the world forgetting by the world forgot (soundtrack: nantes).
title: the world forgetting by the world forgot.
author: conditionelle
pairing: Kris/Adam.
rating: PG-13, for language and non-graphic mentions of sex.
summary: But for an instant, it does him some good, gives him some peace of mind, to be truly alone for the first time in heaven knows how long. Four months? It felt like more, in the best way possible, an eternity past with an eternity to come.
notes: Apparently, this is what happens when I attempt AU. The basic storyline here follows the main plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Well, sort of, for the most part. And the narrative is so temporally disjointed that I feel like I should give a sort of warning, so here it is.
The Ativan the doctor gives him leaves him feeling stupid and slow, drowsy and malleable, too lethargic to not be at peace with his own incomprehension as he loses sight of some speck of dust disappearing into the distant horizon. It's impossible to keep track of where things are when the newly risen California sun bleaches everything beach-sand white. But that's California and that's just the way it is and the world is everything that is the case.
Wait.
Someone said that, it reeked of high school philosophy classes at 9AM, hands temporarily tattooed by coffee stains and inky lines, a distant memory, a wordless and almost tuneless hum. Kris hums along, tunelessly - he's lost the melody somewhere - drags a finger through the condensation on the bus window. A one-way ticket home, and Katy touches his arm, intimate flutter of fingertips: are you okay, baby? He nods. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course he's okay. It's just early and it's the Ativan, so he's a bit stupid and slow, drowsy and malleable, constantly on the verge of remembering.
(This is the world and the world is. )
-
You know, it's the weirdest thing.
Yeah, it really is.
-
What he leaves behind is not so much absence but a negative presence, a pillow that holds the shape of where his head should have been resting. A deliberate swipe of Adam's arm sends the pillow tumbling to the ground. It doesn't matter and this isn't a fucking memorial. There's nothing worth keeping, it's not that fucking special, and space exists to be expanded into and it's his apartment, dammit, so the stamp upon every inch of space is all him, him, him.
If anyone else was supposed to have been here, even so recently as last week - well, too bad.
(It's just temporary; Adam knows this. It's not the first time they argue nor the worst of their arguments - that's what people who lived together do, no matter how in love: they share their spaces so intimately and get so sick of each other that there's nothing to do but snipe, go for blood, come back together and make up. But for an instant, it does him some good, gives him some peace of mind, to be truly alone for the first time in heaven knows how long. Four months? It felt like more, in the best way possible, an eternity past with an eternity to come.)
-
Another week passes and Kris doesn't call and no one's heard anything or knows where he is and one day Adam spectacularly panics, out of the blue just like that - one second he's facing a green light ready to cross on Rodeo Drive, and the next he's gasping for breath from the almost tangible force of impact. Oh God. Oh God what happened Kris is actually gone and Adam doesn't know where he could be and there's nothing left in the apartment that's the way it should be-
(shadows and indentations for two; it's as much his home as it is Kris')
-he needs to stop thinking. Right now.
One more week. And it's physiologically impossible to sustain panic for so long so Adam settles into anger instead; phones up Brad and looks in the mirror one last time before heading out, sneers experimentally and surprises himself with how foreign and feral the expression looks and feels. It's been all softness for too long. A man loses his edge, that way, and that would just be a real damn tragedy.
Well, Allen. Fuck you too.
-
That sentiment, strangely enough, seems to sum up everything.
It's déjà fucking vu, is what it is. The smile, the way he ducks his head - exactly the picture that Adam carried in his mind, a snapshot of the wide-eyed Arkansas boy standing outside the bus station looking lost, still a teenager and resplendently cloaked in the glory of gap-year innocence. One year is all he gets, Adam knows; knows this, because Kris tells him in a wistful faraway voice as he paced his own heart against Adam's (steady strong ba-dump like a metronome, gravitating toward the drum-line of their song); one year to see once and for all if he should just let that dream about music go and start being practical, he'll hit LA and NYC and everything in between and by the end of the year, if God decides that this won't be the path for him - well. Then he'll come home.
Well, looks like he's come home early.
