Work Text:
Forgive me for being silent,
I just want to hear the night
through the thickness of concrete.
I’m not somewhere else, I’m completely
for the first time here without anything left over,
for the first time in my life at home.
***
(Poem by German Plisetsky)
***
The rain gleamed in crystal torrents around him, the restless streams falling through the storm-fragrant air so quickly as to seem like tiny glass comets. The faint light that pushed its way from between the hulking buildings multiplied and synchronized on all of the droplets, a reminder of dusk filtering through to the heavy shadow cast along the alleyway. Abbacchio grunted, turning his head away from the slow suffocation of the sun to the swollen border of a puddle flourishing over the blemished concrete. He pushed closer against the brick of the building he was slumped against, made to down the rest of the bottle clenched tight in his hands before he realized that it was already empty. It rolled from his grip with a sharp clink, a knell answered only by the deluge of patterns picked out on the grime-tarnished surface of the puddle.
Minutes or hours? He couldn’t say. The damp-dark brick of the building looming above him was his tombstone, the narrow alley his six-feet under. Leone Abbacchio engraved itself along the boarded-up windows, along the door leading to the closed corner-store.
“Leone Abbacchio?”
Was someone calling his name? The film of wine gilding his tongue stayed any response, the weight of sooty petrichor in his lungs and the pull of his rain-soaked hair left his head heavy. Dimly he wondered if he would fall face-first into the puddle and drown in a nepenthe more potent than alcohol. The barrage of rain continued on, encouraging, the droplets overlapping on the concrete until he couldn’t tell where the ripples merged with one another and where they began. His head drooped.
“Leone Abbacchio.”
Someone was calling his name. The tilt of his head was more of a toss of its weight against the strain of his shoulders, his gaze up at the illusion before him glossy-eyed, shadowed by makeup and the darker cast of insomnia. The puddle had become now a veritable gulf between them, the silvery sheen of the rainfall a heavier curtain than the velvet of the shadows. The man before him was faintly luminous, his white suit so at odds with the muddle of grey, the umbrella he holds a more elegant kindness than the full disk of a halo he might have expected. The clumps of mascara that try to tug his attention back down to his oblivion flutter in resistance at the catch of a blue so deep and clear as to be a glimpse of the summer sky. He is sure that were he to look down he’d see the curl of his own body half-submerged, but he can’t feel anything more immediate than peace brimming over the numb periphery of his senses.
“What matters isn’t the result,” he hears him say, warm and close as if he’d spoken directly through to his lingering consciousness. “It’s how you got there.”
The man comes forward, the splash of his step too loud over the percussion of rain. The umbrella folds and Abbacchio loses sight of it somewhere along the swiftness of the motion. He focuses instead on the way the fabric of his suit clings to the heat of his skin, on the fingers that uncurl from his palm and the slender angle of his wrist from the slip of his cuff.
***
The wan glow morphed along the chipping plaster of the wall, flinging his silhouette to an exaggerated distortion of sleepless limbs. Abbacchio turned over, an effortful rearrangement declared by the creak of the bed frame and the sedation of his movement. The lighter poised on the nightstand was too polished, the flame at odds with the water stains across the ceiling and the underwater quality of the sound that struggled to reach his ears. He’d hoped that exhaustion would overcome him, that the lighter would collapse with him until smoke lulled him past the boundary of slow-wave sleep into something more profound.
His hands shook. The scarlet 3:47 seared itself into his eyes, left them aching against his squint. He sits up until the room orbits the density of his stuffed head, leans forward to dig through the mess of the drawer for the crumpled pack of cigarettes he knows is stuffed to the back. He pulls one out of the box, holds it between two of his fingers but can’t bring himself to do anything but let it fall to the floor. And he isn’t sure why, but when he turns his head back to the lighter it is to drag the mildew-stale of the air through his teeth and let his sharp exhale extinguish the sickly yellow.
It flicks back on just as easily. Abbacchio’s laugh is dry despite the soak of his sinuses draining down his throat, a sound that pauses only to blow out the flame again. He relights it. Blows it out. Laughs. The shadows around him are vivid, leaping up only to recess over and over again with the click and whoosh of ignition. Absentmindedly, he traces the despair of Orpheus engraved into the silver of the lighter’s side and blows out the flame again.
“You have two possible paths,” something proclaims from the cover of tenebrous in a low and high pitch as of two voices echoing each over the other. “The first path is to become worthy.”
