Title: A Portrait of Steve Sloan.
Series: Portrait vignettes.
Rating: R
Warnings: Alternative universe, disturbing images, first person format.
Summary: One night, two lives…
A Portrait of Steve Sloan
By NorthernStar
I listen to the rain, shattering the silence the bedroom. It would rain like this in Vietnam.
I concentrate on better things. More immediate things…Jesse's breathing. Uneven, snuffling. He's dreaming.
He dreams. I remember.
My hand goes almost unconsciously to the tiny scar on my temple. My fingers trace the mark, healed now into the faintest little crescent. Its years old.
I was a boy when it happened, younger even than Jesse is now, in both years and maturity. Fired up on patriotism and the unerring sense of immortality possessed by the young.
A crack of lightening lights the room, just as the flash of the gun firing all those years ago had lit everything I saw. Obliterated the sight and even the smell of the hootch. Sometimes I'll even swear I saw the bullet as it let the barrel.
I close my eyes, force my breathing to restart. The sound of my own heart racing offering a bitter comfort; reminding me, as it had back then, just how fragile life really was.
I had thought I was going to die. But I was wrong. Pain, sharper and deeper than I had ever experienced before had flowered in my skull. My head rung from the shot, blood jetted from the bullet graze. My bones almost seemed to collapse in on themselves and the excrement-covered floor had risen up to meet me. Lying there, I knew I was already dead.
But I lived.
And you know, it's all subjective in the end, and sometimes, like now; it feels as though I wasn't so wrong after all.
I push the thought away, and roll closer to my lover, to my soulmate. I kiss the soft skin at the base of Jesse's neck, breathing in his scent. He smells faintly of sex and musk and the stink of the Vietnamese jungle fades in its wake.
He continues to sleep and dream.
I envy him his peace.
I know I'll never have the same.
~~End~~