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“I told you not to show your face around here.”
Lemon scoffs dryly. He sucks cigarette smoke into his mouth and blows it out just as quickly, not even enjoying the nicotine.
“I can do whatever I want,” he replies.
“On your own property,” Rollcake says with a curled lip. “Get off of mine before I squish you.”
“And what, prove your reputation for real?”
Lemon lets out another puff. He frowns, tasting nothing but ash.
Rollcake snarls. He almost hisses through his teeth, curling his lip further in disgust as Lemon blows out one last time, smacking his lips when he realizes this one won’t give him anything more.
He can’t tell the difference between the wind kicking up dust and the noises drooling from Rollcake’s mouth. Somehow he looks like a demented roadside attraction in that outfit he’s wearing, despite how plain the colors were.
“I know you haven’t actually killed anyone,” Lemon says wryly. “Despite what they all say.”
“You wanna see what I’m capable of, prick?!”
Lemon reaches for another cigarette. Rollcake tighten his grip on his hammer.
There’s a arid silence between them. It’s only there for a few moments until Rollcake breaks it, hissing and reaching for a wrench in his toolbox. Before Lemon can react, he lobs it at him with a deadly aim and a muscled throwing arm, startling him so badly it he drops his cigarette right as he presses it against his lips to light.
“Hey!”
Rollcake growls. Lemon shakes his head, trying to compose himself.
“What the hell man!”
“Get off my damn property!” Rollcake yells again. “Get! Go! Shoo! I told you once, and I’m not gonna tell you again!”
Lemon scowls, backing away from the dirty garage door he was leaning against, looking back on it as his sneakers hit the old concrete. The wrench had made a dent in it far larger than he thought possible for a tool of that size, but it was almost impossible to tell from all the other buffed dents plastered into it. He had to almost guess where it landed, the rust beneath its bleached paint falling away like dead leaves.
“...Seriously?” he says as the shock wears off. His ears are ringing, and his head is buzzing, but he tries not to take Roll Cake seriously.
“C’mon, what’s wrong with me hanging around for a few hours? It’s not like you’ve had any visitors this month.”
Roll Cake pauses at that last sentence, blinking and bowing his head slightly. He takes a moment to think about it, but doesn’t devote himself to a response when he’s done. Instead he just whips around angrily on his heel, pouting but trying not to let Lemon see.
Lemon can tell he wants to scream, wants to shout, wants to thrash something in the way his brow furrows. But only because he knows he just fucked himself into six hours of work having to fix the little stunt he just pulled—and because he knows that Lemon’s right and then some about nobody having visited in a very long time.
And because if his aim wasn’t dead on...if he had been just a bit more careless...
He would have actually...
...
Lemon wonders in that moment why people never took him seriously.
He never considered him to be worthy of anything less than six feet of personal space.
He sighs. He can hear the paint still peeling off the garage door and Roll Cake muttering to himself furiously in the wind.
He finally strands up straight, stretching his arms and legs on patchy bits of ground. His expression returns to its usual flaccidness as his joints pop, his eyes emptily falling onto the small angry body grabbing yet another wrench from his toolbox.
He knows he’s not going to do it.
“...I could sue you for that,” Lemon says plainly. His eye bags are worse than usual today. The black nylon he’s wearing isn’t exactly helping him, the steady heat from the air starting to glisten on his face.
“And I told you to get the fuck away from my garage,” Roll Cake replies.
“Spare me the macho attitude today, will ya?” Lemon snaps. It’s the most alive he’s sounded since he woke up. “I’m only going to be here for a few hours. Lime and Orange wanted to drag me along to some kind of fashion show, and I needed an excuse not to go.”
“You consider me a good excuse?” Roll Cake, laughing quietly. “Ha, I’ll bet they probably thought you were crazy when you told them you were hanging out with me.”
“Actually they don’t know. They just know I’m seeing a friend.”
“We’re not friends,” Roll Cake snaps again.
“...Then what do you want me to call you?”
Lemon wipes some dust off his shoulder. Roll Cake‘s grip on the wrench tightens again, but meeting Lemon’s eyes he realizes that he’s serious.
