fic: The Fatherless, Set 3/5
Pairing: Zach Condon/Shia LaBeouf, RPS.
Wordcount: 5177
Notes: Installments seven, eight and nine of fifteen.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
vii. My house of reeds
By the high heat of summer Zach is ready to be gone. Shia comes east to visit, but Zach is like a shut-in, he frets about leaving to go to the deli for sandwiches, he frets about staying in, he frets about sex because it means he isn’t working on the EP. He gets up, after, and stalks naked and silent to the bathroom. Runs a shower. Emerges clean and dressed and goes straight back into his studio. Shia pulls on his crumpled boxers and goes out to the balcony to smoke.
The EP hangs over them both, and when Zach locks himself in his studio, he listens to the same three tracks over and over at a painful volume. The only ones he has, half-finished, apparently, from his time down in Mexico last fall. They’re almost a year old, already. When Shia asks to hear them, Zach gets this look in his eyes, almost an anxiety. He hedges, then comes out with a strict no.
So Shia, unless he wants to stand listening at the door, is left at loose ends, thinking about his own obligations. The media junket for Eagle Eye is coming up. He feels the pressure of a time shortage. He knows Zach will leave him to the wolves for that couple of weeks. And even before then, he should be following up on leads, hustling for work in the avenues that Teresa can’t cover.
But he wants to be here. He’s been waiting to be here with Zach for months. He wants to see the city and Zach’s friends and exes and go out at night and yeah, have a normal life for a bit.
He’s here for Zach, who isn’t showing any kind of emotional presence at all.
Zach comes out of the studio in the middle of one afternoon and crawls back into bed, wordless, socks dangling off the end of the bed. Shia comes out from the kitchen, mayonnaise on his hands, and says, “You want a sandwich?”
No response, so he plants his feet. “You have to stop, dude. You’re spinning your wheels.”
Zach shakes his head into the pillow, groans something that isn’t words. A lament.
Shia says, “Fine.” He wipes his hands, and scrounges Zach’s phone out from a pile of half-clean pants that belongs to both of them. He’s not worried about getting confused because, unlike Zach, he can read a designer label.
He picks a name that sounds right - “Nick’s in the band, isn’t he? Red haired guy?” - and dials while Zach turns his face to watch from the pillow in silent protest.
Nick answers his phone with, “So I guess you’re not dead.”
And Shia says, “No, but he’s almost there. You should see him, he’s like a southern belle with the vapours.”
“Um-” says Nick. “Who-”
“This is Shia, I’m at his place right now, actually. Could you do me a favour?”
There is a pause where Shia can imagine Nick mouthing Shia? to himself, then a more pleasant moment of comprehension. Zach looks a little wretched down there on the bed, so Shia can assume he’s been kissing and telling. He hopes Nick is a close friend, and more to the point, a good one. “I need to plan like, a little intervention here or something. I don’t know, if it was me I’d need a pubcrawl, but it’s not, so-“
“Who, Zach? What’s wrong with him?”
“Uh.” Shia says into the phone, glancing down at Zach, who is actually hiding his face under the pillow and groaning. “He spends a lot of time in the studio. I don’t know what he does in there, he sure as hell isn’t working.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says Nick, he sounds like maybe he is a bit upset, actually.
“So how about you call around and get everyone together someplace? Like at a bar, or maybe a diner-“
“No, we’ll just come there. I seriously thought he might have broken a hand or caught the bird flu. It’s been weeks. Tell him he’s a douchebag for me, alright?”
Shia hangs up and tells Zach he’s a douchebag. Zach rolls over onto his back and proclaims to the ceiling, “You can’t count on me for anything.”
Shia has to leave the room and its tragic princess alone for a minute.
He goes downstairs and buys enough alcohol that he has to make two trips to bring it back up. Musicians, right? As actors love their liquor, musicians love their wine. Or their beer, he bets on both.
Nick comes in half an hour later - no knock, they’re just suddenly there in the kitchen - with three people who get introduced as Kristin, Jason and Paul. They’re all that standard breed of sweat-soaked but still pale hipsters that populate New York through the breezeless summer. The kind you’d never see in LA, because they don’t cultivate melanoma like the cool kids there do. No beaches, just cement, and a kind of neutral enthusiasm that means no one says, Oh fuck, I know you!
He shakes their hands and offers them drinks, thinking: girl with glasses; solemn guy with blonde hair; and jazz-hat, and hopes Paul doesn’t take off the hat, because that will fuck up his system.
They have instruments with them, too, and Jason pulls a huge baggie of something frozen out of his backpack and starts rummaging around in the cupboards for a large pot.
Shia points him in the right direction and Nick says, “We went back to Albuquerque last week, so now we have some genuine home-cooked New Mexican chili for when we’re all drunk off our asses.” He raises his beer in a toast to Shia’s fridgeful of liquor.
“My mother’s chili will make you sweat through all your orifices,” says Jason. “Prepare yourselves.”
Kristin groans and says, “Oh god, Jason. It’s freaking three hundred degrees in here already.”
Jason says, “That’s the point.”
Then they all look over as Zach skulks out of the bedroom, his socks pulled back on and his hair still a godawful mess. Shia notes that he’s actually changed out of one large white t-shirt and into another one, less soaked with sweat and frustration.
He smiles at them, probably trying to look apologetic and winsome, but he looks like a sleepwalker.
Shia looks to the others and Nick says, “You little shit, what is up with you?”
Kristin says, “Oh come on, it’s not like he missed anything. You guys went on vacation.”
Zach says, “I’ve been-” but that’s as far as he gets. Everyone waits.
“We turned down like, three shows, dude.” Jason spreads his hands. “I mean, it’s cool. But we wondered what happened.”
Zach says, “I just got-“ and shrugs so eloquently that his hands spin in circles.
Nick shakes his head and hands him a beer. Halfway there he changes his mind and pulls the bottle back: “But there’s still a band, right?” He doesn’t give Zach the beer until he gets a mute glare.
Then Paul perks up and says “Cheers, everyone!” even though his bottle is half-empty already.
Shia helps Jason poke at the melting lump of chili - which, yeah, smells awesome - and then more people arrive. Perrin, unibrow; Tracy, curly hair and earrings; Tom, tall and windburned, the only one with any sun on him; a whole herd of people who he doesn’t get introduced to. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in August and apparently no one in Zach’s social circle has a job that requires showing up. It’s kind of frightening how fast the place fills up. People start making their own liquor runs downstairs.
