Shut Your Eyes - Chapter 6
Title: Shut Your Eyes
Authors: goten0040 and garnetice
Chapter: 6
Rating: M
Ship(s): Kendall/James, Carlos/Stephanie, maybe more.
Summary: Future!Fic. Kendall returns to L.A. six years after Big Time Rush disbanded. James has been missing for years. Imagine how things change when James reappears in his life. And he needs help.
Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
I didn’t know what to make of it. James, being back. Like he’d never left. Like he’d been gone a million years.
Back before we’d all gone our separate ways, James had that walk, the half-swagger, half-loping grace that people only seemed to master when they had confidence to spare. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like Carlos or Logan or I had self-esteem issues.
Okay, maybe Logan had a few.
But James- he was almost hyper-aware of his body. He knew what every tilt of his head or twitch of his lips or cocked hip could do to a person. He never even had a second of adolescent angst about his body image. At least, not a second that didn’t revolve around a bad haircut or spray tan, outside factors that were extraneous to what he already was.
Almost like he’d been thrown straight into the fray already built like a young god. Like he’d been perfect his whole life.
You know what I’m talking about. Some people just have that cool-kid-vibe, that ready-to-inherit-the-earth attitude, as if they’ve known they deserve the world from the moment they took their first breath.
I don’t mean that James never had neuroses, because man, he did. Especially after we all flew out to California, where the pressure had broken lesser men. But when you caught him off guard, without his Cuda manspray and his hair product and mirrors and all the trappings of Hollywood, he just had poise and self-assurance to spare. He knew he was gorgeous. He knew he was strong. And he knew he was going to make it.
Nowhere had that been more evident than in the way he walked.
Now it was this nagging reminder that something was seriously wrong.
Tall and straight and a little distant as he followed Carlos obediently down the boulevard to the next bar, while he could feel our eyes on him. Caving in on himself whenever he thought no one was looking. James was a parody of his old self.
I tried to throw a worried look in Logan’s direction, but he was studiously avoiding my gaze. Camille was tucked under his arm, into his side, telling silly stories about what had happened on the set of her drama. I could tell that Logan knew something was up, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. Camille and Carlos seemed genuinely happy, but at the same time, they were acting off. It felt like we were all trying to sing harmonies for the same song, but kept joining in on the wrong key. So what came out instead was this disjointed conversation, where each of us kept piping in at the awkwardest possible time, trying to keep up the façade as shiny, happy friends who’d finally found each other again.
And I didn’t know if they were all seeing the same things as me; the way the bones of James’s spine poked from beneath his thin, worn shirt or the bags underneath his eyes or the way his walk was all wrong. How he stuck unnaturally close to Guitar Dude, who was the only person that didn’t seem to have any problem acting natural.
Everyone else could have just been cued in to the fact that finding someone who’d dropped off the grid for years was- well, awkward.
Fuck me, a few years ago, I would’ve been able to read Carlos’s every thought just by the way he angled his body. I would have been able to interpret Logan’s rigid posture, seen it as more than just a vague, screaming alarm.
I was so done with this. I didn’t know when or how I’d stopped fitting in with the only people I’d ever cared about, and I didn’t know how to make us all click again on more than a superficial level.
So, superficiality it was. I tried to remember who I’d been seven years ago, the person I’d existed as before I’d decided hockey was more important than friendship. Cocky, aggressive, tactless. Genuine. Sure that there wasn’t a single risk or challenge I couldn’t face.
It had been so easy to be brave when I hadn’t thought there was anything to lose. It had been so damn easy; right up until I realized I had nothing left.
I ignored the fact that we were all out of step and said, “So, wow, James. That place was a shithole.”
Carlos snorted, but caught himself at the last second, turning it into a hacking cough. Logan flat out glared at me, because apparently in Florida, social niceties were something carefully observed. Camille simply raised her eyebrows, the story she’d been telling about the peeping tom camera man trailing off.
James did not look amused.
Except that was a lie, because for one fleeting instant, I saw his eyebrow arch self-deprecatingly before his whole face shuttered closed, dark. Before he created a mask that hid the part of himself that could still laugh at the ludicrous idea of James-fucking-Diamond living like a street urchin, that covered the deep sense of shame running right on his laughter’s heels. He tucked it all behind a stony façade, refusing to even acknowledge that I’d said anything at all.
