alternately stone in you and star (suite bergamasque).
title: alternately stone in you and star.
author: conditionelle
pairing: Kris/Adam.
rating: R.
summary: There are no uniformly happy endings, and to declare that they exist is to indulge in a cop-out, to buy into the sweeping annihilatory aftermath left behind by this delusion of universal peachy-keenness; all your stories neatly concluded and carefully wrapped in ersatz gift-paper, topped ironically by a moralistic ribbon tied into a bow.
notes: If I were an AI contestant, Simon would be in my face about how self-indulgent this is. And he would be absolutely right. (See just how self-indulgent this is here in the extended author's note.) I suppose it doesn't really matter in the end. What this may or may not be, then, is one story told through a few myths; second-person narrative again, though the steering wheel changes hands quite a few times. Also, I live for constructive criticism. If you can tell me what worked and what didn't, what you liked and what you didn't, etc. - that would be so beyond amazing and I would be eternally grateful. Thank you!
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening
Young face, old soul, young smile, old eyes; you are a million miles from home and your homes is a page out of history, an impression in the back of your expansive mind. Your voice a transparent wraith of what it could be, incomparable to that which you had and which you still hear in your own mind, singing the timeless symphony of grace be to the heavens, tripping the cadence magnetic of lilting rhythms - poetry of a more traditional variety - and etching a laugh against clandestine slip of yet-unmarred skin; but hands, hands are what stand out above all else, tapered fingertips drawing constellations down to earth and saying, here is Gemini, you and me, the dark side of the moon and glory of infinite space. A cacophony of annihilating noise resonates between your ribcage and the ground opens beneath your feet; your understanding of descent (cyclic, unending, perpetual revisionist clock-hands drawing same-old, same-old arcs through the exhausted ennui of eternity) is implicit, and your fear of the foreseeable infinite future only goes so far as some inexorable force wrenches, pulls, emerges from your core. One more time, here it goes again.
You think you are screaming but you are not; your body descends before your voice follows.
And now you find yourself blinking up at your ceiling, settling back into your body, this foreign alien so familiar body (your always-temporary home) and feel the ether curl along your eyelashes, down to your toes, as your presence expands and the weight of gravity anchors your feet back down to the ground.
It's your story. (And yours.) It never ends the same way. (And you always meet at the crossroads.)
polaris (I would always know what time it was in California.)
In no way are his eyes remarkable until you find them, in that brief instant trained on you and only you, across a packed foyer of hundreds, each swathed in adrenaline and encumbered by luggage.
There are too many strangers' faces whose edges bleed indiscriminate into each other, faces without names. Your attention flows like a wave, snagged by nothing as you coolly and smoothly survey the sea of lowered lashes and half-captured furtive glances, eyes widened by anxiety and darkened with exhaustion - and then. Right there, near the exit sign. Your eyes meet (his doing what yours were, scanning superficially through the crowd just waiting to be stopped, but he does it with more warmth and curiosity than appraisal), and he does not start, barely pauses for an instant as he grazes your gravitational pull; miraculously sweeps past, but doubles back onto you again a moment later, unable to move on. (No one is, when you want it thus. And oh, do you ever want it this time.) The rest of his face comes together in your field of vision a half-beat later, emerges slowly as if out of a fog: angles acute and oblique, rounded by youth but sharpened by intent.
If you did not know any better you might have expected the opening strains of some lovely quiet song to come streaming through invisible speakers, because it really is that sort of a moment, with time (pretending to) standing still and the (metaphorical) camera going into soft-focus. But you have been here too many times before and you know perfectly well how reality has a tendency to take a turn for the unfortunately banal; but really, you do not need the post-production editing to make this work.
What you have instead is this flawless and fatal sequence: you maintain eye contact, you pin him right where he stands with the magnitude of your full and quite substantial attention, and then you smile. Right on cue he sways, wavering on his feet all of a sudden as if gravity (or perhaps a treacherous knee) has betrayed him, and he has to take a step forward (toward you) to steady himself. When he looks back up, his already-wide-open eyes widen even further when they catch you looking - rather, deliberately staring - at him still.
(Victory is the dazed wash of colour that flits over his cheek, the fact that he cannot even blink beneath the scrutiny yet refuses to look away. You think: he got it, he understood what just happened now, just like that; how astonishingly intuitive.)
He looks away again, breaks the eye contact with a Herculean effort; the conversation he has been drawn into by the girl next to him merely a convenient excuse. You let it slide.
You keep watching with eyes you reserve only for when you are on the stage and in the spotlight (a rule you made that you try not to break, though no one will call you on it because no one knows, you are instead bound by being precisely who you are). The blaze of your gaze is so intense that you set on fire the hairs on the backs of everyone around him, and they turn their button-blank eyes toward you in curiosity, wondering what you were trying to incinerate. Wrong, of course; the last thing you would ever wish to do would be to mar him.
When he finally looks back, after withstanding the hundred-fold magnified focus on your eyes trained on him for something like two whole minutes, you can see that he has forcibly calmed himself. His eyes (framed by thick dark lashes, direct and candid and fearless) burn right through yours (outlined by the careful curvature of kohl), centered on you like his perfect pitch on a note - though presently you do not know about his perfect pitch yet, nor do you yet know his name; you have not spoken to him and despite whatever else you can do, you cannot read minds. (Perhaps it is for the best.) Anyway, you know this already, you know who and what he is: a compass unerringly pointing straight to your heart.
When he takes that first step toward your corner of the room, it feels like falling. (You would know.)
Him into you, that is; footsteps bringing him ever-closer to you, a series of little jostling accidents - shoulders brushing, hands lingering on sleeves, the necessity for unconsciously wide berths; the very things, indeed, that define a crowd and illuminate a path - fortuities that push you into adjacent seats and a hushed conversation. Hello, he says, long lazy vowels stretched over an infectious smile. He says: I'm Kris.
The smile in return, the handshakes, the introductions perfunctory and incidental (though when you test the sound of his name on your tongue with deliberation and an intensely private smile, his eyes burn even brighter - so of course you say it again: it's nice to meet you, Kris). What you focus on is none of these things. His apple-soap-and-fresh-laundry scent is like a memory of where he was than the actual present, the warm timbre of his speaking voice like a distant echo of some faraway stretch of road upon which you can floor the gas pedal; but what you cannot stop drinking in is the unconscious total capitulation behind his eyes and his whole-body reorientation.
(He cannot take his eyes off of you, but of course you knew that already.)
Toward you, always toward you: his knees angle toward you, his shoulder too; and if you could see souls you could make an educated guess to say that his is pulling a Scarlett O'Hara eyelash-flutter right about now (should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how, and you do know, so this would be a prescription you would fill with the keenest pleasure given half a chance).
You are, of course, in control; you are in your own outrageous way the emblem of constancy and origin of reference. This is not a foreign role, and to have people react thusly - it has not been thrilling in a long while already. But to say that you are not moved, that you with clinical interest and cold objectivity watched him fall (toward you, into you) - well, that would be an absolute lie.
Observant though you are, by need and by nature, you do not notice the silver band until it is too late and he has set out, resolute, straight for the North Pole. But you are too human, too selfish, and fallen too far to regret it.
aulos (I am beautiful. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?)
Adam is smiling when you open the case, and so astonishingly gleeful when he sees you pick up your guitar for the first time that you almost wonder if he is mocking you. (You know, of course, that he is not; but still, you are not accustomed to such sharp undiluted enthusiasm directed at you - it has been a long time.) So you nod, because what else can you do, what else would you want to do?
The first quiet moment that the two of you have together (actual privacy being too much to ask for), you sit together with your backs against the wall in a relatively quieter corner of a corridor. He says: play something. You ask him what he wants, and he shrugs. Anything, whatever you want.
