piano lesson
DISCLAIMER: Blaze Union © Sting. I seek no monetary profit from this writing.
(tremble like a flower – our light drunkenness and tomorrow's malaise melted into the repetitive rhythm)
He would have the scar for the rest of his life, the doctors said in even tones. There were options, of course, but they were costly even for a man with connections. And even so, even with the treatment, the injury would linger.
Leon stared and stared and tried to make sense of what they were saying through one solid insulated wall of shock and another solid insulated wall of undiluted morphine. The bones that had cracked were knitting, the great calico splotches of bruising were fading, but his head was still heavily bandaged. And there were other injuries, deeper ones, that wouldn't ever show up on any physical exam. If the tether between him and the medication were taken away, the pain would be far too much for any sole living being to bear.
Turned out it took a lot of drugs to keep a man his size under.
The morphine made him feel like he was in an aquarium, staring out at the world from behind glass and feet of water. His body was heavy; he ached. Life passed by in flashes: Doctors, nurses, shitty television shows with shittier reception, even shittier food when his nutrition wasn't sent straight into his veins with a needle. Elena lurking in the periphery, tiny for her fourteen years, perpetually pale-faced. Connecting the fragments took hard thinking that he didn't want to do. He could have been there for years and only experienced it as a handful of hours.
"There's still the possibility of brain damage, so we have to run a number of tests even once you've started to recover."
Even words like those didn't mean anything much. He was floating. He was weighted down impossibly.
…And through the morphine and the shock and the disconnected way he saw the world, he still realized. Even with a great chunk of his memory missing between that night and the hospital, he still acutely felt the absence. The empty space where two people should have been was impossible to overlook.
He would have the scar for the rest of his life, they said.
From occasional glances at calendars—the ones that remained in his memory—it took something like two months for them to actually let him the fuck out of the hospital. When he got back to the house (empty, too empty) he was still staggering. He threw out the condolence flowers and smashed the vase for good measure, ripped the card with the therapist's number into pieces, and fell hard onto the couch. Everything was spinning, his nerves unable to properly process reality through the heady cocktail of painkillers and rage and strangling disbelief. Cymbals were crashing somewhere. His ears felt like they must be bleeding.
He wanted to break everything the way the world had been broken, but he was too dizzy even to stand, his body reeling under the weight of the drugs. He felt like a marionette too weak to pull out its strings.
Faint, pattering socked footsteps rustled on the linoleum: Elena, probably with a dustpan, cleaning up the broken glass. Leon closed his eyes and tried to blot the sound out with sleep.
The weeks after that were all warped around the edges, made dull by the drugs that continued to leave a nasty aftertaste at the back of his throat. The house stayed dark. He moved from the sofa to the bedroom and back, collapsed around corners or ranging restlessly; the television was never turned on, and when his hunger grew too great to be ignored, he threw an instant meal into the microwave and ate it. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do.
He wanted to break everything. He wanted to close his eyes and stop breathing.
Leon didn't know how long had passed between his homecoming and the light streaming back into the house along with the sound of voices—he just knew the black wordless doldrums of the inside of his skull resolving into a disgruntled what the fuck, and put his pillow over his head where he was sprawled on the bedspread.
The light advanced further—and the bedroom door creaked open, bright yellow halogen-bulb beams assaulting the backs of his eyelids even through the pillowcase. Leon swore into the mattress and didn't get up.
The sound of a sigh echoed in from the direction of the doorframe: Male, annoyingly familiar. Then, following it, a voice.
"Yeah, I figured as much."
"Fuck you," Leon grumbled, and gave the intruder the finger, still not looking up.
There wasn't any reply—just the sound of footsteps, distant and then near, as the other guy looked around the room. "That's pretty convenient, actually. Hey—I'm gonna put this dimmer switch on and close the door, so you can actually sit up without hurting your eyes and I'll be able to goddamn see."
And: A softer, closer light, followed by the click of the door closing completely, as promised. Leon grimaced into the mattress: This was precisely why he hated this raging douchebag.
