|
"Wee Small Hours "Written By: Fancy Figures Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, wish I did, just
enjoy writing about 'em for free etc Pairing: 1x2 Warnings: yaoi, romance, lemon Rating: NC17 Summary: It takes a long night - and some new
acquaintances - for the estranged lovers to realise who and what they're
missing. Written for The Vault’s Spring Songfic Challenge,
inspired by ‘In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ by Carly
Simon "Wee Small Hours " The dark-haired man sat on his own at the bar, leant forward over the counter, resting on his folded arms. He was completely still: his head hung down. Earlier in the evening, there’d been other patrons – the door had creaked open many times – but he’d never raised his head once; never turned to see who might be joining him there. Like he knew no-one would. The clock over the bar clicked dully, the hand sliding past another hour. By now, he was the only customer left. The air in the bar had gradually cleared of its noise and smoke and the tang of spilled beer, and now it was cool and quiet, as the night crept on into the small hours of the next morning. It was one of the few places that were still open at this hour. The barman stood behind the bar, a couple of feet away, polishing a glass for the third time. There weren’t any regular jobs left for him to do tonight, but he felt he ought to be doing something busy in front of a customer – not that this one was taking any notice. He should have closed up the bar a long time ago, but something had made him pause before throwing this guy out. Hell, he only lived above the place, so it wasn’t as if he had to rush home himself. He stared over, but the guy never raised his head. Hadn’t drunk much, either – wasn’t so much a case of drowning his sorrows, as paddling in ‘em. The barman amused himself with his own jokes. But he also recognised there were definite sorrows there. He could see it in the sag of the man’s shoulders; in the way he kept his eyes hidden most of the evening; in the way his hand was clenched on the bar beside his half-full glass. The barman shifted quietly, putting the glass back on the shelf, wondering which one to choose next. There was a discarded slice of lemon caught up behind a couple of bottles and he carefully picked it out. He dropped it into the wastebin with a sigh. This evening was obviously sour enough already.
The young man didn’t seem to be drunk, or under the influence of an enemy’s magic pills – he was just having some problems with a takeout sandwich that had split its bag and dripped its contents all over his jeans and shoes and… well, all over his hair. The king looked even more curiously. He rarely saw anyone with such long hair, and entwined in such a careful braid. He began to wonder if the man’s curses were some kind of ancient lore or magic spell, and that he may have been sent as a messenger. “Fuck,” hissed the braided man. “Dammit. Oh, hell, no – wait – catch that -!” He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular except himself. He’d put too much dressing on the sandwich and it was way too wet for the flimsy takeout packaging. The paper had split, the bread had started to slip through his fingers, and now it was all over him. Then the damned braid had fallen forward and now the ends of his hair were also covered in all of this damned, damned stuff – Perfect end to a perfect day, right? He grimaced. Could say the same for the last few weeks, in all honesty. Nothing was going right – nothing was getting any clearer; any easier. He let the remainder of the sandwich drop to the ground with a damp splat, leaning back against the wall with a sigh that was deep with far more misery than a lost, unappetising supper. The man at the back of the alley stared at the young man’s profile, dark against the dim light of the street beyond. The visitor was in distress, no doubt about it. Much as he disliked being interrupted in his royal chambers, he knew that he would sometimes be called upon to dispense wisdom and justice in the unlikeliest of places. He rose slowly from his bed of cardboard and rags and raised a hand to attract the young man’s attention. *
