Work Text:
The night had its own peculiar colors. Stop lights suffused with crimson peril, streetlights a blue-white assault on the senses. Josh missed the mellow orange gleam of the sodium-vapor lights of his former existence. Same old neighborhood, but one containing a crater-sized absence. Coming off his shift at two AM, Josh stood on the stoop of his house - the house he shared with the patient and loving females in his life - and for only the fifth or sixth time that day, he thought of Pete.
Spring was here and chilly potential filled the air, despite the darkness, despite the surreal invading glare of the new LED lamps. For work purposes, it was helpful to view tragedy, disaster and injury rendered in their invasive illumination. All other situations required kinder lighting. It was Spring, and it brought a specific reminder of the absence which still, after years - but who was counting - left him angry and aching.
Now he was thinking of a night in 1990, in an equally cold Spring, standing in an alleyway behind L’Amour and looking up at Pete looking up at a sky which was blank, like those threadbare spots in his own emotions. And they were each orange-tinged figures in those shadows. But this was one of the few people - whom he could count on the fingers of one hand - requiring no explanation of his silences.
“In the woods, right now,” a low rumble intoned, both articulate and primal in its effect, “something is being hunted.” Pete was riffing, a macabre Marlin Perkins.
“Look down the alley,” Josh replied, dryly sardonic, “I bet there’s a cat and a rat doing the same thing.”
“Yo, youse gasbags gonna stand out there all night holdin’ ya dicks?!” Sal called out from within the humid warmth of the club. An expectant breath reached them, they felt the presence of all within - a sympathetic audience - waiting for whatever would unfold.
“Awww, you wanna hold it for me, Sal?” Josh sniped.
“Better than holding your fat ass,” Pete retorted, then grinned, a sign of affection.
Josh took a last drag of his cigarette and flicked the butt into the depths of that darkness, sparks flying.
“Let’s get this over with,” he murmured, wryly considering what their friends and families’ reactions would be to this new idea, decidedly less dramatic than the band Pete had dissolved, beloved though it was. And for a moment he flashed back to the two of them at age 12, listening to the radio, and how Pete turned it up when a song came on that he knew Nettie liked.
“Momma, your song is on,” he would call out, and her answer would echo from within the house, “Thank you drogi!”
Time parted its’ gossamer veils and this one lifted from East 18th Street, though he was not exactly where he had been, at either time. And Pete was gone: from everywhere, forever.
“But it’s Spring,” he whispered, respecting the neighborhood’s need for quiet if not darkness. “You can’t be gone now, there are redheads waiting to be hunted. In the woods. In the dark.”
He swore he could hear a chuckle within the sounds of the neighborhood. Just like he would hear that rumble in a crowd of people, in the sound of machinery, and sometimes, for real, on the radio. The baritone which was solid bedrock: all menace and longing and deep dark atmosphere. Shades in a spectrum only visible to a few, shadows which stretched across space and time.
Josh took out his keys and spent a few moments breathing in that cold night. But whatever he had sensed had moved on, if he believed in such a thing, which he wasn’t entirely sure he did. If anyone could find a way to loom just as large after death…
“Here we go again,” Pete had said as they walked back into the club. “What d’ya think?”
“I think we’re gonna suck, probably, but it won’t matter.”
“Hey, we gotta be good at something, right?”
They smirked at each other, and Josh smirked to himself as he unlocked the door of the place where everyone and everything he loved resided. And the absence followed him inside, a not entirely unwelcome guest.
It was Spring, but it was cold. A night in which all things, even those intangible, sought shelter.