(BDS) Heliotrope 1/?, Smecker
Heliotrope 1/?
by Dien
Rating: PG-13 for language, violence, Greenly's ego; later chapters may go higher
Disclaimer: Troy owns Smecker and all other BDS characters. Characters from other fandoms who appear belong to their respective creators as well. No money made. Yada. Yada. Yada. "Porphyria's Lover" isn't mine either, belongs to Robert Browning.
Summary: Hm, well, trying not to give too much away right off the bat-- Smecker is assaulted in a bad part of Boston. There are... repercussions. This will eventually be cross-over fic with another fandom, which, if I say what, will also give things away. Pooh. For what it's worth, this is total crack!fic, and should be treated as such.
Feedback: Is always greatly appreciated.
***
O where is our Mother of Peace
Nodding her purple hood?
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood.
I would that the death-pale deer
Had come through the mountain side,
And trampled the mountain away,
And drunk up the murmuring tide;
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood,
And our Mother of Peace has forgot me
Under her purple hood.
- Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings, W.B. Yeats
***
chapter one: till the 4th of July
Paul Smecker exhaled a line of cigarette smoke into the night air, his eyes restlessly scanning the sidewalk. This hour of the a.m., even most of the bums had found places to sleep under bridges or cardboard boxes. On the other side of the street, there was a man staggering home from last call, singing to himself, or at least that's what Smecker supposed the noises he was making could be construed to be.
Smecker really did hate this part of Boston, alternating pubs and churches, pubs and churches, nothing else it seemed except for the damn cheap tenement housing. In the shadow of Our Mother of Peace (or Our Lady of Guinness, or what-the-hell-ever the stone-fronted and stained-glass monstrosity he'd parked behind was) he'd felt the hostility in the very fricken' asphalt, grinding against his mixed English-German bones with a surly resentment. The city always knew, where you belonged, where you didn't.
They were late. The FBI agent's lips pursed in annoyance as he checked the dial of his watch again. Goddamn Irish pricks with their goddamn bonhomie that'd have him reluctantly forgiving their tardiness the instant they showed up. Bastards would probably be drunk, too, grins on their faces as they lurched towards him on the sidewalk, arms slung around each other's shoulders. Murphy's worn jeans would probably be slung low on his hips too--
Smecker scowled the thought away and took another drag on his cigarette, resisting the urge to cross his arms with impatience. Okay, it wasn't as if he'd be sleeping at this hour yet anyways, but Christ, there were things he could be doing with his time. Greenly, for instance; if he were desperate enough to subject himself to rampant stupidity and Greenly’s continual protests of heterosexuality for the sake of the semi-weekly fuck.
There was a noise behind him, maybe feet scuffing the pavement, and Paul turned, but the twins were not in sight. He glared at a piece of newspaper being blown across the asphalt as if it were personally responsible for his life and the problems therein. The drunk was long gone. Smecker tossed his cigarette to the ground and shoved his hands in his coat pockets against the light wind. It was cool for a summer night.
The attack came with no warning at all. One moment, nothing but the empty windy street, and in the next a blow to the back of his head that sent him straight to his knees. He hadn't even processed it when he was hauled back to his feet by his coat's collar. A sharp pain cut into his neck, and the disjointed thought ran through the dizzy spinning that the mugger had a knife but didn't know how to use it, because you held a knife at the throat, not the side of the neck--
Smecker struggled, and the knife sank in deeper, maybe a full inch into his skin, and he fought the ringing in his skull with the knowledge that he could very easily die here. Fight. Fight, get his hand back there and claw the bastard's eyes, get the hand at his neck away-- his hands slapped against a shoulder, a coat, a head, and his skull was still ringing like a carillon of bells at high Mass. His hand found his gun under his jacket, the holster at the small of his back, and he didn't have to think because his body knew what to do. Draw-safety-reachback-andfire, smooth as a sonata. Someone grunted, not him, but the cutting into his neck didn't ease up. He pulled the trigger again, not comprehending, then the gun was knocked from his hand. The pain intensified, hard and throbbing. Smecker's forensic mind calculated the jugular was being severed.
Goddamn amateurs. You were supposed to slit the throat from the front. The only clear and coherent thought he could manage was indignant annoyance that this dumb shit couldn't even kill him right.
There was something pressing against his face, a little late because if he was going to scream, he would have done so already-- cold and wet-- no sense-- didn't make any sense, but rational thought was fading, running out with the blood from his neck, and Paul felt his mouth open to gasp for air. Copper bitterness on his tongue instead, sharp like gunsmoke, and it should have cleared his mind but things just got darker, hazier.
Somewhere someone was yelling. Not him...
Sonuvabitch, get th' fuck off him, and retorts, faint through the haze, and a panicked Connor, he's not fallin' he's not fucken fallin' and more shots. The knife at his throat jerked, and there was more pain, and the cold thing pressed into his face dropped away. He could breathe again. Breathe in air, cold and raw and clean, and Smecker watched the ground spin up to meet him knowing the impact was going to hurt, but when it came he didn't feel a thing.
***
White. White light... Smecker hoped to Christ this wasn't the fabled tunnel light, because hell, blindsided in South Boston, what a shitty way to go. But slowly he began to process: the smell of antiseptic and linen, the irritating twinge of an IV in the forearm, the cottony aftertaste of medicine. In twenty years with the Bureau, he'd woken up in hospitals just enough times to recognize he was in one now.
Well, shit.
He supposed it was better than dying in a botched mugging, but fuck, he'd had nights of delirium tremens that felt better than this, and his neck was goddamn killing him. The docs could have given him some fricken anesthesia, Smecker thought wearily, and opened his eyes.
He had trouble focusing. Things were blurry and sickly-pale in the fluorescent lights, and with a mingled sense of panic and exasperation Smecker realized he couldn't even raise his head to peer around the room. Goddamn. He gave up and closed his eyes; his headache increased exponentially with them open.
The beeping of the hospital equipment seemed shrill and preternaturally loud, but even it couldn't fight the influence of industrial-strength exhaustion, and he slipped back into unconsciousness.
When he woke again, the overhead light was off, and he accepted that with muddled pleasure for a moment, making more of an effort to get his bearings this time. The door creaked open as he was just managing to decipher the time from the blurry, indistinct clock on the wall. A smudge of white with dark on top came near to the bed, had to be a person in a doctor's coat, and a voice with a gently-Pakistani accent said, "Good afternoon, Mister Smecker; I see you are awake. How are you feeling?"
Agent, Agent Smecker. He liked the frustration; it made him feel like himself, to have something to bitch at.
"You the doctor?" he croaked, wincing at how weak his own voice sounded, and the smudge presumably nodded. "Yes, I'm Dr. Chadrapur. I'm sure you're still very tired; you'd lost a lot of blood before you reached the emergency room, but if you're up to my asking a few questions--"
"Who brought me in?" he managed through the haze in his mind-- he had a vague memory of Irish voices accompanying him down into the dark. Surely those dumb shits hadn't gone to a hospital with him, but he guessed if he'd been bad enough off... The doctor was wearing a cheap aftershave he thought he’d smelled on Duffy before.
