(no subject)
An obligatory apology--I haven't written fic in ages, but the idea wouldn't go away.
title; maybe, this time
pairing; Nick/Alan.
rating; PG-13
summary; Pre-series. The solution that fixes nothing.
*
By the time Alan turned seventeen, Nick had learned to tell when he had a crush.
He always talked about them a bit more than the rest of the people he met, and he got distracted when he did. His hands would slow, or he'd forget what he was doing, or he'd stop entirely to talk while Nick bent his head and let Alan's voice wrap around him. For a year, Nick thought that was all there was to that kind of feeling: smiling for the proof of their existence alone.
Nick didn't think he would ever get one himself. Nothing made him want to smile more than a good kill, and he suspected that Alan would not be pleased if Nick went around declaring crushes on dead bodies.
It didn't matter, anyway. That was as close as any of those girls got to Nick: words and memories articulated by his brother's thin hands, irrelevant and striking. They didn't own any part of Alan. They never would. Nick thought it was a bit stupid for Alan to forget that, however temporarily--to smile for something that was never going to last. Considering the big deal everybody made about smiling, he thought that Alan should at least ration his for more important things. But then that was Alan--always mixing up the world with his bright words and his low, coaxing laughter, as though all of it should mean something more.
Nick liked it better when he didn't have a crush. That meant the days right after a move--when Olivia was occupied enough by the strangeness of it all to stay quiet in her own room, and Alan hadn't started the hours at his new job. It meant that he was home all the time, and Nick could always trust in the thought of coming back from school to find his brother reading some ridiculously long book written in a dead hand, with no new girl on his mind. These was the few times Alan could be persuaded to spend a little of their savings on himself, which was only fair.
It was only reasonable, then, that the prospect of losing all of this so soon would ruin Nick's mood.
Jerking the strap over his head, he tossed his bookbag onto the table. From the armchair, he saw, Alan glanced up at the thud, startled and amused. A laugh was starting at the corners of his mouth. "Nick," he said, "what have I told you about abusing books? You know they can't possibly fight back."
They'd found a good house this time, too. Afternoon light warmed the shadows of Alan's face, turned them to the corners of a smooth, easy smile. He was sitting upright, stretched in the warmth like an lanky, enormous cat, if a cat had happened to take to books. If Nick hadn't been primed to spot that he favored one side a little more, he would have never noticed the tension at all. Even the sun had started trying to lie to him, Nick thought, but that didn't matter--Alan looked more alive than he had in days.
Nick turned to head upstairs.
"We're going to have to move again," he said over his shoulder. Seeing Alan stretched out for once, the thought irritated him all the more. He pushed it away. He'd start with the shelves this time, before his idiotic brother got it into his head that the one with the bad leg was destined to be the one to pack heavy wooden things.
"Nick," Alan said, and Nick stopped. "What happened?"
What had happened was that they didn't have much time--any time at all, in fact. The magicians must be incredibly stupid, thinking that Nick couldn't spot one of theirs leagues away. They must imagine that the Ryves brothers were pathetic and desperate if they thought that one would latch onto the first face that smiled in their direction.
Nick grinned unpleasantly--a brief, dark flash. He stretched his arms out, feeling the daggers sagging at his wrists. He'd prove them wrong, all right.
"Some girl was being stupid," he said, and he could afford to say it casually because he knew they had the time. He'd caught the magicians' sneaks early. This time they might even be able to pack properly before they ran. It didn't dissolve the tension in his muscles, but it was something. "I think she's figured us out."
He heard the chair's arm creak as Alan leaned on it. "Being stupid how?"
"Stop asking me pointless questions," Nick growled, sounding very fourteen even to himself. "You get Mum. I'll go take down your shelves. If we leave now, we can be gone before they catch on."
Alan said his name again. The growl tore its way into a snarl in his throat. Nick narrowed his eyes and tried to call it into focus. It wasn't Alan's fault.
