
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/315424.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
  Fandom:
      Dragon_Age
  Relationship:
      Fenris/Male_Hawke, Fen/Garrett, Fenris/Various
  Character:
      Garrett_Hawke, Fen, Varania, Bethany_Hawke, Isabela, Anders, Merrill,
      Serendipity, OC's, Dan
  Additional Tags:
      Drabbles, Alphabet_Meme, Angst, D/s, Unhealthy_Relationships
  Series:
      Part 3 of 'Coffee,_Blackverse'
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-01-07 Completed: 2012-02-25 Chapters: 26/26 Words: 18115
****** Espresso Shots ******
by black_ink_tide
Summary
     There's a great character exploration meme on tumblr started where
     you pick a character that you hold dear, and write something for each
     letter in the alphabet. So... here be the drabbles for Fen (from my
     Coffee, Black DA-AU) A to Z.
***** A is for Anaphylactic Shock *****
“Rainy?”
He’s seven and she’s nine.
“Rainy.”
He says her name again, but she can’t answer.
She can’t even breathe.
They’ve been alone in the house all afternoon, since school ended and she
walked him home. She’s limp on the porch like a rag-doll. He’s sitting in the
doorway, keeping the door open with his body, folded in on himself because
Rainy can’t breathe and can’t talk and can’t tell him what to do.
The TV is on inside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it sounds so far away.
And there aren’t any grown ups here to help.
She reaches for him, her cool pale hand closing around his thin dark wrist and
he sees it.
A bee! A bee is in her arm.
A little yellow and black bee, stuck to her skin like a burr on the dog they
had at the last house.
And he knows what to do.
Leto knows because the school nurse had told him, shown him.
That pretty school nurse with pretty blue eyes. He’d been too shy to look at
her for too long, but he listened to everything she said, because she told him
that he needed to know, because someday it might save his sister.
His Rainy.
The school nurse had shown him how to open the little needle. She said the one
she had wouldn’t stick him but a real one would. She opened it and brought it
against his thigh while he sat on the cot in her office. He’d jumped, because
Leto never liked people touching him and he wasn’t expecting her to do that;
Rainy had giggled behind her hands.
Inside the pen was medicine would save his Rainy. He knows where it is. He runs
inside and gets it, the screen door shutting between them.
He thinks about the pretty school nurse’s hands as he opens it, kneeling next
to Rainy who is so, so quiet but still awake. He injects it into Rainy’s thigh,
through her jeans, just like the nurse had taught him to. He had paid
attention. He had to.
Because even then he knew that there wasn’t going to be anyone else to save
her.
                                       …
“Oh, fuck.”
He’s standing up, and then in a second, he isn’t.
“Garrett?” I can’t see him; he went down behind the island in the kitchen.
I move fast because this is wrong.
He said oh, fuck and then is quiet. No explanation. No laugh. Nothing. And his
voice sounded off.
Wrong.
He just folded and went down and he’s so quiet now that I can’t even hear him
breathing.
Because he isn’t breathing, Fen; he isn’t breathing.
“Garrett, look at me!”
He tries to.
Fuck.
He can’t tell me, can’t look, can’t breathe.
“What—”
He shifts one long leg under me, bends the knee, and I look down. He’s
barefoot. And in the arch of his foot—
I’m up, because I know he keeps one in the kitchen where he keeps the asprin
and the cough drops – the medicine.
“Look at me,” I’m trying to sound calm, because he’s pale and tight and can’t
focus. Don’t die, Garrett, I’m right here, it’s right here.
I uncap the epipen and drop the cap coming back down next to him and hold it
against the side of his thigh, activate, and wait for it to inject.
He reels forward when it does, relief, and his head collides with my chest.
I have to hold this here, in place, and I do, but I try to hold him too. Hold
on to him.
I count. Seconds that seem too long. I pull it away from him and I rub the
injection site with my fingertips.
He breathes against me, shuddering, tight gasps of air.
The bee. I reach down and scrape it out of his skin. It’s a warm day and we
left the windows open. It came in, was on the kitchen floor. He stepped on it.
A fucking bee in the fucking kitchen.
“You’re okay, I’m here, I’m right here,” I hold on to him, just him, but I need
to get him up, because he needs to go to the ER; he’s breathing but this isn’t
done yet.
He’d told me he was allergic. That he’s very allergic. It’s worse than Rainy,
it happened faster. I was losing him faster.
“Hawke,” I bury my nose in his hair for a second; he smells like panic and he
grips me, holds onto me, “You’re okay, Hawke, I’ve got you. We have to get up.
Now. Can you stand up?”
He grunts and I help get him up, slowly, because his blood pressure is too low,
wrong.
He’s heavy, shaking from deep inside. Hawke. I’ve got you.
I call Leandra from the hospital. I sound so much calmer than I feel.
When she comes through the doors she hugs me. Tight. Without hesitation.
“He’s okay,” I tell her, bringing my arms up around her, patting her back – she
smells like honey.
She pulls back after a moment and kisses my temple and says thank you but she
doesn’t need to say that. Not to me.
We go in to see him together. He’s comfortable. Safe. His foot it swollen and
he’s hooked up to an IV and I can’t look at the place where the needle
disappears into his skin.
But he’s smiling.
There’s a TV on in the room. I glance at it while Leandra is fussing sweetly
about his pillows and asking him what the fuck he was thinking stepping on a
goddamn bee.
It’s The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. On the TV. With the volume down low.
I let out a breath and think about that pretty blue-eyed school nurse because
she’s easier to think about than Rain is. I haven’t thought about her for so
long.
“Fen.”
He says my name and I turn back to him.
And I smile.
***** B is for Bastard. *****
He’s nine years old when he looks up the word.
He stole the dictionary from the school library two schools ago. He likes
sitting up at night and reading the words he doesn’t know, words that he likes
that no one ever says out loud. Anachronistic. Cimmerian. Wanderlust. Rampike.
Leto likes knowing words far more than he likes using them.
Today, Rain called him something new. And the word stung even though he didn’t
know what it meant. No. He knew what it meant. He knew because of the way she
said it. He can hear the meaning in unfamiliar words the way that Rain can hear
music in notes printed on paper.
He’s sitting in his bed with a flashlight and the big red dictionary spread
across his lap.
His finger finds the word before his eyes do, because sometimes he can’t focus
on things fast enough and sometimes he has to move closer to see, especially
when it’s dark.
 
bas·tard
noun
1. a person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child.
2. Slang.
a. a vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked person: Some bastard slashed
the tires on my car.
b. a person, especially a man: The poor bastard broke his leg.
3. something irregular, inferior, spurious, or unusual.
4. illegitimate in birth.
5. spurious; not genuine; false: The architecture was bastard Gothic.
6. of abnormal or irregular shape or size; of unusual make or proportions:
bastard quartz; bastard mahogany.
 
Leto reads all of the definitions, sounding out the words that he doesn’t know
already. Then he looks them up. Sounds them out again, his voice very quiet in
a very quiet house. Not even a whisper.
He could guess what those words meant before looking them up, though. They were
all hard words. Inferior. Spurious. Despicable. Illegitimate.
Rain had a different dad. He never knew him. He left when Leto was born.
Not when, Rain told him, because.
…
“Ahh!!” he’s tilting my phone, looking at his reflection in the screen, “You
didn’t tell me!”
I laugh; he’s not really bothered, “Stop. Come here. Let me help you.”
Hawke sets down my phone and drops down onto the blanket with me, kneeling
between my spread knees, “I can’t believe you were just going to let me walk
around like this all day.”
It’s warm. A sunny Tuesday and Hawke’s radiating heat through his t-shirt and
his jeans. I feel it against the inside of my thighs as he crawls over me. His
hips pin mine and I exhale, reaching for his jaw.
“Bastard,” I feel him say softly as he leans in, as he kisses my neck.
The park is quiet, mostly empty, and he had to get out of the apartment. He
said he felt cagey -- he’s been painting a lot lately and selling pieces. It
makes him feel productive and accomplished but at the cost of feeling like a
shut-in.
I’ve gotten used to seeing him spattered all the time. Blues. Greens. Black.
White. Red today, across the bridge of his nose.
I noticed, he didn’t.
Until he did.
He pulls back and I rub at the paint with my index finger.
“It won’t come off now like that,” he sighs, smiling, dry paint crinkling but
not cracking, “I’m stuck like this.”
“Forever?”
He chuckles, “Maybe.”
“I kind of like it," I shrug, "Suits you.”
He laughs and rolls to the side and we lay there, staring up through the
leaves.
I close my eyes. On the inside of my eyelids I see the pattern of shifting
amber light through green leaves.
And red paint.
And black words printed on thin white paper.
***** C is for Candle. *****
He is eleven years old when he wakes up in a hospital for the first time.
He knows that there are other people in the room and he doesn’t want them to
know that he’s awake because they’re going to want to talk to him more. And his
back hurts and he doesn’t want to talk.
Talking about it makes it real.
A nurse wakes him up (he was really asleep this time, sometime, between dinner
and now). Her hands are gentle and even though Leto doesn’t like to be touched,
it feels okay when she touches him. She peels back the pad of gauze taped to
his shoulder, cleans the cut, and replaces the gauze.
And then she asks him if he wants to walk around. She asks him the way that an
adult asks another adult something, and he turns his head to look at her. He
nods.
She gives him a bathrobe to wear and it’s too big. The sleeves end way past his
fingers and she kneels in front of him, rolling them up. He thinks that she
must have kids, because she knows exactly how to do this.
It’s very late, and as they walk the oval loop around the nurse’s station in
the middle of the floor, he hears the other patients snoring, or the beeping of
monitors, the sound of machines. She doesn’t talk or expect him to talk, this
nurse with smooth dark skin and short hair and a thin gold chain around her
neck and they keep walking until they pass a room with a cross on the door. He
stops.
“You want to go in, sweetheart?”
He nods and she pushes the door open for him. It’s quiet and smells like the
rest of the hospital but there’s supposed to be God in this room.
He looks for Him, but as far as Leto can tell it’s just another empty room in a
hospital at night.
The nurse stands next to him with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes
closed.
He steps towards the little white candles. He knows what they mean. He read
about this. Prayers to him are like all the places he’s read about but never
seen.
He wants to light one but she doesn’t have a match and there aren’t any out.
The nurse tells him that they can just pretend to light it; It’ll mean the same
thing. God understands.
Leto doesn’t know if He does. Or if He’s real.
Or if he’s just alone now, now that Rain did what she did.
She cut him.
With scissors.
He won’t be able to use the real word for it for a long time.
Cut is easier to say.
Cut doesn’t go as deep as stab.
He blinks fast and takes the candle from the nurse’s hand.
They won’t be together anymore. His sister is far away from him. Separated.
Gone.
He says his first and last prayer that night, holding an unlit candle. For his
sister.
                                       …
I walk in but the place is quiet and dark.
It’s not late so I expected him to be awake, on the couch, with a pizza. That
was, I had been lead to believe, the plan.
But the couch is empty and the TV is off. And there is no pizza.
“Hawke?”
“Hey.”
He’s in the bathroom.
In the bath.
I push the door open and drop my bag outside in the hall, “You look a little
big for that tub, Hawke.”
Fuck, he’s beautiful. Wet hair on wet skin. His cock, half-hard in the water.
Fuck, Hawke.
More than anything, it’s those eyes smiling. It’s always those eyes.
The bathroom is humid and dark, just lit by candles. A lot of them. Scattered
all over the available flat surfaces in the room.
“I’m not that big.”
I laugh, “Yes. You are.”
He wrinkles his nose, “There is plenty of room in here, Fen.”
I blink at him. All of him.
“You’re… you want me to…”
He smiles and sits up, water dripping from his shoulders, “I opened a bottle of
wine.”
There are two glasses classily waiting on the closed toilet lid.
“I can see that.”
Those eyes, though. I give in. I strip while he watches me, mouth curling and
blue eyes dark in the candlelight.
I get in – he gives me what he calls the “good side” wedging himself in,
somehow, against the end of the tub with the faucet.
