Fic: It Is Bright Where You Are [Middleman, Pip/Noser, R]
I'm not really sure if I like this or not - I know there's going to be heavy editing tomorrow morning, at least, because this feels like a shiny stone that needs to be whittled down a little more - but I'm posting it anyway, because guess what, bitches?
WRITER'S BLOCK IS OVER. YESSSSSS.
it is bright where you are
pip / noser
middleman; r-whatever. general spoilers.
is it bright where you are?
have the people changed?
does it make you happy you're so strange?
- smashing pumpkins,
"the beginning is the end is the beginning"
When Pip is seven-and-three-quarters, his father evicts a tenant. She is screaming and pleading even as he throws her couch cushions out into the hall, her little brown children scattering like ants, but he roars at her out, out.
"Do you understand what I'm trying to show you, son?" his father asks.
And yes, Pip says, he does. He understands.
*
It's the same, always the same, even when it's different. Thin sneer, crook of full lips, widened eyes and banging into drywall. Fingers and cock and tongue, tasting the dark, humid crease between Noser's hip and thigh.
Lick, come, collapse.
(Rinse, wash, repeat.)
They're post-coital, sprawled sweaty on Noser's mattress, sheets tangled around his ankles. Noser hums a few bars of Wonderwall, and, almost absently, Pip considers the emptiness creeping inside him, aching like the hollow of a missing tooth. "I'm going to kick you out," he whispers languidly, into the shell of Noser's ear. "I'm going to kick you out and you'll end up in the streets, none of your little friends will take you in because you're fucking me and your parents don't like you. I could kick you out, Noser. I'm the only thing keeping you off the streets."
The worst thing, he thinks later, is how Noser just murmurs, mmm, and falls a little farther into sleep, like he heard and didn't even care.
*
His first day of art school, he barges into his sister's room. "I know about Jenny Krizinski," he says. "I know about Katie Waters."
She goes pale, and puts down her hairbrush very slowly. "Are you going to tell Dad?" she whispers.
Pip considers her for a moment.
"Strip," he says. "I need to paint you."
It is 2003. She is fourteen.
*
In a way, he admires Wendy Watson. She is proud and strong, everything he should be and everything he's not: not afraid, not weak or guilty of weakness. Not feeling the weakness in her soul like a tumor or a little black worm: wriggling, nauseating.
Wendy is everything he ever wanted to be. So he takes her art, makes it his own, and hopes the rest of her will follow.
*
Pip has had the perfect life. No, don't laugh, you fucker, don't laugh because it's true. His parents are loving and prosperous; when other children were packed on city buses and learned to do dope in the schoolyards, he got a good education. He has money when he wants it, and he may be an artist but he doesn't know what it's like to starve.
Pip may have had the perfect life, but that's just it: he doesn't want perfect. He wants more.
*
In college he takes walks late at night - dressed all in black, hair spiked into needles, his grey face gleaming like a pair of brass knuckles. It's times like these he can feel the edge of danger inside himself, poised, sharp and waiting like buried blade up. Something worthy of ambush. Worthy of blood and sex, anger exploding away into the dark, dark sky.
*
Pip's never really had friends. Groups, yes - people like him, mostly, the ones who would see nothing wrong with climbing up a ladder of bodies to get to the top, but also Wendy's group. Art-school people. Drug people. Paint-with-their-own-blood-and-feces people. Most of them had been too stoned or too high the first few times he hung out with them, and by the time they'd sobered up he was just too much of a regular. Because Pip knows why he's there, of course. After all, if he wasn't, who would they make fun of? Who would they laugh at behind all of their shaking hands? This way, he's important. He's needed. He's 10x2 removed from all of them, but that's okay, because they're all just planets to his giant giant, his supernova, they're all just awed at his brilliance anyway.
*
The thing is, for Pip, love can be boiled down to a brown-bag lunch waiting on the kitchen counter. It's the rasp of feet against the sticky linoleum of summertime, and the bloodstain Nana cleaned up, scrubbed up all tidy, that time Mother walked into a door.
(The first time he touches Noser, he marvels: Noser's so warm.)
*
"You know, it's okay for you to hate me," Pip says.
Noser thinks about this for a moment.
"Okay," he says.
