Work Text:
There's a girl on screen, and she’s beautiful.
Conventionally and namelessly, she’s beautiful, and not just because her legs are spread and her hair is wild and her lips are pliantly parted.
Well, maybe. “Wow.” Shorter watches her, projection lights casting shadows off his gape. He puffs out a stamp of a sigh, “Wow.”
Ash parts his own lips, pressing popcorn into the space. “She’s gonna die,” he chews.
Shorter makes a disgruntled sound. “You said you’ve never seen this.”
“I haven’t.” Ash swallows. “But it’s, like, the golden rule. The chick has sex and then she dies.”
“That’s biblical.”
Ash chuckles, tilting over the bag; Shorter accepts the invitation, scooping up a handful of overpriced popcorn as delighted moans fill up the theater. They sit where they always do, right in the back, feet kicked up over the seats and elbows grazing. Content. Idle. Anything but tired.
They find themselves here in a haze of tepid insomnia: it’s late, and they’re bored, and they’re kids. Slasher flicks felt like a reasonable cure to the mix.
As the camera lingers over the beautiful girl’s skin, Ash speaks again, his voice a quiet hum despite there being nobody else around. “Do you think they like it?”
Shorter shifts. “She sure sounds like she’s likin’ it.”
“No, I mean,” Ash stares at the screen. “The actors. Do you think they like it.”
The question leaves Shorter quiet for a moment, thinking over the logistics of having to simulate sex while a camera captures each thrust. Speaking from his own experiences, he shrugs, not really finding qualms in the invasive presence of that third, unblinking eye -- he likes to look back on the people he’s slept with, sue him.
Still, there must be no real pleasure involved. Hollywood is a jumble of body doubles and lack of penetration.
But before he could answer, Ash gives his own opinion, reaching for another handful as the girl reaches climax. “They don’t,” he decides. “They don’t like it at all.”
Shorter finally tears himself away from the screen at that, looking the other over. Ash’s profile is stark, his expression contemplative; it’s the same look he gets when sitting by himself in Chang Dai, waiting for Shorter to finish a shift. It’s a passive, lost expression, the cogs of his head turning behind the dullness of his eyes.
What are you thinking about right now, Shorter wants to ask. What memories are you stumbling over.
He nearly does. “Ash?”
But the camera fades away, and the scene softly changes, and the moment is plucked out of the air in favor of cutting to the killer, who creepily loiters outside the poor girl’s home. The expression flits away from Ash’s face; he smirks.
“Told you.”
The air is muggy when they exit the theater, a reminder that air conditioning, in its entirety, is a luxury.
Ash stretches as they walk down the sidewalk, hands locked over his head as Shorter falls in step. “That was kinda shit,” he admits. “Waste of a buck.”
Taxi cabs squeak past, carrying drunkards and delinquents in their backseats. The pair don’t bother waving one down; even if they could afford the fare, they’d much rather walk, stretching out their growing legs. “I liked it,” Shorter defends.
“‘Course you did, you see a pair of tits and all merit is lost.”
“Hey.”
Ash smiles up at him, putting his hands back down deep into his pockets. They talk about the color of the fake blood, comparing the violence they’ve seen to the one on the big screen, and how they would’ve defeated the killer, all the while the city screams and screeches. It never sleeps -- how could they?
“You comin’?” Shorter asks as Ash pauses, the street-lamp making a halo out of his hair. They’re two blocks away from Chinatown, standing near a bundle of backstreets and alleyways, and Ash is looking over his shoulder; Shorter follows, landing on a parked car that sits darkly against the curb. New model. “Ash?”
Ash turns back around, jaw locked, eyes scanning. A blink. “How long do you think we were out? Tonight?”
Shorter blinks back. “Two hours?”
Ash doesn’t move, and suddenly they’re both back in juvie, sitting with their knees touching and hearts weeping -- brokenly, they speak, and not just because their voices are becoming deeper.
“I gotta go.”
But because they’re scared, and it’s unfair. “Okay.”
“Don’t let them follow you.”
“I won’t.”
Ash hesitates, nodding gently, looking like he’s about to become sick -- he should only be this scared while watching horror movies. He should only be parting his lips for popcorn.
They don’t like it at all.
Shorter notes the shadow of a man in the car, his plump face hidden behind sunglasses and cigarette smoke: which one are you, he thinks. Has Ash ever screamed your name in his sleep? Does he see your face in the broken bottles they use for target practice? What have you done?
And as Ash reaches for the backseat door, Shorter can’t help it; he can never help it. “I’ll leave my window open,” he calls, though the sound is lost beneath the engine’s sputter. Child lock.
