Phase
-contains spoiler-ish things-
So I wrote this a little over a year and a half ago, originally, as something that demanded I write it. Oddly, this was immediately before my first experiences of being "out" in the real world, so I realized as I went through it that what was dancing from these fingertips was the story of my coming to accept myself as bisexual, in a real sense, rather than the tremendous amount of rationalizing I had done prior to that summer. I decided I'd furry-ize it and see what the anthro community thought, since I never got much feedback on it, so please critique! And don't be sensitive to the fact that it's my coming-out piece; it should still be treated like any other piece of literature, and is not autobiographical. Much.
t3h p05t, 4 j00.
A/N: this is not in chronological order. You have been warned.
I heard him singing and suddenly knew intimately from where seraphs received inspiration. He was standing at the precipice of the building we had climbed, positioned to project, and I, almost able to see sound by this point in my education, knew that at that angle, no one could hear him but me. The aerial vibrations would fade out far above the ground, and with the short, sloping wall around the roof, only those upon it - like me - would hear him.
It was beautiful. It was alto. He sang, and behind him, I fell to my knees and wept. What had I been doing to him? How had I been hurting him?
I knew. I knew those answers, and my questions were more because he was singing them than because I had refused to approach them. I knew. Over and over again, I knew, like a statue knows all the humiliations of the life it epitomizes, hearing them from murmuring observers. His mother was dead. I could hear that in his voice, and I could hear what I had done to him. I gasped, and water brimmed in my eyes and then burst the floodgates. On my hands and knees, it was not long before the first drop of saltwater splashed onto the gravel. His voice didn't falter - not even for an instant.
"I'm... s... I'm- sor..." I couldn't speak right. My lungs wouldn't hold air for long enough for me to control it as I gasped and flickered in and out of closing eyes, flinging tears at the floor. And still he sang, and the song took a different turn. A false major, descending into minor, pulling through diminished fourths, cracking scales with caustic modes as he began to slaughter quarter-tones. He was torturing me, and from what little I could see of his face, he was keeping it all to himself. He raped my ears. And I knelt, and tried to speak, and let him.
"Dude I am so gay."
"I'm... well aware." It was in fact painfully pervasive in my life.
A short silence, and some blinking. "Drunk."
"Who in their right mind gave you whiskey sours?" I could smell it on his breath. Them, rather. Our third roommate rushed past where I had landed on the couch to do homework and where the lush next to me had landed when he tripped.
Our escaping friend winked at me and said, "Enjoy!"
I should have killed him right then and there, but I had a computer in my lap and his life wasn't worth my YouTube access. Also, I suppose I was in a good mood - no one had mentioned Clarissa today. So instead, I sighed and went back to what I was doing as the door slammed and Drinky the eighth dwarf slowly and artlessly crawled closer to me. I didn't look at him. "If you hurl, I stab you with an ice pick."
"Your mom has a nice prick! Ha-ha! Ha. Ha! Ha-ha. Hey." He scooted by about a foot, pretending to look at my computer screen. I inched away. "Hey." He tried to poke me, missed, and squinted at his finger. "Hey."
"What."
"Can I tell you somethin'?"
"I don't have a cho-"
"You are like the hottest guy here." His drink-flushed cheeks made the transition to stop sign red. "Like, seven and a half times hotter than... than... that guy." He waved at the door, then watched for a moment to see if it would wave back.
It didn't.
"Aaaand it's time for bed." I slammed my computer shut and stood up. "'night."
"But it's like four in the morning!"
"Eleven at night."
"Can I come with you?" He crawled up the back of couch to paw at me as I wheeled around it.
"No."
"But you're so hot!"
In a strange way, I think I was flattered. That's got to be why I kept talking. "So you wouldn't sleep well. It's already a warm night."
"Neither one of us would! That's the whole idea!" He spread his arms wide, lost his balance, and almost did a reverse somersault into the coffee table, but I caught his paw. We had already had to pay for a broken glass door; didn't need to explain this one, too.
He started grinning slyly and tried to grab back, so I encouraged him over the arm of the couch and walked off.
"Waaauuugghhh!" thud. A moment of silence. "I'm bleeding Technicolor!" I'd forgotten I'd spilled Kool-aid earlier and never cleaned it up. "I'm a Smurf!" It had been blue raspberry. He giggled. "Dude Smurfette was one sexy bitch."
