A/N:
Song in Chapter Title: "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" ~ Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (lyrics by Elton John, Bernie Taupin)
Notes:
There are certain chapters of this story that are very difficult to write, and some that come so easily it's ridiculous. This was one of the second types of chapters – it helps that a great reveal occurs in this chapter. I've been waiting for this for a very, very long time.
Also, the return of some Byron because… well, because Pink. Aha ha.. Excerpt is from "Stanzas for Music". You should all read it, it's amazing.
As easy as this chapter was to write, it was difficult all the same. I think I achieved what I had wanted to achieve, but I am willing to hear what you all have to say about it.
I think I wanted to write more here? Oh, yes, if I ever get the ability to draw humans and be happy with it, the first thing I'm drawing is camera-toting-hipster-Craig.
Also, I find it interesting that no one has mentioned Stan's sobriety in BMI, as opposed to his, er, non-sobriety in Pink…
(I can't believe BMI is turning into such a long story)
Much Love:
Mattie Scary
DizzyAlice
Shannello
R&R and I will love you forever
Title: Baptize Me In
Author: theZoshi
Rating: Ranging, mostly PG-PG13
Category: South Park
Genre: Angst/General
May contain: Shounen-Ai/Boy Love, Violence, Adult Situations, Swearing
Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest,
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath-
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.
Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.
Doors had never seemed so ominous before. I expected a creak as I pushed it open, but was greeted by weighted silence instead. Closing the door behind me, I walked slowly, warily into the apartment, feeling like a thief, a trespasser, like I was crossing into unknown territory, a world that wasn't mine anymore. Everything was alien in its familiarity.
I passed the living room with slow steps, realizing suddenly that the apartment wasn't as empty as I had thought. It might have been the scent of coffee in the air, or it might have been something not so obvious; nothing I could place, but just an overall… something. As I neared the short hallway that led to the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom the smell of coffee grew stronger, and the presence in the apartment became more tangible.
I stopped just outside the entrance to the kitchen area. The kitchen light was on, but dimmed, and the blinds were closed on the small window above the sink. Red stood leaning back against the counter in front of the coffee maker, staring into the untouched cup of coffee in his hands. Did he not hear the door? Or hear me walking across the apartment floor?
He looked ready for work; black jeans and a dark gray short-sleeved button-up and his ankh collar. Oh. His ankh collar. No simple choker today, but the collar with the widest band instead. The keys I still held dug into my palm as my hands clenched, as I could imagine just why he had chosen that today. Couldn't have anyone asking questions, no, not questions that he didn't want to answer. I could feel my blood, sluggish with alcohol and a night full of sleep but no rest, start heating, could feel it start to burn. I was trying very hard not to think about the day before but my mind wouldn't cooperate, and suddenly my head was filled with bad things, very bad things, dangerous imaginings that I'd never thought of while sober.
It took a moment for me to realize just how far I'd gotten – and it was pretty far and it didn't end well and if I hadn't discovered my black-out-drunken self I might have been surprised by the violence – and then another moment to realize that I was glaring at Red, and a moment longer before I'd realized that he'd finally noticed me, dark eyes fixed on my face, the hands holding his coffee mug gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white. He fidgeted, just barely, and shrank against the inner corner where the two perpendicular pieces of the counter met. I couldn't see it but I could imagine the faint tremor running through him. He could take me, he'd done it before, but he wouldn't this time, there was no defense in his posture, no fight in him, and worse, a sort of resignation in his eyes that sent me a step back. I didn't like that look on him, I'd seen it once before and I swore I'd never make him look like that again and fuck it. Fuck it.
I turned away, stalked off towards the bedroom. Ten million threads all tying us together and they were starting to strangle. Too many poisonous threads that we'd never cut and too few healthy ones that were starting to fray. He was in the wrong. I was in the wrong. There was so much that was in the wrong.