There was the sound of rustling paper, then Chadrapur's voice said, "...We have here a Michael Greenly. Now, if you can tell me how you're feeling, Mister Smecker--"
"Crappy," he gurgled. "Don't hospitals still... believe in painkillers... or has that fallen before the advance of holistic hippie shit... as well?"
There was a brief pause; it sounded like Chadrapur was smiling when he spoke again. "No, Mister Smecker; we still appreciate anesthetic. Are you in pain, then?"
"Do bears shit in the--" Smecker broke into a fit of coughing that ended his attempt at clever repartee for the moment. When it eased up, he tried focusing on the doctor's face again, the smudge gradually resolving itself into a man wearing glasses and a concerned expression.
"Should I get you some water, Mister Smecker?"
He didn't trust himself to try and speak again, so he nodded. His mouth felt dry and parched, the medicinal taste still strong on his tongue. The doctor returned with water and helped him to drink it. It helped, but not enough.
"...it is odd, Mister Smecker, that you should be feeling pain," he said after a moment. "We have you on a rather strong analgesic at the moment... is the discomfort localized, or general?"
"My neck," Smecker said in exasperation, then the dizziness got too much and he stopped listening to the doctor's questions. He felt nauseous, but intellectually knew there'd be nothing in his stomach to lose, so he fought the urge down. The room blurred comfortably, in and out with the white light, and there were more smudges who came and went and spoke. Voices slipping in and out like hunting for a station on a ham radio... silence to noise, noise to silence...
...tient's body rejecting transfusion regardless of typ.... not consistent wi...
...unusual white cell count... doesn't seem to be... condition seems stable but...
...dosage upped... test results indic...
Eventually it all rolled together into meaningless soft babble, overwritten by the piercing, continuous beep of the monitors. There were flickers of image and sound, and one vividly sharp moment-- Greenly's kicked-puppy eyes staring at him with half-worry, half-incomprehension-- but mostly it was just pervasive nausea and the unfading ache in his neck. Morphine if you have to, you bastards, was the one clear thought his mind kept returning to.
***
He woke, the most completely he had in days, and almost closed his eyes immediately. His vision was swimming terribly, shot to fucking hell, and his hearing couldn't pick up on anything other than the beeping. So rhythmic, just... just like a heartbeat. That's what it was. His heartbeat, flickering away on a screen somewhere nearby... Paul tried to orient himself on something familiar: annoyance. What the fuck was wrong with the doctors, because he wasn't so out of it that he didn't know he'd been here too long, why the fuck weren't they doing their job and making him better...?
He refused to close his eyes. Keep them open until he saw something he could focus on or yell at. Smecker argued with the haze that overlaid everything, because he was well aware he had perfect eyesight, so there was no reason his eyes shouldn't be cooperating. There. There, the pasty blotch, that was his hand, and that red line bright against his skin, that was-- the I.V.? Didn't seem right, and his gaze flickered right, found his other forearm. Ah, yes, there was the intravenous feeding drip. His eyes moved back to the red.
Not food. Blood, he realized, blood transfusion, but that didn't make sense either. He'd been here long enough, surely, that they should have recouped whatever blood loss he'd sustained. Incompetent shits. He couldn’t take his eyes from the red line, which was sharp and crisp in his vision like nothing else in the room. Smecker's eyes traveled up the line, and hit a patch of solid brilliant color. The blood pack for the drip.
It was so goddamned bright. And it looked so clean and sharp-edged, like he was seeing every line of the bag through a magnifying glass, not with his drugged-out marvelous blurry trip-vision, and Smecker reached up despite the fact that he hadn't been able to lift his damn head from the pillow, and the plastic was slick and cool under his fingertips. His fingers twitched against the bag, and flash-flicker of memory arose in the back of his throat, something unpleasantly cool in his mouth, copper-bite. Gagging at the taste; a nausea that hadn't left since.
He watched his fingers lift the bag from the hook and bring it closer, and every train of linear thought shut quietly down. Nothing in his mind at all but contemplation of how splendidly red it was, like color in a painting by one of the old masters. Italian red, wine-red, Titian red, vermilion--
There was a chemical undertaste to the contents of the bag, anticoagulants his mind supplied, but that was faint, and didn't really interfere with the amazing flavor.
***
"Is this Michael Greenly?"
"Detective Greenly, yeah. What can I do for you?" Greenly leaned back in his chair with a donut from the box Duffy had brought in. Crumbs from the donut landed on top of the reports on his desk, and he winced before remembering Smecker wasn't at the precinct to bitch him out for it.
"Ah, yes, detective-- your... colleague, Paul Smecker? He--"
Greenly sat up quickly enough to give himself a minor case of whiplash. "Is he awake?"
"Well, yes. Yes, he... he felt much better this morning, and he's requested that he be released, but we can't do that until you authorize it, as you're the one who brought him in and he can't check himself out."
Greenly blinked at the novel experience of having, for once, power over Special Agent to the FBI Paul Smecker, then stuffed part of the donut into his mouth to keep himself from grinning. He washed it partially down with some lukewarm coffee, then mumbled, "Is he-- I mean, is he okay to go home? What do the doctors say?"
The voice of the nurse, or whatever she was, sounded hesitant. "Well-- um-- I think the doctors would like... well, he's fine. The picture of health, in fact. Which is I think why they'd like him to stay a little longer, but he's ready to go home if you ask me. And the rest of the nursing staff." There was a just-audible tone of pleading in her voice, and Greenly almost coughed on what was left of his donut, imagining Smecker making the nurses' lives hell.
He had to drive to the hospital to get Smecker released, and Dolly and Duffy thought that was hi-fucking-larious, him as Smecker's practical next-of-kin. He told them to fuck off with the sourness that invariably rubbed off on you if you spent too much time with the FBI agent. Damnit, he should have told Murphy and Connor to take him to emergency themselves, but yeah, couldn't really do that, so--
Smecker was sitting in the chair at the nurses' station when Greenly arrived, arms crossed, practically twitching in the seat. He had on scrubs he'd probably intimidated some nurse into giving him, not fashionable enough but a step up from the patient's gown, Greenly guessed. He looked remarkably pissed for a man who'd been damn near comatose for the better part of a week.
"Jesus Christ welcomes you to Mayberry, Greenly, the fuck took you so long? Traffic jam? Was there a traffic jam in the middle of town, detective? Or did you stop to learn how to tie your fricken shoes?"
Greenly decided he liked comatose Smecker better. "Sorry," he muttered, stepping up to the desk to sign the forms the nurse was giving him, along with a grateful look.
In the elevator, Smecker drummed his fingers on the handrail like a speed addict until Greenly finally growled, "Will you stop that? What the hell are you in such a hurry to get back to?"
Smecker looked startled, then annoyed, and muttered, "They said I was out a week. A week's worth of cases, Greenly. If I start the paperwork the second you drop me off at home-- and please let's avoid educational stops on this drive-- I may be done with it by Christmas." He stopped with the handrail though, and Greenly rolled his eyes and let it go. Wasn't worth it, ever.