Shia lurks, supervising, nursing his one beer and resolved that it will be his only. He’s the stranger, and people seem to think it’s best just to ignore him, but Zach is surrounded. And smiling and drinking and speaking, which is perfect.
Nick catches him while he’s checking the studio for opportunists - this is getting close enough to a house party that he’s not above a little security for Zach’s instruments - and says, “So I kind of want to blame you for how useless he’s been. Since, uh, May.”
Shia raises his eyebrows and straightens from tucking a chair in under the desk. Nick seems like a friendly guy, all teeth and frizzy hair, but he has a stake in this, too. Everyone always does.
Nick sits on the stool behind Zach’s half-dismantled drum kit, he picks up a stick and chatters it idly against a rim. “He’s not exactly a focused guy, you know. He’s more - consumed. Like, it tortures him even when he doesn’t want to think about it. When he isn’t supposed to be thinking about it. He has fun for a bit with it, and then you turn around and it’s become this albatross. And he’s staggering under it, and you want to help him but he doesn’t want help. It’s his thing that he does.”
Shia is frowning. He says, “Are we still talking about the music, here?”
Nick shrugs, grins. “I guess it works on multiple levels.”
Shia crosses his arms and shifts his feet. “So you’re saying I’m Yoko, here.”
“No,” says Nick. He stops, he looks up. “No. I just thought I’d tell you that this isn’t abnormal for him. It’s just the way he is. He’s amazing for months on end, does it better and faster than anyone else, and then he just drops everything and it all falls apart and even he can’t figure out why.”
Shia nods. He doesn’t want to nod because who the fuck is this guy to be selling a Coles Notes version of Zach to the asshole who’s banging him?
Nick must feel bad or something because he takes another swig from his bottle and gestures with an open hand. “You know, it’s good, in the long term. He’s hit the bottom before, maybe you’ll avoid it this time. We’re just. We need him. So we all worry.”
And that’s all he says, we worry before he turns around and goes back out into the hall.
Shia follows him, eventually. First he spends half an hour sitting where Nick was sitting and finding it impossible to make that same smooth rattle of sound come out of the stick in his hands. Nick knows what he’s doing, he’s been doing it for a while, right?
Shia finds Zach on the balcony and clears a space for himself to stand around with all the people who need Zach, and worry about him.
He stands there all night and he drinks maybe half a dozen more beers and they both wake up with hangovers. While Zach keeps his cheek pressed against the toilet, Shia goes down to find some coffee. When he comes back, he books a pair of tickets to Oaxaca, Mexico.
He drops the boarding passes onto the bathmat and says, “You better stop puking long enough to pack.”
Zach just looks up with hollow eyes and the opposite of a grin. “What the hell?”
Shia just shrugs, and goes to follow his own advice.
Zach starts talking when they get in the cab. Keeps talking through security and a drink in the lounge. The guys he knows that’ll pick them up from the airport; the little restaurant that serves poached eggs with chiles for breakfast; and the music. Zach gets so excited about it that pulls his laptop out as they’re sitting in the departure area, opens some files, offers his headphones. “So you want to hear what I’m working on?” he asks, a little shy, a little coy. Smirking and totally mortified all at once.
Two weeks down south in this little town and Zach will have his album, Shia thinks, listening to the funeral march, the warlike declarations of seventeen brass pieces airing their raw nerves.
viii. You stand between me and all my enemies
At first it’s just the one reporter, and Zach’s pretty sure that she wasn’t even there for Shia to begin with, because first, they took the red-eye from Utah and it got pushed back five hours because of a snow storm, and because second, she’s asking questions like “What’s coming up next for you, Shia?” and “How’s the love life?”
She circles around them both with her microphone and camera guy, obviously taking Zach as some kind of retainer or maybe a really ineffectual bodyguard. Shia just smiles and says, “Hi, how are you?” to the camera guy and keeps moving down the concourse.
That’s when people start taking pictures: camera phones, and tourists with their twenty-pound Nikons pulled out of careful packing jobs. It’s 10am, and they’ve been up since 7am yesterday, except for one of those weird naps on the absurdly short flight from Salt Lake City. They have dirty hair and greasy skin and Shia can’t really put his sunglasses on indoors without looking like a complete jackass, although he does find his baseball cap, belatedly.
Zach tries to keep some distance between them, like, a good four feet because he feels as if one touch on the elbow, put up for posterity on some pissant’s blog, will call the sharks to come circling in. This is why he steps aside when a kid just a little too tall to be on the cute side of puberty comes up with his ushering mother to ask for an autograph.
Shia’s face, a mask of polite oh an autograph, of course.
They pause there, and people streaming by slow down to look at the ambiguous centre of this half-formed circle. It’s the reporter, really, and the kid and the hot-faced mother, and all the murmuring people standing in the lineups, necks craned.
People going by slow, and stop, and three more kids - ok, teenagers - inch forward.
Zach is getting nervous, half-buried in the crowd. Shia is not looking up, not looking past the faces immediately in front of him. That flat, nice-guy smile in full effect, like it might erase his grunginess, the hoodie and jeans, and the duffel dropped at his feet, the worried other half of a potential million-dollar GAY LOVE AFFAIR! story hovering in the middle distance.
Then someone says, “Hey lady, you really think a drunk driver’s a good role model for your kid?” and there’s a muttering of agreement, and someone else says, “Shut up, asshole,” and the surge of anonymous people shifts and crowds closer to Shia and his growing collection of attendants.
Zach actually gets pushed to the side by someone who wants to take a picture of half of the back of Shia’s head, and he snaps at the guy, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” before he even thinks, and then steps immediately back as the offended party turns to him.
At that point he tries to actually get closer to Shia - say, it’s time to go, let’s just go - but he finds it a little difficult. People are both sluggish and irritated. Airport security is shouting to clear the area and some of the mob starts to slough off, but the people interested in biting off that piece of celebrity don’t move. They crowd closer. Zach is stuck a good dozen feet off, shouldering back and forth. He can hear the reporter say to her camera, “the fledgling action star is getting a huge reaction here in the domestic terminal.”