Heero heard the voice cut through his thoughts, but it was all wrong – it wasn’t the one he expected to hear. Was kinder, too. That wasn’t what he remembered. Wasn’t what he’d been torturing himself with, all night. All week. For longer than that, even. He raised his head and felt the joint at the base of his neck crack. How long had he been sitting here? He peered at the barman opposite him. Ah yes. He remembered where he was, now. He shifted on the stool and felt his thigh cramp up. His elbow knocked against his glass, making it rattle on the counter. There was still some beer in the bottom of it, but the thought of drinking it made him feel nauseous. “What time is it?” The barman shrugged. “3 a.m.” He’d been in and out of the kitchen, making a snack, listening to some music on the radio in there. He reckoned he could’ve knocked down a wall in there or fought off a whirling dervish – wouldn’t have made any difference to the dark-haired guy. He was in some other world, all of his own. “Going to move out,” Heero said. His own voice sounded thick, as if he’d been asleep, or had forgotten how to use it. “Yeah,” the guy nodded. “It’s for the best. I gotta lock up now.” “No,” said Heero, over-carefully. “Not from here. From the apartment. No point keeping it on just for myself, right?” “Right,” said the barman. Whatever. He’d heard this conversation a few thousand times in his career. “He hasn’t been back.” Heero looked at the glass. It was cloudy and he could see his fingerprints on the outside, like he’d gripped it too tightly. It wasn’t a particularly interesting glass, but it was pretty fascinating just at this moment. “I thought he just needed time to cool off. Thought he’d be back the next day. Or in a day or so. That he’d need something in the apartment, or come to pick up his mail or something, and then I’d be waiting and we’d talk about it and it’d all be sorted out. We’d laugh about it all some day.” I thought he’d need me, he thought. Just like I need him. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach, and this time it wasn’t the thought of the stale beer. “He hasn’t been back,” he repeated. The barman was moving through the bar, dodging around him, stacking up some loose chairs, picking up a last few discarded coasters. Heero wasn’t really talking to him, he knew, but saying it all aloud seemed kind of comforting. “It was my fault. I was being a prick. That’s what he called me, and he was right.” The barman gave a discreet cough. Heero moved his arm and the man scooped up his glass. “It was probably six and two threes, you know?” Heero stared at him. The barman shrugged. “Takes two to argue. Six of one, half dozen of another. Two to tango. Whatever you like. Why don’t you get on home and sleep on it? It’ll all seem better in the morning.” Heero swallowed heavily. He ran a hand back through his already tousled hair. “It won’t. Haven’t slept for days, not properly. The daytime’s OK, with work and everything, and keeping busy. But the night… you know?” The barman sighed. He knew, all right. But looked like he was going to be told all over again. “I wake in the middle of the night,” said Heero. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he were explaining symptoms to a doctor. “Every night. He’s not there. It hurts – like a physical pain. That’s the worst thing of all.” “Time’s the great healer. Plenty more fish in the sea.” The barman was running out of platitudes. He stood by the door back out to the street, rather obviously waiting for Heero to leave. “No,” said Heero. He sounded almost surprised: he grimaced, as if he’d just discovered a great truth. Maybe it was, for him. “There’s no-one else like him, not like that. Not for me. Never will be.” The barman stared at the guy and something tightened in his chest. He stepped slowly away from the door. He’d seen plenty of ‘em, you know? Plenty of drinkers and weepers and shouters and fighters. Plenty of idiots; plenty of bullies; plenty of victims. But this guy was something else. He wasn’t hurrying home to his bed, alone or otherwise – he wasn’t just some moron who’d pissed off a casual boyfriend. He was in real pain. The barman walked back to the bar and pulled up the stool beside Heero. “Let’s have another drink,” he said. “A decent one. Then tell me about him.”