"She was acting suspicious," he said eventually. "And she kept touching me."
And when she'd leaned over, he'd gotten quite a full view down her blouse. It hadn't been quite like feelings--not the way Alan described them and the way Nick had tried to process something as feeling properly: it had felt hot then cold all at once, shivering with fever like the illness he'd only caught briefly when he was young. Nick didn't feel sick, thinking of her in this warm and shining room, but it was still something new and he couldn't trust anything enough to think that it was anything but a magician's trick.
Alan, watching him, laughed unexpectedly. Nick whirled, but his brother only smiled up at him, an easy lit-up expression. "We're not moving."
"Yes, we are."
"Nick," said Alan, in tones Nick suspected he used on difficult customers, "she's not a magician's spy. She's got a crush on you."
Since Nick's entire experience with crushes had to do with Alan's talking about them, this idea involved a rather complicated picture where he imagined himself as one of Alan's girls, described in quick, scything gestures and warm laughter to some complete stranger's brother. But the girl's hands were probably soft and pale and useless, and Nick had never even spoken to her before.
It was ridiculous.
"Is that it," he gritted, turning away again. "Then I'll go and tell her to stop tomorrow."
He was halfway up the steps when Alan said, "Was it that bad?"
Nick's hand stopped on the banister. He couldn't pin down what he didn't like about Alan's voice, only that it was there. It sounded vaguely like sadness, which was stupid--Alan didn't even know this girl, what was there to be sad about? "If she wanted something from me, she should have said so," he said at last, staring at the wooden railing so that he didn't have to look at Alan's face. It wouldn't have made any difference--the face was the first giveaway in any lie, and so Alan always schooled his to tell only the stories he wanted to show. Nick knew that best of all. "It's just a stupid crush, anyway. She'll get over it."
"But if she'd asked," said Alan, who noticed far too much, "would you have given it to her?"
Nick shrugged without turning. He wanted to climb up the rest of the stairs--but that, he knew, would only have forced Alan to climb after him, and he didn't want to see his brother limp right now. "Maybe," he said. "She's not bad-looking."
"Ladies and gentlemen," Alan said to nobody in particular. "My brother the appraiser."
He let that roll off his shoulders too. "Why's it matter to you?" he asked with sudden force, as if that might startle some truth out of this exchange. "You don't know her."
There was no answer at first--but Nick knew better than to take silence as an indication that a conversation was over with. He waited, fists knotted over the wood and trying to guess at what his brother might be thinking.
Then Alan spoke.
"I think it's nice," he said, voice quiet. "That's all."
Nick didn't see anything nice about it. If it wasn't a magician, then it was some girl who'd gotten some idiotic ideas into her head about the way the world was--the way Nick was. She'd been a pleasant distraction--now that he was sure that she hadn't been trying to see his family dead--but what did that matter? There were plenty of distractions in the world. What difference did it make if it was this girl or anything else?
He wanted to ask, but the fact that Alan hadn't explained was a warning in itself. This was obviously something that Nick should have been able to work out on his own. So he thought about what a girl could offer him that cars and hunting and the Goblin Market couldn't. Abruptly, he thought of his last school, where he'd been kicked out early--of connections, and Alan's wan face asking if he had made any friends. The teachers could never be pleased, and the boys Nick hung out with often turned on each other like wild dogs--they weren't the sort that Alan would want to see. He thought that a girl might be easier if she wanted something from him. If she wanted something from him and he gave it, that would be a connection. Alan would be happy as he'd been in the sunlight, wrapped in a book without Nick.
Happier, even.
His hands knuckled. Nick twisted around. "Do you know what she wants?" he said. The words came out like a bark, and Nick took a second to adjust to the breaking lowness of his own new voice made strange, how it curled and growled at times, until it steadied into something he could use to speak. "If you had a chance," he said carefully, "to do something for--a girl you liked, what would you do?"