So you do that, you play whatever you want, and what you want to play is - a simple melody that shifts smoothly between 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time, quiet and lovely and familiar. You keep your eyes closed, only play the song and do not sing; that might hit a little too close to home, considering that the current setting in which you find yourself is that of a competition.
When you finish playing you simply stop and enjoy the silence, cradling your guitar in your arms with your eyes still closed. Adam does not say anything, and the two of you sit in companionable silence for one second, two seconds, three seconds, four; just as it was beginning to get a little stifling, he finally exhales forcibly. Blackbird, wow, he says. (Your ears turn red, you know he can see it, and your eyes remain closed.) Then he adds, a whisper in your ear: now play Yesterday.
It takes you a moment too long to laugh, as your eyes fly open and seek out his, to be reassured by the joking glimmer you see there. You find it readily enough; then you can smile back at him and comply. He sings this time and you harmonize. You sound glorious together.
Later, in this exact position once more but at another stage of the competition, Adam tells you - with almost a note of awe in his voice - that it's ridiculous how easy you make it all look even when he knows from first-hand experience that it really, really is not; how you make him forget, for whole stretches of time, the certainty of his own past and experiences. You want to laugh or blush but you just shrug instead, and strum another chord. Halfway through deflecting the compliment - you have had a lot of experience doing this over the years, you do it best when you can accompany yourself and hide in the shadow of a melody line - he cuts in with a shake of his head, flatly telling you to please shut up in the best way possible. So you do that too, let your callused fingertips over your guitar strings do all the talking; they find the words that never had a chance to cross your lips, and soon enough the two of you are quiet again, knee to companionable knee in the music-bridged silence.
(You wonder, watching him tear up the stage from the wings one Tuesday night, if maybe he is like you, a creature whose blood is interlaced with the music you live and breathe, more potent and intoxicating than aqua vitae. Maybe you could ask, though the question would sound delirious, strange and affected. Then again, you have spent late nights talking of stranger things, and you are not an unworldly child after all, you have accrued enough tact over the years that you know you can pull it off.
But you do not actually wish to know the answer to this so-revealing question, if you were to be perfectly honest, so you let it rest on the tip of your tongue like bubbles from a glass of freshly poured champagne. And you keep singing, keep playing, week to week to week. All of you do just that.)
People do it a little bit more, though, when they are near you. It was always the case but it did not become this glaringly obvious until you are being as closely scrutinized as you now were, held beneath the microscope by a nation in thrall to the mythology. People are doing spectacular things they did not realise they were capable of, hitting beautiful notes they always believed were out of their ranges; they chalk these astonishing new accomplishments up to providential strokes of genius or divine inspiration or the smile and grace of a wayward muse (or sometimes even hard work!), neglecting to notice your presence. You could care less, so long as they flourished and were happier for it, you were happy too. It all amounts to the same thing anyway. You never ever egregiously courted the attention you have neither urgent need nor real desire for; certainly you were not about to start now.
Intentionally, anyway - accidentally is perhaps a different matter altogether.
Adam notices (of course he would) and shoots the question at you at point-blank range out of the blue one day, just what you were playing at. This competition was hopefully not going to get ugly, but spending this much time every week bringing out the best in everyone else and never taking any credit - what gives?
When confronted like this (you have never been confronted over this, in such a direct manner) you panic in an unbelievable way as the weight of the question drags your stomach right down to the centre of the earth. You are all tachycardia and dilated pupils zero-to-sixty in one-point-three seconds flat, normally steady fingers fluttering nervously to grasp air in the absence of an instrument (half your vocabulary gone). There is no answer, you have no words with which to answer him as you suddenly find yourself on trial for something you never thought of as a crime, simply because - you want to tell Adam that you do know this all too well - what you do best is at odds with all senses of self-preservation. But you do not have the words (words were never your thing) and so you panic, and he looks at you with eyes that grow both concerned and alarmed and he puts a meant-to-be-reassuring hand on your shoulder and you are still panicking (that is your excuse) when you kiss him.
Yes, you kiss him. You crash your mouth into his, messy and clumsy and painful and ohsowrong, for a long heartbeat. It stops the words dead on his half-open and poised lips, and that is what matters, what it is meant to accomplish. (What it accomplishes is this: it turns Adam into an ethereal angel basked in blue-white light for one night, and keeps you so off-balance that you stumble into your first misstep.)
His mascara leaves spider-silk black streaks on your cheek, and you cannot be sure whether you actually said out loud in your strangled voice, darting fingers at your mouth as you stumble backwards: oh my God, I'm sorry; oh my God, what have I done.
You run. You should know better than this.
lorelei (Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.)
For the better part of a week you do not manage to catch Kris alone for longer than thirty seconds at a time, because he is assiduously avoiding you like the plague whenever he can manage it. This is not immediately obvious at all to those who do not know how blurred your personal boundaries had become, not even if they have lived right alongside you for the past however many weeks; but it is glaringly obvious to the both of you, the elephant in the room that he pretends is not there, a wilful blindness he adopts and obstinately clings to. You can only acquiesce for the time being.
(The late-night conversations in your shared room are now off-bounds, sharply curtailed by the sleep he feigns the moment you are alone. Kris holds himself still and tense with his eyes screwed shut and his face turned toward the door, away from you. The act is far from convincing, but you would never call him on it.
Well, an addendum perhaps: you would never call him on it if it was not necessary; and as he flinches away for the seventeenth time from your touch the moment the camera is safely pointed in some other direction, you think - oh yes, this is rapidly edging into the realm of necessity.)
But his avoidance is not so secure a defence as either of you are even going to pretend to believe, and there is a beseeching desperate undercurrent to the looks he does not give you and the hugs from which he extricates himself always a moment too soon. You are not heartless and you are moved by the fact that he is making such a valiant effort, but you are also not going to let him pretend that he can pretend forever.
Take this one rehearsal, then, in which you are feeling good and completely switched on: when your voice soars and holds itself steady and thrilling at a pure tenor C, a hush falls over the room. As you turn away from the piano (on which you rest your elbows) and the vocal coach (who, like everyone else, temporarily forgot to breathe) you look at him (standing with his back against the wall some fifteen feet away, knuckles white around a few sheets of music, trying and failing to not pay attention; you keep track of him). You look straight into his eyes as you hold the note - which makes his breath catch, which makes the blood rush first to then from his pale face. And nobody else notices, but you see him: you see Kris takes two stumbling steps back away from where you are by the piano, two stumbling steps toward the door.
When you look back again, one run-through later, you are not surprised to find him still there as if rooted to the ground, still pale and white-knuckled and wavering on the verge of making a break for it, still unable to pull himself away to safety.
(You are gracious and do not smile when you hear him rehearsing Falling Slowly, when you catch him looking your way before he manages to catch himself. You both know what is going to happen and thinking about it sends electricity down your spine, adds a sharper note of longing to the already multitudinous layers of your voice. Yes: you desperately want him, and you want him desperately to want you.
This is a test of your patience and his resolve, neither of which is infinite.)
But your foregone conclusion is somewhat belated in coming as Kris clings stubbornly on to the lost cause of his treacherous head-and-heart, holds himself apart from you and refuses to go down without a fight. (A fight with whom, exactly? You want to ask, though you already know that he does not have an answer.)
You catch him staring again, tight-lipped and shiny-eyed backstage after the dress rehearsal during which you threw your heart down on the stage as if you were far and beyond the competition already. Shock is evident on his face and in the lines of his body, the kind that paralyzes - his hands remain still and useless by his side, his feet fail to carry him in the other direction even as you approach. Adroitly you turn him, steer him away from the backstage crush down a deserted corridor (it seems that you do all your bonding in these corridors), and cut to the chase.
Kris does not look at you now, when you bend your head down toward him and your hands cup his face-
Say no.
He does not.
