Chapter Text
~*~
His face was charged with beauty as a cloud
With glimmering lightning. When it shadowed me,
I shook, and was uneasy as a tree
That draws the brilliant danger, tremulous, bowed.
So must I tempt that face to loose its lightning.
Great gods, whose beauty is death, will laugh above,
Who made his beauty lovelier than love.
I shall be bright with their unearthly brightening.
And happier were it if my sap consume;
Glorious will shine the opening of my heart;
The land shall freshen that was under gloom;
What matter if all men cry out and start,
And women hide their faces in their shawl,
At those hilarious thunders of my fall?
— Storm, Wilfred Owen (1916)
~*~
He tells himself to move past it.
To forget, to become somebody different in the aftermath. Which is difficult, because he liked who he was—or thought he liked who he was, hell; it all blurs more than a little.
The train takes him westward. As the horizon thins from city to town to plains to desert to mountain, Gale thinks of nothing. He tells himself he will never return to New York until he believes the rest of the lies he tells himself: he will be fine, and everything will be alright, and this hurt is only temporary.
When the train begins slowing to a stop at Taos, something in the angle of the light compels him to rise, collect his trunk, and step out onto the frigid train platform. He is alone, largely—the mountains loom, close and massive, snowed to a dusty white canvas shielding the ponderosas from the sun struggling to peek out low past slate-gray clouds.
He hails a porter, bundled so tightly in so many layers of blankets and furs that Gale can hardly make out their face. “Is there an inn?” he asks. His voice feels strangely heavy in the thin, still air fallen pin-drop quiet in the wake of the train rattling off into the distance.
“No vacancy,” comes a muffled voice, fog pushing past the scarf over the porter’s mouth, “but there are rooms above the mercantile.”
Gale peers at the town disappearing into the mist of snowfall and decides here is as good as anywhere. He juggles his purse from the inside of his coat with frigid fingers and offers a fistful of coin, suddenly eager to start spending it as if shedding the evidence of his salary could remove the taste of the university from his mouth. “Would you be available to help with the trunk?”
~*~
The room above the mercantile is the loosest possible definition of a room, but it’s perfectly suitable. The mattress, stuffed with straw instead of iron springs, is an absolute wonder on his back (truly!).
Gale unpacks his weather instruments: a balloon with a tether, thermometers, radar and barometers and wind gauges. He hopes the proprietor of the inn across the plaza will let him set up on the roof even if he isn’t a tenant—it’s the highest building by far amid all of the low, hunkered-in adobe walls, and he may as well try for the best readings he can manage.
Anything to make the hours pass.
His interest in weather isn’t a compulsion, more a vested interest. He likes to remind himself that nature is an unknowable, untamable thing; that the storms will come whether or not the people on the ground are ready for it. He may as well collect empirical data of it all, just for the keeping.
What else is there worth recording, but the pulse of the planet itself? What other kind of story can even be trusted?
Gale drinks a hot coffee with a dram and a half of whiskey tipped into it, parked in a wooden chair with a wool blanket across his knees, a hearth scented by piñon crackling in the corner of the room before him, and wonders how on earth he ever considered the city the heart of the world worth knowing.
~*~
The proprietor is perfectly willing to let Gale do as he will on the roof, so long as he knows it can get icy up there and he’d best step carefully; any holes or cracks in the plaster would be coming out of his pockets, you hear me, sir?
Gale goes up and finds the air wondrously clear. He can see for miles—the river gorge opening up past the sloping foothills, the blinding blanket of the snow, the edge of the sky a living thing so massive he can hardly make sense of it.
Good. This is good. This is very, very new.
He tromps back down the ladder to the causeway of the second floor. As he comes down the hall with his shoulders steaming in the sudden warmth of every stove in the place burning hot, Gale nearly crashes into a stranger he hardly sees coming.
The man is fair, and lithe, and has an austere mouth pulled up in a sneer as he rounds on Gale—and stops, looking him up and down.
“You’re new.”
“I’ve been here since yesterday.”
“I didn’t see you come in.”
“The weather was miserable.”
“Always is, this time of year.” The man keeps looking at him. Gale feels faintly pinned. “What brings you to town?”
“I’m in the middle of an existential meltdown.”
