Fic: Flicker, Flash, and Fade
So, this is an idea I have been playing around with for a while. I finally wrote some of it down, and I was wondering what you all thought. I think it may possibly be too odd for a rent fic, but I really like it and wanted to at least give it a shot. So if anyone would like to, they could make my day by reading it and giving some feedback on if it's worth continuing or not.
Author: Stephanie
Title: Flicker, Flash & Fade
Characters/Pairings: Mark, Roger, Roger/April (to be Mark/Roger)
Rating: Pg-13
Word Count: 6,380
Summary: Mark and Roger are both dealing with their problems in equally fucked up ways.
Flicker, Flash, and Fade
Scene One
The first camera Mark gets is black, smooth, and heavy in his hands. It’s not like anything he’s ever held before. Newer than any of the ones they have at the school that he sometimes gets to borrow, more professional than his dad’s cheap, plastic recorder he steals on occasions for the quick films his friends help him make in the park. He spends a whole day pouring over the manual, learning each switch and curve until the small black body is imprinted into the memory of his fingertips. Mark is amazed that anything can be this beautiful, complicated, his.
The first thing he gets in frame that is forever on film is his uncle’s smile. “You like it?” As if the way Mark looks through the lens with this expression of reverence for the small, shining machine in his hands isn’t enough of a clue.
So that he doesn’t sound like a freak that is in love with a camera he says, “It’s better than dad’s camcorder.” It’s almost convincing, that he isn’t crazy for this thing that is nothing more than a recording devise, except for the excitement bubbling in his chest shows through in his face-splitting grin.
This is all back at Mark’s sixteenth birthday. There were other gifts, but they would all be forgotten in the rush. Later, right before he drops out of Brown University before they can kick him out for trespassing in attempt to make a documentary about corruption in the local school system, he’ll sell this camera and use his tuition money to buy a new one (Bolex 16mm and it fits in his hands like a dream) and move to the city. That first day, though, trying to keep his uncle in frame as he flips through the manual, Mark swears he would never sell his Arriflex for anything. He will be in love with it forever. Probably longer.
This is at the same time that he thinks his girlfriend, Sasha, is his soul mate. Kind of like his Arriflex, he’d end up without her eventually as well, only she would be the one that leaves. He spent too much time with his camera, she would say. Same reason Maureen would give him years later, but Sasha told him with less cursing and no dramatic arm flailing.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you?” his mom asks, breaking into Mark’s worship of the machine. His mom never really did understand his obsession with art, with cameras, with stealing his dad’s camcorder and running off to the park for hours. She doesn’t get why her “baby” watches these films no one has ever heard of or why he hangs out with kids that have too many piercing or weird hair in unnatural colors and who look like they are always getting into such trouble. He knows she thinks it all stems back to his love of cameras, and that the look she is giving David right now is a mix of thanks and worry because it can only get worse now that Mark has a camera of his own.
When he was sixteen he always figured it was because his mom wanted him to be his dad, and was somehow ashamed about his interests. Of course, he figured out that he was wrong later, but at sixteen he feels persecuted. Turns out she would love him regardless of what he spends his time doing, if it is with a camera or if he were, God forbid, a drug addict with illegitimate children and in jail for murder. Still, he gave her a lot to worry. Like all mothers worry, but not all mothers have a son who constantly talks about moving to New York the moment he turns eighteen, who hangs out with guys who have no homes and girls who Mrs. Cohen just knows are lesbians who are just going to hurt her poor boy. So of course she worries maybe a little more than most parents. She wants Mark to be healthy and safe. As much as she loves David, she doesn’t want Mark to end up like his uncle. That isn’t what she wants for her son.
“Sorry,” Mark says to his mom before turning back to his camera, looking at his uncle through the lens. “Thanks.” David beams at the camera, despite the fact that Mark hardly sounds excited at all, but his family knows him. They can all pretty much see the emotions he doesn’t show.
While Mark is still fiddling around, David makes a show at waving to the camera. “What are you going to film first?”
“Let me see that, Mark,” Mr. Cohen says, snatching the camera from his son’s hands. Mark frowns, watching his dad closely to make sure no harm comes to the brand new machine. “How much did this cost, Dave? It looks too expensive for a kid.” He never approves of anything David ever does. He never approves of David.
“Oh, come off it Jacob. Mark’s sixteen, not a kid. Besides, if he wants it as much as I think he does, he’ll take care of it. Lay off him for once.” But then, David never really approved of how his younger brother raised his children, of how he controls them or treats Mark and Cindy like he’s a mold of himself. The brothers got into a fight every time they were around each other, up until David moved to California. No one ever explained to Mark why.
They fight at that sixteenth birthday about art and Mark and kids. Mark never heard a word. He flipped on his camera, and everything else faded to black.
*
Sometimes Mark feels like his entire life is just going to flicker, flicker, and fade away into nothing. Just like the end of a reel, the film is flashing against the projector, flipping away into nothing but bright white. Mark can look around at his friends, at the story he’s creating, and he sees his life in that final flash of white.
After he has shot all the scenes of New York, and after the documentary has nothing left to say, there will be this flicker of the last of the reel wrapping around and then nothingness where Mark’s life should be. After the credits have rolled, what is left? Mark’s entire life for the last year and a half has been making this film and outside of slowly capturing his friends’ deaths, Mark has no idea what his art, what he, means anymore.
Once, a long time ago, it meant being an artist. He left home for that one, left Brown even though he’d been a promising young student. He’d withstood his father’s shame and mother’s worry and came to New York with his backpack and his camera. Back then, all he had to do was turn on his camera and he knew all the answers. Experiences would prove all of it wrong, of course, but at the time Mark just needed to be an artist. That made it easy to forget that he was starving, to forget that he had a girlfriend (and in turn she occasionally forget she had a boyfriend, as well) or that his best friend was slowly turning into a junkie. Those were days with scripts that Mark could easily follow so the rest of the world meant nothing to him.
Then something happened. Mark would never know, because he never caught in on film, but something snapped. He came home from filming and Roger’s door was locked, would be for three days until for the funeral he would come out just long enough to break down again. Mark came home, self-imposed oblivion destroyed when he saw Collins on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the blood that Mark can still see between the tiles.
After that, Mark’s world became people. He felt like he was trying to keep everyone together, but in reality he’d been so detached for so long that he never knew they had already all fallen apart. He looks to Benny for support without realizing that Benny is all ready engaged and leaving all of this behind. He clings to Maureen, afraid to face the loneliness Roger is suffering from, but by the time he puts away the scripts for his life, Maureen has already moved on. He wants to take care of his best friend, but Roger is already sick and nothing Mark can do now can make that better. Life isn’t like film, he learns in one hard blow. You can’t rewind, edit the part you don’t like, change the script so you can have that happy ending.
Benny finds money and Maureen finds girls and, eventually after clawing at the bed and screaming out and letting Mark see him vomiting and crying and delusional from the withdrawals, even Roger moves to someone else. To a beautiful girl who sings of carpe diem and has April’s smile and who doesn’t need to hide behind a camera. Mark, alone, goes back to filming. This time, it’s a picture book eulogy. This time he knows the ending is coming, even if he doesn’t know when, and he knows happiness is impossible to find by the credit roll.
Just like last time, Mark feels himself disappear into the gears of the camera. The small tick of the winding is a count down, the rolling film is all that is left of Mark’s life, and when the reel snaps to an end, there will be nothing left but a flash of white from the projector. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want these thoughts at all. He wants to be the guy that will jump up on tables, scream at Maureen’s protest, and get high on the roof with Collins. He wants to be fun and happy, always smiling and goofing around. He sees Mimi and Collins and even Roger able to smile and laugh. So why can he only do it when his friends are around?
These are the thoughts that flicker through Mark’s head as he sits there in the colorful office of the hospital’s grief counselor’s room. These are the thoughts he’s supposed to be sharing with the man in front of him but instead he doesn’t stay a word. His eyes flicker from the posters of cats hanging off of branches and clocks with smiley faces inside and the man behind the table taps his fingers against the fake wood, the drums of his finger tips perfectly filling up the space that Mark should use to spill all of this out.
He stays quiet. The man stays quiet. The wall clock and the fingers keep going, but Mark isn’t saying a word.
Finally a sigh mingles in with all the tapping, and the man straightens himself up, looking across the table at Mark with this determination to get Mark to open up. Mark wants to wish him luck, but says nothing. “We’re here for you,” he says, motioning to Mark as if the whole hospital is really here just for him. “I understand that this is a difficult time for you, but we want to be able to help.”
He could help by sorting out all the film that Mark has ever shot, and lining it edge to edge until Mark can take a good luck at his life and figure out what it is supposed to mean. Somehow, he imagines this guy - this, Dr. Klein according to the bronze plaque on his desk - would want to get his hands dirt with that. They want to help Mark, but only until they can get him out of here, and who really cares about his life’s meaning, anyway?
“I want you to reflect on your life,” Dr. Klein is saying despite Mark’s obvious show of not listening to him. He doesn’t want to be in this colorful office with suicidal cats and detached yellow faces. He doesn’t want to be in this hospital at all, ideally, but give him clean white walls over this room any day. “Think about all the time you have had with your friend. Try and remember him how he was, that is what he would have wanted, I’m sure.”
Would Roger have wanted Mark to remember when Mark throw him into the shower and turned the cold water on full blast in hopes that he hadn’t ODed, trying to keep him conscious. Or maybe before that, when he was clawing away the skin at his arms during the withdrawal to try and hold on. Maybe Roger would want to be remembered that way. Dr. Klein doesn’t really say.
As crazy as Mark thinks this guy is, this guy that never meant Roger when he wasn’t passed out in some hospital bed trying to tell Mark want to remember about his best friend, he can’t help but let some of that advice sink in. Maybe it is time to look back on his life. Maybe it is time to reflect. Maybe someone can tell Mark what the fuck happened to his life that he’s sitting across from a man that thinks death can be made okay with a poster that says Hanging In There.
*
Before the camera, that is when Mark’s life gets fucked up. Well, okay, there is no one spot but there is a point, where everything in his life starts getting messy.
“You’re a fag.” Eight year olds shouldn’t know that word, but Mark does. He’s heard his dad call his uncle that a few times, and it’s stuck for him. He asked his mom, and she said to never say it, but dad does it enough that Mark never really shook it off. She said it’s two men love each other in a mommy and daddy sort of way.
Mark doesn’t really get that, but from how his dad yells it, he’s guessing it has to be bad. Eight year olds can pick up more than their parents seem to think, and so even though Mark doesn’t understand homosexuality and hardly understands sex at all, he knows there is something inherently wrong with two guys who love each other. His dad said so.
Michael wrinkles up his nose, growling down at this eight-year-old standing next to him. He’s a whole seven years older than Mark, Cindy’s math tutor who comes over Thursday so that she can flirt with him while he tries to teacher her algebra. This Thursday, Cindy is in the bathroom trying to put on her mom’s make up to show Michael how pretty she is, and so Mark is left alone in the kitchen with the high school student, and the first thing he says to him is, “You’re a fag.”
He isn’t even sure why he says it. Maybe just because he overheard dad using it again. Maybe he just wants this high schooler’s attention because when you’re eight, high school is as cool as it gets. Anyway, he doesn’t have a reason to say it to Michael, but he does, and when he does the older boy turns to look at him very slowly, like he’s about to lash out. And of course, Mark being eight, he jumps away quickly. “What?”
“Uh…” Suddenly, Mark doesn’t want Michael’s attention so bad. Or, really, he doesn’t want to get beaten up by a guy who seems a million times bigger than him. “Nothing?”
Michael just keeps staring at him and Mark starts to fidget around, pulling at his Spiderman shirt and slowly trying to back up towards the living room where his mom is vacuuming. She’ll protect him if Michael tries to beat him up. “Where’d you hear something like that?”
“What?” Little eight-year-old Mark stops walking towards his mom and looks back at this guy, and Michael doesn’t look like the type to beat him up really, and he isn’t glaring anymore. Carefully, Mark walks back towards him. “Nowhere.”
“You don’t say that,” Michael tells him, giving Mark a harsh but not scary look, like when Mom is trying to get him to eat green beans. “Do you even know what that means?”
“With two guys!” Mark says quickly before he can get the thought to form. He wants to impress Michael with what he knows though, so he just blurts it out. Michael seems to get what he means, though, and nods.
“Yeah, something like that,” Michael says, waving a pen at him. Mark watches it bob around in Michael’s hand as he jerks it around to make his point. “And there’s nothing wrong with it, you got that?” And of course Mark nods quickly, eager to show that he’s just as cool as a high school kid. “When someone says something like that, you tell them to shut the fuck up, okay?”
Mark’s eyes go wide. It’s the third time he’s ever heard the word fuck. Once had been on the TV, and mom had switched the station quickly, and once had been from Uncle David, and his mom had nearly had a fit about it. It sounds so cool and grown up, that all Mark can do is nod.
Probably, Michael didn’t even really think about what he was telling this impressionable little eight year old. He is just a kid, too, after all, even if Mark sees him as some kind of cool adult figure. The fact is that, looking back, Michael is this scrawny little guy with huge glasses and bad acne that stutters when he spoke, and when he told Mark what to say if someone uses the word fag, he was just lashing out at all the kids that had called him that all through out high school. He wasn’t thinking that Mark might actually be listening to him.
Two nights later, Mark is sitting next to the grill while his dad makes burgers for the family, and one thing of vegetable stir fry for the guy that David lives with. “I don’t see why he can’t just eat a burger,” his dad grumbles as he flips them over. Mark’s mom starts running a hand through her hair, which Mark knows is a sign that David and his dad are about to get into another fight.
“Jacob... Not now. This is supposed to be about family.” His mom warns, patting Mark before she stands up and walks over to talk with his grandparents. Even a small child has to wonder why his grandparents always refuse to sit or talk to the guy that comes along with David. Mark likes him. His name is Kevin, and he’s always smiling and talking with Mark. Even if he doesn’t like burgers, Mark thinks he’s cool.
“I’m just saying,” his dad says below his breath, but loud enough that David and Kevin both stop talking with Cindy and look back at him. “Don’t see why we have to make some fag meal special for him.”
Kevin would have let it slide. He just rolls his eyes and turns away, and for David he would let it slide. David, he might have. Maybe if his brother kept pushing he’d say something, but since his parents are there, he bites his lip. No one expects there to be a fight today. But then no one realizes that this is the point where Mark’s life gets fucked up, where he stops listening to everything his dad says, and where he speaks up with, “Shut the fuck up.”
Everything expect for the sound of cow’s fat popping against the grill stops and everyone turns to stare at this angelic faced eight year old boy with a dangerously defiant look in his eyes. “What was that?”
“You’re wrong,” Mark says, pointing at his dad. “You’re wrong, so shut the fuck up.”
Cue Hell breaking out in the Cohen’s backyard.
“Mark!” His mom screeches and that pretty much covers up everything us from his sister’s gasp to his grandparent’s muttering. It doesn’t stop his dad from grabbing his upper arm and hauling him out of his chair.
“In your room!” He barks as he pulls Mark into the house and Mark struggles and whines but he can’t pull out. “You’re in so much trouble, Mark. How dare you speak like that!” Mark is screaming the whole way as his dad drags him up the stairs, throws him in his room and slams the door.
The second he’s out of his dad’s grip Mark runs off to his window, looking down at the yard just as his dad gets back outside. He can’t hear anything, but he can watch his parents huddle together, and he’s smart enough to tell that they’re in a fight. Grandma and grandpa don’t look that happy either. Actually, the only person who doesn’t seem to hate Mark right then is his uncle David, leaning against the deck and smiling up at the window.
Mark’s nose presses to the glass as he watches his grandfather getting up and heading in, and his mom trying to stop him, and the smoke rising from the hamburgers, and it looks like he’s managed to cause complete chaos in his small little family just by telling his dad that he was wrong.
And it feels good.
*
“You know…” Mark doesn’t look away from Roger as the hand lands against his shoulder. There are too many machines to watch, the rise and fall of his chest,, the loud beeps from the screen next to him that make up for the utter silence, the stillness that he’s never actually seen in Roger before. He should be kicking in his sleep, at least, but there is nothing. “I’ve heard that coma patients, they can sometimes hear people talking to them.”
“They said he couldn’t hear anything,” Mark mutters, his voice quieter than that buzz in the room coming off all the equipment they have hooked up to Roger. A nurse tried to explain how it’s breathing for him, how it’s keeping him alive and Mark just wanted to scream at her. What makes her think he wants to hear about how the only thing keeping his best friend alive is a stupid machine? Mark had hours of Mimi and Angel on film, and he can swear to her, it didn’t help keep them alive.
“Well…” Joanne slides into the seat next to him, and Mark is sure that she is giving him a hopeful smile but he doesn’t want to see it. He’s kind of tired of people being hopeful right now. “Maybe you could try it anyway, you know? He might be bored…”
Mark can imagine that if Roger were conscious and bored, and Mark tried to talk about him about the things going on in his head right now, Roger would probably laugh at him. Or maybe cuff him in the shoulder and tell him to grow up and stop complaining. He wouldn’t want to listen, though. He’d want to play music, or talk about Mimi, or just sit there in silence and think for a while. Mark can’t do any of that for him, and neither can these machines. So Roger will just have to be bored. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“Maureen is worried…”
“Good for her.” Joanne’s expression goes from pleasant to harsh pretty quickly, and Mark does see this because she decides to stick her face inches from his when she gives him that look so that Mark really doesn’t have any sort of choice.
“Let me rephrase,” she says, backing up but making sure that Mark is still watching her, and he does because he doesn’t have the energy left for a fight. He barely has the energy to drag himself home every night and curl up on the couch and not sleep before visiting hours are open and he can come back here. “We’re all worried. About you.”
“I’m not the one in a coma…” Mark mutters, looking back to Roger. It’s hard to stomach, seeing his best friend this way. Hardly even his best friend at all, and why can’t people just fuck off for a while. They all want Mark to deal and break down and be okay and show how upset he is, and he can’t do all of that. He can’t do any of that. He just wants Roger to wake up.
Joanne managed to stay longer than Maureen or Benny had managed so far, but eventually Mark’s silence gets to her and she sighs, patting his shoulder before walking out of the room. Leaving Mark alone with an almost dead body that only looks like it might have been his best friend at some point. But Roger had never been so sickly and bruised looking, so still and calm, and maybe it’s just easier to believe that Roger is already gone and that thing is just some thing he left behind on his way out.
Mark wishes he could think like that. It seems like it would be easier, if he’d just accept it already, and maybe then he wouldn’t be so fucked up anymore, waiting for his best friend to wake up.
Shaking, Mark stands up and leans over the bed, hand resting on Roger’s stomach that barely moves at all. “Roger?” There isn’t silence, there is the beeping machines and the gentle sigh of fake breaths and the people walking by in the halls, but there isn’t an answer, either. Not even a flutter of lashes. Nothing. “Roger? Roger, can you hear me?”
Scene Two
Roger?
“It’s going to be okay…” Roger leans against the hand in his hair, nails gently scrapping against his skin as it strokes him. Soft touches with just a pinch of roughness to them, just like he’s always liked. It’s comforting without making him feel like he’s in danger of the touch getting softer and softer and disappearing all together.
Red nails. He can’t see them, but he knows they’re red. Deep red, chipped at the edges and stroking through bleached out hair. Red nails. He’s seen them enough to know exactly how they look without having to see them at all.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispers. Pink lips, soft but chapped and moving against his ear as she speaks. “You’re okay now, Roger. I’ve got you.” Roger moves and the bed seems to move with him as he curls up against her chest. Safe. That’s a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.
Roger…
No.
Can you hear me?
No.
No. No. No.
Roger closes his eyes tight, body tensing in her arms. No, he can’t hear him. No. Save me, please. He doesn’t want to. He’s safe here, and he hates that they keep trying to call him back to where he’s sick and alone and in some hospital bed unable to move. “Don’t let them…”
“Shh…” She kisses his forehead, stroking his hair and keeping him in her arms. Safe. “He’ll go away. Don’t worry. You’re safe here.” Roger nods, but he keeps his eyes closed. He wants to be deeper now. He wants to stop hearing voices and the click of shoes against the floor and the rhythmic beat of machines. Deeper until her face is no longer just a shadow and her nails are the perfect red.
The voice stops just like she promises and Roger can relax again. He turns in her arms, forehead resting against hers and she’s so warm it sinks into his skin, makes his body feel like it’s burning. “I…”
She smiles and Roger can smile back. It feels like the first time in ages that he’s smile. Why would anyone want to pull him out of here, when he can smile like this, not having to force it, and everything is all right? “See, I told you baby,” she says, kissing him before sliding out of bed. No, she doesn’t slide out of bed, but she isn’t in his arms anymore either but he doesn’t panic, because here everything is perfect and people don’t just leave. “Come on…”
Roger turns around, and there she is standing and waiting at the door, still smiling at him. “I…” He starts to stand, not even getting half way up when she appears at the bed, offering her hand and pulling him up, tugging him out of the room.
“Come on…”
Roger laughs, not that she could really hear it in the loud crowd as the concert empties out. She turns to smile at him, and Roger laughs again, letting this small girl hold his hand tighten enough that he can’t feel the blood in his fingers as she drags him along, weaving in and out of the hordes of drunken college students. “Come on… You can go faster than that!”
