in the friscalating dusklight.

Meanwhile, this man calls him Anthony, which he won't correct. That's how much power he assigns to his current name and its improvised variations — at least when pronounced by him.

No comment on his choice of drink. He simply nods, casting a furtive glance at the diligent mirage of a bartender: something that registers like a blur to his senses. "Wine," a curt order that requires no elaboration. Whether they (it) will serve actual liquor or blood, he'll simply observe Cliff's reaction with mild interest.

“I've always wanted to be a Bailey.” He already is, his words crackling and small, like admitting to something wrong. Cliff lifts his eyes from the table, both here and not. "...I wish I’d been born earlier."

Although it is very likely, with no way to confirm, that he’d be exactly where he is now.

Anthony orders wine with a single glance, this silver-haired apparition of his dreams. The bartender smears like melting candle wax, stepping back from the bartop. There is the tell-tale sound of a popping cork. The glug of pouring liquid. Cliff hasn’t noticed that a couple has situated themselves into nearby seats, or, possibly, they’ve always been here.

For a moment, he stares at him.

“Why? ...Do you think that?” Cliff murmurs, face-to-face. He looks down to his own hand then, breathing slowly. He glances back. “I see why you would.”

Anthony laughs. The sound of it rolls beneath Chopin, and it reminds Cliff, vaguely, of water running beneath ice, his fingers itchy-pink from the cold, snow caught in his hair. Two eyes fall on him now, steady and determined. Cliff draws a breath.

"Well" —he breathes heavily, fixing his jacket over his shoulders— "I suppose there would be an undertaker, and he would wrangle the souls of outlaws to the sheriff," Cliff explains, all through a winding exhale. His voice drifts off. "...Although he runs away with one of them."

Anthony, perhaps, being the undertaker. Anthony leading souls of outlaws to the afterlife, and to the sheriff, for judgement. Running away with one of them.

A Western fantasy.

𝐀 𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍 while listening to the quiet mutters of the other's around them, Cliff's words blend in with theirs for a moment, until taking the time to focus. The blonde tilted his head for a moment & found his smile. The hat still placed on the top of his head, he bowed his head while holding the top of it - what a GOOD way to hide the front of the face when needing to. —  ❝ You were, monsieur. I believe that you were supposed to meet me & become CLOSE to me. Why, does it feel like we were always meant to be ? Would you mind ordering off the menu for me . . . . ( He stared down at the paper napkins that were rolled up, within them was the utensils that one usually eats with. Lestat grabbed it, unraveled the napkin from the metal & remained a little uncertain with himself as to why he was here. However, he spoke up quietly, talking through the muttering of other human beings. ) You know, mon ami, fate is like a strange, it's like this ODD restaurant filled with little waiters who bring us things that neither of us asked for & we don't ALWAYS know rather or not we'll like everything that was bought to us. . . . ❞

Instead, he turns his head over. A man with a ready smile sits in the passenger seat, his face shielded by the brim of a hat—as if he could ever be bashful. 

They’re meant to be close. Now, an eternity passes. 

"...Do you mean that?" Cliff finally asks, croaking as he whispers. The leather of his car seat whines as he shifts, and he leans until the back of his neck lays over the headrest, his knees bumping the wheel. Softly, he answers, "Yes, it does.” Then, curious and louder, “Why is that, you imagine?"

Why does it feel like they were meant to be.

It’s futile, perhaps, to even wonder. But there is a certainty to Lestat and in the way he said ‘you were supposed to meet me’ that made his question—Are they meant to be?—sound less like a question and more like he knew. Like he was expecting Cliff to already know it as inherently as knowing the back of his own hand. Like knowing night comes after day. 

Lestat unfolds a napkin and the utensils clink, the sunset washing everything gold and orange and warm. He watches a plane crawl across the sky; a dot in the distance. "I think about it, you know... why you leaned against my car," he starts, sighing, his hair blowing in the breeze, "and why you asked me to lunch.”

to regret sharing the bond of blood was the easiest of notions. he could seek penance for it, self - flagellate and starve himself of the euphoria until all the pleasure was tinged in red and throbbing; he did not want to. watching cliff's pillow soft lips close around his fingers was the holiest of all communion's, he was sharing himself with him, body and blood, they shared the same alter now.

armand can feel everything cliff feel's, he drinks it in through the fortified connection of the mind, pouring himself mouthful after mouthful of rosy matter straight from the man's brain. it was not unlike a spontaneous spring time. flowers seem to grow in the darkest corner's of armand's mind and he almost quivers with the sensation, losing himself where his skin met's cliff's.

he can't seem to bring himself to regret it.

he knows what it's like, how the world sing's when the blood is first given: there was nothing like it. cliff was his now, whether or not he knew it. a claim had been staked. when he pulls himself away, looking at him with those big, limp eyes armand wants to ask what he's seeing - what magic did his blood bring to an already interstellar creature?

it's just them - at the edges of this world and the next, lost behind the curtain and fumbling to find it's end. but he's there and cliff is there and for one shining moment the silence is monumental.

