t know-you don’t know what ‘nothing’ means. Did you really-you really think so little of me that I’d just abandon all of this and go off with you like some fucking groupie? Is that it? You want to make sure your favorite fan to fuck comes with you, right?”
“You don’t think that,” Miles says, and his voice quavers, almost fails; and Alfons is almost-but the fear’s built to fury, and he can’t breathe out anything but vitriol- “You don’t think that, because you know me so much fucking better tha-”
“I exist outside you,” Alfons says over him. “I exist, and I care about my shitty-ass life, and if you can’t respect a fundamental part of who I am-”
“I’m not doing this,” Miles says. He opens the door. “I’m not doing this anymore.” He steps out. “I’ll get a cab.” He slams it; he strides away down the sidewalk; he disappears.
Alfons is trembling so hard that the first time he reaches for the gearshift, he misses it. It’s a miracle that he pulls out of the parking spot without bashing one of the cars on either side; it’s a miracle that he moves out into the lane without getting sideswiped; it’s a miracle that he gets halfway home before one of the lights turns yellow on him, and he jams his foot down on the brake. He jars his own neck; the seatbelt gets stuck and starts to constrict his chest; he bangs both hands against the steering wheel, including the one in the stupid cast, and pain blasts through his stupid wrist, and-
And that’s when he starts crying so hard he can’t fucking see, and his contacts feel like shards of glass just swimming in the saltwater, and he can’t even breathe.
He doesn’t know how he makes it home; he doesn’t remember anything but a couple seconds of blurred streetlights and a sharp turn or two. One second he’s bursting into tears; and the next he’s in his car, lined up on the curb in front of the complex, trying-and failing-to stop sobbing into his hands. He feels like he’s falling. He feels like he’s lost it. He feels so fucking empty he thinks he’s imploding; he thinks he’s broken; something in him is unhinged, unmoored, shattered, splintered, gone-
That didn’t just happen. Did it? It couldn’t have; he couldn’t have let it; this is a shitty fucking dream.
Please let this be a shitty dream.
He knows it’s not.
He should have seen this coming from the very beginning. Good things don’t happen to him-or they do, and they wind him up to real joy, to wondrousness, before they cut the cord and drop him, so that he plummets twice as far.
There are old napkins in the center console. He’s distantly glad he can’t read whatever’s written on them through the prism of the unending tears; Miles probably shoved them in there after they got takeout somewhere, because Alfons had grabbed a handful of napkins without realizing there were already some in the bag, and they parked in some empty lot and ate there and tried to see stars through the streaks on the windshield, and Miles whispered “Gorgeous” and kissed him and kissed him like it was the only thing that made sense-
He has soaked all of the napkins. The only thing left is his sleeves.
He clenches his hands around the steering wheel-sort of; the left has a little strip of cast-thing going between his thumb and the rest of his fingers, so its clenching capacity is greatly reduced-and looks out at the road. Everything is where he left it. Cars flit past at intervals-tunnels of light and a growl of an engine and then silence again. The world is still moving, and it’ll keep moving without him if he lets it. The world doesn’t give a shit if he fucked up the closest thing to happiness that he’s ever had. And the world is going to eat him alive and spit out the fragments of his crunchy little bones if he tries to take a breather for self-pity.
He scrubs at his eyes with the forearm that isn’t hiding a cast underneath his sweater and tries to force himself to breathe evenly. The world has never slowed down for Alfons Heiderich. It never will. It’s his choice whether he keeps up or gets run over.
He leans back against the headrest, drags in a shaking deep breath, swipes a mostly-dry spot on his sleeve over his face one more time, and gets out of the car.
He locks it. He keeps his keys in his hand but holds them tightly so they won’t jingle; he doesn’t want to drown out other noises in case… in case. He goes up to the lobby door, sorts the right key out of the cluster, and unlocks it; he pulls it shut behind him and walks down the hall to the elevator. He presses the button. He waits.
The doors open. He steps inside; he presses the 6 and then Door Close. He looks up at the deeply disturbing asbestos ceiling. He waits.
The elevator dings. The doors open again. He steps out and goes to their door; he selects the appropriate key from the bundle and puts it into the lock. He turns.
