Work Text:
Sin.
Tears watered the ground, forlorn human speckles on manufactured stone, polished only to sting, sting the fear-clad membranes that made up his body. Air burst from a vessel resting lung-shaped within him, him who'd forgotten all of human shapes. Tears, water, endless — always endless eternal euphemisms. He lunged for breath, but gulped only fire — pah, fire? him? Ships sat docked at the pier. They poked the ocean's tranquil membrane, caressed the waves and waves and waves of anguish with wooden palms. Tear-watered piers over salt-stained waters stood firm like bridges that were leading nowhere.
The open was no place.
Empty — negative space weighed but the stroke of a paintbrush across life — empty, they stood emptily. Risen hairs shuddered on his lower arms, the shirt draped over his shoulders cloaking him with a foreign sensation, a stranger.
Empty facsimiles.
He was wearing the skin of a foreigner — a wanderer who'd long given up on walking, an echo of a past that wasn't his. Had they cut him — empty — open, the scalpel would've slipped right through, finding shell placed upon shell, a sinner, a sin, stuffed into the taut suit of an innocent. A cadaver in sheep's clothing.
They would've found nothing.
Nothing.
Carve him open? — He hadn't even dared the jump down the cliffs. Too bright had the lamppost donned its nightly shade on him that he had shuddered at the thought of salvation.
Oblivion was what he deserved after so many — stairs; to heaven? —years. He'd climbed all the way up here, all the stairs, Lumière's square, bustling with life because of some festivity he'd not bothered to inquire the reason of, sparkling with lights in the distance. The distance he could not reach, the ground, the pier-littered ground, blinking up at him. If he squinted, he could spot the tears he'd shed in cowardice.
Over months. Days and days, again and again. Cycles had no end. His cycle didn't even have development — only stasis.
Climbing these outskirts again and again, he had not learned how to finish the ascent, the plan to put an end to his wandering evermore confined to sketches in his head, a blueprint to — have you even listened to me ? This...it's all we needed, Verso; the missing piece to our chroma enhancer, it — it's exactly what we needed.
Verso glanced down the cliff-side, the pain-fed nature — his nature — so beautifully stretching across the wall, mosses and branches and some berry bushes, before they met the light, the shade of civilisation, the cobblestone wall he'd climbed on. It only reached his hip, not safety but guidance what those who'd built it had had in mind. Still, he had climbed it.
He was watching the waves crash on the rocks. Although he couldn't hear them, he knew they carried the same tunes as the flooding rounds of applause in the opera house. If they didn't, then why was he shuddering?
It's all we needed, Verso, it's —
He laughed.
He hadn't needed anything in a long time.
Kisses had long abandoned the taste of love when it were his lips that offered them. When he was who asked for them...he hadn't been asking for them. Strokes along his shoulder blades had carved his skin like slashes of his sword, marking him with the promise of more, and caresses had driven him to whimper and claw at the sheets all because his body hadn't stopped rocking with the ghost of Gustave's thrusts. He clutched them until his knuckles drained of any blood before lullabies of tears ushered him to sleep. The next day, being the coward he was, he pathologically chased the high, the touches that had stroked with adoration he'd learned to trap in a bottle and toss in the sea. Awe only blinded one's soul, and since he — this, he was certain — did not possess one such thing, that parasitic wonder would only consume him if he allowed himself to feel it. It was not for him. Passion was not for him albeit the gorgeous panting that fluttered through his bedroom whenever he allowed a sliver of lust to seep from his muscles to Gustave's.
Passion was not for him.
He enjoyed witnessing such fervour too much, caught too many smiles on his lips when Gustave's eyes twinkled at his projects and he got to watch him, as that he could appreciate the emotion. It delighted him because he could gaze upon it, trace it with his fingers, on that perfectly arranged visage of the man. His smiles carried the warmth of copper-bristled brushes, his hair the shade of charcoal that limned the fingertips of the painter who had smudged his eyebrows to perfection. They curled when he was upset, lifted when he was joyous, and stilled only when he was sleeping. Verso loved watching him when he was sleeping, soundly resting in his arms because I told you that final glass of wine wouldn't become you; his soft snores ruined the illusion. They had forced Verso out of bed, had made him march up here.
