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Benjamin Fairest is not a stranger to loneliness.
The cold and the quiet follow him like dogs with iron-tipped claws, metallic and dragging and heavy , pulling down at his arms and his neck and the edges of his smiles like invisible weights dragging him toward the earth. It will never be a happy feeling, being alone, but at least it’s comforting in its familiarity, however twisted that may be – and he is always safer alone, anyway, than he will ever be with others.
There hadn’t been a point in trying to protest when his parents had told him about the party that night, his mother trapping him in a suit too small and shoes too tight as poison words dripped from her lips like honey, snide remarks of my poor, idiotic little boy, you look perfect. Make sure you stay that way and you don’t want to make us look bad, do you? and behave yourself tonight, don’t make us do anything we’ll regret , sharp nails like claws ghosting across the burn marks on his neck on their way to straighten his bowtie. He keeps his mouth shut even as beady eyes give him a cold once over (not the doting gaze of a mother toward a son but the steely, calculating glare of a wolf toward a lamb, daring him to act out, hungry for a chance to exercise teeth and claws), keeps his mouth shut even as polished keratin digs lightly into his flesh, icy blue nails into a cigarette burn too recent to be touched, keeps his mouth shut as he feels the sting of pain – sudden, quick and sharp – and keeps his mouth shut in the back of the limousine as he touches his neck, glances at the fingers that come back red, staring blankly as his vision starts to blur.
(He’s quite good at crying quietly. He can’t stop the tears when they come but he can stop the sobbing that comes with it, and he’s grown to nurse a weird, warped sense of pride for that. There’s one thing in his life he can control, at least.)
The party can’t really be called a party – it’s far too prim and proper, and all the attendees are so horribly snobbish and far up their own asses that Ben's surprised any of them can breathe properly. His father showboats him around the function like a mascot at a carnival, showing him off to the paparazzi at the entrance and then to the rich stuck-ups inside, all waves and how are yous and bright grins that don’t quite meet his dark flint eyes. Of course, that means Benjamin needs to plaster the practised smile across his face and play his part, as well – assure everyone that their home life is fine and that his parents are his biggest inspirations and that he’s so honoured and grateful to be where he is, lie through his teeth about how he thinks his music career will skyrocket, pretend he doesn’t feel more like a hollowed-out husk rather than a real person.
(Pretend he can’t feel the marks burning holes into his collar.)
And he hates it so so much, so much it makes his stomach churn — hates the hands on his shoulders and the cameras in his face and the sickening feeling of trapped cramped not safe that wrings his stomach taut, how cold and awful the eyes on him make him feel — but he knows how to play the game, and he knows how to play it well.
He’s been doing it all his life, after all.
His parents lose interest in parading him around after a while, acting as if they hadn’t just been grinning over his shoulder and spinning stories about how proud they were of him, leaving him at the lavish buffet table to mingle with the other self-obsessed pricks as if he were nothing but a pearl necklace they could just hang up once they were finished with it. Benjamin would feel more offended if he could feel anything at this point. Still, he catches sight of the (horrendously over-decorated) door hanging ajar to his left and silently thanks whatever powers of the universe had gotten him so close to his exit.
Thank god, thank god, thank god, thank god.
The cold air hits him like freshwater. He stumbles out like a blind man, almost tripping over the fancy staircase under his feet, breathing heavily as if he’d just run a marathon – and he really might as well have, considering how long he’d held his breath in there.
He looks up at cold white walls -- smooth, polished, and disgustingly tall. He doesn’t know whose fancy-ass mansion this is. He doesn’t want to be here.
God, this is horrible and awful and he hates today he hates all the days stuck in this endless cycle like a hamster on a wheel, always met at the end of the day with sharp blue nails and the lit end of a cigar and oh God he can feel his lungs burning and his stomach twisting and he needs to move he needs to breathe he needs to get the hell out of here.
“Fffffuck,” Ben hisses under his breath. He relishes the sting of the curse on his tongue — He doesn't get to swear often. It feels liberating in its sharpness now, but it doesn’t do a lot to calm the rabbit-speed pace of his heartbeat or the shallow gasps that leave his lungs, so he feels blindly for something to lean against. He's met with steady, cool brick, and ducks behind it to clutch at his chest like a drowning man.
Oh god. Okay.
Breathing. Breathing. He knows how to do that. He scrambles for the numbers Grace had given him ages ago ( in for three? Out for six? What the fuck was it?) and hears an ugly sob resound through the alley during the process, startling himself when he realizes it had come from his own mouth. Great.
He presses a palm into his eyes and groans in frustration as he feels them start to water.
God, he’s so tired. He’s so, so tired.
Okay. Okay.
He inhales, deep – wet and shaky and more sound than breath, but it’s something – and exhales through his mouth, watching as it leaves his lips in a wisp of white against the cold midnight air. Good – it’s a start.
He tries again and inhales a sudden lungful of a different taste, acrid and foul and unmistakably cigarette smoke.
Perhaps the shuddering gasp that escapes him is rather pathetic, but worrying about appearances is on the bottom of his list right now because that is cigarette smoke and there is a figure in the alley across from him and he’s moving and it reeks of tobacco and Benjamin Fairest is genuinely, properly, horribly convinced that he is going to die.
He expects to be met with yelling and rough hands and fire. They don’t come.
They don’t…. come.
What?
Ben can feel his eyes flutter open despite the shrieking alerts of not safe not alone not hidden rampaging his head and in the process notices that the figure is far too thin and gangly to be his father, hunched over rather than standing up straight and proud like his father would. They haven’t seemed to have noticed him even throughout his whole Thing, keeping their back to him, moving slow and listlessly as they rummage through a bag of something that clinks like metal – and above them, across the white wall behind the lavish-looking house he’d come out of, is the most gorgeous graffiti Benjamin has ever seen in his whole life.
