Work Text:
Fuck.
That's all Curt does. Fuck. He doesn't make love, he doesn't do anything tender and soft unless he's got something in his system, and then it's not even him anymore, is it?
No, he just fucks.
Up on stage, up there, that's not singing, or dancing. That's letting loose, that's raw energy. Fucking the air, himself, the crowd.
It might be the electricity. He can still feel the voltage jarring through his body, through his head, rearranging his mind until it's only another jumble of pieces all adding up to Curt Wild. Electricity is what catches him onstage, throws him about, sets him thrashing. It's what ignites whatever frenzied crude desire it is that motivates him. He's still not sure what that is. He'd like not to think about it.
__
Curt has his quiet moments, too. Quiet is not necessarily still, and quiet is not an absence of noise. No, that's silence, and Curt has no silences. Quiet is just things going on underneath the surface, when you turn down the volume but still have the jabber of conversation like an ambient noise. White noise, is what it is.
White noise with a static like glitter.
That moment on the rooftop was one of those times - kept low, relaxed, quiet. High as a fucking kite, they were, and that night was something else. Curt didn't do gentle, or at least he'd like to tell himself, but he did then. There was that time with that kid Arthur, and then he'd had his quiet moments with Brian. He could count on one hand all the quiet times he'd ever had, and then with that same hand hold all the peace he'd ever known. Not that he cared. Not that he cared about a damn fucking thing.
And then after the quiet they would both go, he and Brian; they would explode onstage, violence and electricity and being utterly alien because they could be. This was life, not the quiet times. Living was this eruption, this constant buzz. Living was going crazy over an electric guitar. Living was this thing with Brian. It was all just this fucking thing.
"And they say it's not natural."
Curt doesn't care what's natural anymore.
_
And he fucked it up, Brian got fucked up, and he didn't know what to do. He went for too long without living after that. He's over Brian, christ knows he's over him because what's the point of hanging on to something that no longer exists, but that doesn't keep him from keeping an eye out for the guy. After all, Brian used to be something, even if he wasn't anymore. Brian could have been something, for Curt.
_
Sometimes Curt knows his life is one big fucking expletive.
The other times, he doesn't care.
_
Even after being out of it for a while, he keeps playing guitar, keeps his hair blonde, keeps with the dying glam scene. It's what he was about in the first place; he's not going to drop it like some passing craze. This craze is permanent: a part of him. There's no magic left, though, and he realizes it's been that way since Brian left. Since he left Brian. Whatever.
He sees Jack Fairy around, does the Death of Glam with him, but keeps on making the music after it’s dead and buried. Maybe it's more out of habit by now, but Curt knows the guitar is his fucking soul. If he's alive, he's going to be making music. He'll still be doing it when he's dead.
Curt thinks a person could have a thousand years of conversation with Jack Fairy and not know anything about him at all, but by then they'd understand the whole fucking universe. What's more, they'll have started to understand themselves, something far more convoluted and thoroughly difficult, Curt maintains. Not that he understands himself. But he thinks he's a lot closer than he used to be.
And there's a little more quiet in his life, too.
_
Curt kept that pin too long. It wasn't hanging onto Brian anymore; it wasn't even a souvenir from a magic era. The thing started to be an everyday part of him, and he knew that wasn't right.
So when he saw the kid and knew him, heard him talk, he knew it was time to hand it over. Like a torch, or some fucking symbol of Life-Goes-On. He probably should have handed it over long ago, all those years when he first met him, first fucked him.
True, it had been one of the quieter, more beautiful moments. But everything Curt did was fucking. And now life was quiet, and he was still fucking, fucking around with things and life and ideas, but quietly. Almost softly. There wasn't any electricity in life anymore; there wasn't even any beauty left.
So he gave the last of it away to a familiar stranger. Because he had to.
Jack Fairy would approve. Maybe even Brian would. Maybe even.