Work Text:
And if you could step inside me
And feel what hatred brings
And if you saw with my eyes
You'd see what self-deception means
I was younger once
And I created a lie
And though my body was strong
I was self-deluded
Confident and blind
Now show some pity
For weak of will
Because when we’re drinking
We can never be filled
Show some understanding
For the lonely fool
Because when I’m drinking
I’m out of control
I was never young
Nothing has transpired
But when I look in the mirror
I feel dead
I feel cold
I feel blind
--"Blind", Swans
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The sound of his voice, low, broken, and detached had caused her to drop everything to book the first flight to DC. If she was honest with herself, she could not afford this; she’d winced at the prices of the last-minute, next-flight-out-of-LaGuardia situation and dug her credit card out with a heavy sigh.
She had not heard him sound like that for some years, harkening back to their time post-Raccoon when he would awaken in the night in a sweat, voice strangled in his throat, subject to the nightmares that came for all of them. Since then, after getting sucked into the government, pointed nonchalance was the name of Leon’s game. Even detachment. Determined assurances of I’m fine and don’t worry about me, Claire.
He’d sounded lost on the phone. Despaired. Hollow.
Claire landed at Dulles, heart in her throat, bag slung over her shoulder, and she set about trying to wrangle a taxi to his apartment. It’d been a long time since she’d been there, but she knew the address—periodically when he was on operations of a decidedly less military slant, something like a presidential security detail, he’d send postcards. He always wrote his home address as the return, crammed into a corner of the postcard. The postcards were dry and sarcastic, and usually he’d complain about the weather or the food or something of that nature.
She was terse and somewhat on edge in the taxi, wishing the cheerful driver would stop trying to make conversation with her. He was from Cuba, as evidenced by the flag hanging from his rear view along with a rosary, and under normal circumstances Claire would have chatted with him. She was wholeheartedly not in the mood today. The sky threatened rain. Quietly Claire willed him to drive faster to Leon’s Spartan, hole-in-the-wall apartment stacked above a business. He told her the business had changed twice in the time he’d lived there. She wondered what it was now.
The taxi pulled up to the curb outside the weathered, narrow brick building. The driver offered to carry her bag; Claire hoisted it over her shoulder and politely declined. The business on the ground floor was now a tax preparation service. Claire spotted Leon’s weathered Jeep sandwiched in between two newer cars a little further down the block. She got out of the taxi and walked to the back of the building, to the staircase that went up to Leon’s door. She glanced up at the violent clouds above, and knocked firmly, then waited.
There was no response. The Jeep was here, he was here. She shifted on her booted feet and reached down for the beat-up door knob, and twisted. The door popped open an inch. It was unlocked. She stepped into the darkness of the apartment, and closed the door behind her.
“Leon?” she tried, her voice moderately loud and concerned. She let her bag drop near the door, and she narrowed her eyes into the gloom. “Leon, it’s me,” she tried again.
“Hmmph,” came a noise from the general vicinity of the small living room.
Cautiously she walked in, and tried to avoid running into anything. She fumblingly made her way into the apartment, and her outstretched hand alit on the arm of the couch, and she reached out further, gropingly. Her hand alit on hair that felt gritty and grimy.
“Leon,” she said, in mild relief. “Are you asleep?”
“Mmph,” was the mumbled noise of reply.
“Leon,” she began, “I’m going to turn on a light. I can’t see shit.” She turned from him, moving her hand, and she began to fumble around looking for a light switch, a lamp, anything. Her seeking hands found a light switch on the wall and experimentally she flipped it, and a lamp in the corner of the room flared to life with a yellow glow. She turned back to the room in front of her and for a moment her heart sank into her stomach somewhere, but she forced her face to steel itself and her gut to behave. The sight in front of her was moderately heartbreaking and concerning, but she figured she should have expected some emotional damage from the tone of his voice on his call. She was here to be support. She was here to try to help. At 25 years old, discombobulatedly bumbling through her own life, she was here to be the adult.
The worn coffee table in his living room was crowded with empty and half-full bottles. Claire counted easily 20 empty beer bottles, and there was a bottle of whisky with about a quarter of its volume left, next to one that had been drained. Cigarette butts were snubbed out in an ashtray; Claire had long suspected Leon was hiding a casual smoking habit from her, but he was always pointedly avoidant about it in the face of her disgruntled adamancy that smoking was bad for you and only idiots smoked, her brother chief among them. A small collection of prescription bottles were clustered amongst the empty bottles.