“ i'm sorry. ” ah, there it is: the guilt.

why would you do that ?

“ i - ” armand slightly jostles as cliff stands. he blinks away uncertainty, but the worry is still there between his eyebrows.

“ i thought - ” i thought you wanted that.

he pulls his fingers under his thighs. tender, he's tender. he'd forgotten how strong human emotion is, had forgotten the derelict way he is left after every reintroduction. for a moment he looks every bit the young man that he is, but the calm that sits in cliff's seat is an unmistakable choice. better calm than the calamity brewing in his stomach.

The sounds have colors. The colors have sounds. Cliff is so hyperaware his neurons might burst, and this is not a mescaline high or the end result of DMT, lying prone on his back in the clouds. He is not on psilocybin floating in the drinks. He thinks about what happened without ever thinking, and he recalls, with a clarity so clear it's fuzzy, the slow coming to, his body growing warmer. His shirt is red.

Andrei is here now, the storm in his eyes cleared by a worried brow. Andrei tucks his hands under his thighs. Cherry red and honey-tacky, Cliff touches his own mouth. He stares at his hand until he glazes.

"...I thought I cut you," he wonders to himself, out of reach. His head is frighteningly clear, frighteningly soupy. His hand is stained and Cliff rubs his fingers together. It doesn't come off. "I'm high, Andrei," he finally says through a winding nasal cavity, so lost and hopelessly out of it. "Oddly so." Then, in the absence of an immediate response, his heart erratic, "...I'd like to stay this way."

He's never been so aware of standing before. His feet might lift off the floor. What else does he remember? He sees red stains down the thigh of his pants. He remembers, vaguely, something wriggling in his mouth, Andrei's leaking fingers. They'd been red, too.

A fountain roars deafening in his ear. The taste of the air cuts too fresh. His mouth was red, and Cliff staggers, hand jittery. "I think you drugged me, Andrei," he says, daintier than he should, rapping unknowingly into a vase. "And you said you wouldn't hurt me."

it seems stupid to ask why; hasn't cliff told them plenty of reasons why they were no good for each other? why they had separated like a trunk splitting into countless branches, never to come back together as it reached for the heavens above? a lack of love is clearer than the disjointed music that spills forth from the stereo, than the riddles that spill from cliff.

“ why did you leave her? ”

lightning flashes, thunder snarling in its immediate wake; theo breathes once, twice, before answering.

“ she might have. she might not have. there's not much of a point to dreaming of what could have been. ” it's a diplomatic answer, described in the carefully emotionless terms theo is comfortable giving it in. “ she didn't love anyone else. she loved herself enough to not allow me to continue to treat her as if she didn't matter. ”

tertia still lingers in their heart; theo thinks she always will. time heals all wounds, and absence makes the heart grow fonder; in theo's experience, neither time or absence lessened the pain of losing her. they watch the stop sign race by, gaze cutting to cliff's profile in on again, off again light of the approaching storm.

He keeps secrets. His no-longer sweetheart, her face bare and bones sturdy, perhaps met him in the middle of the living room, the hour half-past midnight, bags packed. She may have had, then, everything that belonged to her—everything that was theirs now suddenly no one’s. Things Theo, perhaps, was too afraid to keep. Too afraid to throw away.

Rain drops. He rolls the hood up, drawing a breath loud and slow.

"Yes, she did," he finally releases, quiet as a whisper. He doesn't glance back to them, nothing now but the sound of the radio. Rain splattering the windshield. The wipers going. Cliff stops at a light, the red sucked into his eyes. "I find it odd that you love her," he begins, the air pouring forth from his chest, every word lower than the last. He turns, nonchalant. "...and how she didn't matter."

Or she felt like she didn't. It's contradictory. Theo didn't share everything, and even now, they answer without fully answering, a phenomenon that can be explained by having just met—if not for the fact that he did the same to her, years later.

