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His is an ordinary sort of loneliness.
He has had no great love, nor any great loss. There are people he considers to be friends and people he doesn't consider much at all. Mates he goes out for drinks with and numbers that gather dust in his contacts. Families he sees at church every Sunday, but doesn't know the given names of, wouldn't be able to pick out of a crowd outside the context of a service. Mates from school have other mates now, but if they see each other at the shops they stop and have a natter.
His family isn't close—they’re the kind to have raised him cordially, lovingly, and at a comfortable emotional distance. They invite all the children back for Christmas and Easter and send generic cards with a black pen signature for birthdays. They don't fight or talk politics. They ask polite questions when there's a new partner and send condolences when an old partner parts ways. All cousins are distant cousins and he's not sure when he last saw his sister.
She seems fine. She updates her Instagram regularly.
He teaches, mostly. It's something at which his family smiles and nods when he talks about it at holiday brunch. Beginning and intermediate guitar, yes, very interesting. Any news of that nice girl from uni? The one who went off to be a doctor?
His parents had insisted he go to uni and that it be somewhere else. Help him to stretch his wings, they said. He just had to pick something. Didn't need to be big or fancy or complicated. Just something to focus on until he decided what was important to him. Maybe business or political science. Bio-chemistry perhaps?
Music education was decidedly important to him.
From the way his father had reacted, it wasn't quite what they'd been looking for from their oldest son, but that's alright. Music education. Lovely.
It helped that he already played guitar very well for a kid just done with A levels, that he was in a band once, that he'd played a few local gigs. Students and parents of students like to know that their teachers are knowledgeable and accomplished.
A few years down the road, he can admit that he's both, even if he's living month to month with only the smallest cushion of savings. He picked up teching from an old band mate—one that had wandered further afield once they all went off to uni or jobs or what. That helped to bridge the gaps, helped him not feel so frail all of the time. Helped him to not shop at Poundland every week. Helped him get his daily fruit and veg while he established a client base.
He doesn't know how he feels about it all, now. Now that he's got more work teching than teaching. And that much of his teaching is a rotating door of students that either don't stick with guitar or don't stick with him. Mostly he thinks it's alright.
His family say it's lovely. Very nice.
When he isn't teaching, he volunteers at the local parish, which his parents are more blatantly pleased with.
It takes care of most of the rest of his needs—there is no end to the number of little old church ladies who will load him up with home-baked bread, takeaway containers of soup and stew, and other hearty meals. It helps him get through when teaching is slow and he can't get tech work.
He doesn't talk about this with his family. That's not the kind of relationship he has with them.
At the end of his days, he always goes home and eats supper alone at his desk. Sometimes takeaway, sometimes soup or stew from the little old ladies at church. Rarely does he cook for himself if he can help it. He always feels that cooking is something that should be done with or for others. He doesn't know why, but he feels it deeply.
His bed is cold when he crawls beneath the covers, his mattress just the right firmness for him and no one else.
He lays and stares at the white ceiling, fingers laced, hands on his stomach. It is quiet except for traffic in the distance and the children in the flat above him. The thump-thump of their heels describe esoteric bedtime rituals at which he couldn't even hazard a guess. There are three of them. Same as in his family.
He doesn't remember whether he and his siblings were this loud. He remembers being an orderly family. The people above him laugh more often than his own ever did. That's for certain.
He pulls a pillow into his chest and tucks his chin into the plushness of it.
He wonders how long it's been, as he lays there, exhausted but unable to sleep, since he's touched another person.
He doesn't sleep well sometimes.
Often, really.
There are reasons—loud neighbors and the thin walls, stress from the day pressing deep into his chest, a mind that won't still between thoughts of what-if and wherefore. When he gets to sleep, it's disturbed. Tossing and turning and waking at odd intervals is more common for him than not.
The nights he does sleep well are often worse than the sleepless ones.
Not in the way of nightmares, either. There are no boogeymen in his closet, no impending deadlines he can never seem to make headway on, no sudden nakedness or teeth falling out of his head. Nightmares aren't the problem.