Zach is hungry, and exhausted and fucking not enjoying this shit. Shia looks like he’s still signing notebooks and boarding passes. One kid at a time, like he could give every person here the piece of him that they want.
Zach gives up, shoulders his way out only to get jostled by a security guard. “Keep moving,” the woman says.
So he just drifts. Takes his bag to an empty row of seats a ways down the concourse and thinks about how they thought they were so smart, not checking any baggage. Zach didn’t even bring an instrument, they wanted to be really light on their feet for this thing. Shia’d been to Sundance already, three years ago for that Robert Downey Jr. film, and he said it was easier if you just came and went, no investment.
He didn’t have a film there this year, anyway, but they went because Zach had an interest in his own rejection. Fucking Cary Fukunaga and that cancelled soundtrack. The man asked for Zapotec-inspired brass, and then changed his mind and wanted a string quartet after Zach was in up to his elbows and halfway done.
He was hoping the film sucked, because the EP he’d salvaged out of the mess did really well. Like, really fucking well.
But then, the definition of really fucking well changes somewhere between Shia’s circle and Zach’s. Paul and Jason didn’t quit their jobs at the coffee shop, anyway. Which is why the band had to do another tour.
That’s the problem with having an internet fanbase: the album sales are shitty even though everyone has a copy. But everyone wants to buy a t-shirt, so.
So here he is in January and instead of that year in Morocco, he’s planning a second tour to appease the Europeans. And in between he gets stuck in Shia’s shitstorms and wonders if anything he’s composed will ever matter half as much as his boyfriend’s latest bylaw infraction.
He’s sitting fifty feet down the way, but by now security has thinned the crowd enough that Shia is actually walking. A uniform on either arm, basically like a prisoner or royalty. Zach gets up and follows, not really eager to get too close. There are still cameras and eventually, there is a cab. Shia shakes one of his escorts’ hands with a professional nod and a thank you, it’s been a pleasure or whatever and Zach somehow slips through to where Shia can put a hand on his back in official sanction, push him into the back seat. Man and manservant, in the public eye.
“Oh my god, I am fucking starving” is what Shia says when the door is closed. And to the cab driver, “Laurel Canyon, but could you stop at uh, a Jack in the Box or something?”
Zach puts a hand through his hair, rubs at his face, fights a sigh.
Shia says: “I just want to crawl into the hot tub and wallow there. A shower and bed is too much, you know? I need to multitask.”
Zach doesn’t even nod, he just lies back against the seat and watches everything blur as it goes by.
“Dude, I’m sorry you had to be there for that. That was so unnecessary.”
“Whatever, you loved it,” says Zach, guilty as soon as he hears the words come out of his mouth. He thought, somehow, that it’d be gentle and mocking, but his tone is bitter. He almost laughs at himself: which is it, jealousy or envy?
Shia doesn’t take his hand away. But he turns to look out his own window, quiet. After a while he says, “No, not really.”
The cab driver lounges through the lineup at the drive-through, and makes them get out and eat at a picnic table after laughing at Shia’s attempted bribe, “How much you think new upholstery costs these days, kid?”
“Should’ve grabbed a limo. Outside in the dead of fucking winter,” Shia mutters, fishing around in the bag for his onion rings. Zach just powers through his burger, eager for the rush of sleepy satisfaction, not minding the additional grease or the slight chill in the air.
No one approaches them as they scarf their food, possibly because they’re the only people not sitting in a vehicle and it’s the middle of an ugly lunch rush. They see an SUV bump a parked hatchback twice, and then decide to park two spaces over, instead. The cab driver is taking a nap while the meter runs.
Zach wants to ask, what did you ever do to deserve that? He wants to know. But he doesn’t ask, because that word - deserve - is treacherous, and he almost doesn’t know what he means.
“You handled it well,” he says instead, trying for honesty while he wraps his foil up into a ball.
Shia eyes him, swallows, says, “I don’t know how to handle it. It just keeps getting worse.”
“But you’re calm about it, you stayed calm.”
“Did I look calm? I wasn’t calm. Maybe calm like a drowning man.”
Shia actually looks more anxious now than he did half an hour ago. Zach says, “If I were you, I would’ve fainted.” He’s not exaggerating. Once he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in the middle of the street in Paris. Nick brought him to a hospital, they cancelled the rest of the tour.
Shia just shrugs, like, yeah, but you can do that.
Zach cancels a lot of shows. He disappoints a lot of people when he does it, but he can still do it. Compare that to what happened with Shia’s accident last summer: endless apologies, public and private, even when it turned out not to be his fault, even when the breathalyzer sample was released and everyone found out he’d blown a point oh-six, so still stupid, but not illegal. Even after that, Michael sent over the money numbers as a guilt trip - or a reality check as he called it, the asshole - numbers that said Shia put a couple of people out of work, cost everyone at the studio and production companies hundreds of thousands.
Screw his broken hand, the fingers that don’t bend too good anymore: the problem people have with Shia now is that he owes them. He’s owned by everyone who’s ever laid eyes on him.
Even if the definition of owned changes between his circles and Shia’s, Zach knows there’s nothing to envy in that.
Shia slurps up the rest of his drink, collects the garbage and trashes it. When they’re back in the car he rubs his belly and says, “Eugh.”
Zach says, “Don’t make me roll down the window.”
Shia says, “You think I wouldn’t warn you if that was necessary? God, Zach, are we apes?”
Zach just shakes his head against the seatback, and wakes up disoriented half an hour later as Shia hands over some cash and swings their bags over his shoulder.
Shia’s mom calls a hello from the living room as they stumble in. She’s watching Poirot on the television and eating cereal over her table mosaic. Zach drops onto the couch with her and says, “Why’d you let him get so famous, Shayna?”
She just says, “There’s egg salad in the fridge, boys.”
Shia shouts, “Thanks, ma” from the kitchen, and comes in with a glass of water, which he sips from, and then offers to Zach.
“I know, I know,” Shayna sighs. “I just wish I’d known then.”
