Fic: Likeness of Form (Smoke and Mirrors #8)
Title: Likeness of Form
Series: Smoke and Mirrors #8
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Gunn/Lindsey
Spoilers/Timeline: During S5, post-Destiny
Note: I was Jossed. Ignore it.
Summary: Gunn thinks about Lindsey; Lindsey thinks about Gunn. And there's a phone call.
*
Every once in a while, in the middle of this strange, new life Gunn’s living, he stops. Just comes to a dead stop and wonders what the hell he’s done. Most of the time, he doesn’t, though. He lives his new life and allows himself to be so busy that he doesn’t have a thought to spare.
But sometimes? Well, sometimes he can’t help it. The most unlikely times, too. Moments that should be thoughtless and insignificant. When the body should be on autopilot and the mind quiet of anything except maybe the phone calls that need to be made, the groceries that need to be bought, the laundry that needs to be done.
Gun steps out of the shower, his mind on all of those things at once. Wraps a towel around his waist and shuffles his feet on the bathmat before he crosses over to the sink. When he reaches up to wipe away the condensation so that he can see his reflection to shave, everything comes to a dead stop for him. Stares at the one eye he’s revealed, then flattens his palm against the mirror and presses it hard, then drags it in slow, precise circles.
Watches more and more of himself come into streaked view and wonders who the hell that man is. Because it’s not him. It’s an unfamiliar face, with unfamiliar eyes. Was it the white room? The information downloaded into his head? Something else entirely?
Doesn’t know. Decides that it doesn’t really matter, either. Gunn’s no longer a person he actually knows, and he’s not sure whether it’s good or bad.
His hand falls from the mirror and he looks at his brown eyes. They get lighter and lighter, then brighter and brighter, until they’re a hazy kind of blue. He blinks and his eyes are brown again.
Backs away from the mirror, then hurries out of the bathroom entirely. His breath is stuck somewhere inside, and it hurts but he isn’t sure if he needs to inhale or exhale. Does a little of both and finds that it still hurts.
He holds his slipping towel up with one hand, and reaches for the phone with the other. Angel’s direct number is on speed dial.
“I’m not coming in today,” he says as calmly as he can. “I’ll have my secretary rearrange everything that needs to be rearranged.”
“What’s wrong?” Angel asks immediately.
Gunn shakes his head, then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Mental health day,” he says easily. “Getting a little stressed. Senior Partners didn’t give me coping skills with all that knowledge. I seriously need to unwind.”
Angel accepts that, and then Gunn’s hitting another speed dial button, and arranging for meetings to be rescheduled or for other attorneys to take his place.
When that’s done, he drops the cordless phone and finds himself walking to his bedroom door and closing it, and then standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of it that he only uses on his way out in the mornings.
Since Lindsey left town, Gunn’s missed him. Not in a vague way. But in a burst of something that gets him right in the gut, then jerks him around. Started happening more often after Wolfram & Hart got turned over to Angel and the rest of them. Because he got it, suddenly. Got where Lindsey was coming from right before he left.
It’s constant. A constant slipping away. Gunn has to hold on tight with both hands, but he doesn’t always remember to do it. Forgets that little fact and waves to someone, fixes his tie, flips through a book, or other things that require both hands, and he lets go of what he’s trying to hold on to.
Wonders how the hell Lindsey managed it after Angel chopped off his hand. Because, yeah, the holding on thing is a metaphor but...but not entirely. There’s that saying about idle hands, but Gunn thinks that maybe it should really be about busy hands that get distracted and let something slip right on through.
Steps closer to the mirror and wishes like hell Lindsey was there. Last time things got this turned around for Gunn, it was Lindsey that brought him back to his senses. Not by doing anything, just by being around. For a while, it was mostly Gunn just trying to figure out if he’d wandered so far from himself that he was some kind of not good/not bad mix. Faced down Lindsey and couldn’t find himself at all in the other man, who was the textbook definition of not good/not bad.
And after that, it became about more. It was about Lindsey, with his little-boy-lost temper tantrums that just needed to be met with the same look Gunn gave to new members of his old crew: acknowledgment of the reasons for, and the validity of, the tantrum, but refusal to deal with it. And it was about Gunn, having a damn purpose in someone’s life once again.