Katy by his side is easy to recognize, honey-golden Katy with her devoted eyes and homecoming-queen smile, the picture-perfect high school sweetheart just waiting to be made an honest woman of. There's no hint of doubt anywhere in her face, girl that she was, barely on the cusp of womanhood - oh, what a pair they made! Adam knows her from the photographs, the few that he was not supposed to see. (If he wasn't supposed to see them, why were they even around in the first place?)
He can't stand the way that they stand, at the front of the record store where everyone can see because they had nothing to hide: bodies angled toward each other to keep the world out and trade secrets between them, laughter occasionally bubbling over. It's the way that Adam and Kris always stood in LA, wrapped in their own world to the exclusion of all else. He clears his suddenly constricting throat with evidently a failed attempt at being inconspicuous about it, because invariably the noise draws the young couple's attention.
-
Do I know you?
I don't think so. Do you know-?
Afraid not, sorry.
-
Their eyes lock, but only for an instant; Kris' gaze moves on, slides past fluid and damningly dismissive - as if he'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, as if the man whose eyes he had caught could have been anyone in the world, as if it was not Adam who is standing right there, displaced from LA to Conway, worry and anger and guilt and blame nearly driving him out of his mind and instead onto the road.
Adam feels like he's going to throw up, lowers his head and wills himself to be utterly immersed in the perusal of the Bob Dylan vinyl in his hands, and told himself to get a grip and focus. On the simple facts, then:
That wasn't acting.
He can't hear anything else besides that roar in his ears. That wasn't acting, that wasn't feigned, and that was so supremely fucked up that he hasn't the words for it nor the means of comprehending, so he stands there with the vinyl in his hands for too long as his head spins. Kris is an abysmal actor, and Adam could always read him too, too well. (Or maybe that was faked too? Maybe Adam never knew him at all, maybe their four months was entirely a lie - but that was a road that led to nowhere, one that he can't afford to go down right now.)
How the hell would there not even be a flicker of recognition?
-
Well, Allen. Fuck you too.
Two can play this game.
-
A phone call from Katy explains everything. (Tells him to stay away for everyone's sake.)
Another phone call to Brad confirms everything. (Tells him to come home for his own sake.)
And Adam thinks that he may really hate Kris a little, because how the fuck do you do this to someone? It had just been a fight (he thought, now he's not so sure because nothing's certain any longer, after that escalation there's no proportionate reaction) and one fight is hardly grounds enough to - God, he hated that appallingly annihilatory word - hardly grounds enough to erase someone, so entirely and thoroughly that everyone must be warned: it's a very delicate process and the refractory period is fragile, please don't say the words 'Adam' and 'Lambert' in conjunction in his presence. (Nothing bad will happen, most likely, but being careful never hurt, and being careful kept the malpractice suits at bay and every client happy.)
It's difficult to grasp, the fact that as far as Kris is concerned, their four months together are gone. No, not even gone - they never existed. Actually, scratch that as well: the time elapsed is still there, but now it comes with a complementary giant Adam-shaped hole. To Kris, if they pass each other in the streets they do so as strangers. To Adam, it just seems vastly unfair.
-
This is it. It's going to be gone soon.
-
Kris can't believe Adam doesn't know how to hold a guitar, laughs for a full minute until with an undignified yelp he's tackled to the floor amidst shrieks of watch it!, dives back into the tussle once he settles his baby carefully in its case. It's not a fair fight, of course. As soon as he's on top, Adam demands to be taught properly, and the retort dies on Kris' lips as Adam leans down with a kiss that leaves him entirely breathless, pulling away only to murmur, ple-
-
Problems. He's running into a whole slew of them, none of them unforeseeable and all of them surprising.
It seems that making the decision is much easier than the execution of plans, because to erase Kris, he would have to erase Kris' presence from their apartment - which was still ubiquitous when Adam left LA two weeks ago, despite the fact that his pillow no longer conforms to the shape of Kris' head, that his side of the bed no longer smells quite as distinctively sharp of his soap. But some of his shirts are still there from the load of laundry that was in the dryer, and everything they'd called 'theirs.' Kris had been determined to leave the apartment with nothing more (and maybe a little less) than what he came into it with.