Yeah. I wasn’t so good at being the old me. The old me wouldn’t have let that stand.
“Uh, guys. We’re here,” Carlos tapped his fingers against the sandstone wall of his newest choice in bars, a place without a single window or distinguishing mark. Inside, it was cavernous, a dance club pounding out the latest beats, a bank vault door against the far wall as decoration. Everything was soundproofed; wood paneling in rich mahogany, long, white, draped silks. The place was some exaggerated dream of a prohibition hideout, right down to the unmarked bottles of moonshine at the bar.
James and Guitar Dude looked markedly out of place.
Carlos didn’t care. He was all about getting the party started, never mind that we’d been traipsing around greater Los Angeles for the better part of five hours and the party was long past begun. We had a whole new set of things to celebrate. He ordered us up whole bottles of moonshine, grain liquor that would burn down our throats and our bellies.
I noticed James was barely even drinking, mostly spinning his drink around in the dark, amber colored rocks glass until it created a miniature cyclone. He shifted uncomfortably, like he had somewhere else to be, better things to do.
The place was packed full of eye candy, and even so, even skeletal thin and ghostly pale, James was the most beautiful guy in the room. I didn’t think of him like, I don’t know, a potential prospect, some guy I could lay out on my bed and have my wicked way with. I’d never thought of him like that. But I could acknowledge that he was stunning. That he always had been, at his best and at his worst.
We’d only been in the club for ten minutes before he stood up, coltish and unsteady, and said he was going to go smoke.
Maybe I needed fresh air. Maybe I wanted answers. Maybe I just didn’t want to let him out of my sight.
I excused myself too, saying I wanted to grab a bottle of water from the gas station convenience store across the street. Never mind that I could get a perfectly good glass form the bartender, complete with ice and totally free. We burst out onto the street, and I jerked my head at him to indicate I wanted him to cross with me. He hesitated, then followed.
I left him outside the quickie mart, walking inside to a food of too-bright fluorescent lighting and the smell of stale chips. I grabbed a bottle of Poland Springs and strode up to the cashier; a bored teenage girl with dreadlocks and about eight visible facial piercings. She rung up the bottle without even looking up, and I took the opportunity to peer sideways out the window at James.
He was tapping the bottom of a pack of cigarettes, frustrated, like if he hit it hard enough, one might magically appear. I turned to the clerk and asked for some Reds.
Outside, I offered them up, and he looked like he wanted to say something nasty, something that certainly wouldn’t have been ‘thank you’, but instead he took them with a grateful nod. He tore off the protective film and tapped out a cigarette, like it was a familiar, time-honored routine.
I’d never seen James smoke a day in his life.
His fingers were shaking as he tried to flick a lighter, and watching it made me feel like someone had taken a blunted rock and waved it carelessly around, hollowing out my insides. Like I had no pain left to feel; just empty curiosity and a dull throb. Like I was standing outside myself. I took a step forward and grabbed the offending plastic object, thumbing the wheel and cupping my hand over the flame, every movement steady.
He met my gaze, level, measured, his lips still wrapped around the cigarette as he leaned in towards me. The flame reflected back at me, dancing in his eyes. James’s lips puckered as he sucked in, breathing fire as the paper caught. Seconds ticked by before he exhaled, blowing smoke in my eyes as he straightened with a mumbled ‘thanks’.
I straightened up, feeling dizzy even though my previous buzz had vanished the second I heard James’s voice in Fate.
“Where have you been?” my voice was gruffer, meaner than I meant it to be.
“Around,” James gestured at the flashing neon lights and grim fronts of downtown LA.
I grabbed for his wrist, stopping the cigarette on its path back to his mouth, “That’s not really an answer.”
He sighed.
“Culver City, Inglewood, Mulholland if I’m bored. Venice Beach, sometimes, when cash is low. Burbank. I’ve got some friends in Pasadena, but it’s a hike.”
“I don’t- that’s all over the place.”
“I’m like a nomad, now. The only place I don’t go is the Chateau Marmont,” he laughed, like he’d just told a really funny joke, but I felt- god, I don’t even know.
Take something familiar, comforting, homey and pervert it, make it wrong. Now imagine you can’t figure out why. Every time you finally capture the whole picture, figure out where the brushstroke’s gone awry, pinpoint the spot where the edge has turned blurry, the pivotal flaw slips out of your fingers.
