Work Text:
Simon has conversations about it in the commune, of course, around the same large kitchen island where they brew the neurotripteline, leaning against the pantry door (towels and clothes and books inside, no food but canned olives left over from the previous tenants) and watching the smoke from the cigarette Ji-Eun and Sandy pass trickle up to hang in a fog around the ceiling light. The three of them always gravitate there in favor of the more comfortable couches and pallets everywhere in the house—habit, he supposes. He used to stand around for hours sometimes, on long wet Sundays, talking or listening to the radio with his mother and waiting for the roast to cook. He knows Sandy at least had a big family (Jehovah’s Witnesses, near Dover, girlhood full of chalky cliffs and long bare Protestant prayer meetings) and god knows it took enough time in the kitchen to feed them all. Ji-Eun is just a big one for leaning in general, always up when the others are down, back against the wall, watching, one hand gently feeling the material of her skirt, her blouse, her belt.
Talk turns to an involved story about Ji-Eun being walked in on with her first girlfriend at her (the girlfriend’s) sixteenth birthday by roughly twenty classmates bearing a lit cake, and after Sandy recovers her composure, she sighs, “God, I miss that.”
“Crushing humiliation?” Ji-Eun says, lighting another cigarette. She’d just stubbed the other out on her arm.
Sandy shrugs. “Secondary-school scandal stuff, I guess. Drama. Birthday cake. Sex. Definitely sex.”
Their hands brush when they pass the cigarette. Half the commune has a bet running on when they’ll give in and make some sort of public love declaration.
“Yeah, it’s not the same, really,” he says, accepting the cigarette when it’s held out to him. He’d never smoked much in life but it seemed the friendly thing to do. “I mean, it didn’t take me too long to figure out once I started. All the Quaaludes were good practice, suppose, back when I was alive. Numbed things up.”
He looks up from considering the little ember on the end of the fag to meet twin interested, confused expressions. Simon immediately regrets speaking. Everyone said over and over that there were no secrets in the commune, that any and all information was to be for the good of the whole—and he’s taken it upfront for the most part, especially with Amy and Sandy and Ji-Eun. They certainly haven’t been shy around him. Amy in particular.
“Sorry,” he says, just as Sandy says, “What, you mean you can still—?”
“No way your lad still works,” Ji-Eun says decisively. “Bryan talked me half to death whining and moaning about how he misses his.”
“No, ‘course it doesn’t,” he says brusquely, passing the cigarette back. Sandy takes it but ignores it, letting it burn down in her hand.
“How d’you mean ‘didn’t take you too long to figure out’?” she says, indignant. “I’ve only been trying every damn trick in the book for god knows how many weeks.”
“Yeah, he’s full of it,” pronounces Ji-Eun, “It was in that pamphlet I got sent home with, right? There was a whole section about ‘sensitive marital impossibilities’ or whatever they called it.”
“I didn’t say it was exactly the same,” Simon says, glad he can no longer blush. “But we still have our nervous systems, don’t we? All that stuff’s really in the brain and the spine and all, I saw an article about it. It works best if you do it right after the day’s dose.”
They relocate to the roof when Arav stumbles in in his pajamas to “Just open a window, guys, a little stuffy in here, sorry if I’m disturbing you,” and talk the other half of the night away, tiny sliver of moon sailing slowly west above them. Sandy, telling the story some hideous Oxbridge twerp she dated, cackles so hard she slips over the edge and falls with a sick crunch into the garden. They almost fall off themselves helping her up, but end up victorious in a (literally) breathless pile on the sandpapery slope by the chimney, helping her pull twigs out of her clothes and skin. One long thick splinter coming out of her neck—“Oh shit, look at this one!”. Sick grey glow of dawn coming. And even though they’re just messing around, he feels useful, a trellis for others to grow on. When alive, his body wasn’t honestly that much of an asset, or at least he didn’t see it as such. Big hands, crooked shoulders, void in the chest. It’s cold and cut up now, peppered with bruises that won’t go away, but it’s quiet, finally, and his, and full of mysteries. At rest.
And then a week later he gets sent to Roarton, put in an orange vest, and thrown into the orbit of Kieren Walker.
