RP fic
Jumping on the RP fic bandwagon, really. Um, this will really only make sense to people in the HeroNet RPG, and even then you might want to avoid as it's a) wangst and b) amazingly self-indulgent wangst.
Um, basically, Fan' and my characters were fighting a lot, and my brain was obviously affected by this in the shower when I was ill and I think I wrote this in about two hours and it hasn't be beta'd or anything, really, so god knows my tenses will probably be all over the shop. I apologise to
rifle for making her charrie breed. But it made me laugh.
And originally, this was written not just because I had all the scenes in my head, but also to cheer Fan' up and I don't think I managed that. Sorry? At least this time no one is drug addicted and not touching their breadstick But at least it spawned its counterpoint. I like balance.
This isn’t how it goes.
***
A slammed door, a fist thumped against a wall, one lousy ex-client in town and it all goes wrong.
***
He spends exactly three days, six hours and thirty-seven minutes hanging around outside Ryan’s classroom buildings before some girl that he recognises from some party takes pity on him and tells him that Ryan had a family emergency and went back to Massachusetts. Gus thanks her, and leaves. The only family Ryan has is him. He can’t quite think in past tense yet.
***
Pete is welcoming, and full of obscenities and ways to find him, and niceties when he lets his guard down, allowing Gus to drink all of his booze and smoke one fag after another, sleeping, or rather, passing out on his couch that’s about a foot too short for him. Although he thinks it’s Kitty who covers him with a blanket when he’s asleep. Pete tells him to get out of the country, go back to London. “Once you’ve fucked most of Soho, you’ll feel better.” He does and it doesn’t, but he appreciates the advice. He stays in a hotel, avoids Julia, calls Remy. They pass pleasantries, talk about the school, what students are now at Xavier’s, how Jamie is clearly insanely proud of Ash and keeps a scrapbook of all his achievements working for Stark. There’s a pause.
“I haven’t heard anything about where he is.”
“Did I ask?”
Gus can practically hear Remy shrug, his warm laughter somehow soothing even over the phone.
“Non, cher, but with you it’s always about what you don’t say.”
Well, Gus thinks, this time I talked until I had no words left in me and it still didn’t help. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and he really doesn’t like those odds.
***
He returns home briefly to resign, and pack up Ryan’s things, sending them to Keane. No note. Too much to say that he said already and it’s not important anymore. And then it’s time for his distraction, in the form of places, art, things to steal, men, women, beer. Anything that can be eaten, drunk, stolen or fucked. Postcards to Pete and Remy bear the stamps of Brazil, Cuba, India, Sri Lanka, Laos, Japan, New Zealand. Places where people don’t know him, where he hasn’t been before, or at least, not in the past few years. He spends months in some, just days in others, returning and sometimes doubling back on himself. Anyone watching his pattern would say he was searching, but he’s not, he’s losing. The art of displacement.
He’s in a hotel room in Bangkok watching the ceiling lamp spin round, the sound of mosquitoes in the room now relegated to comforting background noise. A couple are fighting in the next room over and he’s half-listening, something about how the man looked at the waitress, and he’s already bored, waiting for the make-up fuck to happen. The bedsprings creak and he gets up, packs efficiently, leaves. The plane back to New York is full and there’s a screaming child but he sleeps through it all. Home.
***
He hasn’t seen Kitty in nearly a year and it surprises him how much she’s changed. Her cheekbones are sharper, her face slightly fuller. Still the same smile, the same laugh, which is a comfort, but sometimes he looks at her and sees a stranger and tries not to think about what a year would do to Ryan. Whether he would even recognise him.
She’s talking about some ‘way cool’ computer move she pulled the other day that helped Pete out somehow and he’s keeping an eye on the guy with insanely messy hair at the other end of the bar. It’s a habit, almost like a game he plays with himself. It was unbelievable how many messy haired short people there were in New York, let alone the world. Every street corner, catching a glimpse of someone and following them until he was lost and it wouldn’t be him anyway. It never was.