Alan blinked. Then he smiled. It had taken Nick a while to learn the difference between all of Alan's smiles, but he knew that he didn't like this one. It was the sort of expression he made when he was reading, or when he told Nick about something that Dad had done for them both when they were younger, as if he thought that Nick might not remember. It looked like hunger and like sorrow at once, and it seemed so fragile that Nick thought it would probably smash if he so much as touched Alan then.
"I'd probably want to take her on a date," he said.
Not trusting himself to move, Nick said, "Anything else?"
Alan's mouth twisted. "Well," he said, "she might also want..."
"What?"
His brother paused to look at him. "This line of questioning is making me very uncomfortable, Nicholas."
Nick rolled his eyes. "Stop squirming," he said. "It's a little shameful."
"I can safely say that I never expected to have this conversation with you," Alan retorted. He ran a hand through his hair. "She might want a kiss, too. You know, I never thought I'd say this either, but maybe you should watch a romance after all."
"Don't need to," Nick said. "I know how it's done."
"It?"
Irritably, Nick took both his hands off the railing. He made a gesture.
Very slowly Alan covered his face. "Nick, movies about that are called porn, and I really hope that isn't what they're teaching my little brother at school."
Nick let his mouth curl. "You can't trust anybody in education these days," he said, but he was thinking, too. He hadn't connected the two before. Now that he had, though, he could relax: it seemed pretty obvious. The girl had touched him because she'd wanted to touch him. He hadn't exactly liked the slide of her fingertips against his wrist or that shining sly hope to her eyes, but he thought that he could get used to it, if a connection would make Alan stop looking at him the way he did sometimes. "And I have in fact had the talk about the birds and the bees," he drawled, "and their little bird-bee babies."
"You remember it. I'm so touched."
"Touched in the head, you mean. Right," Nick went on. "So that's what kissing leads to, that's what she's after, I've got it. I'll be sure to spare your scandalised old heart the details."
"Your mastery of subtleties astounds me," his brother informed him. He was smothering a smile, and doing it badly. "Hold on. Some girls like--romance, you know. And, er, romance is about--"
Nick made the gesture again, lazily, less as an answer and more to shut Alan up. This failed to have any sort of effect.
"Being a gentleman," said Alan, who had problems being straightforward, "and being nice to the girl since breaking her heart means that your own brother will come after you with a very nice chair, and--"
The smile vanished. He stopped as if he'd said more than he'd meant to and now the words lay strewn across the floor between them like shards.
"And what," Nick said.
"And love," Alan said, his voice soft. Nick shut his mouth. "Nick, maybe you shouldn't try this after all."
"Why?" Nick demanded. His shoulders were hunched. He'd grown taller himself, he realised, in these past few months; even across the room, his brother seemed strange and suddenly small. "I can eat. I can stand in line at a film. I can stand there and listen while she babbles, that's being a gentleman. Three out of four. It'll be fine."
"I thought you didn't know her."
"I don't." Romance sounded stupid, Nick thought viciously--softer and even more pointless than love, wrapped up in all the same complications with none of love's force. It didn't seem any less stupid when he applied the idea to the memory of the girl. But if it wasn't love, then it was wanting someone without really wanting who they were. And Nick could understand craving ownership, wishing to have somebody first and foremost above anyone else in the world. Something like that could be thought of as a kind of hunger, and while he couldn't remember the girl looking at him with any kind of similar look, he could have understood if she had. If she was alone.
If she was afraid.
It didn't matter what she wanted in the end. Nick had Alan.
And Alan, for all his crushes, had Nick.
The thought spurred him to cross the room. He covered it in a few short steps. He was tall enough to tower over Alan's chair now, so he crouched instead, watching his brother for some signal. "Tell me," he said, "what else."
Alan bowed his head. His expression was illegible, scrawled with some emotion Nick couldn't read any more than he could burst into Sumerian song. "Is it really that important to you?"