- when your thumb brushes a hard stroke across his cheekbone, when his hands come to rest against your chest, poised between a push and a pull-
Tell me to stop.
He cannot.
What he says, while his hands clench and unclench into fists around your lapel and his eyes remain immovably glued to the floor, is simply a plaintive please that you almost do not hear. And you are not entirely sure if he is begging for mercy and distance or if he is finally capitulating until he rises two inches on precarious tiptoe to press his lips to yours, surprisingly the one to make the move again, this time soft and sweet and tentative but committed.
(Yes: committed to falling as you both knew that the both of you would.)
You kiss him - completely eschewing the tentative exploratory test-drive period that has almost become a cliché, since you both know that you know damn well what you are doing and Kris, to his credit, takes it all in stride - you kiss him as if you have no other purpose in life other than to kiss him until he forgets how to breathe, until he forgets his manners and pulls at the hair at the nape of your neck, until he gasps your name into your mouth as if those two simple syllables hold the answer to all the mysteries in the world.
The wall, you know, leaves its indelible mark on him by the ringing in his ears (partly from the force of impact on the back of his head as you do your best to propel the both of you through it, partly from what you suspect to be vertigo) as you leave the imprint of your teeth against his collarbone. He says please again as your fingers descend and your lips follow, as your fingers dig into the sharp concave groove of his hipbones and press in there to hold him firm against the wall (he is going to need every bit of support he can get); repeats it until the word is rendered meaningless and redefined by the unearthed desire in his voice, his surrender jagged and inexorable like floodwater that carries with it the remnants of a futile dam.
(You can feel it, the concentric contradictions of overwhelming shame-desire-confusion; you wonder what it would be like to live so restrained a life. And his skin tastes of cinnamon and apples, votive candles and a tremor like electricity.)
But full of surprises as ever, Kris matches your purposeful aggression at every turn as you descend even further - a haphazardly-loosened button thanks to the anti-grace of his impatient hands, slightly painful tugs on your perfectly set hair as his fingers snag in their careless scramble to find any sort of solid hold; you counter with the sharp metallic note of his hastily ripped-opened zipper and the onslaught of your fingers, which know exactly what to do.
(His breath hitches, the gasp rising a good twenty decibels and barely stifled from turning into a full-out scream, all for the simple fact of skin touching skin, your lips and your voice calling to his soul. He slams a balled fist against the wall and counts out loud, his voice hitching with every swirl of your tongue: twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine oh God oh my GOD - thirty.)
The picture that the two of you make in the afterglow could have been a Grecian statue. It probably would be a nice way to capture the moment, which certainly does not last long.
When he can speak again Kris says nothing, only asks sharply an unanswerable question after half a minute of breathing at each other, asks a question to neither of you in particular - why do I ruin everything? - as he with shaking hands tries to make himself decent, pulls away instinctively from your hands that linger on his thigh and hover nearby, ready and willing to help. For the first time, the jolt of horrified recognition goes right through you too, as if his skin was a conductor of consequences. You had been so fixated on the thought of what he would gain if he just gave in (you want him and you want this and you want him to want this as much as you do) that you had quite forgotten about the inevitable catalogue of losses.
(Innocence; that was an important one - fidelity too. Would the scales balance? Your devotion and - dare you even think it - the beginnings of your no-longer-just-an-infatuation-but-something-suspiciously-like-love, on one hand: unasked for but readily given, and you know that your offer is an irresistibly tempting one. On the other hand, there was his conscience, his tortured sense of right and wrong, his whole life up to now.
You know how to make him fall; that is always the easiest part. But for the first time, you are uncertain of your chances because he is not like anyone who has readily fallen into your bed: you wonder if you know how to make him want to stay.)
While you ruminate, Kris has made himself decent; if one does not look at his lips or lift up his t-shirt to check for evidence, he could very well pass off as being "perfectly fine." Even as you wonder where you will go from here, he leans down - reverses your earlier position entirely, as you sit back and for the moment, simply marvel - cups your face in his hands and kisses you soundly (tastes himself on your lips), with reckless abandon and a tinge of hysterical desperation. (You realise then, without a shadow of a doubt, that you were never going to let each other go.)
What is it that you do to me?
Funny; you could have asked the same question of him.
hamelin (A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.)
What you feel the most keenly is the utter isolation of your plight. (Bad choice of words there, a semantic misrepresentation: "plight" casts you as the irrefutable victim, and not by any stretch of the imagination can you be called such in good faith. The choices have always been your own, and nobody put you into this position that you are so tempted to bemoan. You take ownership of your decisions; self-pity looks good on no one, after all.) You never suffered under any illusions about how ugly things might - but hopefully will not - get, but you never thought you would still be here either, burnt twice and completely overstaying your welcome, wary and taut, tired and homesick.
Nobody at home understands, and it would be the greatest injustice to ask that of them. (You are perfectly alright - not happy but not unhappy about it - with the idea of being the in-between lost boy, who cannot catch up to the contemptuous beautiful people who do not want you dancing with them into the glorious sunset, or find actual comfort in the sympathy and open arms of your loved ones, as you try your best to come to terms with being left behind.)
So, really, there is only Adam as your link to both sides now, to the competition (because he has not let go of your hand) and to reality (because he knows you, loves you, as you are). And it is Adam, of course, who traces letters into your palm (s t a y) even as you shake your head and gently extricate yourself.
You had been ready to go home after the debacle on Tuesday, mentally prepared on Wednesday night even as he feathered kisses down the length of your nose, punctuating each with an emphatic not yet. But you are by now a realist (a pessimist) who has peeked behind the emerald curtain and now stands naked and defenseless, about to be judged (judged and found wanting, leaving you to go back to a lifetime of counter-factual thinking - if only, if only - thinking about all the things you could have but did not do, would they have made a difference at all.) You cannot, will not allow yourself to draw on him for any more strength, when he might so soon be gone from you; you must not, will not share the weight of your regrets over just how you perpetuated your own undoing.
There is nothing you could have done differently, not when it comes to the competition and not when it comes to Adam. (Reprehensible or not, wrong or not, you would have fallen exactly as you did, every single time - perhaps you would not always be here, actually together in all the ways that count, but you always would have longed with every iota of your being to follow him down.) You do not dare now to hope to go any further; you chose to do what you did, and sometimes that is all you can say, all the answer that you can walk away with.
So it is with the greatest surprise that all of you hear the news on Wednesday night: it is not your time yet, and no, they are not quite sure how you did it either.
(This is the first fork in the road, a matter mostly out of your hands, a pardon you were not expecting.)
When the heady euphoria with its bittersweet overtones outlining an Allison-shaped absence finally drains out of you in the small hours of Thursday morning, you are left with a very sobering list of things which terrify you as you stare up at the ceiling (as you try to match your erratic heart to Adam’s quiet breathing), a list of tasks which you cannot even begin to tackle, a list of problems that you have no idea how to solve:
how would you survive the better part of a week away from Adam, weightless and disoriented, when you have so depended upon him to keep you tethered to something (someone) tangible;
can you even face Katy and your parents - will you even recognize them, and will they still know you;
what are you going to do now that you are completely off-script, stumbling into territory you had never even dared to think of setting foot in;
how do you let go?
(And so much more. The only things you do know are your song - your swan-song - and the fact that Adam, beside you, is the only real thing in a bedazzled dollhouse of smoke and mirrors. Small comfort, that.)
In the early morning you part ways, and in the front of the hotel you linger for a moment in the California sun, memorizing each other's long shadows. You refrain entirely from touching Adam or being touched by him when you say your temporary adieus; no kiss, no hug, no extraneous look - no sentimental souvenirs upon which you could dwell. (Your ticket is for the next stop, the penultimate stop, almost but not quite, no matter how "genius" he thinks your song choice might be; his - you cannot even fathom how far he would travel. You are trying to wean yourself off of him; you need this head start, this practice, because your time left together is very, very short.)