“It’s not him,’ Kitty breaks into his reverie. Her face is sad, her smile kind. She places a hand on his arm and he watches it detachedly like it’s happening to someone else. “I can see him in the mirror, it’s not him.” He knows. For all he’s afraid he wouldn’t recognise him he would be able to tell if he walked in this room with his eyes shut. Some things you just know.
Gus looks at her, his expression unreadable. “Tell me again what happened when you told him.”
Kitty’s face lights up and she gestures with her orange juice. “He said ‘fuck me, I guess that means I have to make an honest woman of you,” and the diamond sparkles on the hand she places on her bump.
***
He’s still restless, a wanderer, going from job to job and city to city. If he keeps this up there will be nothing left to steal. Remy jokingly tells him to learn how to con people, but god knows he never had a good poker face. Not when he wanted to. He needs something else to do, something to keep his mind occupied. The old jewellery store across the road from him goes bust, and the shop sits there, vacant, until the green paint on the windows starts peeling and he can’t take it anymore. Something to do.
The store takes him through another winter, the amount of work needed surprising him. Gus is sure he’s inhaled an entire tree’s worth of sawdust after the first month alone. But he needs to fill it ceiling high with books, and that means shelves and that means hiring people to do that kind of thing for him and then standing round and looking helpful, inordinately pleased when his height allows him to do something that the others can’t. See, he is useful after all.
***
“Don’t try to find me. Really, Gus, don’t look for me.”
“You’re running away again, you always - put that down. You’re not walking out of this room. Stop packing! For fucks’s sake, can you listen for a fucking minute?”
“I have been listening. You haven’t been listening, as always. I have to go. I can’t be here any more.”
“There will be a client in every city, Ryan. You can’t avoid your past, you know this. What the fuck ever happened to let’s face things together? Was that all bullshit?”
“I don’t want you to face this with me.”
And what else was there to say after that?
***
Remy drops by, giving a low whistle at the state of the shop as Gus hands him a cold beer. It’s warm for March, and Gus doesn’t mind so much that he’s sitting on the stoop of his flat in a t-shirt, paint smudged and sweaty. It feels good. “Merde, that looks like a job.”
“Yeah.” Gus squints up at Remy and shields his eyes from the sun. “Where’s the mutants with hacksaws for hands when you need them?”
Remy gives a laugh. “Well, it suits you. You look good.” Gus nods in response, a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, and Remy sighs.
“You know, if you wanted, we could track him down. Emma could find him. Hell, Kitty can hack into any computer, he must be still studying.”
Gus shakes his head. “Nah. If he wanted me to find him, I would find him. It’s fine. Tell me about Charlie. What’s this about his crew?” And spring heats up into summer and his time is spent worrying about other people and arguing with wholesalers, and for one memorable week, going to Prague with Pete. He’s still surprised the police let them go.
***
He opens the store in the autumn, and the russet leaves look striking against the paintwork. Contrary to the original plan, he does sell the books, just not the special ones, which are kept in the back in a cabinet that says ‘touch and be sued’. That generally seems to work on Americans. But the others he happily sells to people, orders more, orders specially for some if they ask. It’s quiet and peaceful and almost perfect, and it’s like a mockery of what he could have had. But it’s what he chose and so he stays.
He spends Christmas with Kitty and Pete and the gurgling Jonny, with Pete furiously chainsmoking in the snow outside, irate that he can’t smoke in the house any more. “It’s a fucking tragedy. You have a kid and you realise you are going to die, that’s what fucking happens. What do kids do anyway, except shit and eat and cry and shit again. Why couldn’t we have gotten a puppy?” Since he doesn’t mean a word of it, Gus ignores him and keeps taking away his whisky, and when he tells Kitty about it, she only hits Pete once. “For your own good,” they both tell him, and grin.
