Ficathon Entry
Title: ...But a Little Bleeding Bird is Better Off Dead than Trying to Survive this Way
Author:
lesinnocents
Pairing: patrickxpeter
Rating: Er... PG-13 for swearing
Summary: Written for the time periods ficathon (woo! two backups that I've written now!) forsweetnovicane. Prompt: futuristic
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the boys, but I guess the really confusing plot it all mine.
Author's Note (From me tomegyal: Sorry, Marie, but I just HAD to put Synth-Lacto in. It was just too hilarious. And thanks to the aforementioned Marie and my sweet, sweet muse Chris for beta-ing. And the amazing futuristic names of dairy products.
Patrick had grown very accustomed to living within the narrow confines of his own mind. The apartment, all sharp edges and glossy surfaces as if the rooms were cast in wax and not real at all, waiting for the match to be lit that would melt the entire illusion to a simmering puddle of murky colors (luckily, no fires existed in this grey gossamer world), was something that he had come to view as an extension of his thoughts.
He couldn’t remember the last time that he had been out the front door that slid back to allow his mother free passage to and from work every day, and he certainly couldn’t recall ever having had the slick black streets and conveyer belt sidewalks that he sometimes saw miniature versions of people traverse from his perch at the corner of the window beneath his feet. Patrick wasn’t supposed to go near the windows, especially during the day, but every once in a while he’d shield himself behind the metal blinds and peer down at the city, active and alive as it sank down so far beneath him. All of those tiny people with places to go and the hypnotizing signs winking and dancing on the sides of the buildings existed contently without him. None of them seemed to care that someone was missing from their bustling ranks.
Sometimes, thoughts like those made Patrick feel like one of the black holes that people were thrown into when they misbehaved, moved against the strict flow of society like walking backwards on a conveyer, like he was a piece of antimatter, an inverted stretch of air that didn’t really exist but had been given a name for the sake of calling it something anyways. Sometimes, he felt like he could swallow himself and the absence wouldn’t be noticed. Sometimes, he wanted to throw himself from the window and taste the sunlight on the back of his tongue and feel the wind threading its fingers through his lashing hair as he fell, fell, fell a hundred stories. Sometimes, he imagined the feeling of his body compressing and decomposing for less than a moment as the onyx roads, which always looked wet as if in the aftermath of some fantasy gentle rain, destroyed every last one of his bones before he was in more pieces than anyone could count, insides peppering the faces of the people around him with little crimson freckles and dusting the walls of their screaming mouths. Sometimes, he wanted to fall and fall apart just to be down in the crowd at long last, dying as he was flying and dead upon landing, yet amongst the world, blissfully belonging in his last moment. But only sometimes.
The remainder of he moments that were pieced together to compose Patrick’s life, which followed an undisturbed monotonous path of ceaseless boredom and repetition, were spent relatively content. He loved his mother dearly, he had plenty of books to keep him occupied, he was never, ever permitted to assimilate into the world at large, and that was just the particular hand he had been dealt. He coped with it (sometimes).
His mother, who worked the night shift at the hospital so she could spend her days keeping her poor, unfortunate son company, had been swallowed by the foreign and unfamiliar darkness outside the door that acted as a barrier, abruptly ending Patrick’s world and beginning the one that belonged to everybody else. Patrick awoke promptly at one-thirty AM, as he did every night, for his normal routine of padding silently into the kitchen, getting a glass of warm synthetic milk, and sitting at the kitchen table (alone, as always) to sip it slowly to the dregs, blanketed in silence that pressed insistently at his ears and the flashing tempo of lights forcing themselves in slivers through the blinds to spur every bleak surface in the apartment to life. By one-forty-three, he would be back in his bed, heated sheets tucked carefully beneath his feet. But on this night, the sharp clattering of the glass on tile and virgin white milk bleeding across the countertop marked one of the rare disturbances in Patrick’s meticulously executed schedule, which was almost familiar enough to be comforting. Sighing over the mess, he turned and headed back to his bedroom to investigate the muffled thudding noise that had surprised him into knocking over the glass in the first place. Standing in the vacant doorway, Patrick set bleary eyes upon the first human being, aside from his mother and his own reflection, that he’d seen up close in far too long to remember without feeling a mournful ache in his chest.