If there is anything, anything, like a God out there-if there is any greater kindness in the universe; if there is any guiding force with any sort of compassion-Ed and Al will be in one of their rooms, arguing loudly about a second cat, or they’ll be in the kitchen squabbling over ice cream, or wherever, arguing about whatever; and Alfons will be able to slip by unnoticed and crumble into misery in peace.
He opens the door.
Ed, Al, and Lan Fan look up from where they’re all sitting on the couch, Ed and Lan Fan with laptops on their laps; Al with Pumpkin on his, using one hand to pet her and the other to read some trashy novel.
They all stare like they’re frozen in place-like they don’t even have a choice; like he’s mesmerizing.
“Holy shit,” Ed says at last. “What happened?”
“Are you okay?” Al asks, looking so crushed already that he must know the answer.
Lan Fan just says, “Dude.”
“I’ll be right back,” Alfons says, and the wetness is creeping into his voice again; it’s climbing up his throat. “I need a f-fucking c-cigarette; I’ll-”
He dodges the end of the couch, fishing the pack out of his pocket; he pushes up the windowpane and climbs out onto the fire escape and sits down on the cold wrought-iron steps, and he buries his face in his hands. Which is stupid, because one of them has a scratchy cast partway across it, and the other one is holding a pack of cigarettes, and neither of those feels particularly good crushed against a cheekbone.
His breath hitches, and his chest jumps, and he feels like the tears are just seeping out-it’s not even that he’s crying, anymore; it’s not active enough for that; he’s just dripping. He’s oozing. There’s too much unhappiness inside of him to hold in, and it’s forcing its way out. That’s just basic fucking density dynamics; the concentration of unhappiness outside of his eyes is so much lower that he couldn’t stop the flow of it if he tried. He won’t be able to until it’s equalized. He’ll just have to keep letting himself cry until then-letting himself cry so hard it’s jarring his spine and shaking the fire escape, but he can barely hear the rattle of the metal over the sound of his own stupid fucking sobs.
He’s better than this. He’s stronger than this. Nothing he said wasn’t true; why does he feel like shit? He was right-wasn’t he? Fuck it. It doesn’t matter who was right, or what was, or-anything. He has to get through this; that’s the only part he needs to care about. That’s the part he has to focus on. He has to swallow this fucking monster in his throat and stop fucking weeping like a four-year-old getting sent to bed without dinner and move on. That’s the only choice he’s ever had. That’s the only thing he’s ever known how to do, and it’s gotten him this far, and fuck anybody who tries to hold him back, or hold him down, or control his trajectory; fuck them; he doesn’t need that-
But he needed to be loved. He let himself need it.
He’d been fine, before. He’d just-done his thing, just ducked his head down and pushed on from one day to the next. He had Ed, and Al, and all their dumb shenanigans; and they had his back, and he had theirs; and he had his blog and stupid coworkers like weirdo Russell; and it was enough. He made it enough. He got by.
So the thing with Miles started out like a gift-like something fantastic, obviously, but something extra, something on top; something great and special and exhilarating, yeah, but an addition to a neatly-categorized little life that was already complete.
Except it’s not, anymore.
Miles wormed his way in like a fucking vine of ivy-twisted into the cracks in Alfons’s fucked-up, shaky little psyche and filled them all with warmth and greenery-turned the half-shattered stone in the core of him into a garden where things grew and flourished and bloomed; turned him into a different person; turned him into someone who relied on that. Miles treated him so fucking well he started to believe he deserved it. Miles made him feel so fucking special that he started to normalize it. Miles loved him so much he started to love himself.
And now-
God. He has to stop crying; he can’t smoke and cry at the same time. His hands are shaking so hard he can’t get a cigarette out of the package, and his sleeves are so wet he’s trying to wipe his eyes on his shoulder, which he’s not really flexible enough to do very well-
Please let this not be happening. Please. Let him wake up in bed and panic for a second believing it’s real, then sit up and center himself and laugh weakly in relief, because it was just his brain tormenting him, because his brain is a douchebag, and life is still good, it’s fine, everything is fine-
Oh, God.
