Fic: Poets Come To Life (1/3)
Title: Poets Come To Life. (1/3)
Rating: MA-15.
Fandom: Bandom. P!atd. FOB. THS. (Brendon/Ryan, Pete/Patrick, implied Spencer/Pete, Spencer/Ryan, Spencer/Greta, past-Pete/Ashlee)
Many thanks to
dawn_afterglowfor the beta.
Poets Come To Life
If you ask Peter, he’ll tell you that stories start every fucking second, but none of them start with once upon a time.
He’ll tell you that stories start with now and when and sometimes maybe why, but they don’t start with nothing, not out of nowhere, not once or upon because real life, reality, it’s no fucking fairy tale.
He’ll mention, slur the words, drag them out behind broad lips and white teeth, mumble that the protagonists are never good guy or bad guy, damsel or villain; that when stories start with who, they don’t start with hero.
Right about now, Peter will roll dark eyes to the ceiling, rock back enough on his stool that he isn’t talking to you anymore, that he’s muttering nonsense at the ceiling, at the woodwork and the insects that chirp and crick in the night. He’ll part his lips just enough that the words can claw out, sprawl against pink flesh. He’ll say that people are just people, boring and angry and stupid; that they will never, ever not be solely motivated by wants, by clingy fingers and desperate thoughts.
He’ll tell you that no one will ever die with a clean conscience.
Stories, he’ll say, don’t end with happily ever after, not with a kiss, not with love or justice or a sense of right. Stories, they just end, with loss and secrets and tears, they end at the wrong moments at the wrong times, hurt the good and bless the undeserving.
Stories, he’ll say, end with nostalgia and anger and always, always the one who gets left behind.
*
His hands aren’t made for this.
Maybe if he’d been anyone else, anywhere else, they’d be fine, delicate and lean and maybe effeminate, but here, this life, this world, there’s dirt beneath his nails, grit beneath the skin. His fingers, they aren’t meant for this, aren’t made for hammer and wood, nails and screws, wire, wrench, saw. They are made for pen, for ink and quill, paintbrush and flower stems.
Peter, he wasn’t made for this life, wasn’t made for this chair, this shop, the flat that sprawls above it. He wasn’t made for toys or little children or tools that don’t fit right between his fingers.
He wasn’t made for the burner that wields the glass or the needles that thread the cotton; he’s not a housewife, not a builder, not a woodsmith or a clothmaker. Peter’s not made for these tools, but he holds them anyway, tight in the worlds between his fingers, and he carves, chips, cuts into the wood, gouges sockets and limbs, lips and nostrils.
He sands the flesh, paints on skin like he’s Van Gogh, like he’s Matisse, Hester, Angelo, like he’s an artist and this, this will keep for decades. He threads cotton-hair through fabric, through wood, welds eyes out of glass, shapes them like the moon looks out the window and sews through tiny wire eyelashes. Peter, he makes this thing, this doll, builds it out of loss and loneliness, out of heartache. He builds the doll out of everything wrong with the world, with him and maybe the doll won’t be perfect, lips won’t ever tug, eyelids won’t ever close, but Peter, all he needs is someone to share this with.
Peter, he breathes.
*
Spencer Smith will be seventeen in three weeks and he thinks that then, and only then, his wage will go up half a dollar an hour.
This, it matters when you’re sixteen, living alone in some rotting flat with three cats and too many cockroaches, termites, spiders. He thinks that this matters when his job involves waking up at four every morning to deliver milk; big, cold jars that clink in the basket on his bike and consume his fingerprints like the night eats the sun.
He delivers milk each morning to the eight side streets that make up this half of the suburb, weaves on his bike between trees and animals and cars that toot and grunt with the put-upon attitude of anyone required to be awake at this time of the morning.
Spencer, he’s worked this shift since he was thirteen and he knows his customers by name - knows Maria Smith who reads the paper till noon, Dayle Granson who buys four bottles off him each morning to feed too many children, knows Sandra Bee who waits by the gate for her dead husband to come home.
Spencer, he knows Peter, who’s all sad eyes and jagged bones, all grief and loss and owns the toyshop at the edge of the suburb.
