NaNoWriMo: Yes, it's happening.
'bout time for a NaNo excerpt, eh? The first is from the piece bridging LTT to its sequel, tentatively titled Agreed Upon, and is one of Christian's (so far) three appearances. The second is, uh, his second; and the third is Sacha's wonderfully awkward attempt at adjusting to normal life and his absolute inability to understand it. Which will go places, I am sure.
The downside of writing the majority of this for word wars is that I am subtle as a hammer to the front of someone's face and the whole thing has that "THEME THEME THEME LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU, LOOK AT IT!" feel. Especially when there's not thousands of words around it where that feeling isn't there.
There are also a million callbacks to the first novel, which is kind of fun! And horrible of me to the people who follow the stories 'cause it's not like those manuscripts have been released in full anywhere. Terrible.
Oh well. Here we go. Blah blah, NaNo quality, fair warning; it needs a good edit, a good trimming, and a bit of whipping into shape, but whatever. NaNo.
~
There is no place in the world for dogs like us, Nicodemo had once told him. But an infinite amount of room for our corpses.
Christian knew, somewhere deep in his bones, at a level that resonated with the pulse of the city under his feet, that his role in the story was coming to an end. The rhythm would choke him off soon. Maybe not this year. Maybe not the next. But it would not accept his presence as it had done before. The dirt on Nicodemo’s grave was beginning to show signs of green, weak blades of grass breaking through the unsettled earth, bowed down under the weight of the rain.
Christian would never approach the grave directly. He stood a few feet off, to the side, where he could not read the name engraved on the heavy stone, safe from the compulsion to piece the letters together in his mind and have it echo around his brain. He wanted no reminders of his failure. Saw the name in the headlines of the paper often enough in the weeks that had followed Nicodemo’s death until he became saturated with the weight of it, until his shoulders, too, sagged under the rain despite the leather that was meant to shed it all.
He did not know why he remained. Why he bothered. In the wake of Nicodemo’s death, the city was beginning to breathe again, to flex its fledgling wings. Oh, it all looked the same on the surface: the same people passed Christian in the street, the same people stepped six inches further to the side than they needed to when he passed, the same jostling for taxi-cabs downtown and the same dour looks on their faces when the sun was shining but the stink from the harbour penetrated the atmosphere all the same.
But the pulse was different. Christian understood it as a bypass: an old heart, a bad heart, whose deteriorating artery had been replaced. Breathing came more easily. The machinery that ran their world had, snakelike, shed its rusting flakes and revealed new steel beneath. A brave new world, full of the same people.
We’ll find somewhere for you, Leone had said. Something for you. And, jesting as usual, he had applied an elbow to Christian still-healing fractured ribs and added, someone for you.
Christian had wheezed. Leone took it for a laugh, a good sign, a sign Christian had let go.
- - -
Miss you.
After buzzing irritably on Christian’s desk, that was all the screen of his phone had to say to him. Rudely jerked from the book he had been reading, he stared at the message, and then flipped his phone shut and tossed it to the side. It skittered across the surface of his desk, tottered precariously at the edge, and then crashed into his garbage can, finding a soft landing amidst a dozen or so crumpled papers.
“Fuck.” Christian flipped his book shut, and got up to retrieve his phone.
He didn’t reply. There was no point; the further he was from Sacha, the easier it would be for him to find a new life, and better people. The kid deserved that much, in Christian’s estimation. That much and more.
He cast a glance toward his book-a catalogue of courses offered by the university in the fall, courtesy of Leone’s friendly attempt to find something for Christian. None of it interested him any longer. The campus had been a foreign, disjointed experience when he had attended school before. A failed attempt to normalize and acculturate to what was expected of him before being drawn into Nicodemo’s snare. He was not made for it. Not for the books, the people, the dorms. But Leone would insist, while refusing to hire, and Christian had finally sat down with the hefty book in his apartment.
Returning to the list of classes offered in languages, his eyes were constantly drawn to his phone.
