Work Text:
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other.
-
There was some part of Shane that blamed himself, mostly, for everything that happened between the two of them. In a way, he was likened to the enemy of a fairy tale between a prince and a princess, even though he thought that maybe he should've been the princess. He was the dragon that sloshed through the mud, destroying everything that came in its way, whether intentionally or not.
In autumn, when he sits down under a maple tree, back in Illinois visiting his parents over Thanksgiving, the leaves lightly falling around him, Shane wonders if the story would be different if he had been.
He wonders if, through it all, he was the one who made all the mistakes that were seemingly unfixable.
In autumn, Shane goes over it all.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
1.
He met Ryan at a party.
Shane noticed him before they were introduced—the way his eyes shown bright in low lights, the way his hands kept a loose grip on his drink, the passionate look in his eyes that he gave no matter what he was speaking of. Shane had instantly seen him and thought I will not before the drink was slipping through his hands and crashing on the floor, the can dented from impact.
Ryan had made his way over with towels, and Shane distantly recalls saying something along the lines of, "Sorry, I'm not usually this clumsy," although he is, and he felt he had started the relationship between them off with a lie. Ryan smiled though, and he didn't seem too bothered to help nonetheless, never once taking Shane's apologies. He brushed them off like he seemed to brush Shane off, easily and carefree, and without a second thought.
Shane had many second thoughts.
Jen had come up to him, later, her small frame bouncing and her eyes glistening with humor, and she offhandedly mentioned Ryan like Shane knew his name before that moment. She speaks of him like an old friend, like he's not as new as Shane was at that time, but Shane wasn't listening. He's thinking, I will not start something.
He did. Of course he did.
He walked across the room and introduced himself, false confidence in his features, and by the end of the night, they're mindlessly making out in the back hall bathroom. But they ignore that detail for the greater part of a year.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
2.
In the cool breeze of an airconditioned office, Shane invited himself further into Ryan's life, acting as if there were no other people in the place who would take up the opportunity to be part of a show that loomed into the unknown. No other people in the office would, however, be as absolutely heart warmed as Shane Madej was by seeing the brightest look on Ryan's face. It was as if he had handed Ryan a star in his own two hands as a gift.
The star would burn him, but it would've been worth it.
The face of a scared boy lying awake at three in the morning next to him on the cold, hard floor of a house that was neither of theirs made Shane think, You make me want to protect you.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
9.
They lived in a shitty place beside the water, the price too high for the broken backyard and an air conditioner that banged in the middle of the night when they were trying to sleep. Ryan jumped every time when it started, no matter the time, as if the thing were to come off the wall and attack him in his sleep.
It's the same building that, a year prior, Shane had pushed him against, his entire body flush against the bricks, and kissed him as if it were the end of the world between them.
It's the same building with the stairwell that went on too long for a big place that felt unwantedly empty. The bottom of the stairwell had a stain that vaguely showed the resemblance of an outline of a cartoon ghost, and that was the same place that Shane had told Ryan he loved him ten months before when Ryan was close to tears.
He thought he ruined everything by saying it out loud.
The floorboards creaked with detest, and Ryan was constantly claiming that something with dark energy lived under them, clearly trying to scare them out. Shane always made fun of the fear and claimed that there were ghosts in the floor who were planning to attack when they least expected because they knew Ryan was afraid. Ryan laughed it off every time, but when he scooted closer to Shane in the dark of the night, only the streetlights cutting through the sleeping dead, he wasn't laughing anymore. Shane always pretended he didn't know why Ryan was scared but pulled him closer nonetheless.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
3.
Wearily into the second season, Shane gave in.
They stayed at the small, cramped Bigfoot Motel, and it was one of the times they weren't filming their sleep because Ryan was unconvinced Bigfoot was to come to them in the middle of the night.
The beds were separate but moved close together and equally uncomfortable, and sometime before bed, Ryan ended up on Shane's anyway, just talking to him as if it weren't already past the time to sleep when they got back from the shoot. He still shook from the cold of the woods, and secretly, Shane found it annoying but awfully cute at the same time since it was only in the fifties, and he had dealt with much, much worse.
Shane interrupted Ryan at some point just to wrap the bed's duvet around him, and Ryan paused as if Shane had posed a deep question instead of just tried to get the smaller man to stop shivering.
The light glow of the lamp behind him had illuminated Ryan's silhouette and cast a dark shadow across his features, so Shane could barely read him, but he noted how tiny the younger man looked at the moment. Under a large duvet that was neatly draped over his shoulders, Ryan was sitting crisscrossed on the bed, the hard mattress still managing to sink under his weight.