"You're gay." It was really hard to talk and not laugh at the same time.
"So's your mom."
"Are you getting up soon or should I call an ambulance?"
"Your mom needs an ambulance," he slurred. He was face-down in dried Kool-aid. "Emergency... lisposuction."
"Come get me if you're dying." As I left, I took the whiskey with me. Getting alcohol poisoning by oneself is sad.
Five hours later, he dive-bombed my bed. My response: "Jesus fuck!"
"Ewwww, all skin and bones!" He went limp on top of me, considering. "Besides, dude had no taste in piercings."
After testing the aerodynamics of a small college student and locking my door after him, I burst into a fit of silent laughter. That was pretty funny.
I'd never heard him slam his door before. Usually, every time I returned to the apartment, I had to deal with that incessant smile and some creepily infantile greeting. Sometimes he even hugged me, or at least, he had tried a few times, until I knocked him against a wall and explained exactly how many pieces the cops would find him in once someone finally realized he was gone. I remember saying the words, "Because Lord knows your parents don't keep up with their broken child."
But this time, as I opened the door to the apartment, preparing myself for whatever form of greeting he had in store for me, all I heard - all I felt - was the slamming of his door. I knew it was his because it came from just beyond mine. Because I usually had to throw him out of my room, sometimes literally.
It felt kind of nice, actually, to be able to take a whole, deep breath without being assaulted. Our other roommate actually poked his head around the corner, from the kitchen. He jerked his thumb at our smaller cohort's abode. "He PMS-ing or something?" he laughed. I grinned, and shrugged.
"Guess so." I wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a bite to eat. Kind of bland bread and cold cuts, but food nonetheless, and that was what was important. It was nice. I hadn't been offered to have it spiced in any way, hadn't had a cooking experiment shoved in my face, hadn't had to listen to God-awful chattering about nothing.
When I got to my room, I couldn't concentrate.
"Let me help. Please." A tear was forming at the edge of his eye. Why? What right did he have to cry? It was my girl. My girl had been violated and murdered. My mink! So why was he crying? Why was he putting his hand on my hand?
"I said get off! I don't want you!" I wanted her. I wanted her so badly. I threw his hand off, hurled it on the counter, shoved him over the back of the sofa. He's like a sack of twigs; just crumbled and somehow, somehow lying like he meant to be there and beckoning me - both hands flicking those feminine little ferret fingers towards him, before he sniffed and wiped away the tear.
"I want to help. I don't want to see you like this."
I screamed at him, "Why the hell not?"
And he just looked at me, as though I'd said something stupid. "Because I love you." Reality dropped my jaw in the silent echo of my fury. I stared him in the eyes, my own red and irritated and unblinking as I was caught between the words that kept oozing out of his mouth and the image of her smile burned on my retina, slowly fading as I tried harder and harder to cling to it, effervescing even as I clutched at it with clenched eyelids. "I don't like to see the people I love get hurt."
A moment longer. He wasn't lying to me. I knew he wasn't lying because of the smile he was wearing. It took me almost three months to figure out his smiles. This one wasn't a lying smile. It was honest. And the ghost image of her branded on my mind was smiling out of it. "No." I backed away, opening my eyes, off-balance in my flinching reeling from her skeleton in his teeth. I needed her. And she chewed out my stomach. "I don't need help. And I don't want it. Especially from you." I turned around, went to my room, and slammed the door behind me. Let there be thunder.
Move-in day. I had never met either roommate before; just went with the lottery and prayed intermittently. I knew that one was somewhat excitable by the way he spoke in emails. The other was reasonable enough. It was the former I met first.
"Hi!" He poked his head out of his room with a smile like a chipmunk. I had not expected him to be so... young-looking. He wasn't young; I knew that from FaceBook. But he looked like it.
He introduced himself to me and pointed me to the fruit punch he was making. It was an odd color of purple-blue, and there were unfortunate shapes floating in it. I didn't partake.
"So where's the other guy?"
"He came in and I met him and he said he had to go do something or another so I've just been in here making fruit punch it's really good you should try some!"