Nick felt his own face twist as he tried to think of the words. The matter about connection twisted on his tongue and slipped away as if it had never meant anything at all. For that matter, what words were there, anyway, for the sort of dream that Alan would hold onto for years and years, talking about it in his sweet, sad voice and never letting go of the thought? What did it mean that they weren't enough--what was it that Alan wanted?
Suddenly, for a reason that was no reason at all, Nick thought of Alan's smile, Alan's clear voice speaking. Alan's idea of a date probably involved museums and books and being a giant nerd. Both of them knew better than to waste money on restaurants when they could eat at home, and Alan cooked better than Nick ever planned to. He thought of romance, close enough to love to pass for it, and what those physical movements had translated to in the video's insane story. Nick didn't think he had ever loved anybody, but those didn't seem to be human movements, layered with meanings Nick couldn't fake. They were simple. He could mimic simple.
His brother's eyes as he met them were cool. Alan was so bad at admitting to anything important that even the expression lay on his face like a lie.
So he didn't have to admit anything.
Nick braced a hand against the armchair and leaned forward. Their mouths bumped once. Alan had the chance to breathe some nonsense syllable against his lips before Nick was kissing him, mindful of teeth, of his leg, of his brother trembling until the latter jerked away.
There wasn't much room in the chair to manoeuvre. Nick had taken up most of what Alan hadn't filled, and if Alan had been on guard, he wouldn't have started to tip over. Automatically, Nick reached forward and caught Alan's shoulder, dragging him to balance. "Idiot," he muttered, and kissed him again, and he was fairly sure that he was getting all of it right this time. Dull heat burned in his throat, underneath his ribs and flaring lower; he knelt over Alan and tried not to pay attention to his brother forming words against his mouth.
"Nick." Alan shuddered a breath and tried to laugh. "That isn't--there's different kinds of love, you have to understand."
Love made him flinch by reflex, though when Nick tried to chase down the reason, he couldn't even begin to think of one. But Alan's eyes were steady for once, reflecting him back in sharp blue lines until his image seemed to swallow up everything else, and Nick felt satisfaction twist brutally in his chest at the idea. Love was a stupid, complicated subject for songs and really long books. This was something much simpler. "Shut up," he said roughly. "Shut up, I don't want to hear about it."
He kissed Alan again. It worked for all of a second, Alan's lips parting as his body tensed against another shiver. Then it ended.
"Nick," he repeated, and Nick felt some leash on his temper snap.
"Whatever it is, I don't care." The words ran out, and Nick couldn't seem to fit the rest together; the sentences wouldn't come no matter how he tried. The only comfort was that Alan couldn't leave, not with Nick braced above him like this, blocking every possible escape. Alan couldn't leave, and underneath the building fury, the feeling coiling in his chest was something he recognised as relief. "Listen to me," Nick raged softly, to his brother's closed mouth and the complications piling up in Alan's expression. "I don't care about romance, or love, or what that stupid girl wanted. It isn't about any of that. Just tell me what you're looking for."
He stopped, breathing forced and ragged.
Alan shut his eyes as if to shut everything out, and Nick felt a savage despair at seeing him. He wanted to break away himself, storm off to an open space where he could practice swords and think about the simple sharp edges to define a world instead of bodies and all their muted signals in a language Nick had never really known to understand. He wanted to be alone. He wanted Alan with him in the dark. Wanting could be just that simple--he didn't see why Alan couldn't say what he wanted out loud.
Then his brother opened his eyes.
"Oh, Nick," he said. Unexpectedly, he laughed again. Nick didn't understand that either, the sharp and strange ring that was neither happy nor angry. If this was something Alan wanted, he could at least look like it--and he'd never been shy about turning things down before. But Alan's fingers lacing his were warm and familiar, his shoulders the same bony stretch underneath Nick's other hand, and this was nothing at all like the girl at school.
"I'm sorry," Alan said simply. He was smiling--a wry grey smile. Then he ran a thumb down Nick's nape, strange and wondering, and the rest of it stopped mattering as he finally, finally kissed him back.