Peter never comes to the door, but Spencer likes to leave things for him, likes to think that maybe waking up to milk and a seashell, milk and a tiny braided bangle, that it makes a difference.
Spencer, he falls in love much too fast.
*
This web is tangled, draped between branches, sticks, leaves and side alleys, lamp posts and bright eyes. Somewhere in here, Patrick and Brendon exist.
*
Peter closes the register, the till and he heads out the back door, climbs the stairs to Neverland, to his flat, to his room. He never sees Spencer creep in, doesn’t hear the bell ding over the door.
The doll rests on the counter.
Spencer thinks he can see forever in glass eyes.
*
If this story were to ever start with once upon a time, it would start here.
It would start with this girl, who‘s all blonde hair and blue eyes, green dress and paper-white skin that stretches across the bone, across muscle and cells and veins. It would start when she sneezes.
“Guh,” she says, but she brushes off her dress, straightens the straps that cling to her shoulders and clenches her lips. “When did dusters fall out of existence?”
The store, Peter’s store, it’s not empty, just Peter’s asleep, Hemingway sprawled over him like a blanket and this girl, she came in, trickled through beneath the window pane.
At this hour of night, customers are anywhere but here, tucked away at home, at motel, brothel, bar, so for the girl, there’s normally no problem slipping in undetected. Thing is, tonight there’s an extra shadow, one that breathes and trembles and moves beneath the counter; his wide blue eyes are icy when they catch the way the light soaks into her skin, reflects off her hair.
Spencer, his mother died when he was so small, too small, but she left him pieces of her, rusted jewellery and matted books that are full of creatures like this girl; angel, spirit, siren and Spencer, he can’t describe it, can’t explain why all this, why it makes him want to run.
She leans down, lets her hair dangle around her neck, trail against the floorboards and she just, she stares at Spencer with wide blue eyes and gently parted lips and Spencer, his breathing is shaky, pounds in his ears and this girl, he’s never seen her before, can’t justify her in this small town.
“Oh,” she whispers and the sound, it’s music to a deaf man, a song to the lyric-less, a promise to the mute. “Oh,” she repeats, and Spencer, he trembles like a new-born, like a shack in a cyclone and then, he just, he runs, bolts from the store like a dog off a lead.
Point is, the doll drops from his ready fingers, falls to the floor with a clatter and a thud and the girl, she just stares at it, at Spencer’s retreating back. She purses her lips, sways over behind the counter and crouches down to where the doll lies flat. “That wasn’t particularly kind of him.”
She picks him up, holds him against the dull light of the waning moon, where it splices against the glass of the window pane. “Boys don’t know how to handle precious things.”
The girl sighs, quirks her forehead and sways her body to a beat that no one can hear. She leans close to the doll, presses her lips to where Peter too carefully sculpted an ear. “I know you can hear me.”
She rocks back on her heels, lets loose a gasp for effect. “What was that? You want to be alive? Human?”
Pursing her lips, she sets him up on the counter, bends her knees just far enough so that she can be eyelevel with his wooden chest, the cotton shirt that frills around his neck, pulls tight around his torso.
“I am a capable young woman and for that you are lucky. After all,” and she grins at this, enough to show rows of white teeth, “not just any fairy is able to complete such an extensive task.
To be fair though, I can’t make you human,” she says, “but I can give you a body that works. I can give you a head and a spirit, but I cannot give you a heart. You can be human, if you earn it,” she continues. “If you are good and brave and kind. You can be human if you are honest.”
She’s not joking anymore, not grinning or laughing, just staring, dead-straight at the glass eyes of the doll. “Love,” she says, “love shamelessly, indiscriminately, hopelessly. Love without want or gain or purpose, point or status, love timelessly and without reservations.”