It's the good dreams that haunt him, the good dreams that affect his daytime wanderings. Those tantalizing visions, alive with color and sound and emotion that, by contrast, bleach the waking world to whitened bone.
So he fills his time that he might not notice.
He teaches, as often as he can get people scheduled. He coaches at a local climbing gym, helps set and test routes at odd times of the day when no one else is available. He volunteers at the parish in every second of remaining time, runs the A/V on most of their programming.
There are no firm divisions between his days and weeks. At most, he notices the seasons, notes rent days, and jots down the weeks when his parish will need a little more assistance than usual. He's happy to help, he really is. There are always new people to meet, new students to teach, new takeaways to try on the days he feels particularly indulgent. There are local bands to tech for and some wider ranging tours if nothing else is on.
He is always on the move and stays busy enough with life to distract himself from everything else.
Despite the myriads of people he sees every day, the talking and conversation and community building and—
He stays busy enough with life to distract from how lonely he is.
So if the days blur together into a kaleidoscope of faces and places and jobs, it's fine. The days are a means to an end. A means to exhausting himself so thoroughly that he might not dream.
Because when he dreams, his dreams are an infinitely wide and infinitely tall mirror that show him how little his days matter. It shows him the aching cavern of want that has echoed through him since the dreams began.
It's been a long time. They were never not there, whether he remembered them or not. They arrived like clouds on the horizon, easy to treat with unease, with trepidation. The clouds came on and blocked the sun of his every day, the peace he knew and carried, cultivated by a life of relative calm, clear skies, and not knowing any better.
It wasn't until the skies opened up that he learned he had been living in a desert. That he had been burning for such a long time and never realized.
And now he knows what it is to wet his parched throat, to feel his pain soothed, to see beauty around him and know that it may only be an artifact of his sleeping mind.
He sleeps and he dreams and there are—
Fingers on off-white piano keys.
A melody he's never heard yet knows in his very bones.
Light which filters through stained glass windows, cracked and missing pieces showing streaks of their colorless absence.
Lips which press reassurances into the top of his head.
Whispered encouragement and laughter that makes his heart soar.
They are memories and they are not. They are the bright pricks of distant stars—pinholes bored in the relentless darkness of the sky through which the brightness of another world, a world of light, of companionship, of—
—but any echo of it in the waking world is just an echo. Deja-vu, maybe. It's not predeterminism, isn't fate, isn't anything that the little old ladies at church would call divine intervention or the grace of God. It's a trick of the human mind, short term memory storage crossing its wires with linear perception.
Not destiny, not fortune-telling, not anything like that.
They're just dreams. Just fanciful dreams and his mind fulfilling a lifetime wish for something more.
So, mostly he keeps busy and he doesn't sleep well. He packs his day with as much activity as he can and tries not to see the reflection of a familiar smile on the lips of a stranger, tries not to look into every pair of blue eyes he meets, tries not to hear the strains of music—of prayer—which ache familiar bruises in his chest.
The hymns at the parish don't compare, but they are all that he has and so he labels himself as content.
Time passes.
He teaches, he climbs, he techs.
There are three pairs of eyes he tries not to look for when he wakes.
He's cold, wrapped in the papery bed linens of a hotel somewhere near Birmingham. Six show tour that he's teching for. Favor to a friend, last minute sub-in. Decent money in it, though, and hotels are included. Two of the band are in the same digs as him, the other three and rest of crew scattered to other rooms.
It's early. Too early for how late he was awake. The wintry sun hasn't yet poked its head over the horizon, much less begun to climb into the sky.
He slides off the pull-out sofa, intending to see if there's breakfast in the lobby. Chances are low, cheap as the place is, but it's something to do.
When he stands, he casts his eyes around the room, looking, but not looking.
The drummer, nice guy, Kyle something, is looking back at him with a strange expression on his face. It isn't suspicious or hostile or grumpy. Nothing like blame for making too much noise or waking him up. It's a perplexed kind of eyebrow crossing, half squished against the pillow and bleary eyed with sleep.
