The Art of the Matter

“Nope. Not doing that,” Stan’s voice was confident and firm, but Bill’s grip was moreso as the spidery fingers wrapped around his wrist manhandled him into the chair. With the judicious application of the world’s pointiest ass to his thighs, Stan was at the mercy of his newest friend.

“Oh, come on. What’s the big deal? It’s just a little paint.” Bill was tucking one of Stan’s arms into the crook of his armpit, holding it steady as his hands readied a small glass bottle.

“It’s nail polish,” Stan protested, unable to use any of the power in his boxer’s frame to leverage against the five-foot-nothing guy who was somehow managing to keep him still. “That’s girl stuff. I’m not a girl, and I’m not some kind of f—”

“Stan, Stan, Stan,” Bill pinched a finger between his own and applied a coat of shimmering gold to the chewed and stubby nail, “you’re not dumb enough to let someone else think for you.”

The comment threw him off enough that he forgot to struggle out of the other’s grasp. Another nail turned gold as he asked, “What the hell’re you talking about?”

Bill rolled his eyes and continued, lacing their fingers together to more effectively keep Stan’s pinned in place and unmoving. “Saying nail polish is for girls and faggots is a scam shilled by Big Society to keep you miserable and stupid. Are you really going to tell me you’re willing to blindly follow whatever rules they try to tell you are the truth? Come on! I watched you swindle the gun off a cop and handcuff him to a fire hydrant, you can’t sit there and act like a straight-laced bootlicker now.”

As he said this, he continued to smear nail polish over each of Stan’s fingers with surprising success. The little flakes of micah sparkled and drifted as the wet polish settled into place, its bright and decorative tones sending alarm bells ringing in Stan’s head.

“Let’s say you’re right-- and I’m not saying you are,” Stan started as Bill switched hands as easily as if he were manipulating the limbs of a doll, “That isn’t gonna change the fact that walking out of this room with a ten-pack like this on my hands is a one-way ticket to getting my teeth kicked in.”

Bill’s laugh was as bright as the nail polish and sharper than his clothes. “Buddy. Pal. You’re rolling with Bill Cipher. The only people getting their teeth kicked in are the ones too stupid to realize who they’re messing with. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

===

With sand stuck in his socks and a mysterious, crusty feeling around the edges of his mouth, Stan stumbled back into the most-recently-discovered hangout spot for Bill’s entourage. (It was an abandoned plantation house somewhere in the marshes, surrounded by old willow trees and about an hour’s drive from anything interesting. A bit of a drive, sure, but he appreciated Bill’s efforts in getting them somewhere new, somewhere farther from Rico’s sphere of influence after what had happened.) Frustration fuzzed at the back of his mind and at his limbs; this might be the last time he’d ever ask any of Bill’s friends to hit up the beach with him.

He was just scrubbing at his cheeks when he found a few of the girls lounging around on a couple of dusty old chaises covered in blankets of varying fanciness and decrepitude.

“Where’s 8-Ball?” Pyronica asked idly, flipping through a magazine without bothering to look up at him.

“Dunno,” Stan told her. “We hit up the boardwalk to watch the turtles hatch like I offered, but then I turn around and I’m the only one out there. I figured he’d just ditched me and come back, but if he’s not here…” he trailed off, brows furrowed in thought.

It hadn’t been the first time he’d invited another of Bill’s friends on an outing like this. The past attempts had all been far more disastrous, but he’d been really keen on watching what few eggs there were hidden along the shore hatch, and seeing all the little turtle babies scuttle down to the water with their weird little flipper legs. They’d found a nest, and Stan had pointed it out, and then… things got a little hazy. Next thing he’d known he was sitting cross-legged in the surf, water lapping at his jeans as he let a hatchling out of his hands and into the sea. The sunset made the water shimmer like diamonds, and the polish on his fingers glimmer like real gold.

“If he’s not here, he wasn’t hip enough to hang,” Bill stated plainly, buffing his already-sharp nails. He was watching Stan, his ever-present smile wide and unyielding. “I guess that makes you the new 8-ball. Congrats on the promotion!”

===

“Okay,” he said with a crack of his knuckles, “Let’s take this from the top!”

Beside him, hunched over the lower range and drumming his fingers in the air to roll out the stiffness, Stan smiled and readied himself for another round. The notes on the page spoke to him like a half-forgotten second language, more familiar with every re-read and promising a stunning duet as long as he played his part and stayed in-step with Bill. It was the sixth song they’d learned from scratch in a row, and their most stylistically complex, but despite needing to shake the rust off his organ-playing skills and take a step leftward into piano, Stan hardly felt the hours or the effort he’d been putting in.

