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Wrecked and dizzy. The feeling was very much human. More human than Scar had ever felt in his life. And that was weird to say because there wasn’t so much as a twitch on his face when driving out into the dark forestry in seemingly the middle of nowhere. He didn’t mind though as long as Grian hadn’t; always spacing out between the gaps of manually planted trees, breadths between them like any movement or animal crossings were going to come out any minute now. But this time, Grian didn’t look out the car window as he usually did.
Grian’s right hand were firmly on the car door, planted with a vigour that Scar had seen plenty in his day, looking straight ahead.
Scar looked at Grian to see the agitation fly back and forth through uninjured limbs and shifty eyes. The car lights’ reflection were disorientating them, mixing brutally with the mellow brown in Grian’s eyes so it looked like an upset yellow, like his pupils themselves were going to be sick.
Scar then took it upon himself to drive slower, thinking that if the spooky landscapes and occasional roadkill came up clearer, there’d be things for Grian to remark about. Like how the animals in his sketchbook looked exactly like that dead ferret there with that cheek of his hanging out, or the bird with the twisted wing at hair’s length from Scar’s wheel. All very Grian-worthy things for him to talk about.
But even then, Grian willing himself to keep quiet about everything was something Scar had trained with and dealt with his whole life. But he felt almost tipsy now. And it became tough and tougher as the moon soon fell short of their steady rhythm and parted ways with them at the back.
Especially dissatisfied with today though, Scar put both of his hands on the wheel but still drove at the same speed, feeling a tad bit tired for Grian. He let his tongue swipe at the front row of his teeth, stopping its sweep to rest its plight there in the corner of his mouth.
Scar knew he had said something then but couldn’t remember what he’d asked. Or how Grian responded to it. But he knew the consolation worked because there was a thought, maybe several, that were brewing in those yellow-brown eyes of his. Especially when Scar saw Grian looking at the tiny bump his side-pout made to his skin.
“Do you even know where you’re going, Scar?”
“Sure I do. Now I can see why you haven’t been a carer for very long.”
Grian turned to look at him, a cute face under furrowed brows, and said, “So these roads are for us then. Not for them.”
Scar smiled, huffing with his nose as if exasperated, “No, Grian.”
Grian was swept into silence once more. Scar somehow knew before they’d stepped into Miss Emily’s home that it was going to be very different. The two of them. And aware in a not-Miss-Lucy type of way when she’d been on the brink of tears staring into Scar’s bemused face all those years ago. No, the only things Scar picked up from that meeting was how old Miss Emily and Madame now looked and how the house was filled with so many precious things, it completely side-tracked him from everything.
He’d truly never seen a room with so many things in them before. Unnerved him to no end. It certainly didn’t make the looking-at-Grian-because-I’m-afraid-he’ll-make-a-run-for-it-if-I-look-away situation any better.
He had noticed Grian taking a whizz past the shelves in her home; filled with little ceramic creatures and marbles the type he and Grian used to play with back at Hailsham. Little detective.
In fact, there was one picture of Miss Emily in her wheelchair that clipped Grian’s mouth to his face like he’d been the one framed on the crooked shelf.
Scar could remember his days in a wheelchair.
He could see it flash behind tired eyes. Jokes, adjacent to lamenting, that humoured him as much as it did Grian. The Guardians giving him a look that said, ‘I want to know how you feel but I never can and I never will’. The attention a whole bunch of kids gave you and the odd few that looked like they wanted to steer Scar a wrong turn and lock him inside a classroom till dark.
Yes, he knew Grian was not the same Grian he’d talked to about French pastries on the way to Miss Emily’s home. His Grian changed so much, and with so little time.
Scar took an upward glance to the sky from behind his windshield, finding nothing and then shifting back onto his seat.
A few minutes later, Grian sat a little straighter and said suddenly: “Scar, can we stop? I need to get out for a minute.”
Scar immediately pulled over, lights bobbing up and down along with the front end of the car, finding that the gas smelt a little stronger as Grian stepped out, holding a hand onto his jumper.
Scar didn’t follow him as he slipped into the darkness to wherever little nightmares in the forest roamed, thinking he’d want privacy getting sick under a leafy roof.
But the first scream had him jolting and pressing his palms onto the wheel.
A maniac out here. To either scare the living shite out of him and Grian or a criminal in the middle of nowhere.
Scar had no choice but to find Grian - opening the car door with force you’d normally put into closing it. He could get sick in the car for all he cared, or the two could live in nature for the next ten years; it was whatever Grian preferred.
But really, by now, Scar was panicking. A second scream rung out, then a third and with it so jutting like a rock’s edge in the unfathomable darkness, it sprung to mind that the pitch in the yell sounded quite like Grian’s.
