oh hello f-list, newbies and old faithfuls, one and all

[dire_redux]

So I am stealing this from my darling featherfish because it is a very, very rad idea and also some of you are shy and I wish you wouldn't be because I really don't bite unless you're into that.

So without further ado, I give you:

In past Christmases, I have left an open invitation to write little fanfic drabbles for LJ holiday presents. I'd like to do that

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Crime Scenes (1/3)

[dire_redux]

When I wake up, it takes a moment for things to fall into focus.

Empty champagne flutes on the floor. A couple are broken. The glass shards shine like diamonds in the morning half-light. They’re all ground into the carpet and I can only think that it’ll be hell to clean them up. Most beautiful things are like that, really. Just awful when you start to consider the practicalities.

Perhaps I think too much.

This isn’t another hotel room. This isn’t my house and I’m pretty sure it isn’t his.

(It’s never his.)

It’s another place we don’t belong. We don’t belong anywhere at all, we’ve given up on belonging, shut the door behind us and kept on walking into the cold where we put our hands in each other’s pockets to keep warm. Or something like that. Voluntary refugees, the two of us. He likes to cut and I like to run.

He is lying next to me and I’m lying next to an empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot and I’m not quite sure I understand. I’m missing something, I know I am. I’ve forgotten how to complete this pattern. What’s the next number in this sequence? You’re good with numbers, shouldn’t you know? He’s smiling so I think it can’t be something bad but then I laugh to myself because I know that if he’s smiling it can’t be anything but bad.

Somewhere, in another room, Robert Smith is singing “Just Like Heaven” and I think that I’m glad that I don’t believe in Heaven. Even if I did, this wouldn’t be a thing like it. But I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

I’ve never woken up next to him before. It’s not exactly fuck and run, no, not in so many words. Not at all, really. But it’s something kind of like that, if you need to call it something at all.

I wake up alone in a hotel room. I wake up alone on my bathroom floor. I wake up alone in a house I don’t know. Like a string of one-night stands. Me with my tie still knotted around my wrists. Me with blood drying on my chin. Me with my wallet empty except for a slip of paper with a tiny smiley face in the middle and CHASE ME written on the back. His neat handwriting, careful, controlled but with a certain violence to it. It suits him and I’m sure he knows it. Another piece of artifice.

Today my pants are around my ankles, I’ve still got my shoes on and the bedsheets look like seafoam. All rumpled and heaped and that exact same pale shade of almost-green. Just like his eyes.

This is a story I know I’ve told before.

There’s something different, though. A break in the pattern. I’ve lost the script, time for improvisation. Quick, quick, where are my words? La commedia dell’arte all’improviso. Haven’t we been there before, done that dance?

He’s lying there next to me and I’m watching the way his chest rises and falls without knowing that I’m looking anywhere at all. He’s watching me think. I’m trying to map out the roads that brought us here. Champagne always goes straight to my head, you know, or maybe it’s just him.

Probably it’s him.

Must be, because I feel it now, with the way his eyes are tearing into me like scalpels. He’s opened me up, but what has he taken? Is there anything left to take? Doesn’t matter. I want to be a hollow cage made of skin and ribs so he can fill me with his words like jackdaws. I want to be the barrel of a gun. I want to be the pupil of an eye.