[Secret Santa Fic] Moon for the Misbegotten

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Title: Moon for the Misbegotten
Main Pairing: Colin/Greg/Jeff/Ryan
Rating: R for language
Word Count: 1,997
Summary: There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
A/N: My Secret Santa fic for jie_jie, who requested “some three-or-more-some ficcage.” The title is taken from the Eugene O’Neill play of the same name; the summary is a quote from the same play. Warning for references to, but not descriptions of, character death. Extra-special hugs & thanks to the Beta Goddess™ herself, sungreen70, for her unerring editorial eye.

They’re backstage at the MGM Grand. Jeff bounces on the balls of his feet as he peeks out from the wings, trying to get a glimpse of the audience as they shuffle in.

“Eager tonight, are we?”

Jeff turns at the sound of Ryan’s voice. “I like watching them come in. The sounds they make, it’s like” — and here his hands join the conversation — “it’s like an orchestra tuning up before a concert. If anticipation had a soundtrack, it would be this.”

This openness, this unabashed willingness to just be Jeff — this is why Ryan loves him. This is why they all do.

Ryan puts his arm around Jeff and gently steers him back toward the others. It’s this vigilance, this protectiveness that borders on the avuncular, that makes Jeff love him. Ryan doesn’t know it, which makes Jeff love him more.

They walk toward Colin and Greg. As they approach, Colin and Greg look up, not disrupting the flow of their conversation, and Jeff imagines he hears a click as he and Ryan join them. This, he would never share, not even with them. To Jeff, it’s the sound of the four of them coming together, completing the puzzle. Together, they fit. Together, they’re just right.

The four of them reach out and touch fingertips. It’s their own private pre-show ritual, Jeff and Ryan and Colin and Greg.

“Knock ’em dead.”

It doesn’t matter who speaks, only that one of them does.

* * *
Colin doesn’t speak anymore, not since the accident. He rattles around like a hurricane in a coffee cup, his body an inadequate vessel for the oceans of grief he contains. He watches the scene play out, again and again and again, on the screen of his own private interior cinema: Mr. Mochrie...? Your friends, they made it. The three of you, you’re going to be fine.

Thinking that they were more than just friends. That fine coming from the mouth of this person was an obscenity, a desecration.

That there were four of them, not three.

* * *
“Did you know that when they broke ground for the Bellagio, they found four bags of casino chips from the Dunes?”

There’s a brief pause as the other three try to figure out where Jeff’s going with this. There’s no guarantee they will, but at least they’ll get to take the scenic route.

“I’m just saying, there’s so much history down there.” Jeff thumps his foot on the ground, as if to illustrate what he means by down there. “They keep trying to build over top of it, like they can just erase the past. Cover it up and start again whenever... whenever they decide they want to shed their skin and become something else.” Delicately, Jeff uses his teeth to slide the cocktail onion off the plastic sword in his drink. “But if something wants to resurface, it will, no matter how well you think you’ve tamped it down.”

“Erasing the past is what Vegas is all about, kitten.”

But Jeff’s lost; he doesn’t hear Greg. “They’re all still down there — the Dunes, the Stardust, the Sands....” Jeff murmurs their names like an incantation, like he’s summoning ghosts long buried beneath the city’s slick neon carapace. He looks up, suddenly, his eyes bright. “Hey, did you know the Sands is where the Rat Pack got its start? We’re kind of like the Rat Pack, don’t you think?”

“So who does that make you?” Greg asks, concentrating on the olive he’s trying to tongue out of his martini. “A latter-day Joey Bishop?”

“No, I’m Peter Lawford,” Jeff says. He’s clearly given this some thought. “You’re Joey Bishop, Colin’s Dean Martin, and Ryan’s Frank Sinatra.”

“Well, well,” Ryan says. “Fly me to the moon, Mr. Lawford.”

