fic: The Fatherless, Set 1/5
Pairing: Zach Condon/Shia LaBeouf, slash.
Wordcount: 2485
Notes: For my first second foray into RPS, I give you the shamelessly non-linear romance that's been gracing my userinfo for weeks, now. delighter, my eternal partner in debauchery, provides all the visuals and motivation, as always. I mean, I'm not expecting there to be any readership for this, but oh god does it make me happy. There will be five sets of three short pieces posted regularly, done by the end of August. And if someone reminds me, I will upload the entire Beirut oeuvre at some point, including their March 2007 KLRU live set. But seriously, remind me to make the media post that might explain some of this.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
i. America, Please Help Them
Shia likes the grey shirt with the blue print of napoleonic Paris on the front best. Usually it’s the first thing he puts on in the morning, after the standard three hours of sitting around on the upstairs couch playing Gears of War 3 in his underwear, or a swim in the pool. By the time he edges downstairs Moms is usually finished her lunch, a swath of washed vegetables laid out across the counter for him to cut and bag and eat probably half of while he complains about there being nothing to eat but vegetables and chocolate protein shakes. Tofu dogs.
“Go to the store then,” she always says. She hates grocery shopping, and cooking, and most things that have to do with serving him (really, serving his father). He understands. Tries to avoid making her do it. That’s what his he pays the nutritionist for, anyway. Jason’s the one who stocks the cupboards with tofu dogs.
When he goes to the store it’s to the corner store down the hill, the one with eight half-empty coke displays lined up in a row and a ragged collection of picked over candy bars. It serves mostly people who have to head up into the hills to clean floors and style hair, the occasional celebrity homes tour group. He picks up a pack of smokes and a bottle of water because yeah, it’s not really that he’s hungry. He doesn’t mind the vegetables, anyway. He’s just. Peckish. Preoccupied.
That feeling you get when you’ve jerked off like, four times already and there’s just nothing left to do but hang around the house and get yelled at for smoking.
Zach left two days ago, as both of their schedules started getting a little too tight around the edges to spend days bumming around on the beach, shooting videos of their own ineptitude at skateboarding and getting hassled for it by passing cars. And then, an hour after he’d dropped Zach off at the airport, Shia got a call from somebody’s assistant saying that Michael pushed filming back two days.
So he’s been waiting. Wearing his shirt. Trying not to call Brooklyn because really he doesn’t know what they’re doing now, besides trying to be adult about it. They both have day jobs, right?
At the counter, Shia chats up Jaspreet, because he’s probably the only person in this entire neighbourhood that skateboards or listens to bands that aren’t U2. They talk about the iron studs the municipality has installed into the sidewalks leading down from the hills: the longest, smoothest ride in a ten mile radius and now even the Hollywood nobility can’t walk down the sidewalk with their strollers without ending up with a case of shaken baby syndrome.
“Life’s mysteries,” Jaspreet says, hands wide.
“Jesus H,” Shia agrees.
He walks out into the sun, pulling down his sunglasses and breaking the cap on the water.
And that’s the picture that’s on Perez the next day:
Shia LaBeouf’s fabulous fucking life: look at his pecs, look at his sneakers. Are those Golas? With white sport socks? Oh kid. And what does his t-shirt say?
Zach calls, and leaves a voice message that says, “Kristin said our myspace playcount jumped by eight thousand. Are you trying to ruin our sex life?”
But all Shia can really do is walk around grinning for a week, thinking, oh good, we have a sex life.
ii. Take only what you need
After Sasquatch, Zach keeps playing these gigs to get the rent paid. A few months, Shia promised. Then I want to come meet all your exes. It was unclear if the second part was a joke.
Zach finds that he spends a lot of time on the computer, jerking off and reading webcomics. He came back to find the apartment gutted - Karen moved out in March, and between Mexico and touring he hasn’t been here in five months to see the result - and his stuff sits around listless as earthquake survivors in the desolate kitchen, the empty living room. He ignores everything except the mattress on the floor, the bathroom (she left the shower curtain, bless her), and his equipment in what used to be the spare room before they all got so suddenly empty.