He loved when Gustave was asleep because he got to study all the paint that constructed his face and all pigment that sculpted his muscles for what it really was. It was during such nights that Verso understood his emotions like no other time that they seemed like a force he could conquer because they were only subconscious responses of his blueprinted human mind to the piece of art labelled 'Gustave 'by a bloody, silver plate in this menagerie of grief and self-loathing. It was those nights he loved him.
— Say, Verso, do you think I was worth saving?
He loathed the nights when Gustave mistook his open arms as an invitation to stroke his fingers over his sternum, when the kisses Verso had put to painted flesh inclined Gustave to dig for answers where he had decided to harbour darkness. He knew Gustave noticed the way his breath shook under his fingertips, just as he knew he didn't comment because that's how Verso worked.
— Do you believe I'm real?
He had laughed. Why did he always goddamn laugh?
Gustave liked phrasing his questions in a weird way, always considering Verso's personal impressions and lacklustre understanding of his own feelings. Never was it 'is this real?' or 'what's the reason?'. No, he only ever asked for Verso's thoughts. He wanted to hear his view as had his opinion mattered more than the existential properties of their universe, as was Verso a vessel containing all answers because he originated from two universes and belonged to neither, as was his mind not but fragment of his mother, my wishes but sacrilege on those who held the paintbrush. Nothing. Nothing he screamed. It all amounted to nothing in this world that existed only because paint had dried when tears had not, and created life when its only meaningful creation was forgotten before it had been mourned. All his speech — no matter how much I want it — did not…— it amounted to nothing.
He much rather kissed Gustave during such nights, dotted on him as had the artist found his muse, his tongue blazing with the taste of bruises that he kissed and kissed until it yielded to that of breathless blood. No piece of music clattered off his fingertips for days after he devoured Gustave during these nights. For days, what he'd done repeated in his head in vicious flickers, like the film screenings at the re-opened theatre, reminding him about the darkness dwelling inside his chest. How broken had he become that, when the purest of souls with the most forgiving, brown eyes to ever have grazed his vision went to pick up the shards of his broken heart, he flung them at Gustave's face and buried a piece of his sorrow in the muscles twitching around a compassionate smile?
'I don't like heights, you know?'
How sadistic was he to answer that voice with his glance, how shameless, to dare and chuckle at Gustave who was sitting at his side, his feet dangling off the wall, how pathetic, to meet his smile with flushed cheeks.
'I know Esquie's taken us to the continent a couple of times,' Gustave continued and threw his gaze out to the endless horizon, 'but I prefer taking the traditional route by ship. Call me soppy all you like but I would rather have the scent of salt in my nose than the wind blowing in my face.'
Verso bit on the inside of his cheek and tore his eyes off Gustave, the banter in his words treading too close to —
— Why shouldn't we? A trip to the beach sounds just like what'd get your creativity flowing again.
His excitement was so hard to resist if it lit his entire face.
— My electrical what? Don't change the topic. I'm perfectly fine with going. I appreciate the scent of salt in my nose from time to time, evens out the constant work with metal and chroma.
Gustave's talent to remember exact phrases astounded as much as frightened him.
— The people?
That hadn't been the reason, but Gustave had known that. He had known and still accepted not to go. Verso hadn't told him that he had tried to drown himself more times than he could count.
'Would you mind?' Gustave asked, holding out his palm. His glance flickered to Verso's back pocket.
Verso fished out his pack of cigarettes and handed it to Gustave. His face trembled to a frown as Gustave picked one from the pack. 'You shouldn't be doing this.'
'I know,' Gustave said and softly snapped his prosthetic fingers to light the cigarette. He drew a long puff from it, blowing the smoke away from Verso. 'Sleeping in a cold bed somehow seemed worse though. Have you decided yet?' His glance darted to Verso's. 'If you'll jump?'
Verso eyed him.
He picked up the shards within his chest —
'Can you hold me?'
— and squeezed them until his hand was clad in more blood than skin.
Gustave puffed another smokey breath. 'Do you want me to hold you?'