"What the fuck are you even doing in my house?" he asked even as he let the pillow slip away, as he pushed himself up on his elbows to glower.
Gulcasa was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, thumbs up over his hip bones, all red hair down past his knees and beat-up jeans and thin zippered hoodie and infuriatingly compassionate pale eyes—bold as fucking brass, with that airheaded attitude like there was nowhere better for him to be than standing here. It was giving Leon a fucking migraine just looking at him, and he itched to just pick up something heavy and throw it, to punch the wall or the idiot's stupid fucking pretty face and show him that he was not motherfucking welcome here, god damn it.
"You probably haven't been keeping track," he said reasonably, "but the default term for a mental health leave's about up by now, and you either need a doctor's papers or my okay to stay here longer and keep your job."
"Fuck you, get out."
"Cute," Gulcasa replied flatly. He pushed off the wall and moved closer, his eyes narrowing in scrutiny. "Look, I don't expect you to be back at work. Not yet. That would be too cruel. All the same, I do expect you to take care of your damn self, which you don't seem to be doing in the least."
Leon responded to this not with words, but with a pair of upraised middle fingers. For some reason, this made Gulcasa smile wryly.
"At least you've still got enough spunk left to be an insufferable prick. C'mon, go dunk your head in the sink—and shave off that five o'clock shadow while you're at it, you look like you've got a fungus growing on your chin."
"Says the fucko with such a baby face he's never even had to shave." Leon was glad he hadn't put his fingers down. "I bet you keep your hair that long to compensate for every other place it ain't come in at."
"Tch. I'd be more than happy to prove you wrong right now, but in your delicate condition seeing what kind of heat I'm packing might give you a case of the vapors." Gulcasa was smirking. "Come on, dumbass, get up."
"I'll do it if you go the fuck away," Leon drawled.
"I will, but I'll be coming back soon."
"And why the fuck is that? Your little inspection's over, isn't it?"
Gulcasa just looked at him blankly, like Leon had overlooked something obvious—but then, things Gulcasa called obvious tended to follow leaps of logic and private trains of thought that were hard for others to follow, and the man himself had positively zero fucking idea what legitimate common sense actually was. "Because," he said patiently, "Elena and I are going shopping, after which we're coming back and I will be cooking you two dinner. She told me you've been living off Marie Calendar's nukables, and what kind of boss would I be if I let you poison yourself with preservatives?"
"Elena needs to learn when to shut her fucking face," Leon grumbled. At last he let his hands drop, and his head as well, propping his cheek on the pillow.
"She's scared for you, scared of losing you," Gulcasa murmured. "She's a sensitive kid and you two've been through something really traumatic. Don't be too hard on her."
He wouldn't even deign to reply to that one. Gulcasa was right, and Leon knew that well enough.
"Don't be too hard on yourself either." And then Gulcasa's hand was on his head, really lightly, ruffling his hair briefly in a gesture so fucking paternal Leon could've died laughing. Those thick fingers skimmed the heavy gauze pad taped over his forehead for just a moment, and then Gulcasa's touch vanished. "And seriously, clean yourself the fuck up before you come downstairs. You look like a goddamn zombie."
And Gulcasa turned on his heel and left, just like that, closing the door behind him again.
Leon growled into the pillow and closed his eyes. His motherfucking boss. Pushy bastard thought it was his god-given right to fuss over everybody in the world just because he'd won a fucking fist fight with the last guy.
The worst part, by far, was that even now Leon couldn't make up his mind whether it was annoying as fuck, kind of sweet, or a combination of both.
It was the smell that woke him—tomatoes and beef and spices and potatoes, and Leon's stomach snarled at him to get up. Groggy, he shoved himself upright, yanked his pants to the right place on his hips, and opened the door to glare into the hallway.
The light was on downstairs, and he could hear voices—Gulcasa's, Elena's. There was clatter, there was stirring. The kitchen was in use, the noises proclaimed. Even as his stomach writhed and clawed at him with need, his head and his chest felt impossibly heavy.
So he stumped his way back into the bedroom, swerving over to the left in order to get into the bathroom and splash some water on his face. Leon could at least admit that he needed to eat and that it was better for that stupid fuckass to do the cooking than for him to flounder around on his own.