His friend was a solid weight at his side, that bright grin and teasing encouragement the only thing that Stan really needed to get into a groove and lose himself in the music like he’d never let himself before.

Sure, Bill had strong-armed Stan to the bench the second he’d caught a whiff of long-abandoned childhood music teachings, but he’d been right in the end-- Stan did love to play, and he especially loved that here, there was no one to compare himself to. It was him, Bill, and the music, and none of it was for anyone but themselves.

“Not half-bad, Stan-o,” Bill complimented when they’d finished, the last chords still ringing in the air.

“This? You haven’t seen anything, yet,” Stan replied. He reached over and turned the page, revealing something new.

===

Stan leaned over the sink, trying not to hyperventilate as Bill stood beside him, wet cloth in hand.

“You don’t need to breathe,” the other told him. Without hesitation or effort, Stan’s fingers were peeled one by one from the porcelain until Bill had one of his hands cradled. The warmth of the cloth came soon after, wicking away dried blood from his digits. “Just hold it in, you’ll calm down faster.”

Stan gulped and twisted his eyes shut. With that one lungful of air, he stood there in the bathroom wound like a too-tight spring about to pop from its casing. But, in lacking the need for more, Stan was able to dial his focus onto the small, steady circles rubbing into the mess on his arms. They moved slowly up from his left palm and up the forearm, then his right, until the touch of Bill’s fingers firmly grasping his chin to swipe away the congealing layers of blood on his mouth brought him out of the last of his panic.

“There. See, what’d I tell you?”

“Right. Yeah,” Stan gasped wetly. “You’re always right.”

A thin hand gently pat him on the cheek, twice.

“Of course I am.”

===

“I thought you said vampires couldn’t cross water,” Stan stared down at the deep end of the indoor pool with his hands in the pockets of a new set of swim trunks. Bill stood beside him in a lemon-yellow swim-cap and what could have been a speedo, but was probably just the bottom half of a bikini. His right eye, usually covered by gel-slicked bangs, was covered instead by an eyepatch of uncertain origins.

“Running water, Mac,” Bill replied in that self-assured way of his. “This stuff’s about as dead as we are, so we shouldn’t have any trouble with it.”

“Right,” Stan said with an air of skepticism, “makes sense. But, uh, What’s a chlorinated pool got to do with vampire powers?”

In answer, without hesitation, Stan felt a hand shove against his back. He toppled headfirst into the water, taking a reflexive breath and holding it as he tumbled down, down, down. He reoriented himself with the bubbles, trying to follow them back up to the surface as his body twisted weightlessly and swam up. Before he could break through to the air above, though, there was a second splash. Its sound played accompaniment to the impact of another body directly into his face. Stan flailed, years of instincts honed at the ocean’s lap guiding his hands to push the offending weight aside so he could properly rise, but Bill’s fingers wrapped around his wrists and dragged him kicking and writhing to the bottom of the pool.

More bubbles flew from both of their mouths, surging upwards without them. Panic likewise surged in Stan’s chest, watching precious seconds’ worth of oxygen leave them with every glossy little orb of air.

But fighting Bill was like trying to swim against a riptide-- stupid at best and death all but a guarantee. All Stan could hope for was that he could hold his breath longer. He thought he could do it; he’d spent his life on the beach, knew the water like the back of his hand. So he tried to keep calm, stilling those limbs of his that wanted nothing more than to kick up to the surface, and began to count the seconds until Bill’s air ran out.

Bill, in contrast to Stan’s brief flight of fear, was sitting happy as a clam on the tiled floor. When they made eye contact, he made a big show of blowing the last of his air out in one huge rush of bubbles that obscured his face, just for a moment. Stan waited and counted.

Thirty seconds.

One minute.

Two.

At the three minute mark, Stan noticed there was no tightness in his own chest from a dwindling supply of oxygen. At five, he’d just beaten his own record for staying underwater. Bill kept smiling.

Six minutes marked the moment he remembered that the two of them were vampires. Vampires were dead. The dead did not need to breathe. Stan waited a moment longer, feeling that fact sink in, then breathed out the stale air left in his lungs. It rose without him, and he sank down to rest at the bottom of the pool as well. All the while, Bill looked increasingly and insufferably smug. When Stan frowned at him, Bill raised an eyebrow and released his hands.

Stan folded his arms and watched Bill kick up towards the wall. He stayed behind a little longer, petulant and more than a little cross, but eventually he found himself swimming back up, too, joining Bill above the water’s surface.