This time you mean it, you think as you stare down at your thumbnail (ears popping as the plane takes off); the shock of electric blue is so familiar by now that it makes your heart ache. This time you know there are no reprieves. This is the end of the road, and you must now turn around and go back home, unable to push any further onwards.
But you will not go with your head bowed, your shoulders dropped in defeat; your resignation died when your execution order did not come, your wistful half-smile turned from impending reality to averted hypothetical because somehow, you are still here.
This time will be different, you think as your feet touch Californian soil again, this time you will have no regrets, because you have come so unexpectedly far. You will sing what you want to sing, and you will love who you must love, for however much longer you have left together.
You see him first, split-instant before he sees you, and in that instant you despair of how you are ever going to let go of each other. Adam looks refreshed and recharged, with his sunglasses on his head and a latte in his hand; you almost want to turn and run in the other direction before it is too late. But then he turns to you, and he smiles.
(You smile back.
And you stop worrying then. You stop fretting. You stop constantly fighting the urge to run away.
You do what you can, and that is all you can do.)
So it is Wednesday night again, and again you are ready to say your goodbyes, this time ready with your head held high, your guitar over your back and Arkansas on your mind; yet again, they tell you: it is not yet your time.
(This is the second fork in the road, a matter of just rewards for the hard work you have silently done, the difficult decisions you have quietly borne.)
And now all hell breaks loose. Time briefly careens out of control, beyond its usual measurable boundaries and becoming almost an otherworldly entity, playing havoc with your mind. This final week you do not remember at all, it passes by so fast, yet you remember some of your night-time conversations and stolen desperate kisses as if they had been permanently burned, etched in white sulphur brilliant and blinding, into your memory. You cannot remember a single interview and you cannot forget the whorls on each of his fingertips as they trace your ribcage.
You make things up as you go, and this ignorance, the utter inability to even think about what will happen tomorrow, somehow lets you sleep better at night. The only thing you know is this: you have somehow, by grace or by providence or by something else altogether, somehow been allowed to (somehow allowed yourself to choose to try?) go all the way to the end this time. And you cannot let a single second go to waste.
On the third Wednesday, the final Wednesday, Ryan says - after a torturously long moment when all of you stop breathing, hanging forever in Limbo-
-your name.
Your name.
(This is the third and final fork in the road, a matter of inevitability, a different sort of foregone conclusion and the denouement at the end of the journey you had never before dared to undertake.)
Panicked and dazed as the world explodes, the only coherent though you can form is: this isn't the way things were supposed to go.
But it is what it is, and what it is - is real. (You try to wrap your head around the fact.) This is real, this conclusion no one could have foreseen. (This is real, this is how it ends.) When the crowd screams and Adam presses you face-chest-hip entirely to his own body, as tight as if he is trying to meld you together with the sheer force of his will and love, when you can feel his smile burn into the side of your head, you cannot help but smile a shaky smile into his shoulder in return, cling to him and think:
We write our own ending this time. (And anyway - this is just the beginning.)
eternal return (That is the tale; the rest is detail.)
You do not live happily ever after because there is no such thing as a real happily ever after ending, and that is a fact you have long since come to terms with - the fact that the tales from which you gain so much of your understanding of the world actually leaves you exceptionally ill-equipped to live in this self-same world, defined as it was by injustices and disappointments and the perpetual difficulty of trying to do what is right. There are no uniformly happy endings, and to declare that they exist is to indulge in a cop-out, to buy into the sweeping annihilatory aftermath left behind by this delusion of universal peachy-keenness; all your stories neatly concluded and carefully wrapped in ersatz gift-paper, topped ironically by a moralistic ribbon tied into a bow.
(Yours is not a story of the moral high ground and virtue rewarded, in any case. You purchase your transient moments of happiness, like everyone else, at a price high enough that you do not like looking at it too often.)
What you have in lieu of happy endings is this one endless summer, endless hours on the bus and endless packed venues, endless screams and endless posters to sign. What you have are endless cycles of the same songs being sung, the same dances being danced, the same white flashes momentarily blinding you as the same-but-different fans smile and smile and smile for this one singular moment in their lives.
What you have are the nights when you fall asleep with fingers interlaced though you lie in your different bunks (and matching cramped arms in the morning from the unnatural position), and the mornings when you are awakened together by the first rays of sunlight as you travel west to east toward an ever-earlier dawn.
What you have, night after night after night, is the chance to bask in the glory of the spotlight and the intoxicating energy of the moment. And night after night after night, you do it all over again: retell the story, and embellish it with new answers as you discover them, answers to all the implicit questions you never dared ask before; find each other's hands again, and fall in love once more.
It goes on and on and on and on.
Fin.
---
The more extended author's note;
This fic consists of very distinct sections, and an endless shuffle of the narrating responsibility from one pair of shoulders back to the other. There are two ways to read it:
1. Each section is built around an extended metaphor rooted in mythology, which serve as a framework for the progression of both the relationship and the story. In this sense, it's a canon retelling of what we already know, maybe filling in some of the blanks where I could.
2. The metaphors are literal. The characters are not behaving "as if" they had striking similarities to some myth's plot or cast of characters, but rather they are the very characters themselves. A few myths are represented; each ends when the section in question ends, and the new section introduces a new myth. In this sense, it's a retelling of canon events from a series of alternate universes.
I couldn't decide on which approach I wanted to commit to when I was writing, and I ultimately chose to stay the middle ground. Read it whichever way you want; I would love to know which you choose! (In the spirit of full disclosure, I will confess that I wrote most of this with the second option in mind, and then simply reined some of the extremities in.)
Basically, blame Neil Gaiman. This is approximately 60% his fault. Of the remainder, 30% is attributable to jehane18 for egging me on from the very beginning. I'll take the last 10% of blame for doing the actual grunt work of writing this out.
And because the entire story is basically a pastiche, a retelling of events that have already taken place, I drew inspiration very heavily from too many other sources. For those who might be interested, a brief catalogue of the aforementioned influences for this fic:
The first section, the "prologue" as it were, is stylistically drawn from A Flash-Back In Paradise, a short scene early on in F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. "Polaris" borrows heavily from Neil Gaiman's Stardust, not for plot or character or even universe-construction, but simply for the idea of an anthropomorphic star. "Aulos" again borrows from Gaiman, this time for the macabre contemporary interpretation of how the Muses can inspire and why they should be careful when interacting with those who they do inspire. "Lorelei" is of course from the Greek tradition of Sirens, which I thought almost too fitting - such that I'm sure the analogy has been made by others before me, the idea of Adam's voice that of a Siren's. "Hamelin" comes from the interesting revisionism that the Pied Piper myth has undergone over the years, especially the perspective shift in Shel Silverstein's The One Who Stayed - which takes on the voice of the boy who was left behind. The final section "Eternal Return" gets its title from the concept as it was presented by Friedrich Nietzsche, the idea that time is infinite and cyclical, and thus the universe repeats itself.
The title of the fic is from Rainer Maria Rilke's Evening, appropriately enough, and I have posted the stunning Stephen Mitchell translation above in its entirety. The quotations beside each subtitle were pretty much the working theses for each of the ensuing sections, and helped to keep me focused; in the order in which they appeared: Janet Fitch, White Oleander; Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; and Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
And that's that.