❝ 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐎𝐃𝐃𝐋𝐘 𝐂𝐔𝐓𝐄 , monsieur. I am not entirely sure what a Bokie is but I am WILLING to trust you with your chooses of food places. I don't get out much . . . . . ❞ This may be true but he knew what was good when it came to the human taste buds. They enjoyed themselves some good burgers & fries. FRENCH FRIES; they called it ( Though, Lestat knew that such a disgusting little thing did not come from his beloved country, in fact - It's said that this dish was discovered by American soldiers in Belgium during World War I &, of course — since the dominant language of southern Belgium is French . . . that's what happens when human's get bored. & BORED they do get, very often. )

The drive to Bokie's was a short one. This may be a day of firsts.

He does not recall the last time someone's asked him to lunch. He is certain that no one has ever leaned against the side of his car or called him what Lestat just did, either, his hat stolen from his head. Tiny bubbles hang above him, his car parked out the front of the restaurant. Cliff feels like a dandelion blown to the wind, white-blank-airborne. 

What is Lestat? Unexpected and untethered, a man who has probably never been denied a thing his entire life that he couldn’t eventually win over—perhaps with a smile. Perhaps with teeth.

"I believe it fits you," he sighs at last, turning his head lazily away, like stirring from sleep. He means the hat. Then, softer, "Plainly so."

The sun is setting; a great orange tangerine. Cliff thinks about biting into it and if it'll finally make him feel bright, and without preamble, the memory of Lestat's face cast over his eyes, he looks to the sky. "I wonder if I was supposed to meet you," Cliff murmurs, the words gone with the wind, "...and why that is."

Fate, he means. If they went meant to find each other in that parking lot. If everyone they've ever met was someone they were supposed to meet, and if, somehow, this 1PM lunch outside a New York drive-in was written in the stars; an indelible truth.

they allow him the time to come back to himself — as much as cliff is ever able to return to whom he once was. sleep had never arrived for them, theo remaining the man he has always been.

“ barely, ” theo allows with a small smile. it would be impossible to tell without cliff's watch. the fluorescent lights above provide sickly, pale light over them both, and outside the doors lurks an unknown, humid darkness, as black as the midnight that has descended outside the building. if not for the timepiece, it could have been the middle of the day, or the middle of the night. they'd listened to the steady tick-tick-tick of cliff's watch for an hour, counting down to a rescue that may not arrive and a sunrise that surely would.

cliff shifts beside him, rifling through his own pockets, and theo watches him do so from the corner of his eye. the elevator dings, damp air rushing in through the crack between the doors, and theo feels sweat bead at their hairline. they've always been warm, as if they hold the very sun within the confines of their chest.

Quiet as a ghost and under his breath. Cliff murmurs, “Yes, you can,” and takes the matchbox.

It is in the comfortable stretch immediately after that the air is stuffy and humid and now filling with smoke, Cliff likely desensitized to it and believing, subconsciously, that they either don’t care or don’t notice—that they wouldn’t have helped if they had. His arm rubs against his in the too-close proximity. They're glued side-by-side, Cliff extending a hand. 

“I can read you now.” Every word left in a sigh, around his cigarette.

He holds his hand palm up until it’s against Theo’s, and here, it’s quiet. There are sunken lines around Cliff’s eyes. His hair’s untucked from his ear. His head swims back to a smoke-filled storefront, incense burning and the lights dimmed to black if not for the perpetual, red glow of shrine bulbs, windchimes twinkling. She always read him with a knowing silence. Knew where to look.

Cliff uses his own hand as reference, looking back and forth, finds a similar palm line. He inhales pine and evergreens. Feels the convergence of body heat.

He lifts his head back up, and forever must have passed.

"You're running, Theo... and you're lonely," he exhales at last, nonchalant and dainty, his voice hovering in the space between them. He never said what they were running from and crosses his ankles. His legs are outstretched. "She also said you'll lose something," he finishes, just as airy.

Something big. Something that'll change everything. The back of his head rests against the wall, his eyes glazing up towards the light, hazy-foggy. The cigarette dangles from his mouth, and he feels warm.

