Rating: PG13
WARNINGS: Slash references, violence references
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Nighttime was never quiet; at least, not in Todd's memory. Something in buildings seemed to move at night, the house settling into it's foundations like a restless dog, grumbling as doorways shifted, the water heater rolling on and off behind the kitchen walls. Houses breathed once the sun went down. Todd could hear it; sometimes the broken shade in his window would lift and clatter all on its own, jostling against the window frame under the power of an unknown wind. It only did it at night.
Laying awake at 1 am, he could hear the people in the house move, too. Freddy snoring blithely in the tv light downstairs, the volume turned down so he wouldn't wake anyone. The sofa creaked now and then when he moved. He was too heavy to sleep in one position all night. It hurt his back, and sometimes, if he sat the wrong way, Todd could hear the snoring choke to a stop and shock Freddy awake again.
There were nights when he heard Pietro thrashing in his room, some thin sheen of nightmare covering him and tangling him in the sheets. Todd didn't know what he dreamed about. Pietro didn't offer, and he didn't ask, and why would he? There were things you didn't offer up between friends, even tenuous ones, and things that woke you sweating in the night shouting names nobody knew were things you didn't talk about, at least, not here. He thought sometimes that Lance knew what Pietro was dreaming. Todd didn't want to ask.
After all, there was a system for divulging secrets. They tell you theirs, and you have to give them some of yours, an equal trade to balance out the universe.
Pietro could keep his secrets.
On long, quiet nights Todd would stare up at his yellowed ceiling tiles, the light from the neighbor's porch bleeding in his window and painting bars across the walls. Some nights he couldn't sleep. Some nights cars driving by kept him awake, and he thought they kept the house awake, too, or maybe it was just his distraction. There was always something, something shifting in the walls, someone talking in their sleep, someone snoring in the TV light because it's easier than trying to sleep alone in the dark….
…
…
………Todd always slept alone in the dark. Todd remembered, in closed rooms, that brief span of time between getting fucked by Kurt Wagner and when the boy got up to get his clothes. Just a brief time, never for very long, when Todd could still see his pulse behind his eyes and there was still an excuse to lie there next to him, panting and sweaty. Kurt didn't always get up the moment that excuse was gone. Kurt would try to talk. Some awkward, half formed attempt at affection, with an arm over Todd's chest. He'd talk about anything. The mansion. Alien invasions.
Home.
He'd told him once, laying on Todd's dirty mattress when the Brotherhood was out for the night; he'd told him once about home, about crawling up on the roof on hot nights and lying down on the shingles, arms sprawled cruciform beside him. He'd told him of a sea of stars that stretched out forever, of crickets chirping in the long grass as far away, in town, headlights flashed by their road every once in a while, their engines loud and distinct against the quiet sky. He'd told him about listening to the moon change shape. About the shadows of bat wings against a copper star.
Todd hadn't told him anything, of course. Todd never did. And, eventually, Kurt would lose his monologue and go quiet, awkwardly pulling back his arm, his offers, that Todd could never really grasp, much less answer to. And he'd leave. And Todd would stay awhile, and try to imagine some place far away where he could lie on the roof on the hot tiles, and listen to the moon change shape.
Something, lying in that dark alone, dreaming someone else's dreams, he remembers the things he didn't tell Kurt. August nights inside thin motel walls, watching neon flicker on and off across the ceiling and wondering if the shape next to him was going to wake up again tonight. He remembered the cars in the city, loud and screaming at the windows, blaring when the traffic slowed down. He remembered curling over broken ribs in the filth of some old hallway, and listening to the woman still behind the apartment door screaming as she got her fifty to the chest.
…He remembered red doe eyes and a white heart in the headlights of his father's car. He remembered the sound of the tires as they left the road, and his mother screaming in her new For-Sunday clothes as the guardrail crumpled beneath them and the car took flight into the dark.
The smell of her perfume. And her blood.
And Todd would turn over in bed, and pull the blanket up over his shoulder. And Todd would listen to the boardinghouse breathe.
And eventually, his breath would slow to match it.