“Us as the Rat Pack.” Colin raises his eyes heavenward, indicating the neon sign above their heads. “More like the Four Queens.”

“Fuck that,” Greg says expansively, toasting the sign with his drink because it’s Las Vegas, and he can. “We’re all kings.”

“You and your obsession with the past,” Colin says, absentmindedly folding his napkin. He looks startled when it turns into a pirate hat. “You’d live in it if you could.”

Ryan takes in Jeff’s impeccably tailored suit, the way he carefully lays the plastic sword across the rim of his cocktail glass. As if he were setting up a high-wire act in miniature, a tiny acrobat about to tightrope-walk across a gin and vermouth lake. “Sometimes I think he does.”

“It was a simpler time.”

The other three exchange an amused glance. “Not that old song again.”

“Someone who lives in the past doesn’t see a future for himself.” Greg talks as if everything he says is a pronouncement, or a fortune cookie. None of them have ever been able to decide which.

Jeff meets Greg’s level gaze, the defiance in his eyes an inadequate mask for the tremor that ripples through his voice. “Sometimes I don’t.”

* * *
The corridors stretch off in all sorts of beguiling directions. Jeff wonders where they lead. They tell him, patiently, when he asks, and Jeff goes to sleep, satisfied.

The next morning, he will wonder, and ask, again.

* * *
Jeff pushes open the door to their hotel room, an hour after the rest of them. “And then the guy goes — you know, that guy on Flamingo Road with the hat? — he goes, I’m going to show you how I do the giraffe, and then — well, here’s the one I made,” he says, placing a twisted mass of pink balloons atop the television.

Colin smiles, partly at the giraffe, partly at the way Jeff always starts a conversation as if they’re already in the middle of it. “Haven’t you had enough for one night?” He says it gently, almost indulgently.

“The kid doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

“I’m not a kid,” Jeff says automatically, while at the same time realizing that pointing it out is something a kid would do. People say I’m very mature for my age. In three months, I’ll be thirty-nine and a half. Here, I made you a giraffe out of balloons.

“You’re right, you’re not.” Greg comes over and lays a hand on the side of Jeff’s face. Fresh from the shower, he’s not wearing his glasses, and it gives him an uncharacteristically defenseless look. “You’re an old, old soul.” Greg moves his hand lower. “In a hot, hot body.”

Jeff’s heart turns over. “And you’re a dirty old man.”

“Correction: a clean old man.”

“I love you, Greg.”

“Pfft, you’re all talk. All talk and no action.” Greg drops his towel. He does this theatrically, like he does most things. But Jeff can see through him, through to the self-doubt that still, after all these years, crops up like a recalcitrant cowlick. Something that Jeff is more than happy to smooth out, to pat down.

Jeff pushes Greg down onto the bed with one hand, loosens his own tie with the other. Greg reaches for Jeff’s belt buckle. Colin and Ryan are propped against the pillows, their little fingers linked, watching the scene as if it were something on pay-per-view. Colin reaches for Greg with his free hand as Jeff crawls up the bed and puts his head in Colin’s lap. Jeff puts one hand between Ryan’s legs, the other between Greg’s.

“Greedy,” Colin says, stroking Jeff’s hair.

No. He just wants to be connected. To all of them, for as long as he can.

Greg’s half-right: Jeff doesn’t see a future for himself. But Ryan’s all wrong: Jeff doesn’t live in the past. He lives in a time entirely of his own making, and he’ll do whatever it takes to hold on to it — to hold on to them — with all the tenacious stupidity of a drowning man clinging to a sugar cube.

Jeff wishes it could last. He knows it won’t.

* * *
The words keep coming, marching up to the door of his subconscious and rattling the knob at all hours of the day and night. Greg struggles to make sense of them, to put them together. He hears a voice screaming about signals, the same voice telling him go go go, but he doesn’t know who. He doesn’t know why.

* * *
Jeff wakes in the night. Ryan is silhouetted against the window, blocking the spill of candy-coloured light into their room. Holding Las Vegas at bay.

