what up?

Gannon stared at the cracked cobblestone beneath his feet, even though he longed to look skyward; revealing that part about himself was something he rarely did, mainly because he hated the reactions people had to it. There was pity, the stiff: “thank you for your service,” the barrage of personal stories about people they’d known with the same problem and how they’d overcome it — all of which made his stomach turn. No one ever said the right thing, mainly because they said too fucking much.

It occurred to him in a brief flash that it’d been stupid to tell Mack; he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what the hell possessed him to do so — that was, until Mack weathered the admission without so much as a look of pity. All he did was acknowledge the confession, the gravitas of it, then let it settle. Gannon’s dark blue eyes, like a faulted, frozen lake, flickered over to his smoking companion. He found himself wondering how Mack’s opinion of him might have changed with that knowledge. Instead of thinking too long about that, he took another pull from his pipe. Ashen embers brightened.

When the veteran asked people about themselves, it was usually to divert the attention off of himself — a defense mechanism. In this instance, he found himself generally curious what brought the blond out here. What reason would someone like him need to avoid the intensity of the party roaring within? Was he avoiding it at all?

“Yeah,” he answered quickly. Air. There was a sense of relief in that; perhaps Mack was just as he appeared. Gannon ignored the drop in his stomach that felt like disappointment. Fucked up of him to hope anyone (let alone someone of which he was growing fond) could relate to the psychosis he dealt with. No one deserved to live in a nightmare.

And then Mack lit another lantern down the dark corridor. Anxiety. Stress. Panic. Gannon could understand that, though it was difficult to make room for those facets in his perception of the man; he seemed so at home at the center of the churning chaos. Before he could respond, his own defense mechanism was used against him — and despite himself and the serious nature of their conversation — he felt the corner of his lip twitch upward ironically.

“Four years,” he said, smothering the embers in his pipe’s bowl with his thumb to put it out. “Feels like yesterday.” He felt the phantom pain in his leg and deftly hid a flinch.

“So, this week. Wanna talk about it?”

“Four years,” Mack echoed, blowing smoke through his lips as he spoke. Four years wasn’t long at all. He looked over at Gannon, not out of pity or admiration, but out of curiosity -- and perhaps even empathy. Of course, he wasn’t going to pretend that he knew the first thing about what a Navy SEAL experienced while on active duty, but he could imagine that PTSD was a hell of a thing to deal with.

“Ah, right. This week...” he murmured, quickly averting his eyes to look at the ground once more, studying a crack in the pavement. His cigarette, just an ashen stub now, fell from his fingers to join the multitude of the cigarette butts that already lay at their feet. Desperate for the relaxing effects of nicotine, Mack immediately lit another and held it to his lips.

This week. What had happened this week? Mack frowned as he mulled it over, grasping for any conclusion that wasn’t ‘actually everything is fine, I was just born with a broken brain.’

Though, truthfully, the week had been more stressful than most. It had been a week of chasing deadlines, scrambling to finish research papers, too much whiskey, and not enough sleep. Classic Mack, some of his superficial colleagues would say if he came to a meeting with a hangover, as if his poor work ethic and bad habits were something to be desired, and not a dangerous cocktail of unhealthy coping mechanisms that would inevitably run him into the ground.

But did he not have the schedule and responsibilities of a typical masters student? Surely he should be able to get through a busy week without hyperventilating mid-way through an indie band’s set on a booming and bustling Friday night... right?

He grimaced, not meeting Gannon’s gaze. “Just a little more hectic than usual,” he sighed, attempting to appear nonchalant. He forced a smile. “The life of a typical masters student,” he added with an unconvincing laugh.

Gannon began to return the lighter offered him, but saw Mack’s eyes shift up to the night sky. His own gaze followed. But a patch of the expanse was viewable from where they sat, saturated with the city’s glow so that it took on a pale, lavender tinge. Growing up, he’d longed to see stars, to map constellations, track satellites — perhaps if he’d been born somewhere other than Bayonne, that longing would have changed him unequivocally. Perhaps he’d been a different person, someone that looked skyward and thought beyond the trappings of this city.

Maybe that was what people were missing here: the bigger picture.

Mack spoke up, interrupting his labyrinthine thoughts, but Gannon didn’t tear his eyes away from the sluice of night just yet. He took in a deep, steadying breath and smiled gently back at the abyss. “For a minute there, I was somewhere else,” he admitted, finally looking back at his bench-mate. “Look up long enough, all of this sort of ..dissolves.” The thrum of the bass started to sink back into his limbs, and he leaned further back into his spot.