She pauses, stills, before clutching at the cold wood of the doll’s arms with porcelain-white fingers. “Once,” the girl mumbles, and her eyes are spilt water, spilt ink that leaks against her pupils, the whites of the bulb. “Upon,” she says, and she kisses him, flush against his wooden lips, the one’s that Peter painted with all the feeling he could muster and the girl, she can taste the loneliness, the wayward love and just, the bitterness that collides with her teeth, soaks through her tongue. “A time,” she whispers and she pretends not to notice the way the wood heats up beneath her fingertips, the way the paint chips away and the glass eyes flicker, focus. She pretends not to feel that first breath, that choke that’s like revival, like rebirth, like the first conscious inhale after a lifetime in a coma.
His pupils, those paint-drowned things, they focus on her for a split second and all the girl says, murmurs, is, “Make him stop hurting,” before she vanishes from sight.
*
The name Ryan, if Peter looks it up, is Gaelic. It means ‘little king’ and Peter, he thinks it’s appropriate in Ryan‘s big eyes and pale skin, in his long neck and longer limbs and the way he holds his head like this life, like it means something.
*
“Take these broken wings,” he hums, breathes out on the air between the bar and the adult store. “And learn to fly.”
*
The thing is, Ryan’s not alive, but for all intents and purposes, he‘s a functioning human being with lungs and veins and liver, with spleen and stomach, just…without a heartbeat.
This shouldn’t matter, but the moment Peter looks at him, like, really looks at him, all Ryan can feel is the pulse in the air, all he can hear is the ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum and Ryan, he can’t explain why this makes him feel so dead.
*
The first thing Ryan learns about Peter, even before the girl kisses him, is that his heart is broken, damaged beyond anything that he’d be able to repair on his own. Ryan reckons that if he could look close enough, he’d be able to see the bruises, the plasters and bandages, the sticky-tape where Peter did try to fix it by himself, small signature marks where other people, JeanaeJoeAshleeMikeySpencer, where they all tried their hand at it, where they left their stitches and scratches.
Ryan, he doesn’t think he’s supposed to remember being made, but he remembers the second that Peter breathed on him and just, that hurt, it erupted beneath his skin. Waves of bitter agony and Ryan, he reckons if that‘s what it feels like to have a heart, then maybe he shouldn‘t want one as much as he does.
He remembers watching Peter through glass eyes, the way this boy, man, the way he stood at the window, shattered pieces of heart scattered at his feet. Ryan would worry that Hemingway would eat them, lick up jagged edges of pulp.
It’s weird being alive all of a sudden, because Peter, he doesn’t act all that differently, but he makes more of an effort to smile in the mornings and conscious decisions each evening to avoid the pills that he keeps stored beneath the till, the pills he thinks Ryan doesn‘t know about.
What’s important though is that Ryan isn’t sure how Peter’s heart got broken so badly, not sure when it happened or why or who and that’s not right, because in fairytales, the blame is supposed to land on someone’s shoulders.
*
Spencer meets Ryan on the milk run three weeks after the girl brings him to life.
Spencer’s not sure how it happened, but he can still see the marks on the wood in this boy’s flesh, can see the way his eyes shine too brightly and the way his lips are just, just too red to be real.
Ryan, he’s sitting on the porch and when Spencer says hello, Ryan just leans back, eyelids flickering over the glass bulbs.
“I don’t love,” Ryan says, “and that was the important one.”
“Oh,” Spencer replies and he purses his lips, puts his hands on his hips before gesturing for Ryan to move over. “Love is important.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ryan says. “I’ve never felt it before.”
*
Thing about love is Ryan isn’t really sure what the point is.
Peter’s in love with the busker on the street corner, the boy who sways with his guitar, the boy who wears a hat and keeps a separate one to hold the coins that passer-bys throw at him. This boy, he sings like he means it.
“You should say hello,” Ryan mentions one morning and Peter’s startled, swivels too quickly on the spot because he watches this guy through the window every morningdaynight and sometimes he forgets that Ryan breathes now, can talk back. He shifts his weight a little, but just closes the blinds, wanders over to the counter and watches the screaming children who gush over the dolls, the cars and the games.
“He sings,” Ryan says, and maybe he means to say something else but just, the words, they catch in his throat, stick to the edges of his voice box.
“Yeah,” Peter replies, and Ryan, he pretends not to notice the way Peter’s pupils dart around the bulbs, dash beneath the eyelids.