Please feel absolutely free to tear this apart, tell me I have too much time on my hands/need to get out more/am a pretentious fuckwit of the first degree. I'm perfectly serious: critique away. I knew from the beginning that this was one of those ideas constantly on the verge of buckling beneath its own weight or from the inadequacy of the execution, and even now when it is complete, I still am not sure if it didn't collapse already. If so, then as the author I do most sincerely apologise; as the unrepentant and defensive AI contestants would say: I had fun out there! - but hell, when has that ever been enough, right? ;)
author: conditionelle
pairing: Kris/Adam.
rating: R.
summary: There are no uniformly happy endings, and to declare that they exist is to indulge in a cop-out, to buy into the sweeping annihilatory aftermath left behind by this delusion of universal peachy-keenness; all your stories neatly concluded and carefully wrapped in ersatz gift-paper, topped ironically by a moralistic ribbon tied into a bow.
notes: If I were an AI contestant, Simon would be in my face about how self-indulgent this is. And he would be absolutely right. (See just how self-indulgent this is here in the extended author's note.) I suppose it doesn't really matter in the end. What this may or may not be, then, is one story told through a few myths; second-person narrative again, though the steering wheel changes hands quite a few times. Also, I live for constructive criticism. If you can tell me what worked and what didn't, what you liked and what you didn't, etc. - that would be so beyond amazing and I would be eternally grateful. Thank you!
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening
Young face, old soul, young smile, old eyes; you are a million miles from home and your homes is a page out of history, an impression in the back of your expansive mind. Your voice a transparent wraith of what it could be, incomparable to that which you had and which you still hear in your own mind, singing the timeless symphony of grace be to the heavens, tripping the cadence magnetic of lilting rhythms - poetry of a more traditional variety - and etching a laugh against clandestine slip of yet-unmarred skin; but hands, hands are what stand out above all else, tapered fingertips drawing constellations down to earth and saying, here is Gemini, you and me, the dark side of the moon and glory of infinite space. A cacophony of annihilating noise resonates between your ribcage and the ground opens beneath your feet; your understanding of descent (cyclic, unending, perpetual revisionist clock-hands drawing same-old, same-old arcs through the exhausted ennui of eternity) is implicit, and your fear of the foreseeable infinite future only goes so far as some inexorable force wrenches, pulls, emerges from your core. One more time, here it goes again.
You think you are screaming but you are not; your body descends before your voice follows.
And now you find yourself blinking up at your ceiling, settling back into your body, this foreign alien so familiar body (your always-temporary home) and feel the ether curl along your eyelashes, down to your toes, as your presence expands and the weight of gravity anchors your feet back down to the ground.
It's your story. (And yours.) It never ends the same way. (And you always meet at the crossroads.)
polaris (I would always know what time it was in California.)
In no way are his eyes remarkable until you find them, in that brief instant trained on you and only you, across a packed foyer of hundreds, each swathed in adrenaline and encumbered by luggage.
There are too many strangers' faces whose edges bleed indiscriminate into each other, faces without names. Your attention flows like a wave, snagged by nothing as you coolly and smoothly survey the sea of lowered lashes and half-captured furtive glances, eyes widened by anxiety and darkened with exhaustion - and then. Right there, near the exit sign. Your eyes meet (his doing what yours were, scanning superficially through the crowd just waiting to be stopped, but he does it with more warmth and curiosity than appraisal), and he does not start, barely pauses for an instant as he grazes your gravitational pull; miraculously sweeps past, but doubles back onto you again a moment later, unable to move on. (No one is, when you want it thus. And oh, do you ever want it this time.) The rest of his face comes together in your field of vision a half-beat later, emerges slowly as if out of a fog: angles acute and oblique, rounded by youth but sharpened by intent.
If you did not know any better you might have expected the opening strains of some lovely quiet song to come streaming through invisible speakers, because it really is that sort of a moment, with time (pretending to) standing still and the (metaphorical) camera going into soft-focus. But you have been here too many times before and you know perfectly well how reality has a tendency to take a turn for the unfortunately banal; but really, you do not need the post-production editing to make this work.
What you have instead is this flawless and fatal sequence: you maintain eye contact, you pin him right where he stands with the magnitude of your full and quite substantial attention, and then you smile. Right on cue he sways, wavering on his feet all of a sudden as if gravity (or perhaps a treacherous knee) has betrayed him, and he has to take a step forward (toward you) to steady himself. When he looks back up, his already-wide-open eyes widen even further when they catch you looking - rather, deliberately staring - at him still.
(Victory is the dazed wash of colour that flits over his cheek, the fact that he cannot even blink beneath the scrutiny yet refuses to look away. You think: he got it, he understood what just happened now, just like that; how astonishingly intuitive.)
He looks away again, breaks the eye contact with a Herculean effort; the conversation he has been drawn into by the girl next to him merely a convenient excuse. You let it slide.
You keep watching with eyes you reserve only for when you are on the stage and in the spotlight (a rule you made that you try not to break, though no one will call you on it because no one knows, you are instead bound by being precisely who you are). The blaze of your gaze is so intense that you set on fire the hairs on the backs of everyone around him, and they turn their button-blank eyes toward you in curiosity, wondering what you were trying to incinerate. Wrong, of course; the last thing you would ever wish to do would be to mar him.
When he finally looks back, after withstanding the hundred-fold magnified focus on your eyes trained on him for something like two whole minutes, you can see that he has forcibly calmed himself. His eyes (framed by thick dark lashes, direct and candid and fearless) burn right through yours (outlined by the careful curvature of kohl), centered on you like his perfect pitch on a note - though presently you do not know about his perfect pitch yet, nor do you yet know his name; you have not spoken to him and despite whatever else you can do, you cannot read minds. (Perhaps it is for the best.) Anyway, you know this already, you know who and what he is: a compass unerringly pointing straight to your heart.
When he takes that first step toward your corner of the room, it feels like falling. (You would know.)
Him into you, that is; footsteps bringing him ever-closer to you, a series of little jostling accidents - shoulders brushing, hands lingering on sleeves, the necessity for unconsciously wide berths; the very things, indeed, that define a crowd and illuminate a path - fortuities that push you into adjacent seats and a hushed conversation. Hello, he says, long lazy vowels stretched over an infectious smile. He says: I'm Kris.
The smile in return, the handshakes, the introductions perfunctory and incidental (though when you test the sound of his name on your tongue with deliberation and an intensely private smile, his eyes burn even brighter - so of course you say it again: it's nice to meet you, Kris). What you focus on is none of these things. His apple-soap-and-fresh-laundry scent is like a memory of where he was than the actual present, the warm timbre of his speaking voice like a distant echo of some faraway stretch of road upon which you can floor the gas pedal; but what you cannot stop drinking in is the unconscious total capitulation behind his eyes and his whole-body reorientation.
(He cannot take his eyes off of you, but of course you knew that already.)
Toward you, always toward you: his knees angle toward you, his shoulder too; and if you could see souls you could make an educated guess to say that his is pulling a Scarlett O'Hara eyelash-flutter right about now (should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how, and you do know, so this would be a prescription you would fill with the keenest pleasure given half a chance).
You are, of course, in control; you are in your own outrageous way the emblem of constancy and origin of reference. This is not a foreign role, and to have people react thusly - it has not been thrilling in a long while already. But to say that you are not moved, that you with clinical interest and cold objectivity watched him fall (toward you, into you) - well, that would be an absolute lie.
Observant though you are, by need and by nature, you do not notice the silver band until it is too late and he has set out, resolute, straight for the North Pole. But you are too human, too selfish, and fallen too far to regret it.
aulos (I am beautiful. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?)
Adam is smiling when you open the case, and so astonishingly gleeful when he sees you pick up your guitar for the first time that you almost wonder if he is mocking you. (You know, of course, that he is not; but still, you are not accustomed to such sharp undiluted enthusiasm directed at you - it has been a long time.) So you nod, because what else can you do, what else would you want to do?
The first quiet moment that the two of you have together (actual privacy being too much to ask for), you sit together with your backs against the wall in a relatively quieter corner of a corridor. He says: play something. You ask him what he wants, and he shrugs. Anything, whatever you want.