*
(Once when he was a little boy he burned ants with a magnifying glass. Just like any other little boy, of course, he found a peculiar pleasure in this little act of sadism, but it wasn't enough. Little Pip wanted something different. Something more. Instead, he built unsolvable mazes and instead watched the ants crawl tirelessly through them, crawling, crawling, tracing out his grand design.)
*
At first he thought he would want to top. Pip had never actually done this before, but he has eyes and a modem, porn isn't that hard to find; a little re-education and he's good, right? But then he thought of Noser lying still underneath him, calm and cold and unshakeably cool while Pip rutted in and out of him, and that fucking inscrutable smile, man, just like the Cheshire Cat, wrecking himself while Noser stayed -
"Noser?" he asks.
"Yeah, man?"
"Fuck me."
Noser fucks like he does everything else - laid-back, lazy. Pip's on his back - he's not getting on his knees for Noser no matter how much this hurts - keening but mostly quiet, and after a while he can see the cracks starting to appear, pieces of Noser's calm flaking away into something primal, animal, rude, and suddenly it's too much, maybe, because Noser stiffens and comes and collapses into a heap of limbs, a modern art piece - skin shining like beaten bronze.
Being powerless, Pip discovers, is really only a different type of power.
*
Pip's always been a controlling boyfriend. Where are you going? Don't wear that skirt. Don't talk to that guy. When he manages to get them, Pip's girlfriends are always weak, soft, malleable like the clay he squeezes and watches explode into shards in the kiln. They never stay soft that way, though. They get hurt. They get tough. Then they hurt him.
"Don't you get it?" he feels like begging them when they scream at him. "Don't you understand?"
*
So he tests Noser. Pip gives him wrong directions, wrong times, berating him when he doesn't show. If he's feeling creative he'll cut off Noser's hot water or badger him about rent, roommates, zoning regulations. Once or twice he even makes an effort to smoke all of Noser's pot stash, but marijuana makes him paranoid, and besides, there is just a whole fucking lot of it.
Nights, though, are a different time than days: a parallel universe where Noser falls asleep curled 'round Pip like a lover, all dark hair and soft, warm skin. Limbs flung in the shape of a question mark, maybe, or an apostrophe, and Pip spends hours on his side, staring out the bedroom windows at the boiler steam rising from the roof.
*
"My father's going to kick you and your Neanderthal roommate out," Pip says. "He is. I talked to him."
Pip pauses, licks his lips.
"Move in with me," he says.
Noser snorts, and strums a few more chords on his guitar.
*
His sister comes home for winter break with short hair and ruddy cheeks; happiness in her smile, girlfriend on her arm.
"Her name's Leslie," she says.
"I'll bet," Pip snorts.
That night he finds her in the parking lot, dousing the nude portrait with gasoline.
"This thing is disgusting," she says. "Pathetic," and he knows she's not really talking about lines and shading, canvas and ink.
He shrugs. For a bizarre second, he wants to ask her if he can light the first match.
*
And one day, it just stops. Everything. Pip steps out into the hall and it's just so empty, so silent, that for a moment his bones sing, as if there was no one but him and Noser in the entire fucking universe. He's hollow, echoing, curled in himself and flung outside, and it's like he's the walls and the ceiling and this space they're standing in, them two, it's the same space inside him, the same damn recycled air current drifting right through him.
"I think I love you," Pip blurts out.
Noser freezes. "Yeah, man, that's good," he says cautiously.
"Do you love me?" Pip asks.
Noser looks away. "Naw, man," he says, quietly. "I don't love you."
There is something building in Pip's throat, his own sobbing tower of Babylon.
"Okay," he says. "Okay."
*
Once, he would've thought that they couldn't go on like this. That sooner of later, something was bound to happen, but now he knows that this thing will break off quietly, slide away into the night; Noser will look back on it with the same banality as he he does everything else, unchanged, and Pip will not be changed either. Zero sum, he thinks. Sooner or later things explode, but only if there is a fire to begin with.
Noser, he knows, would say that this means nothing, that without it there would be no difference, but there has to be, it has to be this, because otherwise all the anger and the ache and the empty that Pip feels is just Pip, always. It's just him. So he fucks and is fucked and drinks Lacey's tea, dark liquid thick and sloppy with herbs that scratch his throat like grit as he swallows it all down.