Ryan, he’s not good at this, can’t read people, can’t tell what’s right to say and what’s not and maybe, he supposes, maybe that’s what the heart is for. That big, pulsing thing that erupts in people‘s chests, works the blood, the spirit, the mind.
“Is it worth it?”
“What?” Peter asks and he tilts his head but his gaze, it’s firmly fixed on the notebook sprawled on the counter.
“Love.”
The silence is stifling, settles over them both like fresh snow, suffocates the grass, the air between them. It’s an eon before Peter answers, his voice stumbling over words he normally has no trouble providing. “I don’t know.”
*
“What are you doing here?”
Spencer’s apartment is tiny. Not tiny like Peter’s, but really, genuinely the size of a cupboard, a closet and Ryan doesn’t know how he fits with all those long limbs.
“I need to live,” Ryan says, “and I can’t do that here.”
“What?”
“With Peter,” Ryan replies and his eyes, they glaze over and this, maybe it hurts a little, a lot, because he rather likes the broken man. “A part of the contract,” Ryan says. “I want to be human, I need to live.”
“Oh,” Spencer says, and he flings the door open a little wider.
*
Ryan leaves Peter’s house and steals a wad of cash from the till. He doesn’t feel bad, but then again, he doesn’t have a heart.
*
The streets in this area of Chicago are frostbitten, snow that sprawls over the sidewalk, stifles the streetlights and strips trees of their leaves, seeds, branches. Ryan, he hates this weather, hates the way the cold crawls beneath his nails, makes his chest feel coarse and bitter, makes every breath from his wooden lungs ache and cut.
The road is dead in this weather, deserted, so when Ryan’s knocked over by a bumbling mess of a boy, all freckles and dark hair and lips that are cherry red, not crimson-painted like Ryan’s, he‘s not sure how to respond.
“Sorry, sorry, Jesus, sorry.” And the boy, he’s off again, bolting down the sidewalk and twisting his body impossibly around corners and brick walls.
It’ll be three hours before Ryan figures out that the clutch of Peter’s money is gone.
*
Continue to part 2.
Rating: MA-15.
Fandom: Bandom. P!atd. FOB. THS. (Brendon/Ryan, Pete/Patrick, implied Spencer/Pete, Spencer/Ryan, Spencer/Greta, past-Pete/Ashlee)
Many thanks to
dawn_afterglowfor the beta.
Poets Come To Life
If you ask Peter, he’ll tell you that stories start every fucking second, but none of them start with once upon a time.
He’ll tell you that stories start with now and when and sometimes maybe why, but they don’t start with nothing, not out of nowhere, not once or upon because real life, reality, it’s no fucking fairy tale.
He’ll mention, slur the words, drag them out behind broad lips and white teeth, mumble that the protagonists are never good guy or bad guy, damsel or villain; that when stories start with who, they don’t start with hero.
Right about now, Peter will roll dark eyes to the ceiling, rock back enough on his stool that he isn’t talking to you anymore, that he’s muttering nonsense at the ceiling, at the woodwork and the insects that chirp and crick in the night. He’ll part his lips just enough that the words can claw out, sprawl against pink flesh. He’ll say that people are just people, boring and angry and stupid; that they will never, ever not be solely motivated by wants, by clingy fingers and desperate thoughts.
He’ll tell you that no one will ever die with a clean conscience.
Stories, he’ll say, don’t end with happily ever after, not with a kiss, not with love or justice or a sense of right. Stories, they just end, with loss and secrets and tears, they end at the wrong moments at the wrong times, hurt the good and bless the undeserving.
Stories, he’ll say, end with nostalgia and anger and always, always the one who gets left behind.
*
His hands aren’t made for this.
Maybe if he’d been anyone else, anywhere else, they’d be fine, delicate and lean and maybe effeminate, but here, this life, this world, there’s dirt beneath his nails, grit beneath the skin. His fingers, they aren’t meant for this, aren’t made for hammer and wood, nails and screws, wire, wrench, saw. They are made for pen, for ink and quill, paintbrush and flower stems.
