(no subject)
Far Side of the Sun
Author Riastarstruck
Pairing Vam
Summary - "He wakes up, has five cigarettes and then plays guitar..."
Disclaimer i own nothing and no one, just the order of the words, please don't sue me.
warnings pointless waffling
Authors Note this is the first part of a much larger story, at the moment i'm posting it as a stand alone but later i will connect it to my other story.
this was inspired last year by Bam's trip to LA and his tattoo, yes, i have been holding onto this part for that long, so this is my Bam's tattoo story. though he isn't actually mentioned just yet. this is in part a character study of Ville.
i'm currently in Berlin on a project trip so you might not post for a while, but i am still here!
comment please as it is love!
He wakes up, has five cigarettes and then plays guitar.
It’s easy to fall into patterns, to live in a routine of your own creation and never even notice the monotony of your days, never notice the slow failing of your heart and the tightness of breath. It’s even easier when you live in the closed white shell of a hotel room. Vacant of any personal touch, any individuality and any reminder of the life you used to live and love. The maid cleans each afternoon when he’s at the studio, changes the sweat stained sheets, empties the over flowing ashtrays and removes any reminder of a life outside. He prefers it that way, likes how he returns each night, tired and strung out with a tension he can’t even name and an ache which seems to settle in his bones and skin and even his hair; though if he tried to pin point its actual location he wouldn’t even know where to start looking.
Hotels offer services they don’t advertise in brochures and on websites, they offer anonymity; they offer an escape from the heat and hunger of the real world. When you close that white, unremarkable door with its uniformly artistic numbers you close the door on the rest of the world, on yourself and the image you project for those crawling, pointless hours where you have to smile and laugh and do things so nobody feels the need to pry, to question, to look at him for that moment extra that it takes to notice there is no fire left in his eyes, only liquids and lights and blood, all those things he never paid attention to at school.
The maid restocks the bar fridge each day, he thinks about telling them not to bother, it would save them both a lot of work and the record label a lot of money, but the words never seem to make it out of his throat, he guesses he just doesn’t care enough, he doesn't care about a lot of things anymore. He wonders what they will think when they see the bill, when they see the mini bar restocked each day with a handful of pint sized bottles.
They won’t say anything, he’s fairly confident about that, but he suspects there will be looks, pitying ashamed looks as they watch him in meetings thinking to themselves how clever alcoholics are sometimes, how discreet they can be.
He has developed rituals, everything is easier with rituals. Over the two year mark of sobriety and he still can’t trust himself to share a room with the stuff, thinks to himself as he pours bottle after bottle down the sink how easy it would be to fall into its spell, to be swept away again in the careless happiness and ease of a half focused world where everything is good and nothing hurts and he can finally get some sleep.
Liquor is beautiful the way the colours swirl together like liquid gemstones, amber, crystal, topaz. Rich colours, colours of wealth and power; colours which haunt his memories, like so much does these days.
At night he sits on the balcony, a cigarette in his hands and the taste of ash on his tongue. He watches the city lights of LA as they pass by and illuminate the streets with false daylight; the darkness which remains hiding the filth that's all too obvious during the day, where the bones of a once beautiful city shows too clearly, like the half mauled alley cat he found when he was a child behind his uncles house.
There are no stars in LA, no moon most nights just a constant shift and move of sequined brilliance down below bathed in the neon wash, the colours of fantasies and dreams.
When he was younger he used to believe, like many people did, that LA was a centre of an entirely different world, where the rich and the famous and the beautiful travelled to from far and wide, and that it must be amazing, that mix of stars and glamour. But now that he’s older and has spent nights and days trolling the streets and seeing the ugliness and crass beauty with his own eyes he feels a kinship to it that his younger self never did, filthy desires and strained smiles more welcome then he ever thought possible.
He saw a book once, Glitter and Doom it was portraits from 1920’s Berlin, the centre of depravity and decadence at the time. The pages were filled with foul, distorted people, mutilated by war or wealth, dressed in the finest furs and silks, diamonds and jewels that did nothing to disguise the ugliness of the rich and the gaudy frightening brothel workers who seemed willing to devour men whole. But there were also other paintings, painfully real ones which haunt him still; these images weren’t of the horrible, decedent society but of the beautiful, plain, disheartened prostitutes, who with their sagging breasts and ill fitting clothes stared dispassionately from the canvas open and unashamed, he didn't like to examine why he feels a kinship with them, why he sees something so painfully familiar in those bitter dark eyes that stare up at him.
LA's like the Berlin they painted, the image that the world saw, and an entirely different one that you only saw if you walked in with eyes wide open and look past the smiles and fake gold.
He belonged in LA because nobody belongs in LA.
Late at night when the city that thrives on the darkness has slowed down, when he can hear his own slow inhales and can count the cars passing in one hour on his hands; he crawls into his bed, allows the crisp sheets to fall around his thin naked body and the smell of detergent to surround him. Then he stares up into the darkness and watches the patterns the lights outside make on the empty white surface. At some point he will fall asleep, sheets curled around his ankles as the ever present heat of LA clings to him as unfamiliar as anything else in this country and he will dream of nothing for a few hours before he wakes up, has five cigarettes and then plays guitar.
Chapter two