Work Text:
You and Me
You & Me - Disclosure ft. Eliza Doolittle
Slumber of days, slumber of hours.
Simon had dreamed through it all.
Simon had slept like a dead one.
He, a young man of only nineteen years of age, did not see time flow and only expected the next minute : he lived perpetually through the clock's mechanic ticking, that trembled like a churning river, the dirt, soil and stones for only barrier.
The artificial light of the aesthetically pleasing lamp on his desk accompanied his nightly wanderings after the slumbering hours of class. It was oddly reassuring because the lamp was the soil, stones and dirt containing his watery mind.
But, the natural sunlight pierced Simon's eyes. It was surprising ; his genetic heritage had made sure that the burning celestial body would enhance the pigments and hearty golden specks of his skin. He had earthy eyes and thick, wavy brown hair, and was supposed to be immune to the sun.
At only nineteen years of age, Simon was vulnerable, his soul penetrable to everything his mind was prone to, and so on. He slept too much for his own good. He dreamed too much for the real, zealous and luminous souls of youth ; his was full of stones and the metaphysical reality he stepped in was shrouded in an intoxicating, luscious, green mist.
So, when his roommate Jordan had begged him to flee his ivory tower of a room, Simon had snapped a firm "No" at first. Then, he looked in Jordan's face for a long moment, unseen, which were mere seconds in his mind. That face reminded him that they both came from the same fascinating lands and cultures, and flowers sprung on blooming ivy in his chest. Wanderlust, the purest form of desire, overtook the shadow in his eyes, the same land where his father came from, Perú, where you roll the r gently, and pronounce the bosky ú in such a way that its intonation remains in the air, reaching a passing cloud, storming off. That is why he said yes, and apologized to starry Jordan, for once.
The party was not Perú. It had been set up by a senior from the same department as Simon, in a surpisingly big apartment with a pool that glimmered under the moonlight. The different colored lights moved too fast for the slow and distraught movements of Simon. He felt spatially inept to exist. Prisms of churning blood orange mixed with hot and sandy circles of blue, mimicking the colors of a phantomatic beach as the lights dropped harder than the beat, than his life.
Tar black silhouettes threw their hands up in the cripsy air, the shadows of their breath inprinting themselves on the rocky, primitive walls of the loft. Simon could only see their black frames, the lights on the dancefloor burning his eyes too much. Yet the light changed. It became golden, not because of the spots which chose yellow as their new object of amusement ; human warmth radiated from the change in the atmosphere. It concentrated itself in one point of the room, or so Simon felt and saw.
A new song came on, and his hazel eyes turned around like a disco ball. They fell upon one person, dancing fluidly and madly at the same time, the fury of wine and unclean vapors roaring within him. The beat dropped. Time stopped.
The man looked like a preRaphaelite ephebe, jet black curls adorning a pale skin, two piercing dark-brown irises reminding Simon of hellish yet iridescent pebbles on volcanic sand.
He looked young, almost innocent if not for his eyes and his gaze ; he seemed hispanic or latino, which released a small flicker in Simon's belly. The way his hair lashed the air as he danced, the way his eyelids glistened and his matted eyelashes fluttered, the way sweat hung on his features like little diamonds made him look so raw compared to the fading world.
Simon stepped closer, his feet carrying him instinctively. He was only observing and reaching from afar, but he was mesmerized. His spirit was awakening from its slumber. The man's eyes met with Simon's, and something inside him, buried deep within, exploded, shaking him to the core.
He could guess so many things as he held onto the exchange, in a desperate but passionate way. The things he guessed in that curly-haired man's eyes were the most convincing thoughts Simon had had in a while. The latter could see in them a will to live, to renew and to experiment, a hunger and a thirst that he himself had put to sleep, plumbered by the daily superficialities of life. He could see absolute passion in the devilish man's eyes, that translated into his gestures because he did not use the music as a platform for fun. He welcomed the music in his soul and he completely let go of all rationality just for a song.
And this particular song - it broke off the sleeping, almost comatose state in which Simon had been for the past year. The background sound of the violins and the man's movements of the hips and arms whom he had not tore his gaze from, created ripples in Simon's soul. The electro beats were in symphony with his heart's systoles and diastoles, and he could almost hear the man's own cardiac rhythm.
Simon was still static, only his right foot tapping the floor as if to let out slowly all the condensed energy.
The latter, coming from a Peruvian seed, looked again into the stranger's eyes and he saw everything he had not dared to think about : the dry plains and violet hills of Patagonia, the ferocious yet motherly mountains of Perú that hid in their creases little villages and brave minds, the shivering and breathing rainforests that spread at the heart of South America, and the clouds in a timelapse that for once Simon could fathom and follow. Once he drew back from the pull of these magnetic and trembling eyes, this devilish angel came closer to him, smiling ; Simon started dancing. He could feel his limbs clicking into place, inside the universe.
The beautiful man came even closer, a hand freely roaming Simon's wavy and light strands of hair, the other on his hips. Their bodies were close to each other, beating hearts breathing against one another, their eyes never falling from the other's gaze, their lips almost touching.
Suddenly, the dancefloor was washed out by an overwhelming green light, as Simon took the other by the hand and laughed. He did not even squint. With their fingers intertwined, as the mad beat steaded itself and announced the end of the song, the man whispered in his ear :
" By the way, my name's Raphael ".