Rusted Glass - [1/1]
Title: Rusted Glass
Author: zephyrina
Pairing: Bob Bryar/Brian Schechter
Rating: PG-13
POV/Wordcount: Third - 2,866 words
Summary: Brian looks up. It’s insane, but it’s like Bob is lying on a wall, defying gravity and logic.
Disclaimer: The guys aren't mine, it never happened.
Author Notes: Inspired by this post at we_are_cities + #33 A New World at fanfic50
For anne_elliot. This is all yours. ♥ Thank you to anne_elliot and veecious for the beta.
TBP AU. Character death.
*
“My world is made of tiles.”
Brian doesn’t reply. He’s standing next to the window with no glass, smoking a cigarette. Every once in a while he pulls at the collar of his uniform. It itches, and it isn’t his size, not really. It feels as if it’s been tailored for someone else, someone who’s more or less of his same shape and height, but not exactly like him. It’s a weird thought, even disturbing to a point, because - why is he wearing clothes that belong to another guy? Where are his own, and where is that guy?
Pointless questions. Neither he nor Bob have answers. He turns his head towards the window. Ivy is breaking in, making its way through shards of glass. There are shards next to his feet, too, and Brian idly wonders how the glass was broken, if with a stone or by accident. He's looked around, but he’s found nothing, only dust. It’s starting to cover his boots as well, his boots and Bob's.
Brian looks up. Bob’s lying on the floor with a stem of grass hanging from his mouth, as still and relaxed as if he was in his own bed - even if that isn’t really a floor to Brian, rather a wall, and there’s the intricate shadow of a railing on Bob's face, on his hair, on the upper part of his uniform. It’s insane, but it’s like Bob is lying on a wall, defying gravity and logic, or if there were two rooms existing in the same space. Two rooms turned sideways, and that reminds him of that famous painting, the one with people climbing a never ending staircase.
Instinct prompts him to raise his head. The ceiling - his ceiling, because Bob would say otherwise - is empty, no hanging lamps and no cobwebs in sight (and no furniture, too, something that Brian’s sanity really appreciates), just chipped paint and a moldy path near the corner. Perhaps a leakage or a broken pipe.
“Hey. If you’re done staring at the stains on the wall, you could help me get up. Fucking sun is blinding me.”
“Can’t you just get up by yourself?” asks Brian, but he’s already bending his knees and reaching out for him. Bob slides, sort of, swinging his legs to hop on the floor - Brian’s floor. For some reason he still has the railing shadow on his face.
“There, better,” he says, brushing the dust off his uniform. He pats it away from the Maltese cross sewn on his arm, the buttons, the silver stripes of his pants. “Those tiles are fucking gross. It’ll take us ages to clean the whole place.”
Brian blinks. “What?”
“What what?”
“I mean, why should we clean this place?” And why were you lying on the wall like a damn lizard in the sun, where are we, and why are we wearing uniforms are the other questions at the top of Brian’s mind. He doesn’t flood Bob with them, though, he just steps back and waits. Bob seems to know more than he does, and Bob doesn’t like being pressed for info.
“Well, if you want to dwell in shit, help yourself. I’ll make sure to draw a line that separates my side of the house from your side.”
“Um.”
Bob reaches over and steals a drag from the half-smoked cigarette Brian had in his hand. He forgot about it, admittedly, but it looks like it’s not an issue, because it stopped burning. It’s still lit up, and Bob proves it by blowing some smoke, but it doesn’t wear out or anything.
“Come on. I put the tiles on the bathroom floor, as you asked me to, now let’s go and chill somewhere while they do whatever tiles do right after you’ve stuck them in. Dry out or something.”
Bob takes Brian by his hand and leads him out. Thankfully, the door is exactly as it’s supposed to.
*
Bob is limping a little and has a bandage around his calf, but when Brian asks him about it (with the nagging feeling that it’s something he should already know), Bob shrugs. Shit happens, that’s what he means.