*
Because hey, Mr. God, what about him?
fin.
WRITER'S BLOCK IS OVER. YESSSSSS.
it is bright where you are
pip / noser
middleman; r-whatever. general spoilers.
is it bright where you are?
have the people changed?
does it make you happy you're so strange?
- smashing pumpkins,
"the beginning is the end is the beginning"
When Pip is seven-and-three-quarters, his father evicts a tenant. She is screaming and pleading even as he throws her couch cushions out into the hall, her little brown children scattering like ants, but he roars at her out, out.
"Do you understand what I'm trying to show you, son?" his father asks.
And yes, Pip says, he does. He understands.
*
It's the same, always the same, even when it's different. Thin sneer, crook of full lips, widened eyes and banging into drywall. Fingers and cock and tongue, tasting the dark, humid crease between Noser's hip and thigh.
Lick, come, collapse.
(Rinse, wash, repeat.)
They're post-coital, sprawled sweaty on Noser's mattress, sheets tangled around his ankles. Noser hums a few bars of Wonderwall, and, almost absently, Pip considers the emptiness creeping inside him, aching like the hollow of a missing tooth. "I'm going to kick you out," he whispers languidly, into the shell of Noser's ear. "I'm going to kick you out and you'll end up in the streets, none of your little friends will take you in because you're fucking me and your parents don't like you. I could kick you out, Noser. I'm the only thing keeping you off the streets."
The worst thing, he thinks later, is how Noser just murmurs, mmm, and falls a little farther into sleep, like he heard and didn't even care.
*
His first day of art school, he barges into his sister's room. "I know about Jenny Krizinski," he says. "I know about Katie Waters."
She goes pale, and puts down her hairbrush very slowly. "Are you going to tell Dad?" she whispers.
Pip considers her for a moment.
"Strip," he says. "I need to paint you."
It is 2003. She is fourteen.
*
In a way, he admires Wendy Watson. She is proud and strong, everything he should be and everything he's not: not afraid, not weak or guilty of weakness. Not feeling the weakness in her soul like a tumor or a little black worm: wriggling, nauseating.
Wendy is everything he ever wanted to be. So he takes her art, makes it his own, and hopes the rest of her will follow.
*
Pip has had the perfect life. No, don't laugh, you fucker, don't laugh because it's true. His parents are loving and prosperous; when other children were packed on city buses and learned to do dope in the schoolyards, he got a good education. He has money when he wants it, and he may be an artist but he doesn't know what it's like to starve.
Pip may have had the perfect life, but that's just it: he doesn't want perfect. He wants more.
*
In college he takes walks late at night - dressed all in black, hair spiked into needles, his grey face gleaming like a pair of brass knuckles. It's times like these he can feel the edge of danger inside himself, poised, sharp and waiting like buried blade up. Something worthy of ambush. Worthy of blood and sex, anger exploding away into the dark, dark sky.
*
Pip's never really had friends. Groups, yes - people like him, mostly, the ones who would see nothing wrong with climbing up a ladder of bodies to get to the top, but also Wendy's group. Art-school people. Drug people. Paint-with-their-own-blood-and-feces people. Most of them had been too stoned or too high the first few times he hung out with them, and by the time they'd sobered up he was just too much of a regular. Because Pip knows why he's there, of course. After all, if he wasn't, who would they make fun of? Who would they laugh at behind all of their shaking hands? This way, he's important. He's needed. He's 10x2 removed from all of them, but that's okay, because they're all just planets to his giant giant, his supernova, they're all just awed at his brilliance anyway.
*
The thing is, for Pip, love can be boiled down to a brown-bag lunch waiting on the kitchen counter. It's the rasp of feet against the sticky linoleum of summertime, and the bloodstain Nana cleaned up, scrubbed up all tidy, that time Mother walked into a door.
(The first time he touches Noser, he marvels: Noser's so warm.)
*
"You know, it's okay for you to hate me," Pip says.
Noser thinks about this for a moment.
"Okay," he says.