*
“Your hair is getting long.”
It’s the first thing Ash says, his tone tiny and torn around the edges.
It takes Shorter a second to respond, lost in the familiarity of the other’s pitch, the other’s frame, which lays battered and beaten upon his unmade bed -- he must have slipped up through the fire-escape, going unnoticed through the clatter of the kitchen.
“Ah.” Shorter runs a burly hand over his head, stepping further into the room. The hair prickles beneath his palm. “Guess so, yeah?”
Ash nods, the motion small, honest. He’s been gone for nearly two weeks -- it’s not the longest he’s disappeared, and it’s not the worst he’s looked, but, still, he’s so obviously tired. Beaten.
Thin. “You eat anythin’?’
“Mm,” Ash sits up, knees pressed to his chest. “Hotdog.”
A lie, but Shorter’s not one to pry. “Library?”
Ash smiles.
“You and your damn books,” Shorter decides, plopping down into the mattress with a creak. He lays on his stomach, face pressed into the pillow, and feels Ash regard him with a glance. He missed this -- missed the heat of Ash’s presence warming his skin, missed the quips they shoot like copper bullets, missed those mussed shoes dirtying up his sheets.
“I’ll ask Nads if she can give me a shave.” Missed it so much.
He wants Ash to say a lot, then. Talk about where he was, who he was with. Answer the question as to why that man was waiting for them -- were they followed? -- and why Ash had asked about the time -- was that meeting scheduled? It must have been, surely. Shorter’s itches to know.
But instead of saying all that, Ash just mumbles something else, and a part of Shorter is thankful that he is spared. “I can do it.”
He pries open an eye; Ash is looking at his head, green gaze fluttering over him with a quiet sense of wonder. In this light, he looks almost heavenly -- like a damn sunbeam, Shorter muses. He doesn’t care if he gets burnt. He never has.
“Want to?” he whispers. Ash meets his eyes.
“Yeah.”
They plug the shears into the bedroom wall, right beside a bundle of wires and sprawled video game controllers. Shorter himself is sprawled, sitting back on his palms as Ash walks over, looking ever the pensive boy.
“You sure?” he asks, settling down with the shears in his hand. Shorter shrugs a single shoulder.
“You can’t really fuck it up.”
Ash laughs, “Coming from you, that’s saying something,” and pulls himself close. Following Shorter’s instructions, he clicks the bottom button on, and a gentle whir envelopes the room. A white noise of sound.
Ash looks at him. Places a hand on the back of his head.
“Don’t move.”
The snow of Shorter’s vanity is brunette, falling down his shoulders in silent, ticklish waves. It’s such a familiar feeling -- he was fourteen when he first reached for the blade, deciding, in all of his adolescent haste, that having hair was too much of a pain. Melon head jerk.
He looks up.
Ash has this little wrinkle between his brows, the one he gets when attempting to use chopsticks, fingers fumbling over the leftover dumplings. It’s a boyish expression, with his chapped lips parted and green eyes clouded and body pulled taut with concentration. Despite this, their proximity leaves no room for other lost details -- he smells like cigar smoke, and there's a bruise right beneath his collarbone, suckled on by the lips of a bastard. Shorter swallows.
His staring must have been obvious, for Ash speaks gently, bringing the shears down over the curve of Shorter’s skull. “Hey.”
“Mm.”
“I’m sorry.”
It’s so quiet. So, so quiet. A tuft of hair falls like dispositions. “Don’t say that while you’re cutting my hair, man.”
There’s a chuckle, and Shorter smiles at that, but it melts away just as naturally as it had come. The words that have been stuck in his throat since juvie then tumble out on accident; he didn’t mean for his voice to crack. “It’s not your fault.”
Ash tilts Shorter’s head down and doesn’t say anything, but Shorter can feel the way he trembles. “It’s not your fault,” he repeats, just for the sake of it. In, out, every breath a prayer. “You don’t owe anybody anything.”
“Shorter.”
He takes the hint, and shuts up. Ash shaves the rest of his head without a word.
Later, when the remains have been piled into the dustbin, and the shears have been tucked away beneath the sink, Shorter takes a moment to study himself, standing in the light of the bathroom mirror. He had made a joke before leaving, something along the lines of asking Ash if he wanted to shave his head, too, to which the silent boy only huffed. Success.
“Your loss. The aerodynamics are worth the tease.”
Now, Shorter runs his hands up and down the fresh skin, wondering, uselessly, if this is how monks feel, clad in their devotional orange cloaks. He wonders if they ever wished for more out of their sacrifice.
Because he’d sacrifice a whole lot more, to reach nirvana. A damn lot more.
He takes a breath.