***
It’s February before he hears from Pete again, tipping him off about a job near Chicago, a family whose estate is notoriously hard to get into. There’s not only good money in it, there’s also the thrill of pissing off rich people who have no right to sit on that much money and that beautiful art and not share. So Gus closes the shop for a while and heads up north, and fuck, if it isn’t freezing. How do people stand this? He spends his time, when not watching the movements of the family, in diners and cafes, pouring over specs or sometimes just reading, simply to get out of the cold. He finds one diner that does perfect tea; he swears that it must be run by someone British, because no one else in America seems to do tea this perfect and strong.
He’s there one Saturday morning, reading the paper, on his second cup, when the bell on the door jangles, and a clatter of people walk in and he gets an involuntary shiver down his spine. He turns the page, attributes it to the cold. Nearly spring but you wouldn’t know it. His fingers twirl the mug around in the table, and old habit, not even noticing that his hand is moving.
Someone slides into the seat opposite him, and he looks up, frowning, and freezes.
“I told you not to look for me,” Ryan says, in a tone so familiarly belligerent that Gus nearly smiles.
“I wasn’t,” he replies automatically, halfway between the truth and a lie. Not actively looking. His eyes rake over Ryan as if he was memorising him, as if this could somehow make up for the time lost. And he looks the same, older perhaps, it’s been over two years, his hair still a mop falling into his eyes, whose colour Gus knows so well by now that it makes his hand tighten on the mug when he sees them again.
“There’s a job in town.”
“But you’re in my diner.”
Gus has to laugh at that. “Your diner does the best tea in the country. Coincidence. I promise. I didn’t track you down.”
Ryan looks sceptical but still nods, his hands busy shredding a napkin into tiny pieces on the table, and Gus has to bite his tongue hard.
“How’s New York?”
“Warmer than this. You go to school here?” Gus is not wasting time on fucking small talk about the damn weather and how New York is, what fucking bullshit.
“Yeah. I transferred to Michigan. We’re in town for the weekend. Before finals.” Ryan gestures to his friends at another table who are all no doubt watching them but Gus doesn’t even glance over. He’s watching Ryan’s hands, the stiffness of his shoulders, the way his eyes dart about. He folds his paper, stands up, throws a couple of crumpled bills on the table.
“I’ll get out of your way. Pretend you never saw me.”
Ryan starts at this, looking at Gus with confusion. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. Why, you want to have a conversation? You really weren’t keen on talking the last time I saw you. Or did you want to talk about how you left me, with no address, no real reason for it, never even came to pick up your things?” His eyes were challenging and he couldn’t help the bitter tone of his voice. “No. I’m going to leave you. In your diner.” He doesn’t look back, doesn’t blink until he gets outside, and then he tells himself that it’s the cold. Chicago is good for blaming the weather.
He leaves the city, and the job never gets done. He finds he doesn’t care. He doesn’t take anyone’s calls for a month but goes and hides in Dublin until he feels too hungover to care anymore.
***
Six months later it is fucking sweltering in New York. He has all the windows of his flat open, and he’s watching the kids in front of the store, making sure they don’t decide to play ‘let’s hit balls through the window’ again. He’s padding around in bare feet, his old faded t-shirt clinging to him, sticky, thinking about taking his fourth shower of the day, attempting to tidy up but his heart isn’t in it. His buzzer goes and he hits it without checking. Pete said he might swing by, which is why his fridge is full of beer and no food.
He opens the door and has to drop his gaze.
“You’re an idiot!” Ryan tells him angrily, and reaches up to shove his shoulder.
“And you’re a fuckwit,” he shoots back in annoyance, and stands there, looking at him and frowning. The next thing he knows, he has an armful of Ryan and his neighbour has just walked up the stairs and given him an odd look, so now would be the right time to close the door.
“I missed you,” Ryan whispers, and he turns his head to look at him.
“What, you needed nearly three years of air?” Gus asks sarcastically, but the bite isn’t there. It’s hard to be bitter when you’ve come home for the first time in years.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You’re the idiot.”
“Yeah.” Ryan nods, his eyes wide, his arms curled around Gus’ neck.
“You ready to talk now?”
