the broken window and the pretty blue sky

[hearnospeakno]

This is a medical emergency. I need alcohol. I will pay you back.

This is what you may find held up to you on Nick Andros' palm, if you seem like the kind of person who might buy a guy a beer on credit. If you're not, or he just hasn't gotten around to you yet, Nick is the skinny guy hassling people in the Smoking Room.

It's been one of those days.

Nick doesn't like this. He's paid his own way for years, and he's been buying his own drinks since he was first able to bluff his way into a bar. But he's not going to steal, and he hasn't carried cash since--he doesn't even remember when he stopped thinking about having money in his pocket. It's been a while.

If this is whatever comes next, Nick has some pointed questions to ask whoever runs the place about why he gets a room free, but not a drink. (Nick's experience with hotels doesn't extend to the kind with minibars, so he didn't think about going up there first. He's honestly not thinking much.)

He's not begging. He's done that before, and it left a sharp, slippery taste in his mouth like sweaty pennies. Whatever is going on, wherever this is, Nick is asking for a loan, not a handout. It might be a stupid thing to be hanging onto, but under the circumstances--

Under the circumstances, Nick just wants a break. Five minutes to sit, drink a beer, and try to reconcile this bustling, beautiful place with what came before.

(He indulges in enough bitterness to think that isn't very fucking likely, but hey. He can dream.)

Comments

[digyourman]

Larry took a moment to exhale, sudden and shuddering, and then reached to pull Nick into a full embrace, both arms wrapped tight around his skinny body, poetry book wedged in between them. Eyes squeezed shut, Larry held on as if for dear life.

It had been his fault, hadn't it? He'd known, him and Frannie, they'd sat there and read the vitriol spewed across the pages of that ledger, and they ought to have expected it, somehow, they ought to have known. Nick had been meant to go to Las Vegas, not Larry, and Jesus, even now knowing what end would have awaited him there was little relief when held against the fact that Larry could have prevented that fucking bomb if he'd just be a little bit less wrapped up in his own problems.

A couple of hot tears slid over Larry's cheeks and splashed down onto the back of Nick's shirt, but he forced himself back after that, gulped down a fortifying breath and hastily wiped at his eyes before nodding toward the bar.

"Come on," he said, leading the way, and immediately ordered two glasses of scotch. Beer was not going to cut it anymore.

Leaning up over the bar, he found lime wedges and maraschino cherries stowed beneath but nothing like writing paper. He grabbed a stack of cocktail napkins instead, and pushed them Nick's way as he settled back onto his stool.

[hearnospeakno]

The breath Nick lets out against Larry's shirt is a mixture of a shocked oof and the ragged leading edge of what could have been a scream. His hand on Larry's shoulder ends up clutching at his back.

When Nick hides his face with closed eyes, the world stops, more or less. He can feel the thud of Larry's heart against his cheek, smell soap and something richer, earthier, pick out warm wetness spattering his shoulders like an uncertain summer shower. Everything outside of that doesn't matter.

Larry's not the only one dragging a hand against his face afterwards, even though Nick doesn't know why he bothers. It's not as if it'll wipe off the bright, desperate look he knows he must be wearing, the one that has him following Larry like a lost puppy to the bar.

He doesn't write anything, not right away. He stacks Larry's books up with almost farcical carefulness instead, like it's vitally important that they're squared away before the scotch gets here. Nick's not much of a drinker, as a rule, so when he tips back his glass when it comes it burns all the way down and makes him grimace.

Then he remembers to clink his glass against Larry's, with a little rueful look. He picks up his pen and presses it against one of the napkins, but it takes a while before he manages: Anyone else?

Nick can guess what happened to him, going by the look on Larry's face, and so he can guess what happened to Larry, too.

[digyourman]

There wasn't any resentment for the question being asked, because there wasn't any other conceivable question to lead with. Still, those two words, stark against the pale and flimsy paper of the napkin, felt as if they were dropped suddenly and solidly upon Larry's shoulders. It took him a moment to nod in the affirmative.

"Nobody else here, though," he clarified, and then went on, each name weighing him down a little more. "Susan, with you. Ralph and Glen with me. We were in Vegas. Stu maybe, too, I don't know." He desperately hoped that wasn't the case, despite the staggering odds against it. If anyone could beat those odds, it had to be Stu.

Gaze still fixed on Nick's question, it occurred to Larry that he finally had a definitive answer as to whether or not this place was heaven, because no heaven he'd ever heard of would keep a man deaf and dumb. What the hell that made the place instead, he couldn't begin to fathom. A way station, maybe. Someplace between life and death where martyrs mingled with fictions.