The manufactured lights, the surplus of dazzling colors outside that, like everything else, became muted upon entering Patrick’s grey world, set the backdrop for the creature, bending around his limbs as he flailed quickly to his feet and just barely illuminating the edges of his features while casting the rest of him in shadow. Patrick watched, eyes wide behind the flimsy shield of stray strands of sleep-mussed hair brushed across his face and lips parted slightly, caught between shock and amazement as the darkened, expressionless form stood straight in front of him, the lines of the intruder’s amorphous body drawn precisely and stretched taut to outline a healthy young man poised for a fight that he would doubtlessly snarl and thrash his way through – messy and impromptu, contradicting the clean angles of his figure. The boy looked immensely ethereal, and somewhere in the back of Patrick’s aghast and numbed mind, he summoned an absent, whispering thought of Jesus Christ, the savior of people in the long ago days when gods and heavens and faiths prevailed (all things holy and pure had since collapsed into Hell, where it all smoldered to ash), and how the sight of him had pushed the bony knees of women into the dirt and altered the hearts of nonbelievers. He thought, in that very small, functioning part of his brain, that he was being made a disciple in that moment, a believer if there ever was one, looking upon this Technicolor deity that had stumbled through his window.
Patrick barely noticed the shift as the boy (the son, the Holy Ghost) rocked back onto his heels and took a faltering step away from him, stance switching in the span of a gasped breath to defensive instead of the haphazard attack he had formerly planned. It wasn’t until he spoke, and the sound of another human voice graced the shells of his ears, sliding over his skin like the teasing hand of an imaginary lover and prickling the fine hairs coating his entire body, that Patrick was able to grab a fleeting hold on reality and blink himself back into a state of sedated consciousness, threatening to lose it all to the fluctuating harsh lights and shifting shadows at any moment.
“Oh, shit,” the boy half-growled, and Patrick was almost surprised to hear that the voice of the real world wasn’t hoarse and feeble, rusted over from having gone so long without use. Then again, voices outside the walls of his existence were constantly being thrown around, casually as if there wasn’t a single person who would cling desperately to and worship every passing syllable, and it was just in Patrick’s mind that such rare delicacies as words from foreign tongues were never used.
But then it was time to assess the situation and stop gawking, and Patrick realized, with a hard blink that had his eyelashes falling upon the pale skin of his cheeks like individual biting snaps of whips and staggering back into the hall a little, that in his careless amazement, his wings had unfurled and were laid out behind him like silks on display, cramped a little in the narrow confines of the corridor.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Patrick blurted out, the words falling over themselves – a graceless first impression of speech upon a member of actual society. He paused for a moment, taking a few tremulous breaths that would have broken the silence with their steadying rhythm had it not been for the industrious sounds of machinery filtering in through the open window. “Please,” he added as an afterthought.
“I – fuck, man, who the hell would I tell?”
The other boy’s vulgar laughter, rough around the edges and nearly barking, still sounded beautifully melodic to Patrick, who hadn’t been blessed with such a sound since childhood, and he had to battle against the sudden sting behind his eyes and the swelling in his throat to hold back smiling tears.
“I… I just don’t want to be taken away,” he replied softly, a blossoming grin twitching at the corners of his lips despite the trembling fear in his fingertips, wings twitching pleasantly, because he was actually speaking to someone.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’d be fucked twelve ways from Sunday if anyone found out about me, too.” The boy turned and walked towards the window, and Patrick’s eyes went wide again, alarm rupturing inside of his stomach at the thought of his newly found, precious companion abandoning him so soon. So soon, after all this time. He took an unsteady step forwards, prepared to lunge at the burglar and grip his ankles adamantly if he had to – anything to hold him inside of that room, keep him swallowed in the same burnished prison that held Patrick captive. A fragile, breathless moment of uncertainty, and the stranger merely slid the window firmly shut, abruptly severing all of the garish sounds of the ever-active city before turning back to Patrick, thumbs hooked casually in the front pockets of his painfully tight jeans and offered him a capricious grin, his ostentatious, large white teeth capturing the gleam of the false colored lights. “I’m Pete. You got any food?”
___________________
“I got you something,” Pete whispered, speaking in the near-silent voice like frail, fleeting ghosts falling from lips that was required when living in such secrecy.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Patrick replied just as softly, though his eyes lit up through the pieces of his fine hair as if they were two of the mesmerizing billboards glittering outside the windows. Pete couldn’t smother the insistent twitching of a grin being born at the corners of his mouth at the sight of his new lover and clandestine companion’s obvious excitement as he reached for the slightly lumpy parcel, wrapped haphazardly in mud-stained newspaper.
“Yes I did,” he assured Patrick, placing the package in the other boy’s lap and reaching up to tenderly swipe a few strands of hair from his face, dark and dirty fingertips lingering against the cool, unblemished skin of Patrick’s pale brow for a few moments. “It was worth it just to see you smile like the stars like that,” he added softly, hand trailing down to rest against the grinning mouth in question.
