Fic: This Tornado Loves You (3/4)
Title: This Tornado Loves You (3/4)
Author: metacheese
Team: Angst
Prompts: horizon, fall
Word count: 1,900
Rating: This chapter, R
Warnings: Sadness. Destructive impulses. Slight suggestion of disordered eating habits because of depression. Bittersweet ending, eventually. No character death, but major irreversible changes. It is a love story, though.
Summary: Eames is a tornado. Arthur is a volcano. Literally. I AM SO SORRY.
Note: The description of the Perfect French Fry is taken shamelessly from here.
--
Part 1
Part 2
--
The day after he meets Eames, Arthur begins to have dreams about changing. He is walking in the desert, the terrain hot-colored, featureless, bending off into nothing in the far distance. He’s shivering and doesn’t have the strength to shiver.
His car, all the doors open, is idling behind him; the only point of reference in the landscape. Smoke trails from the exhaust pipe. The sky is deep gray, a badly reassembled broken thing seamed with cloudgrout. It reminds him of something or someone, but he can’t dream far enough into it to know; the dream is a hyperconcentrated version of fate, herding the dreamer brutishly past all tangents, past all things not part of its design.
As he plods along the ground cracks. A hairline fracture at first, then it spreads, a line drawn on a shuddering page, a thickening black bolt. He is growing heavier with every step.
Finally he can’t support his own weight. He sinks to his knees and the ground around him shoots up, walls him in. He’s pouring into the space. His jaw collapses as he screams.
He wakes up. It is a little harder to reach for the light.
*
Yusuf is Eames’s only real friend. He came into town on the leading edge of a cold front and stayed as long as he’s ever stayed anywhere, sleeping on the couch, using Eames’s tiny kitchen to conduct his experiments with molecular gastronomy.
Yusuf claims he’s made the best French fry ever. By objective standards. First he slices the potatoes thin, then he steams them like any ordinary vegetable. The key, he says, is the ultrasonic bath, the kind you'd use for cleaning jewelry. “It pokes holes in them,” he explains. “That maximizes the surface area. More surface area, more area for crispiness.”
Eames has to admit, it’s a pretty good French fry.
They don’t talk about what they are. The day Arthur drops him off at his apartment, after that awkward car ride, he slides onto the couch scored with bruises, his breaths sounding like air through a sad plastic flute. Yusuf is reading in the corner, writing notes on yellow legal paper. He greets Eames with an Army salute, then goes to the kitchen to put on more coffee.
It isn’t that he’s a heartless bastard. The first time he’d seen Eames after his transformation he’d checked him carefully for broken bones and brought him painkillers and water, but Eames assured him that he didn’t need any babying. He was made for this, he said. His bones thin and flexible; cartilaginous. This time there’s fleeting concern on Yusuf’s face, but he heads it off at the pass with his own scowl.
He thinks of Arthur. (“Just Arthur. Call me Francis and you’ll be one big bruise.”) How, somehow, different rules have been forged between them, whether by the circumstances of their meeting or by Arthur’s sort of fate or by the nature of Arthur himself. But he would let Arthur bring him aspirin. He’d let Arthur do things even Arthur didn’t feel the need to do. Like touch his hair. Or bring him a beer, or a blanket.
“Do you have someone who can take care of you?” Arthur had asked, pulling up in front of Eames’s apartment, one eye on the teenagers smashing bottles outside the liquor store.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “Yeah. I do.”
*
A week after they meet Arthur comes home to a brown paper bag. There’s a note stuck to it that just says To Volcano Boy. The bag contains: a brown glass bottle, an infant sock (mercifully clean-looking), a plastic baggie, an empty film canister, and a condom wrapper.
He lays all the stuff out on his kitchen table. There doesn’t appear to be any significance to any of it. It’s just a bunch of crap.
He lets it stay there for the next few weeks. The kitchen table is right underneath his calendar. Every time he glances at the five pieces of refuse he also sees the date, time turned into space: all the days behind him x’ed off, null and void; all the days in front of him thin as paper, small as one-inch squares.
