Work Text:
Jeudi 17:32
“I really doubt Tolkien would have thought of this entire discourse, but he definitely would have enjoyed it.”
Eliott scoffs. “You are a fool if you think Tolkien didn’t foresee this entire discourse decades ago and he’s not cackling from the afterlife right now.”
“You think he envisioned Legolas as a country bumpkin?”
Eliott widens his eyes, waggles his brows with that irresistible grin that has Lucas melting from the inside out on any day. As it is, Lucas is not about to lose yet another debate to his admittedly literary and artsy boyfriend, and so he masks his attraction with what he hopes is a piercing squint.
Lucas is still narrowing his eyes at Eliott and the latter is throwing back his head in a fit of giggles, arms flapping around his middle, when Lucas’s phone buzzes against the kitchen table. He fixes his boyfriend with another second or two of his patented withering glare before wordlessly turning over his mobile.
papa
It’s been a while since our last dinner, and you didn’t get back to me last time with a time. Does tomorrow work? Six, the usual place.
Lucas doesn’t realize he has been staring at his screen for a moment too long until he feels the metal tip of a spoon poke at his elbow.
“What’s the matter?”
Lucas swallows. He conceals the movement with an overly annoyed frown at his phone and taps out a quick Yes, I’ll be there to his dad. He briefly considers adding a period to his sentence, but ultimately sends off the text without it as his customary gesture of minute rebellion.
“Nothing,” Lucas replies after a beat of unnatural silence. He turns back to Eliott and flashes him a quick crease of a smile. “Nothing,” he says again, softer this time. “Just forgot to follow up with my dad about dinner.”
“Forgot,” Eliott repeats. He slurps down the rest of his soup. “I distinctly remember you flopping on the couch like a dramatic starfish last week when he texted you.”
Lucas scrunches up his nose and allows himself a breathless laugh despite the discomfort of their topic. “Shut up. Let me live in my delusions of being a good son.”
“Hey.” Eliott’s spoon clatters against the crockery, an accidental sound that makes them both jump a little, as he hastens to scrape his chair closer. “Don’t say that. You are a good son.”
“Yeah, well.” Lucas rolls his eyes at the table and is suddenly absorbed in tracing a pattern of nicks in it with his thumbnail. “You haven’t met my dad.”
There’s a pause as Eliott licks his lips. “I should say it would be my pleasure to never meet him, but…”
“If that’s how you feel, you should say it. I don’t disagree with you.”
“But,” Eliott breaks in gently, “I know you, Lucas, and I know that me meeting your dad would be important to you.”
“No, it’s not,” Lucas says quickly. And then he bodily flinches at the lie lodged in his throat, and try as he might to swallow it down, it has already left a streak of sourness at the back of his mouth. He flits his gaze upward to meet Eliott’s for the briefest fraction of a second. “I’m sorry, that’s not true. And I didn’t--I didn’t mean to make it sound that way. Like...it’s not important to tell people about you. Because I’d tell the whole world--”
“I know. I understand,” Eliott says once again in that gentle tone that makes Lucas ball his hand into a fist underneath the table to stop up everything inside him.
“It’s more like...he doesn’t deserve to meet you, you know?”
Eliott blinks. Admittedly, this is perhaps the longest stretch that Lucas has ever tolerated a conversation about his own father. And for good reason.
He tries for a teasing tone. “You put me on a pedestal like some Michelangelo. As if I’m some David or something.”
Lucas shoots him an unimpressed look. “If you think Michelangelo’s David has actually got anything on you, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”
Eliott shoves him away and giggles, his arms curled around his middle in that way of his that Lucas knows by heart by now.
Lucas feigns a look of annoyance that probably melts all too quickly into fondness. He shoves his hands into the pocket of his hoodie and sticks out a socked foot to jerk at the leg of Eliott’s chair. But Eliott, knowing his boyfriend by heart just as well as Lucas knows him, already anticipates the move and clutches onto the edge of the kitchen table with the infuriating grace of a wildcat to avoid being tipped over. He tops it all off with yet another roguish waggle of his brows.