He thinks that he knows art quite well – watercolours and acrylics and brushes and palettes have been with him for as long as he can remember and he knows them like old friends, spinning them across his canvases like it’s the only thing he knows how to do – but he doesn’t know it as giant and abstract and fucking raw as this. There’s nothing even particularly out of the blue about the artist’s techniques but the piece just feels real – like an explosion and a tidal wave and a forest fire and a cloud of stars; elegant curling wisps of purple and violent visceral slashes of red, ribbons of colour and shape colliding into each other to form sand and smoke and knives and guns.
A crude little story on a dingy little wall behind some rich snob’s mansion. And it’s unabashedly beautiful.
There’s a rustling noise of shifting fabric as the figure straightens up – slowly and hesitantly, Ben notices, like it pains them to move. The guy can’t be much older than he is but he looks a lot more boy than man, clad in a green jacket much too small for him and a gas mask slung loose around his neck, clutching a can of spray paint between hands with nails crudely painted black like the person painting them got distracted halfway through. They turn and make eye contact, and Ben can see a hint of ginger hair under the hood, freckles scattered across gaunt skin and the cigarette hanging from chapped lips.
His eyes are the most striking: pale and sunken, carrying a weight that doesn’t belong on a face as young as his, dark circles heavy under the lids. They look tired.
They look haunted.
Benjamin supposes that he isn’t in the best shape, either: he can feel the tears still hot down his cheeks and the stinging in his neck due to him scratching at the scabs a little too hard, red and raw and really quite pathetic-looking. In the back of his mind, a stray thought remarks complacently that this is a sad kind of poetic – meeting a stranger who looks just about as broken as he is. A weird, twisted kinship.
(He feels his eyes well up again and resists the urge to hit himself.)
When the haunted man speaks it sounds like he hasn’t done so for a very long time. “Do I know you?”
Ben can’t move. God, he must look insane, tear-soaked and breathless in a random alleyway. “I… don’t think so?”
“Mn.” The hooded boy shifts the cigar between his teeth, giving him a tense once-over before turning back to the wall and shaking the spray can in his hand a lot more vigorously than Benjamin thinks is necessary. There’d been no flash of recognition in the stranger's eyes, either – he’s apparently not one for keeping up with the Fairests, which is… almost comical in how relieving that is.”’Kay then.”
There’s a pause punctuated by the steady hiss of spray paint across brick, and Ben stares for a bit. The way the stranger moves feels like art in its own right – not effortless but fluid all the same, with precision earned from what had to be countless hours of doing it over and over. Like a dance.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing the mask when you do that?” Ben asks, dumbly, because of course the words leave his mouth before he can even think about saying them.
The stranger gives a dry laugh. “Can’t do much with my life now. Might as well die of paint fumes.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t fuckin’ say,” the boy snarks, but it sounds so resigned that the words don’t hit at all. A wolf, too exhausted to bare its teeth.
They both fall into silence again, Benjamin watching as the spray can dips and weaves between chipped black nails. The stranger isn’t particularly accommodating to him but he doesn’t tell him to leave, either – the way he speaks to him is a weird sort of refreshing, as well, after having been flaunted around a hall full of people who see him as more of a showdog rather than a person. This boy feels human, raw and ugly, instead of the synthetic plastic smiles that plague Benjamin’s life, and it’s… nice. It’s good. Not perfect, but that’s the last thing he wants.
“I like your art,” Ben says after the other spins the spray can back into the duffel bag on the ground and steps back to survey his work, and the stranger grunts back something that sounds vaguely thankful.
“I do art, too,” Ben tries, wringing his hoodie string between his fingers.
The other stills. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, um. Painting. Acrylics, mainly.” Oh, he’s so bad at this. “Sorry, I can leave if you’d like, I don’t want to be a bother–”
“Hm.” The stranger takes the cigarette from his lips and tilts his head to consider Benjamin properly for the first time, haunted eyes so intense it feels like he’s being seen through. “What’s your name, Blue?”
“Oh. Um – Ben works fine.”
The hooded boy chuckles. Actually chuckles. It sounds unpracticed, raspy like the hinge of a door that hasn’t been opened in ages, but it’s a gorgeous sound. Benjamin thinks everything might be okay if he could hear that noise for the rest of his life.
(That’s a strange thought. Whoa.)
“Pico,” the graffiti man states, holding out a black-gloved hand. Ben takes it. It’s warm against his own palm, which is usually always unnaturally, scarily cold. “S’ cool that you’re an artist. We match.”
“Y-yeah, I mean, I don’t think I could paint anything as good as what you do–”
“Shut up,” Pico says – not angrily or bitterly but so matter-of-factly straightforward that it stuns Benjamin into silence. “I bet your stuff is tons better. This is nothin’, I just – needed it. Had to get it out.”
“I think most people do art because they have to get it out,” Ben says.
The other blinks and stares at him for a long enough time that Benjamin wonders if he’d fallen asleep standing up before there’s a tug on his sleeve and he’s suddenly being gently towed down the street before he can even register what had come out of his mouth.
“Oh,” is the only reaction he can muster.
“We’re getting out of here,” Pico tells him, and across his haunted face is a grin and Benjamin catches a glimpse of a tooth gap between his teeth and it’s so humanely imperfect and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life.
"We are?"
“These parts are full of rich stuck-up sanctimonious assholes, anyway,” the hooded man adds, and Ben is so taken aback that he finds himself laughing, genuine and hard, something he hasn’t been able to do in a long, long time.
Benjamin Fairest is not a stranger to loneliness, but for now the world is a little less lonely, and he will let himself be warm just this once.