His own eye bags are worse than his will ever be. Lemon stayed up because he had no choice in his sleep schedule—Roll Cake stayed up because he knew he will have no sweet dreams when he slept.
“...”
“...”
“I dunno,” he says after not being able to take it anymore. “Just don’t call me your friend. That’s not what we are, that’s not what we’ve ever been, and you honestly deserve much better than me in that department.”
Silence. There’s only a gust between them now, blowing scratchily against rough paint and rust.
Lemon’s eyes do not meet Roll Cake’s, but Roll Cake is just short enough that Lemon can fool him by staring at his forehead. Small sparks crackle as his hair sways in the wind, collecting bits of static that frame his tall, lanky figure beset by two glowing neon eyes.
Roll Cake’s own twitch. His eyes are the color of a deep red velvet, the kind dyed with hot blood just as the batter settles. He tries to keep his gaze locked on Lemon, gritting his teeth as the wind keeps pushing a heavier and heavier weight between them.
After a few moments, he finally cracks.
Red eyes clench shut and Roll Cake curses again, to which Lemon has no issue with letting slip past his ears. After a particularly vile one, he spits at the ground hurls the wrench in his hand against the concrete.
It smashes into so many pieces that Lemon’s surprised it didn’t break the entire plot.
But there were already much less pits than he anticipated, already much smaller than he expected. They were almost filled to their eroded brims with dust, old dust that looked like it was once apart of something bigger with the streaks of brown and black snaking through. Something Lemon wonders if Roll Cake ever thought about, living in perpetuity alongside aging machinery.
He watches him curse under his breath over and over again, frantically scanning the pits, old and new. His eyes contort into a face of strain and shame, one which Lemon has seen a hundred times and knows he will see a thousand more.
“...You stupid little...!” Roll Cake says with a gasp.
He whips around to meets Lemon’s gaze again. His is haphazard in response, having long abandoned the exhausting idea of eye contact and now just content with the static from his hair making his pupils look like lightbulbs.
“...AUGH!” Roll Cake grumbles. “Fine, be like that! Just don’t fucking bother me, okay?! I have work to do!”
“So I can stay here?” Lemon asks.
“...Yes!” Roll Cake snaps after thinking about it. “Fucking hell, did you not get that from what I said earlier?!”
Lemon did, he just likes to hear it. Perhaps this was a sin he would pay for later, but he was just so used to people not being obvious with their unspoken motives. That was one of the fun things about hanging around Roll Cake—you could easily force him to say what he really meant if you knew what buttons to push.
“...I get it, I get it,” he says nonchalantly in response. “You don’t always have to curse at me.”
He wipes some more dust off his shoulder.
“Why are you in such a bad mood today anyway? You seem rather...touchy.”
“I’m always angry you dipshit. Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”
“No, but it almost feels like you have. You can drop the act now, there’s no one here but us.“
Roll Cake pauses. The wrench in his hand glimmers hotly against the exposed sun, starting to heave itself way into the top of the sky now that noon is breaking.
“...It’s not an act,” he says quietly. Solemnly almost. His eyes soften and his brow lets up. “This is just who I am.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Lemon says dryly. He starts searching his pockets for more cigarettes.
Roll Cake doesn’t say anything. He just watches him, glad he never started smoking.
The wind blows again. The dust it kicks up lands directly in Lemon’s mouth this time and Roll Cake manages to hide a smile as he tries to spit it out.
He looks away as he grumbles, shakily searching each pocket of his jacket. His mouth is horribly dry, the dust not helping one bit, and he wants to look up to Roll Cake for help but he knows that would be a lost cause for too many reasons.
Finally Lemon hangs his head, sighing and curling his own lip dejectedly. All his pockets are empty, and had been empty since he woke up that morning save for the one that was occupied on the way here.
He wants to bite his own tongue as the static in his chest grows. He wants so desperately to curse out of seething teeth and into the desiccated air that caused him to crave in the first place.
But Roll Cake’s soured those words enough for the day and Lemon doesn’t want to wallow in their filth anymore than he has to.
He has to be the perfect big brother to everyone after all...
Not like he ever was, but he would lying if he said if the weight of everyone’s expectations of him weren’t creeping in now that he was getting ready to finish his first semester of college.
Roll Cake throws another half-hearted snarl at him but Lemon’s eyes start wandering.