“Known what?” Shia says, sitting down between them. In thirty seconds he’s asleep on Zach’s shoulder, and before Poirot interviews his first suspect, Zach’s asleep too.
ix. Paris, je t'aime
Left to his own devices Shia knows he’s a homing pigeon. Drop him off somewhere without an itinerary or a job, and he’ll just turn in circles till he figures out the quickest way home. He always shocks himself when he stops for coffee or smokes somewhere, like the thirty second interaction with the clerk behind the counter is both risky and valuable. Maybe it is: how often does he talk to a genuine human being these days?
But Zach - and as Shia pokes through a French newspaper in the empty patisserie, he realizes that he is pretty alright with this - meanders. He leaves Shia to loiter with his americano as Zach chats with his probably perfect accent to the mothering type selling the coffee.
Shia has no clue what they’re saying. But Zach eventually comes away with a pair of croissants and a smile, and says, “Her son owns that little bar on rue Mazarine, she says. L’horlage. I probably know him.”
Shia puts the paper down, turns that one word over in his mouth l’horlage and says, “So what, you want to book a show?”
Zach rips at his croissant, picking a probably random direction to turn as they come back out onto the wet street, where it’s been raining and cold and kind of miserable all morning. He’s not technically on tour anymore, that was supposed to end in February. “Well, no.” Zach says, eventually. “Maybe.”
Shia grimaces, thinking about what his publicist would do to him if he started performing stand up or whatever out of contract. Years of being owned by media conglomerates has at least taught him what gets you in trouble with their lawyers. But he doesn’t say anything.
Zach protests the grimace anyway, a little whine in his voice, “It’s not like I’d be performing. I don’t have a band. I’d just like, bring the trumpet. See who’s around.”
Shia raises his hands, “I didn’t read your contract, man. I don’t know.”
Zach actually rolls his eyes. It makes him look fifteen and bitchy as hell. “That’s not the point. At all.”
But Shia doesn’t get the point. He doesn’t know where they’re going, first. And he doesn’t know why Zach loves Paris so much, second. He can guess, probably. Like why Zach is staying in that rented room over the cemetery rather than taking up with Shia in the big-ass hotel that the studio’s paying for. Potential photographic evidence on Perez aside, it’s not necessary to full-on slum it.
But that’s where Zach stayed when he lived here, and that’s where he stayed when he was a sixteen-year-old gypsy groupie. And that’s where all of his French-speaking friends are, so.
So Shia’s the second choice, this time around.
“I have to call some people,” Zach says. They’ve hit another intersection. Shia has no clue where they are. His mind goes in grids and freeways. Paris has neither.
Shia nods, “Okay.” He took the afternoon off, pissed off his publicist to do it. To meander with Zach.
Zach sighs, “So I’ll see you later.”
Shia can take a hint, or an order. He catches a cab.
Mandy sighs at him too, over the phone, but the magazines don’t mind, really. They send over their interviewers a day early and Shia offers every one of them espresso before he gets to talking about what he liked about the original, and about Paris, and how New York, I Love You is necessarily different. Not better, just different. Each director’s vision, blah blah. True love, warped love, misguided love, sad and honest love.
He doesn’t say, ever, that Paris and New York can screw themselves and that the only place he wants to be in love is Los Angeles.
And then there’s that thing downstairs tonight, and Mandy’s assistant delivers his three-piece suit, which is linen and grey. He changes, and then goes down to stand around smiling with all the people he didn’t work with and doesn’t know except from magazines, but whose big names are attached to the film from the other vignettes.
He almost feels nervous, and downs a quick shot at the bar inside just to deal with being the token DUI starlet in attendance. He gets caught by one of the Coen brothers - maybe, he’s not sure - and gets an unimpressed look. So he slinks over to chat with Rachel and Blake, who are clustered against the bright lights of the movie stars proper, smiling hopefully but not crossing any undrawn boundaries. And then he goes back for another drink.
He’s having a good time, he decides, he’s always liked this kind of thing. He moves among people and their little groups easily. Avoiding that one Coen brother, carrying a water even though he’s drinking vodka at the bar. He only swears inappropriately twice.
And then he takes another drink, and waves off from one last conversation about how lovely Paris is in the spring, (isn’t it lovely?). And he leaves.
He gets in a cab, and asks for the rue Marzipan, which is wrong, but the driver figures it out, and Shia is happy to pay the jumped-up rate for asshole Americans, seeing as he pretty much defines the stereotype himself.
The patisserie woman’s son’s unpronounceable bar is dark and full of people, and it’s easy to stand at the back in his shirtsleeves and two hundred dollar suspenders - where did he leave his blazer? - and watch Zach in the centre of a circle of vagrant-looking musicians. He fits right in: snarled hair and closed eyes and an agonized voice. The dozen instruments and three dozen voices all together sound like a call to war.
Shia stands there for probably an hour, just watching, sometimes listening, as the rest of the crowd shifts and listens or doesn’t. He wants another drink, but he waits.
When the music stops, at least for a while, Zach looks around with an embarrassed smile, nods at something said in maybe French, maybe whatever. He doesn’t look drained dry, like he did in Washington, the few times Shia saw him play last year. He doesn’t look like he’s just expelled his last breath through his trumpet. His eyes are bright, and his hair is wet with sweat.
Honestly, he looks like he just got laid, and when Shia slips in beside him, a surprise in this milling room of people all wanting a glass of something, he rubs his fingers in under the sweaty tangle of his hair. A little jealous, maybe. But Zach doesn’t even flinch away, he just turns and grins. Wide and unselfconscious, like he invited Shia here, like that weird thing on the street never happened. “Oh god, Shia. Hey, come meet everyone.”
Shia does, and some part of him halts the flow of liquor so that now he’s actually nursing a water and remembering people’s names even though he doesn’t know them already, didn’t grow up looking at them on tv. They’re all amateur musicians and street painters and baristas and pedicab drivers. No one comments on the loveliness of the season. No one looks twice at what’s in his hand.
It’s dawn when they fall asleep. Shia registers that, at least, as he tucks his legs up behind Zach’s on the squat chaise in Matthieu the cellist’s apartment. They helped him get his instrument home, along with a whole herd of accordionists and Jerome’s pedicab, and then Zach said it wasn’t worth the fifteen blocks back to his room by the cemetery, they may as well just stay for an hour or two.
Everyone else is in the kitchen, someone’s making eggs and there’s the smell of coffee, but Shia just puts his nose into Zach’s shoulder and thinks that maybe he was a little hard on Paris. And that yeah, it is kind of lovely in the spring.
