Work Text:
ab·strac·tion
/ab’strakSH(ə)n/
noun
1. an abstract or general idea or term.
2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.
3. an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.
4. absent-mindedness; inattention; mental absorption.
— — —
“Why the hell are we here?” Jiang Cheng asks, staring blankly at the pitch-dark parking lot resting grudgingly outside his windshield, waiting for them to get a move on so it can go back to being undefined and unknown.
“You’re asking big questions tonight.” Fully reclined in the passenger seat, Nie Huaisang picks at a loose thread in his jeans, staring vacantly at the ceiling of the cab. "Does anybody really know why we're here?"
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
Eyebrows raised, Nie Huaisang says, “Well, it’s probably got something to do with how we missed the exit.”
Fucking know-it-all. “No kidding.”
Silence stretches between them, thin and reedy with the strange quality of the half-dead streetlamp flickering overhead. Exhaustion weighs down his eyelids, makes his limbs sluggish and weak. His shoulders are stiff, a knot lodged deep between the blades. His hips are sore, too, from driving for so long without reprieve.
“We were supposed to camp tonight.”
Nie Huaisang grunts in response and swings his feet onto the dash. Jiang Cheng shoves them back down, more reflex than anything at this point, and Nie Huaisang’s grunt turns into a long, drawn-out groan.
If Jiang Cheng’s stomach curls, it’s because of the hour; it’s because he’s had too much caffeine and not enough food; it has nothing to do with the man beside him.
“I could drive,” Nie Huaisang offers, sitting up and wiping the grit from the corners of his eyes.
Jiang Cheng scoffs. “Absolutely not.”
It’s possible he shouldn’t be grousing, but what else is he supposed to do? His phone’s dead, his truck’s clock hasn’t worked properly in over a year, and he’s so tired that he thinks getting another back piece done would be preferable to going out and getting his shit together.
He’s just so fucking tired.
Nie Huaisang sighs theatrically. When Jiang Cheng fails to respond, he sighs again.
“What.”
“We gonna stay here all night?”
“No.”
“Then what do you wanna do?” Nie Huaisang shifts in his seat, turning his too-keen gaze onto Jiang Cheng. He puts so much effort into being lazy that it’s easy to forget how smart he is, sometimes. “We could sleep here, I guess, but that’d be even more miserable than the two days we spent driving through Texas, or we could just keep driving until we hit—the next town.” He pauses. “Where even are we?”
“How the hell should I know?” Jiang Cheng grumbles, since the road signs all blurred together three hours ago. “It’s probably far enough away that getting there’ll suck, though.”
Nie Huaisang flops back onto the seat, groaning. “I know the plan was to camp tonight, but let’s just stop at the first motel we find. I mean, there’s gotta be something along the way. Eventually. At some point. Probably.”
Given that their alternatives are driving until they hit Albuquerque or camping in this shitty parking lot, it's not that much of a choice.
“A bed sounds nice,” is Jiang Cheng’s way of saying, Good idea.
Nie Huaisang grunts agreeably enough before adding, “I’d kill for an actual shower,” which would’ve sold Jiang Cheng on the motel idea if he hadn’t already been throwing the truck into gear, because goddamn, a shower sounds nice.
They hit the road, the radio stubbornly silent, the desert black and formless around them, spurred onward by their desperate determination for an air-conditioned room and a good night’s sleep.
The ache in Jiang Cheng’s neck wriggles deeper. His wrists are sore, and he tells himself that the only reason he keeps glancing at Nie Huaisang curled up in the passenger seat is that he’s jealous—that he wants that comparative comfort for himself. Just—look. Nie Huaisang has the freedom to pull his foot beneath his thigh, to rest his cheek on his raised knee; he can watch the passing nothingness with serene exhaustion, but Jiang Cheng’s limited to the bounds of responsibility.
“Think that was a tumbleweed,” Nie Huaisang murmurs about a vague, passing shadow that could have just as easily been a wild pig.
Jiang Cheng snaps back to the road.
If he keeps sneaking glances at Nie Huaisang… well, that’s his business, and his alone; it’s got absolutely nothing to do with you.