I rubbed my aching temples, opened the bedroom door and shoved it closed behind me. We were both wrong, both wrong, but he was wronger this time, and all the wrongness I'd stacked up during the years was it really worth such a large return? I peeled my shirt off and tossed it into the corner of the room, walked over to the closet and opened the door roughly. Grabbing my work shirt I closed the door again just as roughly and debated showering. Ah hell, I didn't stink. I pulled the shirt on and looked my pants over; they were fine. I didn't have much time, anyways. I looked around the room, trying to focus on the things that mattered just then; vaguely I could see that the bed had barely been touched since last morning, except for a couple of chokers and a shirt that Red had apparently decided against that morning. The alarm clock on my side of the bed flashed eight fifteen as the minutes changed. I rubbed my eyes and left the bedroom, headed to the bathroom to brush the stale taste of hops and coffee out of my mouth and try to tame my hair.
I left the bathroom and headed back through the hallway, patting my pockets to be sure my phone and keys were there. I considered grabbing something from the kitchen, but that would mean going into the kitchen and also putting food in my still-not-quite-cooperative stomach and those were two things I wasn't very keen on. Instead I gritted my teeth, avoided looking into the kitchen as I passed it, and headed out the door, leaving that weighted silence behind.
A full day at work, made more draining by how hard I was trying to pretend that everything was fine and dandy and I wasn't about to break down from a mixture of mental strain and the lingering after-effects of a hang-over. Drinking myself stupid after over a year of sobriety wasn't the smartest thing I could have done, but when had I ever done anything smart? I grinned, too cheerfully, at the little old lady from down the street as I accepted her payment for the package to Boise and tried not to think about how Red was at work today, tried not to wonder if he was there too, starting something, doing something. I handed the little old lady her receipt and assured her that her package will make it within three-to-five days, waving to her as she walked away and as I remembered how pissed Red had been that one day, practically spitting fire as he complained about the vamp-goth. Fuck. I should have known, an over-reaction like that. I should have known. How long? How long how long how long?
The door opened again, a pleasant looking older man came in carrying a bag full of shipping tubes. It was old-person day, apparently. I grinned at him absently and tried to keep thoughts of decapitating Mike-Fucking-Makowski in the back of my mind. I weighed tubes and stickered them, going through the motions as thoughts fired sickeningly through my head. Why didn't I see it before? Was I so out of the loop with what went on with us? Was I that blind? Red told me once I was too honest sometimes, and I thought everyone else was honest too, but that was a lie. I hadn't been honest in a very long time. In such a long time. There was a severe lack of honesty in anything I did, and maybe that was it; the closer someone got to me, the more they saw, and Red was so close that he finally saw just how fake and dishonest I was, with everything. I was a fucking failure, such a fucking failure. Maybe I deserved it, then, maybe that's just what I deserved for attaching myself to a fixed point of dishonesty in the past and never moving beyond it.
I handed the man his receipt, laughed almost too loudly at his joke about the weather, gave Rob a grin, and headed back to the bathroom to try and get my head straight before I ended up exploding on someone.
I managed to get through two empty hours of staring at the TV and not seeing it before I picked up my phone and called Ollie.
It wasn't that simple, actually. I fumbled with the phone a little, then put it back in my pocket, then pulled it back out. Looked at the TV again and tried to ignore the darkness of the apartment. The minutes ticked away as the clock on the wall advanced its hour hand to seven. I shifted on the couch, got up, walked to the kitchen and then walked back. Sat down again. Pulled my phone out for the last time and scrolled down to Ollie's number and hit the button.
I was expecting it to ring a while, expecting it to go to voicemail. When Ollie answered just as the first ring died I was caught off guard, my voice caught in my throat.
"Hello Stan," His voice was cool and calm and he sounded like he'd been expecting my call. I cleared my throat.
"Hey," I licked my lips, eyes flicking to the TV again. "Hey, uh, so… Uh, how was your day?"
"Intriguing," Ollie answered, as if he couldn't tell I was mentally flopping around like a fish out of water.
"I'm sure it was…" I ran a hand through my hair. Where to now?
"I'm sorry," Ollie said into the silence, and I frowned, but he continued. "I believe I may have been a little harsh on… him, today. It wasn't my intention to make him feel pressured but…"
Ollie's voice faded into a sigh, and I heard something clicking in the background. No, tapping, at a keyboard; Ollie was off on another writing sprint, then. I bit my lip.