Abbacchio doesn’t even struggle, just lets the pull of hands drag him down, down, down. He can’t even fathom the glint of the arrow before it’s already piercing through the beads of sweat that pearl from the flesh of his forehead.
“Your only other path is death.”
It is only when the shadows recede again that he screams.
***
He is clinging to the toilet bowl when Bruno finds him, faded lipstick tinting his lips asphyxiation-purple, the pallor of his cheeks stained fever-pink. He seemed only barely conscious, a precarious balance maintained only by the jolting force of his vomiting and the allure of the remaining sip of Lethe in the bottle next to him. He is surprised then, when he finds the strength to look up at him when he crouches down at his side, when the patina over the grey shade of his eyes colours to that of petal-pressed lavender.
“Why are you helping me?” Abbacchio slurs, and he doesn’t get to answer before his hands pull sweat-dampened strands away from the sudden tilt of his face further into the bowl.
In the span between one heave and the next, Bruno pours the remainder of the alcohol out with the rest making it way back up the other man’s throat. The look he’s met with from the waxing fall of lashes is one tone closer to some sort of vibrancy, a sigh of lilac in the sea of churning grey. As if Bruno had given a satisfying answer to his question despite the lack of sound from the press of his closed lips. It doesn't last: Leone clutches closer to the coolness of the porcelain and Bruno gathers up his hair again and doesn’t let himself linger on the clarity that had shone through the haze of his drunken stupor.
The whisper of ’You need to, don’t you?’ is lost in translation from the parting of Leone’s lips to the shell of Bruno’s ear.
***
Bruno sits on the edge of the bed, the mattress cupping his weight with a tangle of cheap cotton.
The expanse of his back is a creamy satin, the shadows that filled the dales between the swell of his muscle cast cool violet over the pale of his skin rather than flesh-warmed heat— a diaphanous quality as of a beam of moonlight, present but glimmering insubstantial. The loose slope of his shoulders and their uncharacteristic ease was shaded by the cover of his hair like hoarfrost. It was only when Bruno finished outlining all the long, sharp lines of Abbacchio’s body with the blue of his eyes, when they turned at last to the tilt of his face away from the glare of the streetlight through the window, that Bruno decided it had been a mistake.
He couldn't seem to look away from the slope of those still-shaded eyebrows, the slight slip of shadow under the fullness of his lips or the pale of his cheekbones, even as he gathered his clothes from the floor. Always painted in a harshness, all black-and-white lines and sharp contrast, Bruno wanted nothing more than to memorize the faded smudge of the plum of his lipstick or the purpling bruises that dappled the unblemished argent of his neck, the way it softened all of his pointed edges.
He tore himself away.
Under the streetlamp, he looked back up to the dark square of the window as if he could catch a glint of silver from his hair or could leave behind the scent that clung to him with foolish sentimentality. "From here I am at a safe distance. From here I cannot lead him astray." Bruno allowed himself to linger, a guilty pleasure he’d admonish himself for under the steam of water in his shower at his apartment later. With the space between he could safely examine the potency of his ache, reject and dilute the imposition of something more personal than a business transaction. The urge to run back to bed and count all the lashes that fanned from the crease of Leone’s sleep-drowsy lids or to measure the length of his ribs with his fingertips faded with the press of his own nails into his palm.
They had a job to do, one that couldn’t be afforded anything more than satisfaction.
***
It wasn’t the first time, nor is it sure to be the last, that the pale of Abbacchio’s chest is a study of crimson and mottled blues. This time wasn’t even so terrible as to warrant the firmness in Bruno's motions with the swab of isopropyl or the rough way he does up the bandages. Leone just grunts, absorbs the displeasure seeping through the firmness of Bruno’s motions with the same detachment he had towards the flash of silver in their target’s hand earlier that night.
Bruno purses his lips in anticipation of his own words, the shape of them already full in his mouth. But the look that Abbacchio sends him from behind the curtain of his hair stops all motion even as he moves to free the sounds from the messy tangle knotted between the ambiguity of thought and emotion.
And Bruno doesn’t know, despite the evidence of the other man’s eyes, that when he thinks: “You can’t keep hurting yourself like this,” Leone is thinking much the same thing. That when: “Work can’t fill the emptiness you feel,” lies half-formed and oil-slicked on his tongue, it’s the same flavor that sticks to the tongue of the other.
