Original -- Stars

[tierfal]

Title: Stars
Part: V
Series: The Sam and Adrian Saga
Pairing: Adrian/Sam
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,793
Warnings: legal drug use, illegal alcohol use, and teenager-worthy language XD
Summary: In which college-aged Sam encounters difficulties attempting to convey his feelings to college-aged Adrian.
Author's Note: Everything in the sky looks orange when you're looking for something orangey. XD I also like how I researched this fic (BIC lighters and cigarettes, man) far more intently than any of the papers that were due around the time I was writing this... And God, I love Mark. XD


STARS
“I think that’s Mars.”

Sam squinted. He shifted his star chart and his pencil to his left hand, rubbed his eyes with his right, and then squinted again. “How do you know?” he asked.

Adrian was shading his eyes with his hand for some reason Sam couldn’t quite figure out. “Because it looks orange,” he answered.

Sam frowned. “They all look orange,” he reported.

Adrian was grinning now.

“Maybe if you’re high they do,” he noted.

Mark joined them at the top of the stairs to the telescope. “Who’s high,” he wanted to know, “and how do I join them?”

Adrian pointed skyward. “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning.”

Mark considered. “That sounds like a lot of work for a little bit of weed.”

“Which one do you think is Mars, pothead?” Sam prompted.

“Your mom,” Mark responded.

“Your face,” Sam retorted.

“Your mom’s face,” Mark shot back.

“Redundant,” Sam sniffed.

“Your mom is redund-”

“Gentlemen,” Adrian interrupted, looking as though he was biting back a grin.

“Your mom is a gentlem-”

The corners of Adrian’s lips twitched upward. “Mark,” he reprimanded.

Mark scoffed. “Just because you wouldn’t even want to get with somebody’s mom.”

Adrian smiled calmly. “‘Your dad’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it,” he replied.

Sam almost fell over the staircase railing to his death. Having your fondest, wildest, maddest, most desperate dream come true without warning could do that to a guy.

Adrian caught him staring, and faint blush seeped into cheeks whose curves Sam had memorized the first time he’d seen them. “What?” Adrian prompted, what might just have been a hint of disappointment sidling in alongside the defensiveness.

If Sam Tanner’s life had been a movie, he would have thrown himself at Adrian Leyman and commenced making out vehemently, right there by the telescope dome and the half-dozen students congregating for their projects, two feet away from Mark Kessley. Furthermore, he would have deliberately botched the scene so that they had to do another take. Or eight other takes. Or a million.

Instead, he lowered his gaze and tried to look like there wasn’t an angel chorus singing the soundtrack of his life right now.

“Nothing,” he said.

Oh, but what a something it was.

Sam wasn’t stupid. He knew that his little old “Nothing” was the reason that Adrian took a step away, withdrew behind those almond eyes, kept his distance and his peace and began to be painfully careful with what he said. He was trying to be tactful, but Adrian was just too damn genuine to get away with it-too simple; too compassionate; and far, far too beautiful.

Sam wanted to corner him and set the record straight-pun worth a cringe of epic proportions-but he had a nagging feeling that he would somehow manage to make it all even worse.

After a week of wanting to die from the moment he woke up in the morning to the one at which his eyes burned so badly that he was forced to call it a night, a week of reading sign after horribly obvious sign, a week of the gauzy curtain swishing shut in his face and leaving him only the silhouettes of Adrian’s thoughts to trace and love and hold so close he feared they’d break, he realized that he couldn’t stand by any longer. It would kill him, and as merciful as that might be, there was a sliver of hope for survival, and he would be an idiot not to seize it.

Or at least not to scrabble for it; seizing it was another matter entirely.

He went to Mark.

Somehow, he managed to squeeze the whole story out around the Boy Scout-approved knot in his throat. Mark raised an eyebrow, the silver bar through it shifting.

“Dude,” he said, “I’m not going to be your matchmaker.”

Sam howled something about worthless sons of bitches and being turned away in his hour of need, and Mark rustled up a baseball bat and a menacing expression.

