Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

He must’ve upset god real fucking bad, because the rain pelts down into him with the furry only a divine being could muster. The sun was shining just a couple minutes ago, before a raven’s blink and a cloud consumed the entire sky, letting down all of its pent-up might. Valentino was caught mid-route to the subway. Now, though, rain pours relentlessly, and Valentino’s completely drenched with water, from head to his pitiful socks.

Valentino runs with his hands covering his head, trying to not trip on the slick pavement. He jaywalks and almost falls over, but he eventually finds salvation in a building alcove.

It’s one of the school libraries, he realizes only after. Two massive stone lions stare ahead, guarding the entrance. Even though it’s raining, the humid warm heat is exhausting, so he pushes his way into the building.

He’s never been to this branch before, but the interior is massive. Multiple stories, stairs on either side reaching up. He’s not the only one here seeking shelter from the spontaneous downpour. There’s an elderly woman holding her purse, a mother and a child, a mid-thirties construction worker, a couple of students here and there. Valentino feels like an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong.

A cold chill runs down his spine.

The air conditioning is better than the moist outside air, but he finds himself shivering relentlessly. He awkwardly stands near the door, using a hand to shove his soppy hair out of his eyes, digging for his phone.

“Woah, you’re absolutely soaked.” Says a voice. It cuts through the haze building in his mind.

Valentino looks around, confused, until he finds the source.

Standing next to him is a college-aged man, white, brownish black hair. Square glasses, sharp eyes. A cheekish smile that melts his heart a little too easily.

“Yeah, unfortunately.” Valentino laughs, wrapping himself tighter in his hands. He coughs. “Didn’t know it was gonna rain.”

The other laughs in return, and then they are both laughing, even though what he said was not funny at all. Yet it’s a sincere laugh, one that warms him up so, so fast, that brings him the first dose of happiness, of shared absurdity, of humanity that he’s had in a long, long time.

“Take this, you’re gonna freeze to death in wet clothes.” The man says finally, handing him his jacket, still warm from his body heat. “My name’s Vincent, by the way.”

“Valentino.” He responds, nodding his head. He feels heat rushing to his face, and he smiles softly. Genuinely.

Fate is such a strange thing, isn’t it?

A week later after his unexpected baptism, Valentino finds himself regretfully sitting through the world’s most boring lecture about art history through the ages, and while he’d normally enjoy learning about these topics, the professor’s hive mind of a voice drowns out all possible interest. He’s almost half asleep, vision fading in and out, when the door opens and a wind-swept man runs into the room.

The sound of wood banging against plaster jolts him out of his doze, and Valentino glances to see that it’s the guy from the library. He looks away quickly, instead opting to stare at his notes.

“You’re late, Vincent.” The professor chides.

“Yeah, yeah, I just got transferred to this class and got lost. Sorry! Won’t happen again.” Vincent says, raising his hands in defense. The entire class, like a pack of prairie dogs, turn their heads to glance at the intruder. Valentino feels a heavy weight of unexplainable pity, of secondhand embarrassment, yet Vincent— the target of everyone’s bored scrutiny— seems unfazed.

The professor clears his throat and continues his lecture. “Well, as I was saying, the ancient egyptians—“

“Hey,” Vincent says, and the noise is so sudden and near that Valentino shakes.

He looks up, and finds Vincent’s right next to him, already setting his stuff down. “Hi.”

Vincent doesn’t ask to sit down next to Val; he doesn’t need to. He just does, and Val lets him, and suddenly, all at once, they are friends.

Valentino is alone in his dorm. It is sometime in January. His roommate is gone— Alastor, majoring in communication, someone even more secluded than him (he’s uttered three words to him throughout an entire semester, that being, “Lock the door”, and every attempt at conversation Valentino makes is quickly and efficiently shut down.) Alastor is always, always away, doing something unbeknownst to Val, and only comes back at the very fringes of night. Does he even sleep?, Valentino thinks. Does he even know my name?

Today is one of those days where he’s entirely gone, and Valentino half wonders if he’ll ever see his roommate again. He doesn’t miss him, but it does make him lonely, makes him yearn for another person to talk to, instead of his bed’s opposing wall. He’s supposed to be sociable, explorative, yet he feels so separated from the other students, so uninvited, a stranger who just watches and exists in the background of all the other’s interesting conversations.