It feels good despite the water being almost too hot. And despite it being so
damn cramped, feels good with our legs together, Hawke’s long body, the shape
of his cock underwater a shadow that I’ll wrap my fingers and lips and tongue
around tonight, and his voice echoing on tiles all around me.
One candle by the sink burns out as he’s talking, sending a thin white column
of smoke up towards the ceiling. For whatever reason it strikes me how easily,
quietly, unnoticed, that change happens – how a lit candle changes into one
that can never be lit again. I watch it as if it means something and sip my
wine while Hawke’s wet finger idly traces a design above my knee.
***** D is for Dropcloth. *****
When Leto Aucoin is twelve years old, he knows that he cannot draw.
He’s in a sixth grade classroom in Louisiana, holding a piece of paper he’s
ruined, when he understands this in the same way that he understands that he
has green eyes (like his mother), black hair (like his father) and a long
straight nose (just like his sister).
Once a week, an art teacher comes to their class. He is strange. Different. He
talks about color and light and shapes and shading. Leto likes that this man is
strange. Leto likes that when he talks, he uses hands with long fingers crusted
with layers of paint and charcoal to explain things in the air in front of
himself. And that he has an earring in one ear and a shark tooth on a piece of
leather around his throat.
He likes that his eyes are sky-light blue and that his eyelashes are dark black
and thick.
Leto likes him.
He thinks about him when he isn’t there, in the classroom. He thinks about him
when he’s falling asleep at night and when he does, he smells paint and the
musty dropcloth that the art teacher brings with him every week.
The dropcloth is nothing special. It’s just a big piece of fabric (what Leto
thought at first was a tarp but what the art teacher tells him is canvas). He
spreads it out on the floor of the classroom when they’ve all pushed their
desks to the edges of the room. They paint there, on the cloth on the floor,
sharing pots of bright, rainbow colored paints in jars. But they each get their
own paper. Sometimes their own square canvases.
Leto cannot draw. And he cannot paint. Nothing looks the way that it’s supposed
to.
The art teacher sits next to him, Indian-style, and tells him that there isn’t
a wrong way to make art – that’s just the way that he, that Leto, sees the
apple. Or the chair. Or the tree.
One day, the last day he sees the art teacher, the man tells him that what he
thinks Leto sees, what he’s painting and drawing, is the light. He tells him
that’s important. That a lot of people never notice the light at all, because
they’re only looking at the form. The object. The thing but not the space
around it.
He doesn’t really believe him, he thinks he’s just being nice, but still Leto
feels something tight and hot and strange in his stomach sitting there with the
man next to him, talking about the light.
It’s the first time he’s ever felt this and he doesn’t entirely know what it is
yet… but it feels good. He knows it’s not something he should talk to anyone
else about. It’s private. His. He want to protect that tight hot strange
feeling in his stomach and he wants that feeling more.
Again.
                                       …
Hawke is tight.
Not just inside, not just in, but everywhere. Tense. Tight. With his head back,
under me, breathing in shallow, shuddering time with me.
And then he gives. Fuck.
This.
This is Hawke. That moment that he gives in, under me, gives in to me, not
because I force him to, not because he has to. He gives in, under, around me,
to me because he wants to.
I’m fucking him on the floor of the studio.
He sits on the floor when he paints, with the canvas propped against the wall.
The shape of him, all that height curled in, focused on painting. On color, on
blending, on shadow and mood and the edges of things that he sees in a white
canvas.
I watched him from the kitchen.
Watched.
Until watching wasn’t enough.
He’s on his back on the floor. On his dropcloth.
His legs are bent, braced against my arms. So much leg.
He says my name, lifting his head off of the canvas to push his forehead
against mine and I do, I push against him, close my eyes and fuck him, my
fingers digging into the layers of dry paint and stiff cloth under his body.
I want this. More of this.
I want to protect this.
More.
Again.
***** E is for Effortless. *****
He’s thirteen when he figures out that he’s charming.
This family is fine; they don’t expect much from him and they don’t talk. He
shows up to meals on time with clean hands and that makes her happy. He does
chores before he’s asked to and that makes him happy. There’s another boy in
the house. Nothing makes him happy but that’s not Leto’s problem.
He comes here to the hospital courtyard after school. Sometimes during school.
There’s a fountain and some grass and stone benches with engraved names. People
come out here to get better, to get sunshine and fresh air, to wait, or to
mourn.
Leto comes here to lie.
He feels charged, like there’s electricity in his arms and his chest and his
brain, because people believe him.
He says that his mother is inside having a baby.
He says that his brother broke his arm.
He says that his father is dying from lung cancer.
He lies, with clean hands, and people believe him.
And sometimes for a few minutes, he believes himself; it feels good to have a
mother, a brother, a father.
Once he tells a boy his age that his sister almost drown and that’s why he’s
here.
The boy looks tired, pale and redheaded and awkward in a way that Leto has
never been awkward.
The boy says his father is dying, slowly, And that’s why he’s here. There’s a
specialist here, at this hospital. He uses phrases like 'last hope' and 'best
option' and 'god's hands.'
Leto watches him, observes his honesty. He’ll practice it later, the way that
this boy moves and stutters and blinks, when he’s alone in the bathroom while
the shower runs.
But he also listens. Really. A part of him does.
The courtyard is empty except for them.
Leto feels something electric but it isn’t his lie.
When he kisses that boy, he does it honestly.
When he slips the five dollar bill from the boy’s pocket that’s honest too. It
its own way.
Both acts are effortless.
                                       …
He’s drunk. He holds eye contact with people for longer when he’s drunk, he
touches more, holds things in his fingers longer and he leans.
We’re on the pub's roof and it’s crowded. We came to support Isabela.
It’s just bad timing and he wasn’t going to just stay home today.
He doesn’t call it an anniversary, because that sounds too pleasant.
Hawke just calls today by its calendar date, nothing else. May First.
He’s talking to Merrill, leaning in towards her, holding his drink with both
hands.
He’s been quiet tonight. Well. Quiet for him.
I watch him from across the roof. He finishes that drink and looks towards the
bar for the next one but when he looks up, he finds me.
He wants to go home but he doesn’t want to be where it’s quiet.
We stay and he drinks until he’s leaning more than standing. When he leads me
inside, he pushes me into a corner where he leans over me and says nothing.
I don't say anything either but kiss him back when he kisses me.
As soon as it’s quiet he won’t be able to think about anything but his dad.
He doesn’t say that. He doesn't say anything.
I read him.
It’s just effortless.
***** F is for Fair. *****
He’s fourteen and he’s about to die.
It’s never even occurred to him before this, before right now, that he could
die. Not even when this boy who is three years older than him had his hand
(which is fucking bigger than Leto’s entire neck) pinned hard and heavy against
the soft part of his throat. The part where the air comes in.
He caught him stealing money from the other side of the room that they share
and this isn’t the first time. He’s been here before with his hand on his
throat.
He figured out a long time ago that this is what scares Leto.
When he can’t breathe, he thinks about Rain, when her throat was so swollen
than she couldn’t breathe or say ‘help’.
He thinks of his father, the only memory he has of him, coughing red blood into
his hand.
The boy presses harder and Leto hears something pop.
Everything is black at the edges. It's going too far this time, further than
last time.
He’s dying. Right now.
He got caught. Maybe it’s only fair.
But the last thing he thinks before everything goes black is No.
No. This is not fucking fair at all.
                                       …
To be honest, neither one of us is interested in the mid-state fair.
I hate it, actually.
Hawke wanted to come for two reasons – the food and the people watching.
It’s after dark now and we’re meandering past the livestock pavilion (Hawke was
interested enough to go in and look at a pig; one horrible pig later and he was
done with the pavilion as a whole) and finally talking about going back to the
hotel when his cell phone rings.
He answers it with one hand, holding a churro (his third one) in the other
hand.
“Hey, Bethy!” he smiles broadly. She’s still in Italy but her year abroad is
technically over, “What time is it there?”
I smile; For all the things that Hawke is brilliant at, he has a surprisingly
limited sense of time. It doesn't matter that Bethany's been in Italy for over
a year, or if I've been in Reykjavik or London or Prague for a month, he starts
every international phone call with a greeting and, 'What time is it there?'
He bites off the end of his churro then offers the rest to me. I decline.
I hate the fair. I hate the noise, the food, and the music, and the midway and…
Jesus Christ, I hate livestock.
"Ah," He shrugs and takes another bite, “No, we're at the fair. Right? What’s
going on?”
He’s stopped walking.
I stop too.
“What?”
He’s pulled in a lungful of air and it holding on to it.
I watch his face as he listens to the phone clutching the churro and plugging
his ear to hear her better, “I don’t… you’re what?”
He’s focused on the ground, on the disgusting wet pavement under our feet for a
long time, listening to her, nodding silently, "Yeah. Yeah. Have you..." he
listens to her for a long time and finally looks up at me, blinking, looking
equal parts terrified and delighted, “Yeah, he's right here. Fen?”
“Yes?”
“I need you to take the phone and talk to Bethany because she’s pregnant and
keeping the baby," he hands me the phone, "and I need to sit down.”
***** G is for German. *****
When Leto is fifteen he only speaks German.
He didn’t speak at all after everything went black in a bedroom he never saw
again.
They told him that he had a laryngeal fracture.
They tell him that the scar where they opened his throat so he could breathe
will hardly be noticeable at all.
They keep telling him that he’s lucky.
Other boys’ voices change that year but when he has a voice again his isn’t
changed, he knows, it’s broken. At first it’s hoarse, flat, and he can’t
control it at all so he stays quiet.
Eventually it sounds smoother but not smooth; he doesn’t sound like anyone
else. He never will again.
They put him back in school and on the first day he decides that if he’s going
speak, he might as well speak German because it’s a language that sounds right
in this voice.
He sits in the back of his classes at a this new school and learns the language
from a book; when he doesn’t know the German word for an answer, he just says
nothing.
The teachers eventually stop calling on him and some of the kids think he’s a
foreign exchange student.
The Russian foreign exchange student he sits next to in geometry knows that he
isn’t.
Her name is Stella.
He loses his virginity to her on the band room floor behind a drum during the
lunch hour on a Friday. She’s seventeen and beautiful and she tells him that
his voice makes her wet. He watches her fingers as she makes herself come in
the band room, in the parking lot, in the bedroom at her host family’s house.
He uses his fingers to make her come in the biology lab and in the parking lot.
He makes her come with his tongue in the bedroom at her host family’s house.
When Leto is sixteen, he only speaks Russian.
                                       …
“Well, look at you!” Isabela pulls on his suspenders and then reaches up for
Hawke’s cheeks, “You’re just fucking adorable.”
I wonder if she notices the flush in his skin the way I do. If she feels it.
I can’t see anything but that — the blush on his chest, his throat, his cheeks.
I still feel it in my palms, my lips, my skin. Him.
“Look at you!” he says glancing down while she’s still squeezing his face,
“Look at them.”
Isabela is wearing a dirndl. A very… fitted dirndl.
We have been dragged, or rather enthusiastically invited, to Kirkwall’s version
of Oktoberfest tonight. It’s… festive.
“Oh, this old thing?” she lets him go, she kisses my cheek, “I just had it
lying around. Andy’s getting seats figured out. You want to go in? When did you
get here?”
“Ahh…” he looks at me, smiling and blinking fast, “a… while ago.”
That’s true. A while ago we arrived. Too early. This restaurant is in the hills
outside the city so rather than waiting in the parking lot, Hawke had suggested
that we drive around and maybe try to find somewhere to park near the creek and
then walk around.
“Or something.”
We never made it out of the car.
It was hot, fast, fun. Like being sixteen.
I was in his lap in the backseat when I came, my cock and my hip in his hands.
He was close, shaking, with his cock in my hand when he asked me to talk to
him.
I did. In German.
“Uh-huh…” Isabela looks from him to me, because she knows and because he’s what
he calls, loved-up and giddy and smiling with messy hair. Everywhere.
Completely obvious, Hawke.
“Well, the accordion and massive quantities of beer beckon,” she smirks and
bends her elbow at me and I get the idea and take it while Hawke shoulders the
door open for both of us.
He laughed after he came and I can still feel that laugh in my palms, my lips,
my skin.