“At least I’m your idiot,” Eliott coos, and goes in for a kiss that Lucas expertly dodges.
“I don’t see you denying that you’re an idiot,” Lucas points out. He swerves again, but this time he’s trapped against the edge of the table and really, anyone would be a fool to assume Lucas Lallemant would actually run away from a good makeout with Eliott Demaury.
Eliott gives a noncommittal hum like it doesn’t even matter. And maybe he’s right, and it doesn’t. He reaches forward to capture Lucas’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and raise the smaller boy’s face so he can press a chaste kiss to his lips.
Lucas leans back on his elbows on the table behind him and sighs into Eliott’s mouth as his eyes flutter shut. A moment later, he lifts his arms to wrap them loosely around Eliott’s shoulders, and Eliott hums again at that, sounding soft and melted and incredibly pleased. Sure enough, Lucas feels the curve of Eliott’s mouth as the latter breaks into a smile. Eliott pecks him again on the lips for good measure before drawing back to catch a gentle breath.
“You shouldn’t go if you don’t want to.” Eliott rests his forehead against Lucas’s.
A puff of air escapes Lucas. “You make it sound so easy.”
“Maybe it is that easy.”
Lucas tilts his head up to press a kiss to the tip of Eliott’s nose. “You know nothing is ever that easy.”
“Because we care too much about what everyone else thinks?”
“Yeah, well, I’m done with that.” It’s a lie, and they both know it, and Lucas knows that Eliott knows it because the corners of his eyes turn down in that incredibly piercing combination of sorrow and desperation tempered by helplessness.
Even still, Eliott doesn’t call him out on it, because he knows Lucas and Lucas knows him, and they know he would never do that. Not in a vulnerable moment like this. Instead he cups the side of Lucas’s cheek with his palm. “Just a little time can do so much,” he murmurs. “Remember where you were at the beginning of the year? Where we both were.”
Lucas pretends for a moment not to follow, but the truth is that he understands immediately. Look where we both were just a few months ago. Too scared of others, scared of the truth, scared of each other. Terrified of the truth. You may feel you still care too much now, but just a bit of time can change all that.
Lucas lifts his chin again, perhaps a little defiantly, but the better part of him acknowledges that Eliott can read anything in his eyes. “So what are you saying? I put this off till I feel strongly enough that I don’t give a fuck about what he thinks?”
“It’s not a bad idea.” Eliott shrugs.
The other boy swallows and looks away. Shifting to make himself more comfortable, Lucas tilts forward, but Eliott does not lean back. Instead he allows Lucas to fold like a tide into the warmth of his chest. Eliott keeps his own hands on the table for several moments, not daring yet to pull him completely into a hug. After all, the hedgehog’s spines are still visible, bristling.
“Maybe,” Eliott says after sucking in a long breath. “Depends on which one will turn out worse for you in the end.”
By way of reply, Lucas simply groans into Eliott’s shirt. He thumps his forehead against the latter’s chest with yet another dramatic sigh. “Probably blowing him off again,” he mumbles into the cotton. “Fuck, I’m really gonna have to do this. Okay. Better to just get it over with.”
“I can drop you off and stay at the café across the street so I’m ready to rescue you. Just text me and I’ll be there.”
At that, Lucas actually lifts his head long enough to squint up at Eliott again. “Aren’t you working tomorrow?”
Eliott challenges him with a curve of that damn eyebrow. “Of course I am. Cute Boyfriend Lookout Duty.”
Lucas steels his gaze. “No. You’re working tomorrow. I know you need the shift, so don’t drop it just on my account. I’ll be fine, promise. I’m probably being dramatic like you always say.”
Eliott rolls his eyes. “I say that to poke fun at you.”
“Same difference.”
“You got an outfit picked out?”