Like when you grasp at sand beneath the ocean’s surface and can never keep it from siphoning out of your palm.
James was just like that. I’d look at him and see the guy I’d grown up with, the same old flash of pearly white teeth and quirked lips, the kindness in his eyes, and then at next glance his smile became alien, his eyes hard. He had aged, but that wasn’t it.
And whenever my mind flickered to what the real problem might be, I squelched the thought, because it was too sick, too twisted, too surreal. This slippery idea, sand slithering from my grip.
“Why’d you- stop calling?”
James flicked a sarcastic look in my direction, but didn’t say anything.
I tried again, “Why’d you pretend you didn’t know me? Back at the club?”
His lips curled up at the ends, and he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and said concisely, clearly, cruelly, “I was really hoping it wasn’t.”
It felt like a punch in the gut. It felt like something I deserved.
By the end of the night, I was the soberest guy in our group. Meaning designated driver. It was hours later.
Camille had conned Logan into throwing back drink after drink after drink. Now they were slumped in the back of Carlos’s car, passed out against each other. Carlos hadn’t needed any encouragement to down alcohol, the impromptu return of our prodigal best friend the greatest reason of all to party it up. James and Guitar Dude- Joseph- were squished into the back seat with the two ex lovebirds. Guitar dude was out like a light, but James was awake, alert.
He told me to drop him off at an unmarked corner, a street so small it didn’t even have a name. I couldn’t see anything around that looked like housing.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“But how are we going to reach you? How are we going to find you again?”
James bit his lip, “This wasn’t enough of a reunion?”
He pushed open the door, elbowed Guitar Dude a few times until the musician woke up and he came stumbling onto the sidewalk after James. And I stayed, my foot on the pedal but not in park, trying to figure out what to do.
That was when I saw Logan’s eyes, half open, in the rearview mirror.
“You okay, dude?” I asked, trying to sound appropriately concerned about his oncoming hangover.
Logan shook his head, voice broken, “He’s on drugs, Kendall.”
“I know.”
And I did.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave James on a street corner without knowing whether I’d ever see him again. So someone explain to me why I slammed my foot on the gas and sped away?
Chapter Seven
Authors: goten0040 and garnetice
Chapter: 6
Rating: M
Ship(s): Kendall/James, Carlos/Stephanie, maybe more.
Summary: Future!Fic. Kendall returns to L.A. six years after Big Time Rush disbanded. James has been missing for years. Imagine how things change when James reappears in his life. And he needs help.
Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
I didn’t know what to make of it. James, being back. Like he’d never left. Like he’d been gone a million years.
Back before we’d all gone our separate ways, James had that walk, the half-swagger, half-loping grace that people only seemed to master when they had confidence to spare. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like Carlos or Logan or I had self-esteem issues.
Okay, maybe Logan had a few.
But James- he was almost hyper-aware of his body. He knew what every tilt of his head or twitch of his lips or cocked hip could do to a person. He never even had a second of adolescent angst about his body image. At least, not a second that didn’t revolve around a bad haircut or spray tan, outside factors that were extraneous to what he already was.
Almost like he’d been thrown straight into the fray already built like a young god. Like he’d been perfect his whole life.
You know what I’m talking about. Some people just have that cool-kid-vibe, that ready-to-inherit-the-earth attitude, as if they’ve known they deserve the world from the moment they took their first breath.
I don’t mean that James never had neuroses, because man, he did. Especially after we all flew out to California, where the pressure had broken lesser men. But when you caught him off guard, without his Cuda manspray and his hair product and mirrors and all the trappings of Hollywood, he just had poise and self-assurance to spare. He knew he was gorgeous. He knew he was strong. And he knew he was going to make it.
Nowhere had that been more evident than in the way he walked.
Now it was this nagging reminder that something was seriously wrong.
Tall and straight and a little distant as he followed Carlos obediently down the boulevard to the next bar, while he could feel our eyes on him. Caving in on himself whenever he thought no one was looking. James was a parody of his old self.
I tried to throw a worried look in Logan’s direction, but he was studiously avoiding my gaze. Camille was tucked under his arm, into his side, telling silly stories about what had happened on the set of her drama. I could tell that Logan knew something was up, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. Camille and Carlos seemed genuinely happy, but at the same time, they were acting off. It felt like we were all trying to sing harmonies for the same song, but kept joining in on the wrong key. So what came out instead was this disjointed conversation, where each of us kept piping in at the awkwardest possible time, trying to keep up the façade as shiny, happy friends who’d finally found each other again.
