[RPS] Much Too Much (Tom Hardy/Cillian Murphy, R-ish) ~6400 words
Oops, my bad. Louis' mom's Rachel, not Sarah. Hee.
Title: Much Too Much
Summary: For the inception_kink prompt: Cillian finds Tom injecting himself with heroin. Cillian is all "THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?". Tears everywhere. Go nuts.
Warning: Drugs, yep.
QUOTE: He was going to wait for Tom when he came back, to make sure he didn’t go anywhere anymore.
The door opened a fraction and Cillian only knew of this fact because he wasn’t really asleep, not yet. Not when the massively big bed was a bit cold. Cillian, the traditional man that he was, liked his beds warm and full; the reason why he hardly ever preferred working abroad than he did working in Ireland, where he could go back to his home and sleep beside his wife.
“You awake, mate?” Tom whispered in the darkness. They both knew Cillian was but Tom, who was always very curious about everything, also knew how to take a hint.
More than that, Tom also respected boundaries.
So it was Cillian who moved first. Without further ceremony, he turned over on his back and patted the space on the bed beside him.
Tom slipped in between the sheets, not once fumbling with the duvet or having difficulty maneuvering his wide frame around the bedside table.
Somehow, Tom’s hand wandered to Cillian’s arm and Cillian somehow turned on his side and pulled him close. They didn’t do anything that night, just slept and slept and slept, not caring if New York was alive with traffic at such a late hour, or if Christopher was harassing the production crew with late night shifts.
Cillian slept with the comforting knowledge that someone was there with him and Tom, well, Cillian didn’t know why Tom honored their routine like this without so much hesitation on his part but Cillian didn’t much care at that point.
******
It didn’t start out that way.
The first time they met, truly met, and not just awkwardly introduced themselves like that time during the British Independent Film awards when Tom won and Cillian wasn’t sure why he was there in the first place.
When they first met it was really, really fucking awkward, and Cillian said so.
Then Tom laughed, and just like that the awkwardness was over between them.
It was one of those luncheons organized by the production. A sort of Get to know your castmates better so that your chemistry looks halfway convincing at the very least-type of luncheon that Cillian had had several of in the past few years.
(The last memorable one was for Batman Begins, but that was in a bar in Brooklyn. A story for another time-which he had told Tom about at some point and Tom, like the good sport that he was, laughed at all the right moments and even ruffled his hair every now and then. That was a good story to tell, Cillian thought, and he told it several more times afterwards, just to see if Tom really was amused and not just humoring him.
It turned out that Tom really was, and that when he got bored with something he’d already heard multiple times he started staring off into space; he just smiled when Cillian called him out on it and didn’t even apologize. Which suited Cillian just fine.)
“I thought it was all a scam, you know,” Cillian had told him over their third luncheon. He was eating his salad, as was his routine, and Tom switched it up a little by pigging out on chicken rather than beef.
“What was?” Tom had asked, still so very curious even though he couldn’t possibly be anymore, not after hearing so many stories from Cillian and Tom just nodding through it all, laughing, then smiling, then being thoughtful, then being not.
Cillian paused, hesitating.
Tom looked at him expectantly, as if to say It’s fine, whatever it is that’s on your mind.
“The drugs,” Cillian finally blurted out. He was a considerate guy, really. He didn’t like asking about other people’s lives but the thing that irked him most was that the industry was chock full of druggies and ex-druggies, the successful ones and then the trainwrecks.
The first time he’d heard of Tom Hardy was when he looked up Nemesis. The second time he’d heard of him was when some tabloid had covered his drug abuse problem and berated him publicly for it. The third time was when he did Oliver Twist and a series of druggies, alcoholics, and crime dramas afterwards that depicted him as slightly insane, slightly off his rocker.
Slightly intense.
And Cillian had thought, for a very long time, that maybe Tom was just a sell-out like the others. Stirred up controversy when there was nothing interesting to talk about just so he’d be the hardcore character actor that critics didn’t dare publicly berate like that again.
Tom smiled ironically, a slight twist of his lips that didn’t seem like he was amused by Cillian this time. And Cillian, for the first time since they’d shaken hands at the airport and did their obligatory How do you do’s which spiraled down to discussions of books and old movies, thought that shit. I’d crossed the line, didn’t I?
Cillian opened his mouth, a haphazard, stumbling bit of an apology already half-formed in his head.
But Tom didn’t look like he was going to punch Cillian in the face, in spite of the physical strength implied by the bulk of his arms.
“Did you really?” Tom asked instead as he leaned back in his chair and dabbed at his lips with the napkin on his lap.
Tom was staring at him, in the way that Tom stared at that big piece of steak he’d gotten for lunch the other day. When he looked like he wanted to indulge himself but couldn’t, not that fast at least, and let self-control dictate every slow, deliberate slice of his knife. Cillian thought that much self-control could kill a man.
Cillian cleared his throat and shook his head. “You don’t have to answer that. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
Then Tom smiled, slowly, and the air shifted around them. A cloud seemed to have lifted and Cillian hadn’t even realized that it had settled above their heads until it was gone.
“It’s fine, yeah?” Tom reassured with a casual wave of his hand, as if dispelling the last wisps of the thickened air between them. “Now about that dog I’d told you I had-“
And they talked about dogs for nearly an hour and Cillian forgot all about his slip, and how Tom’s bright eyes had dulled, and how he went completely still for a long time.
Cillian promised himself he’d never bring it up ever again.
******
How Tom ended up Cillian’s bed was anyone’s guess.
(And the production crew did guess, and all of the guesses were a variation of They’re sleeping together and They’re sleeping together, cheating on their wives, oh my God their poor children.)
But it really started out as an innocent thing, when they were both so fucking tired after a grueling take-after-take-after-take-after-take of an afternoon skiing this way and that. It was in Canada, at the ski resort somewhere in between a very sheer drop to the bottom of the mountain and a very cold and unlivable peak that had daunted them when they first saw it.
Cillian had offered Tom a drink, just to warm them up, he said. To ease those aching muscles a little and give their minds a rest.
Tom had declined the offer, but with that same intense concentration that looked like it was tearing him up inside. But he did offer to stay and talk a bit, to wind down, he said. To stutter the adrenaline still pumping in his veins.
“His name’s Louis,” Tom said, showing him a small picture of a very light-haired infant cradled against Tom’s tattooed shoulder. It was one of those self-taken pictures that included a mirror and a very steady handheld digital camera. “He’s just turned one this year.”
Unlike Tom, Cillian didn’t have pictures of his sons Malachy and Aaron in his wallet. He didn’t even have his wallet. It was stuffed somewhere at the bottom of his carry-on luggage he hadn’t even started unpacking yet.
But he did describe him in great detail as he nursed his one glass of whiskey.
Tom was smiling almost wistfully all throughout and soon enough, he was lowering himself on Cillian’s bed, feet on the carpeted floor, his head missing the pillow by inches.
By the time Cillian had finished his whiskey, and long after he had told Tom of Aaron’s second birthday and how it was really fucking epic, mate, you should’ve been there. For his third, you’re bringing Louis, yeah? And it’ll be a grand time, I promise. Tom was already snoring softly into the duvet and Cillian, who was dead tired himself, didn’t have the heart to kick him out.
So Cillian lay down beside him, on top of the covers, both fully clothed in their thick jackets and slightly snow-wet jeans and socks, and slept deeply and soundly throughout the night.
When Cillian woke up, he did so with an armful of Tom, who was still very much asleep. Cillian had scooted over to Tom’s side of the bed. Tom hadn’t moved the entire time; his head still missed the pillow by a mile and his feet were still on the floor but Cillian, he had somehow flung an arm around those wide shoulders until he was burrowed up against Tom’s warm bulk.