-- -- --
“Could you—?” says Kieren, holding out the little neurotripteline gun to him. They’d been watching some film about a monster (a shark? a big lizard? Simon doesn’t know, the volume was down and they were kissing by the time the two-dimensional scientists had their warnings ignored) when Kieren had caught sight of the clock. He still brought his dose around with him in a case when he thought he might possibly need it—Simon’s offer of the homebrew was politely rejected once, and he didn’t offer again.
It’s not the first time he’s helped him with his medicine, although it took longer than he expected for Kieren to ask, considering how his family could get about it. Simon has only done it a few times, but can tell already that the intensity of the side effects are fading a little. There’s only been one time where Kieren got locked up in it for more than a few seconds, eyes staring at the opposite wall, horrified, his entire back going tense under Simon’s palm. Shaky and distant afterwards, half-there. Simon had a few dark thoughts about the reliability of government neurotripteline compared to his own, but left them unsaid.
Kieren, hair still sticking up in the back from being pressed against the arm of the couch, starts to tug down the back of his shirt like usual, but quickly meets resistance, seeing as he’s worn a turtleneck. (“Wash day,” he’d explained at the door, indicating the high-water sleeves, the too-tight grey stretch across his shoulders.)
“Here,” Simon says, reaching for the hem. “Alright?”
Kieren nods, and between the two of them they manage to peel the old shirt off. A loose thread catches on the stitches crossing Kieren’s left wrist. Simon busies himself preparing the dose (threading the tiny screws, trying not to look at the trademarked names on the label) while he unsticks it. On the screen a glowing green behemoth destroys a Latin American metropolis. Kieren has a series of three freckles under his left shoulder, he notices, in a graph-perfect line. He’s seen him without a shirt before, a flash of skin when he was changing for dinner, but never for long and never up close.
He lines it up, seeing Kieren’s hands go tight on his own knees, and squeezes his shoulder once in warning before pulling the trigger. He can’t see his eyes shut but he’s sure they do from the way his head cranes down. Kieren sucks in a steadying breath that brings him no actual oxygen, but the movement seems to help, and he relaxes. Simon zips the little gun back into his pouch, and when he looks back Kieren is already reaching for his shirt. He touches his elbow lightly when he moves to put it back on. When Kieren lets the turtleneck go, he swipes a thumb over the soft skin of his inner arm, skims it up over his shoulder, watching for the wince he’s half-sure is coming.
They’ve done this before fully dressed, and of course it’s not much of a difference, empirically, in sensation between a thin layer of cotton and nothing. Not to them. They haven’t been particularly chaste or anything: long dizzy hours of necking on the couch, the bed, the floor, which sometimes surges into something more urgent, something with nails on the back of his neck, teeth on his ear, all four of Kieren’s limbs tight around him, holding him fast, surprisingly strong. But the hands fisted in his shirt always eventually loosen, never move to unbutton or tear. And that’s fine by him—god knows he’s had enough quick back-of-the club-type fucks to last him a lifetime and beyond, the back of his throat sparkling and cold from whatever’d been up his nose last, beginning to taste the start of a nosebleed on his back teeth. He’d be more than thrilled to just kiss Kieren Walker for as long and just as thoroughly as he’d like.
Doesn’t mean he hasn’t had other ideas, though.
When he spreads his palm out on Kieren’s back, concentrating on the contours of it, the slight twin furrows in the muscles by the spine,, he isn’t expecting the slight shiver that runs under his hand.
Kieren himself looks surprised. Simon repeats the movement, more slowly, a little lighter, and ducks his head to press a kiss to his collarbone.
“I can feel that a little,” he says, voice carefully controlled. “Not feel it feel it, but…” He trails off when Simon moves his mouth to his sternum.
“I know,” he says, drawing back. “It’s strongest right after the medicine hits the spine. It helps if you watch.”
He can feel Kieren’s eyes on him as he turns his attention to the crook of his elbow, drawing the tips of his fingers over it, tracing the bluish veins there, before bending to kiss it gently. Kieren’s hand comes up to grip the back of his neck—Simon isn’t sure whether to caution him or spur him on. He brings his head up to check.
“I can stop, if you like.”
“No—yes—“ Kieren rubbed his face in frustration, sighing. “Doesn’t it drive you mad, a little?”