*
Their house is - for lack of a better word - peculiar. It has a kitchen (empty except than for a sink placed in a corner), a bedroom (with a mattress on the wall, and it’s quite an experience to walk perpendicularly to the floor. To what Brian would usually call ‘floor’), a bathroom (‘See the tiles? I know shit about do-it-yourself, but it did turn out good, didn’t it?’ and Brian is left staring at chipped, mismatched tiles placed on the ceiling and on part of the wall), and the small room with ivy they had been in before.
There are graffiti in some places, weird drawings that seem to be part of a bigger painting. Brian can make out people in uniform - uniforms similar to the ones he and Bob are wearing - a burning float, the frame of a zeppelin, and a woman with a gas mask on her face. They’re well done, but they’re upsetting, especially the guy with a guitar and Brian’s jacket. It’s the same, he spends the best part of an hour counting the stripes on both sleeves, the tiny buttons.
When Bob comes back from his smoking break - he took Brian’s old cigarette with him, stating that he didn’t want it to go to waste and got back with a couple of old blankets folded under his arm - Brian is still studying the graffiti.
“What are you doing? Gerard did a great job with them, uh? Look, I found these. They’re old but they’ll do, they’re warm.”
Brian nods - really, what else could he do? - and watches him entering the bedroom, his shadow looming next to Brian’s head while he hops on (the wall, the wall, the fucking wall) the bed and drops the blankets. Then, Bob moves and his shadow moves as well, hiding the figure that’s wearing Brian’s clothes. Bob said that Gerard painted them, and that’s a familiar name, but again he’s unable to pinpoint the right memory. It’s there, floating right beneath the surface of his conscious self, yet he can’t reach it. He frowns.
“Hey Bob?”
“Yeah?”
Bob walks back into the kitchen, heading towards the sink. The faucet is rusty, and so is the water he uses to wash his hands. There are no towels in sight, so he just shakes them before reaching Brian. He stands close, just a step behind him.
“What did you want?” he asks, putting a hand on Brian’s back.
“I don’t remember any of this.” Brian points at the graffiti, touches the black outline, the hair of the one with a pin on his uniform. He has fresh paint on his fingertips when he withdraws them. “I do remember about you, though.”
“Well, it’s a good thing, I guess?”
“It is, yes.”
“Cool.”
Bob reaches out and wraps his arm around Brian’s shoulders. The fabric of his sleeve tickles Brian under his chin. He smells of copper, old wood, and ashes. It isn’t unpleasant.
They look at the scene depicted in front of them for a little while, then Bob sighs.
“You know, I just wish Gerard would stop painting on the floor. We’re gonna ruin them in a short while, stepping on them and shit,” he says. Brian blinks. Bob’s looking at the ceiling.
*
It’s probably just an odd thought, but Brian has the feeling that here (wherever that here might be) time passes in a different way. It might be slower, it might be faster, he can’t tell, and the clock hung outside, on the railing of the stairs that lead to the roof, isn’t of any help. It moves, alright, but it does it counterclockwise, ticking time backwards.
According to Bob, it’s set on the Greenwich parallel (‘Parallel?’ ‘Yeah?’), it’s correct and precise. There’s concern in his eyes, though, and Brian stops pushing the subject. Still, every once in a while he turns to look at it, at the roman numbers printed on the white dial, at the tarnished frame, or at the red string wrapped around the hook.
Bob sits on the step right below the clock. He had to clear it from those black and white petals before sitting down. They are everywhere, as if they rained down the sky at some point. Well, perhaps that thought isn’t that far from the truth, Brian wonders, picking up a handful. They’re just that, regular petals of some regular plant, except for the fact that there are way too many scattered around to consider it normal.
“Come on, get up. It’s time.”
Brian looks up, wary. Half of Bob’s face is lit up, and there’s the omnipresent shadow drawing patterns on his cheek. He’s on his feet now, leaned against the railing, his chin raised towards the sky.
“Yes, it’s time,” he repeats in a low voice, as if he's talking to himself. He turns around then and starts climbing the stairs. His boots squash the petals, but Brian doesn’t see that. He’s watching the sky, trying to make out what Bob has just seen. As far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing worth of a mention, not even a funny-shaped cloud.
“Brian? Are you coming or not?”
Bob’s reached the last step already, he has a foot on it and one on the roof.
“Yes. Yes, sure.”