Laughing again, Roger jogs to catch up with her, and the girl squeals in delight as he changes them around, pulling her out of the crowd until they have a spot on the sidewalk all their own. Breathless and laughing with each other, they fall into step, Roger’s arm wrapped around her tiny frame. He doesn’t know her, and maybe it’s just the alcohol and the excitement of seeing such a fucking fantastic concert, but he could be in love with this girl. “Hey,” he says suddenly as she drops against him, head resting on his shoulder. “What’s your name?”
She twists her head and beams up at him. God, she has a beautiful smile and Roger has to laugh, a good laugh not because she looks funny but because tonight is too good not to laugh a little. “I’ll let you guess,” she says, prodding him gently in the side, and he laughs at that, too, swatting at her hand before leaning down to kiss her. It isn’t weird. Just a few minutes ago, screaming at the band on stage, she’d climbed up onto his shoulders without even a word and Roger had held her up, letting the band get a good look at her as she stripped off her shirt. After that a simple kiss seems tame.
She giggles against his lips, kissing him back before it gets too be too much and she leans back against his shoulder, hot breath on his skin as she laughs. “You’re insane.”
“You’re the one climbing up onto strange guys to give bands a free strip tease,” Roger points out, squeezing this girl closer to him, which doesn’t go like planned. Both of them are shitfaced, and this squeeze only helps to make them loser their balance. They stumble down the sidewalk, and Roger just laughs again as the girl squeals and clings to him.
“You ass!” She screams, smiling at him as she cuffs him in the stomach, and Roger just nips playfully at her, knocking her hand away but keeping his arm tight around her waist. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry,” he says without meaning it. She’s cute when she’s trying not to giggle, and when it doesn’t work and she ends up giggling anyway, and when she leans into him, nuzzling against his shoulder. Really, everything about her is cute, and Roger can feel his jeans tightening as she rubs against him on their walk to who the fuck cares where. Product of being a teenage boy with a cute stranger hanging off his arm. “What’s your name again?”
“I told you to guess!” She says, kissing her chin as she wraps her thin arms around him and they struggle to stay up again. It doesn’t matter if they fall over, Roger figures, because this right here is amazing even if it ends up with him falling onto the concrete and being trampled. It’d still be fucking amazing. “And if you guess right, I’ll give you a kiss,” she offers with a bright smile, and Roger licks his lips as he stares down at her drunk bliss expression. He could guess her name for a kiss.
“Uh…” Roger bites his lip, and then ends up laughing because she is watching him and laughs at that, and it’s all contagious. Everything is good. “Uh….” Fishing through his mind, hard to do when it’s swimming in beers, he manages to pull out a few names of girls he knows. “Are you a… Jenny? Or Susan? Or Amanda? Or Tracy? Or…”
“No!” She squeals, giggling again. Probably they’re driving all those people in their apartments as they walk by insane, laughing loudly into the night and being happy not having to worry about kids or family or jobs in the morning. Roger couldn’t give a shit about any of those things or people and what they think of them right now as they break their peaceful night. “Do I look like a Sue?”
Roger squints, concentrating hard as he can as he takes a good look at this shirtless girl tucked under his arm, wild brown hair and deep brown eyes that are hazed over with alcohol, lips a bright pink from heavy make up, clothes torn up but obviously with just a touch of punk. No, she doesn’t look like a Sue or a Jenny or any girl that Roger knows. “Well who are you?”
“I’m a month!” The girl announces loudly, laughing as some guy hollers at her and moving closer to Roger, knee brushing against the front of his jeans. He might blush, if he weren’t so drunk that he couldn’t get embarrassed about anything. He’s just blissful. Just perfect.
“You’re a month?” He asks, beaming down at her as she laughs and puts her hand against his jeans. He’s just this seventeen year old down from Maine to see a band play, and here is this gorgeous girl groping him in the middle of the street. Roger has never had a better day. “You mean, like, you’re January?”
“No,” she giggles, taking another swat at him and Roger laughs as he falls against the wall, feet shaking underneath him. Way too drunk to drag his ass back to his dad’s lent out car. The girl smiles, falling against him, body warm. No, burning. Body burning and making Roger’s blood boil up as she presses into him. “Who names their kid January?”
“I don’t know,” Roger admits with a shrug, swallowing hard as his head starts to spin and this girl moves just a little, body brushing against his. Making Roger almost fall to his ass as he tenses up against the heat. “I… Uh…”
“My name?” She asks with a giggle as she watches Roger stutter and stumble around. “Figured it out yet?”
“Uh…” Roger couldn’t really think before, and now he cab hardly form a sentence but a kiss and a month and that’s all he can think. “May?”
“Close,” she mutters and he can taste her breath already. It taste like beer and smoke, and it tastes better when she leans up, smashing their lips together. Roger’s kissed before, but never so drunk he couldn’t stand up and it’s clumsy and sloppy, but the girl keeps kissing him until finally he leans against the wall and pulls back, panting hard and body burning up beneath hers. “I’m…”
“April?”
Roger looks around the loft. Messier than usual, junk everywhere. The bear his dad had spent him when he forgot that Roger was turning seven, not three. The suitcase he’d packed up in when he ran away from home the day after graduation. The first guitar he ever held. He has to walk over it all, and more stuff keeps adding into the piles. “April?” He calls out, kicking at the junk as if she’s hiding in the heaps of trash that has collected on the loft floor.
Stepping around an old soccer trophy, Roger turns around to look through the loft. Spotless and bright, he can see every inch but there is no April. She had just been pulling him out of the room. Where did she run off? Is she hiding, playing some sort of game? “Apr-“
Roger is looking at the bathroom door, watching the knob rattle around. Swallowing hard he takes a careful step closer, keeping a watch on the knob. It rattles again, louder, the sound ringing through the loft. “April?”
Roger shouts, dropping to his knees as the scream tears through him, ripping at the air and he can barely breath with that sound, the worst thing he’s ever heard. The door is shaking, being pushed at, locked. “April!” Roger runs at the door, yanking at the knob and he can’t move the door and the scream, she’s screaming for him louder and louder and desperate please, get the door open, and he can’t even make it budge.
… Cardiac… Call Doctor…
No, no not now. Go away. Deeper, he needs to be deeper and open the damn door. “April!”
Get out..…. Move… Red… He isn’t…
Fuck, her scream is like a shock to the chest. No reaction. One… Two… Ready… God, it hurts it hurts make it stop open the door. She keeps screaming and clawing but he can’t make it open and the voices of the nurses and - fuck, not now. He needs to get to her. He needs to. Make her stop screaming. Make them shut up. Fuck, please. It hurts.
April! He’s reacting. His heartbeat is evening out. No, not now. Go away.
April! Vitals are stabilizing. Please, open the door.
April…. Heat. Shock. Body shaking and the light coursing through him. Please, April. He’s stabling. Open…
“It’s okay.”
The ceiling is pale white, perfectly blank; the light from the window makes it almost glow. Roger watches his fan turning the air slowly. It’s still stifling in his room, but the damn thing can’t turn any faster. He looks over to April, who smiles as she snuggles closer despite the heat. “You’re okay.”