*
The basement bar is a livewire, and Ash’s body is practically singing to it.
Like everything else that brilliant boy does, he gets drunk confidently, elegantly, performing acrobat routines with limes and salts and clinking shot glasses. Every movement is refined, and if it weren’t for the fact that there was a yellowish bruise blossoming beneath his right eye, Shorter would swear him a saint.
He doesn’t ask about it. He figures it has something to do with Ash’s three-month-long absence, and decides it’s better to bury the question deep into both of their reservations; he takes a swig of beer. Ash sways in his seat.
He’s getting taller, Shorter can’t help but to notice, and he’s filling out those borrowed clothes with muscles that weren’t there before. He must be growing out his hair, too, for it sways just shy of his ear. He looks like a Beach Boy fan.
Good vibrations. “This song sucks.”
Shorter jostles his shoulder, tearing his eyes away from the baseball game up ahead -- Ash had made a sour face to the television when they first walked in. “So’s your tolerance, kid.”
“Don’t call me kid. Do they have wine?”
Shorter knits a brow, and it’s Ash’s turn to jostle, perking up his hand to get the bartender’s attention -- it’s not hard to do, considering everybody has been practically fucking him sideways with the lingering glances they’ve been giving him. If it bothers Ash, he doesn’t seem to care, though, there’s a coil of protection churning in Shorter’s gut.
He swallows it down. The bartender leans in close.
“Wine?” he clarifies, and Ash nods.
“Don’t tell me the kind,” he says, shouting a little to be heard. His voice is so deep, now. “Surprise me.”
A burgundy glass is then set upon the bar, juxtaposing the ring-stained wood and dingy environment they live by. Ash reaches for it with a careless hand, swirling the stem around and smelling the rim and acting ever the aristocrat. It’s some sort of clue, Shorter knows, but he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Ash tips the entire thing back. Shorter whistles.
“It’s my party trick,” Ash justifies, wiping the wine off his lips with one hand and setting the glass back down with the other. He tells the bartender, who had been watching with an impressed expression, placidly, “California, 1974. Harlan.”
He’s right, apparently. He looks vaguely annoyed to be.
Don’t think too much about it. “Where y’going?”
“This song sucks,” Shorter answers, digging jukebox money out from under his waistband. Ash doesn’t say anything, too busy wrestling with insobriety to give a proper damn, and Shorter listens to the fading attempts of conversation the bartender then strikes up with him. Ash’s voice cuts through the crowd like knives. Shorter could find him blind.
He pops a quarter into the machine and sighs, flicking through the neon records that are his options. The chaos feels good, tonight; he figures there must be heaven on earth found in all those drunken smiles. In all those curling hands.
Three months. Three months and a hell of a shiner.
He selects the loudest song he can.
“You fucker.”
Ash can’t stop laughing.
“You fucking dumbass,” Shorter bites, and like most things these days, he can’t help it; he can’t help the vile truth that bursts out of his chest. “Picking a fight with the fucking bartender, Ash? What is wrong with you?”
Ash stumbles behind him, the collar of his shirt stretched wide from how Shorter is yanking it; he weaves the two out of the battleground that now is the bar, the threats and crashes that Ash caused fading gently into the night. A few loiterers and tangled couples look up from their alleyway’s as they do so, watching the pair make use of their drunkard legs.
Ash is still laughing, though. Shorter wants to cry. “Shut up. Shut the fuck up, I’m serious.”
Ash looks up at him, then, chuckling still. There’s a trickle of blood racing down his busted nose, painting his cupid-bow scarlet -- you should see the other guy, who had gotten a bit too handsy from across that auburn bar. “Let go of me.”
The bruise looks black.
Shorter releases him, fighting back the childish urge to push his shoulders. Ash staggers, anyhow, a flash of something wounded crossing his face as he hits the brick behind him.
It goes away just as quickly as it had come. “I don’t get you,” he snarls, tone slurred and croaked with anger. “I never know what you want from me.”
“You don’t get me?” Shorter repeats -- he doesn’t know where it’s all coming from. He doesn’t know anything other than the fact that the blood won’t stop pouring, and it frightens him, how easily Ash bleeds. “I don’t get you, man! You disappear for months and come back looking like hell! What am I supposed to do with that, huh? Roll with it? How am I supposed to help you?”
Ash stares, as if the words take a second to hit. When they finally do, his face shrivels up, teeth baring and eyes ablaze and tone scarily soft. “Maybe you should just try fucking me instead.”
Shorter hits him.