On October 20th he buys a calendar for the next year. Still-Lives of the Dutch Masters, not that it really matters. He circles April 5th and hangs it next to the other. It looks like an art installation. Calendars and Trash on an Unused Kitchen Table.
How dare he call me Volcano Boy, Arthur thinks.
On October 25th he microwaves a can of tomato soup and sits at the table on a whim. He eats with one hand and swipes the objects aside so that they now look like genuine trash, the remains of the sort of party he’d never have. I should get rid of this shit, he thinks. After he’s finished he gets a plastic bag and dumps it all in.
Before he throws the film canister in, he opens it. He’d never opened it before. And there’s a slip of paper curled around the side. He pulls it out.
Come and play with me. You’re not made of stone yet.
*
“Sometimes I think about coming here and sucking everything up,” Eames says, as they walk up a ramp in a dark spiral corridor, catching the molten shadows of sharks on their skin and clothes. “I always wondered what it would be like to have a hammerhead inside me.”
“Is that a come-on?” Arthur asks, cocking an eyebrow.
“Could be, if you want it to be,” Eames smirks. “But seriously. All this glass, all these…fish, and birds, and everything. It gets boring going out to open fields and picking up Coke cans. It was exciting the first few times, but now it’s like the same thing over and over. And, you know, no one’s going to charge me with anything, because people don’t usually turn into tornados. So I could turn in the middle of the street. Rip the roofs off of some buildings, tear some people apart.”
“You really want to do that.”
“Nothing’s stopping me.”
“What about common decency?” Arthur asks, coming to a standstill as a tiger shark pierces his silhouette. “Have people been that terrible to you?”
“No.” Eames muses. “But they don’t have to turn into tornados, either.”
“You’re bitter.”
Eames laughs.
“And you’re not.”
Arthur begins to walk away from him. His shoulders are slumped, and he glances back at Eames only long enough to glare disappointedly at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Arthur, come back,” he says, hastening to catch up. “What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to take your bitterness out on yourself.”
‘So I should just take it out on everyone else, then,” Arthur says coldly.
“No. Take it out on me. Do anything you want with me, really.” He grasps Arthur’s hand, looks into his glassy dark eyes. “Just be with me.”
*
They stumble back to Arthur’s apartment. It feels like a standoff rather than the end of a date. Arthur had invited him up, but now he wants to point his gun at him and tell him to get out; the man, he thinks, is angry and unhinged and resentful of anyone who isn’t damned to their same strange fate. He doesn’t want to be around someone like that. He doesn’t want someone to stoke his bitterness. He’d rather be alone.
“What do you want from me, Eames,” he asks finally, hovering tensely by the window. “Because I can tell you that if you just want someone to commiserate with, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t want to constantly be reminded of what’s going to happen to me.”
“But you are constantly reminded of it,” Eames counters. “You’re alone here, just trying to forget you exist until it happens. And what I want, Arthur, is to finally be able to tell someone what this is like. To not have to hide it or pretend it’s normal. Because it’s not normal. It’s really strange, and sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s terrible.” He walks slowly across the room until he’s standing next to the couch, only a few feet away. “And I like you, Arthur.”
“Because I understand?” Arthur asks coldly. “Because I’m like you? We’re nothing alike, Eames. We don’t even have-“ he pauses “this thing in common. It’s been completely different for you than it has for me. I guarantee that you wouldn’t like me if you didn’t think for some reason that it was us against the world.”
“I want to take you to bed,” Eames states. There are car lights flashing across his face, and Arthur remembers the first time he saw him, sprawled muddy and trembling on the ground, with dirt in his long eyelashes and the creases of his eyelids. Beautiful as a well-executed ambush. “I want to make you feel good. Can I do that at least?”
Arthur can’t say no to that.
*
Eames pulls down the sheets with one hand while the other arm is wrapped around Arthur’s back. He is dismayed at what Arthur’s bed suggests he feels about his life: one hard, flat, greyish pillow skulking in the crease between headboard and mattress, sheets far too thin for October in Baltimore.