In that soft glow, Shane had thought to himself, I will not fall in love with him.
Then, Ryan brought it up. He said something along the lines of, "Hey, do you remember that party we met at?" as if they hadn't been ignoring the topic for nearly a full year. He said it in a casual nature, but when Shane looked closer, it was obvious that nothing he was feeling at that time was even close to casual. He looked down at his hands instead of at Shane, as if avoiding looking him in the eyes so he didn't have to see what was there.
The chance was there for him to say no. It was right there, easy to reach. Shane could've pretended he had no memory of the party because he was wasted, or it was just too long of a time ago.
Instead, he said, "Yeah, how could I forget?" like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Ryan looked up at him, and they just sat there for a minute, looking into each other's eyes like it wasn't weird for them. Like the things that had been building up between them for the past year made sense, and them pretending those things weren't there didn't. Shane didn't like it.
He kissed him. He kissed him for the first time after that party, in the warm but broken glow of the motel lamp, protected from their homes and themselves and the outside world in some stingy motel that had the name of a giant, hairy man with large feet. And, despite the many times where Ryan looked away when he stared for too long, and brushed away from Shane's touch, and said stuff like, "That makes us sound like a couple. We're not," he kissed back.
Shane thought, through the kisses and the feeling of Ryan's skin all over his, too much but not enough, I will not. Between the light ending up off and the clumsy hands in a dark room, the floorboards that hid secrets despite not being theirs, he thought to himself, I will not fall in love with him.
The tabernacle reconstructed.
He falls in love with him.
In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. . .
. . . Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
7.
Over the Christmas holiday when Shane went home, he felt lost, as if he was stuck between two places and didn't feel he quite belonged in either.
He stood in the airport bathroom before his flight back to LA took off, staring in the mirror as though he couldn't recognize himself. Everything was the same, even under the unnatural lighting, but Shane felt as though everything was different. His eyes looked too small, and his hands looked weird. His feet were way too far apart.
On the plane, Shane has the window seat with the view of the wing, and everything felt absolutely odd, but before he knew it, Ryan met him at the train station and offered to take him back to his place to get some rest.
The path they took went through an alley that nearly soaked up the outside lights it was so dark, but it was quick and painless, and soon they took the way around an old, abandoned arcade to a small apartment.
Ryan talked to him about the weird energy of the apartment and how the faucets never felt like working, and Shane laughed at his fear and said how everything was all in his head, as if that would make everything better.
Shane promised to himself that the soft look in Ryan's eyes would never escape him that night, through stolen kisses and the cold, not-so-lonely bedroom where they laid for hours awake and silent. The soft look in his eyes that held everything Ryan wouldn't say, along the lines of "I missed you" and "I love you" and maybe even something like "I don't want to stop kissing you".
Ryan, of course, didn't say any of this that night. Instead, he asked if LA was much different than Illinois. Shane said no, because it wasn't, despite the dark black sky with all the lights that shown for hours even late into the night.
"This doesn't look much different from home at all," is what Shane actually said, as if he felt Illinois was truly his home. As if he knew where his home actually was.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
6.
The first time Shane said I love you was in hysterics.
Ryan had tried so hard to take it all back. In a drunken and confused haze, he left a bar with a stranger to try and forget, but it only ended up with him bailing before anything even happened.
Standing in that stranger's bathroom with an ugly, mustard-colored towel around his waist, twenty minutes away from his haunted, dirty apartment, Ryan found himself flushed with the deepest amount of sadness and regret he had ever felt in his life. The overwhelming waves hit him, and everything became blurred as he sat on the tiles, head in hands, tears coursing down his face.
The world blacked out around him before he arrived back at Shane's apartment, wishing that things could just make sense.
Shane sat on the stairs waiting for him as if he knew that Ryan would come back, and when he saw him, he began laughing. He laughed so humorless that Ryan was ultimately frightened before he noticed that Shane was crying at the exact same time.
Before Ryan could touch him, Shane stood up. He looked Ryan dead in the eyes and said, "I love you." The tears were running down his face still, and the tip of his nose was red, and all Ryan could think was I did this I did this I did this I did this.
Then Shane turned and walked away, leaving Ryan standing at the bottom of the stairwell, confused and misguided and feeling all too alone.
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
4.
You see, Shane made Ryan pancakes the first time he stayed over. And Ryan hated them. They were golden and fluffy and just the way he liked them, but Shane had made them. For him. It was all too domestic.
