Participants:
Scene Title | Strange Bedfellows |
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Synopsis | Al and Teo make a few confessions to one another in lieu of promises. |
Date | May 12, 2019 |
Further From Union Park — Hotel Roof
The new safehouse has all the amenities of the old one because— it's another hotel, and all of those are like in one way or another. Further from Union Park, things are less renowned if only slightly cheaper.
The minifridge was about the same size— large enough to install Delilah's take-home gift of pasta in. The tub, same. Couch, large enough for Helena to bunk on if she chooses that again. There's only one bed inside, no complementary candy on the pillowcases. This establishment also has an outdoor pool. You can see it from up here. A scratchy lace of leaves lies around the glistening green glaze of clear, chlorinated water, the dessicated fronds and fragments peculiarly autumnal, off-season in their sanguine color and scatter. There are no leaves in the water itself. Someone had run a strainer through, without bothering with a rake.
Probably, pragmatically, Teo should've let him stay with the relocated others. Tactically, however, one is like the other. He values his privacy a great deal, and covets their remaining time together still more.
"I won't always be there to protect you." The afternoon sunlight filters out of the sky, permeates the rooftop's plastered surface with clean white light that gives Alexander the soft-focus glow of a maudlin photograph. The Sicilian has his arms around his waist, his nose nudged up in the back of Al's ear, his breathing easing out through the teeth of his smile, dopily sun-drunk but deadly serious. He points a long finger at the emptied beer bottle that squads ten feet before him. "Come on. Throw it. Blow it up.
"Or something."
It's reassuring somehow, for Teo, seeing that his erstwhile lover is still capable of wreaking catastrophic destruction with only a twitch of thought. That doesn't make him a very good person, but not a bad one either. Realism doesn't spare much tolerance for dichotomies that simple. If Alexander can't fight— well, there was an uncomfortable demonstration of what happens, roughly a decade ago. "Huuuh.
"And suddenly I can't rememmmmber which was my objective," he says, creasing one side of his face into a grimace as his torso rebounds gently from the jig of Alexander's posterior. A grin slivers out over his face, a thin edge of enamel. He folds his eyes shut for a brief moment, stretches them big again. "I'm leaving tomorrow, around noon. Try and take care of a few more things regarding for your thing on the fourteenth— but I can't be there myself." He looses one arm from around the trunk of Al's torso, hauls the other up around his shoulders.
Kisses him, brusquely, on the cheek. "So. Apart from athletic experiments on vertical surfaces, there anything else we need to get through?"
Alexander scowls like a recalcitrant teenager at the idea of Teo spending any time away from him. It should make him look petulant, but there's that lurking viciousness. Power aside, Al is not a good person, period. "Not that I can think of," He extends a hand, flexes it to watch the play of sinews under the skin. The water in the pool heaves as if something heavy had been dropped into it. "I…..hope you're somewhere safe while we do that," he says, tone faltering, unhappy.
"Probably not," Teo responds with the irreverence of an equally recalcitrant teenager. It doesn't make him look vicious. It does make him look younger, however, more like the velvet-headed, wrench-swinging young brute who'd made a safari of an abandoned subway tenement with Alexander once upon a time. It fades again after a moment, loses any semblance of the verve that fuels Al's temper or winged the heels of his earlier mirth. "Hey— did I ever—?
"I never got around to telling you," Teo closes his eyes. Opens them again. He looks more tired than he had before. "I had your nightmare once. Back in Moab. The one about Iraq and the weedy Arab kid who could move sand and how you had to dig him out of it after you shot him dead." The words are plain. The nightmare they describe had felt monstrously baroque at the time, down to the last inscrutable detail of sand slapping into his shoes and clothes, sunshine's searing tongue on his skin. "I'd forgive you for anything." He squints. "Partly because I'm a crazy fuckwit.
"Mostly because I love you. Whatever happens, or whomever it happens with, I'll always try to have your back."