I realize as we walk inside that I might be a little loved-up too.
***** H is for Heroes. *****
He’s seventeen years old and sitting in the front seat of his sister’s car.
She’s nineteen and it’s the last time he’ll see her but he doesn’t know that.
It’s raining hard and they’re sitting in the car outside a liquor store in
Baton Rouge at night.
She turns up the radio. Her fingernails are chipped silver and short, like
little broken claws.
He didn’t want to see her but Serendipity talked him into it when he showed up
at her house this morning angry, fucking pissed off. His eyes and his brain and
his chest felt hot and he kicked her fence because he had to do something;
there are still white paint chips embedded in the toe of his boot.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t, Leto,” she had said, holding his face, “she’s
your family, don’t throw that away like it doesn’t matter.”
When he met Serendipity she was named Brian.
They were both lonely until each other.
He’s seventeen and he thinks he might love her but he doesn’t know how to say
that, or how to say a lot of things, so he listens instead.
He listened to her today and now he’s here, sitting in his sister’s car while
she grips the steering wheel and stares ahead.
Rain tells him that she’s moving to Chicago.
He nods. He thinks that she’s going to say something else, more, but she
doesn’t.
Instead they just sit there, in silence, listening to David Bowie in the dark.
                                       …
Hawke sings.
He sings fairly often but he’s always quick to cringe and say how awful he
sounds.
He doesn’t sound awful. His voice is… pleasant, even off-key.
He’ll sing in front of the others, usually while drinking, and usually Lady
Gaga. Or Rihanna. Queen.
And his musical taste is… varied. In the moving process, while going through
Hawke’s closet, Andy had unearthed a shoebox full of his old mix CD’s. Hawke
had wasted no time in putting the least scratched one on and singing along with
what he’d labeled in his teen years, his ‘sweet slow-jams.’
And he’s funny when he does it. And happy. He doesn’t take himself seriously…
he does it to make us laugh. He’ll sing while driving, doing the dishes,
folding his laundry. This week he had Leandra in hysterics as he sang Born This
Way while attempting, unsuccessfully, to unclog her bathroom sink.
Hawke is singing. Now.
The apartment is quiet and I hear him from the kitchen when I turn off the
sink, putting the last plate on the rack to dry next to a glass bottle. He’s
not being funny.
It’s the first time I think I’ve ever heard him like this, not trying to make
up for what he thinks his singing lacks, not being self-deprecating about it,
not cringing. Just… singing. Because he’s singing for her.
Bethany had paused in the kitchen today before leaving her with us for the
weekend.
She was looking at Hawke who was standing by the couch. He was holding Grier,
who is so impossibly small in his hands, in his arms, so that she could safely
see all three of the dogs as they were crowding around his legs, excited to see
her.
She giggled and squealed happily and he laughed, looking up at both of us and
smiling.
“God,” Bethany said quietly to me, “he looks so much like Dad.”
He’s giving Grier a bath with his back to the open bathroom door and singing,
quietly, sincerely, happily.
Heroes. By David Bowie.
Softly off-key.
***** I is for Indestructible. *****
He’s eighteen years old when his mother dies.
He hasn’t seen her for twelve years by that time but it doesn’t matter because
something inside changes when he gets that phone call.
He misses her in a way that he can’t describe.
The hospital where she lived contacts him because they can’t reach Rain and
there’s no one else.
Leto can’t.
Can’t answer their questions.
Can’t go there for belongings.
Can’t remember her face.
Can’t reconcile the fact that the idea of his family died with his mother.
Can’t tell this person that he loves, that he lives with, that he loves her.
Can’t know for certain that the things that were broken inside his mother’s
head aren’t broken in his, too.
Can’t remember the night before.
Can’t remember what he took, smoked, drank.
Can’t remember this girl’s name, the skinny one he fucks in a bathroom stall.
Or the boy that he wakes up next to.
Can’t care that Serendipity leaves telling him that she can’t watch him do
this; that he’s not indestructible.
He can’t know for certain that he isn’t indestructible because none of it’s
killed him yet.
He can’t stop testing.
Pushing.
Maybe the thing that will break is already inside his head and it doesn’t
matter and he can’t stop.
Can’t stay.
He can’t.
So he doesn’t.
                                       …
She’s crying pitifully as I carry her to Leandra’s porch, her face hot and wet
against the front of my shirt, “My knee…”
She fell chasing Paul who was following me out to the car and is now following
closely at my heels guiltily; it was a pretty hard fall and her knee is
scraped, red and full of gravel.
“En Francais?”
Grier is three now and, at Bethany’s request, we are trying to get as many
languages in during this developmental window as possible.
Bethany teaches her Italian.
Andy claimed Polish.
I ended up with French and some Icelandic (which Hawke is also learning, at a
slightly slower rate).
It’s been incredible to see how much she retains; Grier Malcolm Hawke is, I
genuinely believe, brilliant.
She heaves a sigh, putting her arms around my neck and huffing, “Mon genou.”
“Très bien.”
It’s Christmas Eve and the house is surprisingly warm when I push the door open
with my hip, letting Paul in first before carrying her into the laundry room
where I know, now, Leandra keeps the first aid kid.
Hawke’s head pops out of the kitchen, “What happened?”
“Big G!” she reaches for him and he comes over, quickly taking her from my arms
and giving me a look, but, it’s hard to take anyone with that much flour on his
face seriously.
He’s been on me lately about carrying her. There is a weight restriction on
what I’m allowed to lift and Grier now exceeds that limit; Hawke cares, a lot,
but I don’t.
“Mon genou!” she points to her knee where the ripped hole in her tights reveals
the scrape.
He sits her down on the dryer and quickly cleans and covers the scrape while I
try to divert her attention with more vocabulary.
By the time Bethany and Leandra return from an emergency grocery run, she’s
forgotten about the pain but is proud to show off the four dinosaur band-aids
Hawke put on her knee.
I smile, watching her take Bethany’s hand as she guides her to go show off to
Merrill and Bela and Gilly.
“You need to stop lifting her, Fen.”
Hawke’s behind me, tucking his chin on my shoulder and, I know, getting flour
on the back of my shirt.
“I don’t mind,” She’s three and my family and I’m going to carry her when she
needs to be carried, "It's fine."
He sighs, kissing the side of my neck, “You’re not indestructible.”
I shrug, leaning into him, “That remains to be seen, Hawke.”
***** J is for Jacket. *****
He’s twenty years old when his back breaks.
He wakes up.
Strapped down.
Days later.
They say his name to him and shine a light in his eyes.
They know who he is even when he doesn’t because he had an ID card in the
pocket of the jacket he was wearing before, during, after the fight.
No, he doesn’t remember anything.
Doesn’t know faces or names.
Or where they left him.
He won’t ever know anything except that he lost.
No, he says, there isn’t anyone to call.
They give him his jacket back. There’s blood on the lining but it isn’t torn.
He’s twenty years old alone in a bed staring at the ceiling, counting zipper
teeth over and over with his fingernail.
He’s holding his jacket in his hands when they tell him about his skull and the
metal they put in his back.
He’s wearing that jacket when he gets up, stands up, and walks. It’s hard to
put on without twisting, without the room tilting, but he does it.
He’s wearing that jacket when he looks in the mirror and sees the long clotted
line where he used to have thick black hair.
He’s wearing that jacket when he goes outside for the first time.
He’s wearing that jacket when Dan lights his cigarette, cupping his hands
around the flame.
Leto’s wearing that jacket when he inhales.
Still wearing it when he exhales smoke saying, “Leto,” out-loud like he’s
agreeing to something instead of just answering a question.
                                       …
Hawke talks in his sleep.
He doesn’t always use real words, but sometimes he does. And he’s usually
worried. Worried about Bethany, Grier, or Carver, his mother, the dogs.
Me.
He’s asleep in the passenger seat, wearing his jacket zipped up for warmth with
his hands buried in the pockets.
“Babe,” he’s worried, frowning, “what kind of coffee?”
I clear my throat – we’ve been driving in shifts and he’s been asleep for all
of my shift; he slept through the sunrise.
“Babe?”
“Ahh,” he won’t remember anything I say, I’ve learned over time, “Chicory.”
“I don’t have it.”
“That’s okay, Hawke.”
He mumbles softly and unintelligibly for a while. The sound is comforting; I’m
so used to it now, it just sounds like home. He’s quiet as I drive over the
state-line and quiet until he smiles, smiles and says, “I have the cards, Dad,
I have ‘em. You should stay here, Dad. I cleaned the garage. You can stay with
us. Fen?”
I look at him.
His hands are out of the pockets and instead he’s gripping the bottom edge of
the jacket, holding on tight with those broad pale hands. I answer him, like I
always do, “He can stay with us.”
“I have your cards.”
He usually talks in his sleep when he’s worried. Sometimes he does it when he’s
happy or excited.
Sometimes I think he’s trying to finish a conversation that he can’t finish
when he’s awake.
***** K is for Kick. *****
Chapter Notes
     Trigger Warning - So… we’re at the Dan-stage here, and everything
     that entails.
     D/s that isn’t really the happy kind of D/s.
     You know what I mean. Just a heads up to be on the safe side.
He’s twenty-one years old.
He won’t look away.
He’s twenty-one years old on his hands and knees being fucked.
He won’t look away from Dan’s face.
He’s twenty-one years old on his hands and knees being fucked from behind by
the man Dan hugged when the elevator door in the loft opened this morning.
He won’t look away from Dan’s face because he said, “Don’t look away.”
They were spending a quiet morning together, smoking and reading and listening
to music, when he came in.
Dan hadn’t told him before that this would happen today. He hugged this man and
then came back to Leto to touch his cheek lightly and say, then, calmly, “Look
at me when he fucks you.”
Dan’s dressed and sitting on the couch with his hand over his mouth, watching.
And Leto won’t look away from his face.
Even when the man goes too deep, or too hard.
Even when Leto wants him to stop.
Even when Leto’s instinct tells him to kick, pull away, stop.
Leto’s never liked to be fucked but he won’t look away.
Because Dan told him not to.
And he wants to be good.
                                       …
I finish before he does so I watch him.
They had strongly suggested to me that I should do more on my own now, build
‘core strength’ outside of physical therapy, and do it somewhere with,
‘professionals’.
So now we go to the gym. ‘We’ because Hawke comes with me, four days a week;
Hawke started swimming again while I’m upstairs with the obnoxiously upbeat
‘professionals’ being watched and coddled.
I summarily hate the gym, and would rather not come at all. I miss running
outside, just, running without other people, without equipment or LED numbers
and countdowns or TV’s or inspirational posters and pictures of food groups in
silver frames.
The impact from running is too much for my back now and I can’t.
I’m angry about it, but, I can’t.
This is good for my body, I know that, but it doesn’t feel good the way that
running in the sun, in the rain, listening to just the sound of my own
breathing on quiet mornings felt.
I just get through it, let them watch and encourage me and, when I finish
before he does, come down and watch him swim laps.
Hawke flipturns at the other end of the pool and glides underwater back towards
me, propelling himself forward with long smooth kicks.
I lean forward, elbows on thighs, and I watch him; the arch of his arms as he
pulls himself forward, the strength of muscles he’s rediscovered, the density
of his thighs, his arms, his chest; that’s changed.
He’s not fast but he is precise, focused in what we’ve both decided is
uncharacteristic calm on the form of each stroke, each kick.
He comes up in front of me, holding onto the edge of the pool and wipes water
from his eyes, “Hey!”
“Hey.”
“You’re done?”
I nod. Done and tired and ready to go home and get clean; I never shower here.
He pushes himself up, out of the water and stands up, tall and wet, lean but
strong… dense, “How was it?”
I hated it and he knows that, “The same. Fine.”
He grabs a folded towel from the shelf and dries his chest, his stomach, his
thighs and I feel a possessive sense of something like pride – the flex of
muscle and the way that he moves, the memory buried in the muscles of his legs
like instinct as he kicks underwater, the pleasure that he’s found again in the
power of his body.
A body that I unequivocally want to touch, take home, rediscover, feel,
worship, now.
He notices me looking at him like that, with that focus, and he pauses, and
that pause feels… charged. Understood. Good.