Adam thought he understood that: easy come easy go, after all, and he recognizes all too easily that undercurrent of paralyzing fear in Kris' eyes when he thought about expectations and countdowns and choices and time. Well, he understood it until he didn't, because now the whole situation's been made absurd by the fact that when Kris left, he left his memories behind along with the sporadic artefact, the ghost of a scent and the memory of a gesture.
-
I know.
-
The first time they have sex is not at all graceful or wonderful or altogether satisfying and that's why it's perfect; it's messy and clumsy and Adam tries too hard to be gentle and Kris is a little too impatient for it to not hurt. Nearly an hour later, Kris whispers in his fluty midnight whisper under cover from the darkness of the night that he doesn't want perfect, he took a bus away from the illusion of perfection and found something real and beautiful and jaggedly damaged in Adam and he wouldn't have it any other w-
-
This makes Adam's life all the harder now, since he's basically finding it impossible to actually voluntarily throw the remnants of their life together away. If both of them forget, wipe away the evidence, then none of it really did happen. It's what Kris wanted, it's what Kris did - the sacrilegious idea of forgetting, like it really is that simple, like their skin does not hold imprints of every touch - and it's not fair but it's done. So in a way it'd be an act of grace if Adam follows suit, since if both of them forget then it's really gone.
The long-suffering altruist angle rings laughably false, though, and if he's honest, Adam has to admit that he just wants it to not hurt so much.
For whatever reason, then, he's quite determined to forget. But when his eyes flutter shut the only thoughts he can hang on to are if Kris had his doubts while sitting in this same chair, if this little spark of doubt was going to haunt him - but of course not, he's going to forget that Kris exists at all so the question itself really is moot and oh.
Oh.
The only thing that Adam forgets is why he wanted to forget in the first place, and now - no, doctor, please, wait please - now it's begun and already too late.
-
What do we do?
-
The sentiment becomes painfully obvious and obviously reciprocated very early on, but the words aren't said until New Year's morning when they're both looking a mess and feeling shitty from the epic hangover of the night before. Adam laughs and shakes his head (immediately groans, having forgotten why that's not such a good idea) and Kris buries his head beneath a pillow in an attempt to further evade the encroaching sunlight through the Venetian blinds, quips that the mark of real devotion is that the morning after (and what a morning after!) they can still say I lov-
-
Enjoy it.
-
There's a memory that isn't, hidden five layers deep, and it goes a little something like this:
Balcony, late-October sunset, and a lulling murmur from the streets below. Just familiar enough, with the various components stolen from a multitude of sources, and so blazingly real that it makes Kris-in-his-head laugh in delight, inevitably-still-adolescent precocious mischief lingering around the corners of his crinkling eyes.
If they were any closer, they would have disappeared into each other's ribcages, wrapped around beating hearts, steady pulse of flesh and blood, setting sun staining them red and raw inside and out, forever caught at dusk (the perfect moment between day and night); limbs entwined, concrete of the balcony floor and brick façade behind their backs uncomfortable, but they don't waste breath to complain. Instead, they memorize textures and hues and scents and oh, if only the parts could make up the whole, but that's not to be so they try their best to memorize each other - before faces melt into impressions into glances into unfamiliarity, before their presences are bleached away by unforgiving California sun like so much white sand sifting between bare toes.
-
It's a double-blind clean slate. It's only fair. And this is the world and the world is.
-
The work of providence: they meet again in New York in late April, on neutral ground; hit it off after a show at one of those live music venues, after a few minutes of awkwardly dancing around each other to the tune of do I know you / I don't think so; do you know / afraid not, sorry/ you know, it's the weirdest thing / yeah, it really is. It doesn't really matter why they're each there, whether it's to escape to a different coast for a change of pace or to follow one last effort to find the path to a life of music. What matters is that they are.
2AM, and they should be sleeping but are not. Sitting on the floor of his hotel room, Kris strums out basic chords on his guitar, while Adam lies on his back on the bed and hums toward the ceiling, tuneless and sad and wandering, until something clicks and they find the melody again.