He guides Arthur down gently onto the sagging mattress. Kisses him. Kisses him deeper. Cradles his head with one hand while unbuttoning his shirt with the other.
“I love your face,” Eames whispers.
He unveils Arthur’s sharp shoulders, kisses the hollows. His mouth climbs Arthur’s steep collarbone. Running fingertips down his serrated ribs makes Eames sad. He lowers his lips to Arthur’s navel.
“The first thing I’m doing for you, after I suck your cock, is ordering ten pizzas and hand-feeding them all to you slice by slice.” Pauses. "A slight exaggeration, but you get it."
Arthur groans.
“It does matter. Trust me. I want you healthy for me,” Eames says into the trail of fuzz from his navel to his pubic hair. “We’re going to have a wonderful life.”
*
“You don’t want me to come in your mouth. Trust me,” Arthur moans, straining to watch Eames’s lips slide up and down his cock. Eames grasps the shaft and uses his mouth on the head, trilling his tongue underneath, rubbing his upper lip hotly over the glans and looking up at him mischievously, conspiratorially, from beneath his long eyelashes.
The eye contact, and what is said with it, sends a pulse of arousal to Arthur’s cock, and he knows he’s close.
Eames takes Arthur fully into his mouth a few times, and while Arthur feels his tongue swirling around the entire length and width of his cock, he becomes aware of a deeper suction that isn’t coming from Eames’s mouth, but from somewhere deeper inside him. It’s tugging at his cock, gently but insistently, and it’s delicious.
He forgets about the warning he gave and comes ecstatically in Eames’s soft, eager mouth.
And Eames seems unfazed for someone who has just had boiling lava poured down his throat.
“I’m not sure what the big deal was,” he says casually, nuzzling his way back up Arthur’s chest, teasing his neck with a scrape of teeth. “Yeah, it was kind of hot, but I’ve got this.”
Eames opens his mouth wide. Arthur can’t see anything at first, but his vision adjusts. There, past his uvula, is the unmistakable vortex of a spinning tornado.
Author: metacheese
Team: Angst
Prompts: horizon, fall
Word count: 1,900
Rating: This chapter, R
Warnings: Sadness. Destructive impulses. Slight suggestion of disordered eating habits because of depression. Bittersweet ending, eventually. No character death, but major irreversible changes. It is a love story, though.
Summary: Eames is a tornado. Arthur is a volcano. Literally. I AM SO SORRY.
Note: The description of the Perfect French Fry is taken shamelessly from here.
--
Part 1
Part 2
--
The day after he meets Eames, Arthur begins to have dreams about changing. He is walking in the desert, the terrain hot-colored, featureless, bending off into nothing in the far distance. He’s shivering and doesn’t have the strength to shiver.
His car, all the doors open, is idling behind him; the only point of reference in the landscape. Smoke trails from the exhaust pipe. The sky is deep gray, a badly reassembled broken thing seamed with cloudgrout. It reminds him of something or someone, but he can’t dream far enough into it to know; the dream is a hyperconcentrated version of fate, herding the dreamer brutishly past all tangents, past all things not part of its design.
As he plods along the ground cracks. A hairline fracture at first, then it spreads, a line drawn on a shuddering page, a thickening black bolt. He is growing heavier with every step.
Finally he can’t support his own weight. He sinks to his knees and the ground around him shoots up, walls him in. He’s pouring into the space. His jaw collapses as he screams.
He wakes up. It is a little harder to reach for the light.
*
Yusuf is Eames’s only real friend. He came into town on the leading edge of a cold front and stayed as long as he’s ever stayed anywhere, sleeping on the couch, using Eames’s tiny kitchen to conduct his experiments with molecular gastronomy.
Yusuf claims he’s made the best French fry ever. By objective standards. First he slices the potatoes thin, then he steams them like any ordinary vegetable. The key, he says, is the ultrasonic bath, the kind you'd use for cleaning jewelry. “It pokes holes in them,” he explains. “That maximizes the surface area. More surface area, more area for crispiness.”