So you do that, you play whatever you want, and what you want to play is - a simple melody that shifts smoothly between 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time, quiet and lovely and familiar. You keep your eyes closed, only play the song and do not sing; that might hit a little too close to home, considering that the current setting in which you find yourself is that of a competition.
When you finish playing you simply stop and enjoy the silence, cradling your guitar in your arms with your eyes still closed. Adam does not say anything, and the two of you sit in companionable silence for one second, two seconds, three seconds, four; just as it was beginning to get a little stifling, he finally exhales forcibly. Blackbird, wow, he says. (Your ears turn red, you know he can see it, and your eyes remain closed.) Then he adds, a whisper in your ear: now play Yesterday.
It takes you a moment too long to laugh, as your eyes fly open and seek out his, to be reassured by the joking glimmer you see there. You find it readily enough; then you can smile back at him and comply. He sings this time and you harmonize. You sound glorious together.
Later, in this exact position once more but at another stage of the competition, Adam tells you - with almost a note of awe in his voice - that it's ridiculous how easy you make it all look even when he knows from first-hand experience that it really, really is not; how you make him forget, for whole stretches of time, the certainty of his own past and experiences. You want to laugh or blush but you just shrug instead, and strum another chord. Halfway through deflecting the compliment - you have had a lot of experience doing this over the years, you do it best when you can accompany yourself and hide in the shadow of a melody line - he cuts in with a shake of his head, flatly telling you to please shut up in the best way possible. So you do that too, let your callused fingertips over your guitar strings do all the talking; they find the words that never had a chance to cross your lips, and soon enough the two of you are quiet again, knee to companionable knee in the music-bridged silence.
(You wonder, watching him tear up the stage from the wings one Tuesday night, if maybe he is like you, a creature whose blood is interlaced with the music you live and breathe, more potent and intoxicating than aqua vitae. Maybe you could ask, though the question would sound delirious, strange and affected. Then again, you have spent late nights talking of stranger things, and you are not an unworldly child after all, you have accrued enough tact over the years that you know you can pull it off.
But you do not actually wish to know the answer to this so-revealing question, if you were to be perfectly honest, so you let it rest on the tip of your tongue like bubbles from a glass of freshly poured champagne. And you keep singing, keep playing, week to week to week. All of you do just that.)
People do it a little bit more, though, when they are near you. It was always the case but it did not become this glaringly obvious until you are being as closely scrutinized as you now were, held beneath the microscope by a nation in thrall to the mythology. People are doing spectacular things they did not realise they were capable of, hitting beautiful notes they always believed were out of their ranges; they chalk these astonishing new accomplishments up to providential strokes of genius or divine inspiration or the smile and grace of a wayward muse (or sometimes even hard work!), neglecting to notice your presence. You could care less, so long as they flourished and were happier for it, you were happy too. It all amounts to the same thing anyway. You never ever egregiously courted the attention you have neither urgent need nor real desire for; certainly you were not about to start now.
Intentionally, anyway - accidentally is perhaps a different matter altogether.
Adam notices (of course he would) and shoots the question at you at point-blank range out of the blue one day, just what you were playing at. This competition was hopefully not going to get ugly, but spending this much time every week bringing out the best in everyone else and never taking any credit - what gives?
When confronted like this (you have never been confronted over this, in such a direct manner) you panic in an unbelievable way as the weight of the question drags your stomach right down to the centre of the earth. You are all tachycardia and dilated pupils zero-to-sixty in one-point-three seconds flat, normally steady fingers fluttering nervously to grasp air in the absence of an instrument (half your vocabulary gone). There is no answer, you have no words with which to answer him as you suddenly find yourself on trial for something you never thought of as a crime, simply because - you want to tell Adam that you do know this all too well - what you do best is at odds with all senses of self-preservation. But you do not have the words (words were never your thing) and so you panic, and he looks at you with eyes that grow both concerned and alarmed and he puts a meant-to-be-reassuring hand on your shoulder and you are still panicking (that is your excuse) when you kiss him.
Yes, you kiss him. You crash your mouth into his, messy and clumsy and painful and ohsowrong, for a long heartbeat. It stops the words dead on his half-open and poised lips, and that is what matters, what it is meant to accomplish. (What it accomplishes is this: it turns Adam into an ethereal angel basked in blue-white light for one night, and keeps you so off-balance that you stumble into your first misstep.)
His mascara leaves spider-silk black streaks on your cheek, and you cannot be sure whether you actually said out loud in your strangled voice, darting fingers at your mouth as you stumble backwards: oh my God, I'm sorry; oh my God, what have I done.
You run. You should know better than this.
lorelei (Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.)
For the better part of a week you do not manage to catch Kris alone for longer than thirty seconds at a time, because he is assiduously avoiding you like the plague whenever he can manage it. This is not immediately obvious at all to those who do not know how blurred your personal boundaries had become, not even if they have lived right alongside you for the past however many weeks; but it is glaringly obvious to the both of you, the elephant in the room that he pretends is not there, a wilful blindness he adopts and obstinately clings to. You can only acquiesce for the time being.
(The late-night conversations in your shared room are now off-bounds, sharply curtailed by the sleep he feigns the moment you are alone. Kris holds himself still and tense with his eyes screwed shut and his face turned toward the door, away from you. The act is far from convincing, but you would never call him on it.
Well, an addendum perhaps: you would never call him on it if it was not necessary; and as he flinches away for the seventeenth time from your touch the moment the camera is safely pointed in some other direction, you think - oh yes, this is rapidly edging into the realm of necessity.)
But his avoidance is not so secure a defence as either of you are even going to pretend to believe, and there is a beseeching desperate undercurrent to the looks he does not give you and the hugs from which he extricates himself always a moment too soon. You are not heartless and you are moved by the fact that he is making such a valiant effort, but you are also not going to let him pretend that he can pretend forever.
Take this one rehearsal, then, in which you are feeling good and completely switched on: when your voice soars and holds itself steady and thrilling at a pure tenor C, a hush falls over the room. As you turn away from the piano (on which you rest your elbows) and the vocal coach (who, like everyone else, temporarily forgot to breathe) you look at him (standing with his back against the wall some fifteen feet away, knuckles white around a few sheets of music, trying and failing to not pay attention; you keep track of him). You look straight into his eyes as you hold the note - which makes his breath catch, which makes the blood rush first to then from his pale face. And nobody else notices, but you see him: you see Kris takes two stumbling steps back away from where you are by the piano, two stumbling steps toward the door.
When you look back again, one run-through later, you are not surprised to find him still there as if rooted to the ground, still pale and white-knuckled and wavering on the verge of making a break for it, still unable to pull himself away to safety.
(You are gracious and do not smile when you hear him rehearsing Falling Slowly, when you catch him looking your way before he manages to catch himself. You both know what is going to happen and thinking about it sends electricity down your spine, adds a sharper note of longing to the already multitudinous layers of your voice. Yes: you desperately want him, and you want him desperately to want you.
This is a test of your patience and his resolve, neither of which is infinite.)
But your foregone conclusion is somewhat belated in coming as Kris clings stubbornly on to the lost cause of his treacherous head-and-heart, holds himself apart from you and refuses to go down without a fight. (A fight with whom, exactly? You want to ask, though you already know that he does not have an answer.)
You catch him staring again, tight-lipped and shiny-eyed backstage after the dress rehearsal during which you threw your heart down on the stage as if you were far and beyond the competition already. Shock is evident on his face and in the lines of his body, the kind that paralyzes - his hands remain still and useless by his side, his feet fail to carry him in the other direction even as you approach. Adroitly you turn him, steer him away from the backstage crush down a deserted corridor (it seems that you do all your bonding in these corridors), and cut to the chase.
Kris does not look at you now, when you bend your head down toward him and your hands cup his face-
Say no.
He does not.
- when your thumb brushes a hard stroke across his cheekbone, when his hands come to rest against your chest, poised between a push and a pull-
Tell me to stop.