“Oh, yeah. Time to pull out the perennial fave: the healthy, well-adjusted, forgiving and adoring heterosexual future doctor son.”
“Well, fuck that. You look way better in that rose shirt I gave you.”
“For once, Demaury, I actually agree with you.”
--
Vendredi 12:06
It’s barely four hours into the day and Lucas already feels stretched thin. Shaking, half boneless, inadequate. He awoke in the morning searching for the energy to face what awaited him and did not find it, until he stuck his hand under his pillow where he always keeps his phone to muffle the alarm and found the sharp corner of a piece of paper instead.
Sure enough, it was the edge of a sticky note stuck to the screen of his phone. One of Eliott’s more complex drawings: in the first frame, a racoon sipping a coffee and staring out the window of a café; in the second, a hedgehog at a dinner table across from a...mammal? It is difficult for Lucas to tell, considering that the head of the spirit animal has been scratched out multiple times with messy strokes. The hedgehog seems tense; how Lucas can tell beats him, but Eliott is nothing if not a talented artist. On the second sticky note, the racoon comes rushing down the street to greet the hedgehog, and the only speech bubble visible is occupied by a series of question marks, a heart and a teacup.
Despite himself, Lucas had breathed out a chuckle. Eliott. Eliott, Eliott, Eliott.
That had thankfully been the push he needed to propel himself from the bed, shower and face the day. It had not, unfortunately, been quite enough to quell every single tooth of anxiety that buried itself beneath his skin.
He’s in line for lunch, and really, it feels so elementary, so terribly stupid how often his anxiety has been triggered in this very spot in months past for so many different reasons. He’s already scouted the lunch room and found the rest of the gang plus Eliott hanging at the usual table with the wonky leg. Arthur is waving at him, and Bas is probably half a second away from turning in his direction and making a face at him that involves his nose or other unfortunate part of his body. Eliott’s eyes are already on him, and that slow, private smile that only ever the two of them can spot from half a mile away.
This is so precious, Lucas thinks hotly, so real. Everything about this hurts him but only in the best way possible because of how tangible it is even with space and distance and bodies and thoughts between them. And yet the mere thought of his father and the dinner table and the familiar command to silence--and--and--those three words--
Je suis gay--
The three words he cannot even speak, the words that are drawn out by his friends and the people around him by promptings and hints and gentle looks.
The three words that his own father cannot figure out from him unless he himself speaks up.
And, alternatively:
Pourquoi es-tu parti?
Because the distance between him and his father has always been vast--it was always a lake since the day he was born, took up the length of oceans the night he awoke to the sound of Mama holding back sobs because Papa never came home--but nothing, it seems, nothing can kill that goddamn desire for him to be seen through the fog. For him to scream, I’m here, this is me, this is who you’re missing, and for the first time have his father see.
“You’re shaking,” Eliott whispers, when Lucas comes back to himself some minutes later and finds himself at the table with him and the gang.
Lucas shakes his head minutely. “No, I’m not.”
“Did you see the--?”
“Yeah. I did. Thank you.” A small and grateful smile.
Eliott levels him then with a look that speaks of nothing and of everything, and he rubs his knuckles against Lucas’s on the tabletop as he speaks. “Just text me and I promise I’ll be there. Okay?”
“Okay.”
And if Lucas maybe feels like his ribs have turned to wood and the splinters might start to show, even after everything Eliott has said and done for him today and last night--he doesn’t mention it.
--
Vendredi 17:59
She’s here.
His fucking girlfriend. Is here.
Lucas is no longer sure whether the feeling that is consuming him now from his feet upward is rage, terror, overwhelming numbness or a mix of all three. Either way, he feels at once frozen like stone and torn irrevocably apart as his father takes a seat by the brunette woman with the chandelier earrings and gestures to Lucas to do the same.
How foolish, he thinks to himself with the cold sort of bitterness that spreads outward through his chest, that he might have thought his father would actually be so insistent on dinner to have a simple father-son bonding time.