Leaping over wet grass, there’d been barbed wire to stomp through with dog-like finesse and short breaths until Scar found a clearing. A field that sloped down and revealed itself to be a valley. Okay. Okay, progress. The wind was enough to wave a flag on the floor so Scar had to raise his arm over his face, tears peeling over bottom lids whilst making out a figure, Grian’s figure, yelling and stomping through the mud.
Feeling his heart and soul and eyes double-take the silver living of his fuzzy jumper in moonlight, Scar began running to his love. But like Grian’s yell were in magnitude, the size of a ship beaching at land ho, the push he felt from the wind was just as difficult.
“Grian…” He yelled, “Grian!”
He shook Grian’s shoulder, approaching from his back and watched as he cringed under the biting cold and from his touch. Then he looked up at him with no… traces on his face to suggest he’d been filling his stomach barmy with wind and other things like anguish, swallowing it down, hands wrangling around his waist for the time it took to get Scar’s heart back to clean squiggles.
Grian smiled with a sort of twisted innocence at Scar’s contorted expression, and it did reach his eyes.
“Don’t suppose there’d be any cows around to spook at this time.” Grian rolled his shoulders, “think we’re in the clear.”
Scar appraised him up and down at that, even in a prat-like fashion with his drawn-over eyes. It was dark but he could see that he was okay.
Grian was upset. The rumours weren’t true. There was no such thing as deferrals. The rumour’d stay a rumour for as long as they lived and died, and they would’ve preferred to keep it that way for sure. Lovers like them did not sprout from nowhere of course, and it takes a man with a damn good bleeding heart to let hope make some room for itself in there. Hope was something of an entity to creatures like them and if it guarded you, if it hugged you from behind then everything would be okay. It didn’t need the truth. They’d die faster with the truth.
With hope, there’d be things in life you’d never seen before and took the time to really appreciate. And before going to wherever Madame washed up, for Scar, it was Grian’s little cowlick of hair that’d bend up for hours and hours, slicking only when wet. He’d always joke that he’d catch radio signals, or communicated with aliens with that thing. Or perhaps an old Hailsham friend, Cub, knocking at his wheelchair to test its quality and perhaps size capacity, seeing as Scar was, and remains a bit heavy in a few areas. He wished Cub were still here with him.
“You smell really bad.”
Grian tried to look amused at that, but just let Scar take him away from the eye of the storm. He could still see his legs shaking and the quivering mud on it. My God, he’d come to appreciate Grian a lot.
What with his brave, bird eyes and scratched throat still making humming noises at the effort it took to leap over an enlarged tree root in the ground - Scar just took him back inside the car and kissed him.
Grian shook a bit from the press of cold lips but slowly let his arms come to grab at his muscles.
It was dead quiet. Minus the carrier bag of sketchbooks lapping at Grian’s feet, the short intakes of breath and the taste of medicine overtaking everything but Scar’s leniency to making faint noises in their lip-lock.
This time, Grian let his skin turn red, giving it his all. Scar couldn’t find a reason why in the moment but later, it felt like turning your back on a shooting star.
Warmness spread through his scarred heart in the meanwhile.
The two of them still had to sign back in at the centre and Scar chuckled when Grian had reminded him of it through the kiss, yet it felt like the night grew younger as their kisses became hungrier, full of passion, dipping into charted territory.
It was a song they’d danced to numerous of times before and in the times yet to come, the sonnets embedded in their skin like the putrid mud leaking into the car, it stained and would never wash away.
The car was hot and here they were. Once again. Trapped in a box, seeing the other’s features melt in the pale moonlight, and letting hands touch hidden skin - uncovering a secret each descent into unbridled infatuation.
And till Scar’s hand met Grian’s, till they met in sensuous, there’d be no such thing as nirvana on earth.
“I love you.” Scar muttered, when their lips grazed against each other’s. It was languid the way Scar positioned Grian against the wheel, for the man tried to take a breath in tandem with Scar lapping at his sleek mouth. So really, it was natural when Grian’s voice grew in pitch.
“Cheeky bastard.” Grian, a bit ruffled, smiled, threading his fingers through Scar’s hair just below him. His lanyard rattled below their conjoined chests and after some time, he broke off the kiss to look at it after it pulled at his neck in a particular way.
Scar dimmed his gaze also.
Grian breathed out, cloth shifting. Scar ran down it sweetly like a lapel, until he searched Grian’s eyes for anything amiss.
He only saw adoration and heat. Simple, sweet. Pumped with energy that couldn’t burn off anywhere else. It made his heart squeeze in his chest under such a gaze, enkindled with something so bright it could kill him.
Scar took off the lanyard, the clip sound echoing through the starved night.
Nuzzling Grian’s nose to distract him, Scar moved to let it slip from underneath his skin but in doing so, moved Grian a bit so his body hit the horn.
They jumped in surprise at the break in blissful silence, Grian letting out a yelp as he did.
