Work Text:
“You know, I think I love you when I’m drunk,” Red says to the night sky.
The night sky, in the form of a man whose eyes are so purple they must hurt, snorts. There’s a million things he can say, ranging from you’re always drunk, Reddoons to why only then? He settles somewhere in the middle with something a little safer. “That’s drunkenness for you.”
Red hums. It’s noncommittal, like everything Red does. The silence that stretches afterward is bubbly like soda, carbonated with that which was left unsaid. He taps his knee because he doesn’t know what else to do.
These are two men who are willing to kill for each other. Neither are quite sure if they’re willing to die for each other, but that’s alright. That’s the sort of answer that only comes once the trigger is pulled, the kind you only get when it’s too late. Bullets move too fast to jump in front of in real life.
“That’s not the answer you wanted,” Ash notes, the celestial god, the aurora borealis. Red thinks Ash is the night sky, made of asteroids and comets. He thinks he is in constant motion, pulled along by inertia and drive. Ash, who used to have stars in his eyes but now only has Reddoons, doesn’t have the heart to humor him. He doesn’t amend his vague statement from earlier.
Red sighs, heavy. “I’ve had too much whiskey for a different one,” is what he says, and it catches them both off guard. It’s raw, it’s honest. It’s the gold miner deliberately choosing to leave the pyrite behind.
“Sure. You find me when you’re two days sober, tell me how much you really love me, and then we’ll talk.”
He laughs in the way that drunk people do, incoherent and discontinuous from their previous mood. “Yeah? How long you plan on waitin’, Ash, because it’s gonna be awhile.”
The curve of Ash’s mouth is too tight to be named a smile. “I know.”
If he were more patient, he might try to reason with Red. It’s possible to convince him to give up alcohol, if he had fifty years to hammer at it. Theoretically, he could steal into Red’s apartment, try taking every ounce of liquor there. It’d take a couple tries and a lot of discovered hiding spots, but it might happen. As it was, Ash figures it would be a lot faster to just get over his feelings.
“Do you ever think you love me too?” Red asks. Ash hates how quiet he sounds. He stares at the cosmos still, stuck in the patterns his drunk self established ten years ago. Ash could probably count on one hand how many times Red has been stone sober since then, but it’s not as though he’s got the strength to actually go through the number.
This sort of conversation isn’t new to them. They’ve danced this waltz a few times now, and Ash’s steps get surer while Red’s stay the same. He’s clumsy with forgetting, letting alcohol steal his memories like he’s got none to lose. Maybe he doesn’t. For all his talk of loving, he never makes the effort to remember.
“All the time,” Ash answers easily. The outcome will be the same if he denies it; he gains nothing now from lying except another charge on his sentence. “But you make me think I don’t know what love is just as much.”
“You know,” Red says simply. He speaks the pair of words with a certainty Ash has never deserved, and his smile is sad when he turns to look him in the eye. It wavers, but his voice doesn’t. “If anyone knows love, I reckon it’s gotta be you.”
What response is there to that? There isn’t one, not here and not at the edges of the universe. Easy answers disappeared when the big bang invented incineration, and Ash has been at a loss ever since. So he abandons an answer in favor of a question. “Why?”
It’s safe. Ash knows how to make his interactions with Reddoons safe , even when they’re lounging on the roof of his house and watching the constellations instead of their footing. They haven’t fallen yet. Not physically.
Red hums, leaning back on the heels of his hands in a way that must strain his wrists. His sunglasses, obsolete in the nighttime and around Ash, sit pretty in the locks of his hair. He tilts his head back and forth minutely as he thinks. “Y’know, I guess you’re just not the type of guy to hold yourself back. Don’t ever do that, Ash. Love if you wanna love.”
He’s drunk. It’s fine.
Ash’s heart isn’t breaking into a thousand pieces and fusing into a brand new organ.
Ten years is a long time to spend on someone you could ever get over. That possibility has been dead and discarded for a long time now. What is a partner if not a stasis that hides under the guise of unwillingness?
“Stop drinking, then,” he says, tired. Tired of the game. Tired of the decade he’s spent on someone who lives his life in a bottle. Distantly, tired of the fact that he’d spend another decade on him in a heartbeat.
“Can’t,” says Reddoons. He looks at Ash with such a weighted fatigue and weariness it feels like being dragged into a black hole. “Dunno what I am without it anymore. Not human. Not this.”
The ouroboros forgets that stuffed behind that tail in its mouth is a brain, cold and unused as it may be. “You’re Red,” says Ash, which doesn’t explain anything at all.
Red’s lips are tight. “Do you ever feel this ache like you wanna go home? Except you get it even when you’re layin’ in your own bed. That’s what it’s like. It doesn’t go away until I drink enough to forget where the hell I came from.”
In a world where Red is younger than he is, Ash could blame the alcoholism on the Maze, on the show he used to pay his way out of trouble. In this one, though, Red’s been addicted to his addiction before he was twenty, and Ash has been watching him pour cans and bottles into the tank he’ll drown in for years.
“Let me take you to a psychiatrist,” Ash pleads.
He hates how much Red looks like he’s given up. “You know I can’t. They’ll take my blood pressure, ask me things. I’m okay not knowin’ what’s wrong with me.”
I’m not, Ash wants to say, but Ash suppresses a lot of things he wants. His own heart charms sit heavy on the top of his ear, in a little waterfall layering down. He remembers when he first got them, when Red looked at them so hungrily he’d taken a step back.
Orion twinkles in his fatal position above them. Ash feels the arrow pierce his temple. This has to be what dying feels like.
There’s only so much one man can do in this infinite sky with its finite earth, and yet, there is no one else to share the burden. If Red doesn’t fall back on Ash, he’ll fall onto cinder blocks and empty hearth. The concussion will kill him.
“It’s cool if I crash here tonight, right? I don’t feel a whole lot like catchin’ the train right now.”
Ash sighs. “About time you asked. Come on. My bed has room for two.”
And oh, how that space will throb when Ash has to lay there next to whiskey-scented Reddoons. How suffocatingly close, when he knows he will never touch, not when Red is as intoxicated as he needs to be to forget his problems. Instead, Ash will surround himself with the freezing embrace of a vacuum. There is no atmosphere if his mind is far enough away.
What a long decade it’s going to be. How short the last one was.