“You must stay still,” warned the man sitting beside him. “They have spies everywhere nowadays, since the war, and you mustn’t draw attention to my headquarters.” Duo stared back. The guy had only just introduced himself. Well, he’d lurched suddenly out from the shadows, actually, scaring the shit out of him, but Duo had let that incivility pass. He’d let a lot of things pass, recently. “Do you bring a message from the settlements?” the guy asked. He was quite old, or maybe that was just the long, ratty beard he wore. He smelled only slightly less obnoxious than the alley itself, but his eyes were bright and he spoke as if he were someone important. Duo wasn’t in any position nowadays to criticise anyone’s provocative behaviour. “Nah,” he said, slowly. “Just passing through. Just… looking for somewhere to be, y’know?” The king nodded. He well understood the life of a wandering minstrel. That’s what this young man must be. Too young for a true soldier, but with the melodic voice of a performer, surely. Duo leant back against the wall. Maybe he should just stay here, himself. Keep him and his big, stupid mouth out of the way. “It’s starting to get tricky, y’see. I mean, the guys were happy to let me stay at their place at first, though they didn’t want to get involved with… well, Heero and me, the problems, right?” He nodded to himself and continued, not really expecting a reply. “They’re friends to us both. It’s all kind of… tricky. And now I think it’s pissing them off, I’m getting under their feet.” He sighed, and turned to the other guy, chatting as if he’d known him for years. “I don’t sleep, y’see. Can’t seem to. First couple days, I sat up late, thinking he might call around to find me. Then I sat up even later, thinking I’d call him, and just clear the air. Sort it all out. We’d laugh about it all one day.” He started to smile, but couldn’t seem to follow it through. “Then it got really difficult. Couldn’t think of what to say to him. Me, eh, can you imagine that?” The old guy opened his mouth as if to reply, then went back to examining a shadow over behind the dumpster. He muttered something about a wizard’s familiar. Personally, Duo thought it was an urban fox on the prowl, but he supposed the other guy would know better. “I was a real prick,” he murmured. There was a trail of green slime down the brickwork beside him, dribbling into a foetid pool at his feet. Looks like I feel, he thought. “I never learn. Just piss him off, time and again. Then when he snaps, I’m outta there like a frightened rabbit.” Something rustled behind the dumpster and he shivered. The old guy tensed up beside him. “It may be an attack,” he hissed in Duo’s ear. Duo turned his head away from the stench of his breath. “Be ready to defend me.” Duo nodded. When the rat nosed its way out from under a pile of discarded magazines, Duo threw a well-aimed apple core and watched it turn tail. The old guy was embarrassingly grateful. “You are a warrior indeed,” he said. “Your partner will reward you for your courage.” “My partner?” Duo stared with some confusion. “Oh, right. No – we’re not partners now. Not at the moment. Well, not at all. Fuck knows.” He leant his head back and stared up at the dark, cloudy sky. “I’m seeing a lot of these early mornings, y’know. I wake up all the time and… he’s not there.” He tried to keep it at bay, but the anguish wasn’t ever very far away. “I thought he didn’t need me – but it’s a fact that I need him.” Now he lay in bed most nights in Trowa and Quatre’s spare bedroom, listening to the guys whispering and laughing in their bedroom beside him, guys who balanced each other out, who shared, who tolerated, who fucked, but both quietly and gently because they knew that Duo was next door and damned miserable and wouldn’t appreciate hearing Quatre yell out Trowa’s name, and Trowa’s shoulders hitting the headboard time and again… Duo groaned aloud. “I know other warriors,” said the king, confidently. In his opinion, this young man needed more training and less talk. The king had rarely heard so many words in such a short space of time. But even under the quantity, he could hear and judge the quality. This man was dispossessed; possibly betrayed; most certainly vulnerable. “Let me find you another, worthy partner.” Duo shook his head. “Nah, man, that’s no good. There’s no-one else I want. Never has been. I’m his, y’know?” Fuck, was he going to cry? Duo cursed lack of sleep; lack of proper food; lack of proper purpose in his life. Lack of Heero.