Even as exhaustion drags his eyelids back down, a slurry of sounds that might be words fall from his mouth. He's asleep within a second which leaves no chance to hiss a quiet, "wot?"
It's probably nothing. A greeting or a request for five more minutes. As he dons sweatshirt, socks, and slides as quietly as he can, he mulls over the noises. Tries to put them into a semblance of order or sense. He's never been good at that game—Gobbledegook? Everything is just scattered phonemes. The task of figuring it out occupies him all the way to the elevator, then down to the lobby.
As the doors slide open at the ground floor, though, he pauses.
The words play out from his memory as they click into place. He tries to block out the surge of nausea and longing that hits like a train when he registers them. They fill his mind with feedback, high pitched and painful. He doesn't know it, but he's dropped to a knee, hunched over and near retching.
"They miss you," the drummer said. "They're lonely without you."
It doesn't mean anything. Deja-vu. His monkey brain seeing patterns where none exist.
If Kyle speaks any other unsettling words, they go unheard.
Time passes.
There is a little old woman at church who scouts potential students for him. He hasn't asked her to, but she does it all the same. She has a few of his cards on hand, passes them out if people show interest. It's very kind of her. He hadn't mentioned his current dearth of students, but she somehow knew anyway and took it upon herself to help.
It's the kind of thing he knows is common among proper communities. He's just never experienced the benefits of a community's machinations before. He thinks it's part of what he came looking for at the parish—that and something to do with his time that doesn't feel futile and foolish.
He's grateful.
He's also a little exasperated when a good half of the prospects are women near his age who are loudly single.
It makes sense, he admits to himself after the end of another lesson that was mostly personal questions. The little old ladies at church know he's single, polite, hard-working, and—as they often comment—a handsome lad. They want him to be happy. They want to see him out of his own thoughts more often, want him to direct his smile in love rather than courteous obligation.
He also wants to love someone.
There's never a spark, though. Never anything that feels quite like how it feels in his dreams.
Hard to explain that to the little old ladies at church, though.
Time passes.
Spring has sprung.
Green. Budding trees. Mud.
Gearing up for a slightly longer European tour. Guitar and bass tech for a second opener. A band he's toured with twice or three times. He knows the guys—and gal—better than most bands. One of their little cousins does lessons with him every other week over Skype. The kid is cool. Mostly needs theory training. Records rhythm and picking exercises for him as homework.
They'll have a lesson or two while he's on the road.
For now, he stands out front of his church and assures Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Abbey that yes he will be back in time for the spring talent show—true—and no the band isn't one of those screaming loud nonsense bands—false. They try to offload a few tins of biscuits onto him "for the road" and he has to tell them there will only be room for one in his checked bag.
The mud squelches uncomfortably beneath his feet, black trainers sucked slowly into the cold, wet embrace of a small garden bed. Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Abbey don't realize that they've backed him into it, but they don't mean any harm. Their feet are still on comfortably solid ground, which is what matters.
They free him from their conversational gaol when the threat of rain turns into a promise.
He doesn't make it to the Tube station before it begins to come down in sheets, but he can only laugh a little at the pitying looks his fellow commuters level upon him. He taps through the turnstile and doesn't sit when he gets to his platform. He doesn't want to get any of the benches wet. Instead, he stands in a corner and shifts from foot to foot. There's a rhythm to it, even if he doesn't know whether it's musical or environmental. The rumble of the underground is a steady bass, the screech and clack of the passing Picadilly line provides treble and drum. Moisture drips from the tips of his hair, plinking to the tile floor.
He has a biscuit, pleased to find they're still dry.
He looks up as his train arrives, and dismisses it as too full. Besides, he isn't in a hurry and there is a vent blowing warm air directly at him.
The doors close, the slow clunk and clatter of movement start again, and—
He sees blue in the window.
Blue as wide as the sky.
A hand that presses to the glass and the outline of words which are lost to the acceleration of steel.
His heart pounds.
His mind whirls.
Deja-vu pulls at the seams of his being. Surety and denial war for dominance in his chest and—
He knows those eyes.
Everything in him seizes.
He can't breathe, can't blink, can't swallow the rush of saliva to his mouth. Across every inch of his skin, sweat prickles. A wave of something like static charge washes over him. He is simultaneously numb and on fire. As strongly as the fire burns, he can feel none of it.
The eastbound Picadilly passes again.
Then his westbound train stops, and he boards without thinking.
Halfway home, halfway to an empty flat to prepare for a tour with two dozen strangers, he feels the burning coalesce behind his eyes. He can't feel it when the tear drops from his face, but he sees it fall.
Not deja-vu?
Is it real? Are they real?
No, he decides. They can't be real. It's only coincidence.
It would hurt too much if it was real and he'd missed his only chance.
He falls asleep in his seat, despite it being only a twenty minute ride.
The room is warm. The sofa beneath him and blankets around him create a veritable nest of comfort. It seeps into him, suffusing his body with warmth and calming his harried mind, shaking under the weight of its own thoughts. All is washed away in the embrace of this heady feeling. All the worries, fears, insecurities. He knows that if they return, he need only to look up and around.
The room is sparsely furnished—a few bookshelves against the far wall, the sofa he's sat on, and three mismatched armchairs. The last were found at charity shops, flashes of delight which translated to money out of pocket on sight. Worth it. Well worth it. The delight has carried forward to days and nights spent lounging in them, just the way he is now on the sofa.
The sofa is his. They bought it because they know he'd rather have room for someone to join him.
The weight and warmth in his arms soothes the remaining ache inside of him, whatever can't be fixed by warm blankets, a comfy couch, and the faint strains of piano from another room. Like a book ruffled out of shape by moisture and neglect, he is pressed back into a better form of himself by this weight. His words do not rearrange, nor does the meaning and story that they represent. He feels more prepared to face the world, though.
The...
The world?
The waking—
His heart begins to race in his chest as cold fear creeps in. A pit of dread and panic opens up beneath him and so too does the warmth of the room fall out from under him. The feeling has its jaws around him already, opened wide enough that he can't grip the sides. He can only hold on tight to the heavy weight in his arms, wrapped up tight and safe. He tires to hold it, tries to keep it, but he doesn't even know what it is, doesn't know—
Precarious on the edge of an inescapable fall, he tries desperately to see, to know what is in his arms. He gets as much as pale skin, sleep tousled hair, and blue, blue eyes before—
End of the line, chirps the voice over the speakers.
End of the line.
End of the line.
All off.
It is cold.
And he is alone.
He does not bail on the tour, though he dearly wants to.
He is the consummate professional. This is nothing new to him—dreams snatched from him by the waking world. He can bear it.
Paris, then Brussels.
He bears it.
He works hard and socializes only as necessary with the rest of crew. He declines their invites to breakfast or drinks or team-building exercises and cites other work as his excuse. He restrings and retunes guitars and basses. He keeps his lesson appointments with the drummer's little cousin and all the others. He gains a reputation as quiet and dependable and is suspected to mainline energy drinks.
He sleeps, sometimes, when he thinks that he is too tired to dream. Somewhere around Koln he convinces himself that it isn't because he's scared to see blue eyes again.
Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig.
He works himself into a tranced-out state of exhaustion in which muscle memory and the barest remains of his professional pride keeps him on track. He arrives early and stays late, does the double checks that other people don't want to do. He runs point on coffee orders because he is almost always awake before anyone else.
If there are a few near misses, it's fine because only he notices that two guitars are out of tune before they go on in Prague. He takes care of it and avoids stray glances. He thinks he's accrued enough karma to make up for any mistakes, but he still tries to mitigate possible damage ahead of time.
Vienna.
His hands are shaking, as is most of the rest of him. He's making more mistakes than he can reasonably excuse—nearly drops a guitar during instrument change, gets the tuning wrong on two instruments despite a triple check, spends twice as long as he needs on a set of risers because for the life of him he cannot get one of the bolts unscrewed.
He avoids the curious looks he gets, doesn’t listen to the whispers, keeps to himself.
Near the end of cleanup, the bassist for the band--Michael something--strays from the group of guys standing around and approaches him. There's a hesitation to his movements that immediately elicits anxiety, but there's nothing to do but watch him approach.
"Hey, I uh—" Michael clears his throat, obviously not keen to say whatever he's going to say. "Swear this isn't weird, mate, but you were in my dream last night."
He tenses, eyes going wide in the blinding headlights of impending doom.
"Or, really," Michael continues, "You were mentioned. Some tall guy snuck up behind me—I think I was at my mum's doing laundry, except everything kept coming out still dirty? Whatever. But the guy, long legged bastard, came up behind me and asked if I knew you. Told him I did and that you’re a bang-up guy, but then he vanished into thin air. No idea what that was about. Fucking weird, innit?"
He's frozen. From somewhere else, he hears his own voice agreeing that yeah, that's pretty weird. Weird thing to dream about. Wild what brains will do.
The interaction ruins any semblance of balance he had left. He flees as soon as he can.
In the late hours of the night which haven't yet given way to early morning, he cries in his bunk. His shoulders heave, tears fall, but no sound passes his lips. He's so tired. He wants more than to rest. He wants to sleep.
More than anything he wants comfort and familiarity.
He wants to go to the climbing gym near his flat, wants to help route set and wants to beta for some of the newer climbers. Wants chalk on his hands and the burn in his arms of a wall well climbed. He’d settle for some slab work, honestly.
He wants some of Mrs. Collins' cookies. He wishes he'd hoarded them a little bit better, hadn't shared them to gain clout with the Front of House, hadn't devoured what was left on the first few sleepless nights of tour.
At some point he falls unconscious.
It catches up with him in Zurich and he doesn't even know why they booked a gig in Zurich, but that's where it all catches up with him. The late nights, the overwork, the poor diet. He knew this would happen, but he curses his shitty immune system anyway and tells the tour manager. The tour manager looks more concerned for his health than anything, which is eerie.
"It's no wonder, mate," says the tour manager, a guy named Zack whose eyes are flickering between the bags beneath his eyes and the slump in his shoulders. "Go get some sleep, yeah?"
He doesn't have much of a choice in whether he'll be sleeping. He can feel the need for it like claws in his brain stem. He would rather do anything else, but his body aches, his limbs feel like they're made of lead, and if the kick drum behind his eyes is anything to go by, there's a box of some kind of Quil in his future. There seems to be a meter between his mouth and his throat, with how aware he is of every breath, how he's always just avoiding a cough. The tickle in his throat has mutated into an itch which burns every time he swallows. When he turns a bit too quickly, his vision blurs and wants to drop to the ground, just to have a half-second's reprieve from gravity's vice.
His bunk is no more comfortable than it ever is, but it feels like heaven in comparison. He lays in relative silence, breathing in the smell of two weeks on the road with eight other guys—or he would be if his sinuses weren't completely obliterated.
He knows that he needs to rest. Probably he should eat, too, something filling and hot and preferably not thirty euro, but also it's Zurich. It would fix him, he thinks. Spicy soup. Spicy soup and then he can sleep. Everything will be better after his body finally gets some rest.
And maybe, just maybe, a small part of him hopes that there will be a dream and some comfort. It isn't real. He knows that. Knows it's false and flighty, but... it would be nice. It would be nice to be held right now.
His head really hurts.
He stays awake long enough to UberEats Sichuan noodles and eat about six bites.
He falls asleep with the takeaway container propped against the curtained window of his bunk.
He doesn't know how long he's been here, but he thinks it's a while. His eyelids are too heavy to move, as are his limbs. Even the barest hint of a twitch feels like pushing through molasses. His proprioception is shot. He doesn't know whether his arms are over his chest, at his sides, or in some secret third position.
He's warm, he knows that. There is a thin sheen of sweat across his body which he also cannot feel, but knows to be there through some sense he can't name.
Something near to him—by his legs maybe?—readjusts its position, though he cannot see what. He can't see anything much. He feels the warmth around him like honey-gold. It is paradoxically perfect and so damned uncomfortable that he thinks he could die. He'd die happy, sure, but he'd rather not go quite yet. He has things to do.
Things which he cannot do because the weight next to his—legs?—seems also to be on top of his—legs?
Him. On top of him. Enough of him that he cannot budge even a millimeter. He is covered in molasses. Or honey. Or something. But it feels so nice, he wants to cry.
A small voice, almost timid, reminds him that he's sick and sweating and should probably conserve fluids if he can.
And yeah, he's sick, isn't he? Been a while since he's had a proper fever. Mostly it's head-colds and stomach things that don't muck with his temperature. If he's covered in blankets, the heat makes sense. If he throws them off, it will be so cold. He does not want to be cold. The honey gold is warm. Even if it's a fever warm, it's better than the cold.
He sinks deeper, down into honey-brown, then into molten chocolate. He doesn't know if he's ever tasted a place so sweet as within this warmth. Suffocation doesn't seem to be in the cards, despite his blocked airways, so he is content to drift.
At some point, he hears hushed voices, but it's alright. He's allowed to rest right now. He's allowed to sleep. He's done enough—more than enough! He's carried this tour on his back and then some. If he doesn't get a huge bonus and some kind of award, Vessel is going to—
Who?
The first thing he sees when his eyes flutter open is his noodles, gone cold and half spilled across the narrow shelf in front of his window.
But only half.
Only half, he tries to tell himself.
Only half, he repeats as he sits up, head pounding.
Only half, he forces as he tries not to notice—
His bed is cold, and he is alone.
They finish tour and return to England.
He double-checks his budget and then cancels the next week of obligations.
Fuck this, he thinks.
"Fuck this," he says to his empty bed and empty flat and empty life. "Fuck this."
He grabs his guitar case—the acoustic Ibanez, the one with the lowest action—and treks to Hammersmith station.
It is crowded and it is hot, recycled air stale and so very London that he wants to scream. He does not scream. He does sit down on the tile floor—gross, sticky, against his better judgement—and takes out his guitar.
Fuck this, he thinks as he plays. Fuck you, deja-vu.
Three days pass. He returns to his flat only to shower and to sleep—the former keeps him from clawing his way out of his skin and the latter is not so much restful as it is a one-way psychic screaming match. He falls asleep calling out over and over and wakes with a headache and a rough throat. He returns to Hammersmith station and he plays. He hasn't shaved in a week and the stubble itches but he doesn't care. By the fourth day, his fingers are shredded, callus all but useless with so much playing, low action be damned. He tapes them and continues.
He plays through the entire catalog of music in his head—Journey, Rush, the Stones, KISS, Metallica, System of a Down, Korn, Slipknot and back around to Bob Dylan when the commuter crowd rolls back around to the evening folk. TfL employees largely ignore him. He is polite, he is tidy, he has a consistent stream of little old church ladies who visit him after Mrs. Abbey discovers him on the second day. If his arms shake and his words come out somewhat slurred, they chalk it up to exhaustion rather than intoxication.
He plays.
He plays.
He plays.
Time passes.
There is a tidy sum of coins and bills in his case and he uses it to buy himself water and protein bars.
The fifth day sees him in a haze of righteous fury.
He drags an amp to Hammersmith station along with his beaten-to-hell Schecter. He plays Van Halen. He gets tired of that and plays thrash—stuff from his first band, way back in his teens.
Now he's getting nasty looks from TfL employees. The crowd around him him is steadily younger and darker clothed. He sees ripped jeans and leather jackets out of the corner of his eye. Sees unreadable band logos and even a few others with instruments at their sides.
Some lady in a TfL vest chastises him, asks him to turn it down or to go back to "the good music". She seems reluctant to ask that he leave, seems hesitant to go back to her post.
