ficlets

For callmesandy: Lambs. "In my best disguise / I count my blessings and close my eyes / But oh to be out of this place."

Six miserable weeks in and all Justin wants to do is crawl into someone else's bed and pull the covers around him, crawl up into someone else's skin and pull it tight around his ears and ankles and just breathe, breathe someone else's air that's already been pre-warmed by someone else's lungs and spoken on someone else's words. All he wants to do is put it all in someone else's hands and let someone else carry it for a while, let someone else pick it up when it's getting so heavy that he thinks he might drop it at any second. All he wants to do is curl up behind someone else's eyes, reach behind someone else's tongue and wait there, wait for morning and sunrise and clear cool ocean breeze instead of smoke and neon club atmosphere.

All he wants to do is be able to sleep.

There's a knock on his door just as he's washing the last of the dust of another city off his hands, and he picks up his head and stares himself straight in the eyes for an uncomfortable minute, like it's someone else looking back at him from the bathroom mirror, before shaking himself loose of it and going to let whoever it is in. Lance is leaning on the doorjamb, his shoulders hunched over like he's trying to pull himself inward, fold in on himself double and double again until he's small enough to fit in someone else's pocket and be carried along.

"Hey," Justin says, and Lance gives him a smile that's one part exhaustion and one part relief. "We going out?"

"Nah," Lance says. "Well. I think Chris and JC are, if you want to go with them."

"I don't want to move," Justin says.

"Yeah, me either," Lance says. There's a quick blip of silence, like the hiss of static on the end of the tape when the music runs out, and then Lance is talking again, tiny bite-size syllables. "I was, I thought, you know, maybe we could. Just tonight. If you wanted. I'm not making any sense."

"No." Justin reaches out a hand and puts it against Lance's cheek just as Lance is about to turn and go. "I know what you mean. Sometimes it's all just too much."

Lance's skin is fever-warm and his eyes are fever-bright and Justin wonders if maybe it's just that his own skin is so cold that the contrast feels like it might burn. "It's not that I don't love it," Lance says, rushed and urgent and frighteningly precise. "Because I do. I wouldn't change a thing."

"I know," Justin says, because he does, because he always does, and thinks that he couldn't think of a better person with whom to be each other's someone else.

. : | back | : .