A bad habit of his, he tapped the ivory stem of his pipe against his teeth pensively. The aromatic leaf had begun to soothe him, but he couldn’t discount Mack’s hand in that. Unlike most of even his closer acquaintances, he’d felt an immediate kinship. Though they carried themselves so differently, they both somehow ended up on the same bench, looking up at the same patch of sky.

“It’s not the music or the present that chased me out here,” he said with a sigh. The words were like stones in his throat. Difficult to unearth, but surfacing all the same. “It’s the past catching up to me.” A man of few words, he found it nigh impossible to describe how at one moment he was manning the PA for The Naked Giants, and the next, he was dodging gunfire and hearing a chorus of his comrades screaming.

“PTSD. I was a Navy Seal.” Gannon chanced a glance at Mack after the admission. He couldn’t remember the last person he’d outright told.

“What about you?”

Mack turned to looked at Gannon properly. “Shit,” he breathed, then fell silent for a moment, attempting to parse the new information through the haze of alcohol and nicotine that clouded his mind. He then nodded, pursing his lips. “Yeah, that’d do it,” he added wryly.

Though he hadn’t known his friend long, he wondered how such an integral aspect of his past had slipped under the radar until that moment. What did they usually talk about when they found themselves sitting together on the bench, bathing in the breezy air of the city and polluting it further with cigarette smoke?

Mack realized he couldn’t remember. The specific details of their past conversations were lost to him, which he knew could be partially attributed to the fact that he was often a little more intoxicated by that time of night — but he quickly pushed the thought out of his mind, cheeks reddening with shame. In any case, he had grown fond of Gannon over the little while they had known each other.

Yet while he felt comfortable in Gannon’s presence, he was still unsure of how to best answer his question. He felt compelled to return Gannon’s honesty with some honesty of his own.

“Ah, just needed some air,” he murmured, looking away from Gannon. So much for honesty. He swallowed nervously, mustering up the courage to keep going. “I, uh, was feeling a little claustrophobic. Panicky,” he finished lamely. He glanced at Gannon then quickly looked to the ground. “It happens sometimes. This week was stressful,” he said quickly.

“where did you disappear?” vivian immediately said as she finally found him and approached him outside. “I went to use the bathroom because the blonde girl next to our table couldn’t take her eyes off you. I know - you guys don’t usually see that but I noticed that so I wanted to make her space so she could talk to you but then when I got back you weren’t there? what happened?” she asked as she leaned against the wall next to him. “and we lost the table, by the way.”

Mack smiled when he saw it was Vivian approaching him, but the smile quickly turned into a frown when he realized she wasn’t exactly pleased.

“Ah shit,” he sighed, “sorry Viv — just needed to pop out for a sec.” He gestured to the cigarette in his hand, as if it was enough of an explanation.

Truthfully, the blonde girl had attempted to get his attention, and in hindsight he realized he had been quite rude to her. When she approached, he had pushed past her without giving her a chance to speak, too focused on getting way from the bar’s boisterous atmosphere.

“Likewise,” he answered with a mirrored smile, if a degree softer. It was odd, the shift in dynamic — emerging from an underground world of swelling light and shrinking shadow, out into the strange stillness cast in Brooklyn’s streetlamps. Gannon had known quiet, on tours across the sea with the Navy, but nothing compared to the muted cacophony of the city. One only had the illusion of being alone here, but he preferred it to unsettling stretches of silence.

He caught the lighter with ease, tested its weight in his palm. “Thank you. Think I lost my matches downstairs. It’s chaos down there.”

The loud music never triggered his PTSD, but every once in a while a forsaken beer bottle met the stained concrete just right and he was back in fatigues, suffering heat and gunfire unrelenting. Thankfully, Gannon had gotten rather deft at hiding it when he was shaken; he hoped it went unnoticed by his current companion.

The pipe clicked between his teeth, and he lit the moist tobacco therein. It crackled and writhed in the heat, emitting the tart sent of cooked cherries. As Mack joined him on the bench, he leaned back, deflated, and a white column of smoke billowed from between his lips. “Believe it or not, I’m enjoying this better.”

“Nah, no problem,” Mack said, nodding. He sighed, looking up at the night sky, the New York City air too polluted with light to make out a single star. It left him with a spark of homesickness, as he recalled the twinkling skies of rural Ireland.

“Chaos is the right word,” he snorted, then looked down at his hands. He took another drag of his cigarette.

It was a tricky thing, anxiety — it often came unannounced, unprompted, and most definitely unwanted, like a nosy neighbor trying to make sure you weren’t having too much fun. Sometimes it could be washed away with a beer, or three, and sometimes it came back worse.