Bruno finishes wrapping the bandages around him instead. The room is a challenge of amethyst on sapphire, a strung-out silence never breaking for the other to say:
“If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
***
It is at the border of one day and the next when the knock on his door reverberates along the thin walls of his apartment. Abbacchio peeled himself from the couch, stopped the low drone of music for the lurch of the midnight silence. There was only ever one person who showed up this late, the only one person he didn’t mind interrupting. It wasn’t as if he’d been sleeping, or would be sleeping anytime sooner than the flourish of pink from the horizon.
When he opens the door Bruno’s “Can I come in?” is said more in the slight desperation he hides in the cerulean of his eyes than with any words, and the tilt of Leone’s head in response is of the same substance. He stomach turns as much from the lack of dinner as at the doubt Bruno can’t hide from the ease of his usual saunter. As if he’d been unsure if he would be let in. As if he wasn’t sure he should be let in.
“I visited my old hometown,” Bruno says abruptly. It’s clipped: only a scrap of some deeper explanation.
The dark curl of Leone’s lips twitch but he doesn’t move from where he stands watching the strain in the other man’s back. Bruno had left for a solo mission halfway through the day, a mission Abbacchio had immediately known wasn’t so much a mission as it was an excuse for something personal. The guilt of the lie hung heavy on his posture, on the curl of his fist at his side. Only the fragility of his current stillness kept Abbacchio from crumbling into the give of his exasperation— for the unneeded pretense of Bruno's “mission,” from his own inability to soothe Bruno's aches in the way that came so easy for the other man.
“A family moved in,” he continued, uncertainty softening his words. “Parents and two kids.”
Silence filled all spaces, the tiniest attraction of molecules and the largest between them where they stood. Leone didn’t think he’d ever heard Bruno’s voice so strained with the longing for something potent and indescribable. He can see it then as clear as Moody Blues’s replays: the small hand of a child in the warmth of Bruno’s own, his other holding the chubby curl of a smaller child against his hip as he turns to smile at the ambiguous features of a supposed spouse cooking dinner over the low simmer of the stove. The force of it is enough to leave Leone breathless, the simple joy of the impossible dream projected into the space of his shitty apartment. It lasts only the time it takes him to blink, a shadow of desire or the ghost impression of a kinder world overlaid with the reality of their own.
Bruno’s hand trembled at his side. The silence prickles and they both are made aware of the enormity of the other’s cognizance. When he turns to leave Abbacchio catches him in a net of tangled fingers, convinces him to stay with the gratefulness of his trust that spread warmth over all the points of their contact.
***
Leone wakes in the morning to an empty bed.
He isn’t surprised, but the coolness of his sheets and the time-faded scent of cologne still inspire all his being with the want of him, the night before so accessible to his senses and merging with the present written so clearly as to be a note left on his nightstand: last night was a mistake, let us not speak of it.
The sheets wrinkled in the white-knuckled grip of his self-loathing. It isn’t so much the missing weight of him as it is Leone's own disappointment that he couldn’t give him everything. That he was the same man that Bruno had dug from the back of an alley, the same man he held up when he vomited or rolled onto his side when couldn’t make it to his own bed before unconsciousness bore down upon him.
He breathed in the air slowly though his nose, wanted to remember the subtle scent of Bruno infused in the stillness of the room, the way it fell across his shoulders like a caress of honey through the warmth of chamomile. He could live on forever with only that single night held within him to keep him going, the space of a few hours in the dilapidation of his room made sacred by the taste of him ready to spring to his lips, with the murmur of his name always caught in the rumble of his throat and the memory of his face free of the grief and concern so typical to the arch of his brows and the poise of his composure.
The fists that bunched his sheets relaxed. It didn’t matter what Abbacchio did or didn’t feel— Elysium for a night was more than he deserved. All that mattered was that he’d been able to give it to someone who should have it for eternity.
***
Bruno resurfaced to consciousness in the same swift way that a jolt of lightening does to outline the storm clouds against the dark of the sky at night: one moment he did not exist and the next he was present and radiant for all the earth to look upon. And there he was: Leone at his side, kneeling on the acanthus pattern of the rug and the spray of papers that had fallen from his desk.
Shame, then: for his inability to restrain himself before his craving for touch grew more monstrous, for the reverent trace of his fingers along the pale of the other man’s cheek and the sharp line of his nose. Abbacchio didn’t move, just looked up at Bruno with all the undulating deeps of the dusk-purpled sea flooding the fall of his gaze in a concern that he couldn’t fathom any more than the blur of the last few months or the lines of text he’d been reading and rereading for the span of agonizing hours.
“Bruno,” he sighed.