“Let me rinse off and let’s go eat,” he smiles at me, “I’m fucking starving.”
***** L is for Leto. *****
He is twenty-one years old when he stops being Leto and becomes a little wolf
instead.
Dan collects things; fetishes, cultures, religions, mythologies… things that
contradict each other, things from everywhere.
He takes pictures of things he can’t collect.
He tells Leto that he believes when you take a picture of someone, you take a
piece of their soul as Leto stares into his lens and answers his questions.
Leto will never believe that camera has that kind of power.
Dan paid them lots of money to come to this party because he loves Natives.
Leto is high, he’s been high all day. Dan’s focused on guests and doesn’t say
much to Leto at all until the guests who are leaving leave and the guests who
are staying the night, stay. Leto always knows where he is, though, a hot white
blur in the corner of his eye.
He does hear him say that Leto has Native blood, that he’s sure he does,
because of his bone-structure.
That makes Leto laugh and he doesn’t know why.
They dance, Dan’s Natives. Leto watches them and feels himself drifting. They
are a blur of colors moving under bright lights and he goes somewhere else to
the beat of their drum and he leaves his body behind because his body is Dan’s.
That’s the first time he knows that.
He goes somewhere without it and runs.
He knows, as he’s running, that he is a wolf, a white wolf running East,
chasing a hawk’s shadow across soft green grass.
He runs all night.
He runs as a wolf until he runs right back inside his own body, sees through
his own eyes; he is inside his body again when Dan fucks him in bed.
He tells Dan after he comes that he’s got a wolf inside now and Dan says that
he thought something felt different.
Leto wakes up late the next day and on the pillow next to him is a small white
wolf, carved out of stone.
A Zuni fetish. The first of two presents from Dan.
The wolf is still cool in his hand when Dan gives him the second present.
A new name.
Fenris.
Because he is Native and Nordic, Creole, French, Irish, African, from
everywhere and nowhere, because he’s a wolf and because he is his – Fenris, His
Little Wolf.
                                       …
There are three piles of mail in front of me on the kitchen island.
Garrett Hawke.
Leto Aucoin.
Fen Aucoin.
I like to sort it this way. It just makes sense.
Hawke reaches past me and picks up his own pile (credit card statement, health
insurance information packet, flier from that grocery store he likes) and I
hear just the drum-beat of whatever he’s listening to on his ipod before he
carries his mail upstairs, the dogs following him like a pack leader as he
goes.
I look at the two remaining piles of mail.
I stare at the top letter in each pile for a long time, reading each letter of
each name.
And then I push them together, pick them up together, and follow him upstairs.
***** M is for Myopic. *****
He is 22 years old when he sees for the first time.
Dan is healthy. He eats organic food. He exercises, takes supplements, drinks
lots of water, sees specialists.
He believes in Eastern Medicine and he demands that the maids who clean his
apartment sanitize everything, every surface, everything.
Use bleach if you have to.
Dan requires that everyone he fucks, everyone who fucks Fen, everyone Fen fucks
show him proof of a clean bill of health before they do anything.
And he is the only one allowed to come inside of Fen.
He sends Fen to doctors, not just for his back; once a month he has a physical
exam.
Has blood drawn.
Provides a urine sample.
Gets his cheek swabbed.
It’s a routine and he doesn’t mind.
He does this once a month because Dan doesn’t want to get sick.
Fen is healthy because of Dan.
Fen is better because of Dan.
He can see because of Dan.
Dan sends him to an optometrist who is shocked that he’d never worn glasses.
When he puts on his first pair, it’s so overwhelming that if he was alone he
might have cried.
He’s not alone, so instead he lets his hands shake.
They walk through the park together, and he can see individual tree branches,
crisp dark lines, and not just a blur of faded tree and light.
The world does not look how he’s seen it.
His hands are still shaking so he puts them in his pockets and thinks about
that art teacher who made his stomach feel tight and hot while Dan talks about
dinner plans.
                                       …
“How do I look?”
I squint and chuckle, “I think they’re a little narrow for your face.”
“Are you saying I have a wide face, Fen?” Hawke scoffs dramatically and blinks.
I can’t see all the details, even with him just across the table from me, but
he looks fucking good in my glasses. Of course he does.
“I think you look quite scholarly, Garrett,” Merrill’s sitting next to me in
the booth, reaching across the table to color with Grier on her paper place-
mat.
“Yeah?” he smiles, focusing on her face with difficulty, “Like Professor
Garrett Hawke?”
“Mmm!” she nods, “What would you be a professor of?”
“Etiquette and Naps. I’d do my post-doc in Sleeping in Hammocks.”
He leans and reaches for one of Grier’s discarded crayons and she looks up at
him, giggling, “You look silly!”
“Oh yeah?” he leans in more.
“Yeah,” she reaches for the glasses, pulling them off his face and, immediately
getting sticky little fingerprints on the lenses, “Fen’s glasses!”
The waiter sets down another bread basket between us as I watch the indistinct
shape of Hawke carefully take my glasses back from her hands, distracting her
by pretending to loudly gnaw on her ear. He wipes the lenses with his t-shirt
before handing them back to me, “They look better on you, I’m sure.”
He tells me later that he can’t believe how strong the prescription is and
kisses me, softly, like it’s something that’s been on his mind for a long time.
***** N is for Not Enough. *****
Chapter Notes
     Trigger Warning applies. D/s that has veered far from the fun path.
Fen is 23 years old when Dan leaves for a month.
Dan does not take him with him to Munich. Instead he leaves him in the city
with Adriana.
He misses Dan.
It’s a long month and Adriana is… cold but he does what she tells him to do
because Dan said to do it.
He misses Dan but when she tells him to eat, he eats.
When she tells him to sleep, he sleeps.
When she tells him to be good, keep that toy in his ass, eat her out, fuck her,
he does.
He’s good.
He keeps that toy in his ass.
He eats her out.
He fucks her.
And he doesn’t talk because she doesn’t want him to.
He’s twenty-three and so excited when Dan comes back from Munich that he feels
dizzy.
He’s twenty-three when Dan looks at him and sees that a scratch on the skin
between his cock and his ass looks infected.
Dan’s furious at him and tells him to get in the shower.
Cold water.
Ice cold.
So cold that it burns where it hits him.
He stays there until Dan tells him to get out.
He doesn’t tell him that for two hours.
He stays in the shower, shivering and burning and guilty, watching ice-cold
water run tracks along the white lines that are still fresh and crisp, on his
stomach, on his arms, on his legs and his fingers until Dan tells him to get
out and put on clothes so he can take him to a doctor.
His mistake, his fault, his mistake.
He let Dan down. He wasn’t good.
He tried to be good. but not enough.
                                       …
He kisses my wrist, just there, but the plastic bracelet that says Leto Aucoin
gets in the way between his lips and my skin.
“They said it went well,” he says quietly, “Everything’s fine.”
I can’t move, can’t roll over, lying here full of morphine.
And more metal. New metal.
I need to say something, “Doesn’t feel fine yet.”
He smiles and kisses my wrist again.
I fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep.
I watch him sleep in a chair when I wake up.
The silver in his beard and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes; Hawke.
He told me he’d stay with me in the hospital.
I said he didn’t have to. He’s been… frustrated with me. We fought. He said
that I hadn’t been doing enough to prevent this from needing to happen. I told
him it was always going to happen.
The night before surgery he was still frustrated, still mad, still thought that
I could have prevented this, but he said that he had every intention of
spending every day he has with me.
“And I hope that’s a lot of goddamn days,” he said, “thousands and thousands.”
I think he thought I was already asleep when I heard him say that even
thousands and thousands would still be not enough.
***** O is for Over. *****
Chapter Summary
     Trigger Warning in effect - O_O D/s, Dub-Con. Ouch-Feels.
He is twenty-four when it ends.
Everything was different that time.
Dan left him here in the back room of this party, left him, didn’t watch and
didn’t say be good.
He lost track after the fifth man.
Lost.
Track.
Didn’t.
Matter.
And they came inside.
Of him.
Throat and ass.
He went somewhere else after the fifth man.
He was a white wolf running over green grass.
Except when he couldn’t, except when there was a cock in his throat— in his
throat.
Dan would never let anyone else do that, only him, only he was careful enough,
because Fen’s throat is healed but never whole.
He panics when there is a cock in his throat.
Gags.
Heaves.
The instinct to kick, to pull away, to stop is there but it’s so muted,
unfamiliar, ignored for so long it’s atrophied that it just twitches there
inside.
Inside of him.
And when he can’t kick, can’t breathe, he gags.
He’s a white wolf running.
And he wakes up to the brush of soft black feathers on his shoulder.
A girl. He can’t see her face, can’t see details, but she’s is wearing long
earrings made out of feathers and wiping the side of his face with a wet cloth.
He’s dazed, imagines she’s Serendipity. But he knows that she isn’t.
I’m sorry. I loved you. I need air.
She helps him stand up.
She takes him outside, early morning, where he vomits against the wall of the
house, standing in the flowerbed, crushing closed flowers under his bare feet.
And he understands.
Clearly.
Dan left him.
It’s over.
The girl calls him a cab (she tells the driver his address in the city because
he can’t even speak, swallow, say thank you who are you thank you, his throat
is so raw) and when he goes inside, into the loft, it’s empty and cold.
He takes a shower, as hot as he can stand, and vomits again until he’s dry
heaving.
Until there’s nothing left.
Inside of him.
He’s clean when he comes out and he doesn’t belong here.
He’s a white wolf running.
He takes his own clothes, his jacket that’s hung in Dan’s closet like a relic
for years.
He’s a white wolf running.
He takes his passport and Dan’s money. It’s effortless.
He leaves everything else.
He’s numb and sore and empty but the instincts don’t twitch inside anymore.
Instincts are all he has.
He’s a white wolf running.
At the airport, he watches a couple before boarding. Two men. One in tweed with
patches on his elbows and a younger blonde guy with black gauges in both ears.
They’re saying goodbye. They kiss and the blonde smiles like summer.
Fen wakes up over the Atlantic for the first time in years.
He’s not Leto.
He’s not Dan’s Little Wolf.
But he is a white wolf running.
                                       …
“Over.”
He holds my hips in his hands turning me and I trust him, fuck, I trust him.
His tongue glides, hot and steady, against my ass.
“Fuck,” I press my face into his pillow, “Yes.”
He pulls me apart, spreads me, and I thrust forward into the bed because, yes,
fuck that feels good, Hawke.
He knows how much.
Hawke remembers where and how much.
I gasp, the feeling of his breath, beard, face, tongue, buried against me,
solid and hot.
Against but not inside.
I fuck his hand when he wraps it around me, groaning into me because he fucking
loves it.
He wants me to come.
He whispers that into my skin, kisses me, pulling this sound like yes, out of
my lungs and my heart with the tip of his tongue.
I trust him.
I’m present and so is he, in our bed, with his face buried against my ass.
I come.
For him.
For myself.
I come hard in his hand, into the palm of his hand.
And shudder.
Twitch.
Until he reaches for me, arms around my waist and my hips, pulling me back into
him and saying softly, softly because he knows that I’ve gone somewhere else
when I came, “Over, Fen.”
I come back to him.
Into him.
“Hawke.”
***** P is for Pigment. *****
Fen is twenty-five when he steps out of a hostel bathroom in Edinburgh.
He hid. In London. In Paris. He wore long sleeves and coats, scarves, kept his
head down. He hid as hair that had always been black grew in bright white,
starting at the edge of his scar and spreading out.
He steps out of the bathroom with a borrowed trimmer in one hand, his shirt and
the hat that he’s worn every day since his hair started changing in the other.
He shaved it off standing over a bin and got rid of the last of anything black
on the sides leaving just enough to cover the scar where it’s the thickest on
top.
He hands the trimmer back to the guy who’s been sleeping in the bed next to his
bed.
The guy is young and American, “Looks good, man,” he smiles at Fen, “Fucking
mohawk!”
And that’s it.
The last of something.
Dead hair in a bin.
He pulls on a t-shirt and walks out into the city, pausing to look at his
reflection in a shop window.