The squashed petals have a bad smell. It can’t be defined a stench, not really, but Brian wrinkles his nose and hurries up. Once or twice he touches the railing with the palm of his hand, only to find it stained with rust. It even shakes a little when he leans on it, just like it happens in old houses, and it stops abruptly on the last step. There’s no floor connected to the roof, no railing to stop people from falling on the ground. Brian shakes his head.
“I’m here,” he says. “Bob?”
“Yeah, come over.”
Once again logic is chipped, frayed at the edges. Brian knows that the house (their house, alright) isn’t that big, he’s been inside and he’s even circled it before, out of boredom and curiosity. The roof is huge though. From where he stands, it resembles a parking lot, empty and with petals scattered around. Bob is sitting next to one corner, knees up to his chest and far from him.
Drawing near, Brian notices the old mattress and the blankets Bob found earlier, a bedside lamp with a cracked, stained glass. It’s lit up, even if there’s no electricity on the roof (hell, the power cord is wrapped around the base) and turned towards Bob.
“You can lie here, if you want. I brought it up just for you,” Bob says, patting the mattress with his hand. A tiny part of Brian’s mind would want to call him out on that, because no, he’s never seen Bob moving anything out of the house, but he’s tired, worn out all of a sudden, and he only replies with a ‘thanks’ instead.
“Welcome. Cover yourself up, it’ll get cold in a short while.”
“I guess.”
Brian lies down and turns on his side. Bob’s thigh is too near to let the chance pass, so he puts his head on it, feeling both stupid and soothed at the same time. Whatever. They’re on the roof of their house, if he wants to get a little mushy, he damn well can. It’s Bob who pulls up the blankets, draping one around his shoulders and the other on Brian. He was right before, they’re warm.
“What are we doing here?”
“You’ll see in a while. Don’t fall asleep. The air is thicker in this place, it lulls you to sleep, but don’t. You’ll miss the parade.”
“Oh.”
Brian nods, as if he knows what Bob is talking about, and fights off the urge to close his eyes. Apparently, their house has been built next to a cliff, and from the roof they can see almost the whole valley. He frowns, taking some time to study the surroundings. There’s a city far in the distance - the silhouette of a city, with pinnacles and high, black buildings - and barren fields, filled with what looks like garbage. The cliff isn’t that high, he can make out furniture, tree trunks, planks, all piled up along the road. It’s… well, it’s an odd kind garbage, made of wood and nothing else but again, that isn’t the oddest thing Brian has seen there. He yawns.
“Bob?”
“Yes?”
“You said that Gerard painted the graffiti. The ones in our house, I mean.”
“Yes,” Bob replies and touches Brian’s hair, brushing it lightly. “What’s the matter?”
“Who’s Gerard?”
*
Brian falls asleep every now and then. He tries hard to not to, but it feels warm and cozy under the blanket, and Bob has started tapping his fingers against the roof. The dull noise has a familiar beat, it’s something Brian has already heard more than once - perhaps here, perhaps on another planet, another time - and that, together with the thick air Bob mentioned before, induces Brian to close his eyes just for a moment.
The first cinders arrive when Brian is about to give in for the third time in a row. They’re big, of the same size of the black and white petals, and they don’t behave as he’d expect them to, something that Brian should really start to take for granted. Despite the hiss and the smoke they produce when they hit the fabric of their uniforms or the blankets, they’re cold. They remind Brian of hail.
“What is it?”
“The float’s burning,” explains Bob, picking cinders up and tossing them aside.
“What float?”
“Over there. Look.”
Brian looks. The road he saw before isn’t empty anymore. A long stream of people is walking down along it, dressed in black and with their faces covered by masks. He can see men and women of about all ages, from old guys with canes or on wheelchairs to children clutching their toys. There are perhaps thousands of them, so many people that Brian is unable to see the end of the (funeral) procession, and they’re following the float Bob is pointing at without making a noise. No one is talking, no one is crying nor laughing, not even the small kids. Brian wonders for a moment if they might be all mute - a gathering of sort, it’d make as much sense as anything else he’s seen so far - but no, the gravel doesn’t creak under their shoes either.