He’s okay. They’re okay, just resting in his room, safe here from the rest of the world. He leans against her, head resting on her chest and April strokes his hair like she always has. “Just stay here with me,” she whispers, kissing the top of his head, and why would Roger ever leave her or this room or this place, where it’s nice and quiet and calm, even if a little hot. “You’re okay here, baby.”
Author: Stephanie
Title: Flicker, Flash & Fade
Characters/Pairings: Mark, Roger, Roger/April (to be Mark/Roger)
Rating: Pg-13
Word Count: 6,380
Summary: Mark and Roger are both dealing with their problems in equally fucked up ways.
Flicker, Flash, and Fade
Scene One
The first camera Mark gets is black, smooth, and heavy in his hands. It’s not like anything he’s ever held before. Newer than any of the ones they have at the school that he sometimes gets to borrow, more professional than his dad’s cheap, plastic recorder he steals on occasions for the quick films his friends help him make in the park. He spends a whole day pouring over the manual, learning each switch and curve until the small black body is imprinted into the memory of his fingertips. Mark is amazed that anything can be this beautiful, complicated, his.
The first thing he gets in frame that is forever on film is his uncle’s smile. “You like it?” As if the way Mark looks through the lens with this expression of reverence for the small, shining machine in his hands isn’t enough of a clue.
So that he doesn’t sound like a freak that is in love with a camera he says, “It’s better than dad’s camcorder.” It’s almost convincing, that he isn’t crazy for this thing that is nothing more than a recording devise, except for the excitement bubbling in his chest shows through in his face-splitting grin.
This is all back at Mark’s sixteenth birthday. There were other gifts, but they would all be forgotten in the rush. Later, right before he drops out of Brown University before they can kick him out for trespassing in attempt to make a documentary about corruption in the local school system, he’ll sell this camera and use his tuition money to buy a new one (Bolex 16mm and it fits in his hands like a dream) and move to the city. That first day, though, trying to keep his uncle in frame as he flips through the manual, Mark swears he would never sell his Arriflex for anything. He will be in love with it forever. Probably longer.
This is at the same time that he thinks his girlfriend, Sasha, is his soul mate. Kind of like his Arriflex, he’d end up without her eventually as well, only she would be the one that leaves. He spent too much time with his camera, she would say. Same reason Maureen would give him years later, but Sasha told him with less cursing and no dramatic arm flailing.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you?” his mom asks, breaking into Mark’s worship of the machine. His mom never really did understand his obsession with art, with cameras, with stealing his dad’s camcorder and running off to the park for hours. She doesn’t get why her “baby” watches these films no one has ever heard of or why he hangs out with kids that have too many piercing or weird hair in unnatural colors and who look like they are always getting into such trouble. He knows she thinks it all stems back to his love of cameras, and that the look she is giving David right now is a mix of thanks and worry because it can only get worse now that Mark has a camera of his own.
When he was sixteen he always figured it was because his mom wanted him to be his dad, and was somehow ashamed about his interests. Of course, he figured out that he was wrong later, but at sixteen he feels persecuted. Turns out she would love him regardless of what he spends his time doing, if it is with a camera or if he were, God forbid, a drug addict with illegitimate children and in jail for murder. Still, he gave her a lot to worry. Like all mothers worry, but not all mothers have a son who constantly talks about moving to New York the moment he turns eighteen, who hangs out with guys who have no homes and girls who Mrs. Cohen just knows are lesbians who are just going to hurt her poor boy. So of course she worries maybe a little more than most parents. She wants Mark to be healthy and safe. As much as she loves David, she doesn’t want Mark to end up like his uncle. That isn’t what she wants for her son.
“Sorry,” Mark says to his mom before turning back to his camera, looking at his uncle through the lens. “Thanks.” David beams at the camera, despite the fact that Mark hardly sounds excited at all, but his family knows him. They can all pretty much see the emotions he doesn’t show.
While Mark is still fiddling around, David makes a show at waving to the camera. “What are you going to film first?”
“Let me see that, Mark,” Mr. Cohen says, snatching the camera from his son’s hands. Mark frowns, watching his dad closely to make sure no harm comes to the brand new machine. “How much did this cost, Dave? It looks too expensive for a kid.” He never approves of anything David ever does. He never approves of David.
“Oh, come off it Jacob. Mark’s sixteen, not a kid. Besides, if he wants it as much as I think he does, he’ll take care of it. Lay off him for once.” But then, David never really approved of how his younger brother raised his children, of how he controls them or treats Mark and Cindy like he’s a mold of himself. The brothers got into a fight every time they were around each other, up until David moved to California. No one ever explained to Mark why.
They fight at that sixteenth birthday about art and Mark and kids. Mark never heard a word. He flipped on his camera, and everything else faded to black.
*
Sometimes Mark feels like his entire life is just going to flicker, flicker, and fade away into nothing. Just like the end of a reel, the film is flashing against the projector, flipping away into nothing but bright white. Mark can look around at his friends, at the story he’s creating, and he sees his life in that final flash of white.
After he has shot all the scenes of New York, and after the documentary has nothing left to say, there will be this flicker of the last of the reel wrapping around and then nothingness where Mark’s life should be. After the credits have rolled, what is left? Mark’s entire life for the last year and a half has been making this film and outside of slowly capturing his friends’ deaths, Mark has no idea what his art, what he, means anymore.
Once, a long time ago, it meant being an artist. He left home for that one, left Brown even though he’d been a promising young student. He’d withstood his father’s shame and mother’s worry and came to New York with his backpack and his camera. Back then, all he had to do was turn on his camera and he knew all the answers. Experiences would prove all of it wrong, of course, but at the time Mark just needed to be an artist. That made it easy to forget that he was starving, to forget that he had a girlfriend (and in turn she occasionally forget she had a boyfriend, as well) or that his best friend was slowly turning into a junkie. Those were days with scripts that Mark could easily follow so the rest of the world meant nothing to him.
Then something happened. Mark would never know, because he never caught in on film, but something snapped. He came home from filming and Roger’s door was locked, would be for three days until for the funeral he would come out just long enough to break down again. Mark came home, self-imposed oblivion destroyed when he saw Collins on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the blood that Mark can still see between the tiles.
After that, Mark’s world became people. He felt like he was trying to keep everyone together, but in reality he’d been so detached for so long that he never knew they had already all fallen apart. He looks to Benny for support without realizing that Benny is all ready engaged and leaving all of this behind. He clings to Maureen, afraid to face the loneliness Roger is suffering from, but by the time he puts away the scripts for his life, Maureen has already moved on. He wants to take care of his best friend, but Roger is already sick and nothing Mark can do now can make that better. Life isn’t like film, he learns in one hard blow. You can’t rewind, edit the part you don’t like, change the script so you can have that happy ending.
Benny finds money and Maureen finds girls and, eventually after clawing at the bed and screaming out and letting Mark see him vomiting and crying and delusional from the withdrawals, even Roger moves to someone else. To a beautiful girl who sings of carpe diem and has April’s smile and who doesn’t need to hide behind a camera. Mark, alone, goes back to filming. This time, it’s a picture book eulogy. This time he knows the ending is coming, even if he doesn’t know when, and he knows happiness is impossible to find by the credit roll.