It’s clear for the moment, light breaking through clouds, and the sun feels
warm on his arms, on his face, on the back of his neck.
                                       …
“What are you doing?”
“Hmm?”
He came in while I was taking a bath ostensibly because it’s a Sunday afternoon
and he “got lonely” but now he’s been standing there with his fingers in his
beard for about five minutes, picking through it. He’s had to pause
occasionally to wipe steam from the mirror with the edge of his hand.
“I’m counting.”
I laugh, “What?”
“Seventeen.”
“What?”
“Seventeen little silver bastards.”
“I…” I let the back of my head rest against the tub, brace my feet against the
other end and sigh, “You’re counting grey hairs?”
“Seventeen. Last week it was fourteen.”
“Hawke, it happens.”
“I’m being ravaged by age.”
“No you’re not.”
He turns and looks at me. He just turned thirty-five and, yes, there are
seventeen silver hairs in his beard. And more growing in at the nape of his
neck that I’ve neglected to mention to him.
But he’s far from ravaged.
Well.
Hmm.
I drop the book I was reading onto the tile and look at him, “If you’re ravaged
by age, what does that make me?”
“A mutant! A… vampire. I don’t know… you don’t age, Fen.”
“I definitely do. Am. I…” I rub my face with my hands, “age.”
“I feel like my body is betraying me. That’s my pigment! I’m not ready to let
it go. Shouldn't I get to choose?”
“Hmm.”
“I have to tell you something,” he says seriously, coming over to sit down by
the tub, leaning his head on his hands on the edge.
“Okay.”
“I found a grey hair.”
I try not to smile, “You found… seventeen of them.”
“No. No,” he sighs, “A grey hair.”
I break; I can’t help it, “You mean… a pubic hair?”
He nods, eyes fixed somewhere in the bathwater near my hip.
“Hawke.”
He presses his lips together and for a second I think he might cry but he
laughs, hard, “I panicked. I pulled it out!”
“No.”
There are tears in his eyes, “Yeah! That really fucking hurt.”
“I would imagine.”
“Ahh,” his shoulders are shaking, “I kept it.”
I sit up, “Why?!”
“I don’t know, Fen, I felt like I needed to.”
I gasp for air, “Where is it?”
“That’s the thing… I…” he looks at me sheepishly, wiping his eyes, “I pressed
it. In a book.”
“What?! Like a flower?”
“Yeah, only…”
“Only?”
“I don’t remember what book.”
“What?”
“I thought it was in The Mists of Avalon because that’s a book that I’m, like,
99.9% positive you’d never decide to just pick up and read, but, I went looking
for it and… I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. I flipped through the whole book.
So…”
“So…” I cover my face with my hands, trying to breathe normally, “So what
you’re telling me is that in one of our books… there is one, grey, pubic hair.”
“Just… lying-in-wait, like a dick, yeah.”
“Jesus Christ, Hawke.” He sighs but laughs again when I pull him in, kissing
him, “Is that what you do when I’m not here?”
“I shouldn’t be left to my own devices.”
“Clearly not!”
I scratch my wet fingers into his beard and tell him that I’m sure it’ll turn
up, however, I refuse to help him look for it.
He agrees that that’s only fair.
“Fen, promise me something.”
I arch an eyebrow, “Yeah?”
“Promise me that when the time comes that I’ve finally succumbed to old age,
and filled all of the pages of all of our books with grey pubic hairs, and you
still look exactly like this, that you’ll be the one to put me on an ice floe
and send me on my way.”
“Fine,” I kiss his forehead, “but I’m coming with you.”
He smiles, closing his eyes, “I could use the company.”
***** Q is for Questioning Beliefs *****
Chapter Summary
     Trigger Warning - Abortion.
He is twenty-six years old when he sits next to her on the bed and waits.
Fen was in the apartment when she came home with the test in a plastic shopping
bag. She clearly hadn&#x2019;t expected him to be there; he works in the day,
all day, at the butcher&#x2019;s but he has a cold and they sent him home. She
asks him to wait with her.
She pees on a stick in the bathroom with the door closed. She puts it on the
counter next to her perfume and sits next to him on the bed they all sleep in;
she, Fen, and him.
She chews on her fingernail but stops when he asks her if she thinks it is his.
He regrets asking this immediately but couldn&#x2019;t stop the words from
coming out of his mouth.
She turns her head, looking at him, long blonde hair fanning across her
shoulder, &#x201C;Obviously maybe.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Oh.&#x201D;
Oh.
He tries to imagine a child.
Not a child. His.
He tries and he can&#x2019;t.
She stands up without him and goes into the bathroom, closing the door behind
herself.
He is alone, folds his hands between his knees, and closes his eyes.
He&#x2019;s never questioned it before but he knows then, sitting there in
their flat, that at twenty-six, he has nothing to give to a child. To a person.
To her. Or him. To them. But especially not to his.
She opens the door with the stick in her hands.
                                   &#x2026;
&#x201C;Fen, wake up. Are you asleep?&#x201D;
I sigh and roll over, &#x201C;Yes.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Sorry, I&#x2019;m sorry,&#x201D; he kisses my head, &#x201C;but listen
to&#x2014;&#x201D;
&#x201C;You have to stop reading that,&#x201D; I mumble into the pillow,
&#x201C;Please.&#x201D;
He&#x2019;s become obsessed. I know it comes from a good place, that
he&#x2019;s worried about Bethany and the baby and he just wants to be helpful
and knowledgeable.
But this has to stop.
For his sake as well as Bethany&#x2019;s. She texts me every time he calls her
about something else she needs to be worried about &#x2013; &#x2018;please make
him stop.&#x2019;
&#x201C;What?&#x201D;
I look up at him, sitting there with another one of those damn baby books in
his lap. His mother has started calling all of them the &#x2018;Million And One
Things That You Never Knew You Needed To Worry About And The Statistical Chance
That Your Baby Might Have It&#x2019; Series. He&#x2019;s folded the corner of
the page down on whatever horrible birth defect he&#x2019;s found out about
now.
He can&#x2019;t be with her, not until she flies home, and it bothers him.
She is his baby sister and she&#x2019;s pregnant and alone.
But she&#x2019;s tough. Smart. Fine.
&#x201C;What&#x2026;&#x201D; I groan, &#x201C;tell me.&#x201D;
He clears his throat and reads to me about something that sounds awful; a
condition where damaged tissue solidifies into something like bone.
&#x201C;Injuries turn into bone, Fen. They call it Stone Man Syndrome.&#x201D;
I sit up and take the book from him and close it.
He sighs, &#x201C;I&#x2019;m just&#x2026;&#x201D;
&#x201C;I know.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Did you ever want kids?&#x201D;
I don&#x2019;t answer him; I&#x2019;m taken aback by the question.
&#x201C;I never really did,&#x201D; he says quietly, looking at his knees,
&#x201C;I&#x2026; I was Dad for them. Kind of. Sometimes. I don&#x2019;t
know&#x2026; I tried,&#x201D; he looks at me, &#x201C;maybe I blew my Dad-wad
already. Anyway, I always thought I&#x2019;d be a really fucking fantastic
uncle though. In the first grade&#x2026; I wrote a story about what a great
uncle I&#x2019;d be. Mom loved it. She framed it. It was a very short story.
Me, personally, I never wanted kids,&#x201D; he smiles, that wide crooked Hawke
smile, &#x201C;but I always wanted more family.&#x201D;
I nod, because that&#x2019;s what I think I felt too, but I&#x2019;ve never
questioned it, or tried to define it, &#x201C;I thought I might have
one,&#x201D; he sits forward, &#x201C;Once. For a little while.&#x201D;
&#x201C;I don&#x2019;t know this story.&#x201D;
I tell him about them, about that day, and a test that came out positive on a
bathroom counter next to a glass bottle of perfume.
I tell him the rest of that story.
The decision that the three of us made together.
The decision I always knew was hers to make more than mine, more than his.
The decision I&#x2019;ve always thought was the right one.
He&#x2019;s quiet still, until he takes the book out of my hands and puts it
down on top of the stack on his nightstand, &#x201C;You want some tea?&#x201D;
I say yes, and follow him into the kitchen after a few minutes.
He&#x2019;s watching the mugs, lost in thought.
&#x201C;Garrett?&#x201D;
&#x201C;Yeah?&#x201D; he looks up at me, &#x201C;Oh, uh&#x2026; I just&#x2026;
I can&#x2019;t, uh&#x2026;&#x201D; he shrugs, &#x201C;I&#x2019;m sorry.&#x201D;
&#x201C;For what?&#x201D;
&#x201C;For&#x2026; waking you up, and for telling you about Stone Man
Syndrome, and for&#x2026;&#x201D; he smiles, cringes, &#x201C;for saying the
phrase, &#x2018;blew my Dad-wad&#x2019; out loud.&#x201D;
There&#x2019;s more there, I can hear it, but it's not for right now.
I kiss him carefully, &#x201C;How about this&#x2026; you can keep telling me
about, the uh&#x2026; syndromes and things, but, stop calling Bethany.&#x201D;
He laughs, tired, and rests his head on my shoulder, a heavily solid weight,
&#x201C;Deal.&#x201D;
***** R is for Reykjavik. *****
Fen is twenty-seven years old. It&#x2019;s a Sunday morning. He stands at his
front door, fingers pressed against peeling paint and wood.
He&#x2019;s happy.
In Reykjavik he lives in this studio with a green door. The unit is detached
from his eighty-year old land-lady&#x2019;s house. It&#x2019;s the first place
he has every really lived alone in his life.
He works for a butcher. The blood in the butcher shop doesn&#x2019;t make him
feel weak the way that other blood does but it does make him feel&#x2026;
charged. Alert. Alive. He doesn&#x2019;t know why but he knows it. Maybe
it&#x2019;s the place. The calm of the shop. He doesn&#x2019;t know. His hands
get rougher and he smells like iron. He eats more; meat he butchers himself and
fruit and rye bread, still oven-warm in his hands, with real butter.
Fen finds people that are free with sex, with each other, with&#x2026;
affection without ownership.
He&#x2019;s never lonely.
That, he thinks, was the fundamental mistake he was making over and over; he
was never alone but always so lonely.
He sleeps, deep, even when the nights are light and the days are dark. He
sleeps. In a bed of his own.
He wears thick socks and starts drinking coffee in the mornings slowly over
books, over photographs and maps, over long walks over soft green grass to the
edge of things and back.
He buys a camera.
This place is beautiful in a way that he&#x2019;s never seen beautiful before.
Quiet the way that he&#x2019;s quiet. Empty and full. Rough, unforgiving and
calm. Ancient. It feels like the place he was always supposed to come to, that
it was waiting for him.
He photographs it because he doesn&#x2019;t want to forget the color of the
light, the shape of the edges of things, his green front door.
The peeling paint under his fingers.
And that moment he knew he was happy.
                                   &#x2026;
&#x201C;Here?&#x201D;
&#x201C;Yeah, just,&#x201D; I set down my knife and watch Carver work on the
block, &#x201C;watch that, right there.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Oh,&#x201D; he laughs, catching himself, &#x201C;yeah.&#x201D;
His hands look like Hawke&#x2019;s. Their father&#x2019;s hands, I&#x2019;ve
been told, heavy, wide, blunt.
Work-man&#x2019;s hands.
Or butcher&#x2019;s hands.
Carver never had much to say to me until he heard that I&#x2019;d picked up
some part-time work with an aged butcher in Kirkwall who said he could use the
extra hands. I had the down time and initially it made it easier for Hawke to
paint more. I stayed on so that he could spend time with Bethany and Grier.
Hawke was delighted at the prospect of &#x2018;free-meat&#x2019; (Hawkes are
unrepentant carnivores in general) and, suddenly, Carver had conversations with
me.
He worked with me when he was home for the summer, which, I&#x2019;ll admit was
occasionally odd but we found a rhythm. He listened to me and the butcher,
learned, just kept his head down and worked hard. He was more than happy to do
the heavy lifting that neither I nor the butcher could do.
