Work Text:
The voice of the Scandalabra’s stories and tales bounce around the room but though you know how pissed he’ll be when he realizes you haven’t been listening, you can’t bring yourself to focus. You’re too busy fighting a losing battle with the muscles holding the corners of your mouth up and admonishing the urge to move your hands to get rid of that antsy feeling in your skin. Just when you think you have one thing under control, another thing slips. You try to keep your eyes from straying to the walls, too tired to keep attempting to barely deduct bodily movements.
Maybe you just need sleep. That’s probably it.
Scandalabra’s candle lights for some reason or another and your eyes flit to it without your thought. Then it flickers out into smoke. The hiss fills the room.
The smoke hits your face and you try not to move. It hits you harder than normal just as everything else has. It’s not hard enough to immediately immobilize, but hard enough to compound upon everything else.
“Excuse me! Were you even listening?!” Scandalabra squawks. Placing a hand on his chest, he leans forward just enough into your space that you can’t figure out which eye to look at. “I asked if you have any gossip. If you have any hot tea. I’m starting to think you don’t care about being such a prolific scandal-monger as much as I do.”
You suck in a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m a little empty-headed today, aren’t I?” you say with as much enthusiasm as you can muster. You hope it accounts for the drop you feel in your lips. You continue, “I don’t have much but I may have a morsel! I recently… befriended that shadow you mentioned on our first meeting.”
“You paused. My, the implications of that… could it be that the ever cheerful human has seduced the lord of shadows himself, hmm?” Scandalabra asks with his flame alight. He leans closer just for the impact until the heat of his flame nearly singes the tip of your hair. A single glob of wax threatens to drip down. You try not to eye it.
You stammer for a moment as you search for a response. It takes long enough that the Scandalabra’s lip begins to jut out from the bottom of his cheeky smile and his flame extinguishes. “Yes, well, I don’t know if I would say that, but you certainly could,” you say as you try desperately to remain proper.
Why did you have to choose to be proper? You could have just been regular old polite but instead you had to choose to be proper early enough that someone would comment if you broke the pattern.
Scandalabra says something to you, probably about if you have any other gossip or lovers or whatever else he likes to talk about, but you just stare. His flame flickers. As you stand there, watching his perfectly crafted smile, you wonder something. When he stops talking, you tell him nicely that you were busy thinking and ask him, “How do you do it?”
It’s a simple question really. It was only recently that you found out about Scandalabra’s real name, Jon Wick. The candle has been acting his whole life. Scandalabra is such a well done caricature that it’s like he is his own person, and one entirely different from Jon. Does he not have to painstakingly consider every action? Does it not tire him?
His lip curls down. “What are you talking about?” he asks.
“How do you, well…” you begin before pausing to quickly glance around. There is no one there. Lowering your voice to a proper whisper, you say, “...keep up the act?” Your hands twitch. It’s hard to contain energy into a stupid whisper, but it’s proper.
The Scandalabra squares his shoulders and looks at you for a moment through cutting eyes. He raises a brow. For a moment he opens his mouth before quietly shutting it.
Suddenly, he signs and his shoulders slouch forward. Not the Scandalabra anymore, but rather Jon, hisses quietly, “Look, I thought we came to an understanding that we wouldn’t talk about this yet.”
You stare. The corners of your mouth twitch as their muscles push to failure. Your eyes flicker every which way. “I’m asking for advice for, well, a friend,” you push out through a strained voice.
You look at him and he looks at you. Your cheek twitches.
Something in the crinkles of his eyes where mascara meets cheek softens. He raises his brow and asks, “What is this friend acting as? I can’t help unless I know the character.” His hand lazily gestures in a way that looks like it means something but really doesn’t mean much of anything.
“Oh, well, just a cheery, put-together sort of person,” you blunder.
“You can drop the act now,” Jon says bluntly. A hint of a smile ghosts his lips. “If you want, of course,” he adds.
You close your eyes and sigh. You shouldn’t.
God you’re so fucking tired.
Still, your lips fall neutral and your hands begin to move until it’s almost like you’re shaking off the energy around you. Rocking back and forth on your feet, you sigh. You close your eyes. It’s nice to not see anything for just a moment. The muscles in your face praise hallelujah for the rest. You suck in a slow, deep breath. It doesn’t matter that smoke fills your lungs. You just needed to breathe.
You crack open your eyes. Jon stares at you with his hand pressed against his cheek and his mouth pressed into a thin line. You wince. So much for resting if that will be his reaction. You steel yourself to desperately rein your body in somehow.
Jon snaps in front of your face. “Hey,” he says.
“I’ll go back to normal,” you promise.
“I don’t think that would be… beneficial,” he mutters, looking you up and down with an odd sort of worried look buried underneath his deadpan judgement. One hand he places in a point on his cheek in a mimicry of thought and the other he hovers over your shoulder. “How long have you been ‘performing’ this act?” he asks.
You shrug. “Hell, I don’t know. Highschool maybe. Whenever I wouldn’t needed to be normal,” you mumble.
He stares blankly.
“I should probably be better at it since I’ve been doing it for so long but that’s not where we are,” you say bluntly as your hands flit back and forth. It’s weird and it’s wrong, but it doesn’t tire you. Shifting your limbs around to feel the cloth against your skin, you ask, “Could you answer the question?”
Jon swallows. He twirls his hair and looks everywhere but you long enough to gather his thoughts. “Well, I suppose I’ve also always been doing this Scandalabra act,” he muses.
“That doesn’t answer the question. How do you do it?” you ask.
“I like doing it, that’s how I do it,” he scoffs as if it was the simplest thing in the world.
You recoil into yourself. “You like doing it? Why would anyone like hiding themselves? It takes up so much time just crafting responses. Does that not tire you?” you ask. You look him up and down for a moment. Metal glints in the soft light the same way it always has. You grit your teeth with annoyance and ask, “How do you really do it?” You can’t help the desperation lacing your voice.
Something changes in Jon’s face, but it takes you too long to place it. It’s something in the eyes and the lines around his mouth and the wax atop his head. “I like it. I like being the Scandalabra. He’s like an extension of me,” he says in bewilderment. He leans forward to look at you closer. Worry etches his face.
“No you don’t,” you insist numbly.
“Who are you really?” he asks.
You blink tiredly and answer, “I’m me. Normal me. I don’t want to talk about it.” Your hands won’t stop moving. You place them behind your back so they can be annoying in peace.
Smoke floats across your vision. You look at Jon’s expression and something clicks in your brain. A dozen details obstruct your thoughts. The growing ember attached to his candle matches the undiagnosable color in his face. His eyes have softened but his mouth has tightened.
Worried isn’t quite the word you should use.
“We’ll get nowhere with this tonight. If you pretend this didn’t happen then I’ll keep pretending that Maggie never found out anything,” you say.
Jon’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t comment. All he says is, “It’ll be our little secret.”
You nod. Then you close your eyes and painstakingly set every muscle back in place. Your lips curl up. Your hands rest softly and normally at your sides. Beside you, Jon does a vocal warmup into a higher register. You let yourself feel the temperate air of the room.
When you open your eyes, you look at the Scandalabra and he looks at who you have always been. You give a small, happy nod goodbye. Before you turn on your heel, the Scandalabra says, “Oh do be sure to have fun around here! It tends to give me such good scandals.” You smile awkwardly and wave goodbye.