They didn’t talk about it afterwards. Cillian didn’t even know-and never really did, come to think of it-if Tom had been aware of it all.
******
But Tom must have been, because in the nights since then, Tom always invited himself into Cillian’s room and Cillian, who was perfectly fine with that, never took notice of how Tom always conveniently fell asleep before he could call it a night.
But he did notice how Tom was never drunk during that time, and was not always tired when he did wander into Cillian’s room. He could’ve gone on till the wee hours of the night if he wanted to do, but didn’t.
Tom never stirred in his sleep, either, not when Cillian’s arm had wandered down to his waist and Cillian’s lips touched the back of his neck sometime in the middle of the night.
Cillian chalked it up to loneliness, maybe. Something about Canada, and snow, and the cold.
(Later on, he added Something about Tom, and the way he was always looking at Cillian with an intensity that faltered only when Tom looked away and stared at something instead, as if he couldn’t quite cough up the confidence to continue staring into anyone’s eyes with such open curiosity for so long a time.)
******
So when they start having sex, it only seemed logical. They were already sharing a bed. They were already talking to each other in ways that they never talked to each other in interviews. Hell, in ways they didn’t talk to the rest of the cast.
(Cillian thought Joe was a little too young, even though they both had some college under their belts and they had similar tastes in music. Joe, with his open face and his ready smile, there was nothing new there.
Ellen, same deal. But female.)
But the intimacy, this new level of physical intimacy, still surprised the both of them.
They weren’t drunk. Tom was hardly ever drunk these days, he had said, when Cillian offered him a glass of whiskey a second time and Tom declined him yet again. He had wanted to avoid temptation, at all costs, and wasn’t going to go There again. Not without good reason.
They were talking about their families. How Cillian had his older brother and they had their band and they still went out together to attend gigs in Cork and how it was still very good between them, despite Cillian spending half the time elsewhere and Padraig never really going anywhere anymore. How Tom had gone to an Eagles concert with his mum, and shopped with her, and had her drive him to places, how Tom still saw his ex-girlfriend and how the three of them, Rachel, Tom, and their child Louis, would visit his parents in Hammersmith and all would still be right between them still.
They were both sitting on the bed, with Tom facing Cillian, his legs folded under him. His knees touched Cillian’s thigh and that didn’t bother them at all. It was close and familiar and Tom didn’t seem to mind so Cillian didn’t mind either.
Then Tom leaned forward until his forehead rested on Cillian’s shoulder and Cillian, on instinct, shifted his glass from one hand to the other and ruffled Tom’s hair. When Tom didn’t protest, Cillian did it over and over again, petting and threading his thin fingers through, like a comforting gesture that Tom didn’t really need.
“It wasn’t a scam, you know,” Tom suddenly spoke and it took a while for Cillian to understand what he was talking about. His hand stilled, with his palm cupping the gentle swell of Tom’s head.
“What wasn’t a scam?” Cillian replied, looking down at Tom and his downturned face and wanting very much for Tom not to say things with such a subdued tone of voice.
(Tom was a big man, Cillian knew as much. He knew this when he saw Bronson for the first time and thought, Holy fucking crap. That guy can bash my skull in. And Tom made him realize this over and over again, when Tom would strip to his undershirt in front of him and the muscles of his arms stood out against the sheer white cloth with such stark relief that Cillian thought the undershirt looked positively angry for needing to hold Tom together in so futile a manner.
Tom liked to laugh and did so many times and the many more times he didn’t, he spoke with such confidence that Cillian could have mistaken him to be something of a college graduate instead of the tried-and-tested man of the streets that he was.
He wasn’t subdued, not really. He was quiet, but quiet in a way that was alert and dependable. Not fucking subdued.)
Tom turned his head and met Cillian’s eyes. Cillian liked looking at people’s eyes, not because they told so much of the other person. (He always needed a facial expression to go that far, like the draw of the eyebrows or the turn of the lips.) He liked other people’s eyes because they were either sincere or dishonest.
Tom’s eyes, at that moment, were neither. Cillian couldn’t decipher them at all.
“The drugs, mate,” Tom said, his voice soft. “I was drunk and high because I didn’t know what to do with myself, you know what I mean?”
Cillian didn’t, but he nodded anyway. Cillian didn’t know what Tom meant because he never felt that in his entire life. He had law school, he had his band, he had his family, he had his wife who had stuck by him since it all started. He never needed to know where he was because he was never lost in the first place. He always had hands to pull him aside and remind him of the world and where he was in it. Or remind him that there were bills, there were Aaron and Malachy, there were PTA meetings, there were empty kitchen fridges and the mortgage due in the morning.
He never had total freedom, not really.
“I didn’t know how to deal, so I didn’t,” Tom finished and Cillian didn’t know how to respond to that.
So he didn’t.
What he did was lean down and meet Tom’s lips for a kiss that was consoling and comforting and reassuring all at the same time, as if providing Tom with what he needed to keep it all together. Keep it all in, like he’d been doing all this time.
And when Tom kissed back, Cillian thought it wasn’t because Tom wanted to kiss him but because he realized that he needed this, too. A way to keep it all together, to shut himself up and the voices inside his head that kept telling him to give in. To succumb.
When they slept on the bed that night, it wasn’t with so many clothes and hardly as much silence.
Tom was deliberate and slow, letting their limbs run their due course around their bodies. His strong arms wrapped around Cillian’s torso.
And Cillian, underneath him, moaned. He bit his lip to stifle the sound but Tom’s thumb was there to ease his lip from the worry of his teeth. And he moaned, louder, when Tom leaned back and gathered Cillian close until they were both upright and naked and wanton and so fucking slow that Cillian could feel the tension, that tightness of control, in Tom’s arms.
Until they went further and further away to where words couldn’t place them and all that control whipped across Tom’s broad shoulders released like a cut coil of sprung copper.
******
How it turned out into something else other than what friends did for each other sometimes was, for Cillian yet another thing to be surprised by, and, curiously enough, something that Tom didn’t seem to worry about at all.
When Cillian took a tumble down a steep incline, Tom was there to help him up. Not with a foolish grin but with a serious frown that showed more concern than Cillian was comfortable with. But he smiled and just laughed it off, dusting the snow from his shoulders and grinning more widely than his cheeks allowed.
When Cillian’s boots slipped on a puddle of melted snow inside the hotel lobby, Tom was there too. Not just to offer him a hand but to bodily haul him to his feet, with worried hands gripping his forearms with a certainty that almost seemed too familiar.
Cillian didn’t laugh that time, and shrugged off Tom’s hands instead.
When Tom’s face fell, Cillian couldn’t understand why he suddenly felt the need to explain himself. That he really was okay, that Tom didn’t have to shadow him wherever he went to make sure that he really was.
But Cillian never opened his mouth to do so. He just smiled, a reassuring and somewhat forced smile that he always hated doing, and walked away.
Tom didn’t go into his room that night.
Instead, it was Cillian who went to his. He had an apology in mind, a very long one that touched on boundaries and privacy and This isn’t a thing, okay? We have kids, we have our significant others, and we have our lives.
But as soon as Cillian walked through the door, Tom had already caught his arm and was leading him to the bed. A bed a bit smaller than Cillian’s, with its unmade duvet and its haphazardly strewn pillows.
They didn’t talk for a long time afterwards and when they’d finished, sated and half-asleep, with Tom laying down on his front and his arm across Cillian’s chest, Cillian realized that he had forgotten what he was apologizing for.
So he didn’t.
******
One thing Cillian was sure of, and that was how it all ended.
Their three months of shooting were up and the dwindling weeks that followed their production in Canada were counted down by the number of weekend after-parties Joe and Ellen threw for the cast and crew left and right.
Tom stayed behind on most of those nights, and sometimes Cillian was there to stay behind with him.