“Yes,” says Simon. “Entirely.”
“We shouldn’t—here, we shouldn’t even talk about it, it’ll make it worse.” He says, reaching for the turtleneck. He pulls it on backwards, and his face when it reappears from the neck is miserable.
“As you like,” says Simon, “But if it’s on your mind, I’d rather know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m just trying to forget it. It’s like—you know, like apples, or a really good curry, or drinking cold water—“
Kieren, seeing the expression on Simon’s face, gets even more flustered.
“Just another sense memory we’ll never get back, is all I mean, and god it’s nice to—to—get near to it, but it makes it that much worse, sometimes, remembering we can’t—“ he makes a circling, searching movement with his hand.
“Fuck properly?” supplies Simon.
“Yes.”
He shrugs. “Way I think of it, there’s not really a ‘properly’ when it comes to fucking. To be sure, there’s a couple things off the table, but still a pretty good spread if you’re inclined. Nothing the living will ever feel, either, which helps take the edge off. For me at least.”
And—oh god, Simon isn’t sure whether to laugh or curse his own name for not having this conversation earlier, for assuming—Kieren is giving him almost the exact same look that his friends in the commune did all those months ago. He makes a mental note to draw up a zine or something about it, or even some little informational video; this is getting ridiculous.
“You didn’t believe all the pamphlets saying we couldn’t have sex, did you?” he hazards.
“We can have sex?” he says, and Simon absolutely should have brought this up sooner, should have checked rather than just thought, right, he’s not interested in that stuff, or he’s got business to work out in his head from that Rick still. “But I haven’t been able to get—you know, hard or anything. Since I died.”
“Nobody can. No pulse, love. Doesn’t mean you can’t still have a good time.”
“And you’ve tested this theory personally?” Kieren says, looking at him somewhat askance.
“Well, you know me. Very much a proponent of self-love for the undead.”
He says it lightly, but it took him a hell of a long time to get to a place where he could take his shirt off in the same room with a mirror, much less reach back to brush the top of his spine with his fingers; the place just above the long wound. And pursuing that first wandering jolt of feeling around himself, hesitantly, kneeling by his cot-bed with the sounds of the girls talking drifting down from the attic. Song of Songs open on the bed in front of him, just like old times. (Thirteen, heart pounding, doesn’t count as bad if he doesn’t touch himself there, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for his love is better than wine—your name like perfume poured out—)
“I mean, I knew Amy had—but I thought it was different for girls.”
“Not in particular, that I’ve been told,” he says, but decides to not go into his speculations on sense-memory and mirror-neurons, as Kieren is struggling frantically to get the tight shirt over his head again and crawl into his lap at the same time.
“I cannot believe that all this time—“ says Kieren, actually grabbing Simon’s hands and raising them to his waist. “You’ve been waiting for me to go home before getting yourself off and I’ve just been lying in my damn twin bed languishing in the dark, you bastard.”
His mouth on Simon’s is insistent, desperate, one hand tight on the back of his head, holding him in place. He draws back only to tear Simon’s sweater and t-shirt up off over his head, lunging back in to press their chests together, hands tight on his hips, tugging his belt, breath he doesn’t technically need still coming faster. Kieren pauses to lift his tiny tarnished St. Christopher medallion from his chest, rubbing a thumb over the face of it, as Simon often has, before returning to his attentions. Simon tips his head back and enjoys the slightly blunted but sharpening sensation of Kieren’s hands on him, the pressure and weight of another body on his own, the unshakeable sense of being chosen, of receiving some rare gift, whenever the full attention of his gaze (and his eyes, his real and beautiful eyes) falls on him.
Kieren throws Simon’s belt over the arm of the couch, sliding down to kneel in front of him, tugging at the fly of his jeans with single-minded determination, eyes bright.
“Wait, here—“ Simon says, turning off the movie at long last (the hero, streaked with grit, running away from an explosion silently). “Come on, bed, we’re going to need some room for this.”
Kieren all but bolts for Simon’s bedroom, tugging him by the hand, pausing in the hall to push him against the closet door and kiss him again, joyful and impatient, curling around him. He kicks out of his jeans—no boxers, huh, Simon registers—with only slight hesitation and all but throws himself down on the bed, pulling Simon on top of him by the waistband. Simon catches himself before he crashes into him, braced over him, weight on hands he can feel only in fits and starts. Sunset comes in through the blinds; distant sound of the church bells striking six. Kieren’s hair catching the light, small threads of gold.
“Christ, come on, I’ve been thinking about this nonstop,” Kieren says, winding his arms around Simon’s neck and pressing a kiss to its side. Small flare of feeling down his spine, crawling over his scalp—more from Kieren’s voice than his mouth, although the latter doesn’t hurt.
Simon pulls away finally, putting a hand on Kieren’s chest to keep him flat. “Slow down, now. Believe me, I want to—but it takes a while. A long while, and if you go too fast you can get a bit burned out on it. Overloaded.”
(A knock on his door late at night: Ji-Eun and Sandy in bathrobes, arms crossed, irritated. “Monroe, you liar, it never gets anywhere!” Explaining and explaining until finally he just unbuttoned his shirt (solidarity forever, reminding himself, not just during the day; kill every scrap of shame you find within yourself and then give others the knife) and showed them. Slow, slow. Wait for the jittered broken synapses to catch up, get them interested.)
“Like this:” he says again, this time to Kieren, this time watched with an intensity he can feel. He closes his eyes, concentrating, allowing himself to drop into the complete silent stillness of his body. “You can’t treat yourself like one of them,” he says, and distantly perceives Kieren’s hands come up to his hips again. “You can’t expect to find the one perfect angle, or the one little turn of the wrist. Different rules this time around. Just as good, if you let it be. You just sort of…watch for it, the feeling…” Spots of red behind his eyes from the sun, sound of Kieren’s breath. The abstracted pressure of his own hand on his chest, dragging, delicate, waiting. And there: the feeling of a fingernail moving over one of his ribs, resonating through all his nerves. Then again, again, though he can’t tell if it’s his own hand doing it—opens his eyes to Kieren, up on one elbow, watching him like he’s the beautiful one, hand pressed to Simon’s ribcage. He takes Kieren’s hand in his own, presses a kiss to the palm, and then each of the fingertips.
“Honestly, I’m not sure exactly how well it’ll work with someone else,” he says, moving his hands up into Kieren’s hair, shifting over him. “I have some friends who’ve had some smashing successes but, with me—or with you—“ he shrugs as best he can in his position. “Couldn’t say. Although if it’ll work with anyone, with me, God, Kieren, it’ll be you.”
At that, he arches back a little into Simon’s hands, mouth falling open. Encouraged, Simon continues moving his hands, pressing hard and sure, down his neck, down his sides, saying, “You’re wonderful, really you are; I thought about doing this to you just the other day, for hours, just seeing how you look with my hands on you—“
Kieren goes perfectly still, forgetting to breathe, when Simon presses a place low on his stomach, near his hip. He nods, eyes fluttering shut, and his legs jerk in surprise when Simon bends his head to lave the spot with his tongue. He’s careful never to stay in one place too long, even when Kieren gasps, curls inward, says, “Yes there, that’s—keep doing—Simon just—“ in a strained voice. Redeemed bodies are notoriously fickle, anomalies, chemical messes: normally resistant to sensation, they flood too easily with it. It comes and goes, flickering and then scorching.
The first time Simon had discovered it, he hadn’t even been trying. Sex hadn’t crossed his mind for a long time—he spent weeks wandering around destroyed by the fact of being opiate-resistant, of having to face what he’d done without the gentle edge-smoothing knowledge of the oxys rattling in his pocket loose with his AZT, the man he could call for an eight-ball, his gear cradled comfortably in a motel safe somewhere. The numbness of his tongue and fingertips, the shock of the mirror: all the horrors of the high without the rewards, and no ever coming down.
He’d often described himself, when it came up, as “the world’s shittiest Catholic bar no man and take that to the bank, son”, but that was a lie. He’d left his onionskin-papered youth pocket bible in three dumpsters in two different cities (chucked there intentionally or forgotten) but had always come back for it. It still had his eleven-year-old scrawl of ‘fuck Father Mark hes a fucken wanker’ over one of the verses in Isaiah. When he got the plastic bag with his belongings back after being released into the care of his father, he’d been shocked to find it relatively unhurt in his suit pocket, missing only the front cover and the beginning of the world. Dried brown blood soaking through half of Genesis. Finally allowing himself to face it again, checking it for damage, seeing again the dusty Dorito fingerprints in Ezra, the blurred place where he’d spit on Deuteronomy. And finally he reached the dog-eared corners of the Song of Songs, and he allowed his hand to press over his own still heart, and rejoiced at it.
“Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men,” he murmurs into the side of Kieren’s neck, Kieren leaning back against his chest, humming whenever Simon runs flat fingertips along the insides of his thighs, over the head of his cock, up the expanse of his stomach.
“More poetry for me?” he asks, leaning his head back on Simon’s shoulder, and then jumps as Simon’s hands find a bundle of wired-up nerve endings.
Simon nods, and says, “I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.” He punctuates it with a nip at his shoulder. The sun has been down for more than an hour at this point, and every time Kieren loses or gains sensitivity it’s more intense, more sudden. He’s getting impatient, twisting back against Simon, making noises of surprise and frustration. “Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love.”
Kieren yelps at the graze of a thumb over his nipple, and holds Simon’s hand there when he tries to move it away. “Jesus, stay there, that’s—“ he bites out, but lets go of Simon the second after, thrashing as if electrocuted.
“You okay?” Simon asks. “Careful. It gets too much if you stay one place too long.”
“How long does this take?” he asks, twisting around to lie on Simon’s chest, pushing him down onto the bed again. Simon moves his hands to his back, stroking slowly down the long muscles.
“Why, not having a good time?”
“I am, I am! It’s just a lot, and it’s so fast.”
“Don’t think of it like time. More like…” he struggles to explain the things he’s found out in silent communication with his new drugged-up blessed nervous system. “A pattern moving over your skin, and it’s not your job to find it, just to let it circle back to you. Patience is a virtue, you know,” he says, teasing him a little. Kieren smiles but then sighs in frustration, burying his face in Simon’s shoulder. He strokes a hand through his hair, then over his neck.
“I sometimes read, to take my mind off guessing about when and where it’s going to be.”
“You read?”
“Aloud to myself, mostly. Or recite things. Keeps me focused.”
“God,” says Kieren, half-laughing, trailing a hand down his cheek. “I’m shocked you ever leave the house.”
His thumb brushes Simon’s temple and sends a lit sparkler of harsh pleasure spiraling just under his skin. He grabs at Kieren’s back, and finds his mouth, and the next thing he knows the half-cautious exploration of the previous hour and a half is gone entirely. He thought it wouldn’t be different with another person—wasn’t sure it would even work with another person—but it is, it is, it’s an endless series of bright spots in the darkness, the solid press of another body all along him, sudden flares of sensation catching him off-guard like massive waves from a calm ocean. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Lines running through his head, flickering in and out of focus. He’s not sure if he says them aloud or only thinks them, or hears them. His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me. And it does, and it is, and suddenly he feels Kieren’s nails dig into his shoulder, hears him draw in a surprised breath. Simon can barely hold him through it, he’s so strong. His hands grip so hard it actually feels like pain, and that’s it for Simon, he’s gone too to the full-body electrical storm that feels like coming and not like coming, like a visitation, like waking up again.
He becomes aware of Kieren running his hand through his hair some meaningless period of time later, of Kieren pressing small kisses to his forehead, his cheeks, his hands.
“You back yet?” he says, and in response Simon wraps him crushingly in his arms.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m right here.”
“We have got to do that again.” Says Kieren, but he sounds exhausted, and looks it too, more than usual. Simon is too worn and overstimulated and full of static to actually get under the covers, but he flips the edge of the comforter over them and just lies there, whispering back and forth with Kieren in the dark reaches of some pre-dawn time.
“You were saying more of that poem,” says Kieren, nearly asleep, head pillowed on his shoulder. “I liked it.”
“For love is as strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave,” Simon says, watching him blink slowly. “The coals thereof are coals of fire, which hast a most vehement flame.”
He can tell that Kieren’s asleep, after that, but keeps talking, quietly, reverently, his arms a circle and a seal around him.