“You couldn’t have just said I don’t need to breathe anymore?” Stan asked upon clearing his nose of what little water had slipped in.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Bill replied, perched on the pool’s edge and kicking the water with his heels. “It’s not like you didn’t already know, Stan-o, and it definitely didn’t hurt you. You’re in the habit of pretending you’re still human, and it’s a habit you’ve got to break if you want to get to the good stuff.” He leaned against the rim with his hands and splashed at Stan’s face with a laugh. “And because I’m such a good friend, I decided that we’d just get your feet wet instead of tossing you headfirst in the deep end.”

Stan felt an odd twist in his chest that came out as a little titter. He swam closer to rest his arms on the same ledge that Bill sat upon. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“I sure am! But what’s your point?”

In response, Stan reached out and yanked Bill by the ankle into the water. He got an elbow to the face for his troubles, and a one-sided underwater skirmish. Even hours later and still occasionally coughing up pool water, Stan thought back to the feeling of his back against the smooth tiles with Bill’s hands on his wrists to hold him down, the two of them wracked with fits of giggles at the strangeness of breathing with flooded lungs.

===

“Hey, uh. Not that I’m not enjoying this,” Stan said as Bill tugged him along by the arm, “I mean, last time I was in Chicago I got ran out by some unhappy customers before I could see the Sear’s tower all up-close and personal, but… what’re we doing here? It doesn’t feel like your usual brand.”

“Trust me, it’s all a part of the process,” Bill told him.

Stan cocked his head with furrowed brows. “And what process was that, exactly?”

“Consider it as the next step in your journey of casting off those wanna-be-human chains on your mind.”

They entered an elevator together, rising from the lower restaurant and the private even that had been scheduled for Bill’s little crew and up towards the observation deck. But instead of out towards the nice, glass-covered room that overlooked the city, Stan found himself being pulled towards a heavy-duty door with the words “Maintenance Only” stamped across it.

With a flourish, Bill gestured to the lock on the door. Stan took the hint, and in a moment the way was opened for them both. He was led through a twisting maze of big aluminum tubes, naked plywood, and forgotten tools. There was a second elevator here, one that had a flickering florescent light and which looked like no-one had bothered wiping it off since the place was built.

There were buttons from 104 all the way up to 109. Bill’s thumb pressed the last, and they moved up. Stan thought a moment longer, a tense feeling crawling up his spine as a few dots connected.

“Wait,” he said, “Wait a sec. We’re not seeing if I can fly tonight, are we?”

Bill’s smile widened. “Sure we are! It’s the tallest building in the country, isn’t it? Perfect place for you to stretch your wings- there’s plenty of space between you and the ground to let you learn without turning into a red smear on the concrete.”

The visual painted itself on the inside of Stan’s eyes against his will, and he felt the bones in his legs start to liquefy. “I mean, I just-- it seems like a big step, is all,” he protested weakly. “We could start smaller, maybe. Find a two-story building and stick a trampoline under it. Or a pool with a high dive. I could do a high-dive, easy.”

The look leveled at him in reply shut his mouth up quick.

“Come on, Mac, that’s baby stuff. You’re a big boy, I know you can handle more than that. Weren’t you just telling me how ready you were for the big leagues?”

“I am! Of course I am, but-- but the tallest building in the world?” Stan gestured with his hands as he spoke, watching the number on the elevator climb higher and higher. “That’s--”

“A fantastic choice? Glad you agree.”

There was a small ‘ding’ as they reached the mechanical penthouse. The doors slid open, and even through the walls Stan could hear the sound of the blowing wind. Bill strolled onward. Stan trailed behind him, the chipped gold polish on his nails flaking further as he tapped his fingertips together over and over.

The heavy metal door leading outside opened with a creak loud enough to cut over the wind. Bill held it open for him, then led him to the west-most side where the drop down to the sidewalk was sheer. Stan peered over the side with trepidation, hands clutching at the safety rail that separated him from over a thousand feet of empty air.

“Are you sure about this? I mean, we don’t even know if I can fly!”

“Stanley, Stanley, Stanley,” Bill shook his head, “When have I ever steered you wrong? If you think I’m being harsh, you know it’s only because I know you can take it!”

It was true, reluctant as he was to admit it. From the little tweaks to his sense of style, all the way up to feeding without needing to be fed upon first, Bill had been the steady, unrelenting push to bigger and better things that Stan had needed. And if it had made his skin crawl, if it had set off his warning bells, if his common sense told him to pack his bags and take a hike, well… Bill had proved his feelings wrong before plenty of times.

That still didn’t make it any easier to make his hands let go of the building.