“What are you gonna do after filming?” Cillian brought up, somewhere between putting on his boxers and Tom rummaging around for his jeans.
“I’m heading back to London,” Tom answered vaguely, his back to him.
“Yeah, your son must miss you by now,” Cillian remarked, and he didn’t mean anything by it at all because he missed his sons too, even though he called them almost every day and talked about Spongebob and everything that the Cartoon Network had brainwashed their minds with.
Tom didn’t reply for a long time, not until he had gotten both his legs through his pants and was attempting to zip himself up.
“I know what you’re driving at,” Tom finally said. Even though his hands were on his hips and his eyes leveled Cillian’s and he looked, and stood, like the confident man that he usually seemed outside of their hotel rooms, there was something about the shift in his feet and the self-conscious way his lips twisted to a thoughtful frown that made Cillian think otherwise.
“What do you mean?”
“This is going to be over, isn’t it?” And Cillian groaned, silently, turning away so he didn’t have to face the inevitability of talking about this. Whatever this was. But Tom wasn’t finished. “We’re going to go back to our normal lives and never let anyone know.”
Cillian remained quiet. Tom took that as a sign to continue, even when Cillian edged a little further away from him, distracting himself by picking up his clothes from where they were strewn on the foot of the bed.
“And I get that, you know?” Tom paused, and Cillian could imagine him running a hand over his lips, then down his neck, like how he usually did when he was deep in thought. “I love my son, and I love Charlotte and you love your family too. I get that.”
“Yeah, I do,” Cillian replied, emphasizing every word as clearly as possible, but as much as his voice held such passion in them, his eyes were not on Tom but on the wrinkles on the shirt he held in his hands.
When Tom didn’t reply right away, Cillian looked up at him. But he wasn’t there anymore.
Tom was suddenly behind him, those strong arms wrapping around his chest, his chin resting on the crook of Cillian’s neck. And he felt every rasp of stubble against his skin as Tom breathed through his lips. Deep, shuddering breaths, in the way that reminded him of the tightly-wrung thread of his arms when Tom was at his most careful.
“And I’m not going to pine for you like some lovesick teenager,” Tom said with a slight chuckle.
Cillian laughed. Even for his own ears, it sounded slightly desperate, as if he was on the last threads of humor that could possibly lighten their situation. “Bronson doesn’t pine, does he.”
Tom frowned; Cillian felt the slight turn of those soft lips against his skin. “There you go.”
Cillian nodded, and as he spoke, it was as if his throat was negotiating through something very big and very stubborn in his throat. “There we go.”
******
When they parted ways, that was that, Cillian thought. And life moved on.
Until he heard from someone’s agent’s friend’s something about Mad Max and how Mel Gibson was going to produce it this time and the new Mad Max, with Charlize Theron as the leading lady, was going to star Tom Hardy. Of all people.
Cillian had grinned, then, a secretive grin his agent had wondered about but he had just shrugged off to just sheer joy for his friend.
Friend.
So, like friends did, he dialed up Tom’s number. Which he had never done, because they had spent most of the time on set together anyway and after filming, Cillian never found a proper reason to call him up.
“Yeah?” Tom answered. His voice was as deep as Cillian remembered it but different somehow. Like he was speaking through a garbled microphone and the amps were chewing up the syllables along with the air.
“Tom?”
“Who’s this?” Tom answered, and the quality of his voice didn’t change.
Cillian looked at his phone for a moment. Four bars on his signal. “It’s Cillian.”
Then he heard a sudden rustle of something-clothes, maybe? As if Tom had been laying down on a bed when he answered his phone and wasn’t really completely awake when he did. “Cillian! Hey,” Tom greeted, sounding cheerful. And Cillian thought Tom had a lot to be cheerful about right now. “How you doing?”
“I’m good.” A pause. “Listen, I just wanted to congratulate you-“
Then Tom laughed. It was breathy and winded and sluggish all at the same time, and burst out in rapid spurts like something random and completely out of control.
Cillian frowned, “Tom? You alright?”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I’m fine, mate,” Tom replied, but he was still laughing.
Cillian smiled, at first, joining in on Tom’s apparent good mood. But when the laughing didn’t stop, his smile started to falter until all was left was a thoughtful frown.
Oh. “Are you drunk, Tom?”
He heard Tom snort softly, and his laughter tapered off until all he could hear was Tom’s ragged breathing. “Yeah, sorta.” Tom laughed again, “Drunk, yeah, you could say that.”
Cillian had never seen Tom drunk. All those times, Tom had declined the whiskey, even ordered for something bubbly rather than beer when the cast went out to unwind.
“Well, I won’t keep you, alright?” Cillian said, his thumb hovering over the end call button even though the phone was still against his ear.
“Wait, wait, Cillian,” Tom said in a hurry, as if he was out of breath. “Hold on, mate.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Don’t you just want to, to-“ Then Tom trailed off. And Cillian waited.
And waited.
“Want to what, Tom?” He prompted after what seemed like a minute of dead air.
“To,” Tom continued, then trailed off again.
Cillian sighed, “I’ll talk to you later, alright? Have some fun.”
“Yeah yeah,” Tom said, sounding like he agreed. Whole-heartedly so. But Tom didn’t end the call, and neither did Cillian.
“Tom?”
“Yeah, mate?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
He could hear Tom nod. Or he imagined it, at least. That soft hand running over his face, past his lips, then down the length of his neck, as if awaking himself.
But when Tom didn’t speak again, Cillian did hang up.
So much for catching up.
******
Cillian didn’t see Tom again until July, when Inception had become the talk of the media and the onslaught of interviews and promotional gigs he had been expecting from a Nolan film came knocking at his door.
The London premiere was a busy one and after a brief hug from Tom, they were separated shortly after by ushers that pointed to that photographer, then to that photographer. He went on doing five-minute interviews and from the corner of his eye, he saw Tom do his own fair share of talking and promoting. Endless promoting.
They didn’t get a chance to talk until hours later, after their first showing of the movie-
--And fuck, was Cillian impressed by it-
--And the last interviewer had left the hotel room the organizers had made up with a black backdrop and two simple director’s chairs underneath the glare of twin spotlights.
“How about this, eh?” Cillian said, a smile on his face.
Tom was busy-too busy-putting his things in order. Mobile in his front pocket, wallet in his back. Keys. Some piece of paper, some slips of business cards. Too many things in his hands that Tom looked like he didn’t know what to do with any of them.
“Tom?” Cillian tried again.
“Yeah?” Tom looked up at him and fuck, did he look tired. And worn. And not the energetic, if somehow subtle Tom he had remembered on the mountain slopes in Canada, laughing and grinning as he sped off in his skis and all but forgetting that Cillian was there, too, struggling a little bit on the twin planks of wood.
Cillian frowned, and made as if to move towards him but hesitated too long that Tom had already moved away, nodding his head in that reassuring beat.
Cillian certainly didn’t need reassuring. His frowned deepened as he looked at Tom. He had smiled at some point during the premiere, Cillian swore he did, and basked in the glory that he really did deserve. But even then Cillian realized that he looked mildly uncomfortable, as if half a mind wanted him to run away from it all but really, really couldn’t because this was it for him, wasn’t it?
This was his chance.
Oh.
And just like that, Cillian understood.
That the blank look on Tom’s face was not one of exhaustion because he really did seem fit, healthy in his black shirt even though he had shed off some of his bulk. He wasn’t tired, not really.
He was scared. He was scared of all the attention that maybe, somehow, if he said something wrong or if he didn’t say the right things or if he ran out of the little tidbits of information that the media would wolf down in the hungry way that it always did-
--that it would all go away again.
Tom looked like how he did that night, when his head was on Cillian’s shoulder, and too much sobriety and too much time spent thinking and thinking and thinking had boxed himself in with such high walls of expectations he needed to jump over.