“Asshole!” Sam shouted over his shoulder as he careened down the stairs, his would-be benefactor in hot pursuit.

“Tell it to the titanium-aluminum composite,” Mark called back.

Sam moped around the wonder of sardine-style housing that was his apartment for a while longer. He stretched out on the floor, over the length of the slightly worn green rug with the tassled border, folded his arms under his chin, and stared morosely at the dust bunnies, as if the answer lay in their intricate coalesced-crud designs. What was so hard about taking Adrian aside and saying, “I think you misunderstood me; I’ve actually been head-over-heels in love with you for two months, two weeks, and four and a half days”?

Aside from, you know, actually taking Adrian aside and saying the damn thing. Which was, of course, unequivocally impossible.

When his impressively oblivious roommate saw fit to comment on Sam’s persistent wretchedness, he knew he had a problem. Fortunately, college students had developed a surefire way to solve problems of this and other varieties.

Thus it was that Sam Tanner found himself at a slightly lame party, attempting to drink himself straight into oblivion without so much as stopping for a bathroom break in partial existence.

Someone flicked the lights off in the foyer, and from where he was hunched over the kitchen counter, nursing more brandy than Coke by a considerable margin, Sam could see the darting colored lights of a plastic disco ball. He marveled for a moment, mouthing words he couldn’t quite remember, and then the unrelenting bass beat of a throbbing techno song slammed into him, and his ears became a passage directly into his bloodstream.

Some imbecile thinking he was clever might do something extremely unsavory to his unattended drink, but Sam Tanner honestly didn’t give a shit, because there were bodies bending and arching and swirling in that room, and he needed to be one of them. He needed to breathe their sweat and blend into the dark, to become another shadow writhing in the welcoming anonymity of the small, pulsing mass that had gathered to forget it all for just a few more minutes.

His lips formed words again, and this time he recognized them.

Thank God.

He didn’t know how much later it was that Adrian stepped over the threshold from the deck that ran between the townhouses, into the room, into the dark. He didn’t know much of anything.

Adrian was unsettled and uneasy, though he was doing his best to hide it. The dancers eddied unconcernedly around him, but the latest inductees jostled him carelessly aside, making for the booze.

And then their eyes met across a crowded room.

Sam laughed softly, raised his arms above his head, and spun slowly, narrowly missing putting someone’s eye out with an elbow. But that was what it was all about-the narrow misses. That was dancing, and living, and loving. And sometimes you had to laugh to keep the tears at bay, and there was no better reason in the world.

Adrian forged ahead through the room, dividing his time between avoidances and apologies. And then he was drastically close, and he was smiling tentatively, and the lights whirling in those incredible eyes made it impossible to think about anything else.

He looked… what? Confused? Bewildered? Surprised?

“Sam…” he said, hesitantly, attempting at another smile. He started swaying in time with the rhythm, but it wasn’t in him. He was uncomfortable here. He didn’t want the crush to devour him, to destroy him, to melt him down and mix him in. The way Adrian Leyman lived, he had nothing to forget. “I didn’t know you could…”

“What?” Sam murmured. God, he was close. Oh, God, he was close. It would have been terribly awkward if Sam Tanner had been anywhere near his right mind. His right mind, however, might well have eloped to Fiji with his better judgment by now. “What am I doing?” he asked, discovering suddenly that a grin had hijacked his face. It wasn’t the sort to take prisoners. “Do you like it?”

Adrian’s eyes flickered towards the fluorescent safety of the kitchen, and then towards the door. He swallowed. “Can I talk to you outside?”

It looked like Adrian hadn’t yet realized that Sam Tanner would have gone to hell and back just to hear his voice.

“Sure,” he agreed.

While he would have liked to blame the alcohol, his heart was complicit at best in the decision-or lack thereof-to grab Adrian’s hand and lead him to the door, moving from one momentary opening to another, clearings that closed up after them like quicksand.

His mind dropped by for a quick cup of tea and a chat, during which time it convinced him to release Adrian’s hand as they emerged into the breeze-licked cool of the night. He had to give the damn thing some credit for that one, vagrant that it usually was, as there were a few guys lazing around the picnic table who might not have found the gesture too romantic.