"I just need to talk to him," I said finally.
"I know." Ollie said.
"If you hear from him, can you tell him that…" I stopped, sighed, "No, don't. Don't tell him, I don't want him to think I'm being paranoid or something."
"You're a good guy, Stan," Ollie said, with the faintest hint of wistfulness in his voice.
"That's the problem," I sighed, "You all think I am, but I don't think you're right."
For a moment there was just quiet, true quiet, even the tapping of computer keys was silenced.
"Just wait," Ollie said eventually, "He'll come home."
"Yeah," I said, and said goodbye, tossing the phone onto the coffee table. He had to come home, right? Come home. What if this wasn't home anymore?
I sat back, staring at the TV again. I needed to talk to him, but where to start? What to say? What to ask? I wanted to know, I needed to know, I needed to know everything because otherwise I'd wonder, wonder, and debate, and wonder again, and even though I was trying so hard right then I couldn't help imagining that he was… he was…
I groaned, rubbing my eyes and trying, trying so hard. I turned the volume up and leaned back against the couch and waited for the hours to pass.
The bedroom door opened near silently. I was just close enough to sleep that I didn't move at the slight sound, stayed still as he crossed the room slowly, cautiously. A moment of stillness, then I could feel the far side of the bed dip as he sat down on the edge. Another moment, and then I could feel him laying down, moving on the mattress. I tensed, wondering if he was going to try to get closer to me, but he didn't, and if the pressure on the mattress extended a little across the middle it was just barely.
That was fine. It was fine that he came home past midnight and it was fine that he didn't want to get closer and it was even fine that just for a moment I felt the ghost of his fingertips on my back.
"You weren't entirely wrong, I guess," I said, opening my eyes to look at the night-darkened wall in front of me. Red shifted slightly on the bed behind me, surprised. "I mean, he's always there, in the back of my mind. He's not loud, but he's there."
I closed my eyes again, squeezed them shut. Whatever, whatever, it was beyond time for this. It was much too long to be carrying this around and I was just so tired of it. Just so tired. Why was he there, in the back of my head, silent and staring and waiting.
"I didn't like him," I said, sighing, "I barely knew him. High school started and shit started to go down with… with Kenny's family and Kyle and my parents…" the screaming and the fighting and the yelling "…I just didn't really pay attention to anything. Anything. There was so much shit and I was just trying to survive high school, you know?"
"I…I got on the JV football team, and so did Clyde, and wherever Clyde was, Craig was there too," My voice wavered on his name; it felt strange on my tongue. "He was just there. I… I guess we talked? We must have. And he went to the parties but he spent all his time ignoring everyone and not drinking and just fooling around with his camera. He was always behind the lens…"
I swallowed thickly, "I barely knew him but I guess I knew he was always around, just on the edges... I barely knew him… and then that night… It's… It's eleven and I'm just sitting there staring at the computer screen watching a rerun of the Broncos game, and suddenly my phone buzzes. I didn't even have his number put in so I had no idea who was calling, just a random number calling and calling and I just decided to pick it up…"
I pulled my hand out from under the pillow and pressed it against my eyes, felt the tears on my cheeks that I didn't even remember shedding. I gritted my teeth, trying to keep the hollow wind and the blowing leaves out of my head, keep the creak of the swings away, keep the… the…
"I never told anyone I picked up." I choked out, pressing the heel of my hand against my eyes, hard, painfully hard. "Not the police, not my friends, no one. I picked up. It would have all been different… But it wasn't. I picked up. And it was… It was Craig, and he didn't sound wrong. And he didn't sound bad. He just asked if I'd meet him at the park, just that. Eleven at night and my parents had just grounded me for driving the car into the mailbox after celebrating finally getting my license with some binge-drinking at Cartman's, and he asked me to go meet him so I did. I snuck out the back and walked on over. I still don't know why I did it, I never did figure that out. Just… just something, something maybe in his voice? Or just the fact that he called me, and he'd never called me before. For some reason it all seemed logical then but I can't figure it out anymore…"
Deep breath. Relax the hand. Don't rupture your eyes. Ignore the wetness and the saltiness and just breathe. Breathe.