*
title; maybe, this time
pairing; Nick/Alan.
rating; PG-13
summary; Pre-series. The solution that fixes nothing.
*
By the time Alan turned seventeen, Nick had learned to tell when he had a crush.
He always talked about them a bit more than the rest of the people he met, and he got distracted when he did. His hands would slow, or he'd forget what he was doing, or he'd stop entirely to talk while Nick bent his head and let Alan's voice wrap around him. For a year, Nick thought that was all there was to that kind of feeling: smiling for the proof of their existence alone.
Nick didn't think he would ever get one himself. Nothing made him want to smile more than a good kill, and he suspected that Alan would not be pleased if Nick went around declaring crushes on dead bodies.
It didn't matter, anyway. That was as close as any of those girls got to Nick: words and memories articulated by his brother's thin hands, irrelevant and striking. They didn't own any part of Alan. They never would. Nick thought it was a bit stupid for Alan to forget that, however temporarily--to smile for something that was never going to last. Considering the big deal everybody made about smiling, he thought that Alan should at least ration his for more important things. But then that was Alan--always mixing up the world with his bright words and his low, coaxing laughter, as though all of it should mean something more.
Nick liked it better when he didn't have a crush. That meant the days right after a move--when Olivia was occupied enough by the strangeness of it all to stay quiet in her own room, and Alan hadn't started the hours at his new job. It meant that he was home all the time, and Nick could always trust in the thought of coming back from school to find his brother reading some ridiculously long book written in a dead hand, with no new girl on his mind. These was the few times Alan could be persuaded to spend a little of their savings on himself, which was only fair.
It was only reasonable, then, that the prospect of losing all of this so soon would ruin Nick's mood.
Jerking the strap over his head, he tossed his bookbag onto the table. From the armchair, he saw, Alan glanced up at the thud, startled and amused. A laugh was starting at the corners of his mouth. "Nick," he said, "what have I told you about abusing books? You know they can't possibly fight back."
They'd found a good house this time, too. Afternoon light warmed the shadows of Alan's face, turned them to the corners of a smooth, easy smile. He was sitting upright, stretched in the warmth like an lanky, enormous cat, if a cat had happened to take to books. If Nick hadn't been primed to spot that he favored one side a little more, he would have never noticed the tension at all. Even the sun had started trying to lie to him, Nick thought, but that didn't matter--Alan looked more alive than he had in days.
Nick turned to head upstairs.
"We're going to have to move again," he said over his shoulder. Seeing Alan stretched out for once, the thought irritated him all the more. He pushed it away. He'd start with the shelves this time, before his idiotic brother got it into his head that the one with the bad leg was destined to be the one to pack heavy wooden things.
"Nick," Alan said, and Nick stopped. "What happened?"
What had happened was that they didn't have much time--any time at all, in fact. The magicians must be incredibly stupid, thinking that Nick couldn't spot one of theirs leagues away. They must imagine that the Ryves brothers were pathetic and desperate if they thought that one would latch onto the first face that smiled in their direction.
Nick grinned unpleasantly--a brief, dark flash. He stretched his arms out, feeling the daggers sagging at his wrists. He'd prove them wrong, all right.
"Some girl was being stupid," he said, and he could afford to say it casually because he knew they had the time. He'd caught the magicians' sneaks early. This time they might even be able to pack properly before they ran. It didn't dissolve the tension in his muscles, but it was something. "I think she's figured us out."
He heard the chair's arm creak as Alan leaned on it. "Being stupid how?"
"Stop asking me pointless questions," Nick growled, sounding very fourteen even to himself. "You get Mum. I'll go take down your shelves. If we leave now, we can be gone before they catch on."
Alan said his name again. The growl tore its way into a snarl in his throat. Nick narrowed his eyes and tried to call it into focus. It wasn't Alan's fault.
"She was acting suspicious," he said eventually. "And she kept touching me."