The man’s eyebrows go up. “How novel. Are you pelting toward some frontier or another, or have you come to stop in all the world worth knowing’s favorite place to forget?”
Gale opens his mouth before his thought process snags on the strange happenstance of pattern hanging in the air between them, uttered in that low half-murmur for the proximity of passing in the stairwell— the world worth knowing.
He blinks. “I’m staying here. In town. For a little while, at least.”
The man smiles. “Well, one can’t have a proper meltdown without being soaked drunk about it. Would you care to join me downstairs?”
“It takes a lot to get me there.”
The man’s gaze sharpens briefly, like a flash of sunlight glancing hard from a single window very high up above the Upper West Side; tantalizing as the flicker of a curtain against that glass. “ Really .”
He barely breathes it, the curl of a sound couched low under his tongue. Gale tries to quit thinking about his tongue.
~*~
He’s a painter, Astarion.
Britain, Paris, New York, Chicago, Paris again, and now Taos.
“Seems circuitous,” Gale says. The fireplace, twice the size of the one in his room and far more cosmopolitan about itself, pets a wash of warmth across Gale’s chapped face.
“What does?”
“Your route of entry.”
Astarion waves a hand and draws a cigarette case from his breast pocket. “I needed a change of scenery. I had a particularly impassioned relationship, and then I didn’t, and nobody ever shuts up about the light in this place. So.”
Gale watches him strike a match and light the end of a tidy little hand roll. If he feels Gale watching, his expression belies that well.
“Were they right?”
“About what?” Astarion blows a svelte stream of smoke and raises a finger with a brief smile to the lobby host.
“The light.”
The host arrives with pleasantries and a pledge to their comfort. He asks genially after Astarion’s latest, at which Astarion pulls a long-suffering expression that makes the old man chuckle with a chuffing wheeze.
“Two tequilas,” Astarion says, looking at Gale through the edge of his eyes. “Right?”
“Whatever you’re drinking,” Gale says breezily, holding his knuckles up to the hearth.
Astarion smiles at the host. “Salt and cinnamon, if you please. Thank you.”
Gale sits. If it itches so obviously to feel Astarion’s eyes on him, he must have been sure of Gale’s watching. This, or Astarion’s gaze is simply made of sharper stuff. Artist, and all.
“You have a funny way of latching onto the wrong thesis of a statement,” Astarion says.
“Like what?”
“It seems you catch the scent of a point whomever you’re speaking with might not intend for you to find.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know.” Astarion takes his time on another shallow draw. He exhales and prods at the corner of his lips with the tip of his tongue. He doesn't blink. “You tell me.”
Their drinks arrive before Gale can say anything unadvisable.
“Tell me about yourself,” Astarion says, and then lifts his glass. “Or, first; cheers. To new friends.”
Gale taps the edge of his little earthenware cup against Astarion’s. He peers at the pale gold liquid inside. “Is that what we are?”
“In time, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
They both sip from the top. Gale tastes at the air left behind on his tongue and ruminates over the cooling burn.
“I was a professor of physics at Columbia University.”
“God.”
Gale perks up. “You’ve heard of it?”
“I lived in New York,” Astarion says, the back half of a smile on his mouth. “Of course I’ve heard of it. Are you a loon?”
“Depends on who you ask.”
Astarion licks the pad of his right thumb so casually Gale almost forgets to mark the very axis of the universe shifting at the sight.
He takes a very slow, careful breath. Astarion presses his thumb into the shallow well of salt and cinnamon at the edge of his plate, licks his thumb again, and takes another sip.
Astarion purses his lips, looking pleased with the flavor. He raises his eyebrows. “And?”
“And what?” Gale nearly stammers. He blinks again. He’s blinking too much, now that he’s thinking about it. Damn it.
“You were a professor of physics at Columbia, and what? They granted you sabbatical, to have your meltdown in peace?”
Gale tries the trick himself; thumb, salt-cinnamon, tongue, sip. The flavor makes him frown. He likes it better plain. He clears his throat. “I, uh. Had a graduate student. Brilliant young man.”
Astarion hums. “Were you also ousted by the springtime of youth itself?”
There’s a venom on the underbelly of the joke that makes Gale’s chest ache, just for a moment—a jagged edge in the single syllable of youth . Gale stares at the saucer, the abstract pattern of the spice. “In a way. I…over-devoted myself, to his studies. My wife told me to choose one: the work, or the marriage. So I tried to choose both, and wound up with neither.”