Patrick was having a difficult time focusing on the gift at hand with Pete’s words, candied and lovely and nothing like the coarse rest of him, weaving wistful sighs in his lungs and the whispering touch of his fingers that he could almost feel leaving rivulets of the outside world on his skin. “You’re too sweet,” he murmured with a hint of a blush, his peach lips moving beneath Pete’s index finger as he spoke.
Pete chose to remain silent just then – an occasion that Patrick had learned to be a very rare one over the many months that had forged their midnight tryst relationship – and simply watch earnestly as Patrick delicately peeled back the soiled classifieds section, as if the gutter fare wrapping was a priceless treasure that he had to handle with the utmost of care. His expression of childish enthusiasm slowly diminished to a look of confusion as he lifted up his present, brows knitting and drawing fine lines above the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand… what is it?” He asked, looking up at Pete’s face, streaked with manufactured light against a shadowed palette, the same quizzical expression etched into his features.
“It’s a trench coat,” Pete explained, his free hand mapping out the slopes and valleys of Patrick’s side before tracing the fragile border of one pale, filmy wing. Patrick shivered and inched closer to the touch unconsciously, his deformed wings offering a content shudder where they lay curled against his back in slumber.
“What am I going to do with a trench coat?” Patrick asked, the muffled laugh that followed just barely breathless as Pete’s entirely too deft fingers continued to stroke the trembling wing, following the knobby line of a bone pressing against the flesh of the appendage.
“You’re going to use it to hide these,” Pete said, smiling encouragingly as his hand smoothed out the jarring lines of disorderly veins creating a messy lattice through the thin skin of the wing. Patrick, who became quite useless if one wanted some coherent speech out of him the moment his frayed wings began receiving such delectable attention, didn’t seem to catch the point.
“To go outside?” Pete tried, lips fighting a losing battle against amusement yet again as he watched the understanding unfurl on Patrick’s features.
Pete had been expecting a few bright smiles, maybe some potentially embarrassing girlish squeals, in response to the present, but he hadn’t anticipated a sudden armful of delighted Patrick slamming into his chest and knocking him backwards onto the floor. Pete liked surprises – he wasn’t about to complain. Successfully tackled, he wound his arms tightly around the pale boy, his hands splayed out across the warm, fair skin at the nape of Patrick’s back with the leathery tips of wings brushing the backs of his wrists. “I’m guessing you like it?” Pete laughed, between the kisses that Patrick was peppering over his cheeks and lips like falling stars.
“Of course I do!” He near-yelped, forehead resting against Pete’s as he met the dark eyes opposite his. “Can we go right now?”
“Sure can,” Pete grinned, placing a chaste kiss to Patrick’s breathless lips and managing to sit both up them up without dispatching the winged boy from his lap. “Come on, get your coat on, and then we’ll go out, yeah?”
Patrick sure as hell didn’t need to be told twice, and within a few short seconds, the star-struck young man was crossing the formerly impenetrable threshold of the windowsill with wide eyes as he looked down at the glossy pavement and cement, immensely beautiful to him in all of its industrial monstrosity. There was a gusting flash of old, wasting thoughts – his body flying, falling, crashing past blinking windowpanes and organs seeping out through torn pores – as he saw the opportunity to make the illusion a reality.
But then Pete was taking his hand, palm soft and warm and making him apart of everything as it pressed against his; thumb brushing once over the back of his hand, leading him down the fire escape, and sometimes, sometimes became never. Never.
The streets felt surreal beneath his feet. His wings were covered by the long jacket, and the people moving briskly down the conveyors didn’t pay him any special attention as they passed, their faces in the solid moonlight and laughing, dancing color of the living signs seeming to be those of angels. It was like the sweetest dream Patrick had ever had as he stepped onto the moving sidewalk, everything fitting perfectly from his body in the masses of others around him to the bones of Pete’s hand resting against his. It was so much like a dream that he couldn’t properly grasp the reality of the dizzying buildings, the tall perches from where he usually fawned over the very moving figures that he and Pete had become. The brush of peoples’ elbows against his and the sounds, undiluted and strong, felt like glimpses of a world that exists only in the mind or some distant fantasy. He could barely breathe.
“You’re so beautiful like this,” Pete murmured, as if secrecy was still required in the midst of all this existence as he pulled Patrick off of the conveyor so they could stand together and not be a hindrance to the unstoppable force of flowing society. “Everything somehow looks lovely reflected in your eyes.”
Patrick’s lashes fluttered, teasing at the tips of Pete’s fingers as they stroked the pale swells of his cheeks. The quiet sentiments, so achingly gentle that they seemed to crush his ribcage close against his thundering heart, only made everything more perfect, perfect, perfect.