𝐀 𝐒𝐎𝐅𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐋𝐄 𝐒𝐌𝐈𝐋𝐄 rests on the blonde's features while he reaches to take the other's hat off his head for nearly a brief moment, only BRIEFLY. Of course, this man wasn't one to know well about personal boundaries of others. Cliff would know that from first encounters of the artist leaning against his car from how DETERMINED he was now. The prince laughed a little, a soft chuckle of sorts while he soon placed the other's hat on his own head. ❝ Has NO one ever asked you that before, amour ? I would love to take you wherever you would like to go. I know of really expensive nice dinning places & restaurants. Or perhaps you would like those odd fast food joints that seem to be very POPULAR with your kind. ( Humans, that was, -- that's what he meant. The vamprie had hoped it was obvious enough that he himself was not that of a human, but perhaps Cliff did not put two & two together. If anything, he would no be suggestion to eat in, due to the fact of his lack of cooking skills. ) ❞

"I didn't even have a say..." Cliff wonders, harmless and soapy-headed.

Lestat may have smiled, then, and there is an oddity to it all.

No one would have ever expected this man to find him in a vacant parking lot, leaning over the driver’s side window. No one would have ever thought, without reason or preamble, that they'd exchange words together over a pair of thinly rolled cigarettes. Nobody would have ever expected the bike or this: the prospect of lunch, Lestat wearing his hat.  

Your kind, he says, and Cliff thinks he means 'American'. He looks at a no parking sign and exhales. "...I forgot you were French,” he sighs, laying his hand against the pole. He seems to come back. A moment drags, slow and plodding. Then, curiously, he murmurs into the air. "You called me that, didn't you?"

He meant the word 'amour'. He'd muttered to himself.

the perpetual twilight of cliff and armand's conjoined existence would continue to be a lonely thing. he might invite cliff into his mind if only he could return to this world unscathed, but the katabasis was an incurable sickness. cliff was good, achingly good, and armand knew that he was already staining his world beyond repair.

talk of dreams lures him in with promise of being invited into cliff's mind, the man's shoulder's turning towards the bed, slightly pleased to find that he retreated back into the position he was in before he'd climbed in through the window. armand comes to the edge of the bed. “ you dreamt about me. ”

he would dream of cliff if he could dream at all. he doesn't say this, but the thought sits on his tongue like a hot jewel, blocking any attempt at replying. he tries to keep the secret pleasure in his eyes from blossoming further.

when cliff's eyes open, he's standing on his side of the bed, towering over his relaxed form.

“ you're frightened of me. ” dark eyes sweep back up the wall.

he'll try not to be disappointed, but the realization that he is a monster, even in slumber, is an unwelcome one. perhaps it might have pleased him, at one point, to know that he was the dreaded creature in slumber's labyrinth but now he only finds the prospect dreadful. he doesn't want cliff to be afraid of him. he wants nothing more than to sit at the foot of the bed and watch the sky turn from black to purple to pink.

armand takes a step towards the record player again, turning his back to cliff while he tidies up his expression.

You're frightened of me.

Cliff rolls his head towards him. Music curls in the crack below his dresser; in the folds of his sheets. "Why?" he whispers, hair to cheek. "Did I say that?" It comes with a throaty hush, a thing reserved for the night with heads hidden under blankets, the world fast asleep. He lies there, every breath deafening. Then, it comes to him. "...I see why you'd think that."

Andrei's mass of curly black hair. Every dark corner rushing into his eyes. He turns around, the shadow receding with him, and a slant wash of lamplight spills back through the stained panes of the open window, silvery squares pouring bright over Cliff's body. Starlight white.  

Andrei's returned to the record player—volume low. Face hidden. "I Know It's Over"—and Cliff's eyes linger over the width of his back. Lukewarm. Periwinkle. Stale. 

They rove back to the ceiling.

"Anyway, I'm not afraid now," he murmurs, small and croaking, his throat drowsy-raw. His fingers rest on a button of his shirt. His eyelashes stick together. He unspools a breath through his nose, long and heavy. "I'm glad you're here, Andrei."

He does not elaborate either statements.

The bed whines and an outstretched arm unfolds over the other half of the mattress. The typewriter sounds and Cliff's pulled himself over. Paper rustles. You can hear him breathing, contemplating, in the intervening silence.

Cliff reads.

He had dreamt of soft orange walls and of rushing water, a feeling like swirling down a drain. He dreamt of an endless, spiraling hallway and a loneliness that comes only in the dead of night. He'd dreamt of oranges and flowers. Roses and fountains. Andrei stood at the other end of the hall, and as soundlessly as a star blows out and the leaves change colors, his neck was open and a red stream ran down sticky-warm, an undeniable cold finally and mercilessly lulling him to sleep.