Silence condemned the car until Grian shook it with a laugh to rival all laughs, collapsing on Scar’s shoulder whilst Mr. Good Times himself still sat dumbly with a jerked conscience.
“I love you too.”
Grian kissed Scar’s nose.
That day forward, Scar’s dearest dream of a small-town love; that candle burned through the whole night, came true and melded limbs together like pliable twigs. Grian was the wickermaker, weaving them together leaving no white spaces between them - bringing Scar to life. Dizzy and human, indeed.
…Scar could still vividly remember that kiss, working Grian open and letting the fruits of their passion consume till time caught up to the two of them (and until the mud bound them but that’d be a sensation Scar would relive a thousand times more).
Now as he stood behind the wheat field, he let his fingers touch his lips and felt phantom pressure caress at the sides of his face.
There was a mistiness to his under-eyes or whatever it was called and Scar suddenly couldn’t see the bottom half of him nor the yellow beneath his feet. He just watched as it blurred and curled into his periphery.
The setting sun looked onto him, a quarter of it hidden behind one tree that surveyed over the mass of wheat and lost bits and bobs. The scene made for a pretty peaceful thing. Whatever it was that called his name was suppressed by all the gleaming whites and sunflower yellow shining from the horizon, the discarded plastic bags that hung on that tree’s singular branch like flags sermonizing for the lost corner of Norfolk and the bent over figure grooming past a desire path, not even looking at him. It was perfect, pretty and so wretchedly like something that Grian would enjoy.
He would’ve taken him here if he knew it existed.
He’d taken him to places like Buckingham Palace, they weren’t allowed in of course but Grian, his rogue Grian, somehow convinced the ticket collector he was human but yielded when even the normals couldn’t get in without seeing the exit out first.
He didn’t feel inspired by the fleeting glances of paintings he stole in there, Scar knew because his (always seemingly squinted) eyes matched his lips; straight, no quiver, nothing to tell Scar so that usually meant Scar was told everything anyway.
He kissed the straight lips to make it all go away.
He also took him to the Brighton Pier and called it overrated. But Scar was too enamoured by the twinkling lights, the swivels of the pink sky and underneath it, brimming from the shore, a castle-like structure to top it all off, to let Grian be swayed. So Scar didn’t let Grian trace his foot in stranger’s sandy footprints all day and dragged him with a squeak and some resistance.
Going in, Scar hadn’t noticed Grian literally eating everything that Scar was trying to eat but he didn’t eat the framed picture of the Brighton Pier he bought for him at least. It was in broad daylight, pretty, nobody above or below it to obscure it. Scar has it somewhere stashed in his car boot now, in the corner, but it wouldn’t dare squash - not with Scar’s level driving if you asked him. Not that Grian appreciated it.
Oh, and then the white cliffs of Dover. Remarkable. It was completely barren as business-y coasts and high cliffs were, and Scar was reminded of a Shakespeare play he’d bought during one of the Sales back at Hailsham. Something about death and crossing water to enter a new realm, crossing a threshold.
Well, Grian loved it. Those eyes swallowed the ocean whole. Scar could see even from a mile away, Grian’s outstretched hands towards him with the yellow speckled sea and its sun touching down on it, racing to call it a day right behind him.
Scar sighed happily, if only a bit cut off watching the man across from him move a bit more towards him, like a Doctor Who’s angel.
The figure ate the distance between him and Scar step-by-step, deliciously, and it looked familiar. Scar was reminded of this movie he watched with a sprawled-out Grian back at the Cottages in the 80s. What was it? Pride and Predg– Preg– well, it was some old romantic movie.
The male love interest had walked in a bare field with a weeping sky for about forty-five seconds. Forty-five seconds! Not even with one shot change. Scar almost fell asleep but Grian did not take his attention off it, eyes just firmly planted on the million of steps the guy with pantaloons was taking.
It used to scare Scar how still Grian's eye could become. Like a bird the size of half of Scar's palm with wings that whizzed and buzzed like a bee. The ones with black, beady eyes that soaked up the sclera like a blood bath, twitching. It was funny how something so small can look like a beast in Grian's eyes.
Scar loved Grian. Loved him so much.
As a kid, the trees at Hailsham dropped these sticky pinecones, and Scar's grubby hands were no match for them. He earned his name through the hundreds of times he'd slipped trying to get one. Amusing the hell out of Grian. But it was all for him.
Another thing he'd (try to) give to Grian was anything big that came on the Sales. If it was big, it’d be more expensive. Just meant that Grian had to appreciate it more.
A record player. A t-shirt (a tad too) big for Grian's kiddish frame (Scar argued that it was only a tad). A large book, which he didn't know much about, to rival all of Madame's art gallery knick-knacks. Even a mug with some green creature as its face, the top of his head empty, with a smirk that Grian tried to replicate.