— — —
Even without a functional clock, the night’s clearly edged into a strange, timeless hour when they find their way to a roadside motel. The headlights dim, stutter into blackness, and the world goes flat; a void lays before them. Even moon-shadow has no hold on the earth. It’s dark; there’s not much else to say about it, and Jiang Cheng’s eyes ache too fiercely for him to care about waxing poetic about the plateaus he can’t see but knows lurk in the distance, a swath of black lost within the all-consuming wash of pure, unobstructed nothing.
Not that the shadows are all that important. They’re just there, and they’ll be there tomorrow, and if they’re not—there’s not a whole lot Jiang Cheng can do about disappearing mountains.
Nie Huaisang goes inside to check in while Jiang Cheng grabs their bags. There’s no discussion, no need to talk about it, not with the rhythm they’ve fallen into over the past few weeks. Jiang Cheng spares a moment to be glad Nie Huaisang convinced him to turn his post-grad college tour into something fun, that he didn’t leave Jiang Cheng to drive cross country on his own. It’s… nice. To have someone else with him.
Nice does nothing to offset the bone-tired ache eating him from the inside out, though, that lurks beneath the straps of their bags as he shoulders them. There’s a startling blast of cold air when he steps into the lobby, but even that’s not enough to chase the exhaustion away.
Nie Huaisang’s waiting by the desk, looking bored while the receptionist enters something into her ancient-looking computer. The lobby’s stark yellow light casts him in a strange glow, his deep green tank top at odds with the sterile, too-casually decorated room. His hair lays limp and flat against his neck, a few strands clinging in sticky curls against his cheek. His cheek’s still a little red from where he rested it against the truck’s door.
Not that Jiang Cheng’s been staring or anything, not that he has any reason to know what Nie Huaisang was doing, to make his skin look like that. He's not staring now, either—he isn’t. He’s just… standing, really, and trying to shrug off the horrible, fatigue-summoned chill that’s conspiring with the air-conditioning to turn him into an actual fucking popsicle.
He zones out, a little, maybe, while he’s… standing. Enough that he doesn’t notice how Nie Huaisang’s looking at him, too.
“Got us a room,” is the next thing Jiang Cheng registers, coming from Nie Huaisang, who’s standing right in front of him now, a key card in hand. Jiang Cheng could’ve sworn Nie Huaisang’s voice wasn’t this hoarse when they’d split up, but maybe he’s wrong; maybe he didn’t notice; maybe Nie Huaisang’s so tired his voice is starting to crack.
All equally possible; all equally wrong.
— — —
“So,” Jiang Cheng says, because what else is there to say about this?
Nie Huaisang hums emptily beside him. “I can ask the desk for a different room.”
“Don’t bother.” Temple throbbing, Jiang Cheng accepts his fate and drops their things on the bench by the door. He doesn’t think about Nie Huaisang slipping past him and falling face-first into their one, singular, queen-sized bed. Jiang Cheng takes a deep breath. “We were planning on camping anyway, right? I’ll just sleep on the floor.”
Leveling him with an unimpressed stare, Nie Huaisang says, “Why the fresh hell would you do that when there’s a perfectly good bed right here?”
Jiang Cheng stares at him.
“Jiang Cheng,” Nie Huaisang groans, voice muffled by the comforter, “don’t make me sleep alone!”
And. Well.
On any other day, Jiang Cheng would have something to say to that, but right now isn’t a day—it hardly qualifies as a when—and he draws a blank. Thinks, Nie Huaisang wants to sleep with me. Refuses to follow that train of thought to its natural conclusion; not here; not now.
Instead, Jiang Cheng says, “I’m gonna shower,” and postpones the inevitable while revealing absolutely nothing at all. It’s fine. He’s a pro at this.
The shower is nice, in a vaguely refreshing way. The tiny soaps and shampoo bottles smell clean, like leaves, and he knows they’re going to leave his skin tight and uncomfortable like these things always do, and that’s fine, too. It’s too late for anything to really matter.
He throws himself together, grousing at himself for forgetting to grab a clean of boxers as he pulls on his sweats and a threadbare t-shirt. Whatever—he’ll make it work. It’s one less article of clothing he’ll have to wash when they make it out to a laundromat. Which they’ll have to do soon; he’s running perilously low on clothes that don’t stink faintly of sweat.