And I didn’t know if they were all seeing the same things as me; the way the bones of James’s spine poked from beneath his thin, worn shirt or the bags underneath his eyes or the way his walk was all wrong. How he stuck unnaturally close to Guitar Dude, who was the only person that didn’t seem to have any problem acting natural.
Everyone else could have just been cued in to the fact that finding someone who’d dropped off the grid for years was- well, awkward.
Fuck me, a few years ago, I would’ve been able to read Carlos’s every thought just by the way he angled his body. I would have been able to interpret Logan’s rigid posture, seen it as more than just a vague, screaming alarm.
I was so done with this. I didn’t know when or how I’d stopped fitting in with the only people I’d ever cared about, and I didn’t know how to make us all click again on more than a superficial level.
So, superficiality it was. I tried to remember who I’d been seven years ago, the person I’d existed as before I’d decided hockey was more important than friendship. Cocky, aggressive, tactless. Genuine. Sure that there wasn’t a single risk or challenge I couldn’t face.
It had been so easy to be brave when I hadn’t thought there was anything to lose. It had been so damn easy; right up until I realized I had nothing left.
I ignored the fact that we were all out of step and said, “So, wow, James. That place was a shithole.”
Carlos snorted, but caught himself at the last second, turning it into a hacking cough. Logan flat out glared at me, because apparently in Florida, social niceties were something carefully observed. Camille simply raised her eyebrows, the story she’d been telling about the peeping tom camera man trailing off.
James did not look amused.
Except that was a lie, because for one fleeting instant, I saw his eyebrow arch self-deprecatingly before his whole face shuttered closed, dark. Before he created a mask that hid the part of himself that could still laugh at the ludicrous idea of James-fucking-Diamond living like a street urchin, that covered the deep sense of shame running right on his laughter’s heels. He tucked it all behind a stony façade, refusing to even acknowledge that I’d said anything at all.
Yeah. I wasn’t so good at being the old me. The old me wouldn’t have let that stand.
“Uh, guys. We’re here,” Carlos tapped his fingers against the sandstone wall of his newest choice in bars, a place without a single window or distinguishing mark. Inside, it was cavernous, a dance club pounding out the latest beats, a bank vault door against the far wall as decoration. Everything was soundproofed; wood paneling in rich mahogany, long, white, draped silks. The place was some exaggerated dream of a prohibition hideout, right down to the unmarked bottles of moonshine at the bar.
James and Guitar Dude looked markedly out of place.
Carlos didn’t care. He was all about getting the party started, never mind that we’d been traipsing around greater Los Angeles for the better part of five hours and the party was long past begun. We had a whole new set of things to celebrate. He ordered us up whole bottles of moonshine, grain liquor that would burn down our throats and our bellies.
I noticed James was barely even drinking, mostly spinning his drink around in the dark, amber colored rocks glass until it created a miniature cyclone. He shifted uncomfortably, like he had somewhere else to be, better things to do.
The place was packed full of eye candy, and even so, even skeletal thin and ghostly pale, James was the most beautiful guy in the room. I didn’t think of him like, I don’t know, a potential prospect, some guy I could lay out on my bed and have my wicked way with. I’d never thought of him like that. But I could acknowledge that he was stunning. That he always had been, at his best and at his worst.
We’d only been in the club for ten minutes before he stood up, coltish and unsteady, and said he was going to go smoke.
Maybe I needed fresh air. Maybe I wanted answers. Maybe I just didn’t want to let him out of my sight.
I excused myself too, saying I wanted to grab a bottle of water from the gas station convenience store across the street. Never mind that I could get a perfectly good glass form the bartender, complete with ice and totally free. We burst out onto the street, and I jerked my head at him to indicate I wanted him to cross with me. He hesitated, then followed.
I left him outside the quickie mart, walking inside to a food of too-bright fluorescent lighting and the smell of stale chips. I grabbed a bottle of Poland Springs and strode up to the cashier; a bored teenage girl with dreadlocks and about eight visible facial piercings. She rung up the bottle without even looking up, and I took the opportunity to peer sideways out the window at James.