She was not going to panic. She was not going to freak out. She was not going to berate. She’d always never really bought his nonchalant assurances he was fine, that she shouldn’t worry; the assurances never quite made it to his eyes, which were distant, despaired, and haunted.
“Leon,” she began, coming over to the couch. He was laying on it, head semi-buried, and he looked like he was mostly in gear from wherever he’d been last that had caused him to sound like a ghost on the phone. He was dirty, and he had scrapes and bruises visible on him. “Hey. Can you sit up?” she asked.
He made a noise. She let out a sigh, and lowered herself to the couch, sitting on the edge of a cushion next to his pseudo-unresponsive form. Gently she moved the pillow from its haphazard position on his head, and he squinted mightily, brow furrowed. His hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week and his face was mildly grimy, like the rest of him.
“C’mon, Leon,” she urged softly. “I’m here. Let’s get you up.”
Heavily he rolled onto his back and looked at her squintingly, as if his brain was not processing the scene in front of him. He had a rather deep, dramatic cut high on his cheek. “Claire?” he managed after a moment, his voice low and rough.
“Yeah,” she said. “You called me. I’m here. Do you remember calling me?” she prompted, gently.
The answering silence and the continued squinting look he was giving her suggested he probably did not. It was no wonder, with all the drained booze on the table and whatever the mystery prescriptions were.
“C’mon,” she said, taking hold of his arms and pulling slightly. “Up. Up and at ‘em.” Clumsily he sat up, his body heavy against her pull, and he produced a grunt that suggested pain. His hair was a mess and he had a moderate five o’clock shadow. “Alright,” she said, once he was sitting, “first things first. Have you eaten anything?”
“No,” he ground out, after a moment.
“You’re a mess,” she said, looking him over. “Grimy. Beat up. You just get back from somewhere?”
“Spain,” he sat flatly.
Claire had been to Spain; she’d gone to an aid conference in Barcelona and then spent her spare time partying way too hard, avoiding pickpockets. From the looks of it, Leon’s experience in Spain had been quite different. “Okay,” she began slowly. “Let’s—let’s—first things first, let’s get you clean and get you changed,” she said, looking him over. “You wanna go get in the shower?”
He merely kind of grunted, and began to slowly sink back towards the couch.
“Hey, hey, nonono,” Claire said, catching his arms. She looked over at the mess on the coffee table. “Leon, did you take those pills with this alcohol?” she asked.
“Some,” he replied.
Oh boy, Claire thought to herself in moderate panic. She loosed her grip on one of his arms and reached over to the coffee table, picking up the bottles. Hydrocodone. Two medications she’d never heard of, couldn’t really pronounce, and didn’t know the purpose of. She left the bottles and reached back over to him. “Okay,” she said, almost to herself. “No more pills with alcohol,” she said to him, unsure if it was reaching him. “Is this…is this all the alcohol? Is there more?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Leon—c’mon. We’ve got to get you clean.” She was looking at him, and the inevitable conclusion of this situation was dawning on her. If she wanted him clean, he was likely not capable of handling it himself, between the booze and pills. She was going to have to help. Everyone was going to have to be okay with things getting real familiar, real quick. “C’mon,” she said, mutedly bright. “Can you get up?” she asked.
Leon grunted and unsteadily began to shift, but once he got to a certain point he kind of froze, incapable of moving further.
“Okay,” she said lowly, lullingly, “okay. C’mon. Here.” She worked her arm around him and began to half-pull, half-urge him off the couch. She strained a little; he was a lot bigger than her and heavy. “Okay—okay—I got you, come on—“ She got him to his feet. It was a struggle, and for a moment he went wobbly and threatened to bring them both down, his knee bumping against the coffee table spectacularly, causing bottles to fall over and one or two to roll onto the hardwood floor, thankfully remaining intact. “Oh—nonono—c’mon, let’s not do that, let’s not fall down,” Claire said hurriedly, tightening her grip on him. “Okay. C’mon, Leon. Let’s go.”