“I love you,” Patrick whispered, and maybe what he meant is that he loved the way that the sky tasted in his lungs and the blurry bodies smelled as they drifted by; that he loved being dwarfed by skyscrapers and drowned out by bellowing, colorful advertisements, but it didn’t matter. He meant it, in his own way.
“I love you too,” Pete smiled slowly, and was a little alarmed when, after his eyes drifted shut and he started inching forward to kiss Patrick in the perfect punctuation to the exchanging of such vows, his mouth was met with empty air. Brows already furrowed, his eyes blinked open and his sharp gasp was choked off by a set of strong arms tugging him away from his lover, who was writhing against another police officer, the whites of his eyes swollen in terror.
“You two can’t be here. You don’t have chips,” a third said gruffly, and people were staring with mild surprise – just some vagrants without the mandatory microchips escaped from the Slums to stir up some trouble in the city. “We’ll let you off with a warning this time,” he was saying, but Patrick and Peter’s eyes were locked, both gripped by fear and trembling from it, praying silently to one another, maybe hoping that the desperate words would be heard by a God that had long since abandoned their mutilated civilization, that none of the cops would discover what was beneath Patrick’s coat.
They were being shoved, pushed towards the emergency tube that would send them immediately back to the Slums, a place of crumbling black buildings and disease lacing the waters that Pete was all-too-familiar with and liked to call ‘home,’ and as Pete crawled into the cramped, foul-smelling vessel, he let out a long sigh of relief. They hadn’t noticed. They hadn’t seen. They were safe.
Too soon. Too soon, he released that grateful breath, as the hem of the trench coat rode up when Patrick leaned over to awkwardly stuff himself into the unfamiliar tube, and Pete was reaching up to grab him the moment he saw the officers’ eyes lock on the telltale glimpse of wing. He was reaching to pull him in and slam the button that would shoot their capsule down the ramp and to the safety of the crippled Slums, but with a soft cry, the other men got him first.
“NO!” Pete cried, hoarse and pleading and the letters broken as they fell from his tongue, a disgusting, slick tremor of nausea and fear sliding through him as he lunged, tripping out of the small tube entrance and grabbing a hold of one of Patrick’s ankles despite the connection of his jaw with the pavement that sent a white jolt of pain through his mind. “Patrick!” He was screaming now, scrambling to his feet as the coat was ripped off of the other boy, who couldn’t summon the ability to speak from the depths of his shock, let alone react to the rough hands of the policemen jerking him away from his Savior born of trash and muted promises. “Patrick! Patrick! Fly!”
Wings, the same pale hue as Patrick’s flesh, spread out abruptly behind him, responding of their own accord to Pete’s raspy screams, and, displayed in their full glory with the fickle spotlights of gleaming billboards and car headlights, looked absolutely hideous with their gnarled bones and uneven edges like the torn pages of abandoned books. Patrick, inspired by the false hope that he should have known better than to harbor, gave them a few determined flaps, and was almost seared by the image of Pete – his strong, foul-mouthed, daring and grinning Pete – lowering his head in defeat and dismay. The feeble wings, having been created grotesque and twisted like the ruined limbs of war veterans, refused to take flight.
So it would be falling, and not flying, that would undo Patrick.
“Patrick,” Pete called once more, voice failing him along with his hope as he, too hardened by the streets to believe in some dishonest fantasy in which they lived Happily Ever After, came to understand what would happen to the lonely little boy that he had loved so dearly. It was a well-known secret that, after the noxious smoke of the atomic war had cleared and the children began being born with snakes’ tongues and cats’ tails, the government had wanted to rid the new, more strictly controlled society of all abnormalities – that the ones with mutations were taken quickly and quietly away and, though the rest of their miserable lives may have been spent as the subjects for scientific experiments or had ceased immediately at the unfortunate end of a gun behind some barren building, they never returned. They never returned. He writhed against the officer restraining him, Patrick watching with wide eyes and whimpering lips, until the cop rained a single, efficient blow upon the back of his skull and, with a horrifying crack of metal on breaking bone, Pete’s body went limp.
Once the boy’s dark body, painted with the dirt of his leper’s life, fell to the cement with his dark eyes staring blankly up at Patrick’s face, the light behind his unfocused gaze snuffed out like a star that had been amongst the heavens one evening and simply vanished, like the secret and unacceptable members of society, the next. Patrick couldn’t have told you when he started crying, or when he started screaming for the body that was growing colder by the second on the sidewalk at his feet, or when he had fallen utterly silent and gone as still as Pete’s corpse.