Out of the lobby they stepped into the July heat and Smecker cursed and flinched, shading his eyes with his hands. "Goddamnit. Greenly, give me your Oakleys."
"What?"
An aggravated sigh. "Your sunglasses, Greenly."
"I know what they are, asshole; don't they violate some gay fashionista rule of yours?"
Smecker exhaled; Greenly got the distinct feeling Smecker was refraining, with an effort, from punching him. Smecker carefully bit out, "I have been under the fucking fluorescent light for a week, Greenly. The sun. Is bright. You want to give me your sunglasses now, or am I going to teach you all about gay violation in a loud voice, here, in public?"
"Jesus. You're compensating for not having bitched at me for six days, aren't you," Greenly muttered, shaking his head as he pulled the sunglasses from the collar of his T-shirt and handed them over. Smecker didn't respond, just slipped the shades on and starting walking again.
Greenly watched him go, wearing the pale green hospital scrubs and a pair of sunglasses he wouldn't normally have allowed to decorate his corpse, and thought first that Smecker looked ridiculous. Then he thought about whether or not someone still looked ridiculous if nobody would dare say it to their face. Emperor's clothes, and all that.
***
Greenly dropped him at home and Smecker went inside without a backwards glance for the detective. His phone was blinking with numerous messages which he ignored on his way to the bathroom, yanking off the stupid sunglasses as he went. He wasn’t trembling, but he felt he might start any instant.
He had a migraine fit to justify murder. His skin itched, where the sunlight had touched his exposed hands, arms, neck and face. The mirror showed he was already reddening with sunburn. Smecker splashed water on his face until the heat faded, then gripped the edge of the counter and stared into the sink.
He’d been born pasty-pale anyways, dammit, sensitive skin, so this was not a cause to give in to the idiotic thoughts churning in his brain like a blender on frappé. Sensitivity to natural light after six days of artificial, that was nothing to start building insane hypotheses about.
There was enough other evidence to make conjectures on, anyways.
Smecker glanced briefly up at his reflection; yes, he had a reflection, so take the completely crazy ideas and banish them to the appropriate file cabinet of nonsense. He had a reflection, and-- he checked, holding his fingers to his wrist-- he had a pulse, and he was breathing, and Jesusfuck he had drunk a pint of motherfucking blood seven hours ago.
The average layman would be completely revulsed and sickened, Smecker pointed out to himself, searching in his mind for the appropriate emotional response. The 'disgust' tab came up negative; he knew full well what he'd done, and it still seemed as natural as it had when he'd done it. It was blood, you moron, he hissed at himself, not effing Kool-Aid. He took a deep breath and pointed out that twenty years of forensics, of bodies in dumpsters and allies and rivers and back rooms, bodies with heads blown off and horrible deaths-- twenty years of blood, maybe it had inured him, maybe the disgust tab had been turned off years ago in the interests of keeping him sane.
Smecker took another breath and peeled off the bandage they'd slapped on his neck again at the hospital. His lips pulled back from his teeth in something that was almost a grin; Christalfrickenmighty, they'd been so damn befuddled, every last one of them. Explained to him that the wound in his neck hadn't closed up despite the stitches, but now it was all healed and nothing but a inch or so of scar tissue to show where. Explained to him that they wanted to run tests, they wanted him to stay longer and sit there in the damn bed while they analyzed how he went from rejecting blood transfusion for six days to being suddenly a-okay, fit as fiddle, good as new and all the other inane clichés he could think of.
One of them had absently noted the transfusion pack was gone, but he'd said a nurse had taken it away, no, he didn't know which nurse, and he would be out before they got around to questioning that bit, he hoped.
Paul leaned forward and examined his reflection in the mirror. The scar on his neck was a ragged white line, not the clean thinness a knife would have left. That had been another of their questions: what sort of instrument had inflicted the wound, and he had fallen back on the easy, it happened so fast and I don't remember.
Now there were no doctors, just the visual evidence, and his mental catalogue of what sort of weapons left what sort of injuries, and there was nothing that matched the jagged scar. Rough, like there had been tearing, and Smecker's eyes narrowed, because he remembered the body behind his jerking, and maybe if there had been something in his neck, something sticking in, then that could have torn the flesh. In the pattern visible.
Something. Paul set his jaw and stared at his reflection with a pissed-off interrogator's glare. "Go on, say it," he growled. "Teeth. And next we'll be discussing huge frigging goyz with Greenly and the other submorons." Because teeth couldn't sink in that deep, not the cuspids, not without leaving an imprint of the molars. Not unless you had some long friggen cuspids. Paul shook his head slowly.
Drawing back from the mirror, he started to shrug out of the hospital scrubs. A decent shower would help like hell, and then some aloe vera on the sunburn. Then call the twins, ask them who the hell they'd shot and what they had done with the body. Then-- once it got dark-- maybe go to the library, medical reference section, see what he could find.
***
"What do you mean he got away?" Paul could hear the incredulity in his voice and knew what to blame it on. Over-confidence. (Not in himself, not in his own skills because however right the other fucks in the Bureau might have been about his arrogance, he had also always been brutally honest about his limitations. Over-confidence in them, in their being such good little holy killers.)
"I mean, he got away, Smecker. Christ. Forgive us fer worryin' about ya bleedin' out on the sidewalk rather than chasin' him down."
"Jesus." Paul stared at his kitchen wall, shook his head. "Okay, give me something. Physical descrip, was he armed, did you see a weapon of any sort-- what happened, exactly?"
"Fuck. From what Greenly said you've been on death's fucken door all week and now yer all mister investigation again. There ain't nothin' to tell, Smecker-- we just, we'd 'ad a beer or two, came out t'meet you and saw this fuck had ya from behind. So we shot him--"
"Drunk, you did this? I'm lucky you didn't shoot me," he snapped. Murphy took it in stride and kept going, but there was a new note there, something unsettled. The Irish brogue normally contained the full chordal finish; now there was an unfinished harmonic in the rise and fall of words:
"...he didn't fall, though. We shot, an', an' he just kept standin'--"
"And I suppose you're sure you succeeded in hitting him?" The quotient of bitch in his voice was higher than usual, but Paul was a) entitled and b) making up for lost time. Murphy growled on the other end of the line.
"We had a beer, not a fucken flotilla of 'em. Yes, we hit him. We got close and he ran off. Fucken dark, couldn't see a thing about him, and anyways you were, as mentioned, bleedin' out on the street. Y'are welcome we saved yer ungrateful life, by the way."
"Mm-hm, I'm delirious with gratitude," Smecker sighed. "And there's nothing else you can tell me?"
"Can't think o' nothin'. Listen, y'are okay, right?"
Smecker rolled his eyes and hung up.
***
Porphyria. Smecker took notes on a legal pad, his brain spiraling through free associations as concepts bled into one another. The madness of King George. He wrote down symptoms, hand moving steadily, fingers of the other hand jerking, unnoticed, on the desk's surface.