His forehead slaps against the mirror, and his hands come up on either side of his head and meet their reflections. Fingertips curl under so that it seems like he’s trying to dig into it, right through the glass, and the silver backing. Hook himself on the sharpness so that he can’t forget to hold on.
Knows now how much it took out of Lindsey, how much it cost him, to walk away. Just. Walk. Away. Lindsey was hooked on that sharpness, and he came to the decision and just pulled out. Like it was nothing to rip his flesh to shreds. And the thing is? For Lindsey, it wasn’t. And for the first time, Gunn realizes just how much more there was to Lindsey than even he saw during all those nights and all that sex and all that looking at the other man.
He wants to see the rest. Wants to dive right into Lindsey and swim around for a while. Take in the sights without trying to compare anything to himself. Thinks there’s a lot Lindsey could teach him right about now. About who he is, what he is, and where it’s all going to take him. Things Gunn could learn without having to try. They’d kind of slip into him without him even realizing it, he thinks. They’d be secondary to Lindsey, to Lindsey and Gunn, to Gunn and Lindsey.
Pushes away from the mirror and his eyes are blue again in his reflection. He’s a lawyer. He works at Wolfram & Hart. He’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but not entirely good anymore. Sucks in air in a surprised inhalation that makes him choke a little.
It should freak him out. It does. But not as much as it should have. Because he did spend an awful amount of time looking at Lindsey, into him, through him, around him.
He blinks, watches an awed kind of expression come to the face in the mirror that he realizes he does know. Intimately.
***
He’s not Lindsey. Not in anything more than shape and form, really. He’s something else; something fired in the kiln of Haiti and painted with tattoos in New Orleans. But he has Lindsey’s memories. Every last one of them. Can distantly recognize and identify the emotions attached to each of them without actually feeling them.
Tonight, Eve came to the room that is his prison, stripped herself down to her lovely flesh and then climbed into bed while giving him a synopsis of the day’s events. Later, after she was a sated mess of smeared makeup, tussled hair and sticky fluids, she gave him details. And there was a second round, after she told him all of it, and his hands wrapped around her neck, and his eyes closed, and he slammed into her. She collapsed into an exhausted sleep before she could ask him anything, and she knows better to broach the subject outside of the moment.
He leaves her sleeping, a new circle of fingerprints around her lovely throat, and retreats to a chair in the corner of his room.
Thinks about Gunn, because he seems to be the only person Lindsey was never conflicted about, and his mind is often drawn to the anomaly. There’s only startling clarity attached to Gunn, and he knows that if Lindsey still existed far back in the recesses of his mind, Lindsey wouldn’t be worried at all about Gunn right now. Even though Gunn let the senior partners fuck with his head. Even though Gunn visits the White Room more frequently than the john, it seems.
He can’t imagine that Lindsey’s sentiments are entirely correct, given the falling in line Gunn’s doing, but he thinks they might be. Wonders if Gunn will balk at the eleventh hour. Hopes it doesn’t happen, but can’t really alter anything at this point.
He’s still sitting in the chair when Eve gets up and meanders over to him, all deliberately insouciant movements, even half-awake. When she presses a lingering kiss to his lips, he has a flash of Lindsey-memory:
Gunn, prowling from a creaky motel bed, movements naturally graceful and sleek, even half-awake. Lips that tasted of the essence of himself that Lindsey always found empowering and humbling at the same time, instead of some wax based lipstick whose fragrance deteriorates into something sickly without reapplication. Muscle and sinew of a tall frame connecting with the muscle and sinew of Lindsey’s compact frame, rather than the alternating softness and bones that is Eve’s slenderness.
“Gotta go, honey,” Eve says regretfully, and he nods and waves a hand briefly. She pouts as she pulls her clothes back on, gives him a half-hopeful, half-annoyed glare on her way out of the room, but he’s lost in memories that don’t belong to him.
Finds himself glancing at the clock on the bedside table. Two-thirty in the morning. Thinks that maybe it’s about time he start messing with heads, and doesn’t acknowledge that there might be something of Lindsey still around when he picks up the cell phone.
It rings four times, and then a sleepy voice, trying to sound awake, answers. “Gunn, here.”
“Gunn here?” he repeats, his tone slightly mocking. “That’s a new greeting. Kind of pretentious, if you ask me.”
The pause is a wide and gaping maw whose other side he can’t see. But then it rushes to him, fast and dizzying, with Gunn’s whispered, “Holy shit.”
