Escape (1/1)
Title: Escape (one-off)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Pairing: belldom, Matt/other (implied)
Summary: While standing in an American airport on the day before Thanksgiving, Matt changes his mind about where he wants to be and makes an escape.
AN: This almost literally fell out of my head this morning. I'm not even sure what this is, lol.
AN 2: There are references to, but no outright mentions of, significant others in this piece of fiction. I'm not crazy about those kinds of real life inserts in my stories, because they don't really gel with the belldom universe, but I made an exception here because I feel it gets the point across.
Disclaimer: Muse and its members as well as each horrendous Christmas song I mention here aren't mine. The story is.
**
I hate American holidays. They're commercialized, crass, overblown affairs dripping in false sentiment and sincerity, and I can't bloody stand them.
But yet, here I am in an American airport the day before Thanksgiving, waiting for my single piece of checked luggage to come round on the carousel. The airport is a nightmare, all flashing lights and Kenny Rogers Christmas music and screaming children, and ten years ago, it would have been the perfect arena in which to wreak havoc in the name of youth (and hallucinogenic mushrooms).
The public address system drones on in seven different languages (some bollocks about which zone is for loading and which zone is for unloading ) and then a tinny, grating version of Feliz Navidad begins to play. Suddenly, I feel the urge to throw myself onto the tarmac.
A little voice whispers in the darkest recesses of my mind. It begins as a murmur, a mumble in some dead language, a long-lost tongue. It grows louder, piercing the swampy expanse of my mind and breaking through the fog of Christmas music . I close my eyes, trying to turn it down but not off.
In my youth I would have claimed that the voice was an alien transmission, little brain waves commanding me to do their bidding. Today, I know that the voice is my little slice of insanity and I'm not particularly arsed by it. The sound is calm, comforting, and constant, and it's far more friendly than the valet standing just outside the doors, waiting for me and holding a whiteboard sign that says 'baby daddy'' on it (much to his, and my, embarrassment).
The soft, familiar voice is the angel (and, no doubt, the devil) on my shoulder, if I believed in such rubbish.
Luggage begins spilling from the conveyor belt onto the carousel, my bag among the tumbling mass of suitcases (if I'm lucky), but I am pulled toward the departure board, encouraged by the little angel/devil on my shoulder. I search the flat-screen telly for name of the city I just left and when I find it, I'm unable to look away. People crash into me, even running over my bloody shoes with the hard rubber wheels of a pram, but I am held fast, anchored, by the six letter word before my eyes that represents my escape.
My hand, most likely driven by the whisper at the back of my mind, slips down and slides the mobile from my pocket. The iphone slips on the slick fabric of my (admittedly ridiculous) material of my track pants as I unlock the screen with one hand. I still stand in front of the departure board.
I sift through the contents of my inbox, rolling my eyes at the subject lines of the messages in front of me, not stopping the speedy scroll until I find the text message I know will be there. It is identical to the seventeen texts below it, and the hundreds that came before it, stretching back to the first time our record label slipped mobiles into our grubby, young little hands.
I know what the message will say (it's as dependable as little else is in my life), yet I find myself opening it anyway and with a smile on my face.
Are you home yet? D. xx
A pinprick of heat appears in my chest. It is soon blossoming, petals forming and stretching and exploding with color until my whole body is awash in sweet warmth. I look again at the departure board, and the little whisper in my ear becomes a loud, enthusiastic cry, telling me to go.
I glance at the carousel and find that my bag is the only item making laps on the screeching, lumbering conveyor belt. I consider moving toward my bag, only if to keep it from being stolen, but before I can move, some vapid bint grinds her high heel (who wears those at a fucking airport?!) into my toes and I yelp out a string of curses.
I look up from my wounded feet and find myself standing across from the escalator that leads upstairs to the ticket counter. Just before the upstairs corridor appears from view, I can see the edge of a sign. I know what it says, and it is a sign in more ways than one. British Airways.
The sign is beckoning me, but I stand next to the now-silent baggage carousel. From the corner of my eye, I can see the impatient valet, still holding the embarrassing sign and shifting his weight from foot to foot. Beyond him I see a line of luxury cars--Mercedes, Jaguars, Lotuses, Ferraris--and I know that this is not where I want to be.
I do not want to spend my week suffocating under a blanket of smog and covered in baby sick. I don't want to smile emptily almost-in-laws and listen to soulless chatter as another part of my heart crumbles away and turns to dust, and I don't want to be roused from a broken sleep by female coos only to spend my days surrounded by palm trees and flashbulbs and uppity cunts who make shit lattes.
I want to go home, where it rains more than it has any right to; where a pub in Soho has the best chips and ale I've ever had; where calloused fingers and a warm, rumbling voice pull me from perfect sleep, waking my mind and my prick with one lazy kiss.
In a second, I am breezing past my lonely suitcase and am heading for the escalator, encouraged again by the angel on my shoulder (it must be an angel, my atheist heart decides, because only an angel would guide me back to the best thing in my life). I take the moving staircase two steps at a time, heading for the sign at the top of the stairs. Heading home. Making my escape.
My fingers slide across the iphone screen, fingertips jutting on the screen with each frantic, excited beat of my heart, and I type out a reply to the message sitting at the bottom of my inbox.
I'm on my way home. M. xx