He glances up to shoot a wan smile at Astarion, insurance against any potential sympathy Gale doesn’t want to claim for himself. “They’ve probably hired him up in full already to fill my spot.”
“They let you go, for what?”
“I let them go.”
Astarion looks at him. “Bravo,” he says lightly, and keeps on watching.
A soft gust whips in from the front door opening. Astarion’s carriage sharpens—he turns not toward the door but away from it, as though to hunker against the cold air, and yet there comes a lightness to him that settles with the heavy thud of the inn latching shut again.
“Gale,” Astarion says, peering into the fire and flicking the leg of ash from his cigarette, “might I introduce you to another friend of mine?”
Gale looks up at the solid, even tread that stops between their chairs. Long auburn hair barely tamed back, windblown; ruddy cheeks, a waxed overcoat, one large hand ungloved and held out in greeting with a broad, handsome smile for the trouble.
“Halsin,” he says, as though Gale is already used to the sound of his name and it’s merely a reminder.
“Gale Dekarios. Pleased to meet you.”
They shake hands. Gale can’t help but look at Astarion when he realizes he never shook Astarion’s hand, and he finds Astarion looking at where their grip is joined with a flagrant whit of curiosity.
“He’ll be the last to say so,” Astarion says, cigarette perched at the smirk on his mouth, “but our dear Halsin is both a very fine marksman and a master carpenter.”
“Don’t,” Halsin says under his breath—yet fondly.
“And Young Master Gale is a professor,” Astarion says brightly. He tips his face up to catch Halsin’s gaze; they move with the utmost familiarity in one another. Gale’s brows twitch together.
“Was,” he amends.
Astarion makes a tetchy sound. “All the same from here.”
“Where did you teach?” Halsin asks. Gale finds his mouth dry, just a touch, to be the center of both their attention at once. He steals a quick sip from his glass, and Halsin grins.
“Careful; you’ll have your taste all twisted up around itself if you let this one drive,” he says, mocking a low aside, nodding at Astarion.
“New York,” Gale blurts in lieu of examining the particular origin of the swooping sensation in his belly.
Halsin brightens. “Did you! What’s it like?” He thumps the heel of his hand on the back of Astarion’s chair. “I’ve never been able to corroborate his stories.”
Gale doesn’t think first; “Concussive.”
Astarion makes a surprised titter at the back of his mouth. “Good answer.”
“Wonderful.” Halsin looks pleased. He tugs his other glove off and unwinds the scarf from around his neck. Gale looks away from the firm jut of his jaw in the firelight, risking only to look at it in his periphery. “Well, I won’t interrupt any longer; have a good afternoon, gentlemen. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dekarios.”
Gale doesn’t bother correcting him to Doctor and smiles—hopes it reaches his eyes properly, he can never tell anymore. “And you.”
He doesn’t watch Halsin climb the stairs.
Astarion does.
“Well,” he says with an air of finality, stealing one last mouthful of smoke and quaffing the last of his drink not with haste, but a tidy sense of closing up shop. “I may as well try to catch the sky while it’s any good. Did you like the tequila?”
“Better without the salt, I think.”
Astarion grinds out his cigarette on the edge of his saucer and smiles. “It will grow on you. You’ll see.”
And Gale watches him climb the stairs.
He thinks of the graduate student, similarly fair and near about half as beautiful: the heels of his eyes bruised dark by late nights; his nails bitten down with aimless anxieties; hours spent in the dark in his office, deep in the warrens of the science hall, bare and wanting as a milky feast sprawled across his desk to—
Wincing, Gale shoots back the rest of his glass. He barely manages not to cough.
He is less a man, more of an afterthought.
The melancholy comes on familiar feet…but goes a little more quickly than usual.
Gale peers into his empty glass.
~*~
Breakfast is gluey oatmeal made right with honey and pine nuts. Gale listens only middlingly to the newsreader—the belfry clanging in his head has subsided, but his joints still ache. It’s going to be colder than it was even yesterday.
He hauls up to the roof and calibrates his instruments. As he works, a smudge against the horizon grows larger, and larger still, until it’s standing on the snowy ground beneath the canaletas that have sprouted teeth from ice and Gale realizes it’s a man, called Halsin, flushed with the satisfied effort of a morning constitutional.