She half-dragged, half-guided his heavy, stumbling form down the hallway, to the small bathroom. She reached over and hurriedly flipped on the light, and the blank white walls and empty surfaces of the bathroom flared to life. She caught their reflection in the mirror; Leon halfway collapsed on her much smaller form, face dazed; her face suggested mild panic she was trying really hard to squelch down. “Alright,” she said, breathlessly, “okay. Can you—can you stand up on your own?” She pushed on him some, getting him unslouched and upright, and hesitantly she began to withdraw her arms from him, hands held out, as if she expected to catch him at a moment’s notice.
Leon wavered back and forth somewhat dramatically, but he held his feet. One of his hands reached out for the bathroom counter. Claire let out a gust.
“Okay,” she began, “I’m going to take your clothes off,” she informed him, for his own benefit and to steel herself. She reached down for the bottom of his compression shirt, pulling it up, trying to ease it up his torso. “You have to let go of the counter for a second,” she said. As she shirt came up, it exposed garish bruises and more scrapes.
Leon let go and wavered again, but he clumsily and heavily lifted his arms up and Claire pulled the shirt off him, trying not to be alarmed at his damaged state. The ever-present cross and saints’ medallions hung around his neck, just as they had since she’d met him at age 21. “Okay, great,” she said. She looked down at his feet, at his boots. “Okay, you can hold onto the counter again,” she said, and Leon’s hand reached back out for the counter as she sank down to untie and loosen the laces of his boots. “Alright, foot up,” she said, and unsteadily Leon lifted a foot and she pulled one of his boots off, and then quickly his sock. She repeated the action and command for the other foot, and then she stood.
Here they went. “Alright,” she said, reaching down to his belt, sliding it through the loops and buckle. “You okay?” she asked, undoing the belt, reaching for the button of his pants.
“Yeah,” he replied, distantly.
Claire held her breath for a moment and pulled the zipper of his pants down, easing the material over the angular jut of his hips. “Okay,” she said, pushing the fabric down further, until it hit the floor. “Alright, step out,” she said, and haltingly Leon did so. “Wait here a sec,” she said to him, then moved around him to the shower-tub unit. A shower was going to be a logistical nightmare. He was unsteady on his feet and she didn’t know if she could keep him upright without stripping down herself and getting in with him. A bath it was. She knelt down and located the rubber stopper for the tub, and turned on the faucet, adjusting knobs, putting her hand in the water to feel for temperature. Once it was a pleasant kind of warm, she put the stopper in and stood, turning back to Leon.
He was blankly and obediently standing there in his boxer briefs, as docile as a child. Claire regarded his bruised and damaged form, and then stepped over back in front of him, looking up at him.
This was fine. This was normal. She could do this. It was just him naked. It wasn’t like she’d thought about it ever or anything, not at all. Her cheeks turned pink. She needed to stuff the nervous teenage girl feelings down and put on her big girl pants. Leon was there in front of her, damaged, guileless, and distant, and he needed her help.
She’d seen dicks before in her life. Plenty of them, in fact. But none of them had ever been Leon’s. None of them had ever been one she’d idly and yearningly thought about from time to time.
Jesus she needed to pull it together. Big girl pants. Leon was currently a shell in front of her. Now was not the time for it.
“Okay, Leon,” she said calmly, directed to him but herself as well. “Here,” she said, hooking her fingers in the waistband of his boxer briefs and beginning to push down. The cut of his lower torso came into view, the beginning of the patch of hair that the trail that led from his belly button went down to. She swallowed a little, pushing the briefs down all the way, until they landed on the floor at his feet. Her face was still pink, she could feel it, and she pointedly tried to avoid looking down. “Alright, step,” she said, and he did so compliantly, out of the underwear, and she put her hands on his bare shoulders, turning him gently so his front was away from her. She let out a breath; the sight of his chiseled ass similarly wanted to drive her to distraction, but this was not the time for it. “Okay, c’mon, let’s get in the bath,” she said cajolingly. He took an unsteady step forward. “There you go. Okay.” She guided him towards the tub, and helped steady him when he lifted a foot up and set it down into the water in the tub with a loud, large splash. He got his other foot in, and Claire reached up to his shoulders, gently pushing down. “Okay. Okay, big guy. Sit down.”
Leon complied, heavily dropping into the water, and some of it splashed up over the lip of the tub onto the floor. He sat there limply for a long moment while Claire knelt and leaned over to check the temperature of the flowing faucet, and dirt began to swirl off of him into the water. The tub was filling slowly, and Claire let her eyes alight on the firmness of his thighs, paler than the rest of him, and locked there.