Just like last time, Mark feels himself disappear into the gears of the camera. The small tick of the winding is a count down, the rolling film is all that is left of Mark’s life, and when the reel snaps to an end, there will be nothing left but a flash of white from the projector. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want these thoughts at all. He wants to be the guy that will jump up on tables, scream at Maureen’s protest, and get high on the roof with Collins. He wants to be fun and happy, always smiling and goofing around. He sees Mimi and Collins and even Roger able to smile and laugh. So why can he only do it when his friends are around?
These are the thoughts that flicker through Mark’s head as he sits there in the colorful office of the hospital’s grief counselor’s room. These are the thoughts he’s supposed to be sharing with the man in front of him but instead he doesn’t stay a word. His eyes flicker from the posters of cats hanging off of branches and clocks with smiley faces inside and the man behind the table taps his fingers against the fake wood, the drums of his finger tips perfectly filling up the space that Mark should use to spill all of this out.
He stays quiet. The man stays quiet. The wall clock and the fingers keep going, but Mark isn’t saying a word.
Finally a sigh mingles in with all the tapping, and the man straightens himself up, looking across the table at Mark with this determination to get Mark to open up. Mark wants to wish him luck, but says nothing. “We’re here for you,” he says, motioning to Mark as if the whole hospital is really here just for him. “I understand that this is a difficult time for you, but we want to be able to help.”
He could help by sorting out all the film that Mark has ever shot, and lining it edge to edge until Mark can take a good luck at his life and figure out what it is supposed to mean. Somehow, he imagines this guy - this, Dr. Klein according to the bronze plaque on his desk - would want to get his hands dirt with that. They want to help Mark, but only until they can get him out of here, and who really cares about his life’s meaning, anyway?
“I want you to reflect on your life,” Dr. Klein is saying despite Mark’s obvious show of not listening to him. He doesn’t want to be in this colorful office with suicidal cats and detached yellow faces. He doesn’t want to be in this hospital at all, ideally, but give him clean white walls over this room any day. “Think about all the time you have had with your friend. Try and remember him how he was, that is what he would have wanted, I’m sure.”
Would Roger have wanted Mark to remember when Mark throw him into the shower and turned the cold water on full blast in hopes that he hadn’t ODed, trying to keep him conscious. Or maybe before that, when he was clawing away the skin at his arms during the withdrawal to try and hold on. Maybe Roger would want to be remembered that way. Dr. Klein doesn’t really say.
As crazy as Mark thinks this guy is, this guy that never meant Roger when he wasn’t passed out in some hospital bed trying to tell Mark want to remember about his best friend, he can’t help but let some of that advice sink in. Maybe it is time to look back on his life. Maybe it is time to reflect. Maybe someone can tell Mark what the fuck happened to his life that he’s sitting across from a man that thinks death can be made okay with a poster that says Hanging In There.
*
Before the camera, that is when Mark’s life gets fucked up. Well, okay, there is no one spot but there is a point, where everything in his life starts getting messy.
“You’re a fag.” Eight year olds shouldn’t know that word, but Mark does. He’s heard his dad call his uncle that a few times, and it’s stuck for him. He asked his mom, and she said to never say it, but dad does it enough that Mark never really shook it off. She said it’s two men love each other in a mommy and daddy sort of way.
Mark doesn’t really get that, but from how his dad yells it, he’s guessing it has to be bad. Eight year olds can pick up more than their parents seem to think, and so even though Mark doesn’t understand homosexuality and hardly understands sex at all, he knows there is something inherently wrong with two guys who love each other. His dad said so.
Michael wrinkles up his nose, growling down at this eight-year-old standing next to him. He’s a whole seven years older than Mark, Cindy’s math tutor who comes over Thursday so that she can flirt with him while he tries to teacher her algebra. This Thursday, Cindy is in the bathroom trying to put on her mom’s make up to show Michael how pretty she is, and so Mark is left alone in the kitchen with the high school student, and the first thing he says to him is, “You’re a fag.”
He isn’t even sure why he says it. Maybe just because he overheard dad using it again. Maybe he just wants this high schooler’s attention because when you’re eight, high school is as cool as it gets. Anyway, he doesn’t have a reason to say it to Michael, but he does, and when he does the older boy turns to look at him very slowly, like he’s about to lash out. And of course, Mark being eight, he jumps away quickly. “What?”
“Uh…” Suddenly, Mark doesn’t want Michael’s attention so bad. Or, really, he doesn’t want to get beaten up by a guy who seems a million times bigger than him. “Nothing?”
Michael just keeps staring at him and Mark starts to fidget around, pulling at his Spiderman shirt and slowly trying to back up towards the living room where his mom is vacuuming. She’ll protect him if Michael tries to beat him up. “Where’d you hear something like that?”
“What?” Little eight-year-old Mark stops walking towards his mom and looks back at this guy, and Michael doesn’t look like the type to beat him up really, and he isn’t glaring anymore. Carefully, Mark walks back towards him. “Nowhere.”
“You don’t say that,” Michael tells him, giving Mark a harsh but not scary look, like when Mom is trying to get him to eat green beans. “Do you even know what that means?”
“With two guys!” Mark says quickly before he can get the thought to form. He wants to impress Michael with what he knows though, so he just blurts it out. Michael seems to get what he means, though, and nods.
“Yeah, something like that,” Michael says, waving a pen at him. Mark watches it bob around in Michael’s hand as he jerks it around to make his point. “And there’s nothing wrong with it, you got that?” And of course Mark nods quickly, eager to show that he’s just as cool as a high school kid. “When someone says something like that, you tell them to shut the fuck up, okay?”
Mark’s eyes go wide. It’s the third time he’s ever heard the word fuck. Once had been on the TV, and mom had switched the station quickly, and once had been from Uncle David, and his mom had nearly had a fit about it. It sounds so cool and grown up, that all Mark can do is nod.
Probably, Michael didn’t even really think about what he was telling this impressionable little eight year old. He is just a kid, too, after all, even if Mark sees him as some kind of cool adult figure. The fact is that, looking back, Michael is this scrawny little guy with huge glasses and bad acne that stutters when he spoke, and when he told Mark what to say if someone uses the word fag, he was just lashing out at all the kids that had called him that all through out high school. He wasn’t thinking that Mark might actually be listening to him.
Two nights later, Mark is sitting next to the grill while his dad makes burgers for the family, and one thing of vegetable stir fry for the guy that David lives with. “I don’t see why he can’t just eat a burger,” his dad grumbles as he flips them over. Mark’s mom starts running a hand through her hair, which Mark knows is a sign that David and his dad are about to get into another fight.
“Jacob... Not now. This is supposed to be about family.” His mom warns, patting Mark before she stands up and walks over to talk with his grandparents. Even a small child has to wonder why his grandparents always refuse to sit or talk to the guy that comes along with David. Mark likes him. His name is Kevin, and he’s always smiling and talking with Mark. Even if he doesn’t like burgers, Mark thinks he’s cool.
“I’m just saying,” his dad says below his breath, but loud enough that David and Kevin both stop talking with Cindy and look back at him. “Don’t see why we have to make some fag meal special for him.”
Kevin would have let it slide. He just rolls his eyes and turns away, and for David he would let it slide. David, he might have. Maybe if his brother kept pushing he’d say something, but since his parents are there, he bites his lip. No one expects there to be a fight today. But then no one realizes that this is the point where Mark’s life gets fucked up, where he stops listening to everything his dad says, and where he speaks up with, “Shut the fuck up.”