Miss you, what could possibly have prompted that, so soon after Sacha had left?
Russian. Latin. Classical Greek.
Maybe the boy was already having a hard time of it.
Spanish. French. Swedish.
Maybe he was having a fine time of it, Christian mused, and the message had been a positive one. It would be like Sacha, sending something to say he was fine…
Japanese. Mandarin.
Christian reached for his phone, and deposited it back into the garbage can, out of his line of sight.
- - -
The conversation limped along until Sacha felt certain that letting it die would be an act of mercy rather than misery. He excused himself, indicating a need to sleep before the sun was set on both coasts, and slipped back upstairs.
He could not shake that storybook feeling. The sensation of moving through pages rather than across space, stepping from the picture-perfect snapshot of the dining room to the sterile, immobile bedroom, all crisp corners and bright colours. This was not the real world. This was someone’s construction, a painting, a family who had fractured at some point but was still holding hands across the divide so they did not drift helplessly apart and ruin their image of themselves.
The bedroom alone was large enough for him to not feel comfortable in the bed. It was too near the centre, offered too much empty space that demanded filling before the crawling sensation down his spine would cease. And yet, for such a large space, such a large house, why did he feel as if there was no room for him, no matter how small everyone was trying to themselves in order to accommodate him?
Maybe they weren’t trying to make themselves small at all. Maybe this was just how they were: Mariya, flighty and sad but keen to be chipper and overeager to help, as profound as a pomeranian hopping on its back legs to entertain company and foster attention; Anthony, gruff and confident that if the world would run by his rules, nothing would be wrong. Michael seemed the most levelheaded of them all, but he didn’t even live here, was only visiting to help Sacha’s arrival go smoothly.
This was, he realized, the life so many of his clients had referred to when they spoke of home. Those they loved, abandoned, turned away from for a night of flesh and fucking and comfort. A home where something so fundamental was missing that a whorehouse in the inner city could compensate for it.
Sacha sat on the floor under the window, ignoring how the hem of the curtain flickered against his hair and tickled the top of his head. The wall was cold against his back, but steady. He dug his phone out of his pocket, looked at the still-blank screen, and wondered. What did the Butterfly have that this house didn’t?
The downside of writing the majority of this for word wars is that I am subtle as a hammer to the front of someone's face and the whole thing has that "THEME THEME THEME LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU, LOOK AT IT!" feel. Especially when there's not thousands of words around it where that feeling isn't there.
There are also a million callbacks to the first novel, which is kind of fun! And horrible of me to the people who follow the stories 'cause it's not like those manuscripts have been released in full anywhere. Terrible.
Oh well. Here we go. Blah blah, NaNo quality, fair warning; it needs a good edit, a good trimming, and a bit of whipping into shape, but whatever. NaNo.
~
There is no place in the world for dogs like us, Nicodemo had once told him. But an infinite amount of room for our corpses.
Christian knew, somewhere deep in his bones, at a level that resonated with the pulse of the city under his feet, that his role in the story was coming to an end. The rhythm would choke him off soon. Maybe not this year. Maybe not the next. But it would not accept his presence as it had done before. The dirt on Nicodemo’s grave was beginning to show signs of green, weak blades of grass breaking through the unsettled earth, bowed down under the weight of the rain.
Christian would never approach the grave directly. He stood a few feet off, to the side, where he could not read the name engraved on the heavy stone, safe from the compulsion to piece the letters together in his mind and have it echo around his brain. He wanted no reminders of his failure. Saw the name in the headlines of the paper often enough in the weeks that had followed Nicodemo’s death until he became saturated with the weight of it, until his shoulders, too, sagged under the rain despite the leather that was meant to shed it all.
He did not know why he remained. Why he bothered. In the wake of Nicodemo’s death, the city was beginning to breathe again, to flex its fledgling wings. Oh, it all looked the same on the surface: the same people passed Christian in the street, the same people stepped six inches further to the side than they needed to when he passed, the same jostling for taxi-cabs downtown and the same dour looks on their faces when the sun was shining but the stink from the harbour penetrated the atmosphere all the same.