“Are you a meteorologist?” Halsin calls up to him.
“No.” Gale shuffles a little closer to the ledge and waves down at Halsin. “Just a hobbyist.”
“How does one develop weather as a hobby?”
Gale thinks for a moment. “I don’t quite remember. Spent a lot of time staring at the clouds, I suppose.”
Halsin gestures vaguely at the spindly bits of Gale’s machinery visible over the roof ledge. “Seems more expensive than most hobbies I’ve seen.”
“Oh, really?” Gale licks a chilly dripping from the center of his top lip. “How expensive is the woodwork?”
“I’d call that more of a compulsion, than a hobby,” Halsin says, and he’s grinning with those keen white teeth of his, so Gale smiles, too.
They watch one another for a moment, steam pluming from their mouths like partisan engines.
“Would you like to dine with me tonight?” Halsin asks.
Gale tightens his grip on the edge of the flat roof. “Would you ? I—yes, that would be nice. Yes.”
“Perhaps Astarion will have leave from his muse’s whip to join us.”
“Perhaps!” Gale says, too brightly, but ignores that.
~*~
He grooms himself that evening more fastidiously than recent memory can recall.
After washing, oiling, and combing his hair and beard, Gale finds a small vial of lavender oil still knocking around at the bottom of his shaving kit. He taps it into his palms and sniffs it briskly before pressing it to either side of his throat, wiping the rest out on the handkerchief he squares neatly into his pocket.
Gale stares at himself in the mirror, tidied up, and recalls the black-tie salon held by the department chair the year he earned tenure. The world had felt endless from there, his ambition a headless thing set to hurtle into infinity without a single hurdle to slow it.
You’ll get distracted, one of the fellows told Gale over his eighth martini.
I won’t get distracted.
You’ll see. Everyone gets distracted.
Gale looks down at the thumb he’d used yesterday to take the salt and slowly tastes at it; watches himself in the mirror, licking the hypersensitive whorl of his fingerprint as though something of that afternoon still persisted between the ridges.
He uses it to smooth a flyaway hair back down to order. He squares his shoulders and sits up a little taller, checking over his posture.
Fine. If I get distracted, you can tell me you told me so.
I told you so.
That’s now how ‘I told you so’ works.
Come on, Gale. It’s you. We already know how this one goes.
~*~
“Well, I don’t do the story proper justice, but we met in Denver.”
“You do it perfectly adequate justice.”
“What was it you were trying to hunt that night?”
“Oh, come. You can remember.”
“Truly, I never can!” Astarion throws out an open hand across the table at Halsin, who has failed to quit a laugh behind his napkin. The bottle of wine between them is nearly empty. Astarion breaks into his own hapless smile, sullying the immediacy of his tone with a skitter of chuckling. “No, I mean it, what was it you gave up on hunting in that rabid bitch of a storm?”
Halsin grins and makes another forkful on his plate. “Pronghorn.”
“Pronghorn! Thank you, darling. He was hunting pronghorn,” Astarion says, turning to Gale, eyes bright as glowing coals, “and the weather was absolutely dreadful. Almost nobody was out doing anything but freezing, so I’m standing miserable in an empty gallery that this one figured was the most worthy place to come in and stamp some life back into his extremities.”
“I was passing through town on my way down from the mountainside,” Halsin says tidily around the spoonful of rich stew in his mouth. He pauses to swallow. “Needed to board my horse, and the gallery was right next door to the barn.”
Halsin flinches and poorly hides a smile—Astarion has kicked him under the table.
“He looked in through the window and caught sight of a landscape he just had to see up close,” Astarion says, affecting the lightest touch of Halsin’s speech pattern. He rolls his eyes. “It was the worst of the bunch.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Halsin says, like it’s something he’s used to saying.
“What was the landscape?” Gale asks. His plate is mostly cleaned, as Astarion and Halsin have woven chapter after chapter of their own separate and strangely-interwoven histories for him. Astarion’s meal, sparest of the three, has given way to another stout cup; salt, and cinnamon.