She's staggeringly normal. Stick straight light brown hair, sensible shoes and slacks. A name-tag that he doesn't read. There's a clipped expression on her face and she hesitates, seemingly torn between irritation and... something else. Trepidation? Fear?
He plays System of a Down again. Hops around on Steal This Album! and then Mesmerize.
She's still stood there, watching.
Her supervisor comes to ream her out—probably—but also stalls. He stares for a while, listens to the music, a dumbstruck expression on his face. Then, he says what she could not.
"I saw you in my dream."
"Good," he says, and swaps to Led Zeppelin.
Good, he thinks.
The sixth day is Friday and the tube has non-stop service.
He gets a curry, wolfs it down, and keeps playing.
There's only so much tape he can put on his fingers. He'd swap to nylon strings, but he thinks he'd rather die. They bleed, on and off. Stop and start. It hurts and he doesn't care. Downs some painkillers from the nearby Boots. Climbing has trained him for worse. He's done V10s with dislocated fingers before.
It's early Saturday morning. That's what the platform clock says, anyway. He hasn't seen the sky in some eighteen hours. There's a chunk of time he lost—might have fallen asleep while playing. Might still be asleep.
Probably asleep because there's somebody and they've placed their hand on his right one. He stops picking out the melody to the Cranberries Just My Imagination and looks at the hand.
It is a normal hand. The tendons stand out, casting shadows in the harsh overhead light. Nails are cut short, just like his, and aren't terribly clean, but whose are on Saturday morning at half four?
A hand. Just a hand.
His thumb and forefinger hold the plectrum loosely as he turns his own hand palm up.
Funny way to realize he's dreaming, he thinks, flooded with warmth by the mere traces of fingers over his skin. Funny that he feels this deja-vu just because he's...
Happy isn't the right word because he's shaking. His hand is shaking and he can't make himself look up. He can see the hand touching his. Jeans and a loose hoodie out of the corner of his eye. He can hear the thudding of his own heartbeat, loud and sluggish with exhaustion. Can smell the stale warm air of the station, cleaning fluid and metal and that weird scent that can only be found at tube stations on the District line. It's more a bubble at the back of the throat than a smell, really. It could be a taste, but he never wants to think about tasting a tube station.
He's still shaking.
The skin against his hand is neither warm nor cold, no matter the heat it traces onto him.
He can't breathe.
The person attached to the hand, to the jeans and the hoodie, crouches down in front of him and—
Blue.
Blue eyes.
One set of three which he's dreamed of countless times, sometimes all in the same face, sometimes in three different ones. Deep and kind and interminably sad. Always so sad and he's hated that for the longest time. Every sight of these eyes he's ever recorded into his memory plays before him again and his vision blurs. A deep familiarity bubbles up from within him. Every speck of aberrant color is a memory, every eyelash a cherished moment in time—future, present, past, it doesn't matter. It's overwhelming. It's critical that he not blink or look away because otherwise the moment will be broken, shattered glass never to be returned to even a fraction of the clarity he feels now.
Sad blue before him blurs and he doesn't want it to. He wants it to stay clear and sharp and present.
There's a touch on his face.
There's a touch on his face. He leans into it, into the palm, and it cradles him. He can't tell what temperature it is, hot or cold, can't tell whether it's clammy or soft against his cheek. A thumb brushes away the tear which slides down it.
Those blue eyes smile at him and he heaves a shuddering breath. His first in several long moments. He's not sure it does much, but he takes another one anyway.
He wants to ask if this is real, but his voice isn't working. And he doesn't think that those are the right words, anyhow. He wants to ask if the man with the sad blue eyes is actually here, but again. He can't. Something blocks the words. If he asks and the stranger—lover, dream, muse, soulmate?—says no, if he wakes up...
But the man seems to understand. He lifts the other hand so that both cradle his face like something fragile, like something precious.
"I'm Vessel," says Vessel, voice barely above a whisper. "And it is so very nice to meet you."