Peter, he wasn’t made for this life, wasn’t made for this chair, this shop, the flat that sprawls above it. He wasn’t made for toys or little children or tools that don’t fit right between his fingers.
He wasn’t made for the burner that wields the glass or the needles that thread the cotton; he’s not a housewife, not a builder, not a woodsmith or a clothmaker. Peter’s not made for these tools, but he holds them anyway, tight in the worlds between his fingers, and he carves, chips, cuts into the wood, gouges sockets and limbs, lips and nostrils.
He sands the flesh, paints on skin like he’s Van Gogh, like he’s Matisse, Hester, Angelo, like he’s an artist and this, this will keep for decades. He threads cotton-hair through fabric, through wood, welds eyes out of glass, shapes them like the moon looks out the window and sews through tiny wire eyelashes. Peter, he makes this thing, this doll, builds it out of loss and loneliness, out of heartache. He builds the doll out of everything wrong with the world, with him and maybe the doll won’t be perfect, lips won’t ever tug, eyelids won’t ever close, but Peter, all he needs is someone to share this with.
Peter, he breathes.
*
Spencer Smith will be seventeen in three weeks and he thinks that then, and only then, his wage will go up half a dollar an hour.
This, it matters when you’re sixteen, living alone in some rotting flat with three cats and too many cockroaches, termites, spiders. He thinks that this matters when his job involves waking up at four every morning to deliver milk; big, cold jars that clink in the basket on his bike and consume his fingerprints like the night eats the sun.
He delivers milk each morning to the eight side streets that make up this half of the suburb, weaves on his bike between trees and animals and cars that toot and grunt with the put-upon attitude of anyone required to be awake at this time of the morning.
Spencer, he’s worked this shift since he was thirteen and he knows his customers by name - knows Maria Smith who reads the paper till noon, Dayle Granson who buys four bottles off him each morning to feed too many children, knows Sandra Bee who waits by the gate for her dead husband to come home.
Spencer, he knows Peter, who’s all sad eyes and jagged bones, all grief and loss and owns the toyshop at the edge of the suburb.
Peter never comes to the door, but Spencer likes to leave things for him, likes to think that maybe waking up to milk and a seashell, milk and a tiny braided bangle, that it makes a difference.
Spencer, he falls in love much too fast.
*
This web is tangled, draped between branches, sticks, leaves and side alleys, lamp posts and bright eyes. Somewhere in here, Patrick and Brendon exist.
*
Peter closes the register, the till and he heads out the back door, climbs the stairs to Neverland, to his flat, to his room. He never sees Spencer creep in, doesn’t hear the bell ding over the door.
The doll rests on the counter.
Spencer thinks he can see forever in glass eyes.
*
If this story were to ever start with once upon a time, it would start here.
It would start with this girl, who‘s all blonde hair and blue eyes, green dress and paper-white skin that stretches across the bone, across muscle and cells and veins. It would start when she sneezes.
“Guh,” she says, but she brushes off her dress, straightens the straps that cling to her shoulders and clenches her lips. “When did dusters fall out of existence?”
The store, Peter’s store, it’s not empty, just Peter’s asleep, Hemingway sprawled over him like a blanket and this girl, she came in, trickled through beneath the window pane.
At this hour of night, customers are anywhere but here, tucked away at home, at motel, brothel, bar, so for the girl, there’s normally no problem slipping in undetected. Thing is, tonight there’s an extra shadow, one that breathes and trembles and moves beneath the counter; his wide blue eyes are icy when they catch the way the light soaks into her skin, reflects off her hair.
Spencer, his mother died when he was so small, too small, but she left him pieces of her, rusted jewellery and matted books that are full of creatures like this girl; angel, spirit, siren and Spencer, he can’t describe it, can’t explain why all this, why it makes him want to run.
She leans down, lets her hair dangle around her neck, trail against the floorboards and she just, she stares at Spencer with wide blue eyes and gently parted lips and Spencer, his breathing is shaky, pounds in his ears and this girl, he’s never seen her before, can’t justify her in this small town.