But the pulse was different. Christian understood it as a bypass: an old heart, a bad heart, whose deteriorating artery had been replaced. Breathing came more easily. The machinery that ran their world had, snakelike, shed its rusting flakes and revealed new steel beneath. A brave new world, full of the same people.
We’ll find somewhere for you, Leone had said. Something for you. And, jesting as usual, he had applied an elbow to Christian still-healing fractured ribs and added, someone for you.
Christian had wheezed. Leone took it for a laugh, a good sign, a sign Christian had let go.
- - -
Miss you.
After buzzing irritably on Christian’s desk, that was all the screen of his phone had to say to him. Rudely jerked from the book he had been reading, he stared at the message, and then flipped his phone shut and tossed it to the side. It skittered across the surface of his desk, tottered precariously at the edge, and then crashed into his garbage can, finding a soft landing amidst a dozen or so crumpled papers.
“Fuck.” Christian flipped his book shut, and got up to retrieve his phone.
He didn’t reply. There was no point; the further he was from Sacha, the easier it would be for him to find a new life, and better people. The kid deserved that much, in Christian’s estimation. That much and more.
He cast a glance toward his book-a catalogue of courses offered by the university in the fall, courtesy of Leone’s friendly attempt to find something for Christian. None of it interested him any longer. The campus had been a foreign, disjointed experience when he had attended school before. A failed attempt to normalize and acculturate to what was expected of him before being drawn into Nicodemo’s snare. He was not made for it. Not for the books, the people, the dorms. But Leone would insist, while refusing to hire, and Christian had finally sat down with the hefty book in his apartment.
Returning to the list of classes offered in languages, his eyes were constantly drawn to his phone.
Miss you, what could possibly have prompted that, so soon after Sacha had left?
Russian. Latin. Classical Greek.
Maybe the boy was already having a hard time of it.
Spanish. French. Swedish.
Maybe he was having a fine time of it, Christian mused, and the message had been a positive one. It would be like Sacha, sending something to say he was fine…
Japanese. Mandarin.
Christian reached for his phone, and deposited it back into the garbage can, out of his line of sight.
- - -
The conversation limped along until Sacha felt certain that letting it die would be an act of mercy rather than misery. He excused himself, indicating a need to sleep before the sun was set on both coasts, and slipped back upstairs.
He could not shake that storybook feeling. The sensation of moving through pages rather than across space, stepping from the picture-perfect snapshot of the dining room to the sterile, immobile bedroom, all crisp corners and bright colours. This was not the real world. This was someone’s construction, a painting, a family who had fractured at some point but was still holding hands across the divide so they did not drift helplessly apart and ruin their image of themselves.
The bedroom alone was large enough for him to not feel comfortable in the bed. It was too near the centre, offered too much empty space that demanded filling before the crawling sensation down his spine would cease. And yet, for such a large space, such a large house, why did he feel as if there was no room for him, no matter how small everyone was trying to themselves in order to accommodate him?
Maybe they weren’t trying to make themselves small at all. Maybe this was just how they were: Mariya, flighty and sad but keen to be chipper and overeager to help, as profound as a pomeranian hopping on its back legs to entertain company and foster attention; Anthony, gruff and confident that if the world would run by his rules, nothing would be wrong. Michael seemed the most levelheaded of them all, but he didn’t even live here, was only visiting to help Sacha’s arrival go smoothly.
This was, he realized, the life so many of his clients had referred to when they spoke of home. Those they loved, abandoned, turned away from for a night of flesh and fucking and comfort. A home where something so fundamental was missing that a whorehouse in the inner city could compensate for it.
Sacha sat on the floor under the window, ignoring how the hem of the curtain flickered against his hair and tickled the top of his head. The wall was cold against his back, but steady. He dug his phone out of his pocket, looked at the still-blank screen, and wondered. What did the Butterfly have that this house didn’t?