“Listen, do you want to come over later?” Cillian offered, knowing that he couldn’t just turn his head the other way this time. “To-“
Tom turned to him, his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked expectant, as if hanging on to Cillian’s every word by by God, he wasn’t going to admit that at all, was he?
“To catch up?” Cillian finished lamely and even to his own ears, his offer sounded weak, despite its sincerity.
Tom smiled, and the sadness it was tinged with made Cillian’s chest tighten. “No, no,” Tom answered, shaking his head. His fingers were running through his short hair in that self-conscious way he usually did. “I-“ Then he paused, as if to clear his throat, but when he did, his voice didn’t sound any more confident. Or any less uncertain. “I’m staying at Charlotte’s tonight anyway.”
Right. So Cillian just smiled as well and said, “Yeah, another time then.”
And both he and Tom knew that Cillian should have answered differently. Should have asked differently, then maybe they could have actually gotten somewhere instead of skirted around each other like this with Tom edging away and Cillian just standing there, with his hands willing but unmoving, somewhere on the other side of the room where he hesitated too long and Tom didn’t wait for him to catch on.
******
But it turned out that Tom didn’t stay with Charlotte that night.
A brief, albeit awkward, phone call confirmed that and Charlotte said that Tom was staying at the hotel, to bond with his mates, she said. To catch up.
When Cillian rang the bell, it took a while for the door to really open and even then, it just seemed like it fell from its latch and Tom didn’t open it all the way through.
With a breath, Cillian pushed it open and stepped inside.
The first thing he thought was fuck, it was dark.
And the second, Tom was already on the bed, laying haphazardly as if he just fell in. Lying on his front with his face pressed to the duvet, and his legs and arms this way and that.
“You alright, Tom?” Cillian greeted him as he slowly closed the door behind him.
Tom’s head shot upwards and turned to him. In the dim light, Cillian could make out his widened eyes.
“Cill-“ Tom grinned, like the syllable on his lips was really fucking ridiculous to hear but Cillian didn’t find it funny at all. “Shit, I thought you were Peanut.”
(Cillian may have told the receptionist that his name was Peanut, even though the receptionist looked like she was damn sure his name was Cillian Murphy.)
Cillian shook his head as he approached the bed. He looked around the room. It wasn’t a mess, but what did he really expect? That Tom had just thrown a party in here? It didn’t look like it.
Even the bed was still made, just slightly wrinkled from where Cillian could safely assume that Tom had lain there for a while, and tossed and turned as if burrowing his head even deeper between the pillows could quiet the nagging voices in his head and quell the doubt that grew hot and turgid in his belly.
Cillian sat beside him, his hand coming to rest on Tom’s lower back. He could tell that Tom hadn’t changed from what he wore to the premiere, but his shoes and his socks were gone and he still smelled faintly of his aftershave.
“Am I doing it right this time?” Tom muttered, his voice half muffled from where his cheek was pressed to the bed.
“Doing what right this time?”
“Acting normal, like you do,” Tom replied. “I didn’t know,” he continued, swallowing a lump in his throat. He sounded tired and sluggish as if having just awakened from some deep slumber.
Cillian frowned down at Tom. His hand travelled upwards, in an instinctive gesture of comfort. Stroked down the ridges of his spine that hadn’t been pronounced before. Before.
Tom licked his dry lips. “I didn’t know how to do it the first time,” he half-whispered, as if divulging some innermost secret. And Cillian thought, he probably was doing just that. “I fucked it up real good, you know?”
Cillian couldn’t say anything to that because Tom did, that first time. He fucked it up with too much drugs and alcohol. Too much running away. His hand traveled downwards, from Tom’s shoulder down the length of his arm, down to his wrist.
Tom flinched, then jerked his hand away.
“What’s wrong?” Tom had turned his head away, and buried his hands under his torso. “Tom?”
Cillian tried to turn him over but Tom refused to budge, like some petulant child keeping all of his secrets to himself.
“Tom, come on,” Cillian urged.
When Tom still didn’t move, Cillian slowly climbed on top of him until he was straddling Tom’s lower back. He leaned forward until the whole length of him pressed against Tom, his feet in between Tom’s legs, his head resting on Tom’s shoulder.
Cillian tried to wrench Tom’s arms free from underneath him, but Tom was as stubborn as he was strong.
“Fine,” Cillian said, and braced his hands on the mattress.
A sharp pain pricked him on his palm and he cursed.
Tom grunted beneath him and didn’t move when Cillian climbed off of the bed and turned on the lights from the switch at the headboard.
The shock that gripped his throat was like a vice around his entire body.
The sharp pain came from a needle. There were three needles. Three syringes, and all of them empty. On the bedside table was a disposable Bic lighter, and beside it one of the hotel’s standard issue spoons that was crusting at the sides with something Cillian didn’t even want to know.
He climbed back on the bed and turned Tom over and this time, Tom was pliant under his hands.
He looked down at Tom’s wrists and there they were, three puncture marks just below the crease of his elbow, a makeshift tourniquet wrapped tightly around his upper arm. His fingers had already turned slightly blue.
“What the fuck did you do, Tom?” His words rushed out in panic as his fingers stumbled-fucking, struggled--to untie the tourniquet.
Tom grinned lazily up at the ceiling.
Cillian, suddenly irrationally angry at himself and at Tom, and at the three syringes that looked so fucking innocent on the expensive duvet, pulled at the half-loosened tourniquet a bit harsher than he intended.
Tom moaned, his head turning sluggishly this way and that.
“Tom, come on,” Cillian tapped him on the cheek, his panic rising to his throat.
Did he overdose? What the fuck did an overdose look like anyway? Fucking. Fuck. Fuck you, Tom.
“Ngh?” Tom grunted, but his eyes were focused elsewhere. At a patch on the ceiling perhaps. He didn’t look like he was even aware that Cillian was there anymore.
“Tom, for God’s sake,” Cillian almost cried, cupping his cheek and shaking him. Just shaking him, trying to snap him out of it, whatever it was he did to himself. Because this was not the controlled Tom he knew, but the Tom he had read about in papers. The Tom his brother had shook his head at when he heard the news of yet another British actor succumbing to drugs and petty crimes.
“It’s okay, mate,” Tom said suddenly, but his eyes were blank and focused on nothing. “I’m not running away this time.”
“You’re fucking running away now, aren’t you? You fucking idiot,” Cillian exclaimed. He was aware that he was shouting. Hell, even the next room was aware that he was shouting. But he didn’t much care, if it meant that Tom would look at him with the same sharp intensity that he always did and not with eyes so glazed over they hardly seemed bright anymore. But dull, and dead.
As if Tom had really, completely ran away this time, in some corner of his mind where he was safe from his own criticism of himself.
“I’m coming back,” Tom replied, his voice breathy as if his chest had grown so sluggish and hardly let any air out past his lips. “I’m just taking a break, okay?”
Cillian grimaced and let his head fall in defeat. He couldn’t do much else, could he? Tom had already gone, halfway up his mind and burrowed in there like Tom had done so during those nights in Canada, when Tom crept into his room and burrowed between the sheets, letting the duvet come up to his ears as if the physical presence of something separating him from the rest of the world was comfort enough.
You’re a bastard, was what Cillian wanted to say, but Tom wasn’t paying attention anymore. His eyes were already half-lidded, a lazy smile spread across lips that seemed fuller now that his face had gotten leaner.
So what Cillian did do was throw away the lighter, the spoon, the fucking syringes, and after all that, when he was sure that Tom didn’t have any more of it in his pockets, he lay down beside him. Like he had done so that first night. He threw an arm around Tom’s chest and listened to him breathe.
But he didn’t sleep this time.
