Work Text:
He stops at the corner, slapping his hands against the wall and leaning to peer around it. You come up behind him, eyes trained over the curve of his shoulder, looking at nothing.
It’s one of those nights, tremulous and blurred, where the universe is tugging on you at the edges, where every color is warmer and brighter.
And everything is bigger too, pressing in on you: the pounding of your heart, the flush in your face, the dilation of your blood vessels. Everything is so present, immovable. There, waiting for you.
You feel a tingling warmth spread through you: the burning of possibility.
He whips around to face you, eyes bright, an unspoken question written in his face. The answer is always yes.
The cold steel of his eyes softens, and you see cerulean as he turns again and moves, your body following his on instinct. Momentum pulls you towards him as you run. Always, towards him.
And you have felt this so many times, the wind carding through your hair, the pounding cadence of your footsteps, the view of the back of his head. It’s all so familiar, like a second home, and yet burgeoning and new, as thrilling and intoxicating as the first time you ran through these streets with him, the first time you gave into that squirming warmth in your chest, pulling you towards him always and always.
He stops again at another corner, and you’re too busy tracing these thoughts to notice, and when you collide with him you reach to his hip to brace yourself from falling. He stiffens, and the moment is suddenly tense, pulled thin and taut, and the mutual awareness of this floats heady and shaking between the two of you.
But you don’t move your hand, because you don’t want to, and he settles, solid warmth leaning into you as both of you look out beyond the wall. He is thrumming with energy, with a brightness and vitality, and you want more of it. As much as you can get. You want to take it and burrow it in yourself and hold on to it forever.
It feels so right, the warmth settling into your chest and filling the cavity there, shivering and ever-hungry.
You are exhilarated, full of life and quivering, frantic motion, and your inhibition has slid low enough that you finally let your eyes drift the direction they are always being pulled, along the slope of shoulders and the curve of waist. There is a jolting, tremulous excitement at this, this indulgence, new answers to old, crumpled up questions. But there is also warm, solid familiarity settling across your chest.
Your whole life you had been desperately searching for a home. A sense of belonging. A place to lay down that fits around your body. And now you know, so punching-ly, forcibly deeply, that you have found it. Even if the two of you had to carve it out yourselves.
He moves again, and you can tell before he even starts, can feel it in the tensing of his body, and you follow him without thought. There’s something starting within you, a boldness, an excitement. A shaking, nervous certainty.
When he stops again, this time he turns to you, seemingly without aim or purpose. Just to do it. Everything slows, and you do too, and the entire world constricts down to this pocket of air, to the single breath the two of you pass back and forth, to the flush spreading in both your cheeks, to the realization that the two of you are pressing against a thin, fraying line never crossed before. The realization that something may change, not just something but everything, and that you could do it right now.
And he’s looking at you like he knows, like he wants it too. Wants you.
And you’re looking at him, and you think, you can finally have it, what has been pulling you the whole night, and since the day you met him. You can reach for it, and it will be there.
And you think of running through these streets as the two of you share the same breath, of him shoving his feet into your thigh on the sofa, of the sheet slipping lower and lower off his shoulder. Of that warm pull in your chest that you have been wrestling with since he first slammed a door in your face. Of possibility.
And then you think of your trembling reflection in the water by your feet, of the lines in strangers' faces as they ask why you, why him? , of the suffocating tightness of your old uniform on your body and everyone’s eyes on your face, of the rift that tore through your family years ago and has been gaping ever since
Of a life of following rules, of following orders, of lukewarm, rattle-trap safety. Of the shifting, unreadable expression on his beautiful face.
And then you know that you can’t. So you don’t.
He understands, and so neither of you do. And you stand there, solid and stagnant, feeling the weight and pressure of years of stopping, of standing still, of restraint, of misery, wrapping around you and covering you and squeezing ever more tightly.
Something wild and intense, pure and burning and bright, pressed up underneath his pastel skin and pushing to come out, slips back and disappears somewhere deep, deep inside him again. And something pained floods his face, raw and bleeding, an open wound, and then it's staunched. His face is pale and colorless again, unreadable. Unreachable.
He turns, and moves again, his voice tighter and his movements sharper, and your eyes are trained on his back again. The same view you have always had, and that you always will have after this. Close enough to look, to wonder, to want, but never to have.
And isn’t that the most cruel? To catch this glimpse, to have it so close, within reach. A taste, a burst of flavor, startling and inundating. A sudden understanding of possibility, of life in a world that includes this sweet reality. To be able to touch it, even put your fingers on it, but never close your hand.
Or you could have remained like you were before, deafened and ignorant. Life in slow motion and grayscale, in muffled sound and sluggish heart rates. You could have had none of this, of him. And that, you know more than anything, is unacceptable.
At least now, when you lay down at night and the gaping, ravenous hollow in your chest writhes and pulls once again, you will have a name for it. A face. A memory of the brush of skin against skin, of soft breath on your face, and a warmth spreading through your limbs that you had never felt before. Of his face as it crumbled and shattered and stitched itself back together, and the acute awareness of possibility, always in the corner of your eye, but always out of reach.