Reminds himself that the memories aren’t his, that they don’t touch anything in him. They’re a movie, a television show. Knowledge of things, events and moments that happened to someone else. Isn’t entirely successful, because it turns out that remembering Lindsey’s stomach dropping at the sound of Gunn’s gruff voice actually makes his stomach bottom out likewise.
And because he knows it all. Knows even the things Lindsey never fully acknowledged. That Lindsey used to lie awake in various beds in various states, thinking not about Darla or even Angel, but Gunn. Because Gunn made all the sense in the world when Lindsey was half an inch away from climbing a water tower with a rifle and picking off pedestrians. Gunn made all the sense in the world, period.
Knows that Lindsey would often find himself driving *towards* Los Angeles without realizing it, and once got as close as Phoenix before he came to his senses again. Knows that it stopped being about sex, or Lindsey’s internal chaos, the moment he let Gunn into his apartment, and everything Lindsey told himself to the contrary was just bullshit, painted red and called a rose in skewed hindsight.
“Speak of the devil and he damn well calls,” Gunn almost exclaims, something light and relieved in his voice. Something welcoming, as well. Welcoming in a way that even Eve doesn’t make him feel. In a way that only Gunn ever made Lindsey feel.
“I’m the devil now?” he asks dryly. “When did that happen?”
“Know what I meant,” Gunn mumbles, and he can hear the grin in the other man’s voice. “Haven’t heard from you since...shit. Been a while. A long while.”
Not as long as Gunn thinks, because those last few calls got swept away with Angel’s Connor mindwipe since they took place in the midst of that mess. A good thing, really, because Gunn would have a lot of questions to ask if he remembered Lindsey’s very last, frantic, panicked call.
“Figured I should be on my own for a while,” he tells Gunn. “Really on my own. Know what I mean?”
“Guess I do,” Gunn concedes. “Gotta admit, though--coulda used a phone call a time or two recently. Things have been crazy around here. You hear about your old bosses?”
“Heard the L.A. offices were wiped out, restored, and put under new management. Imagine my surprise when word makes its way to me that it’s your crew managing it. What the hell happened there?”
Gunn sighs tiredly. “Fuck if I know, man. It’s all sorts of screwed up.”
Leans back in his chair, rolls his neck to the side and figures he should at least be a little productive while he’s indulging in sentiment that he shouldn’t be feeling.
“Screwed up,” he repeats slowly. “Screwed up like, you’re in the belly of the beast, but you’ve got a solid plan to take it down from the inside? Or screwed up like, you did something stupid and somehow became a lawyer who even I--in exile--have heard about recently?”
Gunn starts to say something. Three times. Doesn’t get any further than a half a syllable each time.
“On the good days?” Gunn says finally. “I think it’s both.”
He grins, slowly and widely. “And on the bad days?”
“On the bad days, I know it’s only the stupid thing,” Gunn admits heavily. “But, you know what I figured out today?”
“What?”
“I still know who I am; I’m just not who I used to be.”
Hand reflexively clenches around the phone, and everything is sharp and delineated for him. Every carpet fiber under his feet. Ever pore on his chest, with the ink drilled into it. Every brushstroke that makes up the marks on the walls. Every bit of Lindsey that hasn’t entirely left the building that he now occupies.
“Good to hear,” he says faintly, clears his throat. “I need to...go.”
“Already?” Gunn replies, an artless disappointment in his tone that causes memories to come crashing down all around him. “Look--don’t be a stranger, all right? Cell’s on twenty-four/seven.”
“All right,” he agrees.
Ends the call and places another one almost immediately. Eve shows up half an hour later, face confused as she hands him the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. He sends her away brusquely, knows he’ll have to smooth her feathers tomorrow, and it doesn’t matter.
Paces the room, drowning himself in movement and motion, and opens the cigarettes and chain-smokes them, rapid fire. And there’s nowhere for all that smoke to go, because the door is closed and so are the windows. It hovers in the room and it stings his eyes, and still he continues until the pack is empty.
Looks around and can’t see anything clearly at all. Not the fibers in the carpet or the ink in his pores or the brush strokes on the walls. Not a single speck of Lindsey, either.
Crawls into bed, turns out the light, and is asleep a few minutes later.
