Chapter Text
you fit into me
like a hook into an eyea fish hook
an open eye--Margaret Atwood, [you fit into me]
In the night, buried beneath his covers, L waits for Beyond to return.
He would like to sleep but he can’t; his mind is rushing quick and his body feels like a live wire. He curls tight around himself and bites down hard on his knuckles and tells himself to breathe, in and out, just like a real person.
Their apartment is moonbright. He’d forgotten to shut the blinds and the effort of leaving the warmth of the bed feels past him so he doesn’t. He looks out onto their room, which is dusted with white light — their dresser, the big fern by the door which they’d dragged all the way from a university sale, Beyond’s bedside table with its lamp and books piled high. He thinks maybe he could read one of Beyond’s books and it would be as if he were there.
Except Beyond doesn’t like it when L touches his things. Sometimes he doesn’t mind the consequences of that and sometimes he does. Tonight he can’t decide.
It’s always like this when Beyond isn’t here. Beyond is the calm centre of his world, the thing around which all things revolve.
There’s no L without Beyond. Everyone they know says Beyond follows L around like a dog and that’s true but no one understands what it’s like to have someone like that, someone who loves you without condition, someone who bites like a dog.
He rolls over and looks at his bedside table instead, his books.
There’s a click from outside.
He sits up.
That’s the door. That’s Beyond.
It won’t do to lie around like he’s been waiting. He sits up and grabs the first book of his pile and opens it to the bookmarked page, stares at it like he’s reading.
From outside, he listens to the rustle of Beyond taking off his shoes and then his coat, familiar noises, noises that invoke in him a calm and a panic beneath the calm, a fear he drinks down sweet. Then he hears Beyond’s feet padding across their wooden floor.
Their bedroom door clicks open and Beyond steps inside.
He breathes out.
“Still awake?” Beyond says. His voice is creaky, just like it always is; it sounds like the wind through dry trees. Then, “You’re not going to look at me?”
L looks up. He smiles. He makes it wry, just like Beyond likes.
Beyond is tall and dark-haired; he’s wearing black jeans and a black shirt and his pale skin looks stark in the moonlight. He smiles back at L. It’s a crooked smile, just the way L likes.
“What are you reading?” he says. He walks across the room then climbs onto the bed in his street clothes. He falls back against the headboard and wraps an arm around L, then plucks the book out of his hand.
It’s a book of poetry. Beyond reads out loud.
“You fit into me like a hook into an eye — this is cute. I didn’t know you read poetry.”
“It’s for my English class,” L says. He’s a psychology student, but there’s an English requirement for all students. “So, I do now, but only under duress.”
He burrows into Beyond’s arms. Beyond laughs, with his voice that is like the wind. “I need to get changed,” he says.
“No,” L tells him. “Stay.”
Beyond laughs again, then runs his knuckles along L’s jaw.
L flinches. It hurts.
“Don’t be silly,” Beyond says, but he lets go, takes his hand off the bruise that blooms there. It’s nothing. It’s really nothing. It was nothing and it will be nothing.
L settles against him. “Stay,” he says, again, then settles against Beyond’s chest.
Beyond kisses his temple. “Okay,” he promises. “I’ll stay.”
L smiles.