After all, this was all he had ever wanted – to fall and fall apart.
Author:
lesinnocentsPairing: patrickxpeter
Rating: Er... PG-13 for swearing
Summary: Written for the time periods ficathon (woo! two backups that I've written now!) for
sweetnovicane. Prompt: futuristicDisclaimer: I don't own any of the boys, but I guess the really confusing plot it all mine.
Author's Note (From me to
megyal: Sorry, Marie, but I just HAD to put Synth-Lacto in. It was just too hilarious. And thanks to the aforementioned Marie and my sweet, sweet muse Chris for beta-ing. And the amazing futuristic names of dairy products.Patrick had grown very accustomed to living within the narrow confines of his own mind. The apartment, all sharp edges and glossy surfaces as if the rooms were cast in wax and not real at all, waiting for the match to be lit that would melt the entire illusion to a simmering puddle of murky colors (luckily, no fires existed in this grey gossamer world), was something that he had come to view as an extension of his thoughts.
He couldn’t remember the last time that he had been out the front door that slid back to allow his mother free passage to and from work every day, and he certainly couldn’t recall ever having had the slick black streets and conveyer belt sidewalks that he sometimes saw miniature versions of people traverse from his perch at the corner of the window beneath his feet. Patrick wasn’t supposed to go near the windows, especially during the day, but every once in a while he’d shield himself behind the metal blinds and peer down at the city, active and alive as it sank down so far beneath him. All of those tiny people with places to go and the hypnotizing signs winking and dancing on the sides of the buildings existed contently without him. None of them seemed to care that someone was missing from their bustling ranks.
Sometimes, thoughts like those made Patrick feel like one of the black holes that people were thrown into when they misbehaved, moved against the strict flow of society like walking backwards on a conveyer, like he was a piece of antimatter, an inverted stretch of air that didn’t really exist but had been given a name for the sake of calling it something anyways. Sometimes, he felt like he could swallow himself and the absence wouldn’t be noticed. Sometimes, he wanted to throw himself from the window and taste the sunlight on the back of his tongue and feel the wind threading its fingers through his lashing hair as he fell, fell, fell a hundred stories. Sometimes, he imagined the feeling of his body compressing and decomposing for less than a moment as the onyx roads, which always looked wet as if in the aftermath of some fantasy gentle rain, destroyed every last one of his bones before he was in more pieces than anyone could count, insides peppering the faces of the people around him with little crimson freckles and dusting the walls of their screaming mouths. Sometimes, he wanted to fall and fall apart just to be down in the crowd at long last, dying as he was flying and dead upon landing, yet amongst the world, blissfully belonging in his last moment. But only sometimes.
The remainder of he moments that were pieced together to compose Patrick’s life, which followed an undisturbed monotonous path of ceaseless boredom and repetition, were spent relatively content. He loved his mother dearly, he had plenty of books to keep him occupied, he was never, ever permitted to assimilate into the world at large, and that was just the particular hand he had been dealt. He coped with it (sometimes).
His mother, who worked the night shift at the hospital so she could spend her days keeping her poor, unfortunate son company, had been swallowed by the foreign and unfamiliar darkness outside the door that acted as a barrier, abruptly ending Patrick’s world and beginning the one that belonged to everybody else. Patrick awoke promptly at one-thirty AM, as he did every night, for his normal routine of padding silently into the kitchen, getting a glass of warm synthetic milk, and sitting at the kitchen table (alone, as always) to sip it slowly to the dregs, blanketed in silence that pressed insistently at his ears and the flashing tempo of lights forcing themselves in slivers through the blinds to spur every bleak surface in the apartment to life. By one-forty-three, he would be back in his bed, heated sheets tucked carefully beneath his feet. But on this night, the sharp clattering of the glass on tile and virgin white milk bleeding across the countertop marked one of the rare disturbances in Patrick’s meticulously executed schedule, which was almost familiar enough to be comforting. Sighing over the mess, he turned and headed back to his bedroom to investigate the muffled thudding noise that had surprised him into knocking over the glass in the first place. Standing in the vacant doorway, Patrick set bleary eyes upon the first human being, aside from his mother and his own reflection, that he’d seen up close in far too long to remember without feeling a mournful ache in his chest.
The manufactured lights, the surplus of dazzling colors outside that, like everything else, became muted upon entering Patrick’s grey world, set the backdrop for the creature, bending around his limbs as he flailed quickly to his feet and just barely illuminating the edges of his features while casting the rest of him in shadow. Patrick watched, eyes wide behind the flimsy shield of stray strands of sleep-mussed hair brushed across his face and lips parted slightly, caught between shock and amazement as the darkened, expressionless form stood straight in front of him, the lines of the intruder’s amorphous body drawn precisely and stretched taut to outline a healthy young man poised for a fight that he would doubtlessly snarl and thrash his way through – messy and impromptu, contradicting the clean angles of his figure. The boy looked immensely ethereal, and somewhere in the back of Patrick’s aghast and numbed mind, he summoned an absent, whispering thought of Jesus Christ, the savior of people in the long ago days when gods and heavens and faiths prevailed (all things holy and pure had since collapsed into Hell, where it all smoldered to ash), and how the sight of him had pushed the bony knees of women into the dirt and altered the hearts of nonbelievers. He thought, in that very small, functioning part of his brain, that he was being made a disciple in that moment, a believer if there ever was one, looking upon this Technicolor deity that had stumbled through his window.
Patrick barely noticed the shift as the boy (the son, the Holy Ghost) rocked back onto his heels and took a faltering step away from him, stance switching in the span of a gasped breath to defensive instead of the haphazard attack he had formerly planned. It wasn’t until he spoke, and the sound of another human voice graced the shells of his ears, sliding over his skin like the teasing hand of an imaginary lover and prickling the fine hairs coating his entire body, that Patrick was able to grab a fleeting hold on reality and blink himself back into a state of sedated consciousness, threatening to lose it all to the fluctuating harsh lights and shifting shadows at any moment.
“Oh, shit,” the boy half-growled, and Patrick was almost surprised to hear that the voice of the real world wasn’t hoarse and feeble, rusted over from having gone so long without use. Then again, voices outside the walls of his existence were constantly being thrown around, casually as if there wasn’t a single person who would cling desperately to and worship every passing syllable, and it was just in Patrick’s mind that such rare delicacies as words from foreign tongues were never used.
But then it was time to assess the situation and stop gawking, and Patrick realized, with a hard blink that had his eyelashes falling upon the pale skin of his cheeks like individual biting snaps of whips and staggering back into the hall a little, that in his careless amazement, his wings had unfurled and were laid out behind him like silks on display, cramped a little in the narrow confines of the corridor.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Patrick blurted out, the words falling over themselves – a graceless first impression of speech upon a member of actual society. He paused for a moment, taking a few tremulous breaths that would have broken the silence with their steadying rhythm had it not been for the industrious sounds of machinery filtering in through the open window. “Please,” he added as an afterthought.
“I – fuck, man, who the hell would I tell?”
The other boy’s vulgar laughter, rough around the edges and nearly barking, still sounded beautifully melodic to Patrick, who hadn’t been blessed with such a sound since childhood, and he had to battle against the sudden sting behind his eyes and the swelling in his throat to hold back smiling tears.
“I… I just don’t want to be taken away,” he replied softly, a blossoming grin twitching at the corners of his lips despite the trembling fear in his fingertips, wings twitching pleasantly, because he was actually speaking to someone.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’d be fucked twelve ways from Sunday if anyone found out about me, too.” The boy turned and walked towards the window, and Patrick’s eyes went wide again, alarm rupturing inside of his stomach at the thought of his newly found, precious companion abandoning him so soon. So soon, after all this time. He took an unsteady step forwards, prepared to lunge at the burglar and grip his ankles adamantly if he had to – anything to hold him inside of that room, keep him swallowed in the same burnished prison that held Patrick captive. A fragile, breathless moment of uncertainty, and the stranger merely slid the window firmly shut, abruptly severing all of the garish sounds of the ever-active city before turning back to Patrick, thumbs hooked casually in the front pockets of his painfully tight jeans and offered him a capricious grin, his ostentatious, large white teeth capturing the gleam of the false colored lights. “I’m Pete. You got any food?”
“I got you something,” Pete whispered, speaking in the near-silent voice like frail, fleeting ghosts falling from lips that was required when living in such secrecy.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Patrick replied just as softly, though his eyes lit up through the pieces of his fine hair as if they were two of the mesmerizing billboards glittering outside the windows. Pete couldn’t smother the insistent twitching of a grin being born at the corners of his mouth at the sight of his new lover and clandestine companion’s obvious excitement as he reached for the slightly lumpy parcel, wrapped haphazardly in mud-stained newspaper.
“Yes I did,” he assured Patrick, placing the package in the other boy’s lap and reaching up to tenderly swipe a few strands of hair from his face, dark and dirty fingertips lingering against the cool, unblemished skin of Patrick’s pale brow for a few moments. “It was worth it just to see you smile like the stars like that,” he added softly, hand trailing down to rest against the grinning mouth in question.