It's as if they never stopped.
author: conditionelle
pairing: Kris/Adam.
rating: PG-13, for language and non-graphic mentions of sex.
summary: But for an instant, it does him some good, gives him some peace of mind, to be truly alone for the first time in heaven knows how long. Four months? It felt like more, in the best way possible, an eternity past with an eternity to come.
notes: Apparently, this is what happens when I attempt AU. The basic storyline here follows the main plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Well, sort of, for the most part. And the narrative is so temporally disjointed that I feel like I should give a sort of warning, so here it is.
The Ativan the doctor gives him leaves him feeling stupid and slow, drowsy and malleable, too lethargic to not be at peace with his own incomprehension as he loses sight of some speck of dust disappearing into the distant horizon. It's impossible to keep track of where things are when the newly risen California sun bleaches everything beach-sand white. But that's California and that's just the way it is and the world is everything that is the case.
Wait.
Someone said that, it reeked of high school philosophy classes at 9AM, hands temporarily tattooed by coffee stains and inky lines, a distant memory, a wordless and almost tuneless hum. Kris hums along, tunelessly - he's lost the melody somewhere - drags a finger through the condensation on the bus window. A one-way ticket home, and Katy touches his arm, intimate flutter of fingertips: are you okay, baby? He nods. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course he's okay. It's just early and it's the Ativan, so he's a bit stupid and slow, drowsy and malleable, constantly on the verge of remembering.
(This is the world and the world is. )
-
You know, it's the weirdest thing.
Yeah, it really is.
-
What he leaves behind is not so much absence but a negative presence, a pillow that holds the shape of where his head should have been resting. A deliberate swipe of Adam's arm sends the pillow tumbling to the ground. It doesn't matter and this isn't a fucking memorial. There's nothing worth keeping, it's not that fucking special, and space exists to be expanded into and it's his apartment, dammit, so the stamp upon every inch of space is all him, him, him.
If anyone else was supposed to have been here, even so recently as last week - well, too bad.
(It's just temporary; Adam knows this. It's not the first time they argue nor the worst of their arguments - that's what people who lived together do, no matter how in love: they share their spaces so intimately and get so sick of each other that there's nothing to do but snipe, go for blood, come back together and make up. But for an instant, it does him some good, gives him some peace of mind, to be truly alone for the first time in heaven knows how long. Four months? It felt like more, in the best way possible, an eternity past with an eternity to come.)
-
Another week passes and Kris doesn't call and no one's heard anything or knows where he is and one day Adam spectacularly panics, out of the blue just like that - one second he's facing a green light ready to cross on Rodeo Drive, and the next he's gasping for breath from the almost tangible force of impact. Oh God. Oh God what happened Kris is actually gone and Adam doesn't know where he could be and there's nothing left in the apartment that's the way it should be-
(shadows and indentations for two; it's as much his home as it is Kris')
-he needs to stop thinking. Right now.
One more week. And it's physiologically impossible to sustain panic for so long so Adam settles into anger instead; phones up Brad and looks in the mirror one last time before heading out, sneers experimentally and surprises himself with how foreign and feral the expression looks and feels. It's been all softness for too long. A man loses his edge, that way, and that would just be a real damn tragedy.
Well, Allen. Fuck you too.
-
That sentiment, strangely enough, seems to sum up everything.
It's déjà fucking vu, is what it is. The smile, the way he ducks his head - exactly the picture that Adam carried in his mind, a snapshot of the wide-eyed Arkansas boy standing outside the bus station looking lost, still a teenager and resplendently cloaked in the glory of gap-year innocence. One year is all he gets, Adam knows; knows this, because Kris tells him in a wistful faraway voice as he paced his own heart against Adam's (steady strong ba-dump like a metronome, gravitating toward the drum-line of their song); one year to see once and for all if he should just let that dream about music go and start being practical, he'll hit LA and NYC and everything in between and by the end of the year, if God decides that this won't be the path for him - well. Then he'll come home.
Well, looks like he's come home early.