Honestly, he likes it better. He coexists with the ghost of her presence, and prefers it to the actual person who used to remind him to eat lunch before 3pm, and throw his - what, six? - shirts in the laundry with her various feminine ephemera. The bathroom counter is stained from her eyeshadows.
He likes it a hundred times better without her.
Most days, he eats downstairs at the deli, and uses up his daylight fucking around with his gear. Working on the Mexican stuff some days, starting fresh all over on others. He plays a lot of covers. Practices scales on the trumpet, which often squawks with affront.
Sometimes Nick or Kristin or Thomas drops by, instrument casually in tow, but he’s never been the jamming type. He does his improvising alone, in solitary confinement where the repercussions of bad decisions never make it past the walls.
And it’s not like he has anything new to teach them, either. They all play a few songs together, practice for the shows on the weekends, and it’s all as perfect as it was on tour - two years of the same material, it’s not hard - and then when he doesn’t offer them (what, a beer? He has tapwater.) a drink or some other social lubricant, they smile and remind him what time sound check will be, and file down the stairs. Their voices float back up from street level, cheery as they decide which diner to eat lunch at.
Zach knows that if he didn’t have those weekend shows, he probably wouldn’t leave the apartment, and wonders if that makes him depressed (doubtful) or just really lazy (likely).
It’s been about eight hundred degrees out for weeks, and sunny, and he still looks like a vampire in the glass windows that look out to the street, the parking garage, a hint of freeway, a back garden. Shadowed eyes and hair that’s getting too long, standing on end as he puts his fingers through it, again and again.
After maybe three months of this, Shia sends probably the seven hundredth text message. Zach’s phones buzzes and he leaps on it: DELAYED. Another week? Fucking Michael. Will call.
Stab him in the face! Zach texts back, and means it, searching out the exclamation mark with a punchy finger. Megan Fox is also on that list. Shia once said that the color of her eyes reminded him of him. Zach had never really disliked someone he’d never met before then.
He stands around in his studio. Trying not to wait for the call, but still. Not doing anything else.
It’s bad for his instruments, he knows, his frustration like a taint in the air that can seep into the fretboards and brass valves. Mold, rust. If he picked up the trumpet right now it would squall like an aching child.
It must be time to go outside. That is what he decides.
He takes the train to Coney Island and falls into the crowds of tourists there, the families that can’t afford the trip up to a beach in Connecticut, the teenagers in pink jeans and what basically amounts to smurf hats. He bakes in his tshirt and cords, skin allover damp and eyes slitted against the sunlight.
He sits on a bench and tries to pretend he’s in Los Angeles. It doesn’t work, it’s like the air is different, the water. Yellow and grey, not white and blue. America’s European nostalgia versus America’s bright vision of a future. Both are off, slightly incorrect. Both save a place for the giant ferris wheel.
He thinks about New Mexico: brown, and another brown. A familiar scent. He thinks about failing, what that feels like. Compares it to what he feels now. Right now, sitting here on this bench in a crowd of strangers.
If Shia were here, they could probably go and get churros and fountain soda and sit under an awning somewhere and hold hands. Maybe. If they were careful enough about the gay, then the famous would take care of itself. People here just don’t care the way they do out west. If they notice, they pretend not to, they preserve the apathetic veneer.
Not caring is one of Zach’s first and best defenses. He loves them all for it.
His phone buzzes in his pocket as he’s standing in line for a churro, money in hand. He doesn’t answer it. It’s almost a compulsion, not to: ignore it, ignore.
He’ll listen to the message on the train. He’ll listen to Shia ramble until he gets cut off, twice. He’ll listen with the intensity of a man receiving instructions on how to diffuse a bomb. He’ll listen to the bad news, and the good, and the promises. He’ll take it all at face value and put the phone and the anxiety aside and go back to his instruments, soothe them like a horsegroom. Play, hit record, sing for days. Until a tune comes out.
He’ll do it all, but right now, for just a few moments, he needs to stand in line in the wet heat, give the stranger his money and walk back down to the sand. Find a way to escape the feeling that the whole world has faded into monochrome.
iii. Art Star
Shia shows up to Sasquatch in the middle of the Ozomatli set, wearing a smurf-colored LA Dodgers hoodie.