His head is beginning to buzz too.
His attention gets caught by the crashing of tools—of Roll Cake slinging his toolbox over his shoulder and sighing so deeply that he almost sounds like wind.
He doesn’t look at him. Not completely. Not like Lemon knew people normally did when they were about to leave. There’s a defeated mood cast over his face but he tries not to let him see it. It’s painted with sweat and dirt, caked between pores that haven’t been cleaned since yesterday and with a misery so thorough he believes no one will ever understand it.
He fails miserably, and Lemon softens up, watching those wide eyes narrowly scan him like something not to be touched, like a precious crystal in a display case.
“...Be out of here by five,” he says plainly. Almost with a warden-like instruction, but with a halfway-teary, sopping intention. “And don’t go in the house.”
Without another word he disappears quietly into the dust, into a big shed that flanks a pile of junk just a ways away.
Lemon watches his figure vanish, wishing that he hadn’t but knowing there’s not much else here to do.
He doesn’t want to denigrate him more than he probably already feels. He wishes in that moment that he had pried a bit more into his testiness, that he had pried a bit more into why today of all days was the one he decided to almost kill him.
He almost wishes he got to ask if he was serious about the wrench missing.
Sighing as he looks out to the sky again, he knows he shouldn’t want those kinds of things. He knows there’s supposed to be a mutual agreement between them here, one signed by their unbothered presences and maintained by the silence supposed to exist within each other’s gravities.
These wide open plains were meant to be devoid of the emotional excavation that came with daily life. Emotional excavation that came from just the simple fact of interacting with others, an exhaustive process for those not born to cope well with it. It was why Lemon originally came here after all—he wasn’t noticed by Roll Cake until the fifth time he visited, and it was only by the tenth when they had bothered to actually talk to each other.
Just as there was nothing beneath the dust of dying machines, there was meant to be nothing between them. No tender words, no curious empathy, just a placid sanctuary.
...Was Roll Cake still okay with that? Lemon didn’t know if he was anymore, but he also didn’t know if it was by some sort of social flaw that he found himself wanting to talk to someone like him in the first place.
He finally slouches again, returning to the garage door. His back creaks in agony but he ignores it, and he tries to ignore the growing hunger in his chest by distracting himself with the ambience dripping in from outside.
The city drawls on about a mile from his ears. Cars whip up clouds of grit that grind against fading paint and steel, both rotting in sun-bleached piles that have been there for decades and will continue to subsist off city officials looking the other way. If he’s lucky, he’ll get to hear an ambulance, the worst kind of sound one could bear witness to, but one that sounds rather pleasant when rightfully smothered by distance.
...
He starts watching the sky. The sun is bright today, barely hidden by thin clouds that look like fraying pieces of cloth. His eyes are burning, but he stopped giving a shit about his health long ago. The static boiling in his brain were always a second pair of eyes to him anyway, and if he went blind and had to live by them, then so be it.
Lemon wonders if he can just...stop thinking for a while.
Just...existing here, baking in the rays.
It’s so quiet. He smiles softly, finally releasing himself from the torture that was searing his eyes out.
Dust kicks up in the wind again, and this time he covers his mouth. He watches the shapes fold and bend into circular motions, dancing to the beat of something he would never be able to hear.
It’s enough, if just for a moment.
It doesn’t last though, but he’s not angry as the moment passes.
He needed a break. A sabbatical, a vacation—whatever people called their coping, he needs that badly. He was having problems with DJ, feeling a sort of imposter syndrome dating someone so successful, something that crept up into his throat and had caused them to put their relationship on hold for the last three months.
He was having problems managing with the schedules of his friend now too. Orange and Lime were being invited to fashion shows and runaway walks on a frequent basis by some sort of glib designer for a streetwear brand, and Lemon never hid how pointless he thought the endeavors were. He got so fed up with his schedule being crammed that he ended up slamming the door on the designer’s foot by accident, something she had to go to the emergency room for, something she screamed at him for being “like that hot-headed shortie” for. Whatever that meant.
He just needed a break.
He needed one badly.
...
He looks up at the sky again, wondering if growing up is supposed to hurt like this.
...
He looks back to the ground. It’s much more comfortable down there.