Except there wasn’t any talking, not for a few long minutes, because some things said more than words anyway.
***
End
Um, basically, Fan' and my characters were fighting a lot, and my brain was obviously affected by this in the shower when I was ill and I think I wrote this in about two hours and it hasn't be beta'd or anything, really, so god knows my tenses will probably be all over the shop. I apologise to
rifle for making her charrie breed. But it made me laugh.
And originally, this was written not just because I had all the scenes in my head, but also to cheer Fan' up and I don't think I managed that. Sorry? At least this time no one is drug addicted and not touching their breadstick But at least it spawned its counterpoint. I like balance.
This isn’t how it goes.
***
A slammed door, a fist thumped against a wall, one lousy ex-client in town and it all goes wrong.
***
He spends exactly three days, six hours and thirty-seven minutes hanging around outside Ryan’s classroom buildings before some girl that he recognises from some party takes pity on him and tells him that Ryan had a family emergency and went back to Massachusetts. Gus thanks her, and leaves. The only family Ryan has is him. He can’t quite think in past tense yet.
***
Pete is welcoming, and full of obscenities and ways to find him, and niceties when he lets his guard down, allowing Gus to drink all of his booze and smoke one fag after another, sleeping, or rather, passing out on his couch that’s about a foot too short for him. Although he thinks it’s Kitty who covers him with a blanket when he’s asleep. Pete tells him to get out of the country, go back to London. “Once you’ve fucked most of Soho, you’ll feel better.” He does and it doesn’t, but he appreciates the advice. He stays in a hotel, avoids Julia, calls Remy. They pass pleasantries, talk about the school, what students are now at Xavier’s, how Jamie is clearly insanely proud of Ash and keeps a scrapbook of all his achievements working for Stark. There’s a pause.
“I haven’t heard anything about where he is.”
“Did I ask?”
Gus can practically hear Remy shrug, his warm laughter somehow soothing even over the phone.
“Non, cher, but with you it’s always about what you don’t say.”
Well, Gus thinks, this time I talked until I had no words left in me and it still didn’t help. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and he really doesn’t like those odds.
***
He returns home briefly to resign, and pack up Ryan’s things, sending them to Keane. No note. Too much to say that he said already and it’s not important anymore. And then it’s time for his distraction, in the form of places, art, things to steal, men, women, beer. Anything that can be eaten, drunk, stolen or fucked. Postcards to Pete and Remy bear the stamps of Brazil, Cuba, India, Sri Lanka, Laos, Japan, New Zealand. Places where people don’t know him, where he hasn’t been before, or at least, not in the past few years. He spends months in some, just days in others, returning and sometimes doubling back on himself. Anyone watching his pattern would say he was searching, but he’s not, he’s losing. The art of displacement.
He’s in a hotel room in Bangkok watching the ceiling lamp spin round, the sound of mosquitoes in the room now relegated to comforting background noise. A couple are fighting in the next room over and he’s half-listening, something about how the man looked at the waitress, and he’s already bored, waiting for the make-up fuck to happen. The bedsprings creak and he gets up, packs efficiently, leaves. The plane back to New York is full and there’s a screaming child but he sleeps through it all. Home.
***
He hasn’t seen Kitty in nearly a year and it surprises him how much she’s changed. Her cheekbones are sharper, her face slightly fuller. Still the same smile, the same laugh, which is a comfort, but sometimes he looks at her and sees a stranger and tries not to think about what a year would do to Ryan. Whether he would even recognise him.
She’s talking about some ‘way cool’ computer move she pulled the other day that helped Pete out somehow and he’s keeping an eye on the guy with insanely messy hair at the other end of the bar. It’s a habit, almost like a game he plays with himself. It was unbelievable how many messy haired short people there were in New York, let alone the world. Every street corner, catching a glimpse of someone and following them until he was lost and it wouldn’t be him anyway. It never was.