He draws his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them instead of in his wet fucking sleeves. His eyes just keep leaking like a fucking hose with a fucking hole in it, and he’s so carved-out-hollow that he can’t remember what to do to try to stop them.
There’s a little bit of commotion at the window, and then Al climbs out onto the fire escape with Pumpkin in one arm. Alfons looks up, as much as he’s capable of looking with his stupid eyes still streaming like the famous waterfall he’s never going to see with the man he’s going to love more than he thought he was capable of until the day he dies.
“Here,” Al says, depositing a very warm cat on Alfons’s lap. Then he leans against the railing, hugging himself with his arms against the chill up here. Alfons can sort of feel that it’s cold, in a distant, who-gives-a-shit kind of way. “So what happened?”
“They’re g-going on t-t-tour,” Alfons says. He tries to take a breath that doesn’t catch eight times on the way in and just as many on the way back out, and… fails. “S-six months, p-probably, and he asked me to leave my b-boring f-fucking life and c-c-come, and I s-said if I was boring, why d-did he want me there anyway?”
“He loves you,” Al says.
Alfons’s whole body convulses so hard with the next sob that Pumpkin startles and jumps down off of his knees, coiling around Al’s ankles where it’s safe.
“He does,” Al says. “If he thought you were boring, he wouldn’t be so devoted to you that it’s like he’s got little stars in his eyes all the time. He wouldn’t bring cupcakes. He wouldn’t put up with Ed.”
“I heard that!” Ed calls.
“But you agree,” Al says.
“…maybe.”
Lan Fan snickers.
“Point is,” Al says, “having a fight about the future doesn’t mean it’s over.”
“He s-said ‘I’m n-not d-d-doing this anymore’,” Alfons says.
Al’s eyes narrow a little bit. Pumpkin meows loudly, staring up at him. His body language has gone… different. Threatening. Ed would probably say ‘evil’, because Ed is a drama queen. “The conversation, or the relationship?”
“I d-dunno,” Alfons says. “Both?”
Al’s eyes are little slits. They look black in the dim light from the other side of the window. “Can I talk to him?”
Ed clambers over the sill and drops down onto the grating. Pumpkin makes a disgruntled noise and winds herself tighter around Al’s right foot. Alfons wonders idly how much weight this fire escape can hold, and what will happen if the supports break. Presumably they’ll all plummet to their deaths.
“Don’t get involved, Al,” Ed says. “If Band Dude has a pair of balls and a pair of eyes, he’s gonna be here with his boom-box on his shoulder blasting some cheesy ballad shit to apologize in T-minus half an hour, because he knows he’s never going to do better than Alfons, and saying that shit was the stupidest thing he’s ever done.”
Alfons grinds his face into his knees a little. He has no idea how all this moisture arrived in his tear ducts; he hasn’t drunk this much water in his entire life.
“And if he doesn’t,” Ed says, “then we know he’s a worthless fuck, and his opinion doesn’t matter anyway.”
It’s always so simple, to Ed. Life, love, people, what’s worth the time investment, what you should reject. Happiness. Feeling whole.
Alfons has always felt he could stand to learn something from the way Ed analyzes the world, but right now there’s no room left in him for anything but this gaping void.
“C’mon, both of you,” Ed says. “You’re gonna get pneumonia. The cat can stay.”
“You’re horrible,” Al says, scooping up his precious furball in both arms.
“Whatever,” Ed says.
And Alfons watches a one-armed boy-another kid who’s never caught a break he hasn’t fought for tooth and nail, with one less hand and a little brother he has volunteered to carry every staggering step of the way-vault over the windowsill and back into the warmth of the living room. Ed never, ever quits; Ed never, ever accepts failure, or roadblocks, or defeat. He just finds a new tactic and keeps on working. He never gives up on what he believes in-and what he believes in is himself. Himself, his life, his family, his brother, little stair-step hopes like a bigger apartment where Al can have another cat he’ll claim to hate, big cumulous-cloud hopes like being rich and comfortable someday. He’ll talk about it, if you catch him in the right moment, when he’s too sleepy to have his guard up and his expectations down. He’ll tell you about the library he wants. He’ll tell you about the charities he’d start for single moms. He’ll tell you about the dreams he won’t surrender, because the world took a shit-ton from him, but it can’t take that.