He listens for a few more moments to the wind blowing until a thought hits him.
There is something enchanting about how silence seems to work here. In this sea of dust, so vast it was almost its own desert.
Lemon listens for a few more minutes, letting the wind fully carry it against his body and ears, making sure he’s hearing right.
No words, no thoughts, not even the vagueness of ambient chatter. Its entire melody is just pure naked quiet, punctuated only occasionally by white noise so faint that it almost fails to register as such.
It was unusual for silence to really mean anything to his ears unless it was encased in some kind of small space. Whether his own room or the special ones he liked to frequent when his senses were spilling over. In small places, it was like a gentle smothering, a welcome one, carrying a black blanket to press over his face until he passed out metaphorically and regained full control of himself.
Here though...
The openness is almost a threat. Silence being just as meaningful here as it was in those little boxes feels like some kind of invisible violence. An eternally closed fist, looming and hardened, one which ground away every bit of your heart under harsh sunlight that sought nothing except to break down relentlessly whatever dared to venture into itself.
The endless sky was as vast as it was empty, and this was a kind of silence so still that often you had no choice in your own thoughts except to look up and fall in.
...How did Roll Cake live like this?
His junkyard was always so much larger than Lemon remembered. He only ever has an accurate map of the size of this place when he’s leaning against his house.
It was from here you could see just how far everything spanned, from here that you could see how the entrance was long gone and that it would be a terrible walk before you would even get a glimpse of those gates again.
It isn’t until now that he realized how vast those mountains of junk are—they practically swallow any remaining visibility one thinks they might have here, in the perfect middle of it all, with only a barely recognizable gravel road leading you back to the entrance.
That wasn’t even mentioning how long it must have taken to create those piles. Lemon swears looking out now that he can see cars three times his age poking out of the mounds, forming the base of the pile’s foundations. Tractors from the city’s old farmland outskirts are buried as well, and that wasn’t even mentioning the number of decommissioned construction vehicles he was just starting to notice show their age and rotting desiccation.
Cranes, loaders, bulldozers...there were even a bunch of rusty forklifts he feels like he remembers going here—there was an incident at the city’s biggest warehouse a few years ago where the faulty manufacturing of a bunch of them caused many severe injuries.
He looks over to the shed with wide eyes.
It’s less accurate to call it that than a workshop—but Roll Cake hated when anyone referred to it by that name. But it made perfect sense given its size—although, in the shadow of the valley of a mountain of aged uselessness and scrapped utility, it was easy to see why he didn’t consider it much.
And perhaps...he wanted it to stay that way?
Lemon wonders to himself quietly why Roll Cake would put up with the city dumping this kind of trash onto him. Why he’d suffer in silence, if he was suffering at all, this kind of...humiliation.
(Lemon wasn’t really sure if that was the right word to call it, but Roll Cake seemed so prideful and tightly-wound that he should have thought of it as nothing but.)
It couldn’t have been good for company.
The dust couldn’t have been good for his lungs.
Even in the wind, it chokes the surroundings with a stench of bleeding iron, dry rubber, and rancid motor oil. So overpowering that if Lemon hadn’t been used to cigarette smoke he would have suffocated on his first step in here.
...
Should he say something?
No doubt Roll Cake had probably heard it before.
But the thought doesn’t occur to Lemon as he ponders over it. He doesn’t even really consider why Roll Cake would listen to him, just that there might be a vague chance that he does, and a vague chance that he does something for himself for once, which in his opinion he needed to have done a long time ago.
That and he’s growing quite bored of this place. He left his phone at the apartment, and Lime has the keys, with Orange having the backup ones this time as well. It’s only been half an hour, but already he needs to stop thinking about having a smoke lest his cheeks burn in the sun more than they already were.
He forgot his wallet at the apartment too.
Such a thing was so embarrassing to him he almost wants to slice his nails into his palms, but he’s wearing thick gloves and can’t be bothered to take them off.
...
Lemon turns over the idea of speaking to Roll Cake in his head again.
Just for a few moments, in an almost clock-like, analytical way until he hears something click within the garage.
He freezes.
...Nothing. He wonders if he was just hearing things until something collapses again and Lemon stares at the garage door, waiting for footsteps.