.End
Next Story in Series - Blowing Smoke
Series Listing in Memories here.
Series: Smoke and Mirrors #8
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Gunn/Lindsey
Spoilers/Timeline: During S5, post-Destiny
Note: I was Jossed. Ignore it.
Summary: Gunn thinks about Lindsey; Lindsey thinks about Gunn. And there's a phone call.
*
Every once in a while, in the middle of this strange, new life Gunn’s living, he stops. Just comes to a dead stop and wonders what the hell he’s done. Most of the time, he doesn’t, though. He lives his new life and allows himself to be so busy that he doesn’t have a thought to spare.
But sometimes? Well, sometimes he can’t help it. The most unlikely times, too. Moments that should be thoughtless and insignificant. When the body should be on autopilot and the mind quiet of anything except maybe the phone calls that need to be made, the groceries that need to be bought, the laundry that needs to be done.
Gun steps out of the shower, his mind on all of those things at once. Wraps a towel around his waist and shuffles his feet on the bathmat before he crosses over to the sink. When he reaches up to wipe away the condensation so that he can see his reflection to shave, everything comes to a dead stop for him. Stares at the one eye he’s revealed, then flattens his palm against the mirror and presses it hard, then drags it in slow, precise circles.
Watches more and more of himself come into streaked view and wonders who the hell that man is. Because it’s not him. It’s an unfamiliar face, with unfamiliar eyes. Was it the white room? The information downloaded into his head? Something else entirely?
Doesn’t know. Decides that it doesn’t really matter, either. Gunn’s no longer a person he actually knows, and he’s not sure whether it’s good or bad.
His hand falls from the mirror and he looks at his brown eyes. They get lighter and lighter, then brighter and brighter, until they’re a hazy kind of blue. He blinks and his eyes are brown again.
Backs away from the mirror, then hurries out of the bathroom entirely. His breath is stuck somewhere inside, and it hurts but he isn’t sure if he needs to inhale or exhale. Does a little of both and finds that it still hurts.
He holds his slipping towel up with one hand, and reaches for the phone with the other. Angel’s direct number is on speed dial.
“I’m not coming in today,” he says as calmly as he can. “I’ll have my secretary rearrange everything that needs to be rearranged.”
“What’s wrong?” Angel asks immediately.
Gunn shakes his head, then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Mental health day,” he says easily. “Getting a little stressed. Senior Partners didn’t give me coping skills with all that knowledge. I seriously need to unwind.”
Angel accepts that, and then Gunn’s hitting another speed dial button, and arranging for meetings to be rescheduled or for other attorneys to take his place.
When that’s done, he drops the cordless phone and finds himself walking to his bedroom door and closing it, and then standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of it that he only uses on his way out in the mornings.
Since Lindsey left town, Gunn’s missed him. Not in a vague way. But in a burst of something that gets him right in the gut, then jerks him around. Started happening more often after Wolfram & Hart got turned over to Angel and the rest of them. Because he got it, suddenly. Got where Lindsey was coming from right before he left.
It’s constant. A constant slipping away. Gunn has to hold on tight with both hands, but he doesn’t always remember to do it. Forgets that little fact and waves to someone, fixes his tie, flips through a book, or other things that require both hands, and he lets go of what he’s trying to hold on to.
Wonders how the hell Lindsey managed it after Angel chopped off his hand. Because, yeah, the holding on thing is a metaphor but...but not entirely. There’s that saying about idle hands, but Gunn thinks that maybe it should really be about busy hands that get distracted and let something slip right on through.
Steps closer to the mirror and wishes like hell Lindsey was there. Last time things got this turned around for Gunn, it was Lindsey that brought him back to his senses. Not by doing anything, just by being around. For a while, it was mostly Gunn just trying to figure out if he’d wandered so far from himself that he was some kind of not good/not bad mix. Faced down Lindsey and couldn’t find himself at all in the other man, who was the textbook definition of not good/not bad.
And after that, it became about more. It was about Lindsey, with his little-boy-lost temper tantrums that just needed to be met with the same look Gunn gave to new members of his old crew: acknowledgment of the reasons for, and the validity of, the tantrum, but refusal to deal with it. And it was about Gunn, having a damn purpose in someone’s life once again.