Wordcount: 5177
Notes: Installments seven, eight and nine of fifteen.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
vii. My house of reeds
By the high heat of summer Zach is ready to be gone. Shia comes east to visit, but Zach is like a shut-in, he frets about leaving to go to the deli for sandwiches, he frets about staying in, he frets about sex because it means he isn’t working on the EP. He gets up, after, and stalks naked and silent to the bathroom. Runs a shower. Emerges clean and dressed and goes straight back into his studio. Shia pulls on his crumpled boxers and goes out to the balcony to smoke.
The EP hangs over them both, and when Zach locks himself in his studio, he listens to the same three tracks over and over at a painful volume. The only ones he has, half-finished, apparently, from his time down in Mexico last fall. They’re almost a year old, already. When Shia asks to hear them, Zach gets this look in his eyes, almost an anxiety. He hedges, then comes out with a strict no.
So Shia, unless he wants to stand listening at the door, is left at loose ends, thinking about his own obligations. The media junket for Eagle Eye is coming up. He feels the pressure of a time shortage. He knows Zach will leave him to the wolves for that couple of weeks. And even before then, he should be following up on leads, hustling for work in the avenues that Teresa can’t cover.
But he wants to be here. He’s been waiting to be here with Zach for months. He wants to see the city and Zach’s friends and exes and go out at night and yeah, have a normal life for a bit.
He’s here for Zach, who isn’t showing any kind of emotional presence at all.
Zach comes out of the studio in the middle of one afternoon and crawls back into bed, wordless, socks dangling off the end of the bed. Shia comes out from the kitchen, mayonnaise on his hands, and says, “You want a sandwich?”
No response, so he plants his feet. “You have to stop, dude. You’re spinning your wheels.”
Zach shakes his head into the pillow, groans something that isn’t words. A lament.
Shia says, “Fine.” He wipes his hands, and scrounges Zach’s phone out from a pile of half-clean pants that belongs to both of them. He’s not worried about getting confused because, unlike Zach, he can read a designer label.
He picks a name that sounds right - “Nick’s in the band, isn’t he? Red haired guy?” - and dials while Zach turns his face to watch from the pillow in silent protest.
Nick answers his phone with, “So I guess you’re not dead.”
And Shia says, “No, but he’s almost there. You should see him, he’s like a southern belle with the vapours.”
“Um-” says Nick. “Who-”
“This is Shia, I’m at his place right now, actually. Could you do me a favour?”
There is a pause where Shia can imagine Nick mouthing Shia? to himself, then a more pleasant moment of comprehension. Zach looks a little wretched down there on the bed, so Shia can assume he’s been kissing and telling. He hopes Nick is a close friend, and more to the point, a good one. “I need to plan like, a little intervention here or something. I don’t know, if it was me I’d need a pubcrawl, but it’s not, so-“
“Who, Zach? What’s wrong with him?”
“Uh.” Shia says into the phone, glancing down at Zach, who is actually hiding his face under the pillow and groaning. “He spends a lot of time in the studio. I don’t know what he does in there, he sure as hell isn’t working.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says Nick, he sounds like maybe he is a bit upset, actually.
“So how about you call around and get everyone together someplace? Like at a bar, or maybe a diner-“
“No, we’ll just come there. I seriously thought he might have broken a hand or caught the bird flu. It’s been weeks. Tell him he’s a douchebag for me, alright?”
Shia hangs up and tells Zach he’s a douchebag. Zach rolls over onto his back and proclaims to the ceiling, “You can’t count on me for anything.”
Shia has to leave the room and its tragic princess alone for a minute.
He goes downstairs and buys enough alcohol that he has to make two trips to bring it back up. Musicians, right? As actors love their liquor, musicians love their wine. Or their beer, he bets on both.
Nick comes in half an hour later - no knock, they’re just suddenly there in the kitchen - with three people who get introduced as Kristin, Jason and Paul. They’re all that standard breed of sweat-soaked but still pale hipsters that populate New York through the breezeless summer. The kind you’d never see in LA, because they don’t cultivate melanoma like the cool kids there do. No beaches, just cement, and a kind of neutral enthusiasm that means no one says, Oh fuck, I know you!
He shakes their hands and offers them drinks, thinking: girl with glasses; solemn guy with blonde hair; and jazz-hat, and hopes Paul doesn’t take off the hat, because that will fuck up his system.
They have instruments with them, too, and Jason pulls a huge baggie of something frozen out of his backpack and starts rummaging around in the cupboards for a large pot.
Shia points him in the right direction and Nick says, “We went back to Albuquerque last week, so now we have some genuine home-cooked New Mexican chili for when we’re all drunk off our asses.” He raises his beer in a toast to Shia’s fridgeful of liquor.
“My mother’s chili will make you sweat through all your orifices,” says Jason. “Prepare yourselves.”
Kristin groans and says, “Oh god, Jason. It’s freaking three hundred degrees in here already.”
Jason says, “That’s the point.”
Then they all look over as Zach skulks out of the bedroom, his socks pulled back on and his hair still a godawful mess. Shia notes that he’s actually changed out of one large white t-shirt and into another one, less soaked with sweat and frustration.
He smiles at them, probably trying to look apologetic and winsome, but he looks like a sleepwalker.
Shia looks to the others and Nick says, “You little shit, what is up with you?”
Kristin says, “Oh come on, it’s not like he missed anything. You guys went on vacation.”
Zach says, “I’ve been-” but that’s as far as he gets. Everyone waits.
“We turned down like, three shows, dude.” Jason spreads his hands. “I mean, it’s cool. But we wondered what happened.”
Zach says, “I just got-“ and shrugs so eloquently that his hands spin in circles.
Nick shakes his head and hands him a beer. Halfway there he changes his mind and pulls the bottle back: “But there’s still a band, right?” He doesn’t give Zach the beer until he gets a mute glare.
Then Paul perks up and says “Cheers, everyone!” even though his bottle is half-empty already.
Shia helps Jason poke at the melting lump of chili - which, yeah, smells awesome - and then more people arrive. Perrin, unibrow; Tracy, curly hair and earrings; Tom, tall and windburned, the only one with any sun on him; a whole herd of people who he doesn’t get introduced to. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in August and apparently no one in Zach’s social circle has a job that requires showing up. It’s kind of frightening how fast the place fills up. People start making their own liquor runs downstairs.