Heero glanced at him. There was gratitude in his look, but a fair amount of cynicism, too. “We don’t argue, that’s the whole issue. Or maybe not argue – just discuss. He likes to talk, and I don’t. So I told him to shut up, he said I was acting like a prick, and he left.” He sighed. “Sounds so straightforward, said just like that, right?” “Right,” agreed the barman, knowing it was nothing but. “He does it all the time, though,” Heero mused. He stared down at the counter, his mind far away. “Even talks during sex. Talks about doing it – talks while we’re in the middle of it – talks about it after we’re done.” The barman whistled, softly. His face felt a little flushed. Way too much information, but hey, the guy needed to talk. “So long as it’s complimentary, huh?” Heero glanced up, confusion on his face. The barman remembered every joke of his that’d ever misfired, and this one looked like winning the gold award. “It’s incredible,” said Heero, slowly. He was still facing the barman, but his eyes had slipped out of focus again. “He’s incredible. In bed, you know? Well, anywhere we do it, really, because it’s not like I had much experience before, of how good it could be. Or where you could do it – or how often – or how much fun it could be.” He was smiling now, very, very gently. “He’s done all that for me. And to be honest, I guess the words make it even more stimulating. But it was just that last personal comment he made - I was still trying to catch my breath, he’d got tangled in the sheets and yet he was still talking…” He focussed back on his companion, maybe looking for support of some kind. “He caught me at the wrong time, you know? I didn’t want to joke. I wanted to hold him – to sleep – to think. To savour. I told him to shut up.” He winced at the memory. “And he left that night.” The barman swallowed, curiosity loosening his extremely tight throat. “What did he say? Was it really gross? Was it…?” Heero was gazing back at the bar. His eyes looked suspiciously damp. The barman sighed. “Yeah, right, gotcha. So it was complimentary. That’s the worst thing, eh?” When Heero didn’t answer, the barman reached over in front of them both and picked up Heero’s cell phone, lying on the counter. He nudged Heero on the arm to get his attention. “Call him,” he said, firmly.
“You will seek out your partner and speak to him,” he said. It was an order, not a question, and he expected the braided man to obey it accordingly. “In the heat of battle, many things are said and regretted, but they must be forgotten for the sake of your duty.” Duo roiled his eyes. “I would have apologised, right? It was just… I was blown away that night. He was so spectacular, so fierce, so tender, so delicious…” The king felt a strange uneasiness in the pit of his royal stomach. He had never heard such sensuality in a soldier’s tone – such physical passion. Maybe he might have had interests that way himself, once, had circumstances not burdened him with his own royal responsibilities, here in the city. Duo smiled, gently. “So gorgeous… so passionate. I just wanted to express that. He’s the best I ever saw – the most generous I ever touched. He gives it all to me, he teaches me what it’s really about.” He felt the old guy shifting awkwardly beside him and he sighed, nodding. “I know – I should shut the fuck up, eight times out of ten. He said that, didn’t he, and it pissed me off. Should have taken time to think it through.” His voice dropped. “I told him he was acting like a prick. Even then, he didn’t come back at me. I was so fucking angry, I had to leave before I said a whole bunch of even worse stuff.” The king found it difficult to steady his voice. “You must trust your partner. There need not be words. It’s enough that you bear arms together.” Duo turned to stare at him, startled. “You’re some guy, you know? Guess you’re right. I didn’t need to say anything at all, even if I thought it was amusing, even if it was meant to make him feel good, y’know, to tell him he’s so big and deep inside me that he makes me come until my balls ache, that when he comes, he hisses in my ear like a wild cat, like something fierce and feral -” Maybe he heard the old guy’s groan of embarrassment beside him, or maybe he was just distracted by a new trickle of warm, sticky liquid from an open drain at the side of the alley. He paused, anyway. “I miss him so bad,” he said, softly. “I just go on and on because I’m worried I don’t understand what he’s thinking; what he wants; what to do that’s gonna be right. I need to know that – and I thought he’d understand. But how can I go back, after I ran out on him like that, after what I said...?” The king was suddenly tired of this audience. He had other matters on his mind, notably what to eat for his own supper, and what the approaching dawn would bring in the way of dangerous adventure. “Seek him out,” he said, dismissively. “Send word.” The young man had something cradled in his palm – a strange, rectangular object with a glowing panel. The king had seen these in the hands of other, less friendly people, and he believed they were for communication. Something from the ancient world, yet reliable enough for their purpose. “Your life is too short to waste,” he said, sternly. The young man still looked startled, but he was brushing his fingers across the surface of the device as if he were preparing to use it. The king’s attention passed on by. He peered away down the alley to where the young man had dropped his food on entering the kingdom. “Was there mayo on that?” he asked, thoughtfully.