Cliff makes it to the last paragraph, a word typoed. The song has long changed on the vinyl, his voice steadied. "...And he closed his eyes to the incandescent starlight."

The end of the page.

Cliff's breathing is still audible, or maybe he's held it in, the look on his face frozen and dazed and never-present. An irreconcilable silence follows, and he sits up, the sound of the bed creaking. 

though warm and golden and bright, the sun clenched between their teeth, destiny has made the night their home. they have watched stars ignite over thousands of years, glittering pinpricks of light that remain constant through it all. the planets and the minerals and the gases of space have made their home in the wolf's bones.

it is deeply unlike the fragile, temporary attachments formed with the life that has clawed its way to the present. they are doomed to watch them fade for one reason or another.

still — they'd like to keep cliff around. that thought prompts them to pick and choose their responses cautiously.

“ i have good reason to be. you wouldn't believe a single story i could tell you about the things i've seen. ”

the words stray a little too close to the truth, far nearer than theo intends to allow them. they study the fan of cliff's hair on his hat, the stars gleaming in the black depths of his pupils, and raise their eyebrows.

The cool on the tips of his fingers feels reel. The lining feels reels. The air feels real. He thinks, without forming any words, that, resolutely, he is here. Theo is, too.

“I believe I would," he exhales, almost like letting out smoke. He thinks of the Tangerine. He watches a star twinkle. He turns to them, his ear to the windshield, and his throat unsticks. "It's probable you would tell me I'm on something," he brings up, weightless and floaty. He turns back, and through the same breath, "But I'm not sure they're real, either."

Cliff doesn't explain it. Something rustles. Theo offers more seltzer, the wind tousling their hair, and he thinks of laundry blowing on a line and what fantastical things they might have seen.

He thinks of it being past sundown, and how, most nights, inexplicably and mercilessly, this wouldn't be happening.

A good time.

❝Our futures? You want to take me to one of those spooky buildings with a woman sitting at a table and a deck of tarot cards and watch as she tells me you'll die in the next ten years?❞ Not what she would have pictured, but it's just so out of left field that the idea actually sounds interesting.

Who knows, she thinks, he might accidentally stumble past the border where mundane meets supernatural and get something a little more surprising than he bargained for.

Ly leans on the counter as the game attendant loads their guns and grins. Terms accepted. ❝Okay; we'll do that.❞ She's handed the gun as the others shuffle in and she wrinkles her nose against the smell of sunscreen and sweat.

Ly is twenty-four and Vilen—Stepan then—drags her out into the woods, ignoring her biting remarks and her constant questions. 'Is this the torture part before you put me down?' His rifle is slung over his shoulder and he'd only told her this is another life lesson, but she couldn't guess what lesson involved two werewolves, a gun, and total isolation, unless she was going to learn how to dodge bullets or deal with the pain. Finally, they stop, and Stepan takes his rifle in his hands and stares her down with that piercing gaze of his. He was a soldier, she remembers, fought in battles well older than her. She is going to die here. Maybe she doesn't mind. Ly steels herself, and her golden eyes blaze in spite of the looming threat of death. She's never been shot before. They didn't allow guns in the fights. Beaten, yes. They've broken bones and gouged out parts of her flesh with claws and knives, but this will be a first. She doesn't plan to make it easy for him. But the shot never comes. The rifle is thrust out to her and he says, 'Take it,' has to repeat the order a second time before she actually does. The weapon is clumsy and unbalanced in her hands; she hates the weight of it, hates the feel of the metal and the way she has to hold it, and she wants to drop it in the dirt at their feet and forget about it. She must look as confused as she feels, because he tells her, 'Different lesson for today. We're going hunting. You want to eat tonight? You're going to catch something.' He holds up his index finger before she can even open her mouth, anticipating this very reaction. She narrows her eyes and growls. 'With that, like a civilised person. Your claws are not an answer to everything. You need to know other ways to protect yourself.' 'Just fucking shoot you instead, what about this?' 'Be quiet; you will scare away the animals. You know how well they hear. Now—'

The weight of this rifle is uneven and awkward, nothing like the feeling of his all those years ago, but she can't help thinking about that day when he'd insisted and pushed and pushed and pushed, correcting her form and clearly enjoying her horrible aim.

All four pellet guns firing at once feels like a spike through her skull, but her need to crush this game keeps her focused on the target in the distance. When she finally empties the gun, the attendant, with no small amount of surprise, announces that she can pick a prize.

