(the libertines) heavy on the meta, sticky on the metaphor, more or less untitled
this should have a bibliography...
ghostboy
The first time after a long time that they meet, Peter is smiling without his upper lip, and Carl, blinded by his hair, from across the nicotine fog can almost imagine that this is real - without camera flashes, unsurreptitious scratching of shorthand on paper - that they're actually here and not just pretending this is coincidence. The music bridging static between them crackles like a foil report as Peter holds his arms up too high, like he is expecting someone taller than Carl to fit under them; but Carl's normal-sized, not some towering straw and wicker man, and he's forgotten something of leaning forward on his toes when he hugs Pete, so his nose ends up smashing into the side of his shoulder. Peter smells of unwashedness and fresh dry cleaning, familiar, yeah, human; nothing romantic or nostalgic to it.
"How've you been, mate?" Carl mumbles. They hold each other for a moment longer than strictly necessary -- give the slow ones a chance to catch up and the sentimental ones a moment to wax glittery-poetic -- then break apart without lingering, as if they're afraid they'll stick, or as if they can't, that their jigsaw body parts have lost their shapes.
They turn and one of the flickering strobe lights catches Peter straight in the face and parts it from its colors like a photograph shock-bleached by the sun; his face loses its creases and edges. Carl feels like he's seeing an animal in its natural habitat, morphing from under camouflage.
Peter's always been that way, if Carl lets himself admit it, has always cultivated an effortless sense of belonging wherever he goes, whoever he's with. No different than when Pete was with him then, for sure, but Carl's not like that, can't help but feel as if he's walked out the door without socks under his shoes, strangely naked, weirdly gauche. What was it once like to have had this other at one point an extension of himself? He knows the case to be true but, like an amnesiac, cannot recollect the sensation past a vague sense of empathy for a self that had surely once been him, but has become lost sometime in the interim. He'd hoped this reunion to be easier, something innate, to fall back into stride as if their separation had never really been, and one of them had simply up and left the room for sixteen sodding months.
He times his stride valiantly quick to keep pace while Pete hunches over, gargantuan and guiltily gangly. He can't imagine how they once were, how the photographic evidence once showed them to be: arms around each others' shoulders loping, lounging, laughing, like they shared a leg and half a lung -- natural, not just this, like some amateur's photoshopped thrill, cut and pasted together from two entirely separate worlds.
Peter is a linen and pin-stripe spider crammed into the corner booth he's chosen, as if this is some pathetic bid for privacy when really all it does is make them more like cornered animals. Carl climbs in after him and there's an elbow in his face as Pete tries to settle around him, touching too deliberately, knees knocking against each other with so much force it hurts. Pete laughs, "Been too fuckin' long, eh, Biggles?" and Carl smiles, reaches gingerly across the way to tilt the trilby hat from out of Peter's eyes.
He has a half pint of bitter left in a glass, and he wishes dearly that he had had the presence of mind to down it all half and hour ago, so that it would have been lining the insides of his veins by now, and he could be moving on to something stronger. He takes a moment of distraction to knock it back anyway, feels his tongue tingle then numb as Peter chats politely with the steady trickle of well-wishers who wink surprised eyelids at Carl as they pass, because tweedle-dee no longer implies tweedle-dum, and that it does right now is an anomaly. (Oh, pardon me, I didn't see you under there, hello)
Starfish, Carl thinks cautiously, torn apart; they grow their own bodies back to make up for where they used to have each other, and now there are too many limbs, no worn places, no way to exchange a joint for an elbow or a lyric for a line.
They don't know how to stand together anymore because they've had to stand alone, just like how you can't grow into a skin you used to wear, and you can't go back to leaning on a shoulder after you've finally learned to hobble on your own. When Peter turns to him again, dark liquid eyes on a face like death, Carl stumbles for something to say, manages inanely, "'Sa right naff jacket you got there. Where'd you pick it up?"
"Dior."
"Really? Us too."
"Nah, haven't got your own line of Barat leather jackets then?"
"Says the one shagging the supermodel. Here, prove it to you."
In every interview he's ever given on his own, they make him talk about Pete, accusatorily, like he's only half shown up.
(So where's the rest of you gone, Barat? Off and left it at home, have you?)
A man only has so many emotions, so many words he's able to give away before he's left with empty hands and no trousers. Carl on Pete - he hasn't even got his pants left, in that. Early on, in its darkest, it'd been as if that continuous series of whirring tape recorders and anonymous hands had been his only confessors, the only way he could make Pete able to ever hear him from underneath his fucking rock. Nothing about the drugs, nothing about the band. Just to have a talk, he'd said. I don't want anything from him. Never have.
I just want my friend back.
But then there'd been the bands, Peter wailing at him in abstract melodies and Carl mumbling back in music so deliberate it bordered on pop. It'd been cathartic, in a way - a bit like banging your face into a mirror and expecting it to talk back to you; quick to grow old in repeatedly denying any relation or retaliation between the lines (Just feelings, yeah, no, not about him, just life, you know); and between the music and the press and the serendipitous glances across vast and insincere rooms, it was almost as if it were just them again, bound together in an endless game of rhyming Chinese whispers.
They've screamed themselves dry while avoiding each others' eyes, bled their frustrations and their feelings away in ink and cellulose and the eardrums of a thousand shrieking audiences. And now, Peter's fingers are curled around his collar like white goose-necks breaking thick and sluggish at the joints while Carl twists for him, sucking on a cigarette like he's sucking the marrow out of life, because it gives his mouth something to do while he realizes that they're talking about nothing because nothing is all they have left to talk about.
"Carl," Peter says, releasing him. All huge eyes, needle veins, and rotting cocaine-skin; mouth like a ragged wound and still, Carl meets his eyes when he calls, because the alternative is not answering at all, which would be too much like apathy, defeat, and admitting that he has nothing else to say. "It's really great to see you again, mate. I've really missed you."
He holds his arms out again, lower, narrower, a better fit, and Carl leans into him, remembers to hook his chin over his shoulder this time, the catch in the lock that bolts them into place. Peter rocks into him, bone on bone and probably closes his eyes; because Peter is like a boy-ghost sometimes, and can't let go and can't grow up and can't understand that he's already been mourned, and that Carl can't do this again, any of it, not even with his hands heavy across Carl's spine and the warmth on his skin that isn't quite anything like home.
A/N: Any wonderful suggestions you can make to make me sound less not-British (or any improvements you'd like to make to my obvious bullshit) are SO FREAKIN' WELCOME IT'S SORT OF NOT EVEN FUNNY. Like. I'd love you forever. That sort of thing.