Well, to be honest, Sam himself had to concede that it was more drunken and reeling than romantic, given the state of things.

He and Adrian retreated towards the street, where Adrian leaned up against the bars of an iron fence that was fleetingly and awfully reminiscent of a prison cell door. Sam was soon distracted from this disturbing train of thought when Adrian fumbled in his jacket (the presence of which made Sam abruptly aware of the goosebumps crawling on his arms) and retrieved his blue BIC lighter. Sam was always secretly terrified that Adrian might accidentally scrape the damn thing from the outside somehow and set himself on fire, but as it hadn’t happened yet, he’d been biting his tongue on the subject so far.

Adrian felt for the pack of Marlboros in his opposite pocket, which were burning him down in a much more metaphorical manner. Sam was waging a modest campaign against the cancer sticks of which Mr. Leyman was so nonchalantly fond-or he had been, back before the “Nothing.”

With tonight’s specimen of cigarette between two fingers of his left hand and the lighter under his right thumb, Adrian looked skyward. Sam wanted to sit down and gaze reverently up at him, but he settled with playing with the scallop-edged leaves that pioneered the spaces between the bars of the fence. Adrian flicked the lighter again and again without so much as glancing at it, conjuring the little orange flame only to let it wink out every time. Mesmerized by it for what might well have been half a minute, Sam managed to tear his eyes away, putting them instead to the task of following the line of Adrian’s arm up to his neck, thence along his jaw, thence past his eyes, objects of worship that they were, and thence to the celestial sphere sprawled out above them.

“Looking for Mars?” he hazarded.

It did not escape Sam’s notice that Adrian’s thumb flicked faster at the lighter. Sam congratulated himself a little, rightfully, he thought; drunk as he was, perception was no mean feat.

“Sam,” Adrian said.

Sam was all ears. He even had a very vivid mental image of a Sam-shaped pile of ears swiveling obligingly, the better to attend Adrian’s every perfect word, since that was really all he wanted to do, probably for the rest of his pathetic little excuse for a life-

“I… just…” Adrian stopped, tensed to shake his head, changed his mind, lit the end of the cigarette, and plugged it into his mouth.

Sam was jealous of the stupid thing, balanced gently between Adrian’s lips as it was, but that was familiar territory. He was often jealous of Adrian’s pens, clothing, and hair, as the lattermost was sometimes twirled around an elegant finger. Sam figured he was already wrapped around that finger; why not get the benefits, too?

One way or another, he calmed down enough to ask the obvious question quietly. “Just what?”

Evading his eyes, Adrian toyed with the cigarette and muttered around it, smoke curling delicately out from between his lips. “Nothing.”

Ah.

Ah.

…ah?

Assumptions were a bitch.

Adrian looked at him now, and there was a hint of a plea glimmering in the dream-eyes. “Where’s the beer?” he wanted to know.

Sam beamed. “Beer’s child’s play,” he announced.

Adrian smiled a little. “So’s your mother,” he replied. When Sam only giggled helplessly, he smiled a little more and took a step away from the fence. “Show me,” he said.

Once again Sam led the way, though Adrian paused on their way back in to set his smoldering cigarette on the edge of the ashtray on the picnic table. “If you want it,” he told the skeptical loafers equably, “go ahead and take it. I don’t have mono or anything.”

Sam had never seen Adrian throw a cigarette butt to the pavement. And he’d watched closely.

He slipped into the fray in the foyer again, grazing a few angled limbs as he tried to blaze a trail Adrian could follow without getting maimed. The cheap wallpaper and chipped countertops of the kitchen greeted them, Adrian not too much worse for the wear, and Sam returned to his drink and knocked back the remaining half-glass before Adrian could open his mouth to protest.

“Here,” he offered, reaching for the brandy bottle, which stubbornly eluded him. “I can… get you… the Coke… is…”

“Sam,” Adrian said again. His face was a little fuzzy until Sam focused on focusing. “Sam,” Adrian repeated, “how much do you weigh?”