Eames has to admit, it’s a pretty good French fry.
They don’t talk about what they are. The day Arthur drops him off at his apartment, after that awkward car ride, he slides onto the couch scored with bruises, his breaths sounding like air through a sad plastic flute. Yusuf is reading in the corner, writing notes on yellow legal paper. He greets Eames with an Army salute, then goes to the kitchen to put on more coffee.
It isn’t that he’s a heartless bastard. The first time he’d seen Eames after his transformation he’d checked him carefully for broken bones and brought him painkillers and water, but Eames assured him that he didn’t need any babying. He was made for this, he said. His bones thin and flexible; cartilaginous. This time there’s fleeting concern on Yusuf’s face, but he heads it off at the pass with his own scowl.
He thinks of Arthur. (“Just Arthur. Call me Francis and you’ll be one big bruise.”) How, somehow, different rules have been forged between them, whether by the circumstances of their meeting or by Arthur’s sort of fate or by the nature of Arthur himself. But he would let Arthur bring him aspirin. He’d let Arthur do things even Arthur didn’t feel the need to do. Like touch his hair. Or bring him a beer, or a blanket.
“Do you have someone who can take care of you?” Arthur had asked, pulling up in front of Eames’s apartment, one eye on the teenagers smashing bottles outside the liquor store.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “Yeah. I do.”
*
A week after they meet Arthur comes home to a brown paper bag. There’s a note stuck to it that just says To Volcano Boy. The bag contains: a brown glass bottle, an infant sock (mercifully clean-looking), a plastic baggie, an empty film canister, and a condom wrapper.
He lays all the stuff out on his kitchen table. There doesn’t appear to be any significance to any of it. It’s just a bunch of crap.
He lets it stay there for the next few weeks. The kitchen table is right underneath his calendar. Every time he glances at the five pieces of refuse he also sees the date, time turned into space: all the days behind him x’ed off, null and void; all the days in front of him thin as paper, small as one-inch squares.
On October 20th he buys a calendar for the next year. Still-Lives of the Dutch Masters, not that it really matters. He circles April 5th and hangs it next to the other. It looks like an art installation. Calendars and Trash on an Unused Kitchen Table.
How dare he call me Volcano Boy, Arthur thinks.
On October 25th he microwaves a can of tomato soup and sits at the table on a whim. He eats with one hand and swipes the objects aside so that they now look like genuine trash, the remains of the sort of party he’d never have. I should get rid of this shit, he thinks. After he’s finished he gets a plastic bag and dumps it all in.
Before he throws the film canister in, he opens it. He’d never opened it before. And there’s a slip of paper curled around the side. He pulls it out.
Come and play with me. You’re not made of stone yet.
*
“Sometimes I think about coming here and sucking everything up,” Eames says, as they walk up a ramp in a dark spiral corridor, catching the molten shadows of sharks on their skin and clothes. “I always wondered what it would be like to have a hammerhead inside me.”
“Is that a come-on?” Arthur asks, cocking an eyebrow.
“Could be, if you want it to be,” Eames smirks. “But seriously. All this glass, all these…fish, and birds, and everything. It gets boring going out to open fields and picking up Coke cans. It was exciting the first few times, but now it’s like the same thing over and over. And, you know, no one’s going to charge me with anything, because people don’t usually turn into tornados. So I could turn in the middle of the street. Rip the roofs off of some buildings, tear some people apart.”
“You really want to do that.”
“Nothing’s stopping me.”
“What about common decency?” Arthur asks, coming to a standstill as a tiger shark pierces his silhouette. “Have people been that terrible to you?”
“No.” Eames muses. “But they don’t have to turn into tornados, either.”
“You’re bitter.”
Eames laughs.
“And you’re not.”
Arthur begins to walk away from him. His shoulders are slumped, and he glances back at Eames only long enough to glare disappointedly at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Arthur, come back,” he says, hastening to catch up. “What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to take your bitterness out on yourself.”
‘So I should just take it out on everyone else, then,” Arthur says coldly.