Increased sensitivity to sunlight. Abnormal production of heme in the system, a primary component of hemoglobin. In varieties of the disorder with lessened heme, artificial supplements must be given to correct the imbalance. The color purple, royal color, the madness of the king. George the tyrant, naked in the halls, like Nebuchadnezzar, the sovereign become beast. His courtiers blank-faced with shock, stock, and barrel--
Acute porphyria affects the nervous system. Unexplainable physical pains, muscle numbing and paralysis, hallucinations and mental disorders. All appearing intermittently. The rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake.
Purple, the faggot's color. Porphyria is genetically transmitted, mother and father to son at birth, in a straight line of blood. Porphyria arises from nowhere, in individuals with no family history. Porphyria transmits in a straight line of purple blood. Porphyria can be triggered by drugs, smoking, alcohol, emotional and physical stress, menstrual hormones, and exposure to the sun. About exactly one of which we can rule out.
I am not insane.
Tell that to the doctors.
Paul's pencil snapped abruptly, black lead leaving a jagged line over the page, and he blinked in mild wonder, concentric circles of drifting thought snapping back to the present, to the physical. He swallowed. This, this, this wasn't--
There was one fucking constant in Paul's life, one goddamn altar to place whatever tattered shreds of belief still remained his own after the Saints had done their fucking waltz through his universe, and that was his own intelligence. His laser-scope mind, burning through the peripherals and getting at the goddamn truth because at the end of the day, the truth was the cold-eyed bitch in bed with him, and she might be all that he had but he had paid enough for her, good mistress for a fag.
He had his mind. Not luck and not kindness and not a good heart, not an Irish accent and not a rosary and not someone else's shoulder to grip in the night, but his mind had carried him for forty-six years and it was a fine fucking instrument, it was precise and it was honed, and it was not fucking going on him. Not now.
Paul took a trembling breath. He had a scientific explanation-- not probable, not perfect, but it was a starting point. He had a logical, rational starting point to explain things, so how was it that now he couldn't focus, he couldn't condense the merging references into linear progression?
And thus we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirr'd, and yet God has not said a word!
Porphyria. And her lover/killer. Browning... Paul brought his fingers to his forehead and rubbed. The migraine had returned, beating with a seventy-throb-a-minute intensity in his skull. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, steadily, in and out.
The aloe vera had a sharp organic smell to it, mint-but-not-mint, and there was that paper-and-dust acrid fragrance he remembered from libraries twenty and thirty years ago, old book smell, and the reference librarian had said these medical journals hadn't been checked out in twelve years anyways. Paul exhaled, because now even his sense of smell was keeping him from thinking. Through the open window it brought him a charred-meat stench from the neighbor's barbecue of their fucking Fourth-of-July leftovers-- was he the only person in all Boston who didn't go out and commemorate the signing of a piece of paper by frying up dead animals? and fuck, they were set to burn the flesh off the bones it seemed, because the smell was strong and nauseating, blistered meat and smoking fat. Smecker's eyes flew open as he realized he was likely going to be sick, and the thing his eyes found first was the window, and it was closed. All the windows were closed.
Paul swallowed, and gritted his teeth, and circled 'hallucinations' on the notepad before him with the broken pencil, and got up to see if he had anything alcoholic in the kitchen.
He didn't manage two steps before stopping, hand flying back to the chair to steady him. His vision was going again, blur-and-spin, Christ no, not like the hospital again, but it was not. Because the carpet swam into focus and Paul stopped breathing for a moment. Every fiber. Every fiber. Sharp like a silver gelatin photograph, but with color, fucking color and detail and texture like, like-- he didn't even know-- Paul breathed again. The world was rotating gently around him, but if he didn't fight it like he had before, if he stopped forcing things back into a static position relative to himself, then suddenly it was manageable. And things weren't indistinct, they were crisp like the world had been etched in acid and ice, and da Vinci had been hired to color the universe, and he was staring at it all through the lens of a high-def forensic microscope, except all of it, not a few millimeters at a time--
Paul heard a weak "fuck" that sounded equal parts awe and shaky panic. His fingers tightened on the chair, gripping it as something solid and hopefully not about to start being fucktastically defiant of the natural laws. Under his fingers he felt the grain of the wood, the smooth worn places and the pattern of the fibers, microscopic pits and crevices.
Lost my mind, he thought as he lost his balance, and flicker-to-fade, back to the cool night air and the teeth, there had been teeth at his neck, science be damned, and his mind had bled out then, sucked away by something else's hunger. Taken from him. Logic and life drained out red and pulsing, synapse and heartbeat tied together.
The carpet under his fingers was a wealth of sensory information, an overload from fingertips to brain, and Paul closed his eyes to eliminate some of the flood. Then he could hear the tick, the clock hammering away slow seconds on the wall; the restless somnolent gurgle of water in the pipes of the building; the hum of current and bright chemical laughter of television in the next apartment.
The rain set early in tonight and there was a shower running two apartments over, water pounding against a woman's skin.
The sullen wind was soon awake; electric fans whirled their blades on windowsills against the summer heat with a throbbing, rhythmic murmur.
It tore the elm-tops down for spite-- the potted plant on the kitchen counter of the apartment beneath his own lost a brown curled leaf; it hit the soil with an audible crunch.
And did its worst to vex the lake-- Water dripping from a faucet. Two floors up. Drip drip dripdripdripdripdripdripdrip, a steady beat, seventy-drops-a-minute, the sound a false, wet promise of satisfaction.
...I listen'd with heart fit to break.
***
He acclimated.
So simple when put like that. He adjusted. He acclimated. He moved around his apartment in a daze, fingertips trailing over walls, floor, furniture and learning the textures of each. He opened the window and stood there for fifty-three minutes doing nothing but sorting out scents, separating the barbecue from the dogs being walked on the street and the incense burning five apartments away and the vegetation-and-dirt smell of the river. He absently noted that three of the cars on the other side of the street didn't have current tags, and realized that a week ago he would not have been able to make out their color in the dark, let alone their license plates.
Finally he closed his eyes and listened, hearing his own pulse as a drumbeat underlying the symphony in the city: car horns on the next street over for the brass, tires and engines growling over the asphalt for the bass. Conversations, snatches of intimacies and threats and secrets and laughter. Breathing. The wind moving through trees at street-level; that was harp and vocals. Dishes falling from a counter was a tinny percussion, and he tried to think what the hell sort of notation one would use to record any of this.
Hallucinations. Paper crumpled and crackled under his fingertips to be discarded and forgotten. If this was insanity--
It wasn't until he felt heat on his face, and opened his eyes to unbearably vicious light, that he realized it was morning. Daytime.
Paul closed his eyes and drew the shades and called in to the precinct that he wouldn't be in today. Greenly's voice was insufferably smug as the dick asked whether he needed to go back to the hospital. He made a careful note to sufficiently break Greenly's trying little ego the next time he ran into it.