He cannot.
What he says, while his hands clench and unclench into fists around your lapel and his eyes remain immovably glued to the floor, is simply a plaintive please that you almost do not hear. And you are not entirely sure if he is begging for mercy and distance or if he is finally capitulating until he rises two inches on precarious tiptoe to press his lips to yours, surprisingly the one to make the move again, this time soft and sweet and tentative but committed.
(Yes: committed to falling as you both knew that the both of you would.)
You kiss him - completely eschewing the tentative exploratory test-drive period that has almost become a cliché, since you both know that you know damn well what you are doing and Kris, to his credit, takes it all in stride - you kiss him as if you have no other purpose in life other than to kiss him until he forgets how to breathe, until he forgets his manners and pulls at the hair at the nape of your neck, until he gasps your name into your mouth as if those two simple syllables hold the answer to all the mysteries in the world.
The wall, you know, leaves its indelible mark on him by the ringing in his ears (partly from the force of impact on the back of his head as you do your best to propel the both of you through it, partly from what you suspect to be vertigo) as you leave the imprint of your teeth against his collarbone. He says please again as your fingers descend and your lips follow, as your fingers dig into the sharp concave groove of his hipbones and press in there to hold him firm against the wall (he is going to need every bit of support he can get); repeats it until the word is rendered meaningless and redefined by the unearthed desire in his voice, his surrender jagged and inexorable like floodwater that carries with it the remnants of a futile dam.
(You can feel it, the concentric contradictions of overwhelming shame-desire-confusion; you wonder what it would be like to live so restrained a life. And his skin tastes of cinnamon and apples, votive candles and a tremor like electricity.)
But full of surprises as ever, Kris matches your purposeful aggression at every turn as you descend even further - a haphazardly-loosened button thanks to the anti-grace of his impatient hands, slightly painful tugs on your perfectly set hair as his fingers snag in their careless scramble to find any sort of solid hold; you counter with the sharp metallic note of his hastily ripped-opened zipper and the onslaught of your fingers, which know exactly what to do.
(His breath hitches, the gasp rising a good twenty decibels and barely stifled from turning into a full-out scream, all for the simple fact of skin touching skin, your lips and your voice calling to his soul. He slams a balled fist against the wall and counts out loud, his voice hitching with every swirl of your tongue: twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine oh God oh my GOD - thirty.)
The picture that the two of you make in the afterglow could have been a Grecian statue. It probably would be a nice way to capture the moment, which certainly does not last long.
When he can speak again Kris says nothing, only asks sharply an unanswerable question after half a minute of breathing at each other, asks a question to neither of you in particular - why do I ruin everything? - as he with shaking hands tries to make himself decent, pulls away instinctively from your hands that linger on his thigh and hover nearby, ready and willing to help. For the first time, the jolt of horrified recognition goes right through you too, as if his skin was a conductor of consequences. You had been so fixated on the thought of what he would gain if he just gave in (you want him and you want this and you want him to want this as much as you do) that you had quite forgotten about the inevitable catalogue of losses.
(Innocence; that was an important one - fidelity too. Would the scales balance? Your devotion and - dare you even think it - the beginnings of your no-longer-just-an-infatuation-but-something-suspiciously-like-love, on one hand: unasked for but readily given, and you know that your offer is an irresistibly tempting one. On the other hand, there was his conscience, his tortured sense of right and wrong, his whole life up to now.
You know how to make him fall; that is always the easiest part. But for the first time, you are uncertain of your chances because he is not like anyone who has readily fallen into your bed: you wonder if you know how to make him want to stay.)
While you ruminate, Kris has made himself decent; if one does not look at his lips or lift up his t-shirt to check for evidence, he could very well pass off as being "perfectly fine." Even as you wonder where you will go from here, he leans down - reverses your earlier position entirely, as you sit back and for the moment, simply marvel - cups your face in his hands and kisses you soundly (tastes himself on your lips), with reckless abandon and a tinge of hysterical desperation. (You realise then, without a shadow of a doubt, that you were never going to let each other go.)
What is it that you do to me?
Funny; you could have asked the same question of him.
hamelin (A shift, another shift, had taken place. Somehow it was up to me now, and I wanted to know why.)
What you feel the most keenly is the utter isolation of your plight. (Bad choice of words there, a semantic misrepresentation: "plight" casts you as the irrefutable victim, and not by any stretch of the imagination can you be called such in good faith. The choices have always been your own, and nobody put you into this position that you are so tempted to bemoan. You take ownership of your decisions; self-pity looks good on no one, after all.) You never suffered under any illusions about how ugly things might - but hopefully will not - get, but you never thought you would still be here either, burnt twice and completely overstaying your welcome, wary and taut, tired and homesick.
Nobody at home understands, and it would be the greatest injustice to ask that of them. (You are perfectly alright - not happy but not unhappy about it - with the idea of being the in-between lost boy, who cannot catch up to the contemptuous beautiful people who do not want you dancing with them into the glorious sunset, or find actual comfort in the sympathy and open arms of your loved ones, as you try your best to come to terms with being left behind.)
So, really, there is only Adam as your link to both sides now, to the competition (because he has not let go of your hand) and to reality (because he knows you, loves you, as you are). And it is Adam, of course, who traces letters into your palm (s t a y) even as you shake your head and gently extricate yourself.
You had been ready to go home after the debacle on Tuesday, mentally prepared on Wednesday night even as he feathered kisses down the length of your nose, punctuating each with an emphatic not yet. But you are by now a realist (a pessimist) who has peeked behind the emerald curtain and now stands naked and defenseless, about to be judged (judged and found wanting, leaving you to go back to a lifetime of counter-factual thinking - if only, if only - thinking about all the things you could have but did not do, would they have made a difference at all.) You cannot, will not allow yourself to draw on him for any more strength, when he might so soon be gone from you; you must not, will not share the weight of your regrets over just how you perpetuated your own undoing.
There is nothing you could have done differently, not when it comes to the competition and not when it comes to Adam. (Reprehensible or not, wrong or not, you would have fallen exactly as you did, every single time - perhaps you would not always be here, actually together in all the ways that count, but you always would have longed with every iota of your being to follow him down.) You do not dare now to hope to go any further; you chose to do what you did, and sometimes that is all you can say, all the answer that you can walk away with.
So it is with the greatest surprise that all of you hear the news on Wednesday night: it is not your time yet, and no, they are not quite sure how you did it either.
(This is the first fork in the road, a matter mostly out of your hands, a pardon you were not expecting.)
When the heady euphoria with its bittersweet overtones outlining an Allison-shaped absence finally drains out of you in the small hours of Thursday morning, you are left with a very sobering list of things which terrify you as you stare up at the ceiling (as you try to match your erratic heart to Adam’s quiet breathing), a list of tasks which you cannot even begin to tackle, a list of problems that you have no idea how to solve:
how would you survive the better part of a week away from Adam, weightless and disoriented, when you have so depended upon him to keep you tethered to something (someone) tangible;
can you even face Katy and your parents - will you even recognize them, and will they still know you;
what are you going to do now that you are completely off-script, stumbling into territory you had never even dared to think of setting foot in;
how do you let go?
(And so much more. The only things you do know are your song - your swan-song - and the fact that Adam, beside you, is the only real thing in a bedazzled dollhouse of smoke and mirrors. Small comfort, that.)
In the early morning you part ways, and in the front of the hotel you linger for a moment in the California sun, memorizing each other's long shadows. You refrain entirely from touching Adam or being touched by him when you say your temporary adieus; no kiss, no hug, no extraneous look - no sentimental souvenirs upon which you could dwell. (Your ticket is for the next stop, the penultimate stop, almost but not quite, no matter how "genius" he thinks your song choice might be; his - you cannot even fathom how far he would travel. You are trying to wean yourself off of him; you need this head start, this practice, because your time left together is very, very short.)