Zach doesn’t even really notice him, has to do a double-take after his brain makes the connection between that one tanned, expectant face in the crowd and the touch on the elbow, the muted hey that he’s been waiting for all afternoon. Really, the only reason Shia’s even visible from the stage is because he’s pretty much elbowed his way to the front, like he’s just headed over to his seats above the dugout. No backstage pass for the smurf hoodie: no problem, apparently. All around him people in androgynous glasses and androgynous hair look disgruntled. He looks like a douchebag. He waves.
Zach tips a nod at him and fifty other people.
Zach is still sweaty and disgusting from their set, still waiting for the shakes to pass. He’s stripped off his overshirt, hoping for a breeze to come in from the miles of rolling view. He thinks their set was fine. The same as it always is. How long has it been now.
Nick is standing beside him, hyperactive and bouncing along to the beat. His hands drum the air and he yells something incomprehensible through the thick sound off the speakers, which they’re standing pretty much under. Zach shakes his head. He can’t hear anything, he can barely look out into the crowd without feeling a little too light on his feet: sensory overload.
He really wouldn’t have noticed. He’s been waiting for Shia to show up - backstage - since they loaded in this morning. Irrational, really, because Shia had said GQ photoshoot, and Zach had nodded in agreement. I’ll see your set had been the promise he’d refused to demand, the one that Shia wouldn’t have been able to make.
He gives Nick a seeyoulater smack on the shoulder and heads around the wings to get at the gate, passing Kristin and Perrin at the beer tent. They corral him, briefly, introduce him to a familiar face named Dan, show him off. He shakes hands, gets a compliment on the set, and agrees with some return flattery that Kristin puts out. He slips away so quick it’s probably rude.
He swears he left Shia a pass at backgate, he knows he did. He wrote the name down himself when they got there. Five a.m. He’d stumbled out of the van from the airport, and unpacked the new uke he picked up in Vancouver two days ago, after the last one got stolen off the stage in Manhattan. Little bastard was like, two hundred dollars, and it’s still a bitch to keep tuned.
Or maybe he didn’t write down the name. Maybe he just tuned his ukulele and found some coffee and did a sound check for the pickup. That also sounds familiar.
At the gap in the fence, he makes eye contact with one of the security detail, who nods at the pass hanging around his neck.
Shia’s standing four feet away, arms crossed, kind of peering at what he can see of the stage. Ozomatli is still rocking the reggae beats.
“Hey,” Zach half-shouts, stepping out to him. He could get away with a one-armed hug here. He knows it, but somehow he ends up sticking his hand out, apologetic, and Shia looks at it with a faltering grin, but recovers with a warm, professional handshake, a firm tip of his chin.
Shia says, “You goddamn killed them,” right away, leaning close and pulling Zach closer by the hand to say it into his ear.
Zach shrugs, smiling, swallows the words whole, feels them warm and calm in his belly. It’s hard to know these things, unless someone says them. He verbalizes that relief with a dull “You made it.” He doesn’t let go of the hand.
“Three hours in line. I wish I was kidding. You know how much I paid for a day pass, dude?” Shia shakes his head. What’s celebrity worth these days, anyway? But he holds up a hand as soon as Zach goes to explain - to probably apologize, flake that he is - and says, “So do they give you actual plumbing back there?”
Zach is showing him to the toilets around the edge of stage left when someone taps one of their shoulders. “Shia, if you had to choose: indie music festivals or baseball?”
There’s a camera, unflashed, and a guy with some fearless assertiveness training holding a tape recorder at shoulder height. Zach folds in on himself and tries to edge to the side, stay out of Shia’s professional life. But Shia’s game face flashes up quick and calm: “Entertainment Weekly, right?” The man nods, taps his badge. It says Michael. So Shia makes the statement like he’s paying a bill he knows he owes: “Both, man. I’d take the festival crowds and then put Billingsley up there to work some magic while the bands rock on.”
“So your opinion on the music?” says Michael, raising the camera.
Zach sees a thumb and a flash, and realizes after that Shia’s hand was on the small of his back the whole time.
Weeks later, Tracy emails him a scanned copy of the photo and Zach looks at his fidgeting and his angry slouch and knows that he’s getting way too close to the precipice with this.