His forehead slaps against the mirror, and his hands come up on either side of his head and meet their reflections. Fingertips curl under so that it seems like he’s trying to dig into it, right through the glass, and the silver backing. Hook himself on the sharpness so that he can’t forget to hold on.
Knows now how much it took out of Lindsey, how much it cost him, to walk away. Just. Walk. Away. Lindsey was hooked on that sharpness, and he came to the decision and just pulled out. Like it was nothing to rip his flesh to shreds. And the thing is? For Lindsey, it wasn’t. And for the first time, Gunn realizes just how much more there was to Lindsey than even he saw during all those nights and all that sex and all that looking at the other man.
He wants to see the rest. Wants to dive right into Lindsey and swim around for a while. Take in the sights without trying to compare anything to himself. Thinks there’s a lot Lindsey could teach him right about now. About who he is, what he is, and where it’s all going to take him. Things Gunn could learn without having to try. They’d kind of slip into him without him even realizing it, he thinks. They’d be secondary to Lindsey, to Lindsey and Gunn, to Gunn and Lindsey.
Pushes away from the mirror and his eyes are blue again in his reflection. He’s a lawyer. He works at Wolfram & Hart. He’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but not entirely good anymore. Sucks in air in a surprised inhalation that makes him choke a little.
It should freak him out. It does. But not as much as it should have. Because he did spend an awful amount of time looking at Lindsey, into him, through him, around him.
He blinks, watches an awed kind of expression come to the face in the mirror that he realizes he does know. Intimately.
***
He’s not Lindsey. Not in anything more than shape and form, really. He’s something else; something fired in the kiln of Haiti and painted with tattoos in New Orleans. But he has Lindsey’s memories. Every last one of them. Can distantly recognize and identify the emotions attached to each of them without actually feeling them.
Tonight, Eve came to the room that is his prison, stripped herself down to her lovely flesh and then climbed into bed while giving him a synopsis of the day’s events. Later, after she was a sated mess of smeared makeup, tussled hair and sticky fluids, she gave him details. And there was a second round, after she told him all of it, and his hands wrapped around her neck, and his eyes closed, and he slammed into her. She collapsed into an exhausted sleep before she could ask him anything, and she knows better to broach the subject outside of the moment.
He leaves her sleeping, a new circle of fingerprints around her lovely throat, and retreats to a chair in the corner of his room.
Thinks about Gunn, because he seems to be the only person Lindsey was never conflicted about, and his mind is often drawn to the anomaly. There’s only startling clarity attached to Gunn, and he knows that if Lindsey still existed far back in the recesses of his mind, Lindsey wouldn’t be worried at all about Gunn right now. Even though Gunn let the senior partners fuck with his head. Even though Gunn visits the White Room more frequently than the john, it seems.
He can’t imagine that Lindsey’s sentiments are entirely correct, given the falling in line Gunn’s doing, but he thinks they might be. Wonders if Gunn will balk at the eleventh hour. Hopes it doesn’t happen, but can’t really alter anything at this point.
He’s still sitting in the chair when Eve gets up and meanders over to him, all deliberately insouciant movements, even half-awake. When she presses a lingering kiss to his lips, he has a flash of Lindsey-memory:
Gunn, prowling from a creaky motel bed, movements naturally graceful and sleek, even half-awake. Lips that tasted of the essence of himself that Lindsey always found empowering and humbling at the same time, instead of some wax based lipstick whose fragrance deteriorates into something sickly without reapplication. Muscle and sinew of a tall frame connecting with the muscle and sinew of Lindsey’s compact frame, rather than the alternating softness and bones that is Eve’s slenderness.
“Gotta go, honey,” Eve says regretfully, and he nods and waves a hand briefly. She pouts as she pulls her clothes back on, gives him a half-hopeful, half-annoyed glare on her way out of the room, but he’s lost in memories that don’t belong to him.
Finds himself glancing at the clock on the bedside table. Two-thirty in the morning. Thinks that maybe it’s about time he start messing with heads, and doesn’t acknowledge that there might be something of Lindsey still around when he picks up the cell phone.
It rings four times, and then a sleepy voice, trying to sound awake, answers. “Gunn, here.”
“Gunn here?” he repeats, his tone slightly mocking. “That’s a new greeting. Kind of pretentious, if you ask me.”
The pause is a wide and gaping maw whose other side he can’t see. But then it rushes to him, fast and dizzying, with Gunn’s whispered, “Holy shit.”