Not to mention—he scowled at his reflection in the mirror, at his hair sticking up every which way and the great dark circles beneath his eyes—the obnoxious bastard was right. He needed to shave. Gulcasa's description of the situation as five o'clock shadow had been unnecessarily generous; Leon's stubble was almost to the point where it could be called bristles.
It looked like shit, and Leon had always snorted at those who grew themselves depression beards—so as a man who refused to hold himself to separate standards from others, he got out his razor and the can of shaving cream and got to work.
By the time he was done, his face stinging a little from the bite of the chemicals and the buzz of the electric razor, the entire house smelled like freshly cooked meal and hunger was a pissed-off animal hooking its claws into the walls of his stomach.
"Well, you at least look a little less like you just crawled out of your own grave," Gulcasa pronounced immediately upon Leon's arrival at the base of the stairs, right at the junction of living room and dinette. "Get your butt in your chair, I'm just about done."
Leon offered up his two favorite fingers in passing, then plunked himself down at the table with a sigh. Elena had already set it. She'd changed the placemats to the plaid set, the one their mother had bought when their father had been so entranced over how cute he thought it was, and that made his throat contract in an awful choking kind of way.
The sound of impact against plastic made him turn. Gulcasa was steadily dumping boxes of frozen food into the garbage can.
"What the fuck are you doing to our food supply, you motherfucking asshole," he snarled. Gulcasa just looked at him and held up one of the remaining boxes, pointing to the nutrition facts printed on the side.
"Have you ever taken a look at these and seen how many chemicals get pumped into this crap to keep it from going bad?" Gulcasa's voice was stern and parental and just a little bit whiny, like he was the teacher's pet lecturing a classmate on a painfully stupid mistake. He wrinkled his nose and tapped the fine print. "As long as I'm in this house you and Elena are going to eat real goddamned food that isn't going to give you cancer."
"It's FDA-fucking-approved, or they couldn't fucking sell it," was the first argument that came to his lips. Gulcasa made a noise of distaste and tossed the box into the garbage with the rest. "And fuck you, stop throwing out the goddamn tortilla tilapia at least, those are actually decent!"
"The FDA can go fellate its own shriveled gonads," Gulcasa proclaimed dismissively. "And fuck you,you obviously have no idea what decent even means if you can call any kind of frozen food that. Tomorrow I'm making you real tortilla tilapia for dinner, and I'm going to teach Elena how to make it before I go so that you'll never have to subsist on this dog shit again."
"My sister does not need any cooking lessons from you,I can do well enough for the both of us!"
Gulcasa snorted and turned back to the stove, dusting off his hands. There was a tall pot on the burners, and he took off its lid in order to stick a ladle in and stir it as great clouds of steam emerged and drifted up to the ceiling. "Leon, you couldn't cook your way out of a paper bag if your life depended on it."
"Fuck you, yes I can."
"You can't."
"I will bet you fucking money that I can."
"Fine, you're on. If you manage to produce even one competent meal before I leave, I'll give you a raise. You don't owe me anything if you lose—anything material, anyway. You'll just have surrendered your competence as a man for all of time, or until you manage to prove otherwise."
The nerve of the son of a bitch just didn't end. Leon stared with something like wonder as Gulcasa lifted up the ladle, casual as you please, and sipped from it.
"Well, this is about ready, so let's eat."
It was like trying to stop up a breaking dam with his bare hands, but Leon still fought to hold his tongue when Gulcasa deposited a pair of bowls on the table—one for Elena and one for him. Dinner was apparently very thick stew. Leon could see thick chunks of beef, potato, green bean, and tomato drifting through the murky broth.
It actually did look appetizing, but Leon wasn't willing to damage his pride enough to start eating right away, so he watched as Gulcasa filled his own bowl and brought it to the table, then sat down.
"You can get your own refills if you want them, and I'm hoping that you do want them, because this stuff is never as good once it's been in the refrigerator for more than a couple of hours—the broth'll get sludgy."