He wanted nothing more than to claw away the fog that settled humid-cold into his bones, wanted to react in time to avoid the movement of the full shape of Leone’s lips, to flinch from the sound of his own name so low and soft that he shuddered with the sublime torment of its composition.
“You’re not taking care of yourself,” the shade of those eyes accused. And perhaps he is right, perhaps it is his own neglect spiraling him down with fatigue rather than any fault of his resurrection.
“I’m okay.” It was so quietly commanding that Bruno could almost believe it to be true, despite the taste of his own lie clinging to him like cough syrup. “I’m alright.”
***
“What matters isn’t the result,” he says. “It’s how you got there.”
Leone knows he’s heard it before from a different voice in what seems like the reach of many lifetimes ago on the broken concrete of a flooded alley, ready to make his spot slumped against the brick walls of the building his sepulcher. He knew he’d end up dead that day— soon from someone else’s hand or sooner by his own. How hadn’t mattered to him before: what had mattered was the result of death, a release from his punishment and purposeless stumble through the haze his days had become, stretching into one long in-between. He’d deserved nothing more than such prolonged comeuppance.
But then there was Bruno… and even his posse of bickering adolescents. Abbacchio had so long drunk himself to numbness that even the simplest phrases of kindness had been lost to him like a disused language, so much so that he hadn’t thought himself capable of learning it again had it not been for the patience with which he was treated.
“You did well, Abbacchio.”
A droplet rolled from the corner of one eye, traced along the length of his cheek before the street and the broken glass and his dead partner gave way to the beach in Sardegna, the merging of blue ocean and blue sky and blue eyes. For once in his life he fought back against the overwhelming desire to die, for once in his life he let himself believe that he didn’t fuck up something before it was too late.
***
Bruno finds himself in a bed the next time he opens his eyes, not draped over the wood and strewn papers of his own desk. His first instinct is to pick himself up but he finds he can’t, is too exhausted to fight the fingers through the curling ends of his hair or the scent of nocturnal violets and skin-warmed vetiver. He needed to remain distant, needed to be sure he could be what they all needed him to be and not what he wanted to be. He couldn’t have this, the ease with which he was tucked under the mussed fold of the sheets and the weight of two arms. It was too dangerous to have anything more.
It is heather this time, the colour that follows the caress of Abbacchio’s own fingers through the shadow of Bruno’s bangs. Heather like the shade on snow-capped mountains, the heather hidden in the foam of the sea or in the reflection of a pearl.
“I can’t change my past,” he finally whispers, the tone of Leone’s voice always so startlingly deep. “And you can’t save the world, Bruno.”
The hand through his hair is softer than the play of a breeze, and Bruno feels that touch before he even felt his face turn to the shelter of the pillow, despite the clear order of events being otherwise. The arms around him do not hesitate to draw him closer, but they enclosed him in such a way that is was obvious their ignorance of the care of the gesture, the touch too gentle and the movement too quick.
Bruno didn’t say anything— couldn’t— because he couldn’t speak better than the clutch of his hands in the silver silk of his hair or the feather-light brush of his lips to the pulse of his neck. Couldn’t suggest his gratefulness in any better way than the obvious ignorance of the surrender of his gesture, the touch too gentle and the movements too quick. It was always unheard but understood between them, caught between thought and sound:
“You don’t have to say anything.”
***
When Leone wakes up the next morning Bruno is still there.
The light and shadow across his face illumines and hides none of the burdens of Atlas, nor any of the other burdens he would try to take upon himself. For a moment Abbacchio is struck by how youthful he looked, a Kouros cast in bronze, the curl of his lip and the slant of his eyes serene and still. “Seraphim,” he thinks, “Likeness of Saint Michael.” But then he admonishes himself for it: because there was nothing more that Leone worshipped than the flaw of Bruno’s compassion, nothing more he hated than when Bruno was treated as anything other than human. He was more sublime than anything so sickeningly holy, something too perfect and too fallible to be constrained by arbitrary epithets.
His hair had curled at the ends from the humidity, remained glossy despite the tangle of his sleep. Leone admired the scrunch of his pointy nose with his sleep-addled eyes, left the ghost-whisper of his caress along the slope of his neck where the warmth and strength of the pulse could be felt. He gathered Bruno close to his chest again, kissed his temple.
They both hurt themselves all the time, Abbacchio had come to realize. In different ways, but self-destructive all the same. Only Bruno had convinced him that he was worth something more than his ability to drown himself under the weight of his own grief.
He would find a way to convince him of the same.
***