He was going to wait for Tom when he came back, to make sure he didn’t go anywhere anymore.
Title: Much Too Much
Summary: For the inception_kink prompt: Cillian finds Tom injecting himself with heroin. Cillian is all "THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?". Tears everywhere. Go nuts.
Warning: Drugs, yep.
QUOTE: He was going to wait for Tom when he came back, to make sure he didn’t go anywhere anymore.
The door opened a fraction and Cillian only knew of this fact because he wasn’t really asleep, not yet. Not when the massively big bed was a bit cold. Cillian, the traditional man that he was, liked his beds warm and full; the reason why he hardly ever preferred working abroad than he did working in Ireland, where he could go back to his home and sleep beside his wife.
“You awake, mate?” Tom whispered in the darkness. They both knew Cillian was but Tom, who was always very curious about everything, also knew how to take a hint.
More than that, Tom also respected boundaries.
So it was Cillian who moved first. Without further ceremony, he turned over on his back and patted the space on the bed beside him.
Tom slipped in between the sheets, not once fumbling with the duvet or having difficulty maneuvering his wide frame around the bedside table.
Somehow, Tom’s hand wandered to Cillian’s arm and Cillian somehow turned on his side and pulled him close. They didn’t do anything that night, just slept and slept and slept, not caring if New York was alive with traffic at such a late hour, or if Christopher was harassing the production crew with late night shifts.
Cillian slept with the comforting knowledge that someone was there with him and Tom, well, Cillian didn’t know why Tom honored their routine like this without so much hesitation on his part but Cillian didn’t much care at that point.
******
It didn’t start out that way.
The first time they met, truly met, and not just awkwardly introduced themselves like that time during the British Independent Film awards when Tom won and Cillian wasn’t sure why he was there in the first place.
When they first met it was really, really fucking awkward, and Cillian said so.
Then Tom laughed, and just like that the awkwardness was over between them.
It was one of those luncheons organized by the production. A sort of Get to know your castmates better so that your chemistry looks halfway convincing at the very least-type of luncheon that Cillian had had several of in the past few years.
(The last memorable one was for Batman Begins, but that was in a bar in Brooklyn. A story for another time-which he had told Tom about at some point and Tom, like the good sport that he was, laughed at all the right moments and even ruffled his hair every now and then. That was a good story to tell, Cillian thought, and he told it several more times afterwards, just to see if Tom really was amused and not just humoring him.
It turned out that Tom really was, and that when he got bored with something he’d already heard multiple times he started staring off into space; he just smiled when Cillian called him out on it and didn’t even apologize. Which suited Cillian just fine.)
“I thought it was all a scam, you know,” Cillian had told him over their third luncheon. He was eating his salad, as was his routine, and Tom switched it up a little by pigging out on chicken rather than beef.
“What was?” Tom had asked, still so very curious even though he couldn’t possibly be anymore, not after hearing so many stories from Cillian and Tom just nodding through it all, laughing, then smiling, then being thoughtful, then being not.
Cillian paused, hesitating.
Tom looked at him expectantly, as if to say It’s fine, whatever it is that’s on your mind.
“The drugs,” Cillian finally blurted out. He was a considerate guy, really. He didn’t like asking about other people’s lives but the thing that irked him most was that the industry was chock full of druggies and ex-druggies, the successful ones and then the trainwrecks.
The first time he’d heard of Tom Hardy was when he looked up Nemesis. The second time he’d heard of him was when some tabloid had covered his drug abuse problem and berated him publicly for it. The third time was when he did Oliver Twist and a series of druggies, alcoholics, and crime dramas afterwards that depicted him as slightly insane, slightly off his rocker.
Slightly intense.
And Cillian had thought, for a very long time, that maybe Tom was just a sell-out like the others. Stirred up controversy when there was nothing interesting to talk about just so he’d be the hardcore character actor that critics didn’t dare publicly berate like that again.
Tom smiled ironically, a slight twist of his lips that didn’t seem like he was amused by Cillian this time. And Cillian, for the first time since they’d shaken hands at the airport and did their obligatory How do you do’s which spiraled down to discussions of books and old movies, thought that shit. I’d crossed the line, didn’t I?
Cillian opened his mouth, a haphazard, stumbling bit of an apology already half-formed in his head.
But Tom didn’t look like he was going to punch Cillian in the face, in spite of the physical strength implied by the bulk of his arms.
“Did you really?” Tom asked instead as he leaned back in his chair and dabbed at his lips with the napkin on his lap.
Tom was staring at him, in the way that Tom stared at that big piece of steak he’d gotten for lunch the other day. When he looked like he wanted to indulge himself but couldn’t, not that fast at least, and let self-control dictate every slow, deliberate slice of his knife. Cillian thought that much self-control could kill a man.
Cillian cleared his throat and shook his head. “You don’t have to answer that. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
Then Tom smiled, slowly, and the air shifted around them. A cloud seemed to have lifted and Cillian hadn’t even realized that it had settled above their heads until it was gone.
“It’s fine, yeah?” Tom reassured with a casual wave of his hand, as if dispelling the last wisps of the thickened air between them. “Now about that dog I’d told you I had-“
And they talked about dogs for nearly an hour and Cillian forgot all about his slip, and how Tom’s bright eyes had dulled, and how he went completely still for a long time.
Cillian promised himself he’d never bring it up ever again.
******
How Tom ended up Cillian’s bed was anyone’s guess.
(And the production crew did guess, and all of the guesses were a variation of They’re sleeping together and They’re sleeping together, cheating on their wives, oh my God their poor children.)
But it really started out as an innocent thing, when they were both so fucking tired after a grueling take-after-take-after-take-after-take of an afternoon skiing this way and that. It was in Canada, at the ski resort somewhere in between a very sheer drop to the bottom of the mountain and a very cold and unlivable peak that had daunted them when they first saw it.
Cillian had offered Tom a drink, just to warm them up, he said. To ease those aching muscles a little and give their minds a rest.
Tom had declined the offer, but with that same intense concentration that looked like it was tearing him up inside. But he did offer to stay and talk a bit, to wind down, he said. To stutter the adrenaline still pumping in his veins.
“His name’s Louis,” Tom said, showing him a small picture of a very light-haired infant cradled against Tom’s tattooed shoulder. It was one of those self-taken pictures that included a mirror and a very steady handheld digital camera. “He’s just turned one this year.”
Unlike Tom, Cillian didn’t have pictures of his sons Malachy and Aaron in his wallet. He didn’t even have his wallet. It was stuffed somewhere at the bottom of his carry-on luggage he hadn’t even started unpacking yet.
But he did describe him in great detail as he nursed his one glass of whiskey.
Tom was smiling almost wistfully all throughout and soon enough, he was lowering himself on Cillian’s bed, feet on the carpeted floor, his head missing the pillow by inches.
By the time Cillian had finished his whiskey, and long after he had told Tom of Aaron’s second birthday and how it was really fucking epic, mate, you should’ve been there. For his third, you’re bringing Louis, yeah? And it’ll be a grand time, I promise. Tom was already snoring softly into the duvet and Cillian, who was dead tired himself, didn’t have the heart to kick him out.
So Cillian lay down beside him, on top of the covers, both fully clothed in their thick jackets and slightly snow-wet jeans and socks, and slept deeply and soundly throughout the night.
When Cillian woke up, he did so with an armful of Tom, who was still very much asleep. Cillian had scooted over to Tom’s side of the bed. Tom hadn’t moved the entire time; his head still missed the pillow by a mile and his feet were still on the floor but Cillian, he had somehow flung an arm around those wide shoulders until he was burrowed up against Tom’s warm bulk.
They didn’t talk about it afterwards. Cillian didn’t even know-and never really did, come to think of it-if Tom had been aware of it all.
