Work Text:
“Are you going to work already?”
Damien’s heart swells in his throat, wishing she had never asked, hoping she won’t check the clock in a wild venture to confirm the validity of his answer that could take them anywhere. “Yes,” is all he says, trying to serve as some albeit faltering consolation. She turns away from him and not having to see her face feels almost like relief, slipped skillfully underneath the all-consuming guilt somewhere between the negative spaces and the 4th dimension. If Iris says anything more, he hopes to not hear it.
He’s willing more than anyone to admit that he’s selfish for cramping all of his monotone morning routines into as small of a vacuum as he does, almost obvious with the way he’s trying to get out of their shared room. Anything that might be needed for his job is cobbled into a corner, dust accruing in a blanket over the flat of his laptop missing nary an inch, save for what seems like a crude attempt at an oval in the center where Iris had left her necklace on top of it one day.
Maybe he doesn't want to press an ear to the monster of self-interest in its entirety; it's one bad deed traded for one, maybe two good ones.
-
Other than desultory shapes and the occasional leaden-murky color, Damien finds it hard to make out anything in the dark as they find their way down the sidewalk, squinting through the Cimmerian midnight to focus in on the keys that Callum is jingling in front of his face like he’s some stray cat. He pats his pockets to little avail, all being in there lies his wallet and phone. Maybe it’d have been a proposition if Damien didn’t already have a key to his apartment, maybe it’d have been some sort of out-of-touch joke about keys if he hadn’t known Callum better than that. No, he squints. Those are his keys.
Damien staggers, cloudy and blinded by the come-on-just-one-more’s and the you’re-not-even-that-drunk’s that left him choking down another shot of liquid ire to separate his mind from his body, only becoming solid in time to catch himself in each step.
“How did you—”
“You can’t leave me if you don’t have your keys,” Callum rouses.
God, Damien can’t help but fall for the challenging tone in his voice. Callum is something dangerous, pushing and pulling and refusing to give in until they hit something even worse or even better than each other.
His hands awkwardly scurry for the ring of metal shapes, caught in his motions by Callum holding his arm as far back as his brittle elbow will let him without snapping. He’s still caught only a few inches short when he passes his weight forward, down into his ankles and soles, chest ghosting against Callum’s in what would be a waltz in some messier universe as they dance and spin and grapple to try to keep the keys away from the other.
Somewhere within him, Callum knows this is a poor attempt at an expertly-crafted device to get Damien to stay, knowing Damien’s door has a passcode (of which he knows easily: twelve-twelve-fifty-three, his birthday), and that Damien has a key to apartment, but he also knows it’d be a hassle and Damien might not think about it too long under the layers of drunken haze and sheer bewilderment over his long-unknown pickpocketing skill and epinephrine as nobody exists in the world but them.
He strains to think about anything logical knowing Damien looks at him like he’s something beautiful and elusive and unattainable, touching him quick and leaving burns to match like he’s a ravenous open flame that might consume both of them if they aren’t careful. Callum doesn’t want to be careful. Damien doesn’t take the hint.
-
It’s arduous to look at Iris like he’s sorry when at least half of Damien’s nights are spent threading his hands with Callum’s and feeling the bones poking his fingertips to keep him connected to some semblance of reality even if he knows he might not be enough, or the routine, panicked fisting through medicine cabinets, or the frustrating motions of relearning how to breathe by his side to no avail because it really never helps enough, does it?
He melts himself under the unrelenting showerhead that wants nothing more than to roast him to cinders, skin peeling under the care of negligent Mother Nature, hoping, maybe—just maybe, that if he keeps doing this, Iris will mistake what he’s doing in exchange for nothing more than her observations: petty flings and meaningless sex that he’d find hard to lose himself in given he has so much better to be thinking about, no matter how drunk he’s able to get himself. He’d be no further to pleasure and no further to where he truly wants to be in life to even try.
Having to get lost in a fantasy where Callum isn’t more than that is his version of suicide, to pretend that the first and last times he’d seen Callum’s empty form sharp and shattered weren’t important, how he’d looked at him like he was still terrified and his fingers were slipping away from the serrated edges of life and way, way too young for it. The way Callum shook in his arms, staining his shirt with the lapse of his will to continue living, losing everything until his voice was broken. He’d heard Callum croaking in the morning, complaining of soreness and asking his mother for cough medicine from the convenience store down the street, all while Damien was still blinking himself into the waking world on the floor next to his mattress. Those memories are framed like pictures in his mind.
Callum has become more of a specter in that regard, one he only hopes to see again in empty bedrooms and old motels. Damien can’t blame him for the loss of trust; they haven’t seen each other in years.