'No,' Verso erupted and fled into a sob, his gaze leaping to the trees at their side, 'but would you?'
Gustave flicked the cigarette out over the cliff, the tobacco not even halfway burned down. He leaned on his hands, looking at the stars.
'Of course I would,' he breathed, the brewing anger in his chest bubbling through his words, but dissolving in his evermore steadfast attempts at being gentle with Verso.
Verso glanced at his shaking hands. Visions flashed before his eyes, images from the past prophesying the remainder of this night. Shudders clad his spine, because it was too humiliating to call it anticipation, as Verso recognised what that sonority on Gustave's voice would wreck on him. Too often had they entered the shower to wash their sweat off bruises, not hickeys when Gustave had resorted to that tone.
Gustave wasn't the type to dress his anger in yells and accusations, and perhaps that was the reason Verso clung to him when nothing in his life mattered enough to keep holding on to. Instead, his touches carried his emotions. Everyone had told him Gustave spoke with a sharp tongue when he was agitated, frustrated, lost, but Verso had only come across his haptic irritation. And that he had lapped up. He relished when his hands roamed him not to pleasure and his kisses sucked on flesh without the intent of tasting him. He yelped, shivered, and bit back moans simultaneously when Gustave used his prosthetic to touch him, wrapping his intimates in pulsing shots of ice and desperation. He cried his name when Gustave slipped to grunted 'merde's and 'salaud's as was Verso's name too sour.
They hadn't drawn blood yet, but Verso knew they would. He was no stranger to the hunger Gustave wore on his face at each of his concerts before he buried the expression in between his legs, sucking him off backstage with Verso's face shoved between the suits on his clothes rack.
He knew.
Passion was a wicked tool in the hands of those desperate.
'Did you follow me?' Verso asked though he didn't particularly care about an answer.
Gustave leaned forward, and Verso's heart thudded, his fingers crawling over his palms, his eyes darting to Gustave's grip on the wall. He wasn't going to leap, this was Gustave, putain, he isn't you, isn't —
'Esquie told me,' Gustave said and lifted his thighs off the stone, his shins crossing in the air. 'He's following you here from time to time. 'Didn't for a second consider that it was wrong to tell me.'
'Of course he didn't,' Verso laughed and sat down, one knee pulled to his chest.
Gustave offered him a cigarette, the pack nudging his shoulder, but Verso shook his head. Again, they silently gazed out on the ocean, some cargo ships dotting the moon-lighted sea like blisters Verso only in feigned memories remembered to have coated his skin.
He hadn't asked Gustave of his own existential horrors, and, for all he cared, he'd continue to do so. The less Gustave knew the better.
— It's all I know. How could it be anything but my reality if it's all I know?
Verso had pretended to study his sheet music, tapped some keys on the piano, and probed his fingers over Gustave's bare hips, traced his thighs that cradled his lap. He didn't want Gustave's voice sitting in his ear when it was such nonsense he rasped. After all that had happened, when he spoke of the intricacies of this world, he was no longer the engineer who revered the endless possibilities of life. It seemed the canvas's rebirth had acted a saviour only to his terminate body. His mind was long starting to decay. It must have or he would not have entered and pounded Verso the same evening, carving bliss out of him as was he to provide answers to this world that seemingly only had as much to it.
Verso had not dared ask.
What if solving Gustave's battling with himself was to make him realise how little Verso mattered in all the equations he scribbled on the board of his classroom? Who would crumble first — his heart, which, despite his constant nightly visits here, returned to Gustave's side before the morrow grazed the horizon, or Gustave's curiosity he wore like gloves when he turned and grasped Verso, moulding him to fit his feverish touches?
Verso had not dared ask.
'I have classes in four hours,' Gustave mumbled, his voice tying around his wrists like the ropes Verso had tucked behind the headrest of his bed. The spark in Gustave's eyes told him how vain it was to have done that.
It wouldn't do.
It wouldn't work.
For the fact he rarely ever felt human, he sure as hell acted like one more often than he liked. Drawn to art like a moth for light, he leaned forward and kissed Gustave without grasping for him. He would not be able to live with himself, had he hurt him.