Reminds himself that the memories aren’t his, that they don’t touch anything in him. They’re a movie, a television show. Knowledge of things, events and moments that happened to someone else. Isn’t entirely successful, because it turns out that remembering Lindsey’s stomach dropping at the sound of Gunn’s gruff voice actually makes his stomach bottom out likewise.
And because he knows it all. Knows even the things Lindsey never fully acknowledged. That Lindsey used to lie awake in various beds in various states, thinking not about Darla or even Angel, but Gunn. Because Gunn made all the sense in the world when Lindsey was half an inch away from climbing a water tower with a rifle and picking off pedestrians. Gunn made all the sense in the world, period.
Knows that Lindsey would often find himself driving *towards* Los Angeles without realizing it, and once got as close as Phoenix before he came to his senses again. Knows that it stopped being about sex, or Lindsey’s internal chaos, the moment he let Gunn into his apartment, and everything Lindsey told himself to the contrary was just bullshit, painted red and called a rose in skewed hindsight.
“Speak of the devil and he damn well calls,” Gunn almost exclaims, something light and relieved in his voice. Something welcoming, as well. Welcoming in a way that even Eve doesn’t make him feel. In a way that only Gunn ever made Lindsey feel.
“I’m the devil now?” he asks dryly. “When did that happen?”
“Know what I meant,” Gunn mumbles, and he can hear the grin in the other man’s voice. “Haven’t heard from you since...shit. Been a while. A long while.”
Not as long as Gunn thinks, because those last few calls got swept away with Angel’s Connor mindwipe since they took place in the midst of that mess. A good thing, really, because Gunn would have a lot of questions to ask if he remembered Lindsey’s very last, frantic, panicked call.
“Figured I should be on my own for a while,” he tells Gunn. “Really on my own. Know what I mean?”
“Guess I do,” Gunn concedes. “Gotta admit, though--coulda used a phone call a time or two recently. Things have been crazy around here. You hear about your old bosses?”
“Heard the L.A. offices were wiped out, restored, and put under new management. Imagine my surprise when word makes its way to me that it’s your crew managing it. What the hell happened there?”
Gunn sighs tiredly. “Fuck if I know, man. It’s all sorts of screwed up.”
Leans back in his chair, rolls his neck to the side and figures he should at least be a little productive while he’s indulging in sentiment that he shouldn’t be feeling.
“Screwed up,” he repeats slowly. “Screwed up like, you’re in the belly of the beast, but you’ve got a solid plan to take it down from the inside? Or screwed up like, you did something stupid and somehow became a lawyer who even I--in exile--have heard about recently?”
Gunn starts to say something. Three times. Doesn’t get any further than a half a syllable each time.
“On the good days?” Gunn says finally. “I think it’s both.”
He grins, slowly and widely. “And on the bad days?”
“On the bad days, I know it’s only the stupid thing,” Gunn admits heavily. “But, you know what I figured out today?”
“What?”
“I still know who I am; I’m just not who I used to be.”
Hand reflexively clenches around the phone, and everything is sharp and delineated for him. Every carpet fiber under his feet. Ever pore on his chest, with the ink drilled into it. Every brushstroke that makes up the marks on the walls. Every bit of Lindsey that hasn’t entirely left the building that he now occupies.
“Good to hear,” he says faintly, clears his throat. “I need to...go.”
“Already?” Gunn replies, an artless disappointment in his tone that causes memories to come crashing down all around him. “Look--don’t be a stranger, all right? Cell’s on twenty-four/seven.”
“All right,” he agrees.
Ends the call and places another one almost immediately. Eve shows up half an hour later, face confused as she hands him the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. He sends her away brusquely, knows he’ll have to smooth her feathers tomorrow, and it doesn’t matter.
Paces the room, drowning himself in movement and motion, and opens the cigarettes and chain-smokes them, rapid fire. And there’s nowhere for all that smoke to go, because the door is closed and so are the windows. It hovers in the room and it stings his eyes, and still he continues until the pack is empty.
Looks around and can’t see anything clearly at all. Not the fibers in the carpet or the ink in his pores or the brush strokes on the walls. Not a single speck of Lindsey, either.
Crawls into bed, turns out the light, and is asleep a few minutes later.
.End
Next Story in Series - Blowing Smoke
Series Listing in Memories here.