That was where Mack had been just fifteen minutes ago, shortly before Gannon arrived.

“It is definitely quieter out here,” he breathed, then glanced at Gannon. He studied the other man for a moment. They had only known each other for a short time, and Mack enjoyed his company. In this particular moment, he felt there might be something a bit off with his recent friend, but he wasn’t sure if he was just projecting his own uneasiness from earlier.

“The Basement” of Fred’s Vinyl Resting Place had become a cynosure of Brooklyn’s diverse music scene overnight, it seemed. It had been Gannon’s idea to renovate the space for exclusive, intimate shows and private recording sessions, but it was hard to keep anything like that under-wraps for long in a place like NYC. Local acts wanted in on the venue, and he and Fred were in no place to deny up and coming acts a place to showcase their work. So it was that The Black Angels, a headlining psychedelic rock act out of Texas — and Sluice, a one-man post-dub artist that lived in the meat-packing district, would share the same stage one night to the next.

Tonight, it was The Naked Giants. Psychedelic grunge at its finest. Fuzzy guitars and moshing post-punks had chased Gannon from the sound booth and out into the damp night air. His hip ached, but he had forsaken his cane in favor of looking less like the enfeebled vet he was. A familiar frame lingered in the deserted smoke-hole; Mack even turned to meet his eyes as he approached. Gannon nodded an acknowledgement, easing down onto a graffiti-laden bench. “Don’t mind me,” he offered with an apologetic half-smile; he hadn’t intended to interrupt anyone.

Cigarettes had never been his flavor, but he had packed a pipe with black cherry tobacco for the evening. When he retrieved it from the breast pocket of his leather jacket, he found he’d forgotten his matches.

“Actually, can I borrow a light, man?”

Mack nodded his head in greeting, flashing Gannon a smile. “Good to see ya’,” he said, then took a long drag of his cigarette. The smoke billowed around the both of them as he exhaled.

When prompted, Mack retrieved his lighter from the front pocket of his jeans and tossed it over to Gannon.

Normally an easygoing people-person, Mack had been to his fair share of live shows in the six months he’d been living in New York City. He loved nothing more than some cool tunes and more than a few alcoholic beverages to help him unwind at the end of each week. This time, however, he was finding the crowded venue stress-inducing instead of stress-relieving — hence why he was recuperating outside, in what was probably his third smoke break in the last hour.

He sat on the bench next to Gannon. “Enjoying the show?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at the other man.

“also needed a smoke?” it just took a couple more steps until she was right at his side, having followed him from inside the bar. she’d met him while hanging out with some friends of friends, inbetween which he was. addison wasn’t really one to turn down an invitation, and that was how she found herself surrounded by new people. “do you mind?” she asked him mindlessly, having put an unlit cigarette inbetween her rouge lips, with no apparant way of lighting it.

“Ah, hey,” Mack said when he spotted Addison, recognizing her from earlier in the evening. He nodded in response to her question, taking a long drag of his cigarette before continuing. “Yeah...” he sighed, blowing smoke into the night, away from her. He gestured toward the bar, “It’s a bit much in there right now.”

He looked to the cigarette between her lips and smirked. In a quick motion he held the flame of his lighter up and lit her cigarette for her.

“Your name is Addison, right?” he asked.

Flora’s forced smile turned genuine as she saw the guy in a rush was non other than her friend, Mack. They hadn’t been friends for too long, but Flora considered him a friendly face and was always glad to see him. She bent down and picked up the book, then passed it over to him. “That’s a lie,” she noted. “You are chaos incarnate. But where are you heading in such a hurry? Don’t let me keep you, if it’s somewhere important.”

Mack laughed, running a hand through his hair. “Fair enough,” he said with a nod. Flora was one of few New York faces that were familiar to him, and he was glad it was her that he had run into, rather than some stranger.

“Ah, I’m late for a meeting with some colleagues,” he said in response to her question, grimacing. He checked the time on his phone and sighed. “Or, well, I was late for a meeting. It’s probably over now.”

⌜ •° ✦ °• — HEY!! is that SAM CLAFLIN? no, that’s MACK RAFFERTY, hanging out in QUEENS. they’re TWENTY SEVEN years old and use HE/HIM pronouns. what do they do here? they’re A MASTERS STUDENT @ NYU and they’ve lived here SIX MONTHS. their favourite thing about the city is THE NIGHTLIFE, but they hate THE INCOME DISPARITY. they pride themselves on being INNOVATIVE . - ── ( bonnie. 21. she/her. adt ).