But then, ever since that rainy day in September, Vincent has been in his life. Vibrant and buzzing with energy that seeps off him in waves, until Valentino has no choice but to smile a little more, just to keep up with him. He fills in the gaps, he’s always there, always making him laugh, even on those days where Valentino just wants to stay in his bed and do nothing. He’s awfully insistent, and a part of Valentino revels from the foreign concept of being wanted, of being called at 2 am in the morning to discuss shark facts and shows.

The friendship, tight-knit in a way he never expected, had started off with a need: Vincent was comically failing at the art history class, and one day he’d come in so unlike himself, so uncheerful and down and bemoaning, lamenting about how difficult interpreting art was (he had gotten a D on the recent test). He described it as ‘trying to figure out the spirituality of the exact same scribbles and shapes and dog excrement but in different positions and colors.’

Valentino had looked at him, looked at his face that wasn’t too far off from a soggy cat, and offered to tutor him (he worded it as studying together). And so they started studying together every Tuesday at 4:00 pm, in the exact same university library they first met at.

To be honest, at a certain point Valentino didn’t need to study more (there were only so many times one could review Mesopotamian sculpture), and he had started to suspect Vincent didn’t need to either. As he had learned, they didn’t share any classes except for the history class. Vincent was, as he told him, a journalism major, and had been forced to take Art History because he was missing a credit. So, often there was little to do, little to discuss.

Yet, even still, they both came exactly at their agreed time, and sometimes Vincent would bring coffee for the both of them, and sometimes Valentino would bring his art supplies and start drawing, and then their mutual study sessions turned into him teaching Vincent how to draw sessions, and then how to use watercolor, and then how to oil paint, until their Tuesday meetings were more just enjoying each other’s company.

They were best friends, Valentino realized at some point, and he had felt a mallet against a gong radiating outwards from his chest, unsure whether the feeling was happiness or something else.

Then, one day, sometime in late November, he recalls; there was such a strong wet and cold spell, so furious that the sidewalks and roads were unbearable, laced with ice. The library was too far away for both of them to trek through in negative degree weather, so instead they met at Vincent’s dorm, and then at Valentino’s dorm, and then officially at Valentino’s, because Vincent’s roommate was too loud and couldn’t “mind his own business” about anything.

They lived in separate complexes, yet he started to expect Vincent at random times of the day; he would be alone, sketching, or listening to music, or doing nothing but waiting, and then he’d hear a knock on the door, and then he’d open it, heart racing, and there was Vincent: still in his shark pajamas, offering cookies (horribly oily, but still) in exchange for Valentino’s company on Christmas Eve. They'd even exchanged gifts (a painting, a record) after the time finally tipped past 12:59 am and into the next day- Christmas Day, and although it was still dark, dark outside, everything felt so bright, so sharp and brilliant and starlike.

Valentino now stares at the bland door, and at then at his phone, and decides, at a whim, at an impulse, to call Vincent. Of course, the other immediately picks up, despite it being past 11 pm, and the sound of his voice relieves a part of him, smoothing down the edges of glass poking under his skin.

He's at a party Vincent dragged him to, trying to avoid awkwardness, as Vincent was currently in the bathroom. And then, from the sea of people emerges a lanky sophomore; he introduces himself as Anthony, “You can call me Angel, though”, and Valentino reciprocates the pleasantries.

They talk for a bit. Then Angel leans closer, clearly a little drunk. “Hey Val, are you single?”

Valentino freezes up, and the fact that he does is so bewildering to him, he is entirely unsure. “..Yes.” He finally says, and he wishes he just said no, because the face Angel makes hurts him in ways he can’t explain.

“Do you want to fuck?” Angel asks now, and suddenly he’s too, too close, and Valentino wishes, strangely, that Vincent was here.

“No, I’m sorry.” Valentino says immediately. He regrets it, he doesn’t know why he says it, because Angel is exactly his type.

“Bummer.” Angel laughs, and bumps him in the arm. “Is it ‘cause you and Vinnie are dating?”

“We’re friends.” Valentino says quickly.

“Yuppp.” Angel says, dragging the word out. “Well, when you guys get married make sure to invite me.” He winks.