“How about I go first, huh? I’ll show you how it’s done.” Bill took a step back, and Stan felt his stomach drop to his feet as Bill’s left the ledge. For one heart-stopping minute, he was sure that he was about to witness the last moments the other had before being turned into a fine red paste on the pavement hundreds of feet below. But instead of plummeting in the way that gravity intended, Bill floated on the whipping wind like a mote of dust. The coattails of his stupid lemon-yellow vest flapped wildly, and one sharp-nailed hand extended itself in Stan’s direction in a beckoning motion.

“You know you can trust me-- why not try un-living a little?”

“I-it’s not you I don’t trust,” Stan stammered, even as he clumsily swung a leg over the rail and pulled himself shakily upright. “It’s gravity.”

“Gravity’s just a suggestion! Let the living worry about dragging their heels-- you’re a vampire, now. The rules no longer apply.”

Stan tried not to look down. Gravity, suggesting itself a little more firmly to him, pulled at his chin until the dizzying distance settled firmly into his mind and locked up his knees. It was a long, long way down. He’d never been so far up, and the only way to get up higher than this was to hop in a plane. Actually, he was surprised Bill hadn’t considered that far more nerve-wracking possibility. Stan was suddenly full of a deep and profound gratitude for the oversight; at least the building stayed in one place.

All he had to do was put one foot in front of the other, and then forget there wasn’t a floor in front of him. Easy as pie.

Bill continued to float ahead of him, leaning back without a care in the world and seemingly content to wait forever for Stan to catch up. His lone eye was as unreadable as the wide smile on his face. He held one hand out, palm-up, fingers splayed for the taking.

Stan knew what would happen if he reached out for it. He’d hung out with Bill long enough to know his game. There’d be a psyche-out, a trick, a prank, and Stan would go plummeting to his doom below only for Bill to be there at the last moment to remind him of what he was capable of. It was the push, but this time Bill was letting him ask for it, first.

Taking a deep breath that he didn’t need, Stan stretched one arm out and slipped his fingers into Bill’s. Thin, spidery digits curled over his own, and as Stan let one let start swinging out for a step, he felt it. With a yank and a wild laugh, Stan went ass-over-tea-kettle down the side of the Sear’s tower all by his lonesome as the only punchline Bill knew how to tell.

He would deny screaming, later. Not that he could tell with the rush of wind in his ears. Around him the lights in the buildings seared by and past in a moment’s notice, dozens of squares of warm yellow or cold white that lit him up as he dropped further down. Stan flailed in the air, fingers grasping for a hold on literally anything as he tried to access whatever it was that let vampires fly under their own power. But he didn’t seem to have it. No power summoned itself to his fingertips, no instincts at he back of his mind guided his body.

Stanley, much like a stone, was simply falling.

He tried not to let the panic get to him as the seconds stretched endlessly on. Despite his watering eyes-- and watering only from the stress of the wind in his face-- he did not dare to close them when the ground was so quickly rising to meet him. The little alarm in his head that told him when one of his bad ideas was about to go south started to ring, its belated warning chiming louder and louder. Stan twisted in the air, not really hearing so much as feeling Bill’s laughter around him without ever seeing its source.

“Nine seconds, Stan-o! Better figure out how to flap those wings.”

“Bill--” he pleaded, arms outstretched for help, “Bill, this isn’t funny anymore!”

The other’s voice seemed to come from just behind his ear, pitch-perfect to cut through the wind. “Tick-tock! I wouldn’t want to have to scrape you off the ground.”

The sidewalk, which had been a hair-thin thread at the top of the tower, was a fat grey ribbon in his line of sight, growing fatter with the expectation of Stanley’s imminent face-first greeting. Time seemed to slow down against his will, dragging out the moment he realized that this time, Bill wasn’t going to save him. He’d run out of chances. He’d proven himself just another failed lackey, and now Bill was doing what he always did with toys that didn’t make him happy.

The streetlights stretched up to meet him.

Stanley thrust his hands out ahead of him, like that would make the face that he was about to be crumpled like an empty soda can any less true.

When he was close enough to count the squares of the sidewalk, to see the cracks in the concrete, he managed to twist his eyes shut.

The impact was swift, and much softer than he expected it to be. Under his hands was something smoother than asphalt or gravel, shaped in beveled angles and sharp joints. Against his ear, a grating and nasally laugh. This was… Stan clutched at Bill’s clothes. His nails threatened to tear the polyester to shreds, balls of fabric taut in his palms as he clung desperately to avoid hitting the concrete. With his face buried in the other’s shoulder, he had to rely on his other senses to parse the world; the bobbing up-and-down uneasiness in his inner ear said they were still floating, and he held on to that as Bill’s laughter drowned out the sound of the wind.