Nie Huaisang is still on the bed, but he’s wriggled so that he’s taking up most of the available space, which is impressive, since the bed’s at least a queen, maybe even a king now that he's looking at it. His hair’s spread in a loose fan around his head, slightly staticky from the dry air; he looks soft, dressed in only a pair of basketball shorts. A large, treacherous part of Jiang Cheng wants to run a hand over his leg to see if his leg hair is as pleasant to touch as the rest of him.
“Shove over,” Jiang Cheng says, climbing into the bed without waiting for Nie Huaisang to move. (His skin is soft; his legs are warm and fuzzy when they brush against Jiang Cheng’s wrist.)
“So mean,” Nie Huaisang whines, flopping more fully on his side of the bed. “It’s almost like you don’t want to sleep with me, or something.”
Heart stuttering, Jiang Cheng scoffs. “What gave you that idea?”
Nie Huaisang hums, turning slightly so he can see Jiang Cheng out of the corner of his eye. Jiang Cheng resists the urge to shove his face back into the pillow. “Just something about the way you look at me.”
On second thought—Jiang Cheng gives in and pushes Nie Huaisang’s head into the pillow. His fingers tangle in Nie Huaisang’s hair, and he winds up on his knees, free hand holding down Nie Huaisang’s shoulder as Nie Huaisang cackles and writhes beneath him.
“Wow,” Nie Huaisang says, once he’s gotten free. His cheeks glow red in the dim, flickering yellow of the lamp, and his smile is bright and unfazed. “Thought it’d take more than a little teasing to get you to do something.”
“Expand on that.”
“No,” Nie Huaisang says, smiling pleasantly.
Eyes narrow, Jiang Cheng shakes his head and rolls onto his side. A moment later, the sheets rustle, and Nie Huaisang turns the light off. Without light, the low ceiling seems to hang lower. The AC blows weakly, impotent against the pervasive heat deep in the New Mexican desert, and it’s not long before sweat prickles up at the backs of Jiang Cheng’s knees, soaking into his sweats.
“Fuck,” he mumbles, and slips out of bed. In the dark, he rustles through his duffel until he finds mesh fabric, and he exchanges his sweats for a pair of shorts. A little stink is better than turning into a fucking husk overnight, and he changes clothes without hesitation.
Nie Huaisang makes a strangled noise.
“What?” Jiang Cheng asks, turning around, but he doesn’t see anything worth noting. Just Nie Huaisang laying on top of the covers, illuminated just enough to make out by the moonlight filtering through the window.
“What yourself,” Nie Huaisang grumbles, which makes no sense, but it’s late, and they’re tired, so Jiang Cheng lets it slide. He’ll find something to pester Nie Huaisang about in the morning, one way or another.
Sleep takes him quickly, once he climbs into bed.
Of course, the same can’t be said for Nie Huaisang.
— — —
When he wakes, the first thing Jiang Cheng notices is the sweat coating his skin. The second thing he notices is the thigh pressed against his hip, and the comfortable pressure of Nie Huaisang beside him.
Shifting onto his side, Jiang Cheng props his chin in his hand and looks at what Nie Huaisang’s doing. He’s got his tablet out in front of him, the screen dim enough that it's hardly visible; his face is pinched with focus, his lips pursed in concentration. The soft morning light makes him glow, his broad lines softened, and Jiang Cheng finds that he can’t quite breathe.
“Morning,” Nie Huaisang says, something casual but hushed to his voice, like he’s afraid to disturb the morning.
Struck similarly dumb, Jiang Cheng grunts his reply and rolls onto his back, aware of how unfairly kept Nie Huaisang looks given the hour and how little time they’ve spent in bed. To his credit, Nie Huaisang laughs like he expected it—which he very well might have, with all the mornings they’ve spent together—and knocks his knee into Jiang Cheng’s thigh.
“Breakfast should still be out,” he says, and Jiang Cheng groans before rolling out of bed and making himself presentable enough to go down to the lobby. All the while, Nie Huaisang sits in bed, knocking around idly on his tablet and pretending he’s not watching Jiang Cheng get dressed with eager eyes.