Tonight isn’t much different. Callum murmurs something with his mouth pursed against one of a bottle’s, a nothing that Damien isn’t prepared to catch. It’s hard to hold any desire to stop him from drinking when Damien is too vividly conscious of the way Callum’s lips connect with the opening of the beer bottle or tear them up with his teeth, pouring his focus into the way he trusts his weight with the balcony railing or how he looks with his execrably-dyed hair pinned behind the back of his head.
This is what Damien does in his mind; he takes, and takes, and takes, even the small things, even when no one wants to give until they’re stuck in an Ouroboric loop of eating their own tails for him, when they’re dried up and stained with tears, all too pretty in the vague light that parades from a room adjacent to them. It’s admittedly painful that he couldn’t think of his own fiancée in such a light, and it’s even more so that it’s someone he can’t have. Maybe if he could have Callum, he’d be content going down the path heeding sin, to fall down that river and sink as deep as he can into his vicarious water. But he can’t.
“Are we going to keep doing this?” Callum rolls his jaw, full and less taken from than he'd been before he’d called Damien to come over.
“What?”
“Nevermind,” Callum doesn’t grace him with an answer, yet Damien knows exactly what he’s talking about. He squeezes Callum’s free hand in his own.
The rest of the night is hurtfully silent. Callum doesn’t push him one way or another, and he doesn’t push Callum.
Life has given him an ultimatum.
-
His willingness to shower wavers when the night he’d last seen Callum leaves him spinning out of direction, losing any reason to deter Iris from what she thinks he’s doing. He can tell how she feels, the bitterness lying just behind what’s vague and can hardly be called a smile, even though he thinks it’s supposed to be one. It doesn’t reach her eyes and leaves her looking like she’s empty. Like he’s empty.
“Do you love her?”
There’s something disingenuous and conceivably underhanded about the way that Callum asks it, so they both choose to ignore how it bleeds into the air like the smoke from a cigarette that Damien decided he didn’t want half-way through, pinched between Callum’s index and thumb. The taller of the two can feel the not-much-shorter’s eyes prodding at his back as he cooks a meal he’d normally reserve for Iris when times were easier.
“I don’t know… she’s nice. She’s intelligent and way kinder to me than I deserve.”
Callum minds the pause between “nice” and “intelligent,” which is one of the many woes of spending all of your time with a detective. Maybe it’s that he knows enough to not need to reconnoiter Damien to poke at all of his possible vulnerabilities, or maybe that Callum pays attention to what he’s saying at all.
“People who love each other don’t think their fiancée is just nice, Damien.”
Damien can also sense abject distaste in Callum’s voice, and for what Damien isn’t sure, but he knows that it’s sparking and dangerous and both of them are trying to avoid letting it ignite, their sentiment negligent of how they'd carelessly let Damien go up in blazes a long time ago.
Callum swears the embers are getting in his eyes, but Damien would be quick to dismiss it just like he used to.
-
I think we should see other people, is what Damien wants to say. Or I think I liked you a lot more than I loved you or maybe I don’t know how to let you down easily so this is all I can give you or even possibly the simple, classic, I’m leaving you. There’s weak formulas of sentences here and there, but not enough to leave anything but the less placating yet almost painfully simpler-to-sort-out string of alphabet soup that drips out of his mouth.
“I’m cheating on you.”
Mercifully, he paves them both an easier path towards the other side of an argument he is waiting to rear its ugly head. He won't struggle, he’ll give her the house and everything in it save for a few valuables and trinkets and heirlooms. He’ll avoid his family, and knowing himself probably resign sheepishly to whatever ferocity they send his way, hoping someone will catch blush of the smoke signals from the burning house that he’s become trapped in.
Maybe he also wants to relish in the idea that someone would truly believe Callum would spread out recumbent in a bed for him, staunch and steadfast in his decision to give himself up to Damien. He doesn’t worry for long about how perverse and hedonistic he might sound; even if entirely clad he’d still take Callum, wanting nothing if not to tell him how beautiful he looks in the morning light that finds his cloudlike skin unhurried.
It plays out in one big mockery of what Damien had spent countless seconds, minutes, hours putting together, what his father had spent countless days, months, years putting together, a perfect lustrously shining bow on the neatly-wrapped-disaster that has become his life thus far, tumbling down further and further until he finds his spine flat against rock bottom.
Callum stands over him, a phantasm in black threadbare, his pink-tinted fingers reaching in to bring Damien back to his feet.
Not only Damien, but all that is inside him, the entity pressing its face against the film, clawing its way through; one with incomplete, stupidly indiscrete language, consuming the way muscles and tendons shift under his lips, swallowing the heartbeats he can auscultate from Callum’s throat, tearing unsightly holes where buttons that thread themselves into white cotton once were. Damien, breaking into Callum’s thoughts, breaking him down into compartments and filling him up again, full and contented and imbibed. Damien, breathless and furious, tearing apart and erasing, possessing and cannibalizing—
Damien, who is shattered into a million desecrated, deplorable, happy pieces.