“Woah-ho-hoh, pal. Careful there,” he said, as if he hadn’t been the reason Stan had fallen, “You’re luck you have me around-- otherwise you would’ve been a pavement pancake.”

Slowly, so slowly, Stan forced himself to stop shaking.

“You—” he gulped, “you caught me.”

“Of course!” Bill said. “Would I let my best friend in the whole world just drop from a skyscraper without making sure he made it to the bottom safe and sound?”

The weight of Bill’s deceptively strong toothpick arms holding him steady was more of a comfort than the answer that Stan refused to voice. “...Th-thanks,” he muttered hoarsely.

“You’re welcome,” Bill told him. “But I gotta say, it’s a real letdown finding out you can’t fly. I guess we’ll have to learn other ways to let you have fun.”

Stan nodded in agreement-- anything to get his feet on something solid as quickly as possible. He felt the air shift, a gentle lifting motion that told him Bill was probably back up to the ledge, and as he allowed himself the briefest moment of relaxation, Bill’s arms went totally slack. Stan’s senses scattered in a million directions as he dropped, the same street seen from the billion fractal angles of an insect’s compound eyes as his body buzzed and hummed like-- well, like a swarm of mosquitoes.

He could see Bill’s face from every side at once, and the way that grin curled around pale cheeks and bared every sharp, white tooth did nothing to settle the panicked energy that had turned him into what he currently was.

“No way,” came a million voices in a million tiny ears. “Look at you! What is going on here? A swarm of little bloodsuckers? You’ve been holding out on me, Stan!”

Replying was a non-starter. His thousands of mouths weren’t shaped the right way to scream like he wanted. The city around him echoed in all of his ears and in his compound eyes; too many lights, too many sounds, all of it too much, too much. Stan found his constituent parts swarming around Bill, tiny mosquitoes crawling over the stitching of his vest and into his pockets and the creases of his clothes just to get away from the everything all around him. Some of him found their way into the palms of Bill’s hands, dozens of them crowding around to take shelter in the curve of the other’s digits. Except that Bill had pinched one of him by the wings and plucked him up to examine, at which point Stan found one of his thousands of bodies on the wrong end of the food chain.

The awareness of how it felt to have chitinous shell crushed under immeasurable pressure was enough of a shock to his already-frayed senses that it snapped something out of alignment in his mind; Stan blinked and the horror of being thousands of small, easily-killable things was replaced with the horror of seeing Bill deep-throating his hand.

Bill spat it out without flinching, leaving Stan with soggy fingers and shot nerves as he wobbled and collapsed to his ass on the ground.

“What-- you-- why? Why would you do that?”

The shrug he got for an answer was entirely noncommittal. “Sue me, I was curious. There were thousands of you, I didn’t think you’d bother pitching a fit over just one.”

Stan wiped his hand off on his shirt and winced at the slobber. All the jitters still stuck in his body were quickly stuffed into a bottle and stacked onto an increasingly-full mental shelf to deal with later. “I’m not pitching a fit! I just- I’m not- look, I get that you think I’m a tasty snack, but can we maybe save that for the bedroom instead? I don’t like getting a first-person perspective on the life of an appetizer.”

The concrete was hard on his ass, but solid and safe, and he really would have liked to spend maybe another minute or two developing his wonderful new friendship with it. Bill extended his hand down, and Stan clasped it in his own, allowing himself to be pulled up to his feet instead of secretly trying to cling to the ground.

“Well, well, Stan-o,” Bill waggled his eyebrows, “I didn’t realize unlocking more of your potential would get you that excited. You know I’m a man who’s already spoken for--”

“That’s not what I meant!” Stan flushed down to his neck and shoved Bill in the shoulder. The other didn’t so much as flinch, his nasally laugh bright and loud at Stan’s open discomfort. “I just meant that, given the choice between getting my blood drawn through a hickey or being eaten alive, I’d choose the hickey, alright?”

“Geeze, you sure are touchy tonight, aren’t you?” Bill slung an arm around him, “Relax. This night’s been a huge success, after all. Focus on that, not on any friendly little love-bites you may or may not have gotten. With all those mosquitoes, you should be figuring out how to give a few of your own.”

Stan took in a deep breath and held it for a while, focusing on the tension between Bill’s arm and the way his ribcage was trying to expand, and then let it out once he felt a little less on-edge. “You’ve got a point. I didn’t think I had it in me to do any of the freakier vampire stuff. Maybe next time I’ll figure out how to do it on purpose.”

“And that’s why you’re lucky to have someone like me. I told you you had it in you.”

‘Lucky’ was certainly a word for it. Stan smiled, a little strained, and looked away.

===

The torchlight flickered, casting strange shadows across Bill’s face as he leaned down over Stan, cradled his face, and kissed his forehead. Stan felt with his dulled nerves the touch of soft fabric as Bill pulled the blanket up as best he could, tucked him in around the stake, and then left him.

Alone.

===

The walk to the bathroom was more of a hazy stumble. Bill’s arm was threaded through his own, holding the lion’s share of his weight while his legs slacked off. Stan’s feet were lead weights attached to the ends of them, dragging along with rolling ankles. But he didn’t fall, not with Bill at his side. They ascended slowly, from the depths of the hidden basement, back through the garage, and up, up, up so many sets of elaborately-designed staircases that Stan could not tell you what a single one looked like.

At the end of it all was Bill’s chosen personal space, the cavernous master suite with the walk-in closet the size of Stan’s childhood living room and an attached bathroom, to boot. It was more cluttered than usual, with details that slipped his notice because Bill was ushering him into the pink-tiled en-suite. The other man hadn’t shut up once on the way up, a mostly-welcome and slightly-grating alternative to the deafening silence of the coffin and the tomb. He was still speaking now, actually, and Stan wasn’t quite able to pay attention to it. Not until Bill had dragged him up to the tub and snapped his fingers.

“Hey, are you paying attention?”

“Huh?” he asked. “I-- I didn’t catch that, sorry.”

Bill huffed, then tugged at the swiftly-crusting shirt on Stan’s chest. His fingerless evening gloves were missing, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up past the elbows. His skinny arms looked like wet noodles without all the accessorizing he usually did, but Stan knew well about the strength behind the façade. “I told you to strip, and here you are still dressed to the nines. Off with it.”

“Oh.” Here was where Stan would find that deep-seated resistance within himself to argue, even in vain. ‘No’, ‘not that’, ‘not here’, ‘not now’, a wall of stubbornness that had held firm for years… until he’d been met with Bill’s sheer force of… Bill-ness. The wall was gone right now, a pile of rubble in the smoking ruins of his mind after two solid weeks of mandatory ‘me-time’. He bowed under Bill’s waiting stare like a crumbling pillar, his stiff fingers moving to work the tiny buttons on his once-nice shirt. They were sluggish and unresponsive, and it didn’t take long for the other to grow impatient once more.

“Ugh, here, let me do it,” Bill insisted, smacking Stan’s hands away. “We’ll be here all night if I let you. Sheesh, I forgot how stiff being staked can make the ol’ hands.”

He lifted one finger with its too-sharp nail and curled it just at the crest of Stan’s breastbone, where the shirt had been buttoned up to. With a smooth motion, he ripped the garment down to the hem, ignoring the buttons entirely and baring a freshly-healed if still-bloodied chest to the room. Two hands raised to Stan’s shoulders and helped the shirt on its way off, letting the silk pool on the floor with a slightly-wet flump. He tried not to let the death of it get to him-- its once-pearly sheen wouldn’t have been fixable either way.

Bill was nicer with his belt, though, unbuckling it like a normal person before shucking Stan like an ear of corn out of the bloody mess his clothes had become. He wasn’t gentle, exactly, but rough hands were still hands, and they served as an unmistakable reminder that he was no longer alone. So he steadied himself with his own palms on Bill’s shoulders and let the other peel him free.

“I can clean m’self up,” Stan didn’t even put half his heart into the words; his traitorous hands were unwilling to let go.

“Sure you can,” Bill placated him unconvincingly. “But why would you? You’ve got me, after all.”

The tub was yet another challenge. Stan wasn’t steady enough to get in on his own, which meant Bill had to sit him down on the lip and help him swing one shaking leg at a time over its side so that he could sit down in the bottom on his bare ass. It was humiliating not being able to do any of this on his own-- he was a grown man, and here he was relying on someone else to keep him upright.

At the same time, he didn’t have it in him to care. His thirst had finally dulled, and he could more or less move again, and under everything in his sluggish mind was one thought repeating itself like a heartbeat-- Bill came back, Bill came back, Bill came back. It was a quiet mantra of delirious relief that had him sinking into every touch as if he were a frightened puppy looking for its mom.