******
But Tom must have been, because in the nights since then, Tom always invited himself into Cillian’s room and Cillian, who was perfectly fine with that, never took notice of how Tom always conveniently fell asleep before he could call it a night.
But he did notice how Tom was never drunk during that time, and was not always tired when he did wander into Cillian’s room. He could’ve gone on till the wee hours of the night if he wanted to do, but didn’t.
Tom never stirred in his sleep, either, not when Cillian’s arm had wandered down to his waist and Cillian’s lips touched the back of his neck sometime in the middle of the night.
Cillian chalked it up to loneliness, maybe. Something about Canada, and snow, and the cold.
(Later on, he added Something about Tom, and the way he was always looking at Cillian with an intensity that faltered only when Tom looked away and stared at something instead, as if he couldn’t quite cough up the confidence to continue staring into anyone’s eyes with such open curiosity for so long a time.)
******
So when they start having sex, it only seemed logical. They were already sharing a bed. They were already talking to each other in ways that they never talked to each other in interviews. Hell, in ways they didn’t talk to the rest of the cast.
(Cillian thought Joe was a little too young, even though they both had some college under their belts and they had similar tastes in music. Joe, with his open face and his ready smile, there was nothing new there.
Ellen, same deal. But female.)
But the intimacy, this new level of physical intimacy, still surprised the both of them.
They weren’t drunk. Tom was hardly ever drunk these days, he had said, when Cillian offered him a glass of whiskey a second time and Tom declined him yet again. He had wanted to avoid temptation, at all costs, and wasn’t going to go There again. Not without good reason.
They were talking about their families. How Cillian had his older brother and they had their band and they still went out together to attend gigs in Cork and how it was still very good between them, despite Cillian spending half the time elsewhere and Padraig never really going anywhere anymore. How Tom had gone to an Eagles concert with his mum, and shopped with her, and had her drive him to places, how Tom still saw his ex-girlfriend and how the three of them, Rachel, Tom, and their child Louis, would visit his parents in Hammersmith and all would still be right between them still.
They were both sitting on the bed, with Tom facing Cillian, his legs folded under him. His knees touched Cillian’s thigh and that didn’t bother them at all. It was close and familiar and Tom didn’t seem to mind so Cillian didn’t mind either.
Then Tom leaned forward until his forehead rested on Cillian’s shoulder and Cillian, on instinct, shifted his glass from one hand to the other and ruffled Tom’s hair. When Tom didn’t protest, Cillian did it over and over again, petting and threading his thin fingers through, like a comforting gesture that Tom didn’t really need.
“It wasn’t a scam, you know,” Tom suddenly spoke and it took a while for Cillian to understand what he was talking about. His hand stilled, with his palm cupping the gentle swell of Tom’s head.
“What wasn’t a scam?” Cillian replied, looking down at Tom and his downturned face and wanting very much for Tom not to say things with such a subdued tone of voice.
(Tom was a big man, Cillian knew as much. He knew this when he saw Bronson for the first time and thought, Holy fucking crap. That guy can bash my skull in. And Tom made him realize this over and over again, when Tom would strip to his undershirt in front of him and the muscles of his arms stood out against the sheer white cloth with such stark relief that Cillian thought the undershirt looked positively angry for needing to hold Tom together in so futile a manner.
Tom liked to laugh and did so many times and the many more times he didn’t, he spoke with such confidence that Cillian could have mistaken him to be something of a college graduate instead of the tried-and-tested man of the streets that he was.
He wasn’t subdued, not really. He was quiet, but quiet in a way that was alert and dependable. Not fucking subdued.)
Tom turned his head and met Cillian’s eyes. Cillian liked looking at people’s eyes, not because they told so much of the other person. (He always needed a facial expression to go that far, like the draw of the eyebrows or the turn of the lips.) He liked other people’s eyes because they were either sincere or dishonest.
Tom’s eyes, at that moment, were neither. Cillian couldn’t decipher them at all.
“The drugs, mate,” Tom said, his voice soft. “I was drunk and high because I didn’t know what to do with myself, you know what I mean?”
Cillian didn’t, but he nodded anyway. Cillian didn’t know what Tom meant because he never felt that in his entire life. He had law school, he had his band, he had his family, he had his wife who had stuck by him since it all started. He never needed to know where he was because he was never lost in the first place. He always had hands to pull him aside and remind him of the world and where he was in it. Or remind him that there were bills, there were Aaron and Malachy, there were PTA meetings, there were empty kitchen fridges and the mortgage due in the morning.
He never had total freedom, not really.
“I didn’t know how to deal, so I didn’t,” Tom finished and Cillian didn’t know how to respond to that.
So he didn’t.
What he did was lean down and meet Tom’s lips for a kiss that was consoling and comforting and reassuring all at the same time, as if providing Tom with what he needed to keep it all together. Keep it all in, like he’d been doing all this time.
And when Tom kissed back, Cillian thought it wasn’t because Tom wanted to kiss him but because he realized that he needed this, too. A way to keep it all together, to shut himself up and the voices inside his head that kept telling him to give in. To succumb.
When they slept on the bed that night, it wasn’t with so many clothes and hardly as much silence.
Tom was deliberate and slow, letting their limbs run their due course around their bodies. His strong arms wrapped around Cillian’s torso.
And Cillian, underneath him, moaned. He bit his lip to stifle the sound but Tom’s thumb was there to ease his lip from the worry of his teeth. And he moaned, louder, when Tom leaned back and gathered Cillian close until they were both upright and naked and wanton and so fucking slow that Cillian could feel the tension, that tightness of control, in Tom’s arms.
Until they went further and further away to where words couldn’t place them and all that control whipped across Tom’s broad shoulders released like a cut coil of sprung copper.
******
How it turned out into something else other than what friends did for each other sometimes was, for Cillian yet another thing to be surprised by, and, curiously enough, something that Tom didn’t seem to worry about at all.
When Cillian took a tumble down a steep incline, Tom was there to help him up. Not with a foolish grin but with a serious frown that showed more concern than Cillian was comfortable with. But he smiled and just laughed it off, dusting the snow from his shoulders and grinning more widely than his cheeks allowed.
When Cillian’s boots slipped on a puddle of melted snow inside the hotel lobby, Tom was there too. Not just to offer him a hand but to bodily haul him to his feet, with worried hands gripping his forearms with a certainty that almost seemed too familiar.
Cillian didn’t laugh that time, and shrugged off Tom’s hands instead.
When Tom’s face fell, Cillian couldn’t understand why he suddenly felt the need to explain himself. That he really was okay, that Tom didn’t have to shadow him wherever he went to make sure that he really was.
But Cillian never opened his mouth to do so. He just smiled, a reassuring and somewhat forced smile that he always hated doing, and walked away.
Tom didn’t go into his room that night.
Instead, it was Cillian who went to his. He had an apology in mind, a very long one that touched on boundaries and privacy and This isn’t a thing, okay? We have kids, we have our significant others, and we have our lives.
But as soon as Cillian walked through the door, Tom had already caught his arm and was leading him to the bed. A bed a bit smaller than Cillian’s, with its unmade duvet and its haphazardly strewn pillows.
They didn’t talk for a long time afterwards and when they’d finished, sated and half-asleep, with Tom laying down on his front and his arm across Cillian’s chest, Cillian realized that he had forgotten what he was apologizing for.
So he didn’t.
******
One thing Cillian was sure of, and that was how it all ended.
Their three months of shooting were up and the dwindling weeks that followed their production in Canada were counted down by the number of weekend after-parties Joe and Ellen threw for the cast and crew left and right.
Tom stayed behind on most of those nights, and sometimes Cillian was there to stay behind with him.
“What are you gonna do after filming?” Cillian brought up, somewhere between putting on his boxers and Tom rummaging around for his jeans.