Shia lurks, supervising, nursing his one beer and resolved that it will be his only. He’s the stranger, and people seem to think it’s best just to ignore him, but Zach is surrounded. And smiling and drinking and speaking, which is perfect.
Nick catches him while he’s checking the studio for opportunists - this is getting close enough to a house party that he’s not above a little security for Zach’s instruments - and says, “So I kind of want to blame you for how useless he’s been. Since, uh, May.”
Shia raises his eyebrows and straightens from tucking a chair in under the desk. Nick seems like a friendly guy, all teeth and frizzy hair, but he has a stake in this, too. Everyone always does.
Nick sits on the stool behind Zach’s half-dismantled drum kit, he picks up a stick and chatters it idly against a rim. “He’s not exactly a focused guy, you know. He’s more - consumed. Like, it tortures him even when he doesn’t want to think about it. When he isn’t supposed to be thinking about it. He has fun for a bit with it, and then you turn around and it’s become this albatross. And he’s staggering under it, and you want to help him but he doesn’t want help. It’s his thing that he does.”
Shia is frowning. He says, “Are we still talking about the music, here?”
Nick shrugs, grins. “I guess it works on multiple levels.”
Shia crosses his arms and shifts his feet. “So you’re saying I’m Yoko, here.”
“No,” says Nick. He stops, he looks up. “No. I just thought I’d tell you that this isn’t abnormal for him. It’s just the way he is. He’s amazing for months on end, does it better and faster than anyone else, and then he just drops everything and it all falls apart and even he can’t figure out why.”
Shia nods. He doesn’t want to nod because who the fuck is this guy to be selling a Coles Notes version of Zach to the asshole who’s banging him?
Nick must feel bad or something because he takes another swig from his bottle and gestures with an open hand. “You know, it’s good, in the long term. He’s hit the bottom before, maybe you’ll avoid it this time. We’re just. We need him. So we all worry.”
And that’s all he says, we worry before he turns around and goes back out into the hall.
Shia follows him, eventually. First he spends half an hour sitting where Nick was sitting and finding it impossible to make that same smooth rattle of sound come out of the stick in his hands. Nick knows what he’s doing, he’s been doing it for a while, right?
Shia finds Zach on the balcony and clears a space for himself to stand around with all the people who need Zach, and worry about him.
He stands there all night and he drinks maybe half a dozen more beers and they both wake up with hangovers. While Zach keeps his cheek pressed against the toilet, Shia goes down to find some coffee. When he comes back, he books a pair of tickets to Oaxaca, Mexico.
He drops the boarding passes onto the bathmat and says, “You better stop puking long enough to pack.”
Zach just looks up with hollow eyes and the opposite of a grin. “What the hell?”
Shia just shrugs, and goes to follow his own advice.
Zach starts talking when they get in the cab. Keeps talking through security and a drink in the lounge. The guys he knows that’ll pick them up from the airport; the little restaurant that serves poached eggs with chiles for breakfast; and the music. Zach gets so excited about it that pulls his laptop out as they’re sitting in the departure area, opens some files, offers his headphones. “So you want to hear what I’m working on?” he asks, a little shy, a little coy. Smirking and totally mortified all at once.
Two weeks down south in this little town and Zach will have his album, Shia thinks, listening to the funeral march, the warlike declarations of seventeen brass pieces airing their raw nerves.
viii. You stand between me and all my enemies
At first it’s just the one reporter, and Zach’s pretty sure that she wasn’t even there for Shia to begin with, because first, they took the red-eye from Utah and it got pushed back five hours because of a snow storm, and because second, she’s asking questions like “What’s coming up next for you, Shia?” and “How’s the love life?”
She circles around them both with her microphone and camera guy, obviously taking Zach as some kind of retainer or maybe a really ineffectual bodyguard. Shia just smiles and says, “Hi, how are you?” to the camera guy and keeps moving down the concourse.
That’s when people start taking pictures: camera phones, and tourists with their twenty-pound Nikons pulled out of careful packing jobs. It’s 10am, and they’ve been up since 7am yesterday, except for one of those weird naps on the absurdly short flight from Salt Lake City. They have dirty hair and greasy skin and Shia can’t really put his sunglasses on indoors without looking like a complete jackass, although he does find his baseball cap, belatedly.
Zach tries to keep some distance between them, like, a good four feet because he feels as if one touch on the elbow, put up for posterity on some pissant’s blog, will call the sharks to come circling in. This is why he steps aside when a kid just a little too tall to be on the cute side of puberty comes up with his ushering mother to ask for an autograph.
Shia’s face, a mask of polite oh an autograph, of course.
They pause there, and people streaming by slow down to look at the ambiguous centre of this half-formed circle. It’s the reporter, really, and the kid and the hot-faced mother, and all the murmuring people standing in the lineups, necks craned.
People going by slow, and stop, and three more kids - ok, teenagers - inch forward.
Zach is getting nervous, half-buried in the crowd. Shia is not looking up, not looking past the faces immediately in front of him. That flat, nice-guy smile in full effect, like it might erase his grunginess, the hoodie and jeans, and the duffel dropped at his feet, the worried other half of a potential million-dollar GAY LOVE AFFAIR! story hovering in the middle distance.
Then someone says, “Hey lady, you really think a drunk driver’s a good role model for your kid?” and there’s a muttering of agreement, and someone else says, “Shut up, asshole,” and the surge of anonymous people shifts and crowds closer to Shia and his growing collection of attendants.
Zach actually gets pushed to the side by someone who wants to take a picture of half of the back of Shia’s head, and he snaps at the guy, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” before he even thinks, and then steps immediately back as the offended party turns to him.
At that point he tries to actually get closer to Shia - say, it’s time to go, let’s just go - but he finds it a little difficult. People are both sluggish and irritated. Airport security is shouting to clear the area and some of the mob starts to slough off, but the people interested in biting off that piece of celebrity don’t move. They crowd closer. Zach is stuck a good dozen feet off, shouldering back and forth. He can hear the reporter say to her camera, “the fledgling action star is getting a huge reaction here in the domestic terminal.”