Katy by his side is easy to recognize, honey-golden Katy with her devoted eyes and homecoming-queen smile, the picture-perfect high school sweetheart just waiting to be made an honest woman of. There's no hint of doubt anywhere in her face, girl that she was, barely on the cusp of womanhood - oh, what a pair they made! Adam knows her from the photographs, the few that he was not supposed to see. (If he wasn't supposed to see them, why were they even around in the first place?)
He can't stand the way that they stand, at the front of the record store where everyone can see because they had nothing to hide: bodies angled toward each other to keep the world out and trade secrets between them, laughter occasionally bubbling over. It's the way that Adam and Kris always stood in LA, wrapped in their own world to the exclusion of all else. He clears his suddenly constricting throat with evidently a failed attempt at being inconspicuous about it, because invariably the noise draws the young couple's attention.
-
Do I know you?
I don't think so. Do you know-?
Afraid not, sorry.
-
Their eyes lock, but only for an instant; Kris' gaze moves on, slides past fluid and damningly dismissive - as if he'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, as if the man whose eyes he had caught could have been anyone in the world, as if it was not Adam who is standing right there, displaced from LA to Conway, worry and anger and guilt and blame nearly driving him out of his mind and instead onto the road.
Adam feels like he's going to throw up, lowers his head and wills himself to be utterly immersed in the perusal of the Bob Dylan vinyl in his hands, and told himself to get a grip and focus. On the simple facts, then:
That wasn't acting.
He can't hear anything else besides that roar in his ears. That wasn't acting, that wasn't feigned, and that was so supremely fucked up that he hasn't the words for it nor the means of comprehending, so he stands there with the vinyl in his hands for too long as his head spins. Kris is an abysmal actor, and Adam could always read him too, too well. (Or maybe that was faked too? Maybe Adam never knew him at all, maybe their four months was entirely a lie - but that was a road that led to nowhere, one that he can't afford to go down right now.)
How the hell would there not even be a flicker of recognition?
-
Well, Allen. Fuck you too.
Two can play this game.
-
A phone call from Katy explains everything. (Tells him to stay away for everyone's sake.)
Another phone call to Brad confirms everything. (Tells him to come home for his own sake.)
And Adam thinks that he may really hate Kris a little, because how the fuck do you do this to someone? It had just been a fight (he thought, now he's not so sure because nothing's certain any longer, after that escalation there's no proportionate reaction) and one fight is hardly grounds enough to - God, he hated that appallingly annihilatory word - hardly grounds enough to erase someone, so entirely and thoroughly that everyone must be warned: it's a very delicate process and the refractory period is fragile, please don't say the words 'Adam' and 'Lambert' in conjunction in his presence. (Nothing bad will happen, most likely, but being careful never hurt, and being careful kept the malpractice suits at bay and every client happy.)
It's difficult to grasp, the fact that as far as Kris is concerned, their four months together are gone. No, not even gone - they never existed. Actually, scratch that as well: the time elapsed is still there, but now it comes with a complementary giant Adam-shaped hole. To Kris, if they pass each other in the streets they do so as strangers. To Adam, it just seems vastly unfair.
-
This is it. It's going to be gone soon.
-
Kris can't believe Adam doesn't know how to hold a guitar, laughs for a full minute until with an undignified yelp he's tackled to the floor amidst shrieks of watch it!, dives back into the tussle once he settles his baby carefully in its case. It's not a fair fight, of course. As soon as he's on top, Adam demands to be taught properly, and the retort dies on Kris' lips as Adam leans down with a kiss that leaves him entirely breathless, pulling away only to murmur, ple-
-
Problems. He's running into a whole slew of them, none of them unforeseeable and all of them surprising.
It seems that making the decision is much easier than the execution of plans, because to erase Kris, he would have to erase Kris' presence from their apartment - which was still ubiquitous when Adam left LA two weeks ago, despite the fact that his pillow no longer conforms to the shape of Kris' head, that his side of the bed no longer smells quite as distinctively sharp of his soap. But some of his shirts are still there from the load of laundry that was in the dryer, and everything they'd called 'theirs.' Kris had been determined to leave the apartment with nothing more (and maybe a little less) than what he came into it with.