“No. Take it out on me. Do anything you want with me, really.” He grasps Arthur’s hand, looks into his glassy dark eyes. “Just be with me.”
*
They stumble back to Arthur’s apartment. It feels like a standoff rather than the end of a date. Arthur had invited him up, but now he wants to point his gun at him and tell him to get out; the man, he thinks, is angry and unhinged and resentful of anyone who isn’t damned to their same strange fate. He doesn’t want to be around someone like that. He doesn’t want someone to stoke his bitterness. He’d rather be alone.
“What do you want from me, Eames,” he asks finally, hovering tensely by the window. “Because I can tell you that if you just want someone to commiserate with, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t want to constantly be reminded of what’s going to happen to me.”
“But you are constantly reminded of it,” Eames counters. “You’re alone here, just trying to forget you exist until it happens. And what I want, Arthur, is to finally be able to tell someone what this is like. To not have to hide it or pretend it’s normal. Because it’s not normal. It’s really strange, and sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s terrible.” He walks slowly across the room until he’s standing next to the couch, only a few feet away. “And I like you, Arthur.”
“Because I understand?” Arthur asks coldly. “Because I’m like you? We’re nothing alike, Eames. We don’t even have-“ he pauses “this thing in common. It’s been completely different for you than it has for me. I guarantee that you wouldn’t like me if you didn’t think for some reason that it was us against the world.”
“I want to take you to bed,” Eames states. There are car lights flashing across his face, and Arthur remembers the first time he saw him, sprawled muddy and trembling on the ground, with dirt in his long eyelashes and the creases of his eyelids. Beautiful as a well-executed ambush. “I want to make you feel good. Can I do that at least?”
Arthur can’t say no to that.
*
Eames pulls down the sheets with one hand while the other arm is wrapped around Arthur’s back. He is dismayed at what Arthur’s bed suggests he feels about his life: one hard, flat, greyish pillow skulking in the crease between headboard and mattress, sheets far too thin for October in Baltimore.
He guides Arthur down gently onto the sagging mattress. Kisses him. Kisses him deeper. Cradles his head with one hand while unbuttoning his shirt with the other.
“I love your face,” Eames whispers.
He unveils Arthur’s sharp shoulders, kisses the hollows. His mouth climbs Arthur’s steep collarbone. Running fingertips down his serrated ribs makes Eames sad. He lowers his lips to Arthur’s navel.
“The first thing I’m doing for you, after I suck your cock, is ordering ten pizzas and hand-feeding them all to you slice by slice.” Pauses. "A slight exaggeration, but you get it."
Arthur groans.
“It does matter. Trust me. I want you healthy for me,” Eames says into the trail of fuzz from his navel to his pubic hair. “We’re going to have a wonderful life.”
*
“You don’t want me to come in your mouth. Trust me,” Arthur moans, straining to watch Eames’s lips slide up and down his cock. Eames grasps the shaft and uses his mouth on the head, trilling his tongue underneath, rubbing his upper lip hotly over the glans and looking up at him mischievously, conspiratorially, from beneath his long eyelashes.
The eye contact, and what is said with it, sends a pulse of arousal to Arthur’s cock, and he knows he’s close.
Eames takes Arthur fully into his mouth a few times, and while Arthur feels his tongue swirling around the entire length and width of his cock, he becomes aware of a deeper suction that isn’t coming from Eames’s mouth, but from somewhere deeper inside him. It’s tugging at his cock, gently but insistently, and it’s delicious.
He forgets about the warning he gave and comes ecstatically in Eames’s soft, eager mouth.
And Eames seems unfazed for someone who has just had boiling lava poured down his throat.
“I’m not sure what the big deal was,” he says casually, nuzzling his way back up Arthur’s chest, teasing his neck with a scrape of teeth. “Yeah, it was kind of hot, but I’ve got this.”
Eames opens his mouth wide. Arthur can’t see anything at first, but his vision adjusts. There, past his uvula, is the unmistakable vortex of a spinning tornado.