NB:
I just read a parody version of a Jason/Bart fic (which was really good!) so feel silly posting this, but oh had this lying around for a while and now seemed like a good time to post it. Why not eh.
Goodnight you
Roaming the streets in the middle of the night. Lamplight. Smoking outdoors. Chips from the kebab van.
Bart loved these things.
He had invited Sinead along. She had thought he was joking. Beauty sleep. Night rain. Straightened hair.
Bart loved night-time. He wasn't much for sleeping. It wasn't just that it was a good time for spray-painting silly messages on walls.
He knew someone else once that felt the same way.
He loved her. But she was gone now.
He was walking past her house actually. It was not like he went past there on purpose, he just lived nearby. The light was on up there. He wondered what she was doing.
He shakes his head. She is not she. She is he. She, he – it doesn't matter, they're both dead.
A man is there at the pub door. A real man. Sinead had started to tell him about this guy a few weeks earlier. Mark. Bisexual. He's twenty-something. Open of face. Wearing scruffy, dickhead, hipster clothes, like it's the seventies or something. He's really fucking good-looking. That's not the worst part: he's nice-looking. He looks like a good guy. He looks normal and not like a freak at all. Bart hates his guts.
The light goes off in her room. She's there at the door. She's letting him in.
Bart turns around and faces nowhere in particular, just away.
This is ridiculous.
Bart takes a seat on a bench. Well, he hadn't meant to make a night of it out here, make it a regular thing, but he's here now, and the weed he smoked earlier has dulled his sense of shame. He stares up shamelessly. He's not perving, he's just thinking.
Jason's family are away and he's being a twat, inviting blokes that he doesn't know around like this. He might be a boy now but think a murderer would care?
Is that a silhouette he sees up there? No, he's imagining that. This isn't some weird fucking peep show. It looks like him. He's all there. The way he was… she was.
He can't really see her but he's thinking about her now. He tries to avoid the whole topic usually. But it's such a mind-boggling, hard-not-to-think-about topic. The mechanics of it. Would he still have..? Would he still..? Would he, Bart, care if he hadn't known, if he hadn't been told, if no one knew? Mark doesn't seem to care. And Mark is the one who's up there now.
None of the serious stuff must have happened yet. The change. It couldn't have. Heidi wouldn't let him, would she?
Would it matter to him if it had? Would it?
No is the answer on a good day, when Bart's being a man about it, when he's listening to music in his room, songs they both had listened to, songs that make him think 'fuck it, it's all transient, we're all transient, it's all good.'
No, when he's watching him laugh and looking him up and down and thinking, well, it's not like the essentials will go, the beauty, the kind heart, the skin, the eyes.
Today? Today he's not man enough to go up to that door. Today all that non-important stuff matters.
And maybe today he really needed to. He needs to because Jason needs him right now. But that necessity of friendship or love or whatever it is they have is just not enough to surmount this burning loss of pride.
'Goodnight, sleep tight' Bart whispers to the person he knows is up there, in there, but whispers into the dark, into the ether, they aren't enough.
…and then the next time? The next time he's not even a street away. He's right below the window. And it doesn't matter because it's too late.
The light went out in Jason's eyes and then the light went out in his room.
Heidi is gone. Jasmine is gone. Jason is gone. There's nothing metaphorical about any of that.
He didn't say goodbye to him. He's got a feeling he knows why it hurts so much.
All he wants is his physical presence. Specifics of gender or whatever his sociology teacher calls it are not a luxury anymore.
He needs him here. Now.