Other cinders reach them, one hits Brian on his neck. They come from the float, just as Bob told him, because the float is burning, and there are other people on it, people playing instruments, people wearing uniforms, fuck, fuck, fuck. He can’t see their faces, and in a wave of nausea, he realizes he doesn’t want to. He knows who they are, he once knew who they were, and that - here, in this place, right now - is a bad thing.
Brian coughs. The air smells of ash.
“It’s alright. I should have thought about it. Why don’t you rest for a while? You’ll feel better then.”
Bob’s voice is soothing and so is his hand, rubbing slow circles on Brian’s shoulder. He closes his eyes and tries to relax. Unsurprisingly enough, the memory of what he’s just seen flows out his mind, like water on smooth stones.
“I guess. I’m really tired.”
Bob says something then, Brian’s sure. ‘Getting used’ and ‘time’ are the only words he catches, though, his mind feels like a blank canvas and he wants to sleep.
*
Brian sleeps. He hasn’t stretched his legs nor his arms once, remaining in the same position all the time. He’s even stopped breathing at some point, ten minutes ago - Bob checked and nodded, relieved. He’ll wake him up in a few, as soon as the float is done burning and the parade vanishes.
Just a little while more, thinks Bob, watching the fire consume himself - a faceless, old version of himself - and the others. He used to find it upsetting once, too, he can understand Brian’s earlier reaction, but now he just dismisses it as a normal thing. It’s like watching a skin he’s shed sometime in the past, nothing more.
*
“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. It’s late.”
“Hm,” is all Brian can reply when Bob tugs at his uniform. It’s always been hard for him to wake up. He yawns and rolls on his back, squinting at Bob while blood starts flowing again in his veins and thoughts refill his mind. It’s a weird sensation, but not unpleasant or uncomfortable. He smiles, tentative.
“What did I miss?”
“Not much.”
Bob is smiling back, and Brian has to sit up and kiss him. He’s warm, as if he’s been lying in the sun, and his fingers feel almost hot against the still cold skin of Brian’s face. It’s good. It’s a bit like coming back to life, somehow. They rest their foreheads against one another then, while their breath mingles, and smile again.
“Let’s get back home.”
Author: zephyrina
Pairing: Bob Bryar/Brian Schechter
Rating: PG-13
POV/Wordcount: Third - 2,866 words
Summary: Brian looks up. It’s insane, but it’s like Bob is lying on a wall, defying gravity and logic.
Disclaimer: The guys aren't mine, it never happened.
Author Notes: Inspired by this post at we_are_cities + #33 A New World at fanfic50
For anne_elliot. This is all yours. ♥ Thank you to anne_elliot and veecious for the beta.
TBP AU. Character death.
*
“My world is made of tiles.”
Brian doesn’t reply. He’s standing next to the window with no glass, smoking a cigarette. Every once in a while he pulls at the collar of his uniform. It itches, and it isn’t his size, not really. It feels as if it’s been tailored for someone else, someone who’s more or less of his same shape and height, but not exactly like him. It’s a weird thought, even disturbing to a point, because - why is he wearing clothes that belong to another guy? Where are his own, and where is that guy?
Pointless questions. Neither he nor Bob have answers. He turns his head towards the window. Ivy is breaking in, making its way through shards of glass. There are shards next to his feet, too, and Brian idly wonders how the glass was broken, if with a stone or by accident. He's looked around, but he’s found nothing, only dust. It’s starting to cover his boots as well, his boots and Bob's.
Brian looks up. Bob’s lying on the floor with a stem of grass hanging from his mouth, as still and relaxed as if he was in his own bed - even if that isn’t really a floor to Brian, rather a wall, and there’s the intricate shadow of a railing on Bob's face, on his hair, on the upper part of his uniform. It’s insane, but it’s like Bob is lying on a wall, defying gravity and logic, or if there were two rooms existing in the same space. Two rooms turned sideways, and that reminds him of that famous painting, the one with people climbing a never ending staircase.
Instinct prompts him to raise his head. The ceiling - his ceiling, because Bob would say otherwise - is empty, no hanging lamps and no cobwebs in sight (and no furniture, too, something that Brian’s sanity really appreciates), just chipped paint and a moldy path near the corner. Perhaps a leakage or a broken pipe.