“It’s not him,’ Kitty breaks into his reverie. Her face is sad, her smile kind. She places a hand on his arm and he watches it detachedly like it’s happening to someone else. “I can see him in the mirror, it’s not him.” He knows. For all he’s afraid he wouldn’t recognise him he would be able to tell if he walked in this room with his eyes shut. Some things you just know.
Gus looks at her, his expression unreadable. “Tell me again what happened when you told him.”
Kitty’s face lights up and she gestures with her orange juice. “He said ‘fuck me, I guess that means I have to make an honest woman of you,” and the diamond sparkles on the hand she places on her bump.
***
He’s still restless, a wanderer, going from job to job and city to city. If he keeps this up there will be nothing left to steal. Remy jokingly tells him to learn how to con people, but god knows he never had a good poker face. Not when he wanted to. He needs something else to do, something to keep his mind occupied. The old jewellery store across the road from him goes bust, and the shop sits there, vacant, until the green paint on the windows starts peeling and he can’t take it anymore. Something to do.
The store takes him through another winter, the amount of work needed surprising him. Gus is sure he’s inhaled an entire tree’s worth of sawdust after the first month alone. But he needs to fill it ceiling high with books, and that means shelves and that means hiring people to do that kind of thing for him and then standing round and looking helpful, inordinately pleased when his height allows him to do something that the others can’t. See, he is useful after all.
***
“Don’t try to find me. Really, Gus, don’t look for me.”
“You’re running away again, you always - put that down. You’re not walking out of this room. Stop packing! For fucks’s sake, can you listen for a fucking minute?”
“I have been listening. You haven’t been listening, as always. I have to go. I can’t be here any more.”
“There will be a client in every city, Ryan. You can’t avoid your past, you know this. What the fuck ever happened to let’s face things together? Was that all bullshit?”
“I don’t want you to face this with me.”
And what else was there to say after that?
***
Remy drops by, giving a low whistle at the state of the shop as Gus hands him a cold beer. It’s warm for March, and Gus doesn’t mind so much that he’s sitting on the stoop of his flat in a t-shirt, paint smudged and sweaty. It feels good. “Merde, that looks like a job.”
“Yeah.” Gus squints up at Remy and shields his eyes from the sun. “Where’s the mutants with hacksaws for hands when you need them?”
Remy gives a laugh. “Well, it suits you. You look good.” Gus nods in response, a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, and Remy sighs.
“You know, if you wanted, we could track him down. Emma could find him. Hell, Kitty can hack into any computer, he must be still studying.”
Gus shakes his head. “Nah. If he wanted me to find him, I would find him. It’s fine. Tell me about Charlie. What’s this about his crew?” And spring heats up into summer and his time is spent worrying about other people and arguing with wholesalers, and for one memorable week, going to Prague with Pete. He’s still surprised the police let them go.
***
He opens the store in the autumn, and the russet leaves look striking against the paintwork. Contrary to the original plan, he does sell the books, just not the special ones, which are kept in the back in a cabinet that says ‘touch and be sued’. That generally seems to work on Americans. But the others he happily sells to people, orders more, orders specially for some if they ask. It’s quiet and peaceful and almost perfect, and it’s like a mockery of what he could have had. But it’s what he chose and so he stays.
He spends Christmas with Kitty and Pete and the gurgling Jonny, with Pete furiously chainsmoking in the snow outside, irate that he can’t smoke in the house any more. “It’s a fucking tragedy. You have a kid and you realise you are going to die, that’s what fucking happens. What do kids do anyway, except shit and eat and cry and shit again. Why couldn’t we have gotten a puppy?” Since he doesn’t mean a word of it, Gus ignores him and keeps taking away his whisky, and when he tells Kitty about it, she only hits Pete once. “For your own good,” they both tell him, and grin.