“I’m heading back to London,” Tom answered vaguely, his back to him.
“Yeah, your son must miss you by now,” Cillian remarked, and he didn’t mean anything by it at all because he missed his sons too, even though he called them almost every day and talked about Spongebob and everything that the Cartoon Network had brainwashed their minds with.
Tom didn’t reply for a long time, not until he had gotten both his legs through his pants and was attempting to zip himself up.
“I know what you’re driving at,” Tom finally said. Even though his hands were on his hips and his eyes leveled Cillian’s and he looked, and stood, like the confident man that he usually seemed outside of their hotel rooms, there was something about the shift in his feet and the self-conscious way his lips twisted to a thoughtful frown that made Cillian think otherwise.
“What do you mean?”
“This is going to be over, isn’t it?” And Cillian groaned, silently, turning away so he didn’t have to face the inevitability of talking about this. Whatever this was. But Tom wasn’t finished. “We’re going to go back to our normal lives and never let anyone know.”
Cillian remained quiet. Tom took that as a sign to continue, even when Cillian edged a little further away from him, distracting himself by picking up his clothes from where they were strewn on the foot of the bed.
“And I get that, you know?” Tom paused, and Cillian could imagine him running a hand over his lips, then down his neck, like how he usually did when he was deep in thought. “I love my son, and I love Charlotte and you love your family too. I get that.”
“Yeah, I do,” Cillian replied, emphasizing every word as clearly as possible, but as much as his voice held such passion in them, his eyes were not on Tom but on the wrinkles on the shirt he held in his hands.
When Tom didn’t reply right away, Cillian looked up at him. But he wasn’t there anymore.
Tom was suddenly behind him, those strong arms wrapping around his chest, his chin resting on the crook of Cillian’s neck. And he felt every rasp of stubble against his skin as Tom breathed through his lips. Deep, shuddering breaths, in the way that reminded him of the tightly-wrung thread of his arms when Tom was at his most careful.
“And I’m not going to pine for you like some lovesick teenager,” Tom said with a slight chuckle.
Cillian laughed. Even for his own ears, it sounded slightly desperate, as if he was on the last threads of humor that could possibly lighten their situation. “Bronson doesn’t pine, does he.”
Tom frowned; Cillian felt the slight turn of those soft lips against his skin. “There you go.”
Cillian nodded, and as he spoke, it was as if his throat was negotiating through something very big and very stubborn in his throat. “There we go.”
******
When they parted ways, that was that, Cillian thought. And life moved on.
Until he heard from someone’s agent’s friend’s something about Mad Max and how Mel Gibson was going to produce it this time and the new Mad Max, with Charlize Theron as the leading lady, was going to star Tom Hardy. Of all people.
Cillian had grinned, then, a secretive grin his agent had wondered about but he had just shrugged off to just sheer joy for his friend.
Friend.
So, like friends did, he dialed up Tom’s number. Which he had never done, because they had spent most of the time on set together anyway and after filming, Cillian never found a proper reason to call him up.
“Yeah?” Tom answered. His voice was as deep as Cillian remembered it but different somehow. Like he was speaking through a garbled microphone and the amps were chewing up the syllables along with the air.
“Tom?”
“Who’s this?” Tom answered, and the quality of his voice didn’t change.
Cillian looked at his phone for a moment. Four bars on his signal. “It’s Cillian.”
Then he heard a sudden rustle of something-clothes, maybe? As if Tom had been laying down on a bed when he answered his phone and wasn’t really completely awake when he did. “Cillian! Hey,” Tom greeted, sounding cheerful. And Cillian thought Tom had a lot to be cheerful about right now. “How you doing?”
“I’m good.” A pause. “Listen, I just wanted to congratulate you-“
Then Tom laughed. It was breathy and winded and sluggish all at the same time, and burst out in rapid spurts like something random and completely out of control.
Cillian frowned, “Tom? You alright?”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I’m fine, mate,” Tom replied, but he was still laughing.
Cillian smiled, at first, joining in on Tom’s apparent good mood. But when the laughing didn’t stop, his smile started to falter until all was left was a thoughtful frown.
Oh. “Are you drunk, Tom?”
He heard Tom snort softly, and his laughter tapered off until all he could hear was Tom’s ragged breathing. “Yeah, sorta.” Tom laughed again, “Drunk, yeah, you could say that.”
Cillian had never seen Tom drunk. All those times, Tom had declined the whiskey, even ordered for something bubbly rather than beer when the cast went out to unwind.
“Well, I won’t keep you, alright?” Cillian said, his thumb hovering over the end call button even though the phone was still against his ear.
“Wait, wait, Cillian,” Tom said in a hurry, as if he was out of breath. “Hold on, mate.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Don’t you just want to, to-“ Then Tom trailed off. And Cillian waited.
And waited.
“Want to what, Tom?” He prompted after what seemed like a minute of dead air.
“To,” Tom continued, then trailed off again.
Cillian sighed, “I’ll talk to you later, alright? Have some fun.”
“Yeah yeah,” Tom said, sounding like he agreed. Whole-heartedly so. But Tom didn’t end the call, and neither did Cillian.
“Tom?”
“Yeah, mate?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
He could hear Tom nod. Or he imagined it, at least. That soft hand running over his face, past his lips, then down the length of his neck, as if awaking himself.
But when Tom didn’t speak again, Cillian did hang up.
So much for catching up.
******
Cillian didn’t see Tom again until July, when Inception had become the talk of the media and the onslaught of interviews and promotional gigs he had been expecting from a Nolan film came knocking at his door.
The London premiere was a busy one and after a brief hug from Tom, they were separated shortly after by ushers that pointed to that photographer, then to that photographer. He went on doing five-minute interviews and from the corner of his eye, he saw Tom do his own fair share of talking and promoting. Endless promoting.
They didn’t get a chance to talk until hours later, after their first showing of the movie-
--And fuck, was Cillian impressed by it-
--And the last interviewer had left the hotel room the organizers had made up with a black backdrop and two simple director’s chairs underneath the glare of twin spotlights.
“How about this, eh?” Cillian said, a smile on his face.
Tom was busy-too busy-putting his things in order. Mobile in his front pocket, wallet in his back. Keys. Some piece of paper, some slips of business cards. Too many things in his hands that Tom looked like he didn’t know what to do with any of them.
“Tom?” Cillian tried again.
“Yeah?” Tom looked up at him and fuck, did he look tired. And worn. And not the energetic, if somehow subtle Tom he had remembered on the mountain slopes in Canada, laughing and grinning as he sped off in his skis and all but forgetting that Cillian was there, too, struggling a little bit on the twin planks of wood.
Cillian frowned, and made as if to move towards him but hesitated too long that Tom had already moved away, nodding his head in that reassuring beat.
Cillian certainly didn’t need reassuring. His frowned deepened as he looked at Tom. He had smiled at some point during the premiere, Cillian swore he did, and basked in the glory that he really did deserve. But even then Cillian realized that he looked mildly uncomfortable, as if half a mind wanted him to run away from it all but really, really couldn’t because this was it for him, wasn’t it?
This was his chance.
Oh.
And just like that, Cillian understood.
That the blank look on Tom’s face was not one of exhaustion because he really did seem fit, healthy in his black shirt even though he had shed off some of his bulk. He wasn’t tired, not really.
He was scared. He was scared of all the attention that maybe, somehow, if he said something wrong or if he didn’t say the right things or if he ran out of the little tidbits of information that the media would wolf down in the hungry way that it always did-
--that it would all go away again.
Tom looked like how he did that night, when his head was on Cillian’s shoulder, and too much sobriety and too much time spent thinking and thinking and thinking had boxed himself in with such high walls of expectations he needed to jump over.