He wished he could explain it at the time—his gross fear of commitment. Shane was different to him compared to past lovers because he was not only Ryan's co-worker, but he was also Ryan's best friend. Somehow, in Ryan's head, that had made everything worse.
Love, to Shane, was larger than the usual romantic love. It was like a religion. It was terrifying, and it made Ryan all the more not want to accept it in any way.
He said to himself, I will not. I will not fall in love with Shane Madej because I refuse to. Because I can't handle that. Because he's my best friend.
So he denies the pancakes, despite how disappointed and let down Shane looks, because somehow in his head, they're much larger than just pancakes. They're a commitment that Ryan has absolutely no want or mental capacity to make. If he said no to the pancakes, he would be saying no to all of it.
I refuse to fall in love with him.
He does.
More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
8.
The good time between them, the time before the storm, is short-lived. That's because, however, the good time wasn't all that good in the first place.
They ignore it. They ignore the time between the stranger and Ryan. They ignore Ryan's lack of "I love you"s. They, together, ignore the fact that what they had between them was larger than love itself, and that there was no way it was just "friends with benefits".
Well, Ryan ignored it. Shane just thought of it silently.
They do talk about it eventually, though, because it wasn't really like they could avoid it forever.
It happened before work on one of the mornings after the few nights they stayed at Ryan's apartment. Shane, half-asleep at the kitchen table and having to keep his head up with only one hand, had looked over at Ryan packing his lunch and mumbled something that sounded exactly like an "I love you".
Ryan froze for a second, before slowly continuing. "Stop that."
Still unaware of his surroundings, Shane halfheartedly hummed. "What?"
"Don't tell me you love me."
Sitting up straighter now, Shane furrowed his eyebrows. "Why?" His voice came out sharper than before, clearly a bit more woken up.
"You-," Ryan sighed, stopping what he was doing to place his hands on the counter, still not turning around to look at Shane. "We're not in a relationship. You can't say that. It's not fair."
Shane blinked. "It's not fair to . . . tell you I love you?" His voice echoed how incredulous he felt at that. "I've told you it before."
"Yeah, well, I'm telling you not to anymore." Ryan still wouldn't meet his eyes.
Letting out a deep sigh, Shane leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "What's your problem, Ryan?"
"I don't have a problem," He snapped. "You just make it sound like we're something other than friends, and we're not. We're not." The second time Ryan said it, he said it in a way that made it seem like he was assuring himself instead of Shane.
"I-, we've been sleeping together for, what, a year and a half? You've been seeing me, and only me, for that long, and on the nights you're not at my place, I'm at yours. If you still see us as 'just friends', then this is the weirdest fucking friendship I've ever been in."
Ryan finally turned to look at him, anger in his motions. "That doesn't mean anything, though! This isn't-, it's not a whole thing! It's a mutual agreement, and we could both easily leave it at any time." He was lying, of course, but he had pretended he wasn't. Ryan told himself that if Shane left, right then, he wouldn't feel destroyed.
Shane did leave, right then. Shane left and he wouldn't talk to Ryan for a full week, and the whole time, Ryan felt completely and utterly destroyed.
When he came back on a rare rainy Saturday night, neither of them said anything at all. Shane had just pushed him against the wall of the walkway just beyond Ryan's apartment door and kissed him, hand already flying beyond Ryan's pants and grabbing hold of him.
Through tears that both of them pretended weren't there, Ryan came with a cry, pressed against the wall of an apartment that felt way too lonely without the taller man there.
They don't talk about it.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either.
5.
Two months before Ryan nearly hooked up with a stranger, they're in an old cabin on a lake that's nearly vacated in some small, sad town in Minnesota for an episode of Unsolved Supernatural.
Alone together, Shane and Ryan sat on a moth-eaten couch, the crew having left for the night to stay at some Super 8 on the edge of town.
The darkening light cascading from the window showed the darkness under Shane's eyes, looking as if he hadn't slept in a month.
The week before that moment was when Shane had realized, truly, that he loved Ryan, in the back of an Uber in the dark, as all the city lights passed their windows. He had looked over, slightly drunk, to see the younger one passed out and leaning on the window. The reds, blues, and greens of the signs they passed descended over his soft features and had shown lightly behind him, and Shane swore he'd never seen someone so beautiful. He'd thought I'm in love with you, and it had made all the sense in the world to Shane at the time, like he couldn't imagine it ever being any other way.
I'm in love with Ryan Bergara, he'd thought. And he took Ryan to his apartment and fucked him senselessly, as if Shane knew that nothing would ever be the same from there on out.