&#x201C;Meat,&#x201D; Hawke said with affected clarity at the end of that
summer while tearing into a &#x2018;free-meat&#x2019; steak, &#x201C;Meat was
just waiting for him. I think meat might just be his calling&#x2026;. provided
he can get over the pun inherent in being a butcher named Carver.&#x201D;
He&#x2019;s gotten over the pun; he found a butcher near his school willing to
let him work a few days a week and now that he&#x2019;s graduated that&#x2019;s
the direction he&#x2019;s going. Here. In Kirkwall.
And we still work together. He works more often than I do. Carver is&#x2026;
different here. Not Garrett&#x2019;s younger brother. Or Bethany&#x2019;s twin.
Not the odd-one out. He&#x2019;s good at what he does.
We work quietly but sometimes we talk&#x2026; not just about meat or knives but
politics, history, beer, girls. Places we want to see before we die.
He says that he wants to go to Amsterdam and Iceland. I tell him about living
in both of those places, about living in Reykjavik.
I want to go back. I want to take Hawke. I want to see if that green door is
still there.
Carver stands back, admiring his work and wiping hand hands on the front of his
apron. He smiles and I see Hawke in his face for just a moment&#x2026; that
look.
It&#x2019;s the same look.
He&#x2019;s happy.
***** S is for Solitude. *****
Fen is twenty-eight and he wants to come back.
Not to home. He doesn&#x2019;t have one of those.
Not to family.
He doesn&#x2019;t have one of those either.
But just&#x2026; back. To some inexplicable place.
America, at least, he knows that much.
He feels the ache to return in his chest on a Friday afternoon, subtle, like
the flutter in his heart that sometimes makes him stand still.
He wants to come back to people. On his terms. To step out of solitude.
Not out of need. Not to fill a void.
The void is still there but he&#x2019;s aware of it now, can touch the hollow
parts of himself with fingertips that don&#x2019;t shake but pulse, steady and
strong. He&#x2019;s aware of himself, of the parts that he lacks, the things
that atrophied or that no one ever thought to instill.
He wants to come back.
He&#x2019;s ready to, then, when he&#x2019;s twenty-eight with strong arms.
Now. Now that he knows how to focus through his lens, knows how to look, knows
how to see.
Because as nice as solitude is, he can&#x2019;t stay forever, can he?
Maybe he could.
Maybe he would have if not for that flutter.
That want.
It makes him stand still.
                                   &#x2026;
I can&#x2019;t get work done when he&#x2019;s home.
I have a workspace in the loft but it&#x2019;s not partitioned off and the
thing about Hawke, the thing he doesn&#x2019;t realize about himself, is that
when he&#x2019;s in a room, he takes up that room.
Even when he&#x2019;s trying to be quiet.
Maybe even more so when he&#x2019;s trying.
I can get work done here, in Portland, in the studio apartment. It&#x2019;s
small, and cool and quiet. Just the desk, the bed, a few pictures in frames.
The most colorful d&#xE9;cor elements are Grier&#x2019;s drawings on the fridge
door, held in place with little black magnetic circles.
The studio in Portland is too small, and too cool and too quiet for Hawke; when
he stays here with me it seems like he has to bend just to stand up straight.
I&#x2019;m almost done for the night, almost. It&#x2019;s late and I&#x2019;m
standing in my kitchen drinking a beer out of the bottle. I smooth the corner
of one of her drawings &#x2013; Hawke, Bethany myself, and Grier, of course.
Hawke&#x2019;s head is disproportionately large, disproportionately curly, and
he appears to be about three times the size of the rest of us; &#x201C;Like a
happy Godzilla!&#x201D; he said happily when he saw it for the first time.
A smiling sun in the corner of the page.
I smooth it out with my thumb and smile, feel something tug in my chest.
Before I left, I went with Hawke to a women&#x2019;s health fundraiser his
mother was involved in organizing. It was unexpectedly dull, and the two of us
ended up in a garden with Isabela drinking bourbon and smoking (Leandra was
carrying; she pressed two neat joints into my hand and said with quiet
desperation, &#x201C;You three have a good time&#x2026; somebody here
should.&#x201D;)
Sitting in that garden, wearing a button with an artistic vulva on his chest,
Hawke waxed poetic about love.
Or&#x2026; what his father had told him about love.
He quoted his father, paraphrasing Rilke.
&#x201C;&#x2019;The point of love is not to create a quick commonality by
tearing down all boundaries; No! On the contrary, good love is good when each
person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and they show
each other the greatest possible trust,&#x2019;&#x201D; Hawke stood up in the
garden, reciting with admirable accuracy given how much of the bourbon that had
been in that bottle in his hand was now in him, &#x201C;&#x2019;A merging of
two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a mutual
consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom! And
development! But! Once the realization is accepted that even between the
closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can
grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which
gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an
immense sky.&#x2019;&#x201D;
He then kissed Isabela and gave her the bottle magnanimously before turning to
me, holding my head between his hands, and saying, &#x201C;Fen! I will guard
your solitude and love your expanses,&#x201D; he smiled, &#x201C;Til I
die.&#x201D;
I finish the beer and rinse out the bottle in the sink.
As soon as I&#x2019;m back at the desk, the skype in-coming call alert goes
off.
It&#x2019;s Hawke.
I laugh. He may guard my solitude, but he&#x2019;s not very conducive to it.
I smile, adjust the webcam, &#x201C;Hey, it&#x2019;s late.&#x201D;
&#x201C;I can&#x2019;t sleep,&#x201D; he shrugs, &#x201C;The place is too
quiet.&#x201D;
He takes up rooms.
Like a happy Godzilla.
And I&#x2019;ll guard his solitude until I die, too.
***** T is for Theirin's. *****
At twenty-nine, he takes one deliberate step backwards.
Fen lives in Kirkwall and works in an independent bookstore with an extensive
travel section. He has a name-tag in a locker but he never wears it. It says
Leto and it feels like a lie; he answers quicker to Fen than he does to that
name.
He steps back from Andy in the Nutrition Section where they are standing alone
on a Tuesday morning. It&#x2019;s early and the only customers inside are the
regulars who wait by the door for one or both of them to open the store from
the inside.
Andy bought him coffee this morning, and not for the first time. He had it when
he arrived with the keys. A white paper cup with red letters and a crossbow
logo.
Fen likes Theirin&#x2019;s.
He likes Alistair and Elissa who own the store.
Fen likes Andy, who he opens with but&#x2026;
He talks about his novel too much but that&#x2019;s not the reason Fen&#x2019;s
not interested. He doesn&#x2019;t actually know why he&#x2019;s not interested;
Andy&#x2019;s attractive, tall and blonde like summer but&#x2014;
But&#x2026;
Maybe it&#x2019;s the ponytail, Fen thinks, smirking.
He steps back with his arms folded across his chest when Andy steps closer and
Andy, who is still standing in front of him, nods, grimaces then smiles an
almost melancholy smile, and looks away.
Understood, then.
Fen nods but says nothing, going back to the front desk where his coffee is
cooling.
It&#x2019;s the best cup of coffee he&#x2019;s had in a long time.
                                   &#x2026;
A four year old dragon collides with my legs and holds on tight.
Alistair, who was chasing her in circles around the front desk, stands upright
and hands me a paper bag. It&#x2019;s heavier than I anticipate.
Grier gets to pick out one new book a month, whatever she wants. She&#x2019;s
building a very peculiar library. There are a few children&#x2019;s books, but,
by and large she prefers books from other less colorful sections of the store.
Today, it&#x2019;s an illustrated dinosaur encyclopedia&#x2026; one that she
most certainly did not find in the children&#x2019;s section.
&#x201C;Merci,&#x201D; she says, reaching for my free hand.
Alistair grins down at her, &#x201C;You&#x2019;re very welcome, little
dragon.&#x201D;
She replies with a friendly rawr sound and then, still holding her hand, I
guide her towards the door.
It&#x2019;s Halloween today, which&#x2026; largely explains her outfit (though,
it&#x2019;s not uncommon to find her wearing this dragon costume on a regular
non-Halloween day) and I pull in a deep breath of October air just outside of
the store.
That October smell.
I came here on an October night that smelled just like this.
I didn&#x2019;t think I&#x2019;d come at all, to that party&#x2026; but I did.
Late.
And he was standing outside.
I smile and bend down, scooping up a dragon who seems to just get bigger
everyday.
She rests her head on my shoulder, twists her fingers into my hair, and
proceeds to tell me everything she knows about pterodactyls.
I hope that October always smells like this because it&#x2019;s nice to be
reminded in a sensory way; that night, that smell, the way that he looked
standing there in the dark outside of Theirin&#x2019;s.
***** U is for Uncovered. *****
Fen turns thirty and he&#x2019;s ready to leave.
He didn&#x2019;t come to Kirkwall with the intention of staying and he makes up
his mind to leave on his birthday, which he spends alone.
That night, he goes out for a drink.
He meets a woman at one of the smaller bars downtown. She buys him a drink and
makes him laugh, hard, and that catches him off guard. She has a piece of sea
glass on a silver chain around her neck that she plays with as they talk, as
they kiss under an outdoor heater, and when her fingers slip delicately into
his coat pockets for warmth, he invites her to come back to his place.
It&#x2019;s only then that he remembers what else the fourteenth of February
is.
She laughs easily, blue eyes bright and happy, holding onto him by the front of
his jacket, and says in a smoky voice that tickles at something inside of him,
&#x201C;How very romantic, Valentine.&#x201D;
It&#x2019;s not the beginning of anything. That night is the only night they
spend together.
They fuck in his bed, twice, in the dark.
He doesn&#x2019;t always keep the lights off but it&#x2019;s easier when he
does. It&#x2019;s not that the tattoos are ugly... but he doesn&#x2019;t know
what to do when someone tells him how beautiful they are. His knee-jerk
reaction is to disagree. She doesn&#x2019;t ask for a light to be on and he's
glad.
She purrs against his shoulder before coming and kisses the palm of his hand
after he comes, his head turned away, eyes shut in the dark.
She traces the lines on his body until he flinches away, her fingertips
venturing too near to his throat. She whispers sorry and doesn&#x2019;t touch
him again.
He can&#x2019;t fall asleep so he stares up at the ceiling, listening to this
woman with bright blue eyes and a small piece of sea glass warm against her
skin breathing softly and deeply next to him.
She rolls over, away from him, and the sheet slips from her side uncovering a
long thick scar that runs from just below her shoulder blade to the swell of
her hip, jagged, raised&#x2026; new and still faintly red, and in what little
light there is in the room, it looks like a road, or a border, more than a tear
or a record&#x2026; a line without a clear beginning and with such an abrupt,
blunt, seemingly false ending.
He thinks it&#x2019;s beautiful but he doesn&#x2019;t say that out-loud.
Fen curls his body against the back of her, lightly touching her uncovered scar
with the heel of his hand. She doesn&#x2019;t pull away, move away, or flinch.
&#x201C;It was an accident,&#x201D; she says into the quiet in the dark.
He listens. He doesn&#x2019;t talk, he&#x2019;s not ready to do that yet, but
he listens.
The next morning, despite what he&#x2019;d planned, Fen stays in Kirkwall.
                                   &#x2026;
I am unprepared when it happens.
That surprises me more than anything else.
I have spent months pondering how, and when, and where this would happen.
Every time I&#x2019;ve done this simple, mundane thing I&#x2019;ve taken a
moment to pause&#x2026; to ask myself, is this the one? Would Hawke have chosen
this book? And if so&#x2026; why?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
Catcher in the Rye?
The Scarlet Letter?
But it&#x2019;s Dorian Gray.
The Picture of Dorian Fucking Gray.
Of course. Of course. It makes perfect sense. It&#x2019;s completely logical in
a&#x2026; in a way. In a Hawke way.
And I wasn&#x2019;t prepared for it. At all.
I forgot, just this once, and opened the book across my chest while I was on
the couch without reflection or pause or consideration. That&#x2019;s the way
of it, really, that things are found, uncovered, revealed just at that moment
you stop looking for them.
It caught the afternoon light as it fell, beautiful in a way&#x2026; this one
coarse, silver pubic hair that he&#x2019;d pressed in a book for safe keeping,
for preservation, for&#x2026; posterity.