“Oh,” she whispers and the sound, it’s music to a deaf man, a song to the lyric-less, a promise to the mute. “Oh,” she repeats, and Spencer, he trembles like a new-born, like a shack in a cyclone and then, he just, he runs, bolts from the store like a dog off a lead.
Point is, the doll drops from his ready fingers, falls to the floor with a clatter and a thud and the girl, she just stares at it, at Spencer’s retreating back. She purses her lips, sways over behind the counter and crouches down to where the doll lies flat. “That wasn’t particularly kind of him.”
She picks him up, holds him against the dull light of the waning moon, where it splices against the glass of the window pane. “Boys don’t know how to handle precious things.”
The girl sighs, quirks her forehead and sways her body to a beat that no one can hear. She leans close to the doll, presses her lips to where Peter too carefully sculpted an ear. “I know you can hear me.”
She rocks back on her heels, lets loose a gasp for effect. “What was that? You want to be alive? Human?”
Pursing her lips, she sets him up on the counter, bends her knees just far enough so that she can be eyelevel with his wooden chest, the cotton shirt that frills around his neck, pulls tight around his torso.
“I am a capable young woman and for that you are lucky. After all,” and she grins at this, enough to show rows of white teeth, “not just any fairy is able to complete such an extensive task.
To be fair though, I can’t make you human,” she says, “but I can give you a body that works. I can give you a head and a spirit, but I cannot give you a heart. You can be human, if you earn it,” she continues. “If you are good and brave and kind. You can be human if you are honest.”
She’s not joking anymore, not grinning or laughing, just staring, dead-straight at the glass eyes of the doll. “Love,” she says, “love shamelessly, indiscriminately, hopelessly. Love without want or gain or purpose, point or status, love timelessly and without reservations.”
She pauses, stills, before clutching at the cold wood of the doll’s arms with porcelain-white fingers. “Once,” the girl mumbles, and her eyes are spilt water, spilt ink that leaks against her pupils, the whites of the bulb. “Upon,” she says, and she kisses him, flush against his wooden lips, the one’s that Peter painted with all the feeling he could muster and the girl, she can taste the loneliness, the wayward love and just, the bitterness that collides with her teeth, soaks through her tongue. “A time,” she whispers and she pretends not to notice the way the wood heats up beneath her fingertips, the way the paint chips away and the glass eyes flicker, focus. She pretends not to feel that first breath, that choke that’s like revival, like rebirth, like the first conscious inhale after a lifetime in a coma.
His pupils, those paint-drowned things, they focus on her for a split second and all the girl says, murmurs, is, “Make him stop hurting,” before she vanishes from sight.
*
The name Ryan, if Peter looks it up, is Gaelic. It means ‘little king’ and Peter, he thinks it’s appropriate in Ryan‘s big eyes and pale skin, in his long neck and longer limbs and the way he holds his head like this life, like it means something.
*
“Take these broken wings,” he hums, breathes out on the air between the bar and the adult store. “And learn to fly.”
*
The thing is, Ryan’s not alive, but for all intents and purposes, he‘s a functioning human being with lungs and veins and liver, with spleen and stomach, just…without a heartbeat.
This shouldn’t matter, but the moment Peter looks at him, like, really looks at him, all Ryan can feel is the pulse in the air, all he can hear is the ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum and Ryan, he can’t explain why this makes him feel so dead.
*
The first thing Ryan learns about Peter, even before the girl kisses him, is that his heart is broken, damaged beyond anything that he’d be able to repair on his own. Ryan reckons that if he could look close enough, he’d be able to see the bruises, the plasters and bandages, the sticky-tape where Peter did try to fix it by himself, small signature marks where other people, JeanaeJoeAshleeMikeySpencer, where they all tried their hand at it, where they left their stitches and scratches.
Ryan, he doesn’t think he’s supposed to remember being made, but he remembers the second that Peter breathed on him and just, that hurt, it erupted beneath his skin. Waves of bitter agony and Ryan, he reckons if that‘s what it feels like to have a heart, then maybe he shouldn‘t want one as much as he does.