He hadn't slept well that whole week, and it reflected on him.
They sat, beer cans in hand and the silent tension between them thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
Right as Ryan was beginning to wonder if he did something wrong, Shane said the ugliest thing he could've.
He said, "I wish I could take everything that's happened between us back."
He didn't mean it. He didn't like that ending.
The next week, he took Ryan back to his apartment building and pressed his entire body against the cold brick of the wall in the alley between the two buildings. Shane kissed him like they would never kiss again, like it was the end of the world, like nothing would ever be the same.
Shane loved Ryan Bergara with his whole heart, and he wasn't sure if he could take it.
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
10.
Somewhere between the blurred year they lived in Shane's run-down apartment and the time they got a working place of their own, Ryan said it.
Sitting on the couch together a late Friday night, Fraiser reruns playing in the background, Ryan had looked over at Shane and noticed him looking back.
"Your legs are so long that they barely fit on the couch, big guy," Ryan noted, a laugh in his voice, referring to Shane's limbs dangling all the way over Ryan's lap and nearly touching the arm of the couch.
Shane smiled. "Not everyone can be as small as you, Ryan."
Ryan actually laughed that time, feeling so content that it was almost like nothing could bring him down. Through the absolute warmth in his bones and the happiness he felt, he managed out, "I love you," as though it was something he had said many times before.
He could feel Shane freeze for a moment, but Shane instantly covered it up and responded with an, "I love you, too," as casual as possible, although Ryan highly doubted that's how he was feeling. He almost felt like maybe he shouldn't have said it—that maybe he should take it back, but before he could go further into that, Shane's face had lit up in a smile so bright that made Ryan want to remember the moment forever.
He asked himself why he didn't say it sooner.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
11.
Curled up next to Shane in a new apartment with floorboards that don't creak and an air conditioner that works beautifully, two and a half years after stolen kisses in the Bigfoot Motel, Ryan asked for forgiveness.
He said, "I was afraid of us, and what we could be, and that's no excuse for any of the shit I pulled. You didn't deserve that."
Shane, sleepily rubbing his eyes, turned around to look at him face-to-face. "Ryan, it's two in the morning. Why are you thinking about this now?"
"I just-, I'm sorry. For making you feel like I didn't love you, and that you were almost worthless to me. You're not. You mean the world to me, and I love you."
A small smile played on Shane's lips before he yawned, pulling Ryan closer and lightly kissing him on the head. "You were confused. I was too, but it doesn't matter now. I love you too." Ryan could tell in Shane's voice that he was already falling back to sleep. "Go back to bed, little guy."
Ryan fell back asleep.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
-
Back under the tree with the falling maple leaves, Shane only realizes how cold it is once a blanket is draped over his shoulders. Though he's lived in Illinois for the greater part of his life, the constant warmth of LA truly has started to get to him.
Ryan, nearly shivering although wearing an old jacket of Shane's brother's with a heavy fur lining, sits next to him, the leaves crunching under his feet. He taps Shane's foot lightly with his own.
"Whatcha thinking about, big guy?" He asks, lips curved upward in a small smile.
Shane hums. "Human existence."
Ryan smiles fully. "Light, happy stuff, then." He laughs lightly. "I don't trust you to get too into your thoughts, so you should probably come inside. From what I know about you, once you get too deep in your thoughts, you get murderous."
"It's not murderous, Ryan, we talked about this before," He says, flabbergasted. "All I said was that if it happened to come down to it, and I had nothing better to do, I wouldn't be opposed to-,"
"Don't try to make it seem better! The point is that-, ugh," Ryan cuts himself off. "I'm way too cold to argue about this. Come inside and then we can talk about your serial killer tendencies."
Ryan stands, stretching before offering a hand to Shane, who gets up after him disgracefully.
"Jake keeps texting me to me to tell me how much of a big deal my mom is making about me not being there, so I think next year we may have to go to her house instead, or she may kill me. She invited you to our Christmas dinner, I think, which is a week before actual Christmas so the whole family can make it. I would say you don't have to come, but you'll probably manage to be roped into it anyway. Besides . . ." Ryan continues on all the way back to the house, his words emitting puffs of smoke along with them due to the temperatures.
Shane repeats the words "next year" in his head over and over, before finally settling on an agreement with himself and letting it go.
He thinks to himself that all the mistakes that happened were fixable, in the end, and that maybe the story would've been different if he acted differently.
Ultimately, he decides that he wouldn't change a thing.
-
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.