And yet he wanted to, more than anything. That’s what he’d said on the phone – the message he’d left on Duo’s voicemail. He’d sort it out. He, Heero, would apologise. OK, so maybe that would take a few practices – Duo always said he sucked at apologising. Whereas Duo did it with ease and charm and genuine passion. Hell, Duo did everything like that. Heero tugged his jacket around himself. The dawn was nudging up over the horizon and the wind was cool and quiet. He started to practise some suitable phrases in his mind. He tried to remember just what Duo said, when he apologised. All he could remember was the way Duo looked. The way he smiled at Heero – the way he stroked a hand down his arm whenever they passed in the kitchen, or on the stairs. The way he laughed. The way he talked. The way he gasped when they were in bed, eyes half-closed, hands digging into Heero’s shoulders, pleading for more, for Heero to take him, for Heero to tell him how it felt, for Heero to say… I never do tell him, Heero thought. Not enough. Never enough. I’m not fair to him, letting him express everything for the pair of us. I feel just as deeply, but I keep it to myself. And that’s why those are the only persons here tonight – me and myself. It hurt – but it was truth, and he welcomed that, didn’t he? He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway and paused, re-orientating himself with the way back to the apartment. He’d sort it out. When the sun came up properly… And then he noticed the man hurrying towards him.
He grinned to himself, his heart suddenly beating more quickly than his brisk walking merited. He was sounding like that weird old guy in the alley, like he was on some kind of a mission. This was the first time for days that he’d felt any energy, any desire for anything but misery. He didn’t want to be away any more – he wanted to be going home to his own place, to be amongst his own stuff, to see Heero there. His mind was full of memories of Heero’s face, of the way he felt under Duo’s hands, of the smell of his skin in amongst freshly washed sheets, of the way he turned to greet him at the end of a working day, slow and careful and thoughtful and with a smile of unbidden pleasure… I never give him the chance to reply, he thought. Never listen, even to his silences. We have so much to say to each other, in so many more ways than words. Heero spoke to him all the damned time – with his smile, with his frown, with his wit, with the way he tilted his head sideways as if puzzled. Then Duo’s cell phone peeped, telling him he’d got a message, at just the same time as he saw the man emerging from the closed bar.
“Look,” Heero began. “I was-” “ –I was a prick,” Duo said, at the same time. They laughed, suddenly, comfortably, familiarly. “And I’m sorry,” said Duo. “Me too,” added Heero. His heart ached. He felt a strange, excited panic: he wanted to rush to talk, to push words out of his mouth in twos and threes. “Stupid mess. I shouldn’t have let it get to that -” “Nah, I pushed it there,” said Duo, shaking his head. He felt strangely reticent; sort of tongue-tied. Hell, he hadn’t missed the glazed expression on the old guy’s face, back in the alley. Guess his rambling could destroy the most royal of audiences. He felt the vibration in his cell phone again, begging to be answered. He flipped open the lid. “I was just going to call you,” he said, slowly, surprised. “But you beat me to it.” He looked up again at Heero, his eyes moist. “Always got to have the first word, eh?” Heero grinned back. “So long as I can make you speechless, just now and then.” “More than that,” murmured Duo. “Way more than that.” He grinned, too. “We look like a couple of Cheshire cats,” said Heero. He felt very flushed. “It’s too damned late for phone calls, anyway. What time do you have?” Duo shrugged, though he had a perfectly good watch on his wrist. Never too late, he thought. “I make it time to go home. If that’s OK with you…” Heero nodded, much too quickly and eagerly, starting to answer but Duo took the two steps forward to close the gap between them, and kissed all the words back into their mouths. End In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning / Carly Simon When the sun is high in the afternoon sky In the wee small hours of the morning When your lonely heart has learned its lesson When your lonely heart has learned its lesson
|