He was tapping the bottom of a pack of cigarettes, frustrated, like if he hit it hard enough, one might magically appear. I turned to the clerk and asked for some Reds.
Outside, I offered them up, and he looked like he wanted to say something nasty, something that certainly wouldn’t have been ‘thank you’, but instead he took them with a grateful nod. He tore off the protective film and tapped out a cigarette, like it was a familiar, time-honored routine.
I’d never seen James smoke a day in his life.
His fingers were shaking as he tried to flick a lighter, and watching it made me feel like someone had taken a blunted rock and waved it carelessly around, hollowing out my insides. Like I had no pain left to feel; just empty curiosity and a dull throb. Like I was standing outside myself. I took a step forward and grabbed the offending plastic object, thumbing the wheel and cupping my hand over the flame, every movement steady.
He met my gaze, level, measured, his lips still wrapped around the cigarette as he leaned in towards me. The flame reflected back at me, dancing in his eyes. James’s lips puckered as he sucked in, breathing fire as the paper caught. Seconds ticked by before he exhaled, blowing smoke in my eyes as he straightened with a mumbled ‘thanks’.
I straightened up, feeling dizzy even though my previous buzz had vanished the second I heard James’s voice in Fate.
“Where have you been?” my voice was gruffer, meaner than I meant it to be.
“Around,” James gestured at the flashing neon lights and grim fronts of downtown LA.
I grabbed for his wrist, stopping the cigarette on its path back to his mouth, “That’s not really an answer.”
He sighed.
“Culver City, Inglewood, Mulholland if I’m bored. Venice Beach, sometimes, when cash is low. Burbank. I’ve got some friends in Pasadena, but it’s a hike.”
“I don’t- that’s all over the place.”
“I’m like a nomad, now. The only place I don’t go is the Chateau Marmont,” he laughed, like he’d just told a really funny joke, but I felt- god, I don’t even know.
Take something familiar, comforting, homey and pervert it, make it wrong. Now imagine you can’t figure out why. Every time you finally capture the whole picture, figure out where the brushstroke’s gone awry, pinpoint the spot where the edge has turned blurry, the pivotal flaw slips out of your fingers.
Like when you grasp at sand beneath the ocean’s surface and can never keep it from siphoning out of your palm.
James was just like that. I’d look at him and see the guy I’d grown up with, the same old flash of pearly white teeth and quirked lips, the kindness in his eyes, and then at next glance his smile became alien, his eyes hard. He had aged, but that wasn’t it.
And whenever my mind flickered to what the real problem might be, I squelched the thought, because it was too sick, too twisted, too surreal. This slippery idea, sand slithering from my grip.
“Why’d you- stop calling?”
James flicked a sarcastic look in my direction, but didn’t say anything.
I tried again, “Why’d you pretend you didn’t know me? Back at the club?”
His lips curled up at the ends, and he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and said concisely, clearly, cruelly, “I was really hoping it wasn’t.”
It felt like a punch in the gut. It felt like something I deserved.
By the end of the night, I was the soberest guy in our group. Meaning designated driver. It was hours later.
Camille had conned Logan into throwing back drink after drink after drink. Now they were slumped in the back of Carlos’s car, passed out against each other. Carlos hadn’t needed any encouragement to down alcohol, the impromptu return of our prodigal best friend the greatest reason of all to party it up. James and Guitar Dude- Joseph- were squished into the back seat with the two ex lovebirds. Guitar dude was out like a light, but James was awake, alert.
He told me to drop him off at an unmarked corner, a street so small it didn’t even have a name. I couldn’t see anything around that looked like housing.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“But how are we going to reach you? How are we going to find you again?”
James bit his lip, “This wasn’t enough of a reunion?”
He pushed open the door, elbowed Guitar Dude a few times until the musician woke up and he came stumbling onto the sidewalk after James. And I stayed, my foot on the pedal but not in park, trying to figure out what to do.
That was when I saw Logan’s eyes, half open, in the rearview mirror.
“You okay, dude?” I asked, trying to sound appropriately concerned about his oncoming hangover.
Logan shook his head, voice broken, “He’s on drugs, Kendall.”
“I know.”
And I did.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave James on a street corner without knowing whether I’d ever see him again. So someone explain to me why I slammed my foot on the gas and sped away?
Chapter Seven