Okay. This was okay. They were doing this. She looked around the shower stall, spotted the soap, the shampoo, various sundries.
“Claire?” his voice issued forth, groggily.
“Yeah,” she said, looking down and over into his face. He was looking at her like he’d just noticed her for the first time, as if he’d just become aware of her presence.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His face suggested misery and maybe a minute moment of self-awareness.
“Hey, it’s okay,” she said hurriedly, soothingly, rubbing her hand up and down his arm. “You’re fine. I’m here to help. You called.” He looked at her blankly, and in that moment she knew for sure he 100% did not remember the phone call. “Um, just sit here for a second—let me go get a cup or a glass or something, so I can rinse you,” she said, and pushed herself up.
She exited the bathroom and went back down the hallway, trying not to look at the evidence of unraveling and despair on the coffee table, and went into the kitchen. She realized with a dull kind of sadness and emptiness that a lot of his cabinets were empty, or mostly empty as she searched for a glass. It was like he lived here but didn’t. He’d been here a long time, now; he’d moved in at 21. The cabinets should have been fuller than this. They were not.
She located a pint glass and took it back to the bathroom with her, Leon dazedly sitting where she’d left him in the filling tub. The water was decidedly dirt-tinged at that point, and Claire tried to keep her eyes in non-lascivious places. She knelt and dipped the pint glass into the water, pouring some over his shoulders. “Alright,” she said, again mostly to herself, as she began to douse him. “How long have you been back?” she asked.
“Two days,” he said.
“How long were you gone?”
“Not long.”
“What happened?” she asked, pouring water over him.
“Rescue mission,” he said. Claire didn’t know if it was the water, or the being naked, or what, but his faculties seemed to have returned to him a bit.
“Okay,” she said. She poured some water over the back of his neck.
“I was infected,” he said, and Claire froze and looked at him.
“Infected with what?” she asked, haltingly.
“A parasite,” he said. “I could hear it in my head. Constantly.” He swallowed. “It’s gone now.”
Claire was frozen for a moment more, and then she willed movement back to her limbs. She scooped up another glass of water and reached up to ease his head forward. “Lean forward,” she said quietly, and compliantly he dipped his head, and she poured water over his dirty hair. “Did you—did you immediately set into the drinking and pills when you got home?”
He was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said finally.
“There’s no more alcohol?” she asked. God knew she was guilty of periodically drinking too much to quiet the demons of her past. She knew she couldn’t judge Leon.
“No,” he said.
Claire resumed wetting him down in silence, and then reached over to shut off the faucet. She stretched upward, for the bottle of shampoo, and clicked it open, squeezing some into her hand. It smelled like sandalwood. It was nice. At least he permitted himself some kind of creature comfort other than alcohol in this barren apartment. “Okay, close your eyes,” she said, rubbing the shampoo between her hands. “I don’t want to get this in your eye.” She reached out and worked her fingers into the thickness of his hair; she’d always marveled at how thick his hair was, and how much of it he had. She began to scrub lightly, his head moving with her movements on a loose neck. She worked up a lather and let her fingers and fingernails massage gently into his scalp, and after a few moments his head was hung forward limply, eyes closed. His shoulders loosened and slumped, and he seemed to droop in the tub.
He was enjoying it. Claire washed his hair for far longer than it took to get it clean.
She reached over for the pint glass and poured water over his head, rinsing out the lather, using her other hand to shield his eyes on his drooped head like a mother would do to a child. She poured water over him until his hair rinsed clear, and she eased him back some, pushing his wet hair off his face. “Okay,” she said, with a gust. “Clean hair. Okay.” She reached up and grabbed the bar of soap and dipped it in the grey water, rubbing it between her hands. It too smelled faintly woody. Claire enjoyed the smell. She held her breath and reached out with the bar of soap, sliding it along his shoulders. “There we go,” she said, beginning to lather him up.
He compliantly let her wash him, body limp and disarmed, and Claire’s cheeks burned fervently as she washed in areas she had no business touching but had often thought about. Leon was silent and unruffled. She tried to be gentle and soft over his bruises and scrapes, and she worked up lather between her hands to carefully clean his face. He winced somewhat when the soap got into the gash on his face. Claire wondered what it was from. It was probably going to leave a scar on a face that had, up until that point, remained blessedly pure, unmarked, and defiantly pretty. She put the soap back in its dish and used the pint glass to rinse him down, the water in the tub at that point an unsettlingly opaque color from grime and soap residue.