Wordcount: 2485
Notes: For my first second foray into RPS, I give you the shamelessly non-linear romance that's been gracing my userinfo for weeks, now. delighter, my eternal partner in debauchery, provides all the visuals and motivation, as always. I mean, I'm not expecting there to be any readership for this, but oh god does it make me happy. There will be five sets of three short pieces posted regularly, done by the end of August. And if someone reminds me, I will upload the entire Beirut oeuvre at some point, including their March 2007 KLRU live set. But seriously, remind me to make the media post that might explain some of this.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
i. America, Please Help Them
Shia likes the grey shirt with the blue print of napoleonic Paris on the front best. Usually it’s the first thing he puts on in the morning, after the standard three hours of sitting around on the upstairs couch playing Gears of War 3 in his underwear, or a swim in the pool. By the time he edges downstairs Moms is usually finished her lunch, a swath of washed vegetables laid out across the counter for him to cut and bag and eat probably half of while he complains about there being nothing to eat but vegetables and chocolate protein shakes. Tofu dogs.
“Go to the store then,” she always says. She hates grocery shopping, and cooking, and most things that have to do with serving him (really, serving his father). He understands. Tries to avoid making her do it. That’s what his he pays the nutritionist for, anyway. Jason’s the one who stocks the cupboards with tofu dogs.
When he goes to the store it’s to the corner store down the hill, the one with eight half-empty coke displays lined up in a row and a ragged collection of picked over candy bars. It serves mostly people who have to head up into the hills to clean floors and style hair, the occasional celebrity homes tour group. He picks up a pack of smokes and a bottle of water because yeah, it’s not really that he’s hungry. He doesn’t mind the vegetables, anyway. He’s just. Peckish. Preoccupied.
That feeling you get when you’ve jerked off like, four times already and there’s just nothing left to do but hang around the house and get yelled at for smoking.
Zach left two days ago, as both of their schedules started getting a little too tight around the edges to spend days bumming around on the beach, shooting videos of their own ineptitude at skateboarding and getting hassled for it by passing cars. And then, an hour after he’d dropped Zach off at the airport, Shia got a call from somebody’s assistant saying that Michael pushed filming back two days.
So he’s been waiting. Wearing his shirt. Trying not to call Brooklyn because really he doesn’t know what they’re doing now, besides trying to be adult about it. They both have day jobs, right?
At the counter, Shia chats up Jaspreet, because he’s probably the only person in this entire neighbourhood that skateboards or listens to bands that aren’t U2. They talk about the iron studs the municipality has installed into the sidewalks leading down from the hills: the longest, smoothest ride in a ten mile radius and now even the Hollywood nobility can’t walk down the sidewalk with their strollers without ending up with a case of shaken baby syndrome.
“Life’s mysteries,” Jaspreet says, hands wide.
“Jesus H,” Shia agrees.
He walks out into the sun, pulling down his sunglasses and breaking the cap on the water.
And that’s the picture that’s on Perez the next day:
Shia LaBeouf’s fabulous fucking life: look at his pecs, look at his sneakers. Are those Golas? With white sport socks? Oh kid. And what does his t-shirt say?
Zach calls, and leaves a voice message that says, “Kristin said our myspace playcount jumped by eight thousand. Are you trying to ruin our sex life?”
But all Shia can really do is walk around grinning for a week, thinking, oh good, we have a sex life.
ii. Take only what you need
After Sasquatch, Zach keeps playing these gigs to get the rent paid. A few months, Shia promised. Then I want to come meet all your exes. It was unclear if the second part was a joke.
Zach finds that he spends a lot of time on the computer, jerking off and reading webcomics. He came back to find the apartment gutted - Karen moved out in March, and between Mexico and touring he hasn’t been here in five months to see the result - and his stuff sits around listless as earthquake survivors in the desolate kitchen, the empty living room. He ignores everything except the mattress on the floor, the bathroom (she left the shower curtain, bless her), and his equipment in what used to be the spare room before they all got so suddenly empty.
