Part I - Howell
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Notes/Disclaimer: Am I the only one who's noticed how similar Leon's situation was to Howell's? Well, anyway, it spawned this fic. Petshop of Horrors and its characters, though I love them, do not belong to me.
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I know it's ridiculous, but I can't stop thinking about him. He's cold. A cold, arrogant jerk. And yet... And yet there's something about him that draws me to him, keeps me coming back, keeps me returning for our verbal sparring again and again.
Maybe it's in the way he teases me, the way he leads me on and teases me forward and runs circles around me and drives me absolutely stark raving mad. Maybe it's the look in his eyes when he does it. Maybe it's the deep, dark depths of his eyes, always so serious and hidden, strange and stormy and full of terrible secrets.
Or maybe it's his hesitancy, the slight pause that no one else but me would notice. The coldness, the blast of icy winter that follows him everywhere and chills all of those around him, it parts. No one else sees that he curbs it slightly, around me. No one else knows him well enough to notice how he seems slightly unsure of himself in my presence, a man who is never unsure of anything. But here he is. Why?
A rhetorical question. The mysteries are so thick between us that I could wade through them for years without ever approaching this particular question.
But it's not enough for me not to know. I'm at this school because I can't stop digging, because my whole life I have been obsessed with solving mysteries. And he is the greatest one of all.
This is why I choose to approach him. This is why I force him down, knowing full well that he is allowing me to force him, that I would never be able to touch him otherwise.
Silk sliding on skin. Silk sliding from skin. Silk sliding snake-like onto the ground at our feet.
This is why I try to have his body, try to claim it. There is a need like terror possessing me. The knowledge that I will never know this man, never understand him, if we should live a thousand years. This is why I run my fingers over pale, delicate skin, searching for answers, searching some hint of his emotions, his intentions, searching for a bottom to the mystery, like treading water when your feet can't reach the ground.
Dive under and look down, and it goes on forever beneath you, a dark cavernous depth of water, endless, endless, and deep. So very deep. Stare into its blackness, its eternity. Stare down, knowing you could fall forever, and lose yourself in the madness and the terror.
And I lose myself. I lose myself in his body, in the ecstasy. I feel the condescension of him. Like a God coming down from on high, allowing himself to be taken. Even as I'm inside him I know in my mind that I am not touching him. I can never touch him. Even as we tangle and moan and stumble towards something that has been inevitable since the moment I first saw him, even as we do this, I can feel him standing above us, cool calm, collected. Watching us, with that amused little smile on his face, untouched, unruffled.
Untouchable.
I've always known he is, but I have to try. I have to do this, you understand. I know he understands. He would not allow me this moment of trying to claim him if he did not. Although I know that he allows it because he knows that it is impossible. He finds it amusing that I should try such a thing, that I should attempt the unthinkable act of trying to make him mine.
But he is. I know he is, some small part of him, because I have seen the cracks in his mask. I have seen the splintering, spidery cracks in the shattered ice. Not yet fallen to pieces. Perhaps it never will. Perhaps it is merely a bullet-hole in an glacier, like a mosquito bite, too small to be noticed. But I am inside him now, and surely that must be registered, at least on some level.
I close my eyes at the climax and can feel his stare boring into me. The way he watches me, the piercing cold intensity of his gaze and it's a wonder I don't freeze on the spot, a solid block of ice at the eternal peak of pleasure, forever frozen with him in this position, for eternity. I would almost welcome it, to be caught forever. At least I would be given the time to work on the mysteries. I could begin to search for the ends of the Gordian Knot that is his soul. Begin the slow unraveling.
But time will pause for no one. And I see him getting up, still calm, still amused. I watch as the silk slides back over his shoulders like water. And in his profile I see that smirk, the knowing, unaltered smile.
But...
But for just a second, just a tiny, infinite fraction of a moment, it falters. And I see what I have always suspected: a strange, lost look. A child who doesn't know what he wants, or why. A solitary animal strayed too far from the herd. A being in unfamiliar surroundings, with desires he does not understand, but cannot suppress.
But it is only a moment.
And he moves away from me.
And I call after him, intending to ask something, find a single question whose answer could somehow define for me his essence, encompass the whole of his mysteries. I call his name, and he turns, and looks questioningly, uncaringly back at me.
And there is no question. Of course there isn't. How could there be?
Instead I ask why he gave his teacher the credit for his work. A small mystery, insignificant perhaps beside all the others. But unlike the others, it is something for which perhaps an answer exists.
He smiles. He understands why this question and not another.
"Human fame does not interest me," he says.
And then, like an icy breeze, he is gone.