And when she'd leaned over, he'd gotten quite a full view down her blouse. It hadn't been quite like feelings--not the way Alan described them and the way Nick had tried to process something as feeling properly: it had felt hot then cold all at once, shivering with fever like the illness he'd only caught briefly when he was young. Nick didn't feel sick, thinking of her in this warm and shining room, but it was still something new and he couldn't trust anything enough to think that it was anything but a magician's trick.
Alan, watching him, laughed unexpectedly. Nick whirled, but his brother only smiled up at him, an easy lit-up expression. "We're not moving."
"Yes, we are."
"Nick," said Alan, in tones Nick suspected he used on difficult customers, "she's not a magician's spy. She's got a crush on you."
Since Nick's entire experience with crushes had to do with Alan's talking about them, this idea involved a rather complicated picture where he imagined himself as one of Alan's girls, described in quick, scything gestures and warm laughter to some complete stranger's brother. But the girl's hands were probably soft and pale and useless, and Nick had never even spoken to her before.
It was ridiculous.
"Is that it," he gritted, turning away again. "Then I'll go and tell her to stop tomorrow."
He was halfway up the steps when Alan said, "Was it that bad?"
Nick's hand stopped on the banister. He couldn't pin down what he didn't like about Alan's voice, only that it was there. It sounded vaguely like sadness, which was stupid--Alan didn't even know this girl, what was there to be sad about? "If she wanted something from me, she should have said so," he said at last, staring at the wooden railing so that he didn't have to look at Alan's face. It wouldn't have made any difference--the face was the first giveaway in any lie, and so Alan always schooled his to tell only the stories he wanted to show. Nick knew that best of all. "It's just a stupid crush, anyway. She'll get over it."
"But if she'd asked," said Alan, who noticed far too much, "would you have given it to her?"
Nick shrugged without turning. He wanted to climb up the rest of the stairs--but that, he knew, would only have forced Alan to climb after him, and he didn't want to see his brother limp right now. "Maybe," he said. "She's not bad-looking."
"Ladies and gentlemen," Alan said to nobody in particular. "My brother the appraiser."
He let that roll off his shoulders too. "Why's it matter to you?" he asked with sudden force, as if that might startle some truth out of this exchange. "You don't know her."
There was no answer at first--but Nick knew better than to take silence as an indication that a conversation was over with. He waited, fists knotted over the wood and trying to guess at what his brother might be thinking.
Then Alan spoke.
"I think it's nice," he said, voice quiet. "That's all."
Nick didn't see anything nice about it. If it wasn't a magician, then it was some girl who'd gotten some idiotic ideas into her head about the way the world was--the way Nick was. She'd been a pleasant distraction--now that he was sure that she hadn't been trying to see his family dead--but what did that matter? There were plenty of distractions in the world. What difference did it make if it was this girl or anything else?
He wanted to ask, but the fact that Alan hadn't explained was a warning in itself. This was obviously something that Nick should have been able to work out on his own. So he thought about what a girl could offer him that cars and hunting and the Goblin Market couldn't. Abruptly, he thought of his last school, where he'd been kicked out early--of connections, and Alan's wan face asking if he had made any friends. The teachers could never be pleased, and the boys Nick hung out with often turned on each other like wild dogs--they weren't the sort that Alan would want to see. He thought that a girl might be easier if she wanted something from him. If she wanted something from him and he gave it, that would be a connection. Alan would be happy as he'd been in the sunlight, wrapped in a book without Nick.
Happier, even.
His hands knuckled. Nick twisted around. "Do you know what she wants?" he said. The words came out like a bark, and Nick took a second to adjust to the breaking lowness of his own new voice made strange, how it curled and growled at times, until it steadied into something he could use to speak. "If you had a chance," he said carefully, "to do something for--a girl you liked, what would you do?"