Everything expect for the sound of cow’s fat popping against the grill stops and everyone turns to stare at this angelic faced eight year old boy with a dangerously defiant look in his eyes. “What was that?”
“You’re wrong,” Mark says, pointing at his dad. “You’re wrong, so shut the fuck up.”
Cue Hell breaking out in the Cohen’s backyard.
“Mark!” His mom screeches and that pretty much covers up everything us from his sister’s gasp to his grandparent’s muttering. It doesn’t stop his dad from grabbing his upper arm and hauling him out of his chair.
“In your room!” He barks as he pulls Mark into the house and Mark struggles and whines but he can’t pull out. “You’re in so much trouble, Mark. How dare you speak like that!” Mark is screaming the whole way as his dad drags him up the stairs, throws him in his room and slams the door.
The second he’s out of his dad’s grip Mark runs off to his window, looking down at the yard just as his dad gets back outside. He can’t hear anything, but he can watch his parents huddle together, and he’s smart enough to tell that they’re in a fight. Grandma and grandpa don’t look that happy either. Actually, the only person who doesn’t seem to hate Mark right then is his uncle David, leaning against the deck and smiling up at the window.
Mark’s nose presses to the glass as he watches his grandfather getting up and heading in, and his mom trying to stop him, and the smoke rising from the hamburgers, and it looks like he’s managed to cause complete chaos in his small little family just by telling his dad that he was wrong.
And it feels good.
*
“You know…” Mark doesn’t look away from Roger as the hand lands against his shoulder. There are too many machines to watch, the rise and fall of his chest,, the loud beeps from the screen next to him that make up for the utter silence, the stillness that he’s never actually seen in Roger before. He should be kicking in his sleep, at least, but there is nothing. “I’ve heard that coma patients, they can sometimes hear people talking to them.”
“They said he couldn’t hear anything,” Mark mutters, his voice quieter than that buzz in the room coming off all the equipment they have hooked up to Roger. A nurse tried to explain how it’s breathing for him, how it’s keeping him alive and Mark just wanted to scream at her. What makes her think he wants to hear about how the only thing keeping his best friend alive is a stupid machine? Mark had hours of Mimi and Angel on film, and he can swear to her, it didn’t help keep them alive.
“Well…” Joanne slides into the seat next to him, and Mark is sure that she is giving him a hopeful smile but he doesn’t want to see it. He’s kind of tired of people being hopeful right now. “Maybe you could try it anyway, you know? He might be bored…”
Mark can imagine that if Roger were conscious and bored, and Mark tried to talk about him about the things going on in his head right now, Roger would probably laugh at him. Or maybe cuff him in the shoulder and tell him to grow up and stop complaining. He wouldn’t want to listen, though. He’d want to play music, or talk about Mimi, or just sit there in silence and think for a while. Mark can’t do any of that for him, and neither can these machines. So Roger will just have to be bored. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“Maureen is worried…”
“Good for her.” Joanne’s expression goes from pleasant to harsh pretty quickly, and Mark does see this because she decides to stick her face inches from his when she gives him that look so that Mark really doesn’t have any sort of choice.
“Let me rephrase,” she says, backing up but making sure that Mark is still watching her, and he does because he doesn’t have the energy left for a fight. He barely has the energy to drag himself home every night and curl up on the couch and not sleep before visiting hours are open and he can come back here. “We’re all worried. About you.”
“I’m not the one in a coma…” Mark mutters, looking back to Roger. It’s hard to stomach, seeing his best friend this way. Hardly even his best friend at all, and why can’t people just fuck off for a while. They all want Mark to deal and break down and be okay and show how upset he is, and he can’t do all of that. He can’t do any of that. He just wants Roger to wake up.
Joanne managed to stay longer than Maureen or Benny had managed so far, but eventually Mark’s silence gets to her and she sighs, patting his shoulder before walking out of the room. Leaving Mark alone with an almost dead body that only looks like it might have been his best friend at some point. But Roger had never been so sickly and bruised looking, so still and calm, and maybe it’s just easier to believe that Roger is already gone and that thing is just some thing he left behind on his way out.
Mark wishes he could think like that. It seems like it would be easier, if he’d just accept it already, and maybe then he wouldn’t be so fucked up anymore, waiting for his best friend to wake up.
Shaking, Mark stands up and leans over the bed, hand resting on Roger’s stomach that barely moves at all. “Roger?” There isn’t silence, there is the beeping machines and the gentle sigh of fake breaths and the people walking by in the halls, but there isn’t an answer, either. Not even a flutter of lashes. Nothing. “Roger? Roger, can you hear me?”
Scene Two
Roger?
“It’s going to be okay…” Roger leans against the hand in his hair, nails gently scrapping against his skin as it strokes him. Soft touches with just a pinch of roughness to them, just like he’s always liked. It’s comforting without making him feel like he’s in danger of the touch getting softer and softer and disappearing all together.
Red nails. He can’t see them, but he knows they’re red. Deep red, chipped at the edges and stroking through bleached out hair. Red nails. He’s seen them enough to know exactly how they look without having to see them at all.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispers. Pink lips, soft but chapped and moving against his ear as she speaks. “You’re okay now, Roger. I’ve got you.” Roger moves and the bed seems to move with him as he curls up against her chest. Safe. That’s a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.
Roger…
No.
Can you hear me?
No.
No. No. No.
Roger closes his eyes tight, body tensing in her arms. No, he can’t hear him. No. Save me, please. He doesn’t want to. He’s safe here, and he hates that they keep trying to call him back to where he’s sick and alone and in some hospital bed unable to move. “Don’t let them…”
“Shh…” She kisses his forehead, stroking his hair and keeping him in her arms. Safe. “He’ll go away. Don’t worry. You’re safe here.” Roger nods, but he keeps his eyes closed. He wants to be deeper now. He wants to stop hearing voices and the click of shoes against the floor and the rhythmic beat of machines. Deeper until her face is no longer just a shadow and her nails are the perfect red.
The voice stops just like she promises and Roger can relax again. He turns in her arms, forehead resting against hers and she’s so warm it sinks into his skin, makes his body feel like it’s burning. “I…”
She smiles and Roger can smile back. It feels like the first time in ages that he’s smile. Why would anyone want to pull him out of here, when he can smile like this, not having to force it, and everything is all right? “See, I told you baby,” she says, kissing him before sliding out of bed. No, she doesn’t slide out of bed, but she isn’t in his arms anymore either but he doesn’t panic, because here everything is perfect and people don’t just leave. “Come on…”
Roger turns around, and there she is standing and waiting at the door, still smiling at him. “I…” He starts to stand, not even getting half way up when she appears at the bed, offering her hand and pulling him up, tugging him out of the room.
“Come on…”
Roger laughs, not that she could really hear it in the loud crowd as the concert empties out. She turns to smile at him, and Roger laughs again, letting this small girl hold his hand tighten enough that he can’t feel the blood in his fingers as she drags him along, weaving in and out of the hordes of drunken college students. “Come on… You can go faster than that!”