— — —
They waste the morning and most of the afternoon doing nothing in particular. Hours pass without them quite noticing; it’s not until their skin grows uncomfortably warm that they realize how high the sun is hanging and realize that maybe they ought to do something other than laze around.
Jiang Cheng suggests a hike. After all, the trails nearby are perfect for it, scenic desert with a range of difficulties perfect for the least seasoned of hikers, and he’d been hoping to get some trails in while they camped. Nie Huaisang, however—who’d planned to hang out at camp while Jiang Cheng hiked—is reluctant.
“We don’t have many clean clothes left,” he says, although they have more than enough to be able to go for a hike and have something clean to change into.
Still. Jiang Cheng is weak, and Nie Huaisang’s eyes are so damned round—
—which is how they wind up at a small laundromat that smells faintly funky beneath the all-encompassing detergent smell, watching their clothes tumble round and round and round again while dusk turns to night.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; they didn’t spend the whole afternoon driving around town, searching for a serviceable laundromat. In fact, they found the laundromat with a fair amount of ease, thanks to it being a straight shot down Main Street from the motel. On that front, it took very little time to get their shit together.
“We’re gonna wash our clothes anyway,” Nie Huaisang had said, while Jiang Cheng was helpless to do anything but listen. “The motel has a pool, and it’s hot! We should swim.”
It was a compelling case.
So, in the hours before they find themselves huddled together in the laundromat, freshly washed themselves, they visit the motel pool, tucked away in a small, fenced-off corner of the property. It’s a decent enough size, really, even if it never gets deep enough for Jiang Cheng to fully submerge himself without sinking to his knees, a fact that Nie Huaisang finds unreasonably hilarious, and makes no effort to hide.
“Shut up,” Jiang Cheng snaps, and Nie Huaisang laughs harder.
Jiang Cheng tries not to look too closely at Nie Huaisang’s collarbones as they shake with his laughter, and he absolutely refuses to look at the way Nie Huaisang’s hands clutch his stomach, because that way lies madness—but not looking isn’t the same as not thinking, and as not thinking is a much harder task to accomplish than not looking, Jiang Cheng fails at it quite spectacularly.
He dunks Nie Huaisang under the water, ignoring the direction his thoughts keep running as he finds himself fending off a soggy, spluttering, affronted Nie Huaisang. Keeping Nie Huaisang’s hands from his face and hair and shoulders occupies him enough that he doesn’t think about the way their bodies fit together until later, in another timeless place—but that’s fine. Because here, in the shadeless, concrete-walled pool, time doesn’t exist, and there’s no later to worry about.
The only thing he needs to think about is wrestling with Nie Huaisang; the only thing that matters is the shape of muscle shifting beneath soft flesh, and only as it pertains to manhandling him into submission; everything else, all those other thoughts, come later.
(Maybe their hands brush, their fingers wind so close together in the chlorinated water that they may as well be twined together, and they forget how to breathe. Maybe they lock eyes about it before coming to a silent, mutual agreement that there’s no reason to talk about this now. Maybe they retreat to their room to rinse off and gather their clothes, skin thrumming with the memory of touch.)
(Maybe their hands brush again.)
(Who’s to say, in a timeless place like this?)
— — —
Laying atop the covers, Jiang Cheng sinks into the slow, languid trickle of night around them, into the hushed rushing sounds of the highway. The hot, dry air they’ve become so intimately acquainted with is milder now that the sun is gone, but it won’t cross the line into pleasant until the small hours of the morning.
For now, it remains just as dry and strange as before.
Jiang Cheng stares at the ceiling for a long time as he waits for sleep to come, focusing on the sparse passing of traffic and the stuttering whine of the air conditioning. Or trying to, anyway.
He keeps thinking about Nie Huaisang, laid out beside him, belly flat against the mattress.
He keeps thinking about him. About the way their skin felt in the pool, slick and soft between them. He imagines what Nie Huaisang’s lips would feel like, with Jiang Cheng cupping his face and kissing them soundly, purposefully; would they be slick, too? Or would the skin catch differently, pull pleasantly as they found the right combination of pressure and release?
He thinks of running his hands along Nie Huaisang’s body, too. Finds the sense-memory of their roughhousing morphing into something else, more sensual and harder to define in the depth of night.
Maybe he thinks about doing more, too, but that doesn’t matter; nothing’s real, here.