Honestly, he likes it better. He coexists with the ghost of her presence, and prefers it to the actual person who used to remind him to eat lunch before 3pm, and throw his - what, six? - shirts in the laundry with her various feminine ephemera. The bathroom counter is stained from her eyeshadows.
He likes it a hundred times better without her.
Most days, he eats downstairs at the deli, and uses up his daylight fucking around with his gear. Working on the Mexican stuff some days, starting fresh all over on others. He plays a lot of covers. Practices scales on the trumpet, which often squawks with affront.
Sometimes Nick or Kristin or Thomas drops by, instrument casually in tow, but he’s never been the jamming type. He does his improvising alone, in solitary confinement where the repercussions of bad decisions never make it past the walls.
And it’s not like he has anything new to teach them, either. They all play a few songs together, practice for the shows on the weekends, and it’s all as perfect as it was on tour - two years of the same material, it’s not hard - and then when he doesn’t offer them (what, a beer? He has tapwater.) a drink or some other social lubricant, they smile and remind him what time sound check will be, and file down the stairs. Their voices float back up from street level, cheery as they decide which diner to eat lunch at.
Zach knows that if he didn’t have those weekend shows, he probably wouldn’t leave the apartment, and wonders if that makes him depressed (doubtful) or just really lazy (likely).
It’s been about eight hundred degrees out for weeks, and sunny, and he still looks like a vampire in the glass windows that look out to the street, the parking garage, a hint of freeway, a back garden. Shadowed eyes and hair that’s getting too long, standing on end as he puts his fingers through it, again and again.
After maybe three months of this, Shia sends probably the seven hundredth text message. Zach’s phones buzzes and he leaps on it: DELAYED. Another week? Fucking Michael. Will call.
Stab him in the face! Zach texts back, and means it, searching out the exclamation mark with a punchy finger. Megan Fox is also on that list. Shia once said that the color of her eyes reminded him of him. Zach had never really disliked someone he’d never met before then.
He stands around in his studio. Trying not to wait for the call, but still. Not doing anything else.
It’s bad for his instruments, he knows, his frustration like a taint in the air that can seep into the fretboards and brass valves. Mold, rust. If he picked up the trumpet right now it would squall like an aching child.
It must be time to go outside. That is what he decides.
He takes the train to Coney Island and falls into the crowds of tourists there, the families that can’t afford the trip up to a beach in Connecticut, the teenagers in pink jeans and what basically amounts to smurf hats. He bakes in his tshirt and cords, skin allover damp and eyes slitted against the sunlight.
He sits on a bench and tries to pretend he’s in Los Angeles. It doesn’t work, it’s like the air is different, the water. Yellow and grey, not white and blue. America’s European nostalgia versus America’s bright vision of a future. Both are off, slightly incorrect. Both save a place for the giant ferris wheel.
He thinks about New Mexico: brown, and another brown. A familiar scent. He thinks about failing, what that feels like. Compares it to what he feels now. Right now, sitting here on this bench in a crowd of strangers.
If Shia were here, they could probably go and get churros and fountain soda and sit under an awning somewhere and hold hands. Maybe. If they were careful enough about the gay, then the famous would take care of itself. People here just don’t care the way they do out west. If they notice, they pretend not to, they preserve the apathetic veneer.
Not caring is one of Zach’s first and best defenses. He loves them all for it.
His phone buzzes in his pocket as he’s standing in line for a churro, money in hand. He doesn’t answer it. It’s almost a compulsion, not to: ignore it, ignore.
He’ll listen to the message on the train. He’ll listen to Shia ramble until he gets cut off, twice. He’ll listen with the intensity of a man receiving instructions on how to diffuse a bomb. He’ll listen to the bad news, and the good, and the promises. He’ll take it all at face value and put the phone and the anxiety aside and go back to his instruments, soothe them like a horsegroom. Play, hit record, sing for days. Until a tune comes out.
He’ll do it all, but right now, for just a few moments, he needs to stand in line in the wet heat, give the stranger his money and walk back down to the sand. Find a way to escape the feeling that the whole world has faded into monochrome.
iii. Art Star
Shia shows up to Sasquatch in the middle of the Ozomatli set, wearing a smurf-colored LA Dodgers hoodie.