And Grian smiled every time. Every time Scar gave him something that had no clear truth to them. Nobody to tell them exactly what it was for. But every time, Grian would give him a bright smile that chanced from uncommon to rare in his last few days.
Onto the topic at hand, Pride and the other thing was something of an epiphany for Scar. Two people; a girl, a man. The sunset peaking out from behind their linked foreheads, the girl’s hand placed upon his, the man letting out a breath at the touch, with their eyes closed shut. It was like they bore their souls for the other to read. Like a love poem, a ‘my dear’ and ‘Mrs. Darcy’ tossed about everywhere that had Scar blinking not for the wishy-washy-ness of the telly but for the sweetness dripping in their prose.
Grian always sent him a careful look after that when Scar called him ‘my dear’.
He'd also picked up ‘sweet angel’ all by himself. It didn't fit Grian at all so maybe that's why he thought it up.
But all Scar could do now is watch the earth spin and listen to his car behind him rumble with the dirt under its wheels, wet and fresh, flashing under English sun with its first layer dug clean out.
Scar huffed, smiling as the figure’s features finally breathed remarkably on their pretty face, sunken deep with a permanent sadness. It leant towards cold but like a frozen poppy, his loveliness could still draw you to sleep behind its icy splendour.
Scar felt the tear finally go down the creases of his face, must've looked like an orange-yellow tear to Grian as he tread on.
Another tear fell.
The sunset finished quite late so Grian was still a bit shorter than it. The heat atop his scalp would’ve made his hair singe right off but Grain didn't look at all affected. It rather looked like a halo rounding his head, like those saints on coloured glass in churches.
He weaved between the wheatfield, the sun accentuating its already luminous colour, and his coat beat against the wind to which he was never hesitant to take steps in its domain. It was also undoubtedly muddy from where Grian was walking, with torn grass and other stuff that made that ‘squelch’ sound when you stepped on it so Scar pitied his shoes.
He just stood though as Grian made his way to him. Hands in pockets and tails of jackets fighting for its right to be still.
What a picture both of them made. A couple happy to see each other but made no effort to look so. No effort to rush at each other and drink in their presence, focussing on the both of them not at the edge of the universe just yet. Not even the small effort to even smile or look each other in the eye, forgiving each other of everything and everyone that crossed in their way. But they still loved and Scar believed it a love so bright that only the pair could see each other in the rays of light that hung off the other. Almost like lifting a bride’s veil. It just needed the ‘go ahead’ by some priest. That’s what it was.
But then suddenly, Grian stopped just a few steps short of Scar on the other side of the fence. He settled on his face with those bird eyes. Scar stiffened. The only pieces of him waving miserably in the now-gentle wind like un-cut hair.
Grian looked as if he were to make a leap, but then he yelled out.
“Scar!”
Scar remained where he was. The fence looked so dirty it diminished his sight of Grian, so he found the statue of him to be not as appealing as he would've seen it.
But then he let out a sob, swallowing it as fast as it rose. So maybe it did get a kick out of him. So what?
He would dream that Grian would come out from behind that tree like there'd been nowhere to come out from and he'd call to him, walk over to him, overseeing all the yellow sparkles on the ground with a loving and doting sun to arrest his heart looking at its beauty.
He'd then try to jump the fence, succeeding. And come to grab at his face, making it lean down to meet his bird eyes. And he'd kiss him, lips already worn from the amount of times that they did, bearing their souls for the other to read.
“I’m sorry.” Scar whispered.
There was that gentle breeze again. Grian looked at him, still on a wet patch beyond the fence.
“I can’t let you walk free.”
Within a blink, Grian was gone and so too his shadow.
He doesn’t let the fantasy go beyond the infamous walking. He can’t let it.
Scar’s received his letter now. In due time, Grian will be just a memory washed up from the shores of Norfolk along with all the piles of trash he’d given him back at Hailsham. They’d move when it was windy, and they’d sit and dangle when there wasn’t.
He’d allowed himself just a bit of indulgence coming here to Norfolk. Alas, it always comes at too heavy a cost. All those months of driving for a limped Grian made him crazy. On some level, Scar would be sat alone in his car - the radio sinking into the lowly depths of what his mind registers nowadays, when he’d unwittingly followed the signs to a sports pavilion, thinking it’s Hailsham or a wind-ridden clearing to remind him of how Grian had lost his temper then, well and truly making Scar scared. Or on a higher level, if some poor, wretched soul had on a red scarf and passed by the station cafe’s Scar would frequently stop at; he’d follow them until they’d boarded a train. He wouldn’t move until the passerbys were well on their journey.
Well, this was Norfolk. And it was Norfolk for the last time. Gazing out into the yellow earth.
And though the tears rolled down Scar’s face, he wasn’t sobbing or out of control. He just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was he was supposed to be.