Archive of Our Own

The gaze mirroring his own is remote, glassy; the azure of it a shade too dull, he finds. Movements are deliberate—honed in a way he himself knows intimately, what with having lived through a similar process of rehearsal and performance, over and over.

Still, dotting kisses on unfamiliar collarbones, Scott tries his hardest to fake the details. Or rather, omit them entirely. A delicate balance is to be maintained here, he thinks, gliding his mouth down the scope of the blond's—to chase the taste of the kiss once denied in hushed tones, the barren Idaho roadside bright in his mind's eye with the campfire gleam casting a golden halo around the man he's been searching for in every doll-faced hustler guesting this king-sized bed.

Tender flesh and futility. Chest fluttering like caged wings, Scott tightens his fingers around velvety thighs, buries his face in the tawny blond streaks over the pillow, and comes.

Memory is quite the beast to tame.

Empty lust sated, he rolls off the boy, unraveling their limbs as he feels a new kind of void creep into his very bones. Gathering himself up to the edge of the bed, he reaches for the pack of reds on the nightstand, as though a filter between his fingers could somehow anchor his mind. He wonders if he looks like any other john now, watching the blond over a hunched shoulder; catching those pale blue eyes before they drift down to the ripples of the sheets between them. Grazed knuckles clutch at the covers pooling below a jutting hip bone. The boy blinks at the bed vacantly, like lucidity costs him.

Scott looks away. Something venomous swirls deep inside his rib cage, tireless in its intensity. Familiar.

He dips back onto the mattress and watches the gray strip of smoke dance through the air, vanishing into the murky, dizzying height of the ceiling. A starless sky over Portland.

Where's Mike tonight?

Maybe there are stars in his line of sight. Maybe there are neon signs doubling. Maybe he’s having a fit in someone else's arms, or maybe he's lying next to a stranger, excruciatingly awake.

The bed shifts ever so slightly—a pebble to still waters. Fingers sink into Scott's hair in a timid, reverent gesture. A breath over his cheekbone, a peck against his temple. A better tip in mind.

Scott lets it be earned, eyes sliding shut to further aid this tattered make-believe.

It's no help. Nothing ever is.

+

"Don't come near me."

It should feel good—like taking power back. The shock stilling those irises once brimming with lust at his sight should be worth something, although from where Scott Favor is standing, the entire span of Bob Pigeon’s pitiful existence itself struggles to amount to anything at all.

Even so, this isn’t the feeling.

Dead air is quivering with whispered conversations as the bouncer gathers what's left of the father Scott never had. As him and his raggedy posse are swiftly ushered out, Scott watches his soon-to-be wife shuffle silently in her seat; unease tinting the soft shadows of her face, the rich amber light of the hall hitting her bare shoulders just right.

Every figure in this game has unwittingly assumed its preordained position, but the player falters. There's a burning image in his mind: a boy curled up in a street corner, arms crossed over his fragile frame, just a thrift store jacket and the escape of sleep on his side against the unforgiving bite of this city.

Do you dream of the road, Mike? Does it haunt you still?

"Amore," Carmela coos, soft. Too soft for her own good.

Scott's senses focus back into the shimmering present—the faint clinking of cutlery, the cloying scent of overabundance and the expectant gazes of the men at the table converged on him like floodlights at a Hollywood premiere. His lips stretch into a carefully gauged smile, first of many tonight, no doubt.

There's a dinner to be had. A Favor to be discussed. So Scott does what he does best, be it at lavish restaurants with expensive liquor in hand, or in dimly lit motel rooms, knees bruising against the stiff, filthy carpet.

He performs.

+

As the night draws to its inevitable close, Scott is drunk off the spectacle, and Carmela’s glad to be done with it—he can sense it in her delicate form finally easing into his arms as they walk out the hall. The brisk December air has rendered the streets empty, save for their Lincoln dutifully humming at the curbside, waxed hood flickering with sparse streetlights.

The chauffeur opens the door and Carmela gets in. It’s all unbearably simple—go home, kiss her worries away and call it a day.

All it takes is one languid look down the street for an entire evening’s worth of distraction to dissolve into a hazy, pointless afterthought. Mike's sleeping body interrupts Scott's line of sight, and there's already an excuse on his lips—some loose ends at the office down the block that have to be taken care of. The lie comes as easily as it sells; it’s often not how you tell it, but to whom. Carmela looks up at him; face framed by the car window, the light in her eyes unchanging. Scott wonders what she sees in his.

“Don’t stay too late,” she says, her T's sharp and tone fond. Slender fingers glide down Scott's cheek, and as he tilts his head to press his lips to her knuckles, he thinks about how long it has been since any of this meant something. Anything.

Only when the car slithers around a corner and out of his sight does it dawn on him how reckless he's being, like a sleepwalker jolting awake on the ledge. There's no real objective in his mind, no premeditation or purpose behind it all, there's just—Mike. Scott takes the plunge, letting something almost instinctive take him to that street corner his best friend has backed himself into.

Now that Mike is only an arm's length away, knees to his chest and face halfway burrowed into his off-season coat, Scott thinks this sight of him should’ve gotten easier to take in with time. Mike's hands twitch and break their loop around his calves, which tells Scott he either just blacked out or is about to wake up. The patterns of his sickness are still engraved in Scott's memory like childhood scars. He knows a lot about Mike. More than his runaway mother. More than anyone has ever cared to know.

Scott watches him for a long moment, gaze flitting over the side of the blond's face glowing in the nightlight of the bookstore. The divot between his eyebrows deepens, and there's unbidden stinging in Scott's chest; chasing Mike's nightmares away feels like a lifetime ago, now. Yet he's still here, idling next to him on this littered pavement like the stray he's never really been. Meaning is a transient entity, but this feels meaningful somehow. This feels right.