Alfons crams the pack of cigarettes into his pocket and climbs back over the windowsill.
The tears seem to have stopped. He can still feel a reservoir of them behind his eyes-which, again, what the fuck; where does it all come from?-but they aren’t overflowing anymore. His eyes are burning, though, and his skin around them must be red and puffed to shit; it’s sore, and his head is banging, and he wants to bury himself in some dark corner and sleep until this never happened. He can’t tell if the shaking is from the aftershocks of the sobs, or a nicotine withdrawal, or from the cold out on the fire escape. He can’t tell much of anything.
Ed sits him down at the kitchen table, and Al puts the cat in his lap again (she eyes him in a manner he would characterize as less-than-trusting) and makes him some herbal tea. Ed disappears and then returns with the extra-fuzzy blanket his mom made for him, which almost never leaves his bed, and drapes it over Alfons’s shoulders.
It’s nice of them. It’s really, really nice, and maybe when he doesn’t have this soul-sucking emptiness eating at him from the inside of his chest, he’ll find the words to thank them for it.
This is what he meant, though, in case some higher being has kept count-this is what he meant when he was turning down that chance, that opportunity, the offer of adventure with a person that he…
This is why he won’t leave them-not can’t; won’t, will not, would not, won’t ever. These are the two other lost, lonely souls who have always, always had his back, and here they are, raising him-this is what family means, bloodlines all aside. This is where he belongs. And anyone who says this is boring-
He needs to take his contacts out; they’re probably crusted with salt by now or something. That can’t be good for his corneas.
The tea steadies his machine-gun-rattling nerves a little bit, and Ed and Al get into a very subdued, half-volume version of the usual Pumpkin-is-lonely-and-needs-a-friend fight to distract him, and Lan Fan plunks down in the next chair at the table and starts showing him a ton of pictures from the Mars Rover that he hadn’t seen before, and by eleven, he’s so exhausted he doesn’t think even the throbbing ache in his chest will stop him from passing out.
In the end, though, he doesn’t really sleep-he drifts; he dozes; he walks the hazy line between dream and reality, arms out to either side, toes on the divider-he fades in and out, sometimes for almost an hour at a time, but it isn’t sleeping, really, and it doesn’t offer any solace or any rest.
When he went to set his alarm, his lock screen was that terrible failed selfie at the park, where Miles was trying to kiss him, and he was wriggling away, and what ended up in the photo was half of his grin and all of Miles’s bright-eyed, delighted laughter. His shaking hands considered hurling the phone across the room, watching that taunting image shatter against the wall-but he can’t afford a new phone, and he’s not really that type, and he was so tired. He just wanted it to be over, and the anger was a low-burning ember underneath the furnace of the other pain. He wasn’t angry, not really. Just-lost. Lost, abandoned, broken up and scattered over miles of space. Humpty Dumpty shit. Humpty Dumpty wasn’t pissed off; he didn’t throw the shards of himself at the king’s men and curse them out just for being in the blast radius; he begged, because he was in fucking pieces, and he didn’t know where to start rebuilding.
So he changed the picture to one of Ed and Al pulling faces at the charity carnival a couple years ago, which was one of the first ones that his trembling fingertips found on the camera roll, and which was also-sort of the point.
Tomorrow he’ll have to… finish the job, right? Fucking hell. He’s had breakups before, obviously, but never… quite like this. Never someone who had wriggled into every single nook and cranny of his goddamn existence and left a fingerprint that wouldn’t just wash away; never someone who was fucking indelible on the pattern of his own life; never someone he was going to have to tear out one bleeding fiber at a time. Never someone he would never go a single day without thinking about, no matter how much time, no matter how he tried, no matter how many stupid inexhaustible tears he choked on as he flipped the pillow to the cold side and succumbed to the trademark putty-skin sensation of a failure to sleep. Never someone he didn’t want to lose. Never someone he’d loved more than almost anything.
Just not enough.
[Part II]