He watches as Colin slips from the bed and comes up behind Ryan. “You need to go?” Colin says, his voice low.

“I need to go.” Ryan murmurs the words but doesn’t turn. His shoulders sag, though whether it’s in defeat or apology Jeff doesn’t know. Jeff does know that Ryan never sleeps well. Even at home, he roams the house most nights, out of stress, tension, vigilance. It’s worse when they travel; worse still when home is so tantalizingly close.

Everything that happens next is like a handful of Polaroid snapshots flung onto the floor: discrete events with nothing connecting them, nothing tying them into a single narrative. Colin hits the down arrow with his elbow and the four of them wait, cushioned by a plush silence, as the crescendo of pings heralds the elevator’s ascent from below. Greg, fully dressed, sits on the edge of the unmade bed, a snowdrift of discarded towels at his feet. Jeff stands next to their car in the hotel’s subterranean parking garage, the keys heavy and cold in his hand.

Jeff drives. Ryan is next to him in the front seat, his head turned to the window; his fingers drum a muffled beat on the armrest. Colin and Greg are asleep in the back.

The horizon feels like a borderline that Jeff is loath to cross, a thin seam of hazy light separating now from soon. He keeps the car windows up, not wanting the world to intrude upon their tiny upholstered kingdom a moment before its time.

Jeff stops for gas at the 76 station in Barstow. When he climbs back into the car, he turns to Ryan, expecting him to ask for mints or a soda or an air freshener shaped like a pine tree, but he’s asleep. He watches the rise and fall of Ryan’s chest, the tempo of his breathing a gentle adagio. Jeff’s fingers graze the soft flannel of Ryan’s shirt. Ryan doesn’t awaken, doesn’t even stir.

Jeff’s never known this kind of love, this pure kind of trust. He wants to gorge himself on it so his soul will never hunger for it again; he wants to slit himself open and cram it inside, bury it so deeply that it colonizes every cell in his body.

Reluctantly, he withdraws his hand. He turns the key in the ignition, pulls out into the street. The orange light of the 76 sign washes over his windshield, and, briefly, across Ryan’s sleeping face. Jeff idles at the intersection that will take them back onto the I-15, his turn signal flashing like a warning in the darkness. High above his head, a sign swings like a hyphen between the two stoplights. This is your signal, it says. Jeff’s vision blurs. The stoplights seem to pulse, a beat out of time. This is your signal.

So go, urges the voice in Jeff’s head.

The desert wind blows in hot, carrying the scent of fire and resurrection.

This is your signal.

Jeff comes off the clutch, leans hard on the accelerator.

So go.

He does.

* * *
It’s been a year. Or ten minutes, or an hour. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Ryan is gone. And the rest of them are just flotsam, washed up on time’s shore.

They gather at their house, their house that stands shuttered and empty because they’re no longer capable of living in it. In deference to Colin, or perhaps in deference to the jagged puzzle pieces of their memory, they don’t speak. Instead, they reach out, and, with effort, touch fingertips.

It’s enough. It has to be.

Comments

[wickedground.livejournal.com]

I don't need my heart anymore, it's totally OK to stomp on it a few more times. This was so sad :(

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Awww...

Thanks for reading & commenting! :-)

[who-is-small.livejournal.com]

I concur. Heart = broken. God, this was beautifully done, so vivid. Oh, boys. Kudos, Allie.

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Awww, cheers for that, Kate :-) I'm amazed (and pleased) at how much this fic seems to be affecting everyone.

[blamography.livejournal.com]

oh, this is so, so very good. jeff's perspective is crushing. i love the line about his age and the balloon giraffe. this is strikingly well written, very well done.

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, thanks! :-)

[jie-jie.livejournal.com]

Yay, you posted! Thank you so much for writing this for me!