Right now, however-- Paul dropped into a chair, hands draped over the arms, fingertips in the air where they felt every current. Closed his eyes and sank back into the concerto of blood and water that filled his ears and mind from the city around him.
by Dien
Rating: PG-13 for language, violence, Greenly's ego; later chapters may go higher
Disclaimer: Troy owns Smecker and all other BDS characters. Characters from other fandoms who appear belong to their respective creators as well. No money made. Yada. Yada. Yada. "Porphyria's Lover" isn't mine either, belongs to Robert Browning.
Summary: Hm, well, trying not to give too much away right off the bat-- Smecker is assaulted in a bad part of Boston. There are... repercussions. This will eventually be cross-over fic with another fandom, which, if I say what, will also give things away. Pooh. For what it's worth, this is total crack!fic, and should be treated as such.
Feedback: Is always greatly appreciated.
***
O where is our Mother of Peace
Nodding her purple hood?
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood.
I would that the death-pale deer
Had come through the mountain side,
And trampled the mountain away,
And drunk up the murmuring tide;
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood,
And our Mother of Peace has forgot me
Under her purple hood.
- Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings, W.B. Yeats
***
chapter one: till the 4th of July
Paul Smecker exhaled a line of cigarette smoke into the night air, his eyes restlessly scanning the sidewalk. This hour of the a.m., even most of the bums had found places to sleep under bridges or cardboard boxes. On the other side of the street, there was a man staggering home from last call, singing to himself, or at least that's what Smecker supposed the noises he was making could be construed to be.
Smecker really did hate this part of Boston, alternating pubs and churches, pubs and churches, nothing else it seemed except for the damn cheap tenement housing. In the shadow of Our Mother of Peace (or Our Lady of Guinness, or what-the-hell-ever the stone-fronted and stained-glass monstrosity he'd parked behind was) he'd felt the hostility in the very fricken' asphalt, grinding against his mixed English-German bones with a surly resentment. The city always knew, where you belonged, where you didn't.
They were late. The FBI agent's lips pursed in annoyance as he checked the dial of his watch again. Goddamn Irish pricks with their goddamn bonhomie that'd have him reluctantly forgiving their tardiness the instant they showed up. Bastards would probably be drunk, too, grins on their faces as they lurched towards him on the sidewalk, arms slung around each other's shoulders. Murphy's worn jeans would probably be slung low on his hips too--
Smecker scowled the thought away and took another drag on his cigarette, resisting the urge to cross his arms with impatience. Okay, it wasn't as if he'd be sleeping at this hour yet anyways, but Christ, there were things he could be doing with his time. Greenly, for instance; if he were desperate enough to subject himself to rampant stupidity and Greenly’s continual protests of heterosexuality for the sake of the semi-weekly fuck.
There was a noise behind him, maybe feet scuffing the pavement, and Paul turned, but the twins were not in sight. He glared at a piece of newspaper being blown across the asphalt as if it were personally responsible for his life and the problems therein. The drunk was long gone. Smecker tossed his cigarette to the ground and shoved his hands in his coat pockets against the light wind. It was cool for a summer night.
The attack came with no warning at all. One moment, nothing but the empty windy street, and in the next a blow to the back of his head that sent him straight to his knees. He hadn't even processed it when he was hauled back to his feet by his coat's collar. A sharp pain cut into his neck, and the disjointed thought ran through the dizzy spinning that the mugger had a knife but didn't know how to use it, because you held a knife at the throat, not the side of the neck--
Smecker struggled, and the knife sank in deeper, maybe a full inch into his skin, and he fought the ringing in his skull with the knowledge that he could very easily die here. Fight. Fight, get his hand back there and claw the bastard's eyes, get the hand at his neck away-- his hands slapped against a shoulder, a coat, a head, and his skull was still ringing like a carillon of bells at high Mass. His hand found his gun under his jacket, the holster at the small of his back, and he didn't have to think because his body knew what to do. Draw-safety-reachback-andfire, smooth as a sonata. Someone grunted, not him, but the cutting into his neck didn't ease up. He pulled the trigger again, not comprehending, then the gun was knocked from his hand. The pain intensified, hard and throbbing. Smecker's forensic mind calculated the jugular was being severed.
Goddamn amateurs. You were supposed to slit the throat from the front. The only clear and coherent thought he could manage was indignant annoyance that this dumb shit couldn't even kill him right.
There was something pressing against his face, a little late because if he was going to scream, he would have done so already-- cold and wet-- no sense-- didn't make any sense, but rational thought was fading, running out with the blood from his neck, and Paul felt his mouth open to gasp for air. Copper bitterness on his tongue instead, sharp like gunsmoke, and it should have cleared his mind but things just got darker, hazier.
Somewhere someone was yelling. Not him...
Sonuvabitch, get th' fuck off him, and retorts, faint through the haze, and a panicked Connor, he's not fallin' he's not fucken fallin' and more shots. The knife at his throat jerked, and there was more pain, and the cold thing pressed into his face dropped away. He could breathe again. Breathe in air, cold and raw and clean, and Smecker watched the ground spin up to meet him knowing the impact was going to hurt, but when it came he didn't feel a thing.
***
White. White light... Smecker hoped to Christ this wasn't the fabled tunnel light, because hell, blindsided in South Boston, what a shitty way to go. But slowly he began to process: the smell of antiseptic and linen, the irritating twinge of an IV in the forearm, the cottony aftertaste of medicine. In twenty years with the Bureau, he'd woken up in hospitals just enough times to recognize he was in one now.
Well, shit.
He supposed it was better than dying in a botched mugging, but fuck, he'd had nights of delirium tremens that felt better than this, and his neck was goddamn killing him. The docs could have given him some fricken anesthesia, Smecker thought wearily, and opened his eyes.
He had trouble focusing. Things were blurry and sickly-pale in the fluorescent lights, and with a mingled sense of panic and exasperation Smecker realized he couldn't even raise his head to peer around the room. Goddamn. He gave up and closed his eyes; his headache increased exponentially with them open.
The beeping of the hospital equipment seemed shrill and preternaturally loud, but even it couldn't fight the influence of industrial-strength exhaustion, and he slipped back into unconsciousness.
When he woke again, the overhead light was off, and he accepted that with muddled pleasure for a moment, making more of an effort to get his bearings this time. The door creaked open as he was just managing to decipher the time from the blurry, indistinct clock on the wall. A smudge of white with dark on top came near to the bed, had to be a person in a doctor's coat, and a voice with a gently-Pakistani accent said, "Good afternoon, Mister Smecker; I see you are awake. How are you feeling?"
Agent, Agent Smecker. He liked the frustration; it made him feel like himself, to have something to bitch at.
"You the doctor?" he croaked, wincing at how weak his own voice sounded, and the smudge presumably nodded. "Yes, I'm Dr. Chadrapur. I'm sure you're still very tired; you'd lost a lot of blood before you reached the emergency room, but if you're up to my asking a few questions--"
"Who brought me in?" he managed through the haze in his mind-- he had a vague memory of Irish voices accompanying him down into the dark. Surely those dumb shits hadn't gone to a hospital with him, but he guessed if he'd been bad enough off... The doctor was wearing a cheap aftershave he thought he’d smelled on Duffy before.