“Okay,” she said quietly, reaching down to pull the stopper. “I’m—I’m going to go in your room. I’m going to try to find you something comfortable to wear. Just…wait here.” She stood and left the bathroom, going into the darkness of his room. It was similarly blank-walled and relatively bare, but she noted at least his bed looked comfortable and large. She walked over to the closet and pulled the chain to turn on the light; suits hung within, shirts. She turned the light off and walked over to a dresser, pulling open drawers. Jeans. Socks. Underwear. She finally pulled open a drawer that looked like it housed what she would term comfortable clothes, and she rooted around, pulling out a pair of basketball shorts. She reopened the underwear and socks drawer and pulled out a fresh pair of boxer briefs. Claire returned to the bathroom, clothes in hand, and set them down on the bathroom counter. She pulled the bath towel off its rack and took it in her hands. “Okay, up. Can you get up?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, and haltingly pushed himself up in stages, until he was standing in front of her, taller than her, wet, and naked as the day he was born. Claire had made it this far without bursting into flames. The end was in sight. She reached up and tenderly toweled his wet hair, and then began to rub the towel down over his shoulders, his arms. Leon still in some ways moderately seemed like he was on another planet.
“Claire,” he said, emptily.
“Yeah,” she said, drying him and trying to maintain a straight and composed face while doing it. Her cheeks were hot again.
“I don’t remember calling you,” he said, finally confirming what she’d suspected.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You did. You sounded…bad. Like you were having a bad time.” She rubbed the towel over his hip. “Like you needed a friend.” Friends did not casually think about each other’s naked bodies, Claire realized, but she was forcing herself to be neutral and detached.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For calling.”
“Hey, no,” she said quickly, quietly. “It’s okay. I’m not upset.” She finished drying him, as well as she could without making it painfully awkward, and she stepped back. “Okay,” she said. “C’mon out. I’ve got some clothes here for you.” Leon stepped forward, looking around blankly. “Um—do you need help putting them on?”
“I—“ Leon stopped, and then finally looked down at the clothes. “I can do it,” he said. He reached for the underwear, almost in slow motion.
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay. Um—“ She turned to hang up the towel and Leon was stiffly and uncertainly getting the underwear onto himself, his limbs seeming somewhat unresponsive. “You got it?” she asked, with an inquiring lilt.
“Yeah,” he said, stepping into the boxer briefs, and pulling them up. He was covered again, and Claire let out a breath. They’d done it. They’d survived. It’d been awkward, and maybe more intimate than they’d ever been—which was saying a lot, because they’d tended each other’s wounds and occasionally shared a bed, sometimes with or without Sherry there too in the days after Raccoon. She pushed her nervous, spiraling thoughts out of her mind as Leon clumsily and heavily stepped into the basketball shorts.
“Okay,” she said, watching him pull them up, “let’s…let’s go lay down. I think you need to drink some water and eat some food. C’mon. Let’s go get you in bed.” She took him by the arm and began to guide him out of the bathroom. “I think we need to restore you a little bit and dry you out before you take any more of those pills. Are you supposed to be taking the pills?”
“Yeah,” he said, letting her guide him to the bedroom. “Some of them are for the infection. After the parasite. Doctors said so.”
Claire felt out of her depth. What had happened to him? What were the medications she could not pronounce meant to treat? What kind of parasite was he talking about? It was all a big nebulous blank, and he was clearly still in no shape to give her a full tale of the tape. “Okay, sure,” she said, guiding him to the bed. “Lay down,” she urged, and he flopped on the bed, long limbs kind of akimbo. She reached down and again pushed his damp hair off his face, her hand trailing down his neck, to his shoulder. His gunshot wound from Raccoon was as garish as ever, and she noted new scars she’d been too nervous and jittery to notice in the light of the bathroom as he stood in front of her nude.
“Claire,” he said, looking up at the ceiling.
“Mmhmm?” she said, adjusting the pillow behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Stop,” she said back to him. “Quit apologizing. It’s—it’s okay. You call, I come. You’d do the same for me. I’ve got you.” She leaned back and put her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you…why don’t you try to sleep? I’m going to go get you some water and try to rustle up some kind of food.”