The tap came on, and with it the sound of rushing water. Stan could feel it lapping at his toes as he watched Bill test the temperature with one hand, and then flip the little lever by the drain so that the water ran to the removable shower head instead of the faucet. When the other moved back, it was with water, gently warm and running now-rusty into the drain. Stan sagged backwards until he hit the far wall of the tub. Chin to his chest, he was pliant and downright obliging as a thin hand began to scrub a soapy cloth against his skin. It followed the line of his mouth, relieving the itchy feeling of crusted blood, then down his throat and over his front to work off the congealed remains of his most recent meal in slow, firm circles.

Stan let his head rest against the rim, tilting it to watch Bill’s expression. The other was still talking. Hell if Stan knew what about, though. It was all running together into an endless drone, pleasant in the way it felt familiar to be drifting half-awake with his eyes shut while someone important to him rattled his ear off. But he refused to shut his eyes. He didn’t want to open them and find himself back in that tomb.

Hands manipulated his body, lifting his arms or his legs, or turning him over to his side so that the blood crusted on his back could be scrubbed away. Stan bore it with a patience he’d never had before, devoting most of his willpower into keeping his fingers from digging into Bill’s arms to drag him close. For now, it was enough for him to be the sole recipient of the other’s attention, water streaking down his temples as the other moved on to washing his hair. At that, he did allow his eyes to slip closed if only to avoid getting soap in them. The air filled with some kind of girly smell that reminded him of the kind of shampoo Carla used to use, and his aching scalp was relieved of the dry blood caked to it by sharp fingernails. Thin digits threaded through his tangles, working them all free as the water ran dark from its soiling. Stan, who already felt as though strength was a distant memory, went boneless under the attention and rumbled a noise out from under his breath. Above him, Bill’s endless noise was parted briefly by a chuckle. The hands carded through his curls more gently than he’d believed Bill capable of until all the knots were gone and his hair lay smoothed wet against his shoulders.

There was another rinse. Water sluiced over him, taking away the last of the dirt and the grime. Stan drifted as he watched the dirty, grey suds swirl around the drain until the water ran clear again. Then, and only then, did Bill’s hand snake down to the other end of the tub. Stan didn’t bother asking what he was up to, and it didn’t matter anyway; the faucet ran again, and he could feel hot, not warm, water lap at his heels and calves. The tub was filling up. Stan furrowed his brow, and made one unconvincing attempt to sit upright before Bill pushed him back down with a single hand.

“Easy, pal, we’re only halfway done.” The other was pouring something from another bottle that made the water foam. And also smell really strongly of artificial bubblegum. When Stan was submerged up to his chin in a freshly-run bubble bath, Bill turned the water back off. It was hot, bordering on just the right side of too-much, and it seemed to unlock the aching, stone-hard muscles in every inch of his body. He hummed quietly, sinking until his head was below the surface, and watched the bubbles float from his nose until there wasn’t any air left in his lungs. In his ears, he heard the muffled sound of an arm reaching into the water.

Fingers brushed his wrist and latched on, dragging his arm up until it hit the cooler air. Bill’s grip was firm and unyielding, and Stan watched through the cloud-like bubbles above as the other held his palm. Two thin thumbs pressed to the meat of his hand, working in slow and even circles from the roots of his fingers out to their tips. The achey stiffness in his joints slowly faded, and even under all the water Stan could hear Bill’s voice continue to prattle. It might have been annoying at one point to hear him go on for so long without end, but Stan was so, so sick of the silence. Every nasally vowel out of Bill’s mouth was a sharp scrape against his ears that contrasted the dull roar inside his own skull. In a weird way, it was a kind of pain that felt good. Like the way the other was massaging his creaking joints, working the flexibility back into them after being taut with rigor mortis for weeks on end.

When each of his fingers were attended to, the pressure moved up to his wrist, and then his forearm, and then his bicep, those spidery hands quick but thorough. Stan let himself float and stare for a long time, his gaze following the line of Bill’s lips as they moved, and the way his nose scrunched up, and how his eye would crinkle at the corners with every terrible joke he told. So many moving parts, so many small details to examine, and all of it fresh to his tired eyes.

Bill reached for his other arm and tugged him up, just enough out of the water to more easily manipulate the limb. The white light from the bulbs above the mirror haloed the other’s head, casting his face partly in shadow and making the whites of his teeth flash as he leaned over Stan. The two of them were close enough that, if Stan wanted to make himself move, he could easily press his face to the crook of those narrow shoulders and tuck himself away against the other’s cold skin, mouth open to--

Well. He brushed the half-formed thought away, along with the ever-present thirst in his throat. He’d just eaten, after all. He didn’t need more than that. The bath, the massage, the conversation, all of that… was extra. Bill didn’t need to do any of this, but he was. That was more thought for Stan’s well-being than had been paid to him by anyone else in a long time. Even if the same hands that held him now were the ones to hammer him down before, in the end didn’t that mean Bill was serious about keeping him close?