Lucas takes the menu that is thrust at him and finds himself fixated on the woman across from him. He’s seen her pictures, of course. They always say that people look different in person than in their photos, and for the most part that has been true, but by God the woman looks exactly the same as she does in every picture she has ever posted on social media. It’s almost as if she is flat, two-dimensional, her mouth moving and her fingers playing with the swirling geometric design of those goddamn chandelier earrings but never registering in Lucas’s vision as a real person.
There are introductions. That much, Lucas is aware of. And then there is wine and an offering of beer for him--to which his stomach twists because never once was he allowed a drink back home. He remembers mutely declining.
“Your father tells me you’re a biology student,” the woman says. There is no fakeness, no hint of simpering, only a half-hearted interest and a bland sort of friendliness, and for that perhaps Lucas should be grateful. But somehow it only makes it worse. Everything makes it worse.
Lucas replies with his gaze still fixed on his father, who has bowed his head over his steak in a barely veiled attempt to avoid eye contact. “Yes, that I am.”
“Oh? And what are you studying to be?”
The boy’s eyes are still boring into the father’s, and when the latter looks up a second later, it is to Lucas’s scorching gaze.
And yet the coolness of Lucas’s voice belies it all. “I’m sure my father has already told you. He wants me to be a doctor.”
His father gestures with his dinner knife. “Tell Violette anyway. I’m sure things can always change.”
“Yes,” says Lucas. He stabs his salad. “They do.” A gulp of his soda. “They have.”
There is a period of marked silence, punctuated only by the grating of his father’s dinner knife against the ceramic plate, and it’s hilarious, really, the sound of it would be making Lucas laugh under any other circumstance. Violette clears her throat with a cough and swallows down more wine. She plays again with those damn earrings.
When she flicks her gaze back in Lucas’s direction, it is not without a discernible tone of apology that somehow only serves to make the writhing something in Lucas’s stomach ache even more.
“That’s all right, Lucas,” Violette says. “Even if you’re not sure yet about your future, you’re still young. There’s still time. As long as you like the path you’ve picked so far.”
“How’s the job?” Lucas cuts in, ignoring Violette completely. Not that he actually gives a fuck about what his father’s doing at work now, but if he has to endure another minute of this ridiculous conversation filled with double meanings, Lucas thinks he just might explode.
His father obliges with a polite rundown of the month’s accomplishments, a summary of who’s been promoted and who’s been let go, absolutely menial details that pass through one of Lucas’s ears and out the other. But anything is better, anything is better than this taste of genuine and sickening interest from a woman he has been prepared to hate with every fiber of his being.
Under the table, Lucas opens up his phone to the messaging app. His thumb hovers over the keyboard, about to send something simple to Eliott like the scared emoji or maybe the vomiting one just for extra emphasis, but he finds that he can’t. He closes his phone, opens it, closes, opens, closes, until his hand is shaking so much that he is compelled to pocket his mobile again.
A long sniff and a shift in tone alert Lucas that his father is about to switch topic. Sure enough, the man leans back and places his napkin primly back on the table before unbuttoning his work-rumpled blazer. “Lucas, I’m sure you’re a little confused as to why Violette is here, but I want to assure you it was not my intention to throw you off guard. This was...actually important because I wanted you to meet each other.”
Why?
Why, why, why why why why--
The boy licks at his teeth behind closed lips. Maybe he gives a tiny nod, maybe he doesn’t. All he knows is that it’s his turn to look at his lap like some kind of coward. It’s a twisted sort of reassurance when he realizes that he did inherit that habit from somewhere after all.
“It’s been nice to meet you,” he chokes out in the softest of voices ever. It fills him with shame, hot and furious, and he would let himself be swallowed up by the cushions right here, right now, if he could.
His father sounds like he’s almost beaming. “It’s great to see you two hitting it off. I admit I was a little worried.”
I wonder why.
“You are a lovely young man,” Violette joins in. And her voice is gentle, so soft, so soft, so fucking soft.
Shut up. Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone go away shut up.
“Yes,” says his father. “I’ve been telling Violette here all about you and your successes in school. She knows I have such high hopes for you. Dreams. She’s very aware of how proud I am of you.”
And for whatever fucking reason the universe might have thought of when it was stoned, it’s that last line, of all things, that makes Lucas’s eyes suddenly fill with moisture.
His mouth opens infinitesimally, and then he finds his jaw is aching from how hard he is holding it, jutting it to the side, because he knows the moment he closes his mouth again the tears will come pouring out and it’s not because he’s emotional about his father being proud of him--God--no. How dare his father say that?
How dare he speak those words he has never heard before in his entire life, all because that putain Violette is here?
He feels young and open and all kinds of broken again. He feels dirty.
His father is going on and on.
“I wanted this moment to be perfect, son. I waited for a really long time. And I wasn’t sure if you’d ever be ready, but I think after seeing how this evening went, I’m feeling a lot more confident. You are so good, Lucas. I think there’s hope for us yet. That’s why I’m no longer afraid to tell you what I’m about to tell you.”
Lucas breathes. Slowly, in, then out, through his mouth. “Tell me what?”
“Well.” His father picks up Violette’s right hand in his left and clasps it on the tabletop. “Violette and I...are engaged. And we would love for you to join us at the wedding.”
How hard does a heart beat before it breaks?
How fast does the hummingbird fly before its lungs cave in?
Never before has Lucas wished to be able to detach himself from his body quite so much as he does now. This--this feeling, this sharpness in his nostrils and this fracturing inside his bones--he can’t stand it. He closes his eyes and thinks of Eliott--Eliott--but the panic has beat him there and clouded his memory and now even the clarity of those gray-green eyes where he finds home are no longer visible.
He’s shaking. His knees are trembling so much that even when he clenches his hands together under the table and shoves them between his thighs, it does nothing to keep the tremors from running up and down and through him.
Finally, finally, Lucas raises his eyes to meet his father’s. By God, if there will be one moment in his life that he is not be a coward, it will be this one. His mouth is still hanging open and he realizes with some measure of horror that moisture has rolled down and is hanging from his chin. He doesn’t even know when he started crying, because his eyes are burning, they feel dry like the sandpaper in his throat.
And then he speaks and says the one thing that makes no sense and yet all the sense in the world at the same time.
“Je suis gay.”
His father’s brow furrows.
Lucas’s mouth snaps shut and his jaw spasms from the force of it. Every cell in his body is screaming at him to look away, to gather his things and start walking straight out of this restaurant, but somehow he cannot tear his eyes away from his father.
His father, who is still gaping at him with his hand tightened around Violette’s. Who seems to be rapidly vacillating between white-lipped shock and red-faced anger just barely held in check by the fact that they are in public and he is in front of his brand-new fiancée.
And then Lucas speaks again, and he keeps speaking in spite of the hoarse drag in his voice and in spite of the fear that has crawled up and taken residence in his throat. “You should know that. That I’m gay, I mean. Before you decide to throw around those words that you’re proud of me. I know it’s hard for you to imagine me being anyone else other than another carbon copy of you when I grow up. And--and honestly, it was probably hard for me too. I worked--and--I worked and worked and worked to make you--” He chokes, God, let the earth open up and take him now, he chokes. But he barrels on. “To make me proud. Of me. Because I still gave a fuck about what you thought of me. Even after everything.”
The color has officially fled his father’s face.
“After everything, Papa. Even after everything.”
Violette squirms as Lucas’s father probably squeezes her hand too hard.
“Well, I was wrong. And I was a coward. And I think we all know by know where I got that from.” The shaking has taken control of Lucas’s entire body, but he doesn’t care. His gaze flits for a second to Violette and then back to his father. “But at least I met someone who killed that part of me. I met someone who loves me and makes me a better person, and I have no intention of letting him go. Not like you did.”
He should stop. He really needs to leave. Lucas’s breath is coming in gasps and there’s a silent pressure closing in on all sides of his brain, and he knows there’s something he needs to get home to, someone, someone--
The next thing Lucas knows, he’s seized his jacket and stumbled to the door. He drops his phone twice on the way out but scrabbles to scoop it up from the tiles. There’s a new crack on the screen.
He throws himself bodily against the chiming door and a second later is slammed by a wash of cold air. His legs are jelly. He folds in on himself there on the pavement; there’s something wet under his palms, but he’s hardly aware of his surroundings anymore.
Fingers quivering so much they threaten to drop his phone again, Lucas somehow manages to thumb over his screen and press the speed-dial before his brain almost complete disconnects from his body.
Eliott picks up before the first ring is done. “Lucas?”
Lucas’s answer is a gasp.
“Lucas? Lucas!”
He tries his best to respond, he really does, but the world has caved to a glass dome around him and all he sees are swirls of nameless color. Lucas hunches in on himself with his knees pulled up to his ribs, as if the futile gesture might somehow stop the air that is pouring out of his lungs as his chest collapses in on itself.
You’re good. You’re good. I’m proud of you.
She knows everything about you.
She wasn’t supposed to. She was supposed to be a mystery. There was supposed to be no face to the photo, no name to the smile that meant the grave of Lucas’s and his mother’s happiness.
She knows how proud I am of you.
Eliott is speaking and his voice is pouring into the receiver even as Lucas chokes out a sob, and then another one, and then more and more until his bones are burning and he wonders if it’s even possible to hurt this much when you’re already dying.
“Lulu. Lulu. I’m here. Please, look at me. You need to breathe.”
Eliott’s voice suddenly sounds and feels so much closer, even through the barrier of this haze over Lucas’s mind. A gentle hand, shaking, even, runs tentatively through his hair, and another one brushes every so lightly over Lucas’s chin. A little more pressure, and Lucas is compelled to tilt his head upward and gulp in what feels like the first taste of air he’s had in years.
His eyes are still blurred with tears, but through them all Lucas can just make out his boyfriend’s disheveled outline. “Eliott,” he croaks.
“Don’t talk. I’m here now. Don’t talk, just breathe.”
“Eliott. Eliott.”
“I know. Just breathe.”
Both hands move to cradle his face between them. Suddenly, everything seems just a little bit clearer, just a bit easier. The vice wrapped around his heart begins to loosen its bands until his skin no longer aches and his nose doesn’t sting when he breathes in.
“That’s it. In...out…”
“Eliott.”
“Lucas. I’m right here. In...out...hold it...in. Out…”
--
Vendredi 18:35
Lucas doesn’t apologize anymore, not since the first and only other panic attack he had that Eliott witnessed after Lucas got fired from his bookstore job and Eliott had breathed for him through it all and made him promise never to apologize again.
Instead, the air is silent and laden with his unspoken shame between them as they walk hand-in-hand back home.
The first thing Lucas utters when the door of the apartment has been shut is: “He knows.”
His voice is wrecked.
Eliott pauses on his way to the kitchen, just long enough for Lucas to know he heard him, and then continues in his path like a video game unstuck on the screen.
“Tea, baby?” he offers mildly.
Lucas returns a mute nod.
The kettle hits the stove with a domestic little clang.
“What does he know?”
“I told him. About me--about--us.”
Eliott stiffens ever so slightly with his hand on the temperature knob. He turns around after a second so he is leaning back against the counter, and he opens his arms for Lucas to step into. The smaller boy wastes no time in folding himself back into those arms where he’s always known he belongs.
“I wasn’t expecting you to do that today.”
Lucas chuckles humorlessly. “Neither was I,” he whispers back.
Eliott drops the softest of kisses on the top of his head. “Well, you know what I think?”
“...That that was incredibly stupid and impulsive?”
The taller boy heaves a sigh. “Lucas...Lulu...that was so brave of you.”
