Work Text:
“It’s hard.”
“Feeling real?”
“Being real.”
They’re sitting on the floor of Jack’s room now, lit by only the moonlight streaming through the open window and the soft, warm lamp on the corner of Jack’s messy desk. It’s nearly midnight now. Jack knows he should go to sleep, he does, but electricity is crackling under his skin, from the tips of his fingers to something hollow in his chest, and it’s difficult to sleep when David is around. He doesn’t want to stop talking to him, and David doesn’t want to leave.
Jack’s gaze flicks up to where David is sitting, slouched against the wall opposite of his bed. He can make him out, clear as day; the swoops of his umber curls, the freckles dotted across the expanse of pale cheeks, the buttons of his blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The haze in his eyes is different tonight, though.
A few beats of silence pass, until a faraway taxi honks its horn and New York fills the room again, urging Jack to speak. “You are real, though.”
“I don’t feel like I am. Like I should be,” David says, voice soft. Jack watches him, watches the way his fingertips brush together as he fiddles with the cap of the pen he always keeps in his back pocket. “I don’t think I was meant for this.”
“Meant for what?”
“I don’t know. This.”
Jack blows his hair out of his face, then shifts to bring himself closer to David, sitting in front of him. He observes him for a few moments, just like always, because when is Jack not observing David? When does he not notice the way his gaze shifts when he’s uncomfortable, the lack of eye contact, the way the corner of his mouth ticks down into a frown before he schools that perfectly practiced neutral expression on his face? When does he not see the fuzzy outline of his person, blending into the background like he’s not meant to be there?
Jack clears his throat. “I don’t think you gotta be meant for anything, Dave. I think you just gotta be.”
“I’ve never been allowed to just be,” he whispers, and Jack swear he feels the temperature drop. Maybe it’s the breeze. Maybe it’s David. “I don’t— I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know anything anymore. It’s been so long since I’ve had to think about who I am, and now…”
“Now it feels different.”
“Yeah. Different.”
They fall into silence again. Jack doesn’t know what to say when David gets like this. He doesn’t know how to touch him- how to comfort without shock, how to feel without startling him into disappearance. With a nod of his head, though, after thirty seconds or so of listening to street conversations and tires on asphalt, Jack says, “Tell me how. How different.”
“It’s just,” David starts before cutting himself off with a shift of his body, gaze darting to the left again before training back on Jack’s knee. “It’s different. I don’t know how to describe it… Like I’m not me anymore. Like I’m my own shadow. I walk behind what I think I should be, and I can’t change my own movement, my own decisions. Everything changes, and I haunt.”
Jack nods again, slow, and takes in a breath. “Is it really a bad thing, though? Haunting?”
After a moment of contemplation, David slowly tilts his chin up, and Jack sees curiosity in those dull blue eyes, in the knick of his furrowed brow.
He doesn’t say anything. Jack continues.
“I think it’s sorta beautiful, in a way,” He says, leaning back against the bedpost behind his back. “I think… the negatives of haunting, the, y’know, feelin’ like you’re left behind part— that’s awful. It is. There’s no denyin’ that. But, I don’t know, there might be somethin’ good about livin’ in the past.”
“Like what?”
“Like… how you don’t gotta worry about what people think. Just what they remember. The future’s always gonna be a constant clean slate, then.” Jack pauses, and cocks his head. “And like, you don’t have to do, like I said, you just have to be, and that takes the pressure off. You don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules. You set your own pace, you make your own calls… You haunt. You deserve the chance to haunt, Davey.”
David darts away again, arms crossed over his chest. “I don’t really feel alive anymore. I forgot what it’s like.”
“That’s okay, too,” Jack murmurs. “We can bring you back to life, when you’re ready. You don’t gotta worry about that right now. Focus on gettin’ your feet back on the ground, okay? I can live enough for the both of us.”
If it means that David can breathe again, if it means David loses the weight of centuries on his shoulders, if he can leave behind the apparition he feels like he is— yeah. Jack can take care of everything else for a while. He can read the signs, he can listen for the knocks on the walls showing David is still here, David isn’t going anywhere. He can be real when David can’t.
After a moment, David looks up at him, alive as ever, and grins. That’s all Jack will ever need from him.