***
It’s February before he hears from Pete again, tipping him off about a job near Chicago, a family whose estate is notoriously hard to get into. There’s not only good money in it, there’s also the thrill of pissing off rich people who have no right to sit on that much money and that beautiful art and not share. So Gus closes the shop for a while and heads up north, and fuck, if it isn’t freezing. How do people stand this? He spends his time, when not watching the movements of the family, in diners and cafes, pouring over specs or sometimes just reading, simply to get out of the cold. He finds one diner that does perfect tea; he swears that it must be run by someone British, because no one else in America seems to do tea this perfect and strong.
He’s there one Saturday morning, reading the paper, on his second cup, when the bell on the door jangles, and a clatter of people walk in and he gets an involuntary shiver down his spine. He turns the page, attributes it to the cold. Nearly spring but you wouldn’t know it. His fingers twirl the mug around in the table, and old habit, not even noticing that his hand is moving.
Someone slides into the seat opposite him, and he looks up, frowning, and freezes.
“I told you not to look for me,” Ryan says, in a tone so familiarly belligerent that Gus nearly smiles.
“I wasn’t,” he replies automatically, halfway between the truth and a lie. Not actively looking. His eyes rake over Ryan as if he was memorising him, as if this could somehow make up for the time lost. And he looks the same, older perhaps, it’s been over two years, his hair still a mop falling into his eyes, whose colour Gus knows so well by now that it makes his hand tighten on the mug when he sees them again.
“There’s a job in town.”
“But you’re in my diner.”
Gus has to laugh at that. “Your diner does the best tea in the country. Coincidence. I promise. I didn’t track you down.”
Ryan looks sceptical but still nods, his hands busy shredding a napkin into tiny pieces on the table, and Gus has to bite his tongue hard.
“How’s New York?”
“Warmer than this. You go to school here?” Gus is not wasting time on fucking small talk about the damn weather and how New York is, what fucking bullshit.
“Yeah. I transferred to Michigan. We’re in town for the weekend. Before finals.” Ryan gestures to his friends at another table who are all no doubt watching them but Gus doesn’t even glance over. He’s watching Ryan’s hands, the stiffness of his shoulders, the way his eyes dart about. He folds his paper, stands up, throws a couple of crumpled bills on the table.
“I’ll get out of your way. Pretend you never saw me.”
Ryan starts at this, looking at Gus with confusion. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. Why, you want to have a conversation? You really weren’t keen on talking the last time I saw you. Or did you want to talk about how you left me, with no address, no real reason for it, never even came to pick up your things?” His eyes were challenging and he couldn’t help the bitter tone of his voice. “No. I’m going to leave you. In your diner.” He doesn’t look back, doesn’t blink until he gets outside, and then he tells himself that it’s the cold. Chicago is good for blaming the weather.
He leaves the city, and the job never gets done. He finds he doesn’t care. He doesn’t take anyone’s calls for a month but goes and hides in Dublin until he feels too hungover to care anymore.
***
Six months later it is fucking sweltering in New York. He has all the windows of his flat open, and he’s watching the kids in front of the store, making sure they don’t decide to play ‘let’s hit balls through the window’ again. He’s padding around in bare feet, his old faded t-shirt clinging to him, sticky, thinking about taking his fourth shower of the day, attempting to tidy up but his heart isn’t in it. His buzzer goes and he hits it without checking. Pete said he might swing by, which is why his fridge is full of beer and no food.
He opens the door and has to drop his gaze.
“You’re an idiot!” Ryan tells him angrily, and reaches up to shove his shoulder.
“And you’re a fuckwit,” he shoots back in annoyance, and stands there, looking at him and frowning. The next thing he knows, he has an armful of Ryan and his neighbour has just walked up the stairs and given him an odd look, so now would be the right time to close the door.
“I missed you,” Ryan whispers, and he turns his head to look at him.
“What, you needed nearly three years of air?” Gus asks sarcastically, but the bite isn’t there. It’s hard to be bitter when you’ve come home for the first time in years.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You’re the idiot.”
“Yeah.” Ryan nods, his eyes wide, his arms curled around Gus’ neck.
“You ready to talk now?”
Except there wasn’t any talking, not for a few long minutes, because some things said more than words anyway.
***
End