There was the sound of rustling paper, then Chadrapur's voice said, "...We have here a Michael Greenly. Now, if you can tell me how you're feeling, Mister Smecker--"
"Crappy," he gurgled. "Don't hospitals still... believe in painkillers... or has that fallen before the advance of holistic hippie shit... as well?"
There was a brief pause; it sounded like Chadrapur was smiling when he spoke again. "No, Mister Smecker; we still appreciate anesthetic. Are you in pain, then?"
"Do bears shit in the--" Smecker broke into a fit of coughing that ended his attempt at clever repartee for the moment. When it eased up, he tried focusing on the doctor's face again, the smudge gradually resolving itself into a man wearing glasses and a concerned expression.
"Should I get you some water, Mister Smecker?"
He didn't trust himself to try and speak again, so he nodded. His mouth felt dry and parched, the medicinal taste still strong on his tongue. The doctor returned with water and helped him to drink it. It helped, but not enough.
"...it is odd, Mister Smecker, that you should be feeling pain," he said after a moment. "We have you on a rather strong analgesic at the moment... is the discomfort localized, or general?"
"My neck," Smecker said in exasperation, then the dizziness got too much and he stopped listening to the doctor's questions. He felt nauseous, but intellectually knew there'd be nothing in his stomach to lose, so he fought the urge down. The room blurred comfortably, in and out with the white light, and there were more smudges who came and went and spoke. Voices slipping in and out like hunting for a station on a ham radio... silence to noise, noise to silence...
...tient's body rejecting transfusion regardless of typ.... not consistent wi...
...unusual white cell count... doesn't seem to be... condition seems stable but...
...dosage upped... test results indic...
Eventually it all rolled together into meaningless soft babble, overwritten by the piercing, continuous beep of the monitors. There were flickers of image and sound, and one vividly sharp moment-- Greenly's kicked-puppy eyes staring at him with half-worry, half-incomprehension-- but mostly it was just pervasive nausea and the unfading ache in his neck. Morphine if you have to, you bastards, was the one clear thought his mind kept returning to.
***
He woke, the most completely he had in days, and almost closed his eyes immediately. His vision was swimming terribly, shot to fucking hell, and his hearing couldn't pick up on anything other than the beeping. So rhythmic, just... just like a heartbeat. That's what it was. His heartbeat, flickering away on a screen somewhere nearby... Paul tried to orient himself on something familiar: annoyance. What the fuck was wrong with the doctors, because he wasn't so out of it that he didn't know he'd been here too long, why the fuck weren't they doing their job and making him better...?
He refused to close his eyes. Keep them open until he saw something he could focus on or yell at. Smecker argued with the haze that overlaid everything, because he was well aware he had perfect eyesight, so there was no reason his eyes shouldn't be cooperating. There. There, the pasty blotch, that was his hand, and that red line bright against his skin, that was-- the I.V.? Didn't seem right, and his gaze flickered right, found his other forearm. Ah, yes, there was the intravenous feeding drip. His eyes moved back to the red.
Not food. Blood, he realized, blood transfusion, but that didn't make sense either. He'd been here long enough, surely, that they should have recouped whatever blood loss he'd sustained. Incompetent shits. He couldn’t take his eyes from the red line, which was sharp and crisp in his vision like nothing else in the room. Smecker's eyes traveled up the line, and hit a patch of solid brilliant color. The blood pack for the drip.
It was so goddamned bright. And it looked so clean and sharp-edged, like he was seeing every line of the bag through a magnifying glass, not with his drugged-out marvelous blurry trip-vision, and Smecker reached up despite the fact that he hadn't been able to lift his damn head from the pillow, and the plastic was slick and cool under his fingertips. His fingers twitched against the bag, and flash-flicker of memory arose in the back of his throat, something unpleasantly cool in his mouth, copper-bite. Gagging at the taste; a nausea that hadn't left since.
He watched his fingers lift the bag from the hook and bring it closer, and every train of linear thought shut quietly down. Nothing in his mind at all but contemplation of how splendidly red it was, like color in a painting by one of the old masters. Italian red, wine-red, Titian red, vermilion--
There was a chemical undertaste to the contents of the bag, anticoagulants his mind supplied, but that was faint, and didn't really interfere with the amazing flavor.
***
"Is this Michael Greenly?"
"Detective Greenly, yeah. What can I do for you?" Greenly leaned back in his chair with a donut from the box Duffy had brought in. Crumbs from the donut landed on top of the reports on his desk, and he winced before remembering Smecker wasn't at the precinct to bitch him out for it.
"Ah, yes, detective-- your... colleague, Paul Smecker? He--"
Greenly sat up quickly enough to give himself a minor case of whiplash. "Is he awake?"
"Well, yes. Yes, he... he felt much better this morning, and he's requested that he be released, but we can't do that until you authorize it, as you're the one who brought him in and he can't check himself out."
Greenly blinked at the novel experience of having, for once, power over Special Agent to the FBI Paul Smecker, then stuffed part of the donut into his mouth to keep himself from grinning. He washed it partially down with some lukewarm coffee, then mumbled, "Is he-- I mean, is he okay to go home? What do the doctors say?"
The voice of the nurse, or whatever she was, sounded hesitant. "Well-- um-- I think the doctors would like... well, he's fine. The picture of health, in fact. Which is I think why they'd like him to stay a little longer, but he's ready to go home if you ask me. And the rest of the nursing staff." There was a just-audible tone of pleading in her voice, and Greenly almost coughed on what was left of his donut, imagining Smecker making the nurses' lives hell.
He had to drive to the hospital to get Smecker released, and Dolly and Duffy thought that was hi-fucking-larious, him as Smecker's practical next-of-kin. He told them to fuck off with the sourness that invariably rubbed off on you if you spent too much time with the FBI agent. Damnit, he should have told Murphy and Connor to take him to emergency themselves, but yeah, couldn't really do that, so--
Smecker was sitting in the chair at the nurses' station when Greenly arrived, arms crossed, practically twitching in the seat. He had on scrubs he'd probably intimidated some nurse into giving him, not fashionable enough but a step up from the patient's gown, Greenly guessed. He looked remarkably pissed for a man who'd been damn near comatose for the better part of a week.
"Jesus Christ welcomes you to Mayberry, Greenly, the fuck took you so long? Traffic jam? Was there a traffic jam in the middle of town, detective? Or did you stop to learn how to tie your fricken shoes?"
Greenly decided he liked comatose Smecker better. "Sorry," he muttered, stepping up to the desk to sign the forms the nurse was giving him, along with a grateful look.
In the elevator, Smecker drummed his fingers on the handrail like a speed addict until Greenly finally growled, "Will you stop that? What the hell are you in such a hurry to get back to?"
Smecker looked startled, then annoyed, and muttered, "They said I was out a week. A week's worth of cases, Greenly. If I start the paperwork the second you drop me off at home-- and please let's avoid educational stops on this drive-- I may be done with it by Christmas." He stopped with the handrail though, and Greenly rolled his eyes and let it go. Wasn't worth it, ever.