And casual as you please, he started eating. Leon shook his head and glared at his own bowl.
Once he heard Elena's spoon start moving, though, he knew that he couldn't delay the inevitable for any longer. Rolling his eyes, he started eating.
…And fuck him—even to Leon's uncultured and uncaring tongue, the stew was on an entirely different level from anything he'd ever prepared out of a can; it was even better than his own parents' cooking. This was closer to what he'd come to expect out of restaurants that served separate courses of appetizers and desserts and charged upwards of $20 a person for each meal. He should've known that Gulcasa wouldn't be so arrogant without being able to back it up—that was the annoying thing about this guy, that every time he came off as a smug douchebag he whipped out raw skill to give himself competence.
If there was one thing that had to be said about his unbearable bastard of a boss, it was that Gulcasa was the right person to stand at the summit of any meritocracy.
…Though Leon would still rather die than admit that anywhere other than the nice, private interior of his own skull.
"This is very good," Elena remarked, out of the blue. Leon looked up at his sister through his hair—there was a real smile on her face, even though it was small and shaky. This was probably the first time she'd actually smiled in months. He didn't want to be the one to make her stop, and so he swallowed the complaints and just kept eating.
"I'm glad you like it. If you want to learn a little about making soup and stew from scratch, I'm happy to teach you anytime." When Leon risked another glance up, Gulcasa was smiling back at her with a pleased expression. "What about you, Leon? At least you don't hate it, do you?"
Fuck yourself with broken glass and die. "If I hated it I wouldn't be eating it, fuckass," was what he said aloud. His face felt hot, which only served to piss him off more. "…It's okay."
And Gulcasa laughed. "That's high praise, coming from you. Glad you find things to your liking."
Elena was still sitting right there. Times like this, the high road was the only road, but it still didn't feel any less grating.
Gulcasa didn't simply cook—he also did all the dishes himself.
"Are you a businessman or are you a mail-order housewife?" Leon jeered. "Give me a fucking break."
"Only when you stop being such a goddamn stereotype," Gulcasa replied. His voice was airy, even, and carried no perceptible malice. "If somebody doesn't do it, your sink is going to be filled with rotting shit in no time, and trust me when I tell you that that's about as fun to clean or work around as it is sanitary. Elena's probably sick of cleaning up after you by now, and since you don't seem to feel like cleaning things up yourself, I'm graciously giving her a reprieve."
"Fuck off."
It was late by the time Gulcasa finished, almost eleven—but then dinner had started at around nine anyway. Elena had disappeared for a time, and they heard the shower running counterpoint to the faucet in the sink. The noise had vanished then too, and given the reading on the oven clock she'd probably gone to bed by now. Even though Elena was most alert in the evening, she still went to bed before midnight every day so that she could be awake in time for school.
"Well, your mission's accomplished, anyway, so you can invite yourself back the fuck out." Leon sprawled back on the couch and glared at the opposite end of the room.
"Nope." The sound of the faucet flipping off punctuated Gulcasa's declaration. "Did you manage to miss it when I said I was going to be cooking for you tomorrow, birdbrain? I'm off work; Baldus and Velleman have things under control, and I'll be taking care of you until I know that you and Elena will be all right on your own."
"Don't you have your own damn household to play matron at? Fuck off already."
There was the sound of a groan, and then footsteps. Leon stared warily from the corner of his eye; Gulcasa had his hands in his pockets and was walking towards the division between kitchen and living room in an easy stride. Like he fucking owned the place. "I do, but the twins are sixteen, and that's more than old enough to handle household chores for a while. Medoute's also supposed to come around and check up on them every few days, and there are more than enough shenanigans going on at that coffee shop to keep her perpetually in my debt as far as favors go, so I have no reason to believe she won't. On top of which, there's this amazing, futuristic device called the cellular phone that lets us contact each other via text or voice from any damn where."
"You are not staying overnight." Try as he might, Leon couldn't keep the horror from leaking into his voice. He hadn't actually realized—must've been trying to block it out subconsciously—but now that it was smacking him in the face, Gulcasa's intentions had been pretty clear from the start.