Laughing again, Roger jogs to catch up with her, and the girl squeals in delight as he changes them around, pulling her out of the crowd until they have a spot on the sidewalk all their own. Breathless and laughing with each other, they fall into step, Roger’s arm wrapped around her tiny frame. He doesn’t know her, and maybe it’s just the alcohol and the excitement of seeing such a fucking fantastic concert, but he could be in love with this girl. “Hey,” he says suddenly as she drops against him, head resting on his shoulder. “What’s your name?”
She twists her head and beams up at him. God, she has a beautiful smile and Roger has to laugh, a good laugh not because she looks funny but because tonight is too good not to laugh a little. “I’ll let you guess,” she says, prodding him gently in the side, and he laughs at that, too, swatting at her hand before leaning down to kiss her. It isn’t weird. Just a few minutes ago, screaming at the band on stage, she’d climbed up onto his shoulders without even a word and Roger had held her up, letting the band get a good look at her as she stripped off her shirt. After that a simple kiss seems tame.
She giggles against his lips, kissing him back before it gets too be too much and she leans back against his shoulder, hot breath on his skin as she laughs. “You’re insane.”
“You’re the one climbing up onto strange guys to give bands a free strip tease,” Roger points out, squeezing this girl closer to him, which doesn’t go like planned. Both of them are shitfaced, and this squeeze only helps to make them loser their balance. They stumble down the sidewalk, and Roger just laughs again as the girl squeals and clings to him.
“You ass!” She screams, smiling at him as she cuffs him in the stomach, and Roger just nips playfully at her, knocking her hand away but keeping his arm tight around her waist. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry,” he says without meaning it. She’s cute when she’s trying not to giggle, and when it doesn’t work and she ends up giggling anyway, and when she leans into him, nuzzling against his shoulder. Really, everything about her is cute, and Roger can feel his jeans tightening as she rubs against him on their walk to who the fuck cares where. Product of being a teenage boy with a cute stranger hanging off his arm. “What’s your name again?”
“I told you to guess!” She says, kissing her chin as she wraps her thin arms around him and they struggle to stay up again. It doesn’t matter if they fall over, Roger figures, because this right here is amazing even if it ends up with him falling onto the concrete and being trampled. It’d still be fucking amazing. “And if you guess right, I’ll give you a kiss,” she offers with a bright smile, and Roger licks his lips as he stares down at her drunk bliss expression. He could guess her name for a kiss.
“Uh…” Roger bites his lip, and then ends up laughing because she is watching him and laughs at that, and it’s all contagious. Everything is good. “Uh….” Fishing through his mind, hard to do when it’s swimming in beers, he manages to pull out a few names of girls he knows. “Are you a… Jenny? Or Susan? Or Amanda? Or Tracy? Or…”
“No!” She squeals, giggling again. Probably they’re driving all those people in their apartments as they walk by insane, laughing loudly into the night and being happy not having to worry about kids or family or jobs in the morning. Roger couldn’t give a shit about any of those things or people and what they think of them right now as they break their peaceful night. “Do I look like a Sue?”
Roger squints, concentrating hard as he can as he takes a good look at this shirtless girl tucked under his arm, wild brown hair and deep brown eyes that are hazed over with alcohol, lips a bright pink from heavy make up, clothes torn up but obviously with just a touch of punk. No, she doesn’t look like a Sue or a Jenny or any girl that Roger knows. “Well who are you?”
“I’m a month!” The girl announces loudly, laughing as some guy hollers at her and moving closer to Roger, knee brushing against the front of his jeans. He might blush, if he weren’t so drunk that he couldn’t get embarrassed about anything. He’s just blissful. Just perfect.
“You’re a month?” He asks, beaming down at her as she laughs and puts her hand against his jeans. He’s just this seventeen year old down from Maine to see a band play, and here is this gorgeous girl groping him in the middle of the street. Roger has never had a better day. “You mean, like, you’re January?”
“No,” she giggles, taking another swat at him and Roger laughs as he falls against the wall, feet shaking underneath him. Way too drunk to drag his ass back to his dad’s lent out car. The girl smiles, falling against him, body warm. No, burning. Body burning and making Roger’s blood boil up as she presses into him. “Who names their kid January?”
“I don’t know,” Roger admits with a shrug, swallowing hard as his head starts to spin and this girl moves just a little, body brushing against his. Making Roger almost fall to his ass as he tenses up against the heat. “I… Uh…”
“My name?” She asks with a giggle as she watches Roger stutter and stumble around. “Figured it out yet?”
“Uh…” Roger couldn’t really think before, and now he cab hardly form a sentence but a kiss and a month and that’s all he can think. “May?”
“Close,” she mutters and he can taste her breath already. It taste like beer and smoke, and it tastes better when she leans up, smashing their lips together. Roger’s kissed before, but never so drunk he couldn’t stand up and it’s clumsy and sloppy, but the girl keeps kissing him until finally he leans against the wall and pulls back, panting hard and body burning up beneath hers. “I’m…”
“April?”
Roger looks around the loft. Messier than usual, junk everywhere. The bear his dad had spent him when he forgot that Roger was turning seven, not three. The suitcase he’d packed up in when he ran away from home the day after graduation. The first guitar he ever held. He has to walk over it all, and more stuff keeps adding into the piles. “April?” He calls out, kicking at the junk as if she’s hiding in the heaps of trash that has collected on the loft floor.
Stepping around an old soccer trophy, Roger turns around to look through the loft. Spotless and bright, he can see every inch but there is no April. She had just been pulling him out of the room. Where did she run off? Is she hiding, playing some sort of game? “Apr-“
Roger is looking at the bathroom door, watching the knob rattle around. Swallowing hard he takes a careful step closer, keeping a watch on the knob. It rattles again, louder, the sound ringing through the loft. “April?”
Roger shouts, dropping to his knees as the scream tears through him, ripping at the air and he can barely breath with that sound, the worst thing he’s ever heard. The door is shaking, being pushed at, locked. “April!” Roger runs at the door, yanking at the knob and he can’t move the door and the scream, she’s screaming for him louder and louder and desperate please, get the door open, and he can’t even make it budge.
… Cardiac… Call Doctor…
No, no not now. Go away. Deeper, he needs to be deeper and open the damn door. “April!”
Get out..…. Move… Red… He isn’t…
Fuck, her scream is like a shock to the chest. No reaction. One… Two… Ready… God, it hurts it hurts make it stop open the door. She keeps screaming and clawing but he can’t make it open and the voices of the nurses and - fuck, not now. He needs to get to her. He needs to. Make her stop screaming. Make them shut up. Fuck, please. It hurts.
April! He’s reacting. His heartbeat is evening out. No, not now. Go away.
April! Vitals are stabilizing. Please, open the door.
April…. Heat. Shock. Body shaking and the light coursing through him. Please, April. He’s stabling. Open…
“It’s okay.”
The ceiling is pale white, perfectly blank; the light from the window makes it almost glow. Roger watches his fan turning the air slowly. It’s still stifling in his room, but the damn thing can’t turn any faster. He looks over to April, who smiles as she snuggles closer despite the heat. “You’re okay.”
He’s okay. They’re okay, just resting in his room, safe here from the rest of the world. He leans against her, head resting on her chest and April strokes his hair like she always has. “Just stay here with me,” she whispers, kissing the top of his head, and why would Roger ever leave her or this room or this place, where it’s nice and quiet and calm, even if a little hot. “You’re okay here, baby.”