Alan blinked. Then he smiled. It had taken Nick a while to learn the difference between all of Alan's smiles, but he knew that he didn't like this one. It was the sort of expression he made when he was reading, or when he told Nick about something that Dad had done for them both when they were younger, as if he thought that Nick might not remember. It looked like hunger and like sorrow at once, and it seemed so fragile that Nick thought it would probably smash if he so much as touched Alan then.
"I'd probably want to take her on a date," he said.
Not trusting himself to move, Nick said, "Anything else?"
Alan's mouth twisted. "Well," he said, "she might also want..."
"What?"
His brother paused to look at him. "This line of questioning is making me very uncomfortable, Nicholas."
Nick rolled his eyes. "Stop squirming," he said. "It's a little shameful."
"I can safely say that I never expected to have this conversation with you," Alan retorted. He ran a hand through his hair. "She might want a kiss, too. You know, I never thought I'd say this either, but maybe you should watch a romance after all."
"Don't need to," Nick said. "I know how it's done."
"It?"
Irritably, Nick took both his hands off the railing. He made a gesture.
Very slowly Alan covered his face. "Nick, movies about that are called porn, and I really hope that isn't what they're teaching my little brother at school."
Nick let his mouth curl. "You can't trust anybody in education these days," he said, but he was thinking, too. He hadn't connected the two before. Now that he had, though, he could relax: it seemed pretty obvious. The girl had touched him because she'd wanted to touch him. He hadn't exactly liked the slide of her fingertips against his wrist or that shining sly hope to her eyes, but he thought that he could get used to it, if a connection would make Alan stop looking at him the way he did sometimes. "And I have in fact had the talk about the birds and the bees," he drawled, "and their little bird-bee babies."
"You remember it. I'm so touched."
"Touched in the head, you mean. Right," Nick went on. "So that's what kissing leads to, that's what she's after, I've got it. I'll be sure to spare your scandalised old heart the details."
"Your mastery of subtleties astounds me," his brother informed him. He was smothering a smile, and doing it badly. "Hold on. Some girls like--romance, you know. And, er, romance is about--"
Nick made the gesture again, lazily, less as an answer and more to shut Alan up. This failed to have any sort of effect.
"Being a gentleman," said Alan, who had problems being straightforward, "and being nice to the girl since breaking her heart means that your own brother will come after you with a very nice chair, and--"
The smile vanished. He stopped as if he'd said more than he'd meant to and now the words lay strewn across the floor between them like shards.
"And what," Nick said.
"And love," Alan said, his voice soft. Nick shut his mouth. "Nick, maybe you shouldn't try this after all."
"Why?" Nick demanded. His shoulders were hunched. He'd grown taller himself, he realised, in these past few months; even across the room, his brother seemed strange and suddenly small. "I can eat. I can stand in line at a film. I can stand there and listen while she babbles, that's being a gentleman. Three out of four. It'll be fine."
"I thought you didn't know her."
"I don't." Romance sounded stupid, Nick thought viciously--softer and even more pointless than love, wrapped up in all the same complications with none of love's force. It didn't seem any less stupid when he applied the idea to the memory of the girl. But if it wasn't love, then it was wanting someone without really wanting who they were. And Nick could understand craving ownership, wishing to have somebody first and foremost above anyone else in the world. Something like that could be thought of as a kind of hunger, and while he couldn't remember the girl looking at him with any kind of similar look, he could have understood if she had. If she was alone.
If she was afraid.
It didn't matter what she wanted in the end. Nick had Alan.
And Alan, for all his crushes, had Nick.
The thought spurred him to cross the room. He covered it in a few short steps. He was tall enough to tower over Alan's chair now, so he crouched instead, watching his brother for some signal. "Tell me," he said, "what else."
Alan bowed his head. His expression was illegible, scrawled with some emotion Nick couldn't read any more than he could burst into Sumerian song. "Is it really that important to you?"