[hearnospeakno]

Nick thinks, in a rush of dizzying horror-tinged relief, that there should be a saying about not counting your dead friends before they're cold. Grief hits him next, as deeply physical as a sucker-shot to the gut, and he slumps over the bartop with his nails digging into the palms of his hands, blinking desperately. He needs his eyes clear.

But God, these people were his friends. They were as close to family as he'd gotten in years. He can't get his head around it. He doesn't want to get his head around it, not here, in this crowded space full of people he doesn't recognize.

He unknots his hand enough to get pen to napkin, but he doesn't know what to write. There really aren't words, are there?

What happened? He scrawls, finally. When he looks at Larry again his face is set in a terrible, thin-lipped kind of calm, like it's taking everything Nick has just not to come apart.

[digyourman]

This wasn't the place to be having this sort of conversation. The two of them had already been crying, and the way this new question punched Larry in the gut told him he would probably be setting his masculinity aside again sooner rather than later. Nick looked all tied up, in that strained place between anger and sorrow, and Larry figured he probably should have just taken them upstairs in the first place.

"We should go someplace private," he answered, and slung back the remainder of his scotch before letting the empty glass drop solidly back onto the bar top. "I've got a room."

In the lobby, he had the presence of mind to pop into the shop and buy a little spiral-bound notebook, which he passed off to Nick on the way to the elevator. Better than half the hotel seeing one side of their conversation because they used the stationery provided in the rooms.

The door to Larry's guest room was innocuous enough, giving no indicator that the space beyond was a near-perfect replica of the living room from his and Lucy's home in Boulder. Even its scent evoked the original, a mixture of freshly mown grass, cool air, and the distant aroma of dish-washing liquid. Larry had been sleeping on the sofa, and he now wadded up the linens and pushed them aside.

He sat, drew a breath, slid his hands over his thighs.

"Mother Abigail came back."

[hearnospeakno]

Nick's nostrils flare as he steps into the room, his grip tightening on Larry's poetry and the notebook he accepted with a grateful nod. (Bound to be even more grateful when he learns about the stationary.) He sets the Browning down on Larry's coffee table and flips the notebook open to its brand new first page.

He doesn't use it yet. Instead he brushes his fingers over Larry's sofa, looking at the slight indentation of years of people sitting. Part of him wants to get up and shimmy out a window so he can take off for a house he knows wouldn't be there. Nick has the feel of dreams and other places now, though. He knows, without knowing exactly how he does, that if he walked up to one of those windows he wouldn't find a way back to Boulder. Just a hotel view.

Why not a hotel? It's a place where no one stays, waiting to go somewhere else, and if Nick thinks about it he can come up with all kinds of reasons that it'd be him and Larry in a place like that. Larry has a Past, capital P, and Nick...Nick still doesn't believe. Not in the way that's supposed to earn you the free ticket up an elevator into the clouds. He believes enough: he believes in the Boulder Free Zone Committee, he sure as hell believes in the dark man, and he believes that Mother Abigail is (was; does he know that, or just suspect?) a good woman he's been worrying like crazy about.

She's gone. He hitches his shoulders up and shakes his head, less wretched looking than he'd been downstairs. Not much better, all things told, but by way of degrees he'd much rather be here with someone going through the same thing with the same kind of weight on his shoulders. To not be alone in a room full of people. And you went to Vegas.

He rolls his pen between his fingers before he adds: Dayna? Judge?

Tom?

[digyourman]

Larry shook his head, and hated himself a little bit for the vagueness of his answer. "I don't know," he said, which was possibly worse than a yes. "I never saw them, but—"

No, wait. He needed to back up. Needed to pick up the thread where Nick had dropped it.

"The bomb at Ralph's house that night was Harold," he began again, not knowing whether Nick would have intuited as much or not. "Harold and Nadine." Eyes falling heavily closed, Larry scrubbed a hand through his hair and swallowed hard against the guilt clawing up his throat.

"I knew he might be dangerous," he admitted, eyes open again but fixed on the floor. "Frannie and I knew, we found this book Harold had been keeping, like a diary, we were going to bring what we'd read to the council that night, suggest exile—"

He looked up, then, looked Nick straight in the eye, and it was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. Dying had been easier.

"I'm sorry, Nick," he said, eyes welling with tears again. "I'm so fucking sorry. It wasn't supposed to happen that way."

[hearnospeakno]

Nick looks away.