“Okay,” he said meekly, and she left the bedroom. She went back into the kitchen and grabbed a second pint glass out of the cabinet, filling it with water from the kitchen sink. When she returned to the bedroom, Leon had rolled over onto his side and into a loose ball, his bruised back exposed to her. Quietly she set the glass of water down at the bedside, and slipped out of the room.
Now that she wasn’t wrestling with her out of control, girlish, yearning thoughts in front of a naked, shell-shocked man, she set to work. She found the trash can and hauled the bag out of it, noting it was already moderately full of empty booze bottles, and she began to clean up the coffee table. She looked at the bottle of whisky that still had liquid in it. Part of her, her own nerves on edge and unsettled by Leon’s state, wanted to twist it open and take some swigs. She forced herself to pour it down the sink instead, throwing the empty bottle in the trash bag with the rest. This led to her determinedly scouring the apartment for further booze; with a sad twinge she realized either Leon had lied to her or he was so out of it he thought he had drank it all, but she located more half full bottles. Without stopping to think about whether or not a Leon with his faculties would be pissed off about it, she poured them down the sink too. She crossed the small living room and pulled open the blinds covering the windows, letting light from the stormy day into the room for perhaps the first time ever. In the light of day, the apartment seemed even smaller and bleaker than it was in the darkness.
His cabinets were bereft of anything that would pass as food, and his fridge and freezer looked like he didn’t think they existed, aside from the errant photos on the front of it. Claire gazed at them a moment; the people that bore enough of a resemblance to Leon that she pegged them as parents, siblings. Smiling children looked at her from school photos, remnants of the life the government had forced him from returning to after Raccoon. There was an empty beer box in the fridge, and she hauled it out, broke it down, and stuffed it into the burgeoning trash bag. She didn’t have anything she could cook him, and even if she did, Leon’s kitchen was so poorly stocked she’d likely have nothing to cook it in. She began to hunt around for a phone book; began to shuffle through the stacks of paper dotting surfaces in the apartment here and there. She located a well-worn menu for an Indian place; take-out or delivery in a 15 mile radius. Leon didn’t like spicy food, Claire remembered. She drew her phone out of her back pocket and flipped it open, and dialed the number for the restaurant. They informed her she was in fact in the 15 mile radius and that they delivered to this address all the time, and Claire placed an order, urging them to make everything as mild as possible.
She didn’t know what the balance of her bank account was, and when they told her the total of the order, she sighed at the potential for further damage to her credit card.
It was fine. It was necessary. Leon was always the spender; he never let her pay for anything, always bought Sherry whatever she wanted. It was Claire’s turn. Leon was incapable of caring for himself at that moment, endless supply of money or no.
Apartment tided and de-boozified, with food on the way, Claire stood in the middle of the living room, looking around her. For a moment she felt at a loss, and then she walked down the hallway, peering into Leon’s bedroom from the open door. He was laying limply in the gloom, unmoving. She gazed at him for a moment, her hand on the doorframe, and then she started to turn away.
“Claire,” his voice came from inside the room.
“Yeah?” she asked, turning back to the darkness.
“Come here,” he said, and she let loose of the door frame and stepped inside the room, stopping at the foot of the bed. “Here. Come here,” he urged further, and Claire froze for a moment, hesitating. She eventually climbed up onto the bed and next to him, and lowered her body down, lying next to him with a space of a few inches between them. She worked her head into the pillow, and gazed at his face in front of hers. He was again looking at her like he was maybe just seeing her for the first time.
“Lay here with me,” he said, quietly.
“Okay,” she said. “Um—food’ll be here soon. I ordered from the Indian place. They said they deliver to this address all the time.”
“Yeah,” he said, distantly. “Just…lay here.”
“Sure,” she said gently, hands held loosely against her chest in front of her.
They laid there, time stretching on in silence. They laid there and Leon’s gaze into her face did not falter, and Claire made herself look back into his glance; his was somehow stripped bare, raw, and pleading. His pupils were large, suggesting he was still under the influence of how ever many pills he had eaten. She could smell the faint smell of booze on him being that close. She loosed one of her hands from against her chest and reached out, hesitantly, to smooth her hand over his damp hair.
He closed his eyes and dipped his head, as if inviting her to continue.
They laid there in the darkness, in silence, one of them broken and the other trying to figure out where all the pieces had gone when the break happened.