He remembers watching Peter through glass eyes, the way this boy, man, the way he stood at the window, shattered pieces of heart scattered at his feet. Ryan would worry that Hemingway would eat them, lick up jagged edges of pulp.
It’s weird being alive all of a sudden, because Peter, he doesn’t act all that differently, but he makes more of an effort to smile in the mornings and conscious decisions each evening to avoid the pills that he keeps stored beneath the till, the pills he thinks Ryan doesn‘t know about.
What’s important though is that Ryan isn’t sure how Peter’s heart got broken so badly, not sure when it happened or why or who and that’s not right, because in fairytales, the blame is supposed to land on someone’s shoulders.
*
Spencer meets Ryan on the milk run three weeks after the girl brings him to life.
Spencer’s not sure how it happened, but he can still see the marks on the wood in this boy’s flesh, can see the way his eyes shine too brightly and the way his lips are just, just too red to be real.
Ryan, he’s sitting on the porch and when Spencer says hello, Ryan just leans back, eyelids flickering over the glass bulbs.
“I don’t love,” Ryan says, “and that was the important one.”
“Oh,” Spencer replies and he purses his lips, puts his hands on his hips before gesturing for Ryan to move over. “Love is important.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ryan says. “I’ve never felt it before.”
*
Thing about love is Ryan isn’t really sure what the point is.
Peter’s in love with the busker on the street corner, the boy who sways with his guitar, the boy who wears a hat and keeps a separate one to hold the coins that passer-bys throw at him. This boy, he sings like he means it.
“You should say hello,” Ryan mentions one morning and Peter’s startled, swivels too quickly on the spot because he watches this guy through the window every morningdaynight and sometimes he forgets that Ryan breathes now, can talk back. He shifts his weight a little, but just closes the blinds, wanders over to the counter and watches the screaming children who gush over the dolls, the cars and the games.
“He sings,” Ryan says, and maybe he means to say something else but just, the words, they catch in his throat, stick to the edges of his voice box.
“Yeah,” Peter replies, and Ryan, he pretends not to notice the way Peter’s pupils dart around the bulbs, dash beneath the eyelids.
Ryan, he’s not good at this, can’t read people, can’t tell what’s right to say and what’s not and maybe, he supposes, maybe that’s what the heart is for. That big, pulsing thing that erupts in people‘s chests, works the blood, the spirit, the mind.
“Is it worth it?”
“What?” Peter asks and he tilts his head but his gaze, it’s firmly fixed on the notebook sprawled on the counter.
“Love.”
The silence is stifling, settles over them both like fresh snow, suffocates the grass, the air between them. It’s an eon before Peter answers, his voice stumbling over words he normally has no trouble providing. “I don’t know.”
*
“What are you doing here?”
Spencer’s apartment is tiny. Not tiny like Peter’s, but really, genuinely the size of a cupboard, a closet and Ryan doesn’t know how he fits with all those long limbs.
“I need to live,” Ryan says, “and I can’t do that here.”
“What?”
“With Peter,” Ryan replies and his eyes, they glaze over and this, maybe it hurts a little, a lot, because he rather likes the broken man. “A part of the contract,” Ryan says. “I want to be human, I need to live.”
“Oh,” Spencer says, and he flings the door open a little wider.
*
Ryan leaves Peter’s house and steals a wad of cash from the till. He doesn’t feel bad, but then again, he doesn’t have a heart.
*
The streets in this area of Chicago are frostbitten, snow that sprawls over the sidewalk, stifles the streetlights and strips trees of their leaves, seeds, branches. Ryan, he hates this weather, hates the way the cold crawls beneath his nails, makes his chest feel coarse and bitter, makes every breath from his wooden lungs ache and cut.
The road is dead in this weather, deserted, so when Ryan’s knocked over by a bumbling mess of a boy, all freckles and dark hair and lips that are cherry red, not crimson-painted like Ryan’s, he‘s not sure how to respond.
“Sorry, sorry, Jesus, sorry.” And the boy, he’s off again, bolting down the sidewalk and twisting his body impossibly around corners and brick walls.
It’ll be three hours before Ryan figures out that the clutch of Peter’s money is gone.
*
Continue to part 2.