Was he back already? It usually took him several hours before he finished...whatever it was he called work.
Lemon stares at the front door, waiting for the brass handle to turn. . His heart skips a few beats as he tries to not let his breath speed up too much, as if the mere idea of excitement was out of character for him like anyone was watching or cared.
...
He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help himself. Static buzzes around his hair as he nervously peers into the house through the door, perfectly framed by a pristine glass panel above the handle that Roll Cake never bothered to cover with a curtain.
It was almost so ornate Lemon thought he inherited the door when he first saw it—the rest of the house’s anatomy looked nothing like it except in hue. A same-y, bleached white reminiscent of a well kept tomb, complemented by an insultingly fitting utilitarian design.
The door looked so over-dressed in comparison. Why did he have this?
The house is dark. Ambient shadows cleave over every surface one could think of being lit by sunshine and smothers the idea before it can form. Even at high noon, the house’s lighting remains so eternally shut off that the front door seems to provide only a temporary respite for the light until it knows it must retreat again when night comes.
Lemon cannot help but stare. He knows he shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t be thinking about Roll Cake this much and should just go back to staring at nothing and thinking empty thoughts to fill the time. Maybe even explore the junk piles, see what kind of old machines he could shock, maybe turning their rust into something more useful with his electricity if there was any iron left in those old bodies.
He watches through the glass for a second.
When nothing comes, he turns the handle and throws open the door.
...
The house’s dark is much colder than he expected.
He shivers and takes a step instead with wide eyes, trying not to let his mouth hang agape.
Light begins to creep in from the disturbance, as if staining the perfectly polished floors and walls of the long hallway he was looking down.
There no picture frames to intrude their soiling hands. No rugs to hook their little bodies into and scatter accordingly. No tables or drawers to curve neatly along and contour.
He makes a conscientious effort to muffle the door closing behind him, looking out at the living room with wide eyes.
Curtains fall as it shuts for the first time in a while, and Lemon whirls around on his heel in surprise as if expecting it to make a sound. He tries to calm himself as he stares into it, biting his tongue as much as he can to keep that stalwart face he always had.
Keep your cool, he tells himself. He doesn’t dare whisper a thought aloud.
He almost wants to tell himself that he’s in over his head, and that he should leave, but he knows that this kind of thing of thing is way better than anything anyone could ever offer him.
Plus, he never got to see houses that much. Lemon hated to admit such a banal thing to himself, but it was true. Too often he was cooped up in his apartment for his own good.
It doesn’t take long for him to land in the living room. The air is putrid here, stale in a stripped and bleached kind of way. When he runs his hands over the fabric of the furniture it sticks to him for just a few seconds in a voraciously industrial manner, reminiscent of the wax used to polish motorcycles.
None of this looked nice enough to warrant such things. The furniture all matched, yes, but aside from that it looked like something someone would buy from a garage sale.
The kitchen doesn’t really look like it’s that much different either. It’s homely, and compact, designed as if meant to be mass manufactured, the shadows do it no favors.
—
It’s hard to describe it. It’s something he doesn’t think is real, the way the magazine is splayed out on the counter, but the thin layer of dust covering it convinces him that yes, it did indeed exist. And it was turned to exactly who he thought it was sparkling in the few rays of sun fluttering down from the window.
Lemon’s eyes return to the door.
The silence raged. He looked back around to the living room, polished dark floors staring back at him, glistening crystal cabinets flickering in and out of the edges of his edges of his eyes.
For once, he wasn’t sure what would happen to him if he got caught in here. Something about the pristine way the house was kept clean, as if nobody had lived in it for years, compared to the scarred war zone outside formed a lump inside his throat he would pay anything to get rid of.
If he was caught here, would he be cleaned up so well that this place would look no different after it all went down?
Despite his fears, his curiosity burned hotter. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from that page, glossy pink streaks burning bright against a plain marble tabletop.
His footsteps sounded like rocks as he approached. At least he thought they did. He held his breath as he got closer, trying not to gape as if anyone was watching him here, even if the contents of the magazine were practically made for wayward voyeurs.
...Shining Glitter.
Posed perfectly on the cover with her phone number and a sticky note written in pink ink.