Valentino is struggling with a response, struggling to regather his jangled-up thoughts and calm down his emotions, when an actual angel materializes in the form of a pink-haired woman who yells “Oy! Angie!”, and takes away the blonde man’s attention, and then he is alone again, where he breathes to himself in long ins and outs. Not for long, though, because Vincent returns soon enough, and Valentino feels a part of himself decompress just a little, a balloon losing pressure.

The revelation hits him all at once, later that night, alone in his dorm (Alastor is gone, as always). It’s that slow twisting in his heart, and all he wants in those brief seconds was to be with Vincent, to have him here to talk to, to hug him, to kiss him— and then he jolts up so fast, head banging loudly against the wall. Through the aching, bright pain making rounds through his body, he realizes; I like him. I like Vincent.

Valentino doesn’t know what to do with the feelings. He’s been in relationships before, but the last one in his junior high school year ended horribly wrong, and he knew it was because of his own faults, his own ugly problems, and he knows if he ever lets Vincent know, their friendship will be over. He doesn’t even know if Vincent likes men, if he’s willing to date someone like Valentino, and anxiety rolls through him so hard that he starts trembling like he was 16 again.

He can't ever know, he thinks, and turns on his side and stares at the different shades on the wall, as the outside world slowly paints itself white, snow fluttering to the ground in silent swirls.

He doesn't stay at the library for long. He had stared at the old table they used to sit at for not more than eight seconds, and then promptly left, swerving a hard right, letting the muscle memory take him to the store. He knows the worker at the pharmacy knows him, and he recognizes them as well. They've been acquaintances, familiars in the too-large world, interacting only by necessity. Not quite strangers but also not quite anything else for the past few years. Valentino sees the worker more regularly than he sees his own family, yet he doesn't know their name and they don't know his, and the most Valentino has ever said to them was 'thank you', and only after he receives the standard bottle of pills in a plastic bag.

The next day, Valentino lies in bed, having woken up from a dreamless, medicated sleep. He is staring at the ceiling water stains, but not really. He is in his bed, but he is also not- he is in another place, one just out of reach from the stars, crowded in by colossal, ever changing structures. He is somewhere else entirely, somewhere strange and uncertain and vast. It is in this familiar emptiness in which he sets the stage for the constant back and forth of his mind. He sweeps off the dust, pulls back the curtains and fixes the lights, and then the actors walk in, body expressive but face always obscured, blurred just enough until everything feels wrong, uncanny. And then they act, and he’s god playing with imaginary dolls— rerunning and holding discussions and conversations and emotions at an arm’s reach. The audience is empty, yet he feels millions of eyes on him, and he has this sickening, horrible feeling lurch into the pits of his stomach. You’re going to die alone.

Then a familiar actor walks across this imaginary stage, all black hair (brown in afternoon light), eyes impossible, and Valentino feels such a strange, horrible emotion ringing its way back again; love. Then he makes him move.

Every impression of him is wrong. It doesn’t work, the pieces do not fit together, the voice he plays in his head sounds too much like himself, despite years of trying and trying. And that only brings him another feeling of ugly, ugly patheticness, and then all he wants to do is cry.

It is how it always ends, him crying. Wallowed in self pity and self hatred and self everything but never something else, never with someone else, never with Vincent, because he— Valentino was the one who fucked it all up, he was the one who ruined what they could’ve had, he was the reason it all ended. And now this is his punishment, his personal hell, his retribution for everything. There is no use crying anymore, but at least it is his way of showing he is sorry— he is sorry, so fucking sorry, even if Vincent will never hear the apology.

And then, when time is moving too fast, when he finally leaves his bed and changes clothes and goes on a walk alone, then he will ask himself; Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you make yourself suffer? Why do you still care?

The questions will echo in his head, and he will close his eyes and let his head fall back into the cold sun.

Because I love him, he will respond to the actor, to himself, and then they will look confused and disgusted at him, and then he will try to crawl into the gaps in his skin and die there, forever, burning in an odd self hatred that permeates into his everyday life, into the past which he warps and molds and mourns, into the future as time passes too fast, as he gets older and older and closer to death. Because I love him and he loved me and I don’t think I can love anyone else anymore, he will say to himself, and the admission in words destroys him, validates every single problem etched under his skin.

Because maybe one day he’ll come back.