It’s not hard, and it’s not meant to hurt, but it’s still enough to startle. Ash's eyes go big, and for a moment Shorter feels a pang of guilt surrounding the stinging sensation in his palm. But it also feels right, somehow; violence is all they’ve ever known, so why shouldn’t they speak to each other with it? Why shouldn’t they use a language they’ve both built a life up from?
Shorter puts his hands by his side after the fact, taking a moment to recollect himself. He lets the sound of their ragged breathing echo off the brick, a conversation found between two sputtering lungs, before asking the question that keeps him up at night. That keeps him tied to Ash, all in hopes of one day finding it out.
“What is wrong with you?”
It’s a hypocritical question, but still a good one. Shorter wants to know why everything in Ash’s life has to hurt -- why there can’t just be movies and haircuts and tequila shots, nothing more.
But as he watches reality finally settle over Ash’s face, prodding through the haze of a youth spent suppressing it, he realizes that there are no real answers, sometimes.
Sometimes, you just punch to feel.
Ash’s voice comes out a garbled mess of grief when he finally does speak, and all those little emotions Shorter once tried to heal come crashing down as well -- Jericho. “I don’t know.”
Shorter doesn’t reply, and Ash doesn’t give him room to; a sob shakes the air around them, and his chest heaves wildly as he tries to push it down. To make it go away. To feel, for once in his life, in control, even if it’s just for a moment in time.
But like all things, he can’t. He’s never had that luxury.
“I don’t know,” Ash repeats, and his voice breaks on the upkeep. He curls into himself as the tears finally come, quivering his way through drunkenness and youth. “I don't know.”
And so Shorter makes the only selfish decision he’s ever had with Ash that night; he turns away, unable to handle the sounds that tumble out from that should-be Beach Boy fan. He sleeps with his window pulled shut, and wakes up with a sense of shame.
Regret, as always, comes in the form of a hangover.
*
There’s a girl on screen, and she’s beautiful.
The moonbeam of her body projects across the frame, dust swirling through the edges of her wake. It’s the first thing Shorter notices as he creeps inside the theater, eyes adjusting to the sudden lack of people and lights. He thinks about how often they show these slasher reruns. How this establishment must capitalize off restlessness.
Her surround-sound moans echo as he weaves through the half-empty seats; there’s a couple playing tonsil hockey in the front row, and a boy sitting slouched in the back. It’s prolific, in some way. Beautiful.
Filling up the cavity of his youth.
Ash hasn’t been back to Chang Dai since that night, licking his wounds in the corners of the city that Shorter never sees. Usually, he’d let the other brood, simmering in the time spent apart, but this time is different. This time, Shorter needs clarity -- he values their friendship over pride, and he’s been driving himself half insane with the things he didn’t say. With the things he did instead.
He settles himself beside him. Pretends not to notice the way his body tenses.
“Thought I might find you here.”
Ash doesn’t say anything, but Shorter can feel the push and pull happening in his head right now -- the way Ash teeters between staying rightfully angry and uncharacteristically apologetic; it’s been over a week without each other. They have a right to miss the sound of hello.
Shorter watches as the knife-wielding killer lurks into frame, waiting, scheming. Yet another late night showing -- it seems that neither of them could get any sleep with the weight of what happened. The actors start to scream.
His voice comes out a rasp. “I don’t want anything from you.”
Ash’s eyes flutter at the screen.
“I don’t want anything from you. Nothing that you aren’t willing to give,” Shorter clarifies, going over the script he’s rehearsed time and time again throughout these past two years. He discards it with a sigh, “I’m sorry I hit you.”
Ash shakes his head, as if on instinct, he’s meant to push it away, but Shorter’s prepared. “No,” he says, “really, I’m sorry. I don’t think you hear that enough so just -- please. Just this once, let me…”
He trails away; Ash starts to cry, and it’s not like all the other times. This is a quiet, lonely cry, falling as soft as feathers.
Shorter curses beneath his breath. Pucks his sunglasses off his head and passes them over.
Ash puts them on as he presses further.
“I don’t want anything from you, Ash, but I, I think I need to know what’s going on.” He's off script, now, and his words are choppy. Raw. A burden too easily carried. “I need to know where you go, what happens to you. I don’t need to know everything, but I just -- I need you to trust me enough to tell me.”
“I trust you.”
Shorter holds his breath. “Then tell me.”
So in the light of that little movie theater, where beautiful girls die on repeat, Ash tells him what he can, starting up from where it all began and building, building, building, until he’s sixteen and punching bartenders because it feels good to finally fight back. There are ripples missing from the plot, but there’s also a brilliant, bittersweet truth found in the mess.
“I ran away from home when I was eight,” he starts, “and now I don’t know what to do,” he ends.
Shorter cradles what he can.