Zach is hungry, and exhausted and fucking not enjoying this shit. Shia looks like he’s still signing notebooks and boarding passes. One kid at a time, like he could give every person here the piece of him that they want.
Zach gives up, shoulders his way out only to get jostled by a security guard. “Keep moving,” the woman says.
So he just drifts. Takes his bag to an empty row of seats a ways down the concourse and thinks about how they thought they were so smart, not checking any baggage. Zach didn’t even bring an instrument, they wanted to be really light on their feet for this thing. Shia’d been to Sundance already, three years ago for that Robert Downey Jr. film, and he said it was easier if you just came and went, no investment.
He didn’t have a film there this year, anyway, but they went because Zach had an interest in his own rejection. Fucking Cary Fukunaga and that cancelled soundtrack. The man asked for Zapotec-inspired brass, and then changed his mind and wanted a string quartet after Zach was in up to his elbows and halfway done.
He was hoping the film sucked, because the EP he’d salvaged out of the mess did really well. Like, really fucking well.
But then, the definition of really fucking well changes somewhere between Shia’s circle and Zach’s. Paul and Jason didn’t quit their jobs at the coffee shop, anyway. Which is why the band had to do another tour.
That’s the problem with having an internet fanbase: the album sales are shitty even though everyone has a copy. But everyone wants to buy a t-shirt, so.
So here he is in January and instead of that year in Morocco, he’s planning a second tour to appease the Europeans. And in between he gets stuck in Shia’s shitstorms and wonders if anything he’s composed will ever matter half as much as his boyfriend’s latest bylaw infraction.
He’s sitting fifty feet down the way, but by now security has thinned the crowd enough that Shia is actually walking. A uniform on either arm, basically like a prisoner or royalty. Zach gets up and follows, not really eager to get too close. There are still cameras and eventually, there is a cab. Shia shakes one of his escorts’ hands with a professional nod and a thank you, it’s been a pleasure or whatever and Zach somehow slips through to where Shia can put a hand on his back in official sanction, push him into the back seat. Man and manservant, in the public eye.
“Oh my god, I am fucking starving” is what Shia says when the door is closed. And to the cab driver, “Laurel Canyon, but could you stop at uh, a Jack in the Box or something?”
Zach puts a hand through his hair, rubs at his face, fights a sigh.
Shia says: “I just want to crawl into the hot tub and wallow there. A shower and bed is too much, you know? I need to multitask.”
Zach doesn’t even nod, he just lies back against the seat and watches everything blur as it goes by.
“Dude, I’m sorry you had to be there for that. That was so unnecessary.”
“Whatever, you loved it,” says Zach, guilty as soon as he hears the words come out of his mouth. He thought, somehow, that it’d be gentle and mocking, but his tone is bitter. He almost laughs at himself: which is it, jealousy or envy?
Shia doesn’t take his hand away. But he turns to look out his own window, quiet. After a while he says, “No, not really.”
The cab driver lounges through the lineup at the drive-through, and makes them get out and eat at a picnic table after laughing at Shia’s attempted bribe, “How much you think new upholstery costs these days, kid?”
“Should’ve grabbed a limo. Outside in the dead of fucking winter,” Shia mutters, fishing around in the bag for his onion rings. Zach just powers through his burger, eager for the rush of sleepy satisfaction, not minding the additional grease or the slight chill in the air.
No one approaches them as they scarf their food, possibly because they’re the only people not sitting in a vehicle and it’s the middle of an ugly lunch rush. They see an SUV bump a parked hatchback twice, and then decide to park two spaces over, instead. The cab driver is taking a nap while the meter runs.
Zach wants to ask, what did you ever do to deserve that? He wants to know. But he doesn’t ask, because that word - deserve - is treacherous, and he almost doesn’t know what he means.
“You handled it well,” he says instead, trying for honesty while he wraps his foil up into a ball.
Shia eyes him, swallows, says, “I don’t know how to handle it. It just keeps getting worse.”
“But you’re calm about it, you stayed calm.”
“Did I look calm? I wasn’t calm. Maybe calm like a drowning man.”
Shia actually looks more anxious now than he did half an hour ago. Zach says, “If I were you, I would’ve fainted.” He’s not exaggerating. Once he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in the middle of the street in Paris. Nick brought him to a hospital, they cancelled the rest of the tour.
Shia just shrugs, like, yeah, but you can do that.
Zach cancels a lot of shows. He disappoints a lot of people when he does it, but he can still do it. Compare that to what happened with Shia’s accident last summer: endless apologies, public and private, even when it turned out not to be his fault, even when the breathalyzer sample was released and everyone found out he’d blown a point oh-six, so still stupid, but not illegal. Even after that, Michael sent over the money numbers as a guilt trip - or a reality check as he called it, the asshole - numbers that said Shia put a couple of people out of work, cost everyone at the studio and production companies hundreds of thousands.
Screw his broken hand, the fingers that don’t bend too good anymore: the problem people have with Shia now is that he owes them. He’s owned by everyone who’s ever laid eyes on him.
Even if the definition of owned changes between his circles and Shia’s, Zach knows there’s nothing to envy in that.
Shia slurps up the rest of his drink, collects the garbage and trashes it. When they’re back in the car he rubs his belly and says, “Eugh.”
Zach says, “Don’t make me roll down the window.”
Shia says, “You think I wouldn’t warn you if that was necessary? God, Zach, are we apes?”
Zach just shakes his head against the seatback, and wakes up disoriented half an hour later as Shia hands over some cash and swings their bags over his shoulder.
Shia’s mom calls a hello from the living room as they stumble in. She’s watching Poirot on the television and eating cereal over her table mosaic. Zach drops onto the couch with her and says, “Why’d you let him get so famous, Shayna?”
She just says, “There’s egg salad in the fridge, boys.”
Shia shouts, “Thanks, ma” from the kitchen, and comes in with a glass of water, which he sips from, and then offers to Zach.
“I know, I know,” Shayna sighs. “I just wish I’d known then.”
“Known what?” Shia says, sitting down between them. In thirty seconds he’s asleep on Zach’s shoulder, and before Poirot interviews his first suspect, Zach’s asleep too.
ix. Paris, je t'aime
Left to his own devices Shia knows he’s a homing pigeon. Drop him off somewhere without an itinerary or a job, and he’ll just turn in circles till he figures out the quickest way home. He always shocks himself when he stops for coffee or smokes somewhere, like the thirty second interaction with the clerk behind the counter is both risky and valuable. Maybe it is: how often does he talk to a genuine human being these days?
