Work Text:
BAZ
He asks me if vampires live forever.
We’re in his room. I’m sitting up against the headboard reading a book. He’s lying down on his stomach at the foot of the bed, playing Minecraft on his laptop. His wings are folded up behind him, and one drapes over the edge of the bed and trails across the floor. His tail sways languidly. It’s late afternoon, and the sunlight turns him into a whirlwind of reds and golds and bronze, and around this time most everything he does is languid, practically liquid.
After a little while, he gets up to get some water, and he brings me back a glass. As he’s handing it to me (I’m not embarrassed about eating and drinking around him anymore), he asks, “Do vampires live forever?” I nearly spit out my water all over him. He thumps my back a little till I manage to stop coughing.
“I don’t know,” I admit after regaining myself, because I really don’t. Nobody ever thought to tell me, and besides, it’s not like there’s anybody at home that I can ask.
He hums. “Alright,” he says, and goes back to his game. I frown at him, but he’s too absorbed to notice.
Two weeks later I find a note in one of my textbooks (in the middle of a bleeding lecture, no less) in his untidy scrawl. I pocket it to read when I’m alone. I don’t get a moment to myself all day until I’m walking up the hill from the university to the flat, and I pull the folded square of paper out.
I did a little reading, says Simon’s handwriting at the top of the page.
The note itself is a photocopied page from a book. It’s a section of a research study on vampires. I blink, for a second, and I can’t believe what I’m reading.
Vampires, the thing says, live for longer than the average human lifespan, at least by eighty or ninety years. However, with proper diet, exercise, and regular feedings, this can easily extend to a hundred years or more. And then there’s a large paragraph with statistics from the research study which is supposed to support this claim.
I’m twenty, I think suddenly. That’s crumbs stacked up against what I’ve (apparently) got left.
And what about Simon? Is he an average human, even with the wings and tail? Am I going to outlive him by a century? Is there going to be a time in my life where I’ll have to somehow exist without him?
My stomach drops then, and I have to take a few deep breaths in the middle of the sidewalk to calm myself down.
The walk to the flat seems much longer, suddenly. I don’t know why. My insides are in a sick knot the entire time.
SIMON
When Baz shows up after uni, he looks angry. I frown as he pushes past me into the flat without so much as a “Hello”.
“Are you okay?” I ask, and he shoves my shoulders back. I nearly lose my footing, but my wings pop open and somehow keep me from falling over. “Ow, hey!”
He throws a piece of paper at me. “What the fuck is this?” he demands, his upper lip curling away from his teeth.
Oh. He got my note.
“Why did you give me this?’ he snarls.
“Why are you mad?”
“Because!” he yells in exasperation and picks up the note. “ Vampires live for longer than the average human lifespan, at least by eighty or ninety years .” His voice is venomous as he reads it. He glowers at me while I (attempt to) put two and two together.
“The more you know?” I say, frowning, and the statement kind of tilts upwards in a question, because I still don’t know why he’s mad. He starts hitting me, balling up his fists and punching my shoulders, my arms, my chest. There’s no real weight behind his punches, though, and they don’t hurt like they would’ve if he really wanted to hurt me. (I know what it feels like when he really throws a punch.) I pull him closer and hold him tight. He’s still kind of hitting me, and then he huffs and buries his face in my shoulder.
He starts to cry.
“Baz — hey, wait, woah. Don’t cry, why’re you crying? Ninety years. That’s… that’s not bad, is it?” He doesn’t answer. Instead he cries, and we stand like that for a long time, me rubbing his back slowly and saying random, hopefully soothing things in the most gentle voice I can manage, and him, crying angrily, his curled fists kind of trapped between us.
“Of course it’s fucking bad, Snow.”
“Why?”
He laughs, but it sounds empty. “How can someone as clever as you be so thick?” he asks, and it’s more of an exclamation than an actual statement. I don’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed by that, so I let it slide. “I don’t want to grow old without you, you… you fucking halfwit,” he mumbles then, and it hits me like a ton of bricks.
“Oh,” is all I can say, because what are you supposed to say to that?
I hold him tighter till he stops crying. He looks up at me, and his eyes are red, and his nose and cheeks are flushed. He looks at me like he’s searching for something.
“I can’t change anything, even if I wanted to,” I say, kind of quietly, and he doesn’t interrupt. Just waits and listens and searches my eyes for an answer to a question that I don’t even know. “But I’m glad to spend whatever time we have together, together .” And I cringe a little bit. “Sorry. That sounded better in my head,” I add quickly, because it did sound bad. I’m not good with words like he is. Sometimes I wish I was. I wish I could say the things he wanted to hear and I wish I could make him feel better, but I just can’t seem to —
He takes my face in his hands, then, and I stop thinking. He gives me a watery half-smile, and then he kisses me, and I have the sense to kiss him back (even though I’m a little surprised.)
He walks me backwards to my room (it’s become our room now, I think; his iPod deck is plugged into the wall socket; he’s got some succulents and spider plants on my window sill, with a little calendar marked with all the days he has to water them on my desk — colour-coded, mind — and he’s got some books and clothes lying about, mixed in with my stuff) and when my legs hit the edge of the mattress, I let myself fall. He drops on top of me, and my arms snake around him, and he curls into my side. I get the feeling he doesn’t want to fool around, right now, not really. He just wants to be held. So I hold him, stroking his hair and back slowly. Sometimes I’ll kiss his forehead, or his jaw, and he’ll shudder and press closer.
I want to say so much. I don’t know how to. I try to show him with my mouth and my hands all the things I want to say, and some part of me knows that he understands.
BAZ
I’m a mess, an absolutely deranged mess, and he loves me anyway.
I wonder how I got this damn lucky, and I think back to what he said, about being glad to spend whatever time we have together, together, and it’s such a Simon thing to say. It’s so simple and yet it was exactly what I needed to hear. He holds me, and it’s exactly what I wanted him to do, even if I didn’t know it myself.
I’m afraid to lose him (I think I’ll always be a little afraid of that) but I know that right now I have him, and maybe that’s enough. He’s pressing kisses into my hair, kisses that I probably don’t deserve, and I time my breaths with his, till I stop feeling like I’m about to shake apart into millions of pieces. He holds me, and I let myself be held. I’m afraid, but I love him, and every day that we’ll have together I’m going to make sure he knows it. I’ve spent far too long not showing him how much I love him, and I have to make up for it. It has to be enough.
Right now, I can hear him snoring softly and I can feel his arm go limp where it’s curled around me. I think maybe I should take off my shoes, before I glance up at him, and he looks so peaceful that it’s not worth waking him up for.
I kiss the corner of his mouth, because he likes it when I do that, like I can’t get enough of him (I can’t). He smiles, still asleep.
He loves me, and I love him, and maybe that’s enough.
(It is.)