The carnie announces their winner—”A world record to the lady up front… Misses Red!"—and a low groan unravels from one of the participants, everyone filing out in a jerky, undulating rush. Cliff stays behind, his eyes never leaving her.

A rakish grin. She knew how it’d end. The attendant hands off an oversized husky he'd chosen, and Cliff takes it, the pockets beneath his eyes sleepy-puffy. He stares.

“You only wanted to beat me," he mutters to himself, low and serene. He looks back up to find her papercut grin, something in him going both carefully silent—also loud. Then, with a long breath, like she isn't there, "...I already think of you."

Ly never said if she meant it when she told him she was lucky. 

Subconsciously, and by no choice of his own, he believes he never heard her.

-

He doesn't scour the pier for a fortune-teller he doesn't know the name to. Fifteen minutes out and tucked behind a beaten fire hydrant, the decal on the front door chipped and streaked, 'MADAME FORTUNA'S' welcomes them in lemon yellow, a half-closed eye floating beneath it. 

Cliff had lit a cigarette somewhere between the pier and now, peppering the walk with points of conversation. 'I go to see her often,' he began, wistful, and, almost regretfully, 'Although I forgot to last week,' then, winding and eyes to the ground, his arm outstretched as he holds open the door, '...Nothing she hasn't told me hasn't happened,' as though that lent any credence to her gift. Like he actually believes it.

He snubs his cigarette out and walks inside.

Darkness surrounds them all at once.

Somewhere unseen, whindchimes rustle without a breeze. Incense burns, herby smoky, and the room is lit only by their fading glow and the flickering wicks of sitting candles, an alter illuminated drowsy and red in the back. Skulls lie on a draped table, maybe a tapestry. Lucky cats wave.

"Sugar, it's Cliff and Ly."

The bell chimes as the door wheezes closed, and behind a cluttered counter, obscured by a bansai, a woman lifts her head. Dark makeup. Heavily lined eyes. A small, knowing smile.

midnight is armand's playground. his presence is a playful one, a peter - pan - esque creature with white fangs and naked feet and a longing that stretched from the northstar & back home. tonight there is a thrill that calls to him, a song that cannot be unanswered and for a long moment he simply gazes on cliff as he mosey's on through to his night light.

pale tangerine light creeps into the off white walls. with it, the rest of the story: the record player seems to hiss and somewhere, always, the sound of slowly draining water. like a leak has sprung where the eye cannot see, but the sound is a relentlessly common place noise that would seem odd if it were not for cliff's peculiar presence in his life.

feet first, armand lands on the bed. his weight jostles the typewriter but the springs to not creak and when he moves towards the end of the bed, inhaling the unmistakable smell of sex and love and wet ink, he does so with an alarming amount of grace.

“ is it ? ” is his retort when he limply steps onto the floor. the vampire's bottom lip is enclosed between his teeth when he turns back around on his heel, glancing from cliff, to the bed, and back. a small smile is being hidden there but it doesn't hide the smile in his eyes.

“ i'm not here to take it if that's what you're worried about. ”

another spin, this time towards the record player. “ you sound like you were asleep. ” softly, with the tips of his nails, armand returns the needle to the furthest groove and drops the needle. crackling, a whispered start, and then music; wondrous and slow and sad.

Cliff should say something. He shouldn't let Andrei unspool himself over the rumpled sheets of a bed still warm with one-sided affection, used and desolate, but it's too late and Cliff's head is perpetually full, buzzing radio static. The typewriter jostles. Andrei's settled in. 

He says he's not here to take it.

A synonym for I won't be staying.

“But I do have a couch,” Cliff offers like he hadn't heard him, always in that distant-worldly way of his. He sits on the other side, exhaling. This time, the mattress does whine. "You're welcome to it." A murmur, lower.

Andrei must have started the vinyl again. The Smiths spins and whispers, nighttime quiet, and Cliff wordlessly lies himself down over the once-empty expanse of his bed, his wrist held over his belly. There is a water stain up above. It's a black hole in his ceiling. He thinks quietly of being sucked into it and of somebody who just left his bed. Who's presently in it. A car trawls down the road, the window still open.

Finally, he opens his mouth.

"I dreamed about you, Andrei." He sounds far-off like a distant memory, like it was some insignificant thing. Cliff's hair splays beneath him, and he blinks, bleary. "Although I believe you were eating me... and it was very surreal."