But Zach - and as Shia pokes through a French newspaper in the empty patisserie, he realizes that he is pretty alright with this - meanders. He leaves Shia to loiter with his americano as Zach chats with his probably perfect accent to the mothering type selling the coffee.
Shia has no clue what they’re saying. But Zach eventually comes away with a pair of croissants and a smile, and says, “Her son owns that little bar on rue Mazarine, she says. L’horlage. I probably know him.”
Shia puts the paper down, turns that one word over in his mouth l’horlage and says, “So what, you want to book a show?”
Zach rips at his croissant, picking a probably random direction to turn as they come back out onto the wet street, where it’s been raining and cold and kind of miserable all morning. He’s not technically on tour anymore, that was supposed to end in February. “Well, no.” Zach says, eventually. “Maybe.”
Shia grimaces, thinking about what his publicist would do to him if he started performing stand up or whatever out of contract. Years of being owned by media conglomerates has at least taught him what gets you in trouble with their lawyers. But he doesn’t say anything.
Zach protests the grimace anyway, a little whine in his voice, “It’s not like I’d be performing. I don’t have a band. I’d just like, bring the trumpet. See who’s around.”
Shia raises his hands, “I didn’t read your contract, man. I don’t know.”
Zach actually rolls his eyes. It makes him look fifteen and bitchy as hell. “That’s not the point. At all.”
But Shia doesn’t get the point. He doesn’t know where they’re going, first. And he doesn’t know why Zach loves Paris so much, second. He can guess, probably. Like why Zach is staying in that rented room over the cemetery rather than taking up with Shia in the big-ass hotel that the studio’s paying for. Potential photographic evidence on Perez aside, it’s not necessary to full-on slum it.
But that’s where Zach stayed when he lived here, and that’s where he stayed when he was a sixteen-year-old gypsy groupie. And that’s where all of his French-speaking friends are, so.
So Shia’s the second choice, this time around.
“I have to call some people,” Zach says. They’ve hit another intersection. Shia has no clue where they are. His mind goes in grids and freeways. Paris has neither.
Shia nods, “Okay.” He took the afternoon off, pissed off his publicist to do it. To meander with Zach.
Zach sighs, “So I’ll see you later.”
Shia can take a hint, or an order. He catches a cab.
Mandy sighs at him too, over the phone, but the magazines don’t mind, really. They send over their interviewers a day early and Shia offers every one of them espresso before he gets to talking about what he liked about the original, and about Paris, and how New York, I Love You is necessarily different. Not better, just different. Each director’s vision, blah blah. True love, warped love, misguided love, sad and honest love.
He doesn’t say, ever, that Paris and New York can screw themselves and that the only place he wants to be in love is Los Angeles.
And then there’s that thing downstairs tonight, and Mandy’s assistant delivers his three-piece suit, which is linen and grey. He changes, and then goes down to stand around smiling with all the people he didn’t work with and doesn’t know except from magazines, but whose big names are attached to the film from the other vignettes.
He almost feels nervous, and downs a quick shot at the bar inside just to deal with being the token DUI starlet in attendance. He gets caught by one of the Coen brothers - maybe, he’s not sure - and gets an unimpressed look. So he slinks over to chat with Rachel and Blake, who are clustered against the bright lights of the movie stars proper, smiling hopefully but not crossing any undrawn boundaries. And then he goes back for another drink.
He’s having a good time, he decides, he’s always liked this kind of thing. He moves among people and their little groups easily. Avoiding that one Coen brother, carrying a water even though he’s drinking vodka at the bar. He only swears inappropriately twice.
And then he takes another drink, and waves off from one last conversation about how lovely Paris is in the spring, (isn’t it lovely?). And he leaves.
He gets in a cab, and asks for the rue Marzipan, which is wrong, but the driver figures it out, and Shia is happy to pay the jumped-up rate for asshole Americans, seeing as he pretty much defines the stereotype himself.
The patisserie woman’s son’s unpronounceable bar is dark and full of people, and it’s easy to stand at the back in his shirtsleeves and two hundred dollar suspenders - where did he leave his blazer? - and watch Zach in the centre of a circle of vagrant-looking musicians. He fits right in: snarled hair and closed eyes and an agonized voice. The dozen instruments and three dozen voices all together sound like a call to war.
Shia stands there for probably an hour, just watching, sometimes listening, as the rest of the crowd shifts and listens or doesn’t. He wants another drink, but he waits.
When the music stops, at least for a while, Zach looks around with an embarrassed smile, nods at something said in maybe French, maybe whatever. He doesn’t look drained dry, like he did in Washington, the few times Shia saw him play last year. He doesn’t look like he’s just expelled his last breath through his trumpet. His eyes are bright, and his hair is wet with sweat.
Honestly, he looks like he just got laid, and when Shia slips in beside him, a surprise in this milling room of people all wanting a glass of something, he rubs his fingers in under the sweaty tangle of his hair. A little jealous, maybe. But Zach doesn’t even flinch away, he just turns and grins. Wide and unselfconscious, like he invited Shia here, like that weird thing on the street never happened. “Oh god, Shia. Hey, come meet everyone.”
Shia does, and some part of him halts the flow of liquor so that now he’s actually nursing a water and remembering people’s names even though he doesn’t know them already, didn’t grow up looking at them on tv. They’re all amateur musicians and street painters and baristas and pedicab drivers. No one comments on the loveliness of the season. No one looks twice at what’s in his hand.
It’s dawn when they fall asleep. Shia registers that, at least, as he tucks his legs up behind Zach’s on the squat chaise in Matthieu the cellist’s apartment. They helped him get his instrument home, along with a whole herd of accordionists and Jerome’s pedicab, and then Zach said it wasn’t worth the fifteen blocks back to his room by the cemetery, they may as well just stay for an hour or two.
Everyone else is in the kitchen, someone’s making eggs and there’s the smell of coffee, but Shia just puts his nose into Zach’s shoulder and thinks that maybe he was a little hard on Paris. And that yeah, it is kind of lovely in the spring.