Stan tilted his head back to rest against the rim of the tub again. Bill had moved behind him, now, kneading at his shoulders next. He pressed his cheek firmly to one of the arms framing his face and felt the way the tendons and muscles underneath the skin shifted with every motion. The hands crawled higher, sliding up his collarbone, and then slowly wrapped around his throat. Eight fingers cradled his neck with two thumbs straddling his windpipe, stroking little lines along its length and only occasionally digging into his flesh with those sharp nails. Despite that, Stan couldn’t hold tension in his body even if he wanted to, and he was too wrung-out for fear anymore.

Their eyes met, Bill’s hands squeezing just a little too hard, and Stan relaxed into the choking touch with a small, heavy sigh. When they loosened and tried to slip away, Stan found his body still had a little fight left in it after all; a brief needle of fear sent his own hands shooting up, clutching one of Bill’s to keep it from leaving.

“Wait,” Stan said, “Don’t-- um. I mean…”

“You’ll turn into a prune if you stay here any longer,” Bill told him. He didn’t pull his hand back. “Besides, it’s boy’s night! I’ve got way more planned for you than one bath.”

The tub was drained. Stan was bundled into a large, luxuriously fluffy towel the moment his feet hit the tiles, and he flexed his hands open and shut as he stumbled with Bill’s guidance to the seat at the bathroom vanity, where there was another, slightly-smaller towel waiting to be used. Stan took it up to wring the water from his hair, turning his back to the useless mirror to follow Bill with his eyes as the other scooped something up.

“Here, I got you something.”

A pile of slippery fabric hit his chest and then pooled in his lap over the damp bath towel. When he picked it up and shook it loose, it turned into a set of lingerie. Scarlet, classy-looking tap shorts made of more lace than fabric paired with an equally-lacy chemise that tied in the front, and a comfortable-looking gold robe made of the smoothest, softest silk he’d ever touched. It was embroidered very finely, with little whorls and swoops that were pleasant to run his fingers over, and was heavier than it appeared to be. Some buried part of him wondered how much it all cost even while he slipped it on without a pause, relishing in the comfort of fresh, non-blood-stained clothes.

Bill came closer as he dressed, and Stan looked up from the knot he was tying in the robe’s sash to look at him again. The other had both hands held up.

“Which one?” From one dangled a length of black leather, its ends held together by a length of respectably-thick gold chain woven back and forth such that it could be pulled taut or loosened at a whim. In the other was a silk choker, its fabric studded with small gold beads and delicate loops of lace that dripped with garnets.

Stan didn’t want either-- if anything, he wanted his plain gold chain, the one that went with everything he wore, but Bill hadn’t offered that as an option. Hell, it was odd that Bill was offering any options at all. Stan nodded at the length of leather, and Bill hucked the other one over his shoulder without looking. Stan saw it hit the wall and crumple to the ground without comment.

Bill held up the accessory, unhooking the chain to open it up. Stan offered his throat without hesitation. The length of it went over the back of his neck, settling down with a reassuring weight, and he tilted his chin back to give the other room to fasten it shut again. The chain rubbed against the skin of his throat as it was looped through, and back, and across itself before the clasp was secured. Bill tugged at the line, adjusting it until all three new loops lay flat and neat against Stan’s collarbone. His digits lingered, trailing along the gold links and waggling Stan’s chin as if he were a dog.

“There we are-- all cleaned up and ready to party! I’ve got a few new albums, a couple of board games, some movies… Plenty to get your mind back into shape.”

===

Something was on the television. Had been for a bit, but Stan couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on what it was. There were sounds of screams somewhere at the foot of the bed, accompanied by an assortment of odd, wet sound effects. Bill was laughing, which made sense; he never got the heebie-jeebies from watching scary movies. Stan could feel the other’s chest moving under his head, only breathing in to make some kind of snide commentary or belt out another peal of nasally guffaws. His sharp nails were tangled in Stan’s drying hair, alternative between scrunching handfuls of it into his palm and brushing his fingers through it. Stan was melting under the touch; it had been so long since he’d seen or heard from anyone since Bill “let him” take a “break”, and the loneliness had taken more of a toll on him than he’d thought. He let his arms squeeze a little tighter around Bill’s waist where they’d been slung, and pulled himself that much closer.

“Easy, pal,” Bill said, distracted, “I’m not going anywhere.”