Out of the lobby they stepped into the July heat and Smecker cursed and flinched, shading his eyes with his hands. "Goddamnit. Greenly, give me your Oakleys."
"What?"
An aggravated sigh. "Your sunglasses, Greenly."
"I know what they are, asshole; don't they violate some gay fashionista rule of yours?"
Smecker exhaled; Greenly got the distinct feeling Smecker was refraining, with an effort, from punching him. Smecker carefully bit out, "I have been under the fucking fluorescent light for a week, Greenly. The sun. Is bright. You want to give me your sunglasses now, or am I going to teach you all about gay violation in a loud voice, here, in public?"
"Jesus. You're compensating for not having bitched at me for six days, aren't you," Greenly muttered, shaking his head as he pulled the sunglasses from the collar of his T-shirt and handed them over. Smecker didn't respond, just slipped the shades on and starting walking again.
Greenly watched him go, wearing the pale green hospital scrubs and a pair of sunglasses he wouldn't normally have allowed to decorate his corpse, and thought first that Smecker looked ridiculous. Then he thought about whether or not someone still looked ridiculous if nobody would dare say it to their face. Emperor's clothes, and all that.
***
Greenly dropped him at home and Smecker went inside without a backwards glance for the detective. His phone was blinking with numerous messages which he ignored on his way to the bathroom, yanking off the stupid sunglasses as he went. He wasn’t trembling, but he felt he might start any instant.
He had a migraine fit to justify murder. His skin itched, where the sunlight had touched his exposed hands, arms, neck and face. The mirror showed he was already reddening with sunburn. Smecker splashed water on his face until the heat faded, then gripped the edge of the counter and stared into the sink.
He’d been born pasty-pale anyways, dammit, sensitive skin, so this was not a cause to give in to the idiotic thoughts churning in his brain like a blender on frappé. Sensitivity to natural light after six days of artificial, that was nothing to start building insane hypotheses about.
There was enough other evidence to make conjectures on, anyways.
Smecker glanced briefly up at his reflection; yes, he had a reflection, so take the completely crazy ideas and banish them to the appropriate file cabinet of nonsense. He had a reflection, and-- he checked, holding his fingers to his wrist-- he had a pulse, and he was breathing, and Jesusfuck he had drunk a pint of motherfucking blood seven hours ago.
The average layman would be completely revulsed and sickened, Smecker pointed out to himself, searching in his mind for the appropriate emotional response. The 'disgust' tab came up negative; he knew full well what he'd done, and it still seemed as natural as it had when he'd done it. It was blood, you moron, he hissed at himself, not effing Kool-Aid. He took a deep breath and pointed out that twenty years of forensics, of bodies in dumpsters and allies and rivers and back rooms, bodies with heads blown off and horrible deaths-- twenty years of blood, maybe it had inured him, maybe the disgust tab had been turned off years ago in the interests of keeping him sane.
Smecker took another breath and peeled off the bandage they'd slapped on his neck again at the hospital. His lips pulled back from his teeth in something that was almost a grin; Christalfrickenmighty, they'd been so damn befuddled, every last one of them. Explained to him that the wound in his neck hadn't closed up despite the stitches, but now it was all healed and nothing but a inch or so of scar tissue to show where. Explained to him that they wanted to run tests, they wanted him to stay longer and sit there in the damn bed while they analyzed how he went from rejecting blood transfusion for six days to being suddenly a-okay, fit as fiddle, good as new and all the other inane clichés he could think of.
One of them had absently noted the transfusion pack was gone, but he'd said a nurse had taken it away, no, he didn't know which nurse, and he would be out before they got around to questioning that bit, he hoped.
Paul leaned forward and examined his reflection in the mirror. The scar on his neck was a ragged white line, not the clean thinness a knife would have left. That had been another of their questions: what sort of instrument had inflicted the wound, and he had fallen back on the easy, it happened so fast and I don't remember.
Now there were no doctors, just the visual evidence, and his mental catalogue of what sort of weapons left what sort of injuries, and there was nothing that matched the jagged scar. Rough, like there had been tearing, and Smecker's eyes narrowed, because he remembered the body behind his jerking, and maybe if there had been something in his neck, something sticking in, then that could have torn the flesh. In the pattern visible.
Something. Paul set his jaw and stared at his reflection with a pissed-off interrogator's glare. "Go on, say it," he growled. "Teeth. And next we'll be discussing huge frigging goyz with Greenly and the other submorons." Because teeth couldn't sink in that deep, not the cuspids, not without leaving an imprint of the molars. Not unless you had some long friggen cuspids. Paul shook his head slowly.
Drawing back from the mirror, he started to shrug out of the hospital scrubs. A decent shower would help like hell, and then some aloe vera on the sunburn. Then call the twins, ask them who the hell they'd shot and what they had done with the body. Then-- once it got dark-- maybe go to the library, medical reference section, see what he could find.
***
"What do you mean he got away?" Paul could hear the incredulity in his voice and knew what to blame it on. Over-confidence. (Not in himself, not in his own skills because however right the other fucks in the Bureau might have been about his arrogance, he had also always been brutally honest about his limitations. Over-confidence in them, in their being such good little holy killers.)
"I mean, he got away, Smecker. Christ. Forgive us fer worryin' about ya bleedin' out on the sidewalk rather than chasin' him down."
"Jesus." Paul stared at his kitchen wall, shook his head. "Okay, give me something. Physical descrip, was he armed, did you see a weapon of any sort-- what happened, exactly?"
"Fuck. From what Greenly said you've been on death's fucken door all week and now yer all mister investigation again. There ain't nothin' to tell, Smecker-- we just, we'd 'ad a beer or two, came out t'meet you and saw this fuck had ya from behind. So we shot him--"
"Drunk, you did this? I'm lucky you didn't shoot me," he snapped. Murphy took it in stride and kept going, but there was a new note there, something unsettled. The Irish brogue normally contained the full chordal finish; now there was an unfinished harmonic in the rise and fall of words:
"...he didn't fall, though. We shot, an', an' he just kept standin'--"
"And I suppose you're sure you succeeded in hitting him?" The quotient of bitch in his voice was higher than usual, but Paul was a) entitled and b) making up for lost time. Murphy growled on the other end of the line.
"We had a beer, not a fucken flotilla of 'em. Yes, we hit him. We got close and he ran off. Fucken dark, couldn't see a thing about him, and anyways you were, as mentioned, bleedin' out on the street. Y'are welcome we saved yer ungrateful life, by the way."
"Mm-hm, I'm delirious with gratitude," Smecker sighed. "And there's nothing else you can tell me?"
"Can't think o' nothin'. Listen, y'are okay, right?"
Smecker rolled his eyes and hung up.
***
Porphyria. Smecker took notes on a legal pad, his brain spiraling through free associations as concepts bled into one another. The madness of King George. He wrote down symptoms, hand moving steadily, fingers of the other hand jerking, unnoticed, on the desk's surface.