Like so many nights in a different life, Scott watches Mike sleep until he starts to tremble back into consciousness. Slow, cloudy eyes scan the street for a moment before coming to focus on Scott, who tries to will away the craven tingle up his spine as their gazes lock. Mike leans his head back on the glass and stares—half-lidded and unblinking. Beautiful, even with sunken cheeks and overgrown hair, blue eyes colored gray with the night, ashen with burnout. By the time Scott is able to weave words from this invisible thread that binds them, there's nothing left to say. Silence is closing in on him.

Mike rubs at his eyes and shakes his head, sucking in a sharp breath, and Scott can hear the sob he swallows down with it. It's crippling; he who just wine and dined Portland royalty is now speechless before the man who would hang on to his every word, once upon a time. Although his limbs are still heavy with sleep, Mike jerks himself up decidedly. Scott follows, arms hovering between their bodies, longing to steady him. Moth to light.

"Don't."

It barely leaves Mike's lips—a sigh against the Portland gusts. Scott pauses. The word swells to a storm in the back of his mind.

Nonetheless, he recognizes the twitch of Mike's fingers, the telltale stutter of his body, the way it halts for a moment—buying him some time until someone catches him before he hits the ground.

So Scott does. Cradles him mid-air, succumbing to a reflex that has only sharpened without use. Mike groans weary in his arms, not much protest left in him except a hand clutching at Scott's lapels, its grip slackening as he drifts off, again. His form goes inert, frigid. Watching their breaths tangle into a cloud, Scott feels his palms burn over the faded denim. A car passes. He steels himself, remembering who he is and what he's doing. How entirely out of comprehension all of this is.

Scott holds Mike and thinks he could take him anywhere. At least that's what he'd tell him on nights quite like this one, in another break in time. Still, in Scott's sleep Mike is drenched in Bel Air sunlight. The Pacific lightens his gaze. In an innermost recess of Scott’s mind there’s a fireplace, its flames softening the shadows of Mike’s face. Dreams are just that, though, and right now the best he can do is get him out of the cold.

Two blocks down there's a low-rise building, and on its roof a tent made out of tarp and blankets—it had been there before Scott's time, and he hopes it's been holding the fort, after. When Mike would choose to flee the entire world, he would often be found cocooned inside that makeshift haven; a mop of dirty blonde peeking from under thrift store layers. Scott always thought they were alike in that sudden urge to escape, except Mike would never run off to where he couldn't follow.

The city takes pity on him, seemingly fast asleep just like the boy in his arms, because Scott is spared from having to show his face to anyone on his way up. The building's as lonely as ever, haunted by the lives its scarce occupants aren't living, and the vagabonds that hover over them unnoticed. He rounds the corner to the last flight of steps leading to the roof hatch, surprised he has made it there with Mike softly snoring in his grasp. A familiar, loose end of plastic sways in the wind like an ensign, and Scott thanks his lucky stars once again—the tent's still there, empty and mostly intact.

He lays Mike's body inside just in time for the rain to start thrumming above them like the muted footsteps echoing in the Governor's halls. After catching his breath and pulling a blanket over Mike he ends up huddled next to his friend in the small space, designer coat resting on some third hand bedding. Nothing new.

What is new, however, is the capricious ease with which Scott's fingers slide over Mike's cheek, across the line of his jaw, down to the gentle flutter of his pulse. No prying eyes in sight, only the moon filtering through the rain-wet, cloudy film, draping their bodies in midnight blue.

With the warmth of Mike's skin at his fingertips Scott is swept into a heady déjà vu. He feels like a kid again—one who'd find forgotten solace in the glow of Mike's body heat, the pattern of his breathing, the scratch of his voice as he says his name in the dense darkness of their room, half-asleep when Scott gets into bed and twines their limbs after missing for weeks. Words are of no use to an openness so unquestioning, so honest that it terrifies Scott if he dwells on it for a moment too long.

But now, with the truth having already cleaved its way between them, only this nameless ache remains. As if driven by something beyond himself, Mike's sleep-limp hand shifts to Scott's, gently curling around the wrist. His eyes are still closed, but his lips move in a murmur.

"This feels like—" he sighs, voice almost melding with the rainfall. Fingers move up, settling between knuckles with a softness that has been haunting Scott for years. "The real you."

There's a deep breath taken before Mike's hold slips, hand sliding back to the blanket, spasming and going still. As his breathing evens out again, Scott too allows his fatigued body to crumble, finally laying his head down on the cold fabric and pressing his forehead to Mike’s without even consciously deciding to do so. The gesture reminds him of tawdry motel rooms, the waft of cheap weed in the air, and momentary, single-minded obliviousness to paying spectators. Another life, another break in time.

Maybe that's what this whole thing is, he figures: some lucid memory swirling inside his skull, instead of the empty-handed apology that it looks to be. Maybe it is neither. Maybe there's no use giving names to broken things.

Either way, by the morning Scott will be a Favor again.

And Mike, he will wake up alone, yet warm, his whereabouts hardly surprising to his own blurred senses. The rain will have stopped by then, and he'll unknowingly retrace Scott's footsteps down rickety stairs and damp sidewalks, the cracks in the concrete steering him on a much different path.

They'll catch sight of each other again across funerals—in the middle of chaos and lack thereof. Scott will fix his gaze on Mike, try to hold on to his outline like he’s already gone, and it must be some kind of divination, because after returning his stare over the cemetery hills Mike will vanish off the streets of Portland like a mirage over the endless expanse of the road.