Sam blushed hotly, feeling deeply wounded, and folded his arms primly across his chest. “That is a very personal question,” he retorted.

For some reason, Adrian winced. “I’m sorry,” he responded, “but if you tell me, I can calculate your B-”

Sam knocked the brandy bottle over. Amber liquid pooled on the countertop.

“Shitmotherfuckinghell!” Sam cried, curling his fingers in his hair and tugging hard. It was the end of the world. It was. The world was doomed. Apocalypse time. Say your prayers. Bedtime for Bozos. Permanently.

“Sam,” Adrian said, which sounded very familiar, “come here.”

He held an arm out. Sam stared at it. Now, if he had a flag, maybe that would mean something in semaphore, but as it was-

“I’m not letting you wander around town trying to get back to your apartment like this,” Adrian was saying. “Especially not this town.”

That sounded vaguely logical, though Sam didn’t quite understand where the arm figured into all of this. Would he clothesline prospective muggers with it?

And then they were on the steps at the edge of the deck, which were writhing and folding under his feet, and he was babbling something about William Wordsworth being a prick as Adrian made quiet noises of agreement and gripped his elbow until it tingled.

The cracks in the sidewalk shimmied too as Sam watched them, awed into silence now. The whole world was coming alive. Maybe it wasn’t the End of Days after all…?

His mother’s favorite psalm dredged itself up from his memory, so he recited it theatrically, and all the while Adrian pulled him gently along and murmured things that were encouraging judging by the tone, though Sam couldn’t always parse the words.

“We live just down this way,” he added, directing Sam’s uncooperative feet along another endless stretch of sidewalk.

“I know,” Sam sang. “I tracked it down so I could go talk to Mark so I could ask him to tell you that I’m in love with you, only he chased me out with a baseball bat, and I only barely escaped with my life.”

There was an extremely long pause, and Adrian stopped walking. Sam’s feet didn’t get the memo until a step or two later and, glaring reproachfully at them, he noticed that his shoelaces were untied.

“Aw, man,” he mumbled.

He started to bend to remedy the situation, but Adrian touched his arm.

“Sam,” he said.

Sam was pretty sure he would never tire of hearing Adrian utter his name, and he’d heard it more than a few times tonight already.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“Do-” Adrian glanced at the nearest picket fence and recommenced guiding them onward, his hand sitting on Sam’s shoulder, his eyes more restless. “I mean, Mark said-he didn’t say much-only that… I should find you.”

Sam smiled blithely up at him. “Well,” he replied, “you did.”

Adrian smiled back, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “C’mon,” he said, softly still. “We’re almost there.”

That seemed to be the case, as either they arrived immediately, or Sam blacked out intermittently until they did. One of his trailing shoelaces snagged on the welcome mat, and only Adrian’s arms and reflexes saved his face from a rather uncouth introduction to the hardwood.

Adrian had hauled him over to the couch by the time Mark clomped down the stairs in a gray tee-shirt and a pair of pajama pants with green dinosaurs on them. He looked slightly strange with the majority of his piercings taken out for the night.

For a few moments, Mark stood at the foot of the stairs, his hand raised to itch his head, staring at Sam, who stared unabashedly back. Then Mark snickered.

“I need pictures,” he declared, “for next time he calls me a rampaging druggie.”

Adrian was pulling Sam’s unlaced shoes off. Sam wiggled his toes. “He has never called you any such thing, and you know it,” Adrian responded calmly. “Would you get a glass of water?”

Mark smirked. “Want me to get a bucket, too?”

Adrian set his hands on the edge of the couch and glanced at his cousin over his shoulder. “Please,” he said.

As Mark sauntered off, Adrian turned to Sam again. He took a deep breath and smiled weakly, and the vulnerability in it made Sam’s knees turn to jelly quite despite the fact that he was lying down.

“Do you?” Adrian asked cautiously.