I&#x2019;m laughing so hard that I hardly hear him come down the stairs. There
are tears in my eyes but I can see him standing over me, worried, because
he&#x2019;s never seen me like this.
I can&#x2019;t help it.
It&#x2019;s still there, on the center of my chest.
I drop Dorian Fucking Gray on the floor and cover the hair with my hand to keep
it from getting lost again&#x2026; like it means something so much more than
any pubic hair should.
&#x201C;What?!&#x201D;
&#x201C;I found it.&#x201D;
That&#x2019;s all I can say.
&#x201C;Found what? What are you&#x2026;&#x201D; he looks at the book, stripped
of its dust cover, &#x201C;Oh. Oh!&#x201D;
When I lift my hand, he doesn&#x2019;t take it right away. No, he&#x2019;s
crouched next to me just&#x2026; staring at it with the kind of quiet, intense
reflection usually reserved for contemplative walks through galleries. And with
his chin in his hand, I see another look&#x2026; that distant focus that
I&#x2019;ve seen in him when he&#x2019;s thinking what he dismissively calls
deep-thoughts (usually about his father) and doesn&#x2019;t know that I can see
him.
&#x201C;I have so many more of them now,&#x201D; he says quietly, plucking it
from my shirt with wide careful fingertips.
I swallow, breathing more normally, &#x201C;Not so many.&#x201D;
He looks at me, squinting, creasing the corners of his eyes, &#x201C;Hmm. I
guess you&#x2019;d know better than anybody,&#x201D; he smiles, &#x201C;I want
to frame this, or bronze it like a baby shoe&#x2026; is that weird?&#x201D;
I laugh again, watching him examine the hair again in the light.
He&#x2019;ll tell me, later, that he mixed the hair into his paints&#x2026;
that the hair is in one of his pieces.
He&#x2019;ll tell me he doesn't know which piece it's in.
But I'll always think he knows.
***** V is for Viggo Mortensen. *****
When he&#x2019;s thirty-one years old, Fen goes to movies alone.
That night it&#x2019;s a movie he&#x2019;s seen before. More than once.
It might be his favorite movie, if he thought about it.
Eastern Promises.
He&#x2019;s standing in the ticket line, leaning against the red-brick exterior
wall of the old independent movie theater. The theater does series&#x2026;
showing either a genre or the work of a director, a writer, or an actor.
Fen has been to every screening in this series.
Viggo Mortensen might be his favorite actor&#x2026; if he thought about it.
It&#x2019;s a crisp, foggy night and the lights inside the theater are warm and
inviting but the line is moving slowly.
In front of him, in line, are a guy and a girl. She&#x2019;s about Fen&#x2019;s
height, pretty and wry, with chocolate brown hair to the middle of her back.
She smiles at Fen once and he sees how young she is&#x2026; just a kid.
The guy with her is tall.
Very tall.
With dark messy hair that&#x2019;s uneven at the nape of his neck.
He&#x2019;s wearing a flannel coat and talking, a lot, about Viggo Mortensen.
Fen doesn&#x2019;t mean to listen to their conversation.
He doesn&#x2019;t mean to smile when the guy, who never turns around, tells her
that he&#x2019;s going to cover her eyes when, &#x201C;Viggo&#x2019;s balls
start flying.&#x201D;
He doesn&#x2019;t mean to try to see this tall guy&#x2019;s face when the girl
wraps her arms around him and says, &#x201C;Oh, Big Brother, nothing I
haven&#x2019;t seen before.&#x201D;
He doesn't mean to laugh when they guy sighs, &#x201C;Oh, jesus&#x2026;
don&#x2019;t tell me that.&#x201D;
When they&#x2019;re inside, the two of them sit a few rows in front of him. He
doesn&#x2019;t mean to pay attention to this fact&#x2026; but he can&#x2019;t
help it.
Fen doesn&#x2019;t mean to laugh when the tall guy, as promised, reaches to
cover the girl&#x2019;s eyes with a big, wide hand when, in the fight scene,
Viggo&#x2019;s&#x2026; balls start flying.
Fen covers his mouth with his hand and keeps his eyes on the screen for the
rest of the movie, ignoring the impulse to watch the silhouette of the back of
this tall guy&#x2019;s head.
When the movie ends, he tries again to see the guy&#x2019;s face&#x2026; but
the two of them are already gone.
                                   &#x2026;
I open the door, drop my keys into the dish, and look up to see Viggo Mortensen
standing in front of me. A sign tacked to the front of his chest says,
&#x201C;Welcome home! I missed you.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Hawke,&#x201D; I set down my bag and roll my shoulder before trying
again, &#x201C;Hawke?&#x201D;
Viggo Mortensen&#x2026; or rather the cardboard cut-out of Viggo Mortensen as
Aragorn, was a&#x2026; gift. Of sorts.
I brought this on myself.
Several months ago, we were finishing off a bottle of wine with Isabela and
Bethany. Grier was sound asleep by then and Bethany was staying over that
night. Somehow the conversation turned to what Bethany called, &#x201C;the
List.&#x201D; Or what celebrities we would fuck, if given the chance to do so
without repercussions. Up to five people.
I said his name. Without even thinking about it.
I said, &#x201C;Viggo Mortensen.&#x201D;
Hawke was beside me, lying on his belly. He looked up at me, grinning,
&#x201C;I&#x2019;m&#x2026; I&#x2019;m really okay with that.&#x201D;
Isabela said the Viggo was on her list as well, and offered to make it a group
activity, should the opportunity present itself.
&#x201C;You have a crush on him, Fen?&#x201D; Hawke rested his head against my
thigh.
&#x201C;I&#x2026; no?&#x201D;
&#x201C;What is it about Viggo?&#x201D; Bethany asked me.
I shrugged, &#x201C;I&#x2026; don&#x2019;t know. Can&#x2019;t explain
it.&#x201D;
Isabela, however, could&#x2026; in graphic and strangely poetic detail.
And I agreed with everything she said. Emphatically.
A week later, I came home to find this cardboard cut-out standing next to our
bed with a red bow attached to the shoulder.
Hawke puts him in various places around the loft now.
I&#x2019;ve found him in the kitchen, standing proudly by a freshly baked cake.
Standing guard by the coat closet, wearing a fedora (I still don&#x2019;t know
where the fedora came from).
I found him once standing in the middle of the bathroom late at night&#x2026; a
surprise for me when I turned the light on.
And Hawke laughs. Every time. It makes him happy.
I hear him, now, in the kitchen, laughing, &#x201C;He missed you so
much!&#x201D;
I pick Viggo up and carry him into the kitchen where Hawke is waiting for me.
I lean Viggo against the fridge and kiss Hawke.
He&#x2019;s still smiling.
Still smiling when I lead him upstairs.
Smiling in our bed, under me.
Bethany asked me that night if I had gone to that screening; she remembered
seeing me in line.
I told her that yes, I was there. That was me.
Hawke didn&#x2019;t see me then.
He didn&#x2019;t see me until the first morning I walked into Bianca&#x2019;s.
I saw him before he saw me but that morning, that was the first time I saw his
eyes.
I smile too, kiss him, move with him until he stops smiling and groans under
me, mouth open slightly and eyes closed, &#x201C;I missed you, too.&#x201D;
***** W is for Wolf. *****
Thirty-two.
Fen is thirty-two, sitting on a hotel bed in a city that was never home but
where he lived once. Once. For a lifetime. He is waiting for the one person
he&#x2019;s ever&#x2014;
What, Fenris?
His chest burns, inside, deeper inside than breath can go.
Thirty-two.
Ten years ago, he was twenty-two.
He lived in this city and was never alone and where he healed but was never
whole and he saw, he saw and when he opened his eyes he ran and he&#x2014;
What, fucker?
Fen was a white wolf ten years ago, running at night, chasing a shadow&#x2014;
What, Leto, do you know yet?
He shuts his eyes tight and feels his face with his fingertips. They smell like
tobacco, they smell like him, always, because he can&#x2019;t stop touching
him, can&#x2019;t stop touching&#x2014;
Him.
Hawke.
He&#x2019;s never wanted to touch anything as much, as much, as he wants to
touch Hawke. More than instinct, more than desire, more than&#x2014;
What, Little Wolf?
Fen is thirty-two and, he knows then, afraid.
Waiting.
Alone.
Because a part of him inside is screaming, ragged, a ten-year-old-twenty-two
year old part of himself that died in this city, in the shower, in a flowerbed
at dawn naked and vomiting, screaming that he won&#x2019;t come back, that no
one would, that he&#x2019;s too good, too bright, too whole and that as soon as
he&#x2019;s seen him for the wolf that he was, is, inside, under the layers of
coats and skin that look human, pass for human, as soon as Hawke sees him like
that he&#x2019;ll never come back, not like he was, not bright like he was,
because no one would.
He&#x2019;s afraid because he&#x2019;s never wanted to touch anything so much
for so long, to not let go.
But he did. Today. He let go and now all he can do is hope&#x2014;
And Hawke is the only person he&#x2019;s ever&#x2014;
What, Fen?
Fen is thirty-two.
And waiting on a hotel bed.
He&#x2019;s a white wolf.
Hoping.
                                   &#x2026;
It&#x2019;s quiet. The video is muted.
I don&#x2019;t care. I remember what I said. I remember. I see my lips move.
Twenty-two years old.
I remember that broken tooth.
I run the tip of my tongue against the back of the tooth, where I know
there&#x2019;s a fine seam between what&#x2019;s really me, my tooth, and what
was bought, restored, a veneer to make my mouth look whole again, fixed,
aesthetically pleasing.
There&#x2019;s a skinned wolf in the center of the room.
Subtle, Dan.
A grey wolf.
Dan never got the color right.
Grey not white.
I touch the fur of this dead wolf, run my thumb over the empty place where an
eye was&#x2026; what looks now like a button-hole.
And then I touch the cast.
Mine.
Hollow plaster. What held me in when my back was broken. Tied me in. Kept my
bones straight until they were whole. Again. I couldn&#x2019;t breathe inside
until it was cut to let me out and now, at the sides, tied together again with
thick black ribbon.
Dan tied my wrists together, Dan tied my throat closed, Dan kept me where he
wanted me.
And my bones mended in the shape he wanted.
Little Wolf. His.
No.
Not.
Just an empty cast.
A wolf&#x2019;s skin with a button-hole eye.
Empty.
All he can hold onto.
Before I go, I look at the photo again.
The first one. The smallest one. The ironic one. The relic.
Leto, Fourth Grade.
Hawke saw this. He saw this.
And he came back.
I take a picture of Leto, Fourth Grade and it&#x2019;s mine, now, not his.
I go, and when I cover my mouth with my hand outside in the dark, I smell fur,
tobacco, something metallic&#x2026; but more than anything else, I taste Hawke.
He came back.
And so will I.
***** X is for X-Ray. *****
Fen&#x2019;s thirty-four being x-rayed again.
It&#x2019;s just getting worse, not getting better.
Leandra&#x2019;s been gentle, saying we all fall apart, as they smoke together
outside (they are both, she&#x2019;s proud to point out, &#x2018;legal card-
bearing potheads now&#x2019;). The pain ebbs as she recounts the most
inopportune times that Malcolm Hawke&#x2019;s back went out in a way that makes
all three of her children smile the way that Hawkes smile when they
don&#x2019;t really want to.
Isabela offers the services of some holistic woman she knows who would, as
Gilly said, shake some incense at him and probably make it worse.
Andy&#x2019;s been quiet. But there. He smiles the way that someone does when
they understand pain.
&#x201C;Okay, Mr. Aucoin,&#x201D; a cool voice over the speaker,
&#x201C;Breathe in.&#x201D;
He does. He breathes in and holds still, inside the machine.
And his bones light up. Again.
Hawke wants to help, but he&#x2019;s mad.
Hes in the waiting room. He isn&#x2019;t smiling today.
Not in anyway.
Because he thinks Fen could be taking better care of himself.
He gets the all clear and breathes out, past the pain in his back, and sags
slightly.
Maybe he could. Should.
He&#x2019;s trying.
                                   &#x2026;
I knew something was wrong as soon as I got in bed.