Patrick was having a difficult time focusing on the gift at hand with Pete’s words, candied and lovely and nothing like the coarse rest of him, weaving wistful sighs in his lungs and the whispering touch of his fingers that he could almost feel leaving rivulets of the outside world on his skin. “You’re too sweet,” he murmured with a hint of a blush, his peach lips moving beneath Pete’s index finger as he spoke.
Pete chose to remain silent just then – an occasion that Patrick had learned to be a very rare one over the many months that had forged their midnight tryst relationship – and simply watch earnestly as Patrick delicately peeled back the soiled classifieds section, as if the gutter fare wrapping was a priceless treasure that he had to handle with the utmost of care. His expression of childish enthusiasm slowly diminished to a look of confusion as he lifted up his present, brows knitting and drawing fine lines above the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand… what is it?” He asked, looking up at Pete’s face, streaked with manufactured light against a shadowed palette, the same quizzical expression etched into his features.
“It’s a trench coat,” Pete explained, his free hand mapping out the slopes and valleys of Patrick’s side before tracing the fragile border of one pale, filmy wing. Patrick shivered and inched closer to the touch unconsciously, his deformed wings offering a content shudder where they lay curled against his back in slumber.
“What am I going to do with a trench coat?” Patrick asked, the muffled laugh that followed just barely breathless as Pete’s entirely too deft fingers continued to stroke the trembling wing, following the knobby line of a bone pressing against the flesh of the appendage.
“You’re going to use it to hide these,” Pete said, smiling encouragingly as his hand smoothed out the jarring lines of disorderly veins creating a messy lattice through the thin skin of the wing. Patrick, who became quite useless if one wanted some coherent speech out of him the moment his frayed wings began receiving such delectable attention, didn’t seem to catch the point.
“To go outside?” Pete tried, lips fighting a losing battle against amusement yet again as he watched the understanding unfurl on Patrick’s features.
Pete had been expecting a few bright smiles, maybe some potentially embarrassing girlish squeals, in response to the present, but he hadn’t anticipated a sudden armful of delighted Patrick slamming into his chest and knocking him backwards onto the floor. Pete liked surprises – he wasn’t about to complain. Successfully tackled, he wound his arms tightly around the pale boy, his hands splayed out across the warm, fair skin at the nape of Patrick’s back with the leathery tips of wings brushing the backs of his wrists. “I’m guessing you like it?” Pete laughed, between the kisses that Patrick was peppering over his cheeks and lips like falling stars.
“Of course I do!” He near-yelped, forehead resting against Pete’s as he met the dark eyes opposite his. “Can we go right now?”
“Sure can,” Pete grinned, placing a chaste kiss to Patrick’s breathless lips and managing to sit both up them up without dispatching the winged boy from his lap. “Come on, get your coat on, and then we’ll go out, yeah?”
Patrick sure as hell didn’t need to be told twice, and within a few short seconds, the star-struck young man was crossing the formerly impenetrable threshold of the windowsill with wide eyes as he looked down at the glossy pavement and cement, immensely beautiful to him in all of its industrial monstrosity. There was a gusting flash of old, wasting thoughts – his body flying, falling, crashing past blinking windowpanes and organs seeping out through torn pores – as he saw the opportunity to make the illusion a reality.
But then Pete was taking his hand, palm soft and warm and making him apart of everything as it pressed against his; thumb brushing once over the back of his hand, leading him down the fire escape, and sometimes, sometimes became never. Never.
The streets felt surreal beneath his feet. His wings were covered by the long jacket, and the people moving briskly down the conveyors didn’t pay him any special attention as they passed, their faces in the solid moonlight and laughing, dancing color of the living signs seeming to be those of angels. It was like the sweetest dream Patrick had ever had as he stepped onto the moving sidewalk, everything fitting perfectly from his body in the masses of others around him to the bones of Pete’s hand resting against his. It was so much like a dream that he couldn’t properly grasp the reality of the dizzying buildings, the tall perches from where he usually fawned over the very moving figures that he and Pete had become. The brush of peoples’ elbows against his and the sounds, undiluted and strong, felt like glimpses of a world that exists only in the mind or some distant fantasy. He could barely breathe.
“You’re so beautiful like this,” Pete murmured, as if secrecy was still required in the midst of all this existence as he pulled Patrick off of the conveyor so they could stand together and not be a hindrance to the unstoppable force of flowing society. “Everything somehow looks lovely reflected in your eyes.”
Patrick’s lashes fluttered, teasing at the tips of Pete’s fingers as they stroked the pale swells of his cheeks. The quiet sentiments, so achingly gentle that they seemed to crush his ribcage close against his thundering heart, only made everything more perfect, perfect, perfect.