“Oh, it was glorious. He’d washed the entire canvas blue, like bottled midnight…”
And Gale wants to give what is doubtless a beautiful description from Halsin the attention it deserves, he really is interested, but Astarion catches Gale’s eye as he brings a thumb of salt to his mouth; dragging his tongue, lingering, all but full-mouth kissing it.
Gale looks to Halsin, but he doesn’t know why in hell he feels the need to check if Halsin is looking—“...the mountains felt so massive in the background. I don’t know, like I might fall in if I looked too long at it.”
“That would have been inconvenient,” Astarion breezes, setting down the cup and licking his lips. He shoots a conspiratorial look at Gale. “He was wearing green, he’d have ruined the entire palette.”
Gale draws himself up and gently clears his throat. “It sounds stunning.”
“The most interesting dowager with far too much money bought it off me for more than she ought to have.” Astarion stands and tidies his napkin on the seat of his chair. “Excuse me, gentlemen; freshening up.”
Astarion smoothes the brushed brown velvet of his coat with an unconscious efficiency. He navigates easily through the spaces between the other diners' chairs, packed close in the perimeter of heat from the fire stoked high behind a filigreed grate.
“How are you liking it here so far?”
Gale looks back at Halsin—there, the incongruous sting of feeling caught in the act of…something. “I—don’t think I’ve been here long enough to pass any fair judgment,” he says, “but it’s got a…stillness to it. It isn’t quite like any other place I’ve ever been.”
Halsin’s eyes shine in the low, warm flicker of the candle at the center of their table. “There’s no other place quite like it.”
“Do you stay the year through?” Gale sops at his dinner dregs with the last crust of bread.
“I winter here. Have for the past three years.”
“Is it always this cold?”
“It has yet to get as cold as the year before last.”
Gale mocks a shiver. “Well, lucky us.”
Halsin chuckles. A comfortable silence passes.
“Do you know how long Astarion has been here?” Gale asks, looking hard at the patterns showing in the congealing shimmer at the bottom of his bowl.
Halsin takes up the wine bottle and pours Gale the last of it. “Three years,” he says, without a bit of discomfort or smugness or even the hint of suggestion.
Gale toasts him mutely with the wine glass and drinks it in silence, in several slow sips, trying to make sense of his own arousal.
“Excuse me,” he mutters as genially as possible, and makes for the toilet.
Turning the hairpin of a narrow corridor to which the host gamely points him, Gale nearly collides with Astarion—sniffing lightly, pinching at his nose, looking up and balking as Gale catches himself on the wall.
“Jesus,” he breathes. “Hello.”
“What is it they say, twice is a habit?”
They make to pass one another, shuffling with little egress, and from so near Gale sees Astarion’s gaze glimmering wide-open and chemical. Chest to chest—Astarion leans in and tips his face to sniff lightly at Gale’s neck.
“What a lovely scent you wear, professor,” he murmurs, his lips brushing at Gale’s skin.
Gale reaches up and catches Astarion by the wrist. He angles for and holds Astarion’s gaze once he gets it before pushing Astarion’s thumb past his lips, onto the tip of his tongue: an eye for an eye and a want for a want, so the both of them blind and hungry.
Astarion marvels at his thumb in the space between their mouths. “I didn’t think you such a brazen slut.” Gale struggles to recall ever before seeing anyone look so deviously delighted.
“You know what you’re doing.”
You know what you’re doing, he tells his student the very first time it happens, years and eons and entirely different people ago.
Astarion bites his lip and smiles. “Of course I do, darling. I cut my teeth in Paris.”
Gale watches Astarion return to the dining room. Not once does he glance backward over his shoulder or hesitate even a half-step in his stride.
Hurrying through the door, Gale fumbles the latch shut behind him and pries hastily at the buttons of his fly. One of the brace tabs of his left suspender slips. The strap shrugs down his shoulder and skews the lay of his jacket.
He finds himself urgently hard and braces his right hand on the wall behind the toilet. Nearly stumbling with the effort, Gale fights down the guttural sound that wants to tear out from the center of his chest at the first desperate twist of his fist.
He works a swift rhythm standing over the bowl and presses his forehead into his elbow, panting against the vivid green wallpaper.
When Gale’s knees begin to shudder, a-twitch and attenuated and now , he smears his own thumb past his teeth. He presses down hard on his wet tongue, still vague with salt, and sees Astarion’s feline smile across the backs of his eyes.