Zach doesn’t even really notice him, has to do a double-take after his brain makes the connection between that one tanned, expectant face in the crowd and the touch on the elbow, the muted hey that he’s been waiting for all afternoon. Really, the only reason Shia’s even visible from the stage is because he’s pretty much elbowed his way to the front, like he’s just headed over to his seats above the dugout. No backstage pass for the smurf hoodie: no problem, apparently. All around him people in androgynous glasses and androgynous hair look disgruntled. He looks like a douchebag. He waves.
Zach tips a nod at him and fifty other people.
Zach is still sweaty and disgusting from their set, still waiting for the shakes to pass. He’s stripped off his overshirt, hoping for a breeze to come in from the miles of rolling view. He thinks their set was fine. The same as it always is. How long has it been now.
Nick is standing beside him, hyperactive and bouncing along to the beat. His hands drum the air and he yells something incomprehensible through the thick sound off the speakers, which they’re standing pretty much under. Zach shakes his head. He can’t hear anything, he can barely look out into the crowd without feeling a little too light on his feet: sensory overload.
He really wouldn’t have noticed. He’s been waiting for Shia to show up - backstage - since they loaded in this morning. Irrational, really, because Shia had said GQ photoshoot, and Zach had nodded in agreement. I’ll see your set had been the promise he’d refused to demand, the one that Shia wouldn’t have been able to make.
He gives Nick a seeyoulater smack on the shoulder and heads around the wings to get at the gate, passing Kristin and Perrin at the beer tent. They corral him, briefly, introduce him to a familiar face named Dan, show him off. He shakes hands, gets a compliment on the set, and agrees with some return flattery that Kristin puts out. He slips away so quick it’s probably rude.
He swears he left Shia a pass at backgate, he knows he did. He wrote the name down himself when they got there. Five a.m. He’d stumbled out of the van from the airport, and unpacked the new uke he picked up in Vancouver two days ago, after the last one got stolen off the stage in Manhattan. Little bastard was like, two hundred dollars, and it’s still a bitch to keep tuned.
Or maybe he didn’t write down the name. Maybe he just tuned his ukulele and found some coffee and did a sound check for the pickup. That also sounds familiar.
At the gap in the fence, he makes eye contact with one of the security detail, who nods at the pass hanging around his neck.
Shia’s standing four feet away, arms crossed, kind of peering at what he can see of the stage. Ozomatli is still rocking the reggae beats.
“Hey,” Zach half-shouts, stepping out to him. He could get away with a one-armed hug here. He knows it, but somehow he ends up sticking his hand out, apologetic, and Shia looks at it with a faltering grin, but recovers with a warm, professional handshake, a firm tip of his chin.
Shia says, “You goddamn killed them,” right away, leaning close and pulling Zach closer by the hand to say it into his ear.
Zach shrugs, smiling, swallows the words whole, feels them warm and calm in his belly. It’s hard to know these things, unless someone says them. He verbalizes that relief with a dull “You made it.” He doesn’t let go of the hand.
“Three hours in line. I wish I was kidding. You know how much I paid for a day pass, dude?” Shia shakes his head. What’s celebrity worth these days, anyway? But he holds up a hand as soon as Zach goes to explain - to probably apologize, flake that he is - and says, “So do they give you actual plumbing back there?”
Zach is showing him to the toilets around the edge of stage left when someone taps one of their shoulders. “Shia, if you had to choose: indie music festivals or baseball?”
There’s a camera, unflashed, and a guy with some fearless assertiveness training holding a tape recorder at shoulder height. Zach folds in on himself and tries to edge to the side, stay out of Shia’s professional life. But Shia’s game face flashes up quick and calm: “Entertainment Weekly, right?” The man nods, taps his badge. It says Michael. So Shia makes the statement like he’s paying a bill he knows he owes: “Both, man. I’d take the festival crowds and then put Billingsley up there to work some magic while the bands rock on.”
“So your opinion on the music?” says Michael, raising the camera.
Zach sees a thumb and a flash, and realizes after that Shia’s hand was on the small of his back the whole time.
Weeks later, Tracy emails him a scanned copy of the photo and Zach looks at his fidgeting and his angry slouch and knows that he’s getting way too close to the precipice with this.