There's a Lelandish grunt from Al, at first, disapproving. And then that confession has him gone as still as an ivory figurine. Not much more color there, either. He's aghast, suddenly trembling on the edge of tears the way crystal struck by the right note shivers before shattering. "…how? How?" he says, sob stuck in his throat. "I never told you that!"
A sigh bends upward out of the jut of Teo's lower jaw. "I'm not sure. I have theories, but none of them are relevant and I'm not sure." The arm around Alexander grows restless, a hitch of muscular movement in the elbow, his fingers flexing shut into a fist, locking briefly, before they loosen into a splay again. He turns his eyes on the younger man's profile and then his head lists over, his forehead resting the scent of expensive but interchangeable soaps and human salt on Alexander's temple. "You told me a little. You didn't tell me that much."
That pale profile cuts sharp against the green beyond them. "Strange," he says, tone distant. "Strange. I love you, Teodoro. When I am gone, promise me you will be happy," A rather oxymoronic request, but he will make it anyway. "I am still ashamed of that. He must've been Evolved, that child."
"I figure some form of terrakinetic," Teo agrees, swiveling his eyes back at the water of the pool. Stilling now that the more violent brunt of Alexander's passions has turned inward. He sniffs loudly, the hauteur of a cat. "Bullshit. You don't want me to do that. Who wants me to do that? I don't know— I guess it could happen anyway, eventually, but no promises. I'm egocentric as fuck, you know. It takes a lot to make me happy, and even more to keep me interested.
"Most things about us are strange." The words end in a fade. He bridges his fingers over Alexander's mouth briefly, fitting the recurve of his notched lip against the imperfect curve of index, segmented and callused. A half-beat. "I'd promise if you promised, but you can't do that either, eh?" I know you.
"If you are alive in the past I return to, I will eat my heart out until I win you," So much for pity for poor Sonny. "I've fucked things up then, but if I can save the world, I can certainly get you into bed. Perhaps the man you like then will consent to share," Al let his lids drift down, giving him the air of a sleepy faun. He speaks the words against the caging fingers, and they slip past, like smoke, like escaping children.
When Teo escapes into the periphery of Alexander's attention, where full color and depth perception give out, sometimes he lets himself look a little less like Teo. The parts of his smiles too thin, eyes and mouth and the hollowed shadows under his cheeks, and they come together too bladed, the planes of his face meeting at severe angles under the glow of the sky. "That almost makes sense," he allows by way of bad humor, after a moment, a rough chuckle eking warmth out across Al's cheek, willing the color back into it. "You didn't save the world by yourself, either.
"I could show you the house in Darien today, if you want. I'm not totally fucking broke from keeping you in the style in which you're unaccustomed yet." His thumb crooks, bisects the cleft and damp join of Al's lips with its rounded end. "Sonny's the President's kid now. There's some kind of fucked up irony in that."
"I feel triumphant," Al says, in a tone which flatly contradicts the statement made. "How strange. Take me there, I want to see." He turns to nuzzle blindly, seeking to place mouth on mouth, like he'll whisper a secret.
Mouth there is. No escape for the children for a moment, their retreat cut off by other lips and countered by a tongue without any clever sphinxy riddles to it. It's a crooked, hook-shaped smile that Teo peels off him, sizes down into a neat kiss for his forehead afterward, a deep breath in Alexander's ridiculously bright hair. "You keep throwing that word around, you'll never get into my pants," he says, running a finger down Al's spine with a smile.
He steps away, for the stairs. Turns his back and observes, blankly, "I feel jealous."
"Jealous why?" AL persists, after a last idle batting at the water of the pool, making it splash.
Lazy about stealth, Teo lets his shoes scratch-scratch out a cadence on the ceiling. He ignores the gutted glass behind them, looks at the stairs as he descends them on a lazy jog. The edge of a smile is audible in his voice, prompted by the distant gurgle of pool water. "I'm not him. With a little luck, he'll never be me."