“Hey. If you’re done staring at the stains on the wall, you could help me get up. Fucking sun is blinding me.”
“Can’t you just get up by yourself?” asks Brian, but he’s already bending his knees and reaching out for him. Bob slides, sort of, swinging his legs to hop on the floor - Brian’s floor. For some reason he still has the railing shadow on his face.
“There, better,” he says, brushing the dust off his uniform. He pats it away from the Maltese cross sewn on his arm, the buttons, the silver stripes of his pants. “Those tiles are fucking gross. It’ll take us ages to clean the whole place.”
Brian blinks. “What?”
“What what?”
“I mean, why should we clean this place?” And why were you lying on the wall like a damn lizard in the sun, where are we, and why are we wearing uniforms are the other questions at the top of Brian’s mind. He doesn’t flood Bob with them, though, he just steps back and waits. Bob seems to know more than he does, and Bob doesn’t like being pressed for info.
“Well, if you want to dwell in shit, help yourself. I’ll make sure to draw a line that separates my side of the house from your side.”
“Um.”
Bob reaches over and steals a drag from the half-smoked cigarette Brian had in his hand. He forgot about it, admittedly, but it looks like it’s not an issue, because it stopped burning. It’s still lit up, and Bob proves it by blowing some smoke, but it doesn’t wear out or anything.
“Come on. I put the tiles on the bathroom floor, as you asked me to, now let’s go and chill somewhere while they do whatever tiles do right after you’ve stuck them in. Dry out or something.”
Bob takes Brian by his hand and leads him out. Thankfully, the door is exactly as it’s supposed to.
*
Bob is limping a little and has a bandage around his calf, but when Brian asks him about it (with the nagging feeling that it’s something he should already know), Bob shrugs. Shit happens, that’s what he means.
*
Their house is - for lack of a better word - peculiar. It has a kitchen (empty except than for a sink placed in a corner), a bedroom (with a mattress on the wall, and it’s quite an experience to walk perpendicularly to the floor. To what Brian would usually call ‘floor’), a bathroom (‘See the tiles? I know shit about do-it-yourself, but it did turn out good, didn’t it?’ and Brian is left staring at chipped, mismatched tiles placed on the ceiling and on part of the wall), and the small room with ivy they had been in before.
There are graffiti in some places, weird drawings that seem to be part of a bigger painting. Brian can make out people in uniform - uniforms similar to the ones he and Bob are wearing - a burning float, the frame of a zeppelin, and a woman with a gas mask on her face. They’re well done, but they’re upsetting, especially the guy with a guitar and Brian’s jacket. It’s the same, he spends the best part of an hour counting the stripes on both sleeves, the tiny buttons.
When Bob comes back from his smoking break - he took Brian’s old cigarette with him, stating that he didn’t want it to go to waste and got back with a couple of old blankets folded under his arm - Brian is still studying the graffiti.
“What are you doing? Gerard did a great job with them, uh? Look, I found these. They’re old but they’ll do, they’re warm.”
Brian nods - really, what else could he do? - and watches him entering the bedroom, his shadow looming next to Brian’s head while he hops on (the wall, the wall, the fucking wall) the bed and drops the blankets. Then, Bob moves and his shadow moves as well, hiding the figure that’s wearing Brian’s clothes. Bob said that Gerard painted them, and that’s a familiar name, but again he’s unable to pinpoint the right memory. It’s there, floating right beneath the surface of his conscious self, yet he can’t reach it. He frowns.
“Hey Bob?”
“Yeah?”
Bob walks back into the kitchen, heading towards the sink. The faucet is rusty, and so is the water he uses to wash his hands. There are no towels in sight, so he just shakes them before reaching Brian. He stands close, just a step behind him.
“What did you want?” he asks, putting a hand on Brian’s back.
“I don’t remember any of this.” Brian points at the graffiti, touches the black outline, the hair of the one with a pin on his uniform. He has fresh paint on his fingertips when he withdraws them. “I do remember about you, though.”
“Well, it’s a good thing, I guess?”
“It is, yes.”
“Cool.”
