Spoilers: Nope, but my keyboard just did something seriously, seriously weird. Twice. Grr.
Disclaimer: Two questions: Does Martin's mother have a name? And is there a specified time that Danny moved to New York?
Author's Note: Inspired by brother's-girlfriend-induced insomnia, mostly. By extension, the pretty sounds of rain.
Danny missed the sound of rain.
It never rained in New York like it did in Florida. Even on the middle floor of an apartment complex in Hialeah you could hear the rain as it hit the windows; the street outside, the cars, the balcony railings, the leaves of the trees.
In New York, you could barely hear it hitting your umbrella.
Sound drowned out by cars and sirens and talking and ringing phones and street performers and spruikers and whatever the hell else the depths of New York seemed to continuously spew up.
Laughing, he pressed his forehead against the cool window and repeated what he'd just thought; so dramatic and forceful that he wondered whether he should have been an artist.
Even when it did rain, though – which was considerably less often than in Florida – the droplets weren't as clear. Weren't water, so much as liquefied pollution. When it had rained in Hialeah, it had truly rained. And Danny wasn't stupid enough not to factor in latitude, but that didn't make the feeling go away. Didn't stop him from hating the weather in this city.
He'd moved up here in the summer, and had hated it almost instantly. Hot, humid like Florida, but dirty. The pollution of the city mingled with the gravitationally-inclined layers of heat, making the shared bedrooms of foster homes just about unbearable. He'd come back from school feeling dirty, as if the grime had gotten into him, covered him, like coal does a miner.
Florida was different. More humid, of course, but clean. The stickiness of the air made people flock to the beach, not to air-conditioned apartments and office buildings. Not to the shower, like Danny had done after school, every day, for almost four months.
Perhaps, he thought, if he had have grown up in Miami, things would have been different. Miami was a big city; similar in attitude to New York. Perhaps the pollution there was just as bad. Perhaps pollution everywhere had simply gotten worse in the twenty-odd years since he'd moved.
But thinking this didn't stop the strange ache that he still felt for the rain, because in New York, when the haze finally – finally – lifted, the rain only trickled. The droplets were soft, almost, even when it seemed like buckets were being poured down onto the heads of the city's inhabitants.
The funny thing was, when it started to rain in New York, people flocked to dry apartments and office buildings. Danny remembered vaguely playing in the rain with Rafi when they were children, singing some nursery rhyme in barely-accented English, acting out gruesome fairytales and running barefoot around the deserted street.
Didn't want to recall what had happened when they had gone inside, though, drenched through and through. Didn't want to, but did anyway, because Martin was still in bed, fast asleep, and the memories weren't going to do any more damage if he let them surface. Wasn't really possible for them to do anymore damage, so he let the image of his papi's fury into his conscious.
Their father had been drinking. The whole of the small apartment had smelled of bad alcohol, and Danny had caught barely a glimpse of his mother – curled up in the corner of the kitchen, face hidden by bruised arms – before Rafi had shoved him into their bedroom telling him surely change you clothes, Danny, now. Dry your hair, hermano; don't come out till I tell you.
Rafi couldn't have been older than ten.
So Danny's love for the rain wasn't some deep-seeded need to return to a lost time and place.
The first time he'd seen snow, he had been almost fifteen. Fifteen. Before then, he'd hardly even considered what it would feel like, too busy wondering about day-to-day matters, like how to survive in Hialeah.
But after the oppressiveness of the summer heat and the constant drizzle of polluted spring rain, the snow had seemed like a godsend. The blankness was nice, a change from the constant glare of sun and water that had recently begun only to remind him of the things he had wanted to forget.
Only, after a few days, he had stopped seeing it as blankness, as a physical representation of a clean slate. He'd started loathing it with the same fervour that he loathed a lot of things about New York. It was dirty: turning to slush and sleet under the soles of hundreds of formal shoes; slowing and angering traffic even further than the summer heat-waves; killing the homeless by nameless dozens; melting into nothing but freezing water that always seemed to find its way down shirt-collars.
One thing that Danny remembered well, though, was – rather absurdly, he thought – the smell of New York in the winter. It wasn't the open grates in the streets, or the market stalls, or the fumes from cars. It was salt. The salt that they tossed onto the streets by the bucket to melt the snow had made a distinct impression in Danny's mind, but the strange thing was that he couldn't smell it anymore.
Fall bacame his favourite season in New York, though he could have done without the constant wind. It hadn't bothered him too much when he'd moved here, because he was so used to hurricane-force winds that the veritable wind-tunnels the buildings in New York created barely registered. He hadn't liked the chill, though, that the winds brought.
It was the kind of chill that seeped through all manner of clothing, through every window, and again, people flocked to windless apartments and office buildings. One fall, when he was about seventeen, he had taken his bottle of whiskey down to the docks and climbed one of the mooring posts – the tallest he could find.
The dead of night – if there was such a thing in New York City – the dead of autumn, the freezing wind howling around him as he'd stood like a drunken Cristo Redento. He'd mocked the Statue of Liberty, not caring that he couldn't see it, holding his whiskey bottle above his head, arm around his waist. He'd bowed – was quite surprised now that he hadn't fallen into the river – and when he'd straightened again, he was grinning scathingly, hatefully, tears on his cold-numb cheeks.
He'd screamed at it, at this supposed epitome of New York City, a tumbling nonsense of Spanish and English and Latin: hypocritical legal phrases, mottos, insults, frustrations, prayers. It had ended with a sob, but the bottle hadn't ever reached his mouth to cut it off, because he'd been suddenly hauled off the post by two police officers.
Didn't remember anything more than waking up in a hospital the next morning being treated for mild hypothermia.
Yes, he had hated so many things about the seasons in New York, but he had only ever missed one thing. The only thing he'd missed was the rain.
Until tonight, because tonight… tonight it was raining.
Truly raining like it had in Hialeah, like it had in his childhood, with innocence and clarity and something that felt to Danny like home. The droplets were clear, every now and then fracturing the light from the surrounding buildings, creating strange little distorted balls of liquid colour, and the thought made Danny laugh quietly.
Still, though, it was rain like he hadn't seen since he'd left Hialeah, and the sound… It was even nicer than he'd remembered it as it hit the window; calming and exciting at the same time, and he'd only ever heard a few things quite so complex.
The rain continued to hit the windows rhythmically, drumming the sounds into the silent apartment until Danny could feel the beat reverberating through his skull. He tried to recall exactly how he'd ended up here, standing at this window; recalled nothing more than a few blurry images. Martin's eyes, darkened by lust and night-time; slight awkwardness of a first kiss; revelation at finding a faultless body underneath that hideous suit; hard, cold metal of the elevator against the back of his head. Martin's smile afterwards: genuinely happy, soft, and aimed directly at Danny as they both struggled to catch their breath.
The rain had started only minutes after Martin had fallen asleep, and Danny's exhaustion had been replaced by an onslaught of memories and nostalgia. Now, he closed his eyes and just listened. The images that passed through his head this time were not of Hialeah, though, not of anger or of hatred or of fear.
They were of the past few years. Of sobriety and pride, of the lives he'd saved, of his friends – his family, really – of Vivian and Jack and Samantha. Of Martin, and something suddenly occurred to him as he walked back towards the bedroom, listening, heavy pulse of raindrops mingling with the steady timing of Martin's breath.
Somewhere between that first year in New York and today, standing in front of a fourth storey window in the middle of the night, Danny had come to think of New York as his home.