Nick felt his own face twist as he tried to think of the words. The matter about connection twisted on his tongue and slipped away as if it had never meant anything at all. For that matter, what words were there, anyway, for the sort of dream that Alan would hold onto for years and years, talking about it in his sweet, sad voice and never letting go of the thought? What did it mean that they weren't enough--what was it that Alan wanted?
Suddenly, for a reason that was no reason at all, Nick thought of Alan's smile, Alan's clear voice speaking. Alan's idea of a date probably involved museums and books and being a giant nerd. Both of them knew better than to waste money on restaurants when they could eat at home, and Alan cooked better than Nick ever planned to. He thought of romance, close enough to love to pass for it, and what those physical movements had translated to in the video's insane story. Nick didn't think he had ever loved anybody, but those didn't seem to be human movements, layered with meanings Nick couldn't fake. They were simple. He could mimic simple.
His brother's eyes as he met them were cool. Alan was so bad at admitting to anything important that even the expression lay on his face like a lie.
So he didn't have to admit anything.
Nick braced a hand against the armchair and leaned forward. Their mouths bumped once. Alan had the chance to breathe some nonsense syllable against his lips before Nick was kissing him, mindful of teeth, of his leg, of his brother trembling until the latter jerked away.
There wasn't much room in the chair to manoeuvre. Nick had taken up most of what Alan hadn't filled, and if Alan had been on guard, he wouldn't have started to tip over. Automatically, Nick reached forward and caught Alan's shoulder, dragging him to balance. "Idiot," he muttered, and kissed him again, and he was fairly sure that he was getting all of it right this time. Dull heat burned in his throat, underneath his ribs and flaring lower; he knelt over Alan and tried not to pay attention to his brother forming words against his mouth.
"Nick." Alan shuddered a breath and tried to laugh. "That isn't--there's different kinds of love, you have to understand."
Love made him flinch by reflex, though when Nick tried to chase down the reason, he couldn't even begin to think of one. But Alan's eyes were steady for once, reflecting him back in sharp blue lines until his image seemed to swallow up everything else, and Nick felt satisfaction twist brutally in his chest at the idea. Love was a stupid, complicated subject for songs and really long books. This was something much simpler. "Shut up," he said roughly. "Shut up, I don't want to hear about it."
He kissed Alan again. It worked for all of a second, Alan's lips parting as his body tensed against another shiver. Then it ended.
"Nick," he repeated, and Nick felt some leash on his temper snap.
"Whatever it is, I don't care." The words ran out, and Nick couldn't seem to fit the rest together; the sentences wouldn't come no matter how he tried. The only comfort was that Alan couldn't leave, not with Nick braced above him like this, blocking every possible escape. Alan couldn't leave, and underneath the building fury, the feeling coiling in his chest was something he recognised as relief. "Listen to me," Nick raged softly, to his brother's closed mouth and the complications piling up in Alan's expression. "I don't care about romance, or love, or what that stupid girl wanted. It isn't about any of that. Just tell me what you're looking for."
He stopped, breathing forced and ragged.
Alan shut his eyes as if to shut everything out, and Nick felt a savage despair at seeing him. He wanted to break away himself, storm off to an open space where he could practice swords and think about the simple sharp edges to define a world instead of bodies and all their muted signals in a language Nick had never really known to understand. He wanted to be alone. He wanted Alan with him in the dark. Wanting could be just that simple--he didn't see why Alan couldn't say what he wanted out loud.
Then his brother opened his eyes.
"Oh, Nick," he said. Unexpectedly, he laughed again. Nick didn't understand that either, the sharp and strange ring that was neither happy nor angry. If this was something Alan wanted, he could at least look like it--and he'd never been shy about turning things down before. But Alan's fingers lacing his were warm and familiar, his shoulders the same bony stretch underneath Nick's other hand, and this was nothing at all like the girl at school.
"I'm sorry," Alan said simply. He was smiling--a wry grey smile. Then he ran a thumb down Nick's nape, strange and wondering, and the rest of it stopped mattering as he finally, finally kissed him back.
*