Work Text:
“You working on some new material?” Vince asked as he spotted the guitar in Howard’s hands, draping himself on the sofa next to him. Howard knew this tone of voice, had it filed away in his mental Vince library, collected unwillingly from a decade and a half of the man’s company, as the one he pulled out when he didn’t actually care about what Howard was doing but desperately needed something to do. Howard decided to humour him.
“Nothing for the band I’m afraid, little man. Just one for the good old Moon Tunes songbook,”
Vince rolled his eyes “Well can I at least hear it?” There was a pause. At Howard’s look, he added “Leroy cancelled on me. I’m bored off my skull,”
Howard weighed up his options. It wasn’t one he particularly wanted to share with Vince yet - or ever, really. Everything in his song notebook was categorised: For the band (meaningless tat - something to do with glam-rock aliens or disco balls maybe. Vince friendly) and For Howard (Howard’s emotional numbers. His very best; in his own opinion and that of the Moon, who would often provide lyrical suggestions on clear nights that ranged between nonsensical and vaguely threatening)
However Howard was also very aware that if he denied Vince this he’d head for the bedroom to sulk, and Vince’s sulks always had a Gary Numan soundtrack. Howard let out his best long-suffering sigh
“Alright. You won’t like it though. It’s meaningful,” Howard delayed. Vince said nothing and just flopped back against the sofa cushions, attention span dwindling. Howard felt a sudden and strange need to recapture it. Howard flipped a page back to the tabs he’d scribbled down earlier and started to play.
It was actually a meaningful number, though he doubted Vince would pick up on that. Howard wasn’t sure though, refusing to look up at his roommate at all while he played through the first verse. His hands were inexplicably sweaty, and despite playing gigs of hundreds at the Velvet Onion most nights nowadays and bouncing songs off of Vince beforehand even more, he was nervous. His hand slipped against the strings. He swore and carried on from where he left off. It was only then he realised he hadn’t heard a single laugh or sigh or ‘Hey, this sounds a bit like that Bowie number’ from next to him yet. He glanced up through his eyelashes. Vince sat up cross-legged just… watching. Listening. Howard felt strangely unable to stop glancing.
Howard was getting the precious traces of Vince's silent, undivided attention only reserved for the most fascinating issues of Cheekbone and, in a way that Howard found very odd, he felt almost blessed by it. Here was a man whose daily presence was an irritating but reliable constant in Howard's life since he was old enough to dress himself and yet in this moment his complete focus made him feel like the most important man in the world.
Despite spending most waking moments together it still felt like he and Vince lived a universe apart sometimes. Every now and then, when Vince was out particularly late and Howard up especially early, their paths would meet in their room at the flat - two beds now, rather than the single spread they shared at the zoo - Vince, giggling, makeup smudgy, peering in the mirror in the dim light, and Howard, just-showered and caffeinated and squinting just to see, if only for a second, what his friend was getting so much laughter from.
Vince was always thinking, going. Trying to keep him on one conversation path was like herding cats. Vain cats in glittery suits and impractical shoes who always had somewhere better to be and someone better to talk to. Even in a blank room, Vince would still have inane hypotheticals about long-dead celebrities and elaborate tales that lead nowhere and often resemble the ramblings of a madman.
But here in this fleeting moment, as Howard continued to sing and play, Vince was sitting quiet and focused in his jumpsuit and platforms like a rare bird captured, and Howard was the one whose mind was straying elsewhere, pondering what was happening and why it felt so important to him.
When Howard finally reached the end of his song for a split second he felt disappointed. Song finished, that will be all, you can go back to being just out of reach now; glitter in my peripheral vision. But Vince didn’t move, or even say anything for a moment, until a smile spread across his features like the first rays of sunlight after a night of fishing.
“That was genius, Howard!”
Howard flushed “Really?”
“Yeah! I keep forgetting you’re, like, a musical master or something.” Howard could feel the grin Vince was giving him appearing on his own face “What was it about?”
Howard looked at him incredulously, trying to squash down the anxiety starting to creep up the back of his neck “You never care what my songs are about,”
“Keep your moustache on,” Vince raised his hands in joking surrender “Maybe I’m just curious about this one. You said it was meaningful or whatever,”
Howard laughed, and almost shrivelled in the amount of fondness that’d crept into the noise. He kept his eyes focused down towards his guitar as he answered.
“You, actually,” He still didn’t dare look up, feeling his face grow hot.
“Me?” The quiet tone of the reply wasn’t filed in the Vince library, wasn’t one he’d heard before at all, and Howard wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“Yeah. I mean, well, you know, when I said meaningful I didn’t mean it was really-”
“I do love you, Howard.”
Howard’s head snapped up at that almost involuntarily. He squinted as if it would make sense of the words that had just left Vince’s mouth and the face that went with them, honest and unguarded and almost casual without a trace of mocking in it. This wasn’t what happened. Howard told Vince he loved him and Vince laughed, or made a witty remark, or preened under the attention.
Vince didn’t say things like that, step over the invisible line between them, the time zone separating their bedroom into halves and their settee into different worlds. Vince would run off mid-conversation when they hung out together as a child, returning after an hour to say he’d remembered a cool coat he’d walked past that morning and needed to get it before it got lost again in the glitter glue web of Vince’s brain. The directness of it made Howard disoriented.
Vince was still looking at him, miraculously quiet. His big eyes were wide like saucers and catching the light from the moonlit windows. This was a Vince look he’d seen before: wariness. Vince was waiting for him to say something, he realised.
“Do you want to hear the song again?” Howard asked quietly “Now you, you know, know .”
“Yeah,” he said, a smile creeping across his face. The one that could make lesser stars run for the hills, as he’d put in his song. He added that look to the Vince catalogue in his subconscious as ‘affection’.
Vince was here, was real, was still sitting and listening and looking. He was more than an apparition, lit by neon and surrounded by people. He was here, and Howard intended to make the most of it.