This time you mean it, you think as you stare down at your thumbnail (ears popping as the plane takes off); the shock of electric blue is so familiar by now that it makes your heart ache. This time you know there are no reprieves. This is the end of the road, and you must now turn around and go back home, unable to push any further onwards.
But you will not go with your head bowed, your shoulders dropped in defeat; your resignation died when your execution order did not come, your wistful half-smile turned from impending reality to averted hypothetical because somehow, you are still here.
This time will be different, you think as your feet touch Californian soil again, this time you will have no regrets, because you have come so unexpectedly far. You will sing what you want to sing, and you will love who you must love, for however much longer you have left together.
You see him first, split-instant before he sees you, and in that instant you despair of how you are ever going to let go of each other. Adam looks refreshed and recharged, with his sunglasses on his head and a latte in his hand; you almost want to turn and run in the other direction before it is too late. But then he turns to you, and he smiles.
(You smile back.
And you stop worrying then. You stop fretting. You stop constantly fighting the urge to run away.
You do what you can, and that is all you can do.)
So it is Wednesday night again, and again you are ready to say your goodbyes, this time ready with your head held high, your guitar over your back and Arkansas on your mind; yet again, they tell you: it is not yet your time.
(This is the second fork in the road, a matter of just rewards for the hard work you have silently done, the difficult decisions you have quietly borne.)
And now all hell breaks loose. Time briefly careens out of control, beyond its usual measurable boundaries and becoming almost an otherworldly entity, playing havoc with your mind. This final week you do not remember at all, it passes by so fast, yet you remember some of your night-time conversations and stolen desperate kisses as if they had been permanently burned, etched in white sulphur brilliant and blinding, into your memory. You cannot remember a single interview and you cannot forget the whorls on each of his fingertips as they trace your ribcage.
You make things up as you go, and this ignorance, the utter inability to even think about what will happen tomorrow, somehow lets you sleep better at night. The only thing you know is this: you have somehow, by grace or by providence or by something else altogether, somehow been allowed to (somehow allowed yourself to choose to try?) go all the way to the end this time. And you cannot let a single second go to waste.
On the third Wednesday, the final Wednesday, Ryan says - after a torturously long moment when all of you stop breathing, hanging forever in Limbo-
-your name.
Your name.
(This is the third and final fork in the road, a matter of inevitability, a different sort of foregone conclusion and the denouement at the end of the journey you had never before dared to undertake.)
Panicked and dazed as the world explodes, the only coherent though you can form is: this isn't the way things were supposed to go.
But it is what it is, and what it is - is real. (You try to wrap your head around the fact.) This is real, this conclusion no one could have foreseen. (This is real, this is how it ends.) When the crowd screams and Adam presses you face-chest-hip entirely to his own body, as tight as if he is trying to meld you together with the sheer force of his will and love, when you can feel his smile burn into the side of your head, you cannot help but smile a shaky smile into his shoulder in return, cling to him and think:
We write our own ending this time. (And anyway - this is just the beginning.)
eternal return (That is the tale; the rest is detail.)
You do not live happily ever after because there is no such thing as a real happily ever after ending, and that is a fact you have long since come to terms with - the fact that the tales from which you gain so much of your understanding of the world actually leaves you exceptionally ill-equipped to live in this self-same world, defined as it was by injustices and disappointments and the perpetual difficulty of trying to do what is right. There are no uniformly happy endings, and to declare that they exist is to indulge in a cop-out, to buy into the sweeping annihilatory aftermath left behind by this delusion of universal peachy-keenness; all your stories neatly concluded and carefully wrapped in ersatz gift-paper, topped ironically by a moralistic ribbon tied into a bow.
(Yours is not a story of the moral high ground and virtue rewarded, in any case. You purchase your transient moments of happiness, like everyone else, at a price high enough that you do not like looking at it too often.)
What you have in lieu of happy endings is this one endless summer, endless hours on the bus and endless packed venues, endless screams and endless posters to sign. What you have are endless cycles of the same songs being sung, the same dances being danced, the same white flashes momentarily blinding you as the same-but-different fans smile and smile and smile for this one singular moment in their lives.
What you have are the nights when you fall asleep with fingers interlaced though you lie in your different bunks (and matching cramped arms in the morning from the unnatural position), and the mornings when you are awakened together by the first rays of sunlight as you travel west to east toward an ever-earlier dawn.
What you have, night after night after night, is the chance to bask in the glory of the spotlight and the intoxicating energy of the moment. And night after night after night, you do it all over again: retell the story, and embellish it with new answers as you discover them, answers to all the implicit questions you never dared ask before; find each other's hands again, and fall in love once more.
It goes on and on and on and on.
Fin.
---
The more extended author's note;
This fic consists of very distinct sections, and an endless shuffle of the narrating responsibility from one pair of shoulders back to the other. There are two ways to read it:
1. Each section is built around an extended metaphor rooted in mythology, which serve as a framework for the progression of both the relationship and the story. In this sense, it's a canon retelling of what we already know, maybe filling in some of the blanks where I could.
2. The metaphors are literal. The characters are not behaving "as if" they had striking similarities to some myth's plot or cast of characters, but rather they are the very characters themselves. A few myths are represented; each ends when the section in question ends, and the new section introduces a new myth. In this sense, it's a retelling of canon events from a series of alternate universes.
I couldn't decide on which approach I wanted to commit to when I was writing, and I ultimately chose to stay the middle ground. Read it whichever way you want; I would love to know which you choose! (In the spirit of full disclosure, I will confess that I wrote most of this with the second option in mind, and then simply reined some of the extremities in.)
Basically, blame Neil Gaiman. This is approximately 60% his fault. Of the remainder, 30% is attributable to jehane18 for egging me on from the very beginning. I'll take the last 10% of blame for doing the actual grunt work of writing this out.
And because the entire story is basically a pastiche, a retelling of events that have already taken place, I drew inspiration very heavily from too many other sources. For those who might be interested, a brief catalogue of the aforementioned influences for this fic:
The first section, the "prologue" as it were, is stylistically drawn from A Flash-Back In Paradise, a short scene early on in F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. "Polaris" borrows heavily from Neil Gaiman's Stardust, not for plot or character or even universe-construction, but simply for the idea of an anthropomorphic star. "Aulos" again borrows from Gaiman, this time for the macabre contemporary interpretation of how the Muses can inspire and why they should be careful when interacting with those who they do inspire. "Lorelei" is of course from the Greek tradition of Sirens, which I thought almost too fitting - such that I'm sure the analogy has been made by others before me, the idea of Adam's voice that of a Siren's. "Hamelin" comes from the interesting revisionism that the Pied Piper myth has undergone over the years, especially the perspective shift in Shel Silverstein's The One Who Stayed - which takes on the voice of the boy who was left behind. The final section "Eternal Return" gets its title from the concept as it was presented by Friedrich Nietzsche, the idea that time is infinite and cyclical, and thus the universe repeats itself.
The title of the fic is from Rainer Maria Rilke's Evening, appropriately enough, and I have posted the stunning Stephen Mitchell translation above in its entirety. The quotations beside each subtitle were pretty much the working theses for each of the ensuing sections, and helped to keep me focused; in the order in which they appeared: Janet Fitch, White Oleander; Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; and Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
And that's that.
Please feel absolutely free to tear this apart, tell me I have too much time on my hands/need to get out more/am a pretentious fuckwit of the first degree. I'm perfectly serious: critique away. I knew from the beginning that this was one of those ideas constantly on the verge of buckling beneath its own weight or from the inadequacy of the execution, and even now when it is complete, I still am not sure if it didn't collapse already. If so, then as the author I do most sincerely apologise; as the unrepentant and defensive AI contestants would say: I had fun out there! - but hell, when has that ever been enough, right? ;)