I tried to be cordial. "Need help moving in at all?" He looked pretty small. If he had a chair or anything, the chances of him managing it were-
"Nah, I just had a suitcase or two. I pack light and it's not as though I can't buy anything I need from here, right?" I stared. How do you get to college on just a suitcase or two? I didn't even see a good-sized duffel bag anywhere. Hadn't his family given him a cooler, or like a television or something?
I frankly couldn't blame the guy who had left, as I endured the next thirty minutes of meeting this peppy little rodent. I started setting my stuff up while he began chattering about school. Music major, hadn't gotten along well with his last roommates, put himself up for the lottery. I rolled my eyes while he wasn't facing me. I couldn't imagine what had put them on bad terms...
"Look, I'm gonna go... get my books," I said after that half-hour of uninterrupted drivel. "I'll see you."
"Okay! Hey, I'll come with you!" He ran and grabbed a giant paper bag and a list.
"You don't have t-"
"Come on, we can get to know each other!" He was already out the door and waiting on me expectantly, tail alive with anticipation. Apparently I was stuck with him.
I kind of stared at her. Was she deaf or stupid? Had she really just asked me...?
"You know, just to take your mind off things. We could have a fun night, maybe a drink or two." She was grinning the Lethe at me. After I had told her my girlfriend was dead. As though a night with a whore would melt away three years of paradise, now frozen in my neurons.
But how was I supposed to tell her "no"? She had been my friend for at least as long. She knew I loved Clarissa. She looked like she honestly wanted to help me, but I kept digging my gaze past her eyes and I knew that she had sought me like a jaguar after an elk for all of those three years. I always thought it was weird that we used animal analogies when we all looked like them, anyway. It was stupid to say yes, but I found myself opening my mouth to answer all the same.
"Well, I guess I cou-"
"Mm-mmm, girlfriend!"
I believe I went apoplectic. My face and ears turned a scarlet color of barn red. It was him.
He snapped his fingers at her. "He ain't want you! Ain't you got a brain up there in that misshapen skull of yours? You _uuu-_gly, bitch! An' ain't no one like a slut."
"Y- How dare you?" she demanded. His hands went to his cocked hips as they faced off. One or two people had heard and were giggling into hands underneath deer-wide eyes. "I've known him for years; I don't want to-"
"Don't lie t' me, girlfriend! You want him inside you." He smirked and snaked his head back and forth, eyes and tail dancing. When had he learned to behave like this? Whispers and more smiles were gathering around us. He mrowled. "I know I do."
Her face and mine passed one another in hue as I began to calm down to watch and she became incensed. "You bastard!" I almost felt an ironic, mean smile twist my lips. Odd choice of words.
He checked his fingernails. He checked his fucking fingernails. I kind of wondered if he had painted them, but couldn't remember later. Looking down hid the brief hurt that surfaced. "Better 'n a bitch in heat."
"Shut up!"
"Look," he said, and he was no longer joking. His eyes had turned to steel in winter, his tail had laid out flat on the ground like a magnet, and she jumped as though electrocuted. We were not exactly in a public place, but for the few ears who had tuned themselves to our station, he raised his voice. "You want to take advantage of the fact that his girlfriend was brutally violated and then had her throat slit open. You want to drink her blood from his lips and suck it from his fur. You are happy another human being is dead." Those eyes... I was seeing hell, and didn't even have to meet them straight on. Her face had been exsanguinated. No one was giggling. "Back off and find some other man to be your dildo for the night. He doesn't need your shit."
Her head turned towards me, dreading looking at him, but unable to keep from being trapped by that glare. "I... I-"
"Please go away," I whispered. She did, and I turned to him as the crowd complied. "Why...?" I asked, as he also tried to follow suit.
The same intensity as his earlier hell burned my eyes with a whole new fire when he paused to look for a single second over his shoulder. Very quietly, in a voice only I could hear, he said, "Because I love you." And he didn't look back.
"I made a cake!"
Let me be perfectly honest - I cannot say I had ever seen another human being as proud of himself as he was in the moment he very nearly made an imprint of my face in the icing. I looked up from the video game I was playing and glanced at him. "And your shirt is off why?"
He blinked a few times, not seeming to understand, then looked down at his bare chest. The red oven mitts on his hands somehow fit the picture. Why he was still wearing them after the cake had been successfully put on a plate, I don't think I'll ever know. Mysteries kind of billowed out of his idiocy, like mist from a drizzle. He looked back at me, smiling like a kitten that had shredded drapