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“Are you seriously trying to patch up that hunk of junk again?”
From among a pile of dirty parts and the noise of a spluttering hoverbike engine, Mick Mercury looks up from where he’s kneeling on the ground and grins with all of his teeth, “Jayjay! It’s really you, buddy!”
“Yeah,” Juno mutters. He leans against the crumbling brick mailbox that sits outside the Old Town Common Use Tool-Shed and Garage. It’s a Martian government initiative that boasted ‘improving accessibility to basic tool sets’ and ‘promoting a community spirit’ for Hyperion’s worst-off citizens, and that had, in fact, consisted of ‘dumping a shed a little way out of the squalor of the housing area’ and ‘filling it with tools that were all immediately stolen and never replaced.’
Juno watches with mounting concern as Mick stands up without making any reach towards the half-blackened cloth lying limp beside his bike to wipe off the grease on his fingers. At the last moment, he tries to make a break for it, but it’s too late. Mick scoops him up in the kind of hug that tends to land him in a chiropractor’s office, all his vertebrae popping and complaining, and doesn’t let go no matter how much Juno kicks and squirms and threatens when his studded boots get lifted off the ground.
“Damnit—Jesus hell, Mercury, watch the jacket, it’s not fake!” is what finally gets Juno released, and he makes a show out of glowering while he pulls and adjusts his leather sleeves and wipes invisible dirt off of them.
Mick disappears back into the garage and picks up the greasy cloth, wiping his hands on it, and Juno, despite the voice in his head reminding him on loop that he doesn’t have it in him to care about anybody right now, follows him in.
Mick wipes an impressive streak of grease across his forehead with the cloth and grins again, “So! What brings you to visit?”
Juno fixes his gaze to the smudge in the mix of quiet exasperation and bewilderment he tends to associate with Mick Mercury, and says impassively, “Not here to see you. Just in the area and thought I’d check if they still use this place to get a fix. Apparently not. They probably all went running when you showed up.”
He glances down in time to see Mick’s grin drop a few millimetres. Mick absentmindedly drags the grease further of his forehead with the back of his hand and turns away from Juno to kneel back down beside his bike, “The police busted it a while back. Replaced the tools, too, see?” He waves a spanner at Juno.
Juno snorts and kicks at the ground, “Fucking cops. Pereyra probably paid them to clean out the junkies so they can show off this shitty place leading up to the election.”
Mick glances up at him warily, “That’s… uh, why you’re here, though? Drugs, I mean.”
Juno walks over to the wall and slides down against it. He picks at a hole in his stockings under his knee-length skirt and sighs, “Mick, what else could possibly force me to come all the way to Old Town?”
Mick frowns at the spanner in his hands. He’s not doing anything with it. Juno tips back his head and sighs at the roof. Apart from you, the words build in his throat, forced there by guilt.
Guilt generates kindness, and kindness gets you nowhere but killed, and Juno’s decided the only person who deserves to take his shitty life is himself, and he’s not there yet. So he swallows the words down and grits his teeth. He closes his eyes.
After a while he hears footsteps crunching on the concrete ground and opens his eyes to see Mick dangling over him, dreads almost brushing Juno’s face.
“Shit!” Juno scrambles away, and pouts when Mick laughs, “Not funny. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Get up, Jay,” Mick lends him a hand and, when Juno refuses to take it, grabs him anyway and hauls him to his feet. They both groan at the effort and Juno ends up with his face flush to Mick’s chest.
His arms are sweaty and his shirt smells like liquor and the only worth it parts of Juno’s childhood all in one, and Juno shoves him away before he has to acknowledge that he’s blushing, “Get off of me, you fucking smell like motor oil.”
“How’s about,” Mick says with his Playful Voice, that one that has Juno’s face scrunching in anticipation, “Instead, we go back to my place and have a few drinks, eh? Just like old times.”
He reaches into his pocket and digs out a flask, holding it out to Juno with a little shake and a quirk of his eyebrows, like it’s some big prize and not some street-bought blend of eight-cred whiskey and a few toxic chemical substances.
Juno could already be halfway to a pleasant little trip to nowhere in some back alley by now. He looks Mick up and down, all puppy-dog enthusiasm and unawareness of how to control his own limbs. It’s cute—it was cute. When they were kids. Not anymore.
Juno rolls his eyes and snatches the flask out of Mick’s hands. He drinks just so he can pretend it’s the street alcohol and not Mick’s huge smile that makes his heart skip a beat.
Look, he knows how it sounds. They walk back to Mick’s apartment with Mick’s arm around Juno’s shoulders and Juno looking the other way and trying to ignore every place they touch. But no matter how he makes it seem, Juno’s not serious about it: the stupid laugh he hides behind a fake coughing attack and derisive comment about how Mick smells, or the way by the time they get to Mick’s Juno’s arm is around his waist as well.
He’s just… full of old habits he can’t seem to shake, is all. And this one has been a stupid habit of his since he was eleven.
“Alright, Jayjay, I know that face,” Mick hands him a glass of something a little nicer than what he had in his flask, and hopefully stronger too, and then sits down beside him with his own drink, “You’re brooding.”
“’M not,” Juno twists on the couch and puts his knees up, his boots resting on Mick’s thighs. The residual look is entirely too sulky, so he stretches his legs out over Mick’s thighs instead and reiterates, “I’m not brooding.”
“’Kay then,” Mick says, and then starts drumming a beat into Juno’s shins. He has long, bony fingers and warm skin – Juno’s always been told he’s warm but if that’s true Mick’s like a human water bottle. Juno gulps down his drink and watches Mick’s fingers on his legs.
His voice croaks when it comes out. “Diamond and I are off.”
Mick’s fingers stop on Juno’s legs. He glances at him, “Juno…”
“Don’t get all ‘Juno’ on me, Mercury, it’s fine, it’s—” he laughs bitterly and lets his head fall back onto the couch, “What? The fifth time this has happened now? Just… I think it might be serious, this time. It’s been a whole week since we talked.”
Mick bites on his lip, the little crease forming between his eyebrows he’s had since he was a kid. Juno has the stupid urge to kiss it, fuck. He’s too desperate and lonely for this. He reaches for the bottle on the coffee table.
“Jay… maybe it’s time to admit—”
“I’m not here to admit anything, Mercury, I’m here to get so stoned I can’t remember what planet I’m on,” Juno grunts, “And since you’ve already taken that off the table I plan on settling on not being able to remember tonight.”
Mick makes the face he makes when he wants to say something but doesn’t know how to stand up to Juno, and sighs, “Well. That I can help with, buddy.”
Juno sits up so he won’t spill alcohol over himself and throws back the glass he just poured himself. The alcohol burns, but not enough. He wants to burn stronger and hotter until he can’t feel anything else, can’t feel the deep-down desolateness in the desert waste of himself.
“I gotta say, it’s nice having you here, Jay,” Mick says, and tips his own glass back. Juno’s legs are still over his and Mick has turned slightly on the couch to face him.
Juno folds his legs under him instead and allows, begrudgingly, “Yeah. ‘S been a while.”
Mick lights up and throws himself at Juno, holding his head close to press a too-wet smooch to the side of his head, “Aw, Jay! I knew you still loved me in there somewhere.”
“Alright, alright, don’t overdo it,” Juno pushes himself away. He’s burning now in a different way, right over his temple. It’s not the fuzzy drowning kind of burn but the sharp, aching kind, the scalding. Juno grits his teeth and wipes the side of his head with the back of his hand.
Mick pours them both another drink and then settles back with his head on Juno’s shoulder, “I missed you, Jay,” he says, and Juno doesn’t answer. The scald on his temple has dried and spread down into his stomach, and he feels like he’s been cracked open; split in two.
Juno’s been avoiding exactly this for months: realising exactly how fucking lonely he is. Pretending Diamond’s gaze still makes him flutter, and Diamond’s presence is still all he needs to feel whole, and Diamond’s hands still make him feel warm and don’t just make him ache for an iteration of the two of them that lies still and cold in its grave.
“You know what?” Juno mutters, several drinks later, “Fuck Diamond.”
Mick sits up and looks at him.
“I don’t need Diamond,” Juno emphasises, sitting forward on the couch, ‘If-if-if Diamond can’t find time for me, thinks I’m all… being ‘closed off’ and ‘different’, can’t understand I need my space, then whatever. It’s not like either of us have been happy for months now. It’s time we admitted it instead of… this stupid whatever we have.”
Mick puts his hand on Juno’s back and rubs soothing circles. He says nothing, though that crease is back between his eyebrows. Juno watches him, his dreads around his shoulders and his lips closed and pressed in a worried line.
How weird is it that he knows how those lips feel against his?
The memory of it is still carved into the membrane of every cell in his body. Juno can’t remember his first kiss with Diamond. They were probably drunk before Juno had the guts to make a move. But all Mick Mercury had to do was ask Juno how it felt to kiss someone when they were seventeen and Juno had had Mick’s name imprinted into his heartbeat for six years and Juno had done the stupidest, boldest thing in his life and asked him if he wanted to find out.
He remembers, too, the way he’d watched Mick’s face scrunch when he’d pulled away.
“Kissing isn’t as cool as they say it is,” he’d said, and Juno had laughed and pretended his whole body wasn’t filled with tingles and his pulse wasn’t racing in his chest.
He wonders if Mick would think differently, now.
Juno pulls his eyes away from Mick’s lips and reaches for the bottle.
He can’t start feeding himself stupid little fantasies like that. Not only is Mick clearly not interested but Juno just did that whole paragraph before about how he’s not serious about Mercury, remember? It’s just the urge to find a rebound. Prove to Diamond he can fuck someone else just to prove it’s over.
Juno isn’t sure when his brain made the mental leap from wanting to kiss Mick Mercury to that, and he decides not to spend any time considering it. He drinks.
“Mick,” he says, some time later. “You remember the time we kissed?”
Mick’s arm, around Juno’s shoulders, stiffens. He frowns, as if casting his mind back, and then snorts and shakes his head, “Oh, yeah! Psh, wow. That was awful.”
He laughs again, though Juno stays silent pressed close against him. When Mick stops laughing he says, quietly, “You think we’re any better than that, now?”
Mick looks at him, evaluating. They’re both a little drunk and Juno’s glad for it – he can ignore the little voice screaming ‘what are you doing!?’ and excuse himself this one mistake. As far as things go, it’s nowhere near the worst he’s made.
Mick settles on grinning and says, “I dunno, guess we could always try and find out.”
It’s a joke. Juno doesn’t laugh. Mick’s grin slowly fades.
Juno shrugs, “I guess we could.”
Mick worries his lip between his teeth, “Jay,” he says, “I mean, I don’t know what you want, but… I can’t—don’t—” he sighs sharply and starts again, “If we’re just messing around, that’s fine, but…”
“’Course I’m just messing,” Juno lies straight through his teeth. “Believe it or not I don’t have a massive soppy crush on you, Mick.”
“Alright then,” Mick says. Then he breaks into a goofy smile, “This is stupid.”
“We’re stupid,” Juno says, “Come here.”
Mick lets him get a hand in his dreads, though he bursts into giggles when Juno tries to guide their lips together the first time. After a flat look from Juno, though, he goes “right—yes, sorry,” and…
Juno kisses Mick Mercury. It’s exactly the burning he’s been looking for.
It’s not a burn at all, he realises, it’s different. It's giving way, it's relief. The desolate desert emptiness inside Juno tastes like rain for the first time in years.
He wants to be in Mick’s lap. No. He wants Mick in his lap, wants his tongue in his mouth and wants them both to laugh like it’s so stupid they ended up here – finally ended up here, after all this time. He holds Mick’s face close to him before he realises Mick is trying to pull away.
Juno lets him.
Mick’s face scrunches and he laughs, “Guess some things never change, huh, bud?”
Juno’s body goes soft into the couch cushion, “Yeah.” he says, softly, “I guess some things never do.”
“It was Diamond,” Juno says, flatly.
“Huh?” Mick looks up from the couch, “What? What happened?”
Juno is slumped against the doorway, staring blankly ahead, his comms loose in his hand, still frozen halfway from putting the phone down. “It was Diamond. Wanted to know if I still wanted to get back together.”
Mick leans over the back of the couch, “So? Did you say it? That it’s over forever and you both need to move on?”
Juno shakes his head dazedly, “Diamond… proposed. Over the phone.”
“What?!” Mick leaps up so fast the couch almost tips over backwards, “What did you say?!”
“I… said yes,” Juno says, like he’s realising it out loud. He laughs, shocked, disbelieving, ‘I said yes. And we’re going to start going to couples therapy. Apparently Diamond wanted to prove it to me that we could still make us work. Forever, this time. I… I said yes, Mick.”
Mick just stares. After a long time, he says, “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
Juno looks down at his comms. He frowns, “I… maybe it’ll work out. Maybe we just needed commitment like that, you know? A reason to stay together.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Mick says. His face says otherwise.
Later that night. Juno is in his fiancé’s bed. His fiancé is asleep, naked, beside him, and Juno is staring at the ceiling.
Or maybe not asleep. Diamond takes his hand, “Juno…”
“Yeah,” Juno says, “Yeah, sorry, just… thinking.”
“I’m glad you’re back. I'm so sorry things have been so rough between us, I just... I want you to know I still want us to work. It's just been... hard. I think therapy will help. I’m never going to leave you again.”
And, well. There’s a promise in that that Juno can’t resist. It may not be what he wants, but it’s what he can get.
“Something’s worrying you,” Diamond says.
“Nah,” says Juno.
“I kept thinking,” Diamond says, “When we had sex, that you were thinking of someone else.”
It’s not accusatory. It’s almost a resignation. Juno says nothing.
He can’t get what he wants. That’s not new. He makes do with what he’s lucky enough to get his hands on. Like the HCPD, shitty, but a job. Like Diamond, someone he isn’t sure he’s in love with anymore, but maybe he could be. Maybe this time, he won’t fuck it up.
But still, he can’t shake the feeling. Some things never change, after all.