“I was angry,” Lucas argues. He turns his head sideways to rest his cheek on Eliott’s chest so he can take a better look at his boyfriend. “I just...reacted. He said things that I--felt he had no right to say and then it just...all came out.”
Eliott’s grip on him tightens infinitesimally. Lucas knows he wants to ask just what his father said--he can taste the question on the air between them--but when Lucas keeps his silence for longer than half a minute, Eliott lets it go with another little sigh.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes into Lucas’s hair.
Lucas pushes his nose up against Eliott’s collarbone, against his neck. He simply stands there and breathes: inhales.
“I had to tell him sometime. Remember what you said? That the time would come when I stopped giving a fuck what he thinks?”
“I know, but I didn’t quite mean today. So...still. I’m sorry it had to happen this way.”
“It would have gone down the exact same way whether it was today or next week or next year.” At Eliott’s skeptical look, Lucas shrugs. “I mean it.”
Lucas can see it then, the same brand of compassion and hurt and indignation and helplessness wrapped into one behind Eliott’s eyes, but he doesn’t know how to ease it. Neither does Eliott, it seems, because even as their gazes lock his mouth opens and closes as though nothing will come out. Instead Eliott moves his arms from their hug so he can push his hands into the back of Lucas’s hair and hold him right where he wants him, where he can touch their foreheads together and rub his nose against Lucas’s.
“Thank you,” Eliott whispers after a beat.
“No. Don’t.”
“I mean it,” Eliott murmurs, a mimicry of Lucas’s earlier statement, and the parallelism is not lost on the younger boy. He returns Eliott’s sad little smile of recognition.
Lucas swallows. “Well, in that case, thank you.”
“For what?”
“For helping me through the panic attack.” For being there. For holding me, for taking off work and staying in that café across the street even when I told you not to. For picking up on the first ring and running to me even when you didn’t know what was going on.
For existing. For breathing. With me, for me, beside me.
“I wish you never had to have another one again. Most especially at the hands of your dad. But you’re welcome.”
Lucas laughs then, softly, but a little out of place, enough that Eliott shoots him a look of confusion. “He’s probably not gonna be inviting me over for dinner any time soon,” Lucas chuckles by way of explanation. The sound is wet and a little pathetic, but God, does it actually feel good to say it aloud.
“All the better,” says Eliott with a sad lilt in his voice, “because that leaves all your dinner dates to me.”
Even as he says it, another bolt of pity and terror flashes through Eliott’s eyes before it’s gone. He knows how much Lucas’s father means to him, even if the man may be a homophobic piece of trash who left his wife and son in a swirl of silent chaos at the lowest trough of their life. One dinner gone horribly wrong may not be the easy on-off switch to the relationship that Lucas seems to think that it is. And Lucas? Eliott knows how Lucas shakes each time someone else leaves his life.
Eliott knows how Lucas held the shards of himself together before it all came crashing down when Yann walked out on him coming out to him. He knows how Mika and Manon were there to see the pieces fall to the floor, because of that one time Mika pulled him aside and ordered him with a frightening quietness to treat his kitten with the loyalty and respect that Lucas deserved for all the people who had left him behind.
And so Eliott knows how hours from now, he will be curled around his hedgehog, smoothing Lucas’s hair from his brow over and over in an attempt to smooth the spines that bristle so often in defensiveness. He knows how Lucas may say things that seem nonchalant on the surface, flippant or angry, even, but he will be able to see through them because Lucas is hurting. And he knows that Lucas will hurt for a long while before his pride crumbles and he comes to Eliott with the truth.
But that’s all right with Eliott. Because when Eliott was in the darkest place in the shadows of his mind mirrored by the shadows under his bridge, it was Lucas who came charging through the blackness and the rain, all light and hard breaths and hair streaming down his face, who knelt with his torch on between them and took Eliott’s face between his hands and whispered:
Tu n’es plus seul. Tu n'es pas seul.