Did he what? Dream about him nightly? Lose his wits and his mind every time he earned a smile? Ache to taste that skin and trace that jaw and slide slow fingers through that hair-so badly that he thought sometimes his chest would bleed? Want to curl up in those dark, warm eyes and learn what peace meant after all?

Love him so damn much that the most magnificent four-letter word in the language wasn’t big enough?

Sam smiled. “Yes,” he said.

Adrian’s much-touted eyes widened appreciably, and his hands started shaking. He reached for the lighter, his thumb flicking preemptively.

In a flash of green dinosaurs and reddish-orange hair that might or might not have been dyed, Mark returned, slamming the bucket down definitively, to the splitting of some helpless nerve in Sam’s skull. The agony spread like gleeful wildfire through his body and simmered with especial malice in the pit of his stomach.

He grabbed the bucket away from Mark and made use of it.

Everything burned, his face most of all, and that was much of the reason that he swung himself unsteadily to his feet and stumbled for a bathroom that had to exist. Adrian was at his arm again, guiding him, and Sam couldn’t read his face through the haze. Somebody unearthed a toothbrush for him, and pajamas that were much too long, and when he was standing well enough on his own feet, somebodies retreated.

Sam splashed enough water on his face to double Mark and Adrian’s utilities bill, and then he stepped out into the living room again, stabler for the suffering, to find that Adrian was sitting on the floor, the lighter submitting obediently to his inconstant will. There were sheets and a pillow on the couch now, and the next thing he knew, Sam’s body had buried his face in the latter without his mind’s consent.

He couldn’t blame it; his mind’s track record was shit.

There was a very faint pressure as a few fingertips lighted on the small of his back. “Sam?”

The pillow had him in its nefarious clutches, and it wasn’t giving him up. “Mmm” was audible enough.

The fingertips stayed. “I… Just… I-like you-a lot.”

But you’re not the one.

But I’m actually straight.

But you’re the ugliest thing this side of cockroaches.

“And…”

Now, that was a better conjunction altogether.

“…I just… want… I don’t want there to be any… misunderstanding.”

Fuck the pillow and its delusions about world domination; this was melodramatic-capitals IT.

He sat up, ignored the way his head swam, and looked Adrian Leyman in the face. He opened his mouth.

“What the hell is there to misunderstand?” Mark demanded from the doorway to the kitchen. “He’s hot for you; you’re hot for him; now get together and go make some babies.”

Sam said the only thing he could think of: “Pothead.”

Mark flashed a triumphant grin. “Drunkard,” he returned with a flourish.

“Your mom’s a drunkard,” Sam snapped. It was automatic by now; he couldn’t have stopped it if he’d wanted to.

“Your face…” Mark looked positively tickled. “…is really red right now, Sammy. Good look for you.” He saluted and made for the stairs. “Don’t stay up too late, lovebirds. You’re giving blood tomorrow, don’t forget, Adrian, dear boy.” His less-than-dainty progression up the stairs made Sam’s head protest all over again.

Adrian looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Adrian.

Adrian unfolded to his feet and sat down next to him. Sam, to prove that he was perfectly okay now, climbed into his lap and put both arms around his neck.

…or maybe that didn’t prove that he was okay.

What-the-hell-ever.

Adrian held him for a long while. When Sam was dozing, however, Adrian returned him to the pillow’s evil headquarters.

“But we have to make out now!” Sam cried, probably a bit too loudly.

Adrian smiled. “I’ve been smoking, and you’re still really drunk,” he noted.

“Am not.”

“Are so. Goodnight, Sam.”

Sam selected the most mature course of action. “But I need closure!” he howled.

Adrian leaned down and kissed his forehead. “Goodnight, Sam,” he repeated, though there was a hint of the church-bell laugh in his voice. Sure enough, he was smiling as he flipped the light-switch, and presumably kept at it as he padded up the stairs.

Sam had slightly psychedelic dreams about making the groundbreaking discovery that Mars was actually shaped like a heart. He also identified a new constellation and called it Adrian. He was blissfully unaware that he would wake up in eleven hours feeling accomplished and extraordinarily hungover.

[IV: Wonders] [VI: Cigarettes]