"I am indeed staying overnight, because you are my employee—ergo, I own your ass; ergo, your well-being is my personal responsibility. You need somebody to look after you for a little while, Leon. And I'm sure Elena's been doing just fine with that, but she probably needs time to grieve too. Hell, she needs time to be a normal middle school kid, and she can't do that when she has to be the adult in the household."
"I don't need you to babysit my ass, you goddamn fuckhead, get out." He wasn't fully sure when he launched himself off the sofa to stand square in the center of the room—just that he was on his feet with his weight distributed just perfectly to fly in any direction, his veins full of adrenaline and his head full of rage.
Gulcasa stood there across from him. One of the strings of his hoodie had gotten tugged askew and was stuck on his shoulder, underneath the edge of the hood itself. His hands were still in his pockets, with just his thumbs visible—they were balanced over the bones of his hips again. His eyebrows were drawn down, but other than that he was expressionless.
His chest rose and fell once, exaggeratedly, and then he spoke. "Stop bluffing just to protect your own damn pride. You're pissing me off."
It was like flipping a switch. Leon had stepped forward, his fist had flown out, almost before he knew what was actually happening. And just like that, Gulcasa sank down fluidly and grabbed Leon's wrist as the punch sailed over his head. He stood back up in the next moment, and Leon was still bristling as Gulcasa loosened his death grip on the wrist and shifted his hand down so that his palm and fingers were cupped soft but firm over the knuckles of Leon's clenched fist.
"You are not okay and nobody with any goddamn common sense would expect you to be okay," Gulcasa said in an even and relentless tone, and his pale eyes caught the dim lighting so that Leon could have sworn they glowed like a cat's. "And it does not make you weak to admit that you need someone else's help, it makes you a fucking adult."
"Fuck you," and it was a good thing that that was an all-purpose phrase because over and over again it was all that Leon could articulate. He grabbed the front of that stupid hoodie in his left hand and tightened his grip; there wasn't room to wrench Gulcasa forward any further than this. "You don't get to give me that bullshit about how oh you know how I feel until you've been in my head, and you aren't me,so you can get the fuck off your motherfucking high horse any day now, you raging douche—"
"I know," Gulcasa went on from six inches away, and his eyes were intense and pitiless and his gaze was boring straight through Leon in a way that was hot and almost unbearable—"you don't have to believe me, but I do know—"
And his right hand came up, open and easy, and Gulcasa's fingertips skimmed over the freshly shaved line of Leon's jawbone.
Leon dragged him the last six inches inward.
Apparently his brain had disengaged, because all that mattered was that Gulcasa's hands were on his body, not quite rough but decidedly not gentle either. They kept getting teeth mixed up in their kisses—never really biting down, but grazing the rough edge of enamel over lips and tongue like a reminder. Gulcasa was breathing deeply against him, eyes half-closed, and Leon grabbed onto his hips to better feel the shift of his body, of his musculature. The blades of Gulcasa's pelvis fitted against his palms perfectly, sharp and sculpted.
They strained together like it was some kind of contest. Gulcasa kept making a low noise that was too deep to really be called a whimper, and when their bodies brushed up hard against each other he pulled back to breathe oh god against Leon's shoulder. Leon tried to yank Gulcasa's hips up against his again—he wanted contact, he wanted the urgent burn of lust to resolve itself into actual pleasure—but Gulcasa pushed him forward at the same time, and sent the both of them slamming hard against the couch, Leon back-first.
Even with all the breath blown straight out of him, Leon bared his teeth and laughed. This was fine. This was perfect. The bottled-up emotions of the past months and all tonight's anger had resolved themselves into reckless, restless aggression. Leon welcomed the outlet, the chance after so long to vent all the tangled-up violence inside him. Gulcasa's body weighed heavy on top of him, pressed against him from the diaphragm down, hips planted perfectly and immovably between Leon's legs. Both of them were shaking—from anticipation, from impatience.Leon reached up, framed Gulcasa's face in both his hands, and knotted his fingers into Gulcasa's hair to drag him down into a kiss.