It was a question that had seemed less important to have answered than everything else, and he's not sure what his lack of interest in assigning a name and a face to his--and he should just fucking admit it, his death, you're dead, Nicky-boy, like a doornail--what that lack of interest meant. Maybe just that it's easy to overlook little details like that. Or maybe he didn't want to know who could betray them.

He wonders why he was already so sure it was betrayal and not someone come riding up from Vegas; when he lets his mind settle on it, it's because there's something dirty and petty about a bomb in a closet. If it'd been someone from Vegas it probably would have worked, too, in one brilliant orange bang.

Nick is only gone for a second, swallowing around a knot full of tears, and he meets Larry's eyes before sweeping them back down to write: It's not your fault, Larry.

It's not. Nick knows that with a sureness that displaces the wisps of resentment, the little bitter orange twist in him that wants to swing a fist at whoever's close enough to hit. If Larry or Frannie had even an idea that Harold and Nadine would try something like that, they never would have let it wait.

I'm sorry, too. With that, he sets his notebook aside and reaches out to rub Larry's back in small one-handed circles. When that's not enough, he scoots closer, bumping their knees together and slinging his arm over Larry's shoulder. He's almost terribly serene with how sorry he is; sure as shooting sorrier than that mountain lion the sheriff told him about such a long time ago.

He's not sure why that thought unpicks the frayed knot of his control, but he brings a hand up to scrub at the corners of his eyes while comforting closeness turns into the clutching of a drowner. It's not just grieving, not anymore. There's an angry, snarling hitch to this feeling, now that he has faces and names. It's lucky that they're going to burn in hell. Lucky for them, and maybe lucky for Nick, because he has no idea what he'd do if he saw either of them.

[digyourman]

There had been moment there, unsteady but comforting, where Larry had thought he might just be able to hold himself together despite the bald and ugly face they were two suddenly staring down. The center would hold, maybe, just this once, the denial of the past couple of weeks gone sluggish but still serviceable. It told him he was okay, that he was a Zen fucking master, and that the reunion in the bar notwithstanding, he could be something solid for somebody else for once in his miserable life.

The last thing Larry had ever wanted, though, was forgiveness from Nick Andros, regardless of where the fault actually fell.

He was weeping then, too, a desperate and interminable helplessness welling in his chest, pressing against his lungs and squeezing the feeble muscle of his heart, a physical pain that he wished came from anger so that he might have some hope of channeling it some way other than grasping onto Nick's thin shoulders and just fucking holding on for dear life.

[hearnospeakno]

Nick isn't quite sure how he ends up burying himself in Larry's shoulder (and what a turn of phrase; and he needs to stop, he needs to stop right now) and he doesn't care to know. It feels like safety, and like home, and all the parts of Boulder that let him become something more than he was when he walked into Shoyo.

No one is particularly strong in this room, Nick realizes, because they have a goddamn right not to be. He's all right with that, for the first time. He's all right with letting go, a little, just to know that they are not in this alone.

His age has always been a number, and just that. Nick has taken care of himself since his mother died, one way or another. It's not an uncomplicated thing, to let himself cry in sodden silence. But there has been so much time spent dry, years of it, and he feels every short year of his life now.

It doesn't last. It can't. These sorts of moments don't. What does happen is that Nick eventually lets go, pulling a sleeve over his hands to dry his eyes, and smiling in a wounded but indomitable way as he scratches: Missed me?

[digyourman]

A laugh erupted from Larry's throat, breathless and good, and he grabbed gracelessly for Nick again, pressed a sloppy but enthusiastic kiss to the messy hair over his temple. He couldn't remember if he'd ever hugged Nick before today, thought he must have at some point amongst all their tiny triumphs and little sorrows in that time working together, because the particular musky scent of him was nearly as familiar as the room they were sitting in. A wave of homesickness swelled up and got swallowed down again as Larry sat back, squeezing Nick on the back of the neck.

"You got no idea, buddy," he replied with his own smile, the levity strung between them easy but fragile, something to be handled with care. There was more to say, so much more, but it could wait. They had time, more time than either of them probably would ever fathom.

[hearnospeakno]

It reminds Nick of Rudy, all in a rush, and all the things Nick has tried not to let himself feel since people in Boulder seemed to decide he deserved to be a leader. (It was Sue who told him he got the loudest applause, since Nick couldn't judge by hands alone. And that's something he'll remember in a better, softer way.) He wants to be taken care of, even if it's just for a moment. His eyes flutter shut when Larry squeezes the back of his neck, and Nick looks as young as he is when he opens his eyes.

Young, and achingly earnest: You're stuck with me now.

It's a promise, in it's way.