Bob reaches out and wraps his arm around Brian’s shoulders. The fabric of his sleeve tickles Brian under his chin. He smells of copper, old wood, and ashes. It isn’t unpleasant.
They look at the scene depicted in front of them for a little while, then Bob sighs.
“You know, I just wish Gerard would stop painting on the floor. We’re gonna ruin them in a short while, stepping on them and shit,” he says. Brian blinks. Bob’s looking at the ceiling.
*
It’s probably just an odd thought, but Brian has the feeling that here (wherever that here might be) time passes in a different way. It might be slower, it might be faster, he can’t tell, and the clock hung outside, on the railing of the stairs that lead to the roof, isn’t of any help. It moves, alright, but it does it counterclockwise, ticking time backwards.
According to Bob, it’s set on the Greenwich parallel (‘Parallel?’ ‘Yeah?’), it’s correct and precise. There’s concern in his eyes, though, and Brian stops pushing the subject. Still, every once in a while he turns to look at it, at the roman numbers printed on the white dial, at the tarnished frame, or at the red string wrapped around the hook.
Bob sits on the step right below the clock. He had to clear it from those black and white petals before sitting down. They are everywhere, as if they rained down the sky at some point. Well, perhaps that thought isn’t that far from the truth, Brian wonders, picking up a handful. They’re just that, regular petals of some regular plant, except for the fact that there are way too many scattered around to consider it normal.
“Come on, get up. It’s time.”
Brian looks up, wary. Half of Bob’s face is lit up, and there’s the omnipresent shadow drawing patterns on his cheek. He’s on his feet now, leaned against the railing, his chin raised towards the sky.
“Yes, it’s time,” he repeats in a low voice, as if he's talking to himself. He turns around then and starts climbing the stairs. His boots squash the petals, but Brian doesn’t see that. He’s watching the sky, trying to make out what Bob has just seen. As far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing worth of a mention, not even a funny-shaped cloud.
“Brian? Are you coming or not?”
Bob’s reached the last step already, he has a foot on it and one on the roof.
“Yes. Yes, sure.”
The squashed petals have a bad smell. It can’t be defined a stench, not really, but Brian wrinkles his nose and hurries up. Once or twice he touches the railing with the palm of his hand, only to find it stained with rust. It even shakes a little when he leans on it, just like it happens in old houses, and it stops abruptly on the last step. There’s no floor connected to the roof, no railing to stop people from falling on the ground. Brian shakes his head.
“I’m here,” he says. “Bob?”
“Yeah, come over.”
Once again logic is chipped, frayed at the edges. Brian knows that the house (their house, alright) isn’t that big, he’s been inside and he’s even circled it before, out of boredom and curiosity. The roof is huge though. From where he stands, it resembles a parking lot, empty and with petals scattered around. Bob is sitting next to one corner, knees up to his chest and far from him.
Drawing near, Brian notices the old mattress and the blankets Bob found earlier, a bedside lamp with a cracked, stained glass. It’s lit up, even if there’s no electricity on the roof (hell, the power cord is wrapped around the base) and turned towards Bob.
“You can lie here, if you want. I brought it up just for you,” Bob says, patting the mattress with his hand. A tiny part of Brian’s mind would want to call him out on that, because no, he’s never seen Bob moving anything out of the house, but he’s tired, worn out all of a sudden, and he only replies with a ‘thanks’ instead.
“Welcome. Cover yourself up, it’ll get cold in a short while.”
“I guess.”
Brian lies down and turns on his side. Bob’s thigh is too near to let the chance pass, so he puts his head on it, feeling both stupid and soothed at the same time. Whatever. They’re on the roof of their house, if he wants to get a little mushy, he damn well can. It’s Bob who pulls up the blankets, draping one around his shoulders and the other on Brian. He was right before, they’re warm.
“What are we doing here?”
“You’ll see in a while. Don’t fall asleep. The air is thicker in this place, it lulls you to sleep, but don’t. You’ll miss the parade.”
“Oh.”