— — —
In the morning, they wake laid out on top of each other. Sweat clings to the places where they meet, sinking into their clothes, but they don’t separate. Not right away.
When they do, it’s so hard not to think about doing more than just imagining.
— — —
Jiang Cheng drags them out to a trail.
It’s only a forty-five minute drive—not terrible, in the grand scheme of things—but it’s more than enough time for Nie Huaisang to sleep through the gentle oranges and waking blues of sunrise. Jiang Cheng snorts when he sees Nie Huaisang’s head loll to the side and has to muffle another when soft snores fill the cab. But he doesn’t wake Nie Huaisang until he absolutely has to, after he’s paid the park’s fee and gotten a map and staked out a trail that’s pleasant enough to start the morning but not so easy as to be a leisurely stroll through a craggy, nature-worn trail.
Regardless of the moderate difficulty, Nie Huaisang finds plenty of opportunities to complain about the hike, starting from the moment he opens his eyes and hisses at the budding daylight.
According to Nie Huaisang, the trail’s too steep, and too long, and too hot—he finds something to complain about at each turn, and usually Jiang Cheng would be annoyed by now, eye twitching as Nie Huaisang works himself up. Right now, though… he’s just happy to have Nie Huaisang here. Complaints and all.
Because, for all that he complains, Nie Huaisang also bumps his shoulder into Jiang Cheng’s from time to time, and he smiles softly at him when Jiang Cheng slows down so Nie Huaisang can catch his breath, and it’s strange, how nice it is, to be known well enough to be thanked in physical terms—one of the few ways he’s not violently, pathologically allergic to.
Maybe that’s why he lets down his guard; he doesn’t notice Nie Huaisang taking a picture until Nie Huaisang’s holding the phone out to him, and Jiang Cheng takes it without question.
It’s… odd, how soft he looks, leaning on the railing of a scenic overlook, taking in the wide array of plants that have found life in this desert valley. He wonders, absently, if this is how he always looks to Nie Huaisang.
The rest of the hike is quiet.
They make their way back to the truck, sweating and pleasantly sore and exhausted, and they don’t talk. Don’t bring up any of the things blooming between them. They just walk, and breathe, and embrace the sweat-slick press of their arms as they walk.
This lasts until they make it back to the hotel, where they wordlessly strip down and jump in the pool again, since it’s there and they’re hot and it feels so good, and nothing around them feels quite solid, quite real. Not the desert around them or the mountains lurking in the distance; not the past, and hardly the present.
Maybe there’s a future, somewhere, but it’s not now.
They dick around in the pool, alternating between floating and touching and not talking about it. When they find themselves pressed together, chest to chest, it only seems natural that they kiss, tender and easy, and sleep another night in the motel.
— — —
“Hey there,” Nie Huaisang murmurs, shifting so he can press a kiss to Jiang Cheng’s cheek.
Leaning into his touch, Jiang Cheng hums, content, and wraps Nie Huaisang tighter in his arms. The sound Nie Huaisang makes can’t quite be called a purr, but it seems close enough, and Jiang Cheng is too tired to think about it with any more depth, what with how Nie Huaisang is holding him, too, fingers tracing the deep purple ink on Jiang Cheng's back like he's trying to find the raised places where the tattoo starts and the bare canvas ends. There's nothing to find; there hasn't been a raised edge to the tattoo for years now, but Nie Huaisang keeps going regardless, and Jiang Cheng lets him.
Morning creeps over them slowly, and then all at once, until there’s no more putting off the inevitable. Jiang Cheng feels the loss of Nie Huaisang against him far deeper than can be explained by the loss of his body heat, so if he’s sulking, a little, when he joins Nie Huaisang in the bathroom—well. It’s not his fault that he wants to hold Nie Huaisang close for as long as he’ll let him.
When they hit the road again, nothing feels quite real, quite solid… but maybe later, when they stop, when they get somewhere that’s not the repeating plains and mountains of the desert—when they get somewhere that’s real, again—maybe then they’ll have the words for this thing between them, beyond the way the world feels a little more solid, a little more right when they’re together.
Maybe later, they’ll figure out what this thing between them is. For now, though… for now, there’s nothing to do but exist.