Adam thought he understood that: easy come easy go, after all, and he recognizes all too easily that undercurrent of paralyzing fear in Kris' eyes when he thought about expectations and countdowns and choices and time. Well, he understood it until he didn't, because now the whole situation's been made absurd by the fact that when Kris left, he left his memories behind along with the sporadic artefact, the ghost of a scent and the memory of a gesture.
-
I know.
-
The first time they have sex is not at all graceful or wonderful or altogether satisfying and that's why it's perfect; it's messy and clumsy and Adam tries too hard to be gentle and Kris is a little too impatient for it to not hurt. Nearly an hour later, Kris whispers in his fluty midnight whisper under cover from the darkness of the night that he doesn't want perfect, he took a bus away from the illusion of perfection and found something real and beautiful and jaggedly damaged in Adam and he wouldn't have it any other w-
-
This makes Adam's life all the harder now, since he's basically finding it impossible to actually voluntarily throw the remnants of their life together away. If both of them forget, wipe away the evidence, then none of it really did happen. It's what Kris wanted, it's what Kris did - the sacrilegious idea of forgetting, like it really is that simple, like their skin does not hold imprints of every touch - and it's not fair but it's done. So in a way it'd be an act of grace if Adam follows suit, since if both of them forget then it's really gone.
The long-suffering altruist angle rings laughably false, though, and if he's honest, Adam has to admit that he just wants it to not hurt so much.
For whatever reason, then, he's quite determined to forget. But when his eyes flutter shut the only thoughts he can hang on to are if Kris had his doubts while sitting in this same chair, if this little spark of doubt was going to haunt him - but of course not, he's going to forget that Kris exists at all so the question itself really is moot and oh.
Oh.
The only thing that Adam forgets is why he wanted to forget in the first place, and now - no, doctor, please, wait please - now it's begun and already too late.
-
What do we do?
-
The sentiment becomes painfully obvious and obviously reciprocated very early on, but the words aren't said until New Year's morning when they're both looking a mess and feeling shitty from the epic hangover of the night before. Adam laughs and shakes his head (immediately groans, having forgotten why that's not such a good idea) and Kris buries his head beneath a pillow in an attempt to further evade the encroaching sunlight through the Venetian blinds, quips that the mark of real devotion is that the morning after (and what a morning after!) they can still say I lov-
-
Enjoy it.
-
There's a memory that isn't, hidden five layers deep, and it goes a little something like this:
Balcony, late-October sunset, and a lulling murmur from the streets below. Just familiar enough, with the various components stolen from a multitude of sources, and so blazingly real that it makes Kris-in-his-head laugh in delight, inevitably-still-adolescent precocious mischief lingering around the corners of his crinkling eyes.
If they were any closer, they would have disappeared into each other's ribcages, wrapped around beating hearts, steady pulse of flesh and blood, setting sun staining them red and raw inside and out, forever caught at dusk (the perfect moment between day and night); limbs entwined, concrete of the balcony floor and brick façade behind their backs uncomfortable, but they don't waste breath to complain. Instead, they memorize textures and hues and scents and oh, if only the parts could make up the whole, but that's not to be so they try their best to memorize each other - before faces melt into impressions into glances into unfamiliarity, before their presences are bleached away by unforgiving California sun like so much white sand sifting between bare toes.
-
It's a double-blind clean slate. It's only fair. And this is the world and the world is.
-
The work of providence: they meet again in New York in late April, on neutral ground; hit it off after a show at one of those live music venues, after a few minutes of awkwardly dancing around each other to the tune of do I know you / I don't think so; do you know / afraid not, sorry/ you know, it's the weirdest thing / yeah, it really is. It doesn't really matter why they're each there, whether it's to escape to a different coast for a change of pace or to follow one last effort to find the path to a life of music. What matters is that they are.
2AM, and they should be sleeping but are not. Sitting on the floor of his hotel room, Kris strums out basic chords on his guitar, while Adam lies on his back on the bed and hums toward the ceiling, tuneless and sad and wandering, until something clicks and they find the melody again.
It's as if they never stopped.