“I love you,” Patrick whispered, and maybe what he meant is that he loved the way that the sky tasted in his lungs and the blurry bodies smelled as they drifted by; that he loved being dwarfed by skyscrapers and drowned out by bellowing, colorful advertisements, but it didn’t matter. He meant it, in his own way.
“I love you too,” Pete smiled slowly, and was a little alarmed when, after his eyes drifted shut and he started inching forward to kiss Patrick in the perfect punctuation to the exchanging of such vows, his mouth was met with empty air. Brows already furrowed, his eyes blinked open and his sharp gasp was choked off by a set of strong arms tugging him away from his lover, who was writhing against another police officer, the whites of his eyes swollen in terror.
“You two can’t be here. You don’t have chips,” a third said gruffly, and people were staring with mild surprise – just some vagrants without the mandatory microchips escaped from the Slums to stir up some trouble in the city. “We’ll let you off with a warning this time,” he was saying, but Patrick and Peter’s eyes were locked, both gripped by fear and trembling from it, praying silently to one another, maybe hoping that the desperate words would be heard by a God that had long since abandoned their mutilated civilization, that none of the cops would discover what was beneath Patrick’s coat.
They were being shoved, pushed towards the emergency tube that would send them immediately back to the Slums, a place of crumbling black buildings and disease lacing the waters that Pete was all-too-familiar with and liked to call ‘home,’ and as Pete crawled into the cramped, foul-smelling vessel, he let out a long sigh of relief. They hadn’t noticed. They hadn’t seen. They were safe.
Too soon. Too soon, he released that grateful breath, as the hem of the trench coat rode up when Patrick leaned over to awkwardly stuff himself into the unfamiliar tube, and Pete was reaching up to grab him the moment he saw the officers’ eyes lock on the telltale glimpse of wing. He was reaching to pull him in and slam the button that would shoot their capsule down the ramp and to the safety of the crippled Slums, but with a soft cry, the other men got him first.
“NO!” Pete cried, hoarse and pleading and the letters broken as they fell from his tongue, a disgusting, slick tremor of nausea and fear sliding through him as he lunged, tripping out of the small tube entrance and grabbing a hold of one of Patrick’s ankles despite the connection of his jaw with the pavement that sent a white jolt of pain through his mind. “Patrick!” He was screaming now, scrambling to his feet as the coat was ripped off of the other boy, who couldn’t summon the ability to speak from the depths of his shock, let alone react to the rough hands of the policemen jerking him away from his Savior born of trash and muted promises. “Patrick! Patrick! Fly!”
Wings, the same pale hue as Patrick’s flesh, spread out abruptly behind him, responding of their own accord to Pete’s raspy screams, and, displayed in their full glory with the fickle spotlights of gleaming billboards and car headlights, looked absolutely hideous with their gnarled bones and uneven edges like the torn pages of abandoned books. Patrick, inspired by the false hope that he should have known better than to harbor, gave them a few determined flaps, and was almost seared by the image of Pete – his strong, foul-mouthed, daring and grinning Pete – lowering his head in defeat and dismay. The feeble wings, having been created grotesque and twisted like the ruined limbs of war veterans, refused to take flight.
So it would be falling, and not flying, that would undo Patrick.
“Patrick,” Pete called once more, voice failing him along with his hope as he, too hardened by the streets to believe in some dishonest fantasy in which they lived Happily Ever After, came to understand what would happen to the lonely little boy that he had loved so dearly. It was a well-known secret that, after the noxious smoke of the atomic war had cleared and the children began being born with snakes’ tongues and cats’ tails, the government had wanted to rid the new, more strictly controlled society of all abnormalities – that the ones with mutations were taken quickly and quietly away and, though the rest of their miserable lives may have been spent as the subjects for scientific experiments or had ceased immediately at the unfortunate end of a gun behind some barren building, they never returned. They never returned. He writhed against the officer restraining him, Patrick watching with wide eyes and whimpering lips, until the cop rained a single, efficient blow upon the back of his skull and, with a horrifying crack of metal on breaking bone, Pete’s body went limp.
Once the boy’s dark body, painted with the dirt of his leper’s life, fell to the cement with his dark eyes staring blankly up at Patrick’s face, the light behind his unfocused gaze snuffed out like a star that had been amongst the heavens one evening and simply vanished, like the secret and unacceptable members of society, the next. Patrick couldn’t have told you when he started crying, or when he started screaming for the body that was growing colder by the second on the sidewalk at his feet, or when he had fallen utterly silent and gone as still as Pete’s corpse.
After all, this was all he had ever wanted – to fall and fall apart.