"He was just… sitting on a swing, his camera in his hands. For once he wasn't looking through the viewfinder, and it was weird to have him looking at me without it as a filter. I sat on a swing next to him, and for a while we didn't talk or anything. I remember thinking it was boring, and kind of cold even though it was the beginning of summer. Then, just out of nowhere, he started talking. Talking about… about his photography, and his filming. Talking about school and his friends and how they were the only good thing about it. He wanted to be a film-maker, you know? Wanted to make stuff people would want to see, not stupid movies or shows or anything, but real stuff… I don't know why I was there, I don't know why I was there to hear it all. It was weird and I didn't want to be there because it all started edging on personal things, things like his parents never being around for him and his sister and how the only person he liked was Clyde and how it made him feel weird sometimes," I gnawed my lip, pausing for a moment, "I guess he was trying to figure himself out? I was trying to figure myself out too but I didn't go calling up people I barely knew in the middle of the night to have a heart-to-heart in an abandoned playground. I don't know."
"He looked at me at one moment, and I looked at him and it was… I don't know. People were always getting us mixed up and I never knew why but I knew why then, looking at him, in the darkness, there was just enough similarities that it was like looking into a really misty mirror. I don't know. I guess that's when it changed." I licked my suddenly dry lips, gripped my pillow to myself tightly. "I guess that's when I saw it. I guess… he didn't like me, or maybe he did once but… I… I… didn't see that, then. I saw longing. He wanted something from me, something… I don't know. I don't know what. I can't forget them… his eyes… it was so … so dark, but his eyes were so blue."
"We were there for a couple of hours, at least. Maybe a little more. Spent some of the time talking about s… stupid shit, like pets… god, we talked about Sparky and Stripe for such a long time, and… I was kind of… happy? I was happy. Shit was still so messed up and…and I was just, having this rough time, and then I just get out there and we're talking and it's like nothing matters or anything…" I tried not to sputter my words, tried to keep them coming out of my throat, tried to keep them from sticking in my lungs, crushing them with the pressure of their weight. "And then I had to go, and… and he said he was going to get going too… and I decided that I was g-going to talk to him… the next day, ask him, you know, why. Why."
-and never an answer-
"I was halfway home when my phone started buzzing again… I… I didn't answer, I was tired, it was like two in the morning, I just… I kept walking…" I tried to keep my voice from shaking, I really did, "But then my phone buzzed again, a short one. Voicemail. I pulled it out and I saw… saw Craig's number. Again. And something just, I don't know, something gripped me and I couldn't breathe. Something about the way he'd been talking…"
"I started walking back to the park. Then I started… started running, but I was far and… and it was like fifteen minutes to get there. I ran so fast but I didn't get there in time. I didn't get there in time…" My voice died, I tried to say more but my words were stolen away by memories of a stale wind and crunching leaves and the gently twitching body of a lonely boy hanging from the monkey bars by the strap of his camera.
"I ran home," I choked out through my tightening throat, "A-and I listened to the v-voicemail and all he said was I'm sorry. And I… I listened to it… over… and over… and morning came and then the police came and they asked if I talked to him… and I said no. I lied. I lied and I kept lying and I just… I lied to… to all my friends… I lied to Clyde… I… I lied to you. I haven't been honest in such a long time…"
"And you were right… I've never been all there for you, not the way I should have been. He's always in my head, right out of reach, always… I don't know… maybe I'm crazy, maybe… I just… I don't like mirrors much anymore…" I shuddered, "But that's no excuse. There's no excuse…"
For a moment I could just hear my ragged breathing, feel the tears run down my face. I closed my eyes and I could see deep blue staring back at me. I choked out a sob and buried my face in the pillow and tried to ignore the silence in the room and tried to ignore the boy staring at me from the back of my mind.
When I woke up, Red was gone.