Gulcasa made some kind of faint noise, and Leon only had time to notice that there was something off about his eyes before a sharp blow to his chest knocked all the breath out of him. The next instant, Gulcasa had torn himself free and fled the room.
"What the fuck," he said to himself under his breath, and frowned as he heard the faint sound of retching. He pulled himself to his feet gingerly, rubbing his sternum with the heel of his hand, and stared hard into the kitchen. Gulcasa was bent shaking over the sink.
And it was odd, it was fucking odd, but he couldn't move. His head was an entirely different kind of disconnected from the rest of him, so that even if he'd wanted to cross the line that divided the living room and kitchen to try to figure out what was happening, his legs just wouldn't obey.
After a pause that was entirely too long, Gulcasa rose back up. He wiped his face with his wrist, stood for a while with his shoulders hunched and his face downturned, and then ran the faucet. The smell of bile lingered. Even from half a room away, Leon could tell that Gulcasa was tense and jittering. His chest was rising and falling very sharply, like he was hyperventilating.
Leon stepped onto the linoleum, wary for reasons he didn't understand all too well. Gulcasa didn't startle again, but he still didn't move away from the sink or even look up. Leon stepped forward again, still tense, pausing after each pace; there wasn't any reaction until all that separated them was the kitchen counter. That was when Gulcasa smiled bitterly and straightened up, not turning to face him at all. There were shiny tear tracks on his face and his eyes were red-rimmed, but at least he wasn't actively crying.
"What the fuck was that," Leon managed at last. His brow had furrowed on his own, and even to his own ears his voice sounded more worried than he wanted it to.
Gulcasa actually laughed. "That," he replied wryly, "was the signal that everybody goes to bed with blue balls tonight."
"…Are you okay?" Leon clenched his fists as he said it; his body wanted to resist his giving out those words, but it somehow seemed important to say them.
"Nope, apparently not. Fuck me. I'll clean the sink out properly later, I don't think I'm really up to that right now." He turned, finally, to face Leon. Gulcasa's smile was lopsided, and his hands were still jittering a little, almost like he had some kind of palsy. "Future reference, though—I don't like getting my hair pulled, it puts me back in a really bad place. Should've warned you, but it's been a while since this has happened, so I thought—fuck."
The staggering, loose way Gulcasa moved reminded Leon dimly of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz,toward the end when his stuffing had been pulled out. He listed to one side, gravitated towards things he could lean on; he looked diminished, somehow.
And it's got to be at least five or six years since I last saw that dumbshit movie, what the fuck am I even. "Okay. I can take care of the sink my own damn self, you know; I'm not helpless enough to not know how to disinfect shit."
For some reason, this made Gulcasa laugh again. "Nope, just give me ten or fifteen minutes to breathe and I'll do it. I doubt you could clean your way out of a paper bag."
"Fuck you, yes I can."
"Don't believe you."
"Yes I can, you colossal ass."
"Bet."
"Fine. If I can clean and disinfect the sink to your specifications, oh high-and-mighty president, then I'm off the hook about your goddamn cooking bet."
"Ah." There was something a little less pained to Gulcasa's expression when he smiled this time. Leon still couldn't decide if it was irritating as fuck all or actually kind of a relief. "Yeah, okay, I can work with that."
He pushed himself upright, took a few dragging steps forward, and then plunked his forehead onto Leon's shoulder before Leon had any idea what was actually happening.
Gulcasa didn't say anything. He just stood there, brought his hands up to lay them flat against Leon's chest, and leaned, a warm and heavy weight.
Leon stood awkwardly still for quite a while, but even then Gulcasa didn't straighten up. If not for the fact that his eyes were still half open and his breathing uneven, Leon would have thought that he'd gone to sleep right there.
In very cautious movements, he lifted one arm and got it around Gulcasa's shoulders awkwardly, resting his palm directly between the point where his shoulder blades started to raise up. Even though this put Leon's hand flat on Gulcasa's hair, no protest came.
It occurred to Leon that he had something breakable in his hands right now.
It occurred to Leon that not for anything in the world would he break it.