Work Text:
What does it mean?
"What does it mean?" he keeps asking, time after time, and he asks and asks until he finally asks out loud, in a brief moment of freedom.
"What does it mean?"
Brown eyes, heavily made up, almost to the point of vulgarity, glint at him from behind strands of hair with an expression that drives that point home.
"What does what mean?"
"Don't. Johnny -"
He turns away as Johnny lunges again, and feels a moist touch at his chin. The skin on his back crawls.
"What..." Johnny repeats, in a sort of fake half-hearted question. Morrissey can't believe the cruelty, the softness burried in the cruelty and the cruelty at the heart of the softness, and so on, ad nauseam. He wonders what is in the very middle, what is the starting point. He asks about that, although in a simpler phrasing:
"What does it mean?"
It's as if his whole existence has been turned into these four words.
Johnny is breathing slowly, so close he can hear it, and feel it on his face. He is still clutching Morrissey's elbow, but he makes no more attempts.
"Does it have to mean something?"
"Everything does. What?"
A drawn-out sigh, almost petulant. How can he be so childish?
"Answer me," he says, very quietly.
Johnny shakes his head stubbornly. Him and his look of gentle misery, in such stark, disheartening contrast with his grin from half a minute ago. The grin Morrissey can still taste on his mouth, like a wax seal.
"Why did you do it?"
In the dubious sanctity of a locked hotel room, no one is likely to see them, yet Johnny flinches back, as if caught redhanded. When he lets go of Morrissey's arm, backing down, it feels like an extremity amputated.
"God, why..." he chokes out, involuntarily, and Johnny glances at him, surprise and shame jumbled together in his face.
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want - I don't need your sorry. Don't you know -" he trails off. Well, he would, he thinks.
Of course he knows. Johnny smiles a small, uncertain smile.
"Sure doesn't look like it."
"No, that's exactly what it's supposed to look like."
He doesn't go into details, trusting Johnny to comprehend the situation. That's exactly what it's supposed to look like when a man who is desperately, damningly, fatally infatuated with another is yanked from his hopeless reverie to the real, tough life, and by a kiss, no less.
"I thought you'd... I thought you wouldn't mind. At least," Johnny speaks heavily. He moves to the other side of the couch and draws up his legs, hugging his knees. He's not timid by nature, this is so wrong, so against himself. Even now there is some defiant, sarcastic quality to his timidity. Morrissey mirrors his position, and they sit, like two silly hermits, with absurdity drifting through the air serenely all around.
"It's not that I mind. It doesn't matter if..." Morrissey closes his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine a reality where he could mind that. Blank spaces all over.
"I just don't see why you would," he finishes helplessly.
"Because you wouldn't, and someone had to!"
Morrissey's heart is beating out an irregular pattern.
"Why?"
"I tried to explain, but you won't let me," Johnny says stubbornly, looking away, at the beige rug, or the beige couch, or the tangible beige nothing that unites hotel rooms all over the world.
"I won't..? I do let you! I ask you to explain."
Johnny makes a perfectly comic here-we-go-again face at him, but still he stands up and takes two steps until he's towering over. He perches on the scarce piece of couch, narrowly avoiding sitting on Morrissey's feet. Morrissey sighs and meets his eye, but his arms tighten around his legs nervously, on their own accord. When Johnny leans in again, he doesn't turn away.
Well, he did ask for explanation, and explanation he is getting. Though the second he is sumberged in a kiss again, he feels the need for explanation ebb. What's the world, he thinks with dizzy humour, holding his breath. His mind stops wandering, and wondering. His lips wonder, and his nose wonders at the clumsy touch of Johnny's cheek to its tip, and all his skin wonders endlessly. His ear wonders as it catches a soft sound of lips sliding against lips, of a tongue reaching out like a rubber ring. That's it, isn't that it? What's anything when there's that?
When Johnny pulls back, Morrissey inhales deeply, as if he'd just dived out of an ocean depth. His muscles ache, and his head spins. He lowers it, and he knows his hair is touching Johnny's chin.
"Quite an exercise, huh?" Johnny murmurs, and he would be embarrassed, but he can hear Johnny's own ragged breaths. Almost as if it felt the same for him.
When he looks up, Johnny is expectant.
"Got it?" he asks simply.
"No," Morrissey tells him. He angles his face just a tiny bit, and Johnny meets him halfway, whispering something brief.