*
(Once when he was a little boy he burned ants with a magnifying glass. Just like any other little boy, of course, he found a peculiar pleasure in this little act of sadism, but it wasn't enough. Little Pip wanted something different. Something more. Instead, he built unsolvable mazes and instead watched the ants crawl tirelessly through them, crawling, crawling, tracing out his grand design.)
*
At first he thought he would want to top. Pip had never actually done this before, but he has eyes and a modem, porn isn't that hard to find; a little re-education and he's good, right? But then he thought of Noser lying still underneath him, calm and cold and unshakeably cool while Pip rutted in and out of him, and that fucking inscrutable smile, man, just like the Cheshire Cat, wrecking himself while Noser stayed -
"Noser?" he asks.
"Yeah, man?"
"Fuck me."
Noser fucks like he does everything else - laid-back, lazy. Pip's on his back - he's not getting on his knees for Noser no matter how much this hurts - keening but mostly quiet, and after a while he can see the cracks starting to appear, pieces of Noser's calm flaking away into something primal, animal, rude, and suddenly it's too much, maybe, because Noser stiffens and comes and collapses into a heap of limbs, a modern art piece - skin shining like beaten bronze.
Being powerless, Pip discovers, is really only a different type of power.
*
Pip's always been a controlling boyfriend. Where are you going? Don't wear that skirt. Don't talk to that guy. When he manages to get them, Pip's girlfriends are always weak, soft, malleable like the clay he squeezes and watches explode into shards in the kiln. They never stay soft that way, though. They get hurt. They get tough. Then they hurt him.
"Don't you get it?" he feels like begging them when they scream at him. "Don't you understand?"
*
So he tests Noser. Pip gives him wrong directions, wrong times, berating him when he doesn't show. If he's feeling creative he'll cut off Noser's hot water or badger him about rent, roommates, zoning regulations. Once or twice he even makes an effort to smoke all of Noser's pot stash, but marijuana makes him paranoid, and besides, there is just a whole fucking lot of it.
Nights, though, are a different time than days: a parallel universe where Noser falls asleep curled 'round Pip like a lover, all dark hair and soft, warm skin. Limbs flung in the shape of a question mark, maybe, or an apostrophe, and Pip spends hours on his side, staring out the bedroom windows at the boiler steam rising from the roof.
*
"My father's going to kick you and your Neanderthal roommate out," Pip says. "He is. I talked to him."
Pip pauses, licks his lips.
"Move in with me," he says.
Noser snorts, and strums a few more chords on his guitar.
*
His sister comes home for winter break with short hair and ruddy cheeks; happiness in her smile, girlfriend on her arm.
"Her name's Leslie," she says.
"I'll bet," Pip snorts.
That night he finds her in the parking lot, dousing the nude portrait with gasoline.
"This thing is disgusting," she says. "Pathetic," and he knows she's not really talking about lines and shading, canvas and ink.
He shrugs. For a bizarre second, he wants to ask her if he can light the first match.
*
And one day, it just stops. Everything. Pip steps out into the hall and it's just so empty, so silent, that for a moment his bones sing, as if there was no one but him and Noser in the entire fucking universe. He's hollow, echoing, curled in himself and flung outside, and it's like he's the walls and the ceiling and this space they're standing in, them two, it's the same space inside him, the same damn recycled air current drifting right through him.
"I think I love you," Pip blurts out.
Noser freezes. "Yeah, man, that's good," he says cautiously.
"Do you love me?" Pip asks.
Noser looks away. "Naw, man," he says, quietly. "I don't love you."
There is something building in Pip's throat, his own sobbing tower of Babylon.
"Okay," he says. "Okay."
*
Once, he would've thought that they couldn't go on like this. That sooner of later, something was bound to happen, but now he knows that this thing will break off quietly, slide away into the night; Noser will look back on it with the same banality as he he does everything else, unchanged, and Pip will not be changed either. Zero sum, he thinks. Sooner or later things explode, but only if there is a fire to begin with.
Noser, he knows, would say that this means nothing, that without it there would be no difference, but there has to be, it has to be this, because otherwise all the anger and the ache and the empty that Pip feels is just Pip, always. It's just him. So he fucks and is fucked and drinks Lacey's tea, dark liquid thick and sloppy with herbs that scratch his throat like grit as he swallows it all down.
*
Because hey, Mr. God, what about him?
fin.