Brian nods, as if he knows what Bob is talking about, and fights off the urge to close his eyes. Apparently, their house has been built next to a cliff, and from the roof they can see almost the whole valley. He frowns, taking some time to study the surroundings. There’s a city far in the distance - the silhouette of a city, with pinnacles and high, black buildings - and barren fields, filled with what looks like garbage. The cliff isn’t that high, he can make out furniture, tree trunks, planks, all piled up along the road. It’s… well, it’s an odd kind garbage, made of wood and nothing else but again, that isn’t the oddest thing Brian has seen there. He yawns.
“Bob?”
“Yes?”
“You said that Gerard painted the graffiti. The ones in our house, I mean.”
“Yes,” Bob replies and touches Brian’s hair, brushing it lightly. “What’s the matter?”
“Who’s Gerard?”
*
Brian falls asleep every now and then. He tries hard to not to, but it feels warm and cozy under the blanket, and Bob has started tapping his fingers against the roof. The dull noise has a familiar beat, it’s something Brian has already heard more than once - perhaps here, perhaps on another planet, another time - and that, together with the thick air Bob mentioned before, induces Brian to close his eyes just for a moment.
The first cinders arrive when Brian is about to give in for the third time in a row. They’re big, of the same size of the black and white petals, and they don’t behave as he’d expect them to, something that Brian should really start to take for granted. Despite the hiss and the smoke they produce when they hit the fabric of their uniforms or the blankets, they’re cold. They remind Brian of hail.
“What is it?”
“The float’s burning,” explains Bob, picking cinders up and tossing them aside.
“What float?”
“Over there. Look.”
Brian looks. The road he saw before isn’t empty anymore. A long stream of people is walking down along it, dressed in black and with their faces covered by masks. He can see men and women of about all ages, from old guys with canes or on wheelchairs to children clutching their toys. There are perhaps thousands of them, so many people that Brian is unable to see the end of the (funeral) procession, and they’re following the float Bob is pointing at without making a noise. No one is talking, no one is crying nor laughing, not even the small kids. Brian wonders for a moment if they might be all mute - a gathering of sort, it’d make as much sense as anything else he’s seen so far - but no, the gravel doesn’t creak under their shoes either.
Other cinders reach them, one hits Brian on his neck. They come from the float, just as Bob told him, because the float is burning, and there are other people on it, people playing instruments, people wearing uniforms, fuck, fuck, fuck. He can’t see their faces, and in a wave of nausea, he realizes he doesn’t want to. He knows who they are, he once knew who they were, and that - here, in this place, right now - is a bad thing.
Brian coughs. The air smells of ash.
“It’s alright. I should have thought about it. Why don’t you rest for a while? You’ll feel better then.”
Bob’s voice is soothing and so is his hand, rubbing slow circles on Brian’s shoulder. He closes his eyes and tries to relax. Unsurprisingly enough, the memory of what he’s just seen flows out his mind, like water on smooth stones.
“I guess. I’m really tired.”
Bob says something then, Brian’s sure. ‘Getting used’ and ‘time’ are the only words he catches, though, his mind feels like a blank canvas and he wants to sleep.
*
Brian sleeps. He hasn’t stretched his legs nor his arms once, remaining in the same position all the time. He’s even stopped breathing at some point, ten minutes ago - Bob checked and nodded, relieved. He’ll wake him up in a few, as soon as the float is done burning and the parade vanishes.
Just a little while more, thinks Bob, watching the fire consume himself - a faceless, old version of himself - and the others. He used to find it upsetting once, too, he can understand Brian’s earlier reaction, but now he just dismisses it as a normal thing. It’s like watching a skin he’s shed sometime in the past, nothing more.
*
“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. It’s late.”
“Hm,” is all Brian can reply when Bob tugs at his uniform. It’s always been hard for him to wake up. He yawns and rolls on his back, squinting at Bob while blood starts flowing again in his veins and thoughts refill his mind. It’s a weird sensation, but not unpleasant or uncomfortable. He smiles, tentative.
“What did I miss?”
“Not much.”
Bob is smiling back, and Brian has to sit up and kiss him. He’s warm, as if he’s been lying in the sun, and his fingers feel almost hot against the still cold skin of Brian’s face. It’s good. It’s a bit like coming back to life, somehow. They rest their foreheads against one another then, while their breath mingles, and smile again.
“Let’s get back home.”