It was hot. It&#x2019;s always hot, Hawke runs hot, but this was&#x2026; wrong.
I turned on the light but he was facing away from me, hunched shoulders wrapped
in the quilt and the sheets. He was sick when I left. A week ago. I
didn&#x2019;t want to wake him up. I kissed the back of his neck.
Soaked.
Cold.
Wrong.
&#x201C;Hawke.&#x201D;
I wished later that the next moments hadn&#x2019;t happened so fast. That
we&#x2019;d had a few more minutes in the in-between, in the calm &#x2013; just
a normal night, late, I came in late and took a shower and got into bed for the
first time in a week. Our bed. With him. Selfish.
But it couldn&#x2019;t last.
I pulled back the quilt and the sheet both of which were soaked through;
he&#x2019;d sweated through them both, and the sheet beneath him. But he was
shivering.
Hot.
Cold.
Wrong.
He was disoriented. Couldn&#x2019;t answer my questions. Just stared down at
himself, uncovered and drenched in cold sweat, and started to panic. He looked
up at me, glassy-eyed, &#x201C;Fen?&#x201D;
And then coughing, couldn&#x2019;t stop coughing, with the dogs sitting there
watching him as helpless as me.
The ER was quiet. Nate was there, as he always is.
They did an x-ray because they suspected pneumonia.
Pneumonia.
I wanted to ask him why he didn&#x2019;t go to a doctor.
I wanted to ask him why he didn&#x2019;t tell me.
I was only gone for a week and, yeah, the wi-fi was bad, and the cell-
reception, and we didn&#x2019;t talk, I wanted to ask why&#x2014;
But he was asleep, so I didn&#x2019;t
So they did this x-ray and, yes, just like they thought, pneumonia.
Easy. Uncomfortable but easy. Antibiotics and rest and, oh God, Leandra is
going to make such a big deal out of this, because she&#x2019;s out of the
country with Bethany, he can hear her voice now, saying, &#x201C;I leave for
one month and&#x2014;&#x201D;
I hear the word biopsy.
Hawke&#x2019;s sitting in bed, glassy-eyed, sweaty, and he doesn&#x2019;t look
at me or the doctor. I don&#x2019;t know what he&#x2019;s looking at.
I ask the doctor to repeat what he said and Hawke makes a noise, a No, please
don&#x2019;t sound.
But the doctor repeats himself and this time I hear him. Disjointed.
Concern. Mass. Needle. Lung. Biopsy.
Hawke tells me not to tell anyone.
He doesn&#x2019;t want them to worry.
In the morning, I call Merrill and ask her to check on the dogs.
And then, of all the people we know, I tell Merrill.
Merrill.
The words just come out of my mouth (Concern-Mass-Needle-Lung-Biopsy) and she
listens, and swears not to tell anyone else when I ask her not to.
They do it, more blood-work, a needle goes into his lung and comes back out and
it&#x2019;s quick and done, take another x-ray, observation to make sure his
lung doesn&#x2019;t collapse. When he coughs and coughs blood, they say that
that&#x2019;s normal, okay, because of the biopsy but it&#x2019;s not okay, I
can&#x2019;t&#x2014;
I don&#x2019;t think about coughing up blood.
Or my father.
Or his father.
He makes a joke, something about Doc Holiday, and I smile. Even though I
don&#x2019;t want to.
We can go.
He&#x2019;s home, and listless. Not Hawke. Not the Hawke that takes up too much
room. The Hawke that fidgets. Hawke that sleeps through the night hot but not
burning.
He doesn&#x2019;t eat much and he just keeps repeating, please don&#x2019;t
tell them, Fen, in a voice that&#x2019;s too thin, I don&#x2019;t want them to
worry.
Four days of waiting.
Inconclusive. Another biopsy. Come back.
We wait longer.
And he asks me to take him to bed.
And I do.
Of course I do.
Even with that thin voice&#x2014;
Because of that thin voice.
I take him, fuck him, a long hot familiar body that&#x2019;s thinner and full
of antibiotics and potentially&#x2014;
Concern. Mass. Needle. Lung. Biopsy.
I push him too far that night, but he doesn&#x2019;t ask me to stop, he leans
into too far, into me, into rough hands and my hips, too fast, and my cock,
don&#x2019;t stop, and pain, pleasure and please take control, please.
And afterward, we lie in bed together, in the dark on clean sheets.
And he just says, in a voice that isn&#x2019;t thin now, &#x201C;I&#x2019;m
scared.&#x201D;
He fidgets.
I say, into the dark, &#x201C;I am too.&#x201D;
I hold his hand. Then.
And I hold it again when we both hear the word benign the next day, a word that
feels like a clean light, a flash, something that says, he&#x2019;s okay,
he&#x2019;s safe, hold on to him, Fen, but it&#x2019;s okay, he&#x2019;s safe.
A white light that sears through me, clear through, like an x-ray.
I breathe out then and try to hold on.
***** Y is for Yours. *****
Fen is thirty-six years old with a sweaty sleeping princess in his arms.
Grier, like Fen and unlike the rest of them, is not a fan of the annual
Kirkwall Renaissance Faire.
She was suspicious of the costume they put her in (though she did like the
little wooden bow and arrow set Bethany gave her enough to allow it) at home,
and as soon as they arrived inside the park where everyone was dressed up, she
had a meltdown.
She reached for Fen and wouldn&#x2019;t let go.
Fen who was, like a wet-blanket (thank you, Isabela), just wearing his normal
clothes.
Fen was familiar to a two-year old princess.
At first they offered to go home, she didn&#x2019;t like it, wasn&#x2019;t
going to have fun &#x2014; but she was fine, happy, as long as Fen was holding
her, her arms wrapped around his neck, her bow over his shoulder.
So they stayed and that&#x2019;s how they&#x2019;ve spent the whole day at the
park. With his assurances that he was fine, that they were fine, the others
went off together in a costumed pack, and did the Renaissance Faire routine
while Fen and Grier wandered together, veering away from anything that made her
too nervous.
When she walked, he held her hand.
When they ate, he stripped the turkey meat off of a bone for her with his
fingers.
And she shared, messily, her strawberry shortcake with him.
He changed her, cleaned her face and her hands, and when she felt brave enough,
he took her over to see the stumpy little ponies in a wooden pen.
And now, in the warm late afternoon, she fell asleep in his arms. So he bought
a watery American beer in a plastic cup (not very period, is that?) and sat
down with her on a bench in the shade.
&#x201C;Is she yours, serrah?&#x201D; a passing wench, with a wooden spoon in
her cleavage, asks him.
Fen thinks, smiling, with Grier in his arms that it&#x2019;d be too much to
explain to this wench, No, she&#x2019;s not mine, she&#x2019;s my&#x2014;
He doesn&#x2019;t know what to call him&#x2026; not boyfriend. Partner? That
doesn&#x2019;t sound right.
Lover? No.
Hawke.
She&#x2019;s my Hawke&#x2019;s sister&#x2019;s daughter.
She&#x2019;s a Hawke, though.
A Hawke.
And because she&#x2019;s a Hawke, his answer isn&#x2019;t a lie.
Fen smiles when he&#x2019;s thirty-six with a sleeping princess in his arms and
answers, &#x201C;Yes, she&#x2019;s mine.&#x201D;
                                   &#x2026;
&#x201C;Merrill is beautiful.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Glowing.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Showing, yeah?&#x201D;
I smile, &#x201C;Just a little.&#x201D;
I have gone to many weddings. For work. I know the energy and the money and the
time that go into them. I understand the machine of weddings. This was one of
the few that was actually beautiful.
Not manufactured beautiful.
Not about the dress or the venue or the centerpieces.
Merrill and Gilly got married in the rain.
We stood in the rain with them. We are soaked, still.
Its dark now, but the tent where the food and the portable dance-floor and
what&#x2019;s left of the cake that Bela made for them is protected from the
continuing drizzle is lit up, warm, full.
Hawke and I stepped out.
For a little air.
His side is against mine where we sit on a sloped hill. The winery overlooks a
valley in the day time, far from the city, far from anything. Just a warm tent
and music and their voices and an endless night sky.
And Hawke, warm and solid against me.
It&#x2019;s beautiful. Calm. Whole and full.
&#x201C;Hawke.&#x201D;
&#x201C;Mmm?&#x201D;
I need to say this.
I grip his left hand with my right, because it feels important, this moment, it
feels like everything I have been, everything I will be. Two words said at
night. A promise.
&#x201C;I&#x2019;m yours.&#x201D;
He kisses me, mouth hot and open against the side of my throat, closes his
fingers around mine and waits for a few breaths. Heartbeats in time.
I feel his eyelashes brush soft against my cheek, voice low, whole and full,
&#x201C;And I&#x2019;m yours, Fen.&#x201D;
***** Z is for Zuni Wolf Fetish. *****
Fen is forty-one years old when he finally tells Hawke about the little stone
wolf.
A wolf Dan gave him that he held in his hand twenty-years ago in New York.
He tells Hawke when they&#x2019;ve been together for ten years. A decade.
Hawke&#x2019;s hands are empty on the table as he listens.
I thought I knew all your stories, Fen.
That&#x2019;s what he says in the kitchen, with his hands folded and sunlight
catching on the silver in his beard, catching fire in the blue of his eyes.
He doesn&#x2019;t know all of Fen&#x2019;s stories.
But he smiles.
This story mattered today. For some reason. The Zuni Wolf Fetish and the dream
that he had, that he chased a shadow, that he kept moving forward because of
that shadow&#x2026; today, in their kitchen, over cups of coffee, that was
important.
Fen wonders what stories Hawke hasn&#x2019;t told him.
You never really know all of someone&#x2019;s stories.
Not even after ten years.
&#x201C;Fuck, Hawke,&#x201D; he shrugs, grinning easily, &#x201C;I don&#x2019;t
even know all of my stories.&#x201D;
Hawke smiles again, and kisses the inside of Fen&#x2019;s hands.
                                   &#x2026;
Rainy&#x2019;s holding my hand and I don&#x2019;t ever want to let her go. Not
ever. She&#x2019;s taller than me, and her hair is so bright and pretty and
red, and she knows so much. She knows about Zunis because she learned about
them in school.
Rainy picks me up so that I can see inside the case. I see a whole bunch of
little stone animals with different colored eyes.
&#x201C;Can I touch them?&#x201D;
Sometimes I can&#x2019;t see things very clear right away and if I touch them,
I understand them better.
&#x201C;No, Leto,&#x201D; she sounds annoyed with me but she still holds me up,
&#x201C;Not these ones.&#x201D;
She tells me that they are important, like magic, and that each one means
something to a different direction. Like on the compass her dad gave her, the
one that she keeps under her pillow.
I know the directions.
North.
South.
East.
West.
&#x201C;The mountain lion is for the north,&#x201D; she points at each one in
the glass case, &#x201C;The black bear is for the west, the badger is for the
south, the white wolf for the east. But there&#x2019;s also down in the ground,
a mole, and up, the sky, that&#x2019;s an eagle.&#x201D;
She tells me that they carve lines into the animals and that they&#x2019;re
called heart lines. They start at the mouth, where they breathe, and go to the
heart where their spirit is.
My sister Rainy is so smart.
There&#x2019;s a woman selling stuff outside the museum. She has little stone
animals like the ones inside on a table and I can touch these (she tells me
it&#x2019;s okay).
I pick up a bird.
She tells me it&#x2019;s a hawk, not an eagle.
Hawks are messengers, they tell you what&#x2019;s ahead of you.
That&#x2019;s what she tells me about hawks.
I pick up a dog, but she says it&#x2019;s a wolf, like the one inside the case
in the museum.
They&#x2019;re survivors, she says, which means they just keep on living.
I hold one in each hand until Rainy tells me to put them down, we have to go
home now and we can&#x2019;t afford to buy these.
She pulls me away from the table and the woman and the wolf and the hawk.
And we go home together, walking real fast, because we&#x2019;ll both be in
trouble if we&#x2019;re not home in time. I walk as fast as I can, because I
don&#x2019;t want to get Rainy in trouble.
I run when she does.
I run like a wolf.
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