Increased sensitivity to sunlight. Abnormal production of heme in the system, a primary component of hemoglobin. In varieties of the disorder with lessened heme, artificial supplements must be given to correct the imbalance. The color purple, royal color, the madness of the king. George the tyrant, naked in the halls, like Nebuchadnezzar, the sovereign become beast. His courtiers blank-faced with shock, stock, and barrel--
Acute porphyria affects the nervous system. Unexplainable physical pains, muscle numbing and paralysis, hallucinations and mental disorders. All appearing intermittently. The rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake.
Purple, the faggot's color. Porphyria is genetically transmitted, mother and father to son at birth, in a straight line of blood. Porphyria arises from nowhere, in individuals with no family history. Porphyria transmits in a straight line of purple blood. Porphyria can be triggered by drugs, smoking, alcohol, emotional and physical stress, menstrual hormones, and exposure to the sun. About exactly one of which we can rule out.
I am not insane.
Tell that to the doctors.
Paul's pencil snapped abruptly, black lead leaving a jagged line over the page, and he blinked in mild wonder, concentric circles of drifting thought snapping back to the present, to the physical. He swallowed. This, this, this wasn't--
There was one fucking constant in Paul's life, one goddamn altar to place whatever tattered shreds of belief still remained his own after the Saints had done their fucking waltz through his universe, and that was his own intelligence. His laser-scope mind, burning through the peripherals and getting at the goddamn truth because at the end of the day, the truth was the cold-eyed bitch in bed with him, and she might be all that he had but he had paid enough for her, good mistress for a fag.
He had his mind. Not luck and not kindness and not a good heart, not an Irish accent and not a rosary and not someone else's shoulder to grip in the night, but his mind had carried him for forty-six years and it was a fine fucking instrument, it was precise and it was honed, and it was not fucking going on him. Not now.
Paul took a trembling breath. He had a scientific explanation-- not probable, not perfect, but it was a starting point. He had a logical, rational starting point to explain things, so how was it that now he couldn't focus, he couldn't condense the merging references into linear progression?
And thus we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirr'd, and yet God has not said a word!
Porphyria. And her lover/killer. Browning... Paul brought his fingers to his forehead and rubbed. The migraine had returned, beating with a seventy-throb-a-minute intensity in his skull. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, steadily, in and out.
The aloe vera had a sharp organic smell to it, mint-but-not-mint, and there was that paper-and-dust acrid fragrance he remembered from libraries twenty and thirty years ago, old book smell, and the reference librarian had said these medical journals hadn't been checked out in twelve years anyways. Paul exhaled, because now even his sense of smell was keeping him from thinking. Through the open window it brought him a charred-meat stench from the neighbor's barbecue of their fucking Fourth-of-July leftovers-- was he the only person in all Boston who didn't go out and commemorate the signing of a piece of paper by frying up dead animals? and fuck, they were set to burn the flesh off the bones it seemed, because the smell was strong and nauseating, blistered meat and smoking fat. Smecker's eyes flew open as he realized he was likely going to be sick, and the thing his eyes found first was the window, and it was closed. All the windows were closed.
Paul swallowed, and gritted his teeth, and circled 'hallucinations' on the notepad before him with the broken pencil, and got up to see if he had anything alcoholic in the kitchen.
He didn't manage two steps before stopping, hand flying back to the chair to steady him. His vision was going again, blur-and-spin, Christ no, not like the hospital again, but it was not. Because the carpet swam into focus and Paul stopped breathing for a moment. Every fiber. Every fiber. Sharp like a silver gelatin photograph, but with color, fucking color and detail and texture like, like-- he didn't even know-- Paul breathed again. The world was rotating gently around him, but if he didn't fight it like he had before, if he stopped forcing things back into a static position relative to himself, then suddenly it was manageable. And things weren't indistinct, they were crisp like the world had been etched in acid and ice, and da Vinci had been hired to color the universe, and he was staring at it all through the lens of a high-def forensic microscope, except all of it, not a few millimeters at a time--
Paul heard a weak "fuck" that sounded equal parts awe and shaky panic. His fingers tightened on the chair, gripping it as something solid and hopefully not about to start being fucktastically defiant of the natural laws. Under his fingers he felt the grain of the wood, the smooth worn places and the pattern of the fibers, microscopic pits and crevices.
Lost my mind, he thought as he lost his balance, and flicker-to-fade, back to the cool night air and the teeth, there had been teeth at his neck, science be damned, and his mind had bled out then, sucked away by something else's hunger. Taken from him. Logic and life drained out red and pulsing, synapse and heartbeat tied together.
The carpet under his fingers was a wealth of sensory information, an overload from fingertips to brain, and Paul closed his eyes to eliminate some of the flood. Then he could hear the tick, the clock hammering away slow seconds on the wall; the restless somnolent gurgle of water in the pipes of the building; the hum of current and bright chemical laughter of television in the next apartment.
The rain set early in tonight and there was a shower running two apartments over, water pounding against a woman's skin.
The sullen wind was soon awake; electric fans whirled their blades on windowsills against the summer heat with a throbbing, rhythmic murmur.
It tore the elm-tops down for spite-- the potted plant on the kitchen counter of the apartment beneath his own lost a brown curled leaf; it hit the soil with an audible crunch.
And did its worst to vex the lake-- Water dripping from a faucet. Two floors up. Drip drip dripdripdripdripdripdripdrip, a steady beat, seventy-drops-a-minute, the sound a false, wet promise of satisfaction.
...I listen'd with heart fit to break.
***
He acclimated.
So simple when put like that. He adjusted. He acclimated. He moved around his apartment in a daze, fingertips trailing over walls, floor, furniture and learning the textures of each. He opened the window and stood there for fifty-three minutes doing nothing but sorting out scents, separating the barbecue from the dogs being walked on the street and the incense burning five apartments away and the vegetation-and-dirt smell of the river. He absently noted that three of the cars on the other side of the street didn't have current tags, and realized that a week ago he would not have been able to make out their color in the dark, let alone their license plates.
Finally he closed his eyes and listened, hearing his own pulse as a drumbeat underlying the symphony in the city: car horns on the next street over for the brass, tires and engines growling over the asphalt for the bass. Conversations, snatches of intimacies and threats and secrets and laughter. Breathing. The wind moving through trees at street-level; that was harp and vocals. Dishes falling from a counter was a tinny percussion, and he tried to think what the hell sort of notation one would use to record any of this.
Hallucinations. Paper crumpled and crackled under his fingertips to be discarded and forgotten. If this was insanity--
It wasn't until he felt heat on his face, and opened his eyes to unbearably vicious light, that he realized it was morning. Daytime.
Paul closed his eyes and drew the shades and called in to the precinct that he wouldn't be in today. Greenly's voice was insufferably smug as the dick asked whether he needed to go back to the hospital. He made a careful note to sufficiently break Greenly's trying little ego the next time he ran into it.
Right now, however-- Paul dropped into a chair, hands draped over the arms, fingertips in the air where they felt every current. Closed his eyes and sank back into the concerto of blood and water that filled his ears and mind from the city around him.