“Listen, do you want to come over later?” Cillian offered, knowing that he couldn’t just turn his head the other way this time. “To-“
Tom turned to him, his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked expectant, as if hanging on to Cillian’s every word by by God, he wasn’t going to admit that at all, was he?
“To catch up?” Cillian finished lamely and even to his own ears, his offer sounded weak, despite its sincerity.
Tom smiled, and the sadness it was tinged with made Cillian’s chest tighten. “No, no,” Tom answered, shaking his head. His fingers were running through his short hair in that self-conscious way he usually did. “I-“ Then he paused, as if to clear his throat, but when he did, his voice didn’t sound any more confident. Or any less uncertain. “I’m staying at Charlotte’s tonight anyway.”
Right. So Cillian just smiled as well and said, “Yeah, another time then.”
And both he and Tom knew that Cillian should have answered differently. Should have asked differently, then maybe they could have actually gotten somewhere instead of skirted around each other like this with Tom edging away and Cillian just standing there, with his hands willing but unmoving, somewhere on the other side of the room where he hesitated too long and Tom didn’t wait for him to catch on.
******
But it turned out that Tom didn’t stay with Charlotte that night.
A brief, albeit awkward, phone call confirmed that and Charlotte said that Tom was staying at the hotel, to bond with his mates, she said. To catch up.
When Cillian rang the bell, it took a while for the door to really open and even then, it just seemed like it fell from its latch and Tom didn’t open it all the way through.
With a breath, Cillian pushed it open and stepped inside.
The first thing he thought was fuck, it was dark.
And the second, Tom was already on the bed, laying haphazardly as if he just fell in. Lying on his front with his face pressed to the duvet, and his legs and arms this way and that.
“You alright, Tom?” Cillian greeted him as he slowly closed the door behind him.
Tom’s head shot upwards and turned to him. In the dim light, Cillian could make out his widened eyes.
“Cill-“ Tom grinned, like the syllable on his lips was really fucking ridiculous to hear but Cillian didn’t find it funny at all. “Shit, I thought you were Peanut.”
(Cillian may have told the receptionist that his name was Peanut, even though the receptionist looked like she was damn sure his name was Cillian Murphy.)
Cillian shook his head as he approached the bed. He looked around the room. It wasn’t a mess, but what did he really expect? That Tom had just thrown a party in here? It didn’t look like it.
Even the bed was still made, just slightly wrinkled from where Cillian could safely assume that Tom had lain there for a while, and tossed and turned as if burrowing his head even deeper between the pillows could quiet the nagging voices in his head and quell the doubt that grew hot and turgid in his belly.
Cillian sat beside him, his hand coming to rest on Tom’s lower back. He could tell that Tom hadn’t changed from what he wore to the premiere, but his shoes and his socks were gone and he still smelled faintly of his aftershave.
“Am I doing it right this time?” Tom muttered, his voice half muffled from where his cheek was pressed to the bed.
“Doing what right this time?”
“Acting normal, like you do,” Tom replied. “I didn’t know,” he continued, swallowing a lump in his throat. He sounded tired and sluggish as if having just awakened from some deep slumber.
Cillian frowned down at Tom. His hand travelled upwards, in an instinctive gesture of comfort. Stroked down the ridges of his spine that hadn’t been pronounced before. Before.
Tom licked his dry lips. “I didn’t know how to do it the first time,” he half-whispered, as if divulging some innermost secret. And Cillian thought, he probably was doing just that. “I fucked it up real good, you know?”
Cillian couldn’t say anything to that because Tom did, that first time. He fucked it up with too much drugs and alcohol. Too much running away. His hand traveled downwards, from Tom’s shoulder down the length of his arm, down to his wrist.
Tom flinched, then jerked his hand away.
“What’s wrong?” Tom had turned his head away, and buried his hands under his torso. “Tom?”
Cillian tried to turn him over but Tom refused to budge, like some petulant child keeping all of his secrets to himself.
“Tom, come on,” Cillian urged.
When Tom still didn’t move, Cillian slowly climbed on top of him until he was straddling Tom’s lower back. He leaned forward until the whole length of him pressed against Tom, his feet in between Tom’s legs, his head resting on Tom’s shoulder.
Cillian tried to wrench Tom’s arms free from underneath him, but Tom was as stubborn as he was strong.
“Fine,” Cillian said, and braced his hands on the mattress.
A sharp pain pricked him on his palm and he cursed.
Tom grunted beneath him and didn’t move when Cillian climbed off of the bed and turned on the lights from the switch at the headboard.
The shock that gripped his throat was like a vice around his entire body.
The sharp pain came from a needle. There were three needles. Three syringes, and all of them empty. On the bedside table was a disposable Bic lighter, and beside it one of the hotel’s standard issue spoons that was crusting at the sides with something Cillian didn’t even want to know.
He climbed back on the bed and turned Tom over and this time, Tom was pliant under his hands.
He looked down at Tom’s wrists and there they were, three puncture marks just below the crease of his elbow, a makeshift tourniquet wrapped tightly around his upper arm. His fingers had already turned slightly blue.
“What the fuck did you do, Tom?” His words rushed out in panic as his fingers stumbled-fucking, struggled--to untie the tourniquet.
Tom grinned lazily up at the ceiling.
Cillian, suddenly irrationally angry at himself and at Tom, and at the three syringes that looked so fucking innocent on the expensive duvet, pulled at the half-loosened tourniquet a bit harsher than he intended.
Tom moaned, his head turning sluggishly this way and that.
“Tom, come on,” Cillian tapped him on the cheek, his panic rising to his throat.
Did he overdose? What the fuck did an overdose look like anyway? Fucking. Fuck. Fuck you, Tom.
“Ngh?” Tom grunted, but his eyes were focused elsewhere. At a patch on the ceiling perhaps. He didn’t look like he was even aware that Cillian was there anymore.
“Tom, for God’s sake,” Cillian almost cried, cupping his cheek and shaking him. Just shaking him, trying to snap him out of it, whatever it was he did to himself. Because this was not the controlled Tom he knew, but the Tom he had read about in papers. The Tom his brother had shook his head at when he heard the news of yet another British actor succumbing to drugs and petty crimes.
“It’s okay, mate,” Tom said suddenly, but his eyes were blank and focused on nothing. “I’m not running away this time.”
“You’re fucking running away now, aren’t you? You fucking idiot,” Cillian exclaimed. He was aware that he was shouting. Hell, even the next room was aware that he was shouting. But he didn’t much care, if it meant that Tom would look at him with the same sharp intensity that he always did and not with eyes so glazed over they hardly seemed bright anymore. But dull, and dead.
As if Tom had really, completely ran away this time, in some corner of his mind where he was safe from his own criticism of himself.
“I’m coming back,” Tom replied, his voice breathy as if his chest had grown so sluggish and hardly let any air out past his lips. “I’m just taking a break, okay?”
Cillian grimaced and let his head fall in defeat. He couldn’t do much else, could he? Tom had already gone, halfway up his mind and burrowed in there like Tom had done so during those nights in Canada, when Tom crept into his room and burrowed between the sheets, letting the duvet come up to his ears as if the physical presence of something separating him from the rest of the world was comfort enough.
You’re a bastard, was what Cillian wanted to say, but Tom wasn’t paying attention anymore. His eyes were already half-lidded, a lazy smile spread across lips that seemed fuller now that his face had gotten leaner.
So what Cillian did do was throw away the lighter, the spoon, the fucking syringes, and after all that, when he was sure that Tom didn’t have any more of it in his pockets, he lay down beside him. Like he had done so that first night. He threw an arm around Tom’s chest and listened to him breathe.
But he didn’t sleep this time.
He was going to wait for Tom when he came back, to make sure he didn’t go anywhere anymore.