First off, I love the pairing. :D That first scene, describing their relationship, how they click, worked really well. Your juxtaposition of the different time periods was very nicely done too. Going from It doesn’t matter who speaks, only that one of them does to Colin doesn’t speak anymore, not since the accident...wow.

The little flashes of their future lives were such a great way to ramp up the tension. I was completely on edge every time I read one just waiting to find out who had died. That last one was just heartbreaking and I loved this line: It’s been a year. Or ten minutes, or an hour. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Ryan is gone. And the rest of them are just flotsam, washed up on time’s shore. *clutches chest* It just captures their grief perfectly.

You took my prompt in a totally unexpected direction and I love you for it. I have a very happy inner angst whore right now. ^_^ Thank you again!

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome! :-)

You took my prompt in a totally unexpected direction

Lol, this fic took me in an unexpected direction, too! I didn't plan it this way at all; at one point while I was writing I emailed Sun and said, "Uh, I think I just killed Ryan!" I'm so glad it worked for you, though -- it was an interesting ride writing this one!

[sungreen70.livejournal.com]

You already know how I feel about this story :) All I really have to add is that it STILL haunts me! It's such a perfect romance, which is something that is usally said about two people, not four, but just as Jeff reflects early on, these four CLICK. You can't imagine them without all four together. That's why it's so devastating when they become three. You're left not knowing if the three that are left will survive the grief and heartbreak, but you do know that if they do, it will never be the same.

You write Jeff so beautifully. I love the whole balloon giraffe scene - it seems so very like him. So does the way he's thought out the whole Rat Pack comparison, and the way "his hands join the conversation". I like his dark side too - he KNOWS that what he has is just too perfect, and it can't last, and that makes the whole story especially poignant, even during the happier parts.

I know I already said it, but I think this is your best work yet :)

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Awww, thanks! *hugs you* And thanks for being such an awesome beta reader, too! *hugs you again*

[deaconite.livejournal.com]

He rattles around like a hurricane in a coffee cup, his body an inadequate vessel for the oceans of grief he contains. That line is amazing; I love the imagery of it, how well it encapsulates his grief.

I really love this piece. You've written Jeff's perspective wonderfully, it seems very real. The snapshots of the aftermath of the accident works really well, I love how those scenes juxtapose with the rest of the story.

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

What a great comment -- thank you so much! The hurricane line was one of the first that came to me as I was planning this fic, so I'm glad it worked for you! :-)

[sencha-kt.livejournal.com]

...*sobs incoherently* The imagery. THE IMAGERY. Every line, every word, everything was perfect; I can't quote because it was the story as a unified whole which took my breath away. I particularly love the image of them coming together to touch fingertips, a tiny gesture that means so much to them. Colin, poor Colin who has such deep ties with Ryan -- you really show that it's like a part of Colin has been ripped from him. Ah, my heart Jeff.

YOU WRITE SO BEAUTIFULLY. AND THIS IS SO SAD ;___;

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your awesome comment! It's perverse, but I loooooove writing angst.

[rycolfan.livejournal.com]

Okay, I should have waited another couple of days... *sobs brokenly upon the floor*

It's so beautifully written, and I adore the way you've handled the four-way relationship, but... gah. That ending just about broke my heart. And I'm out of tissues. Damn you! Not many fics can make me cry; now yours is right up there with Sun's 'Autumn' in that regard. So, so sad.

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

Awwww *hugs & shoulder-pats* I should've provided some sort of therapy hotline number at the end, given how people are reacting to this, lol.

Oh, Sun's Autumn just broke me, too. One of her very best fics, imo.

[indybaggins.livejournal.com]

Wow. I feel as if my soul has been turned inside out. BEAUTIFUL, flowing, provocative, perfect imagery, one of the best characterizations of Jeff I have ever read. Damn you're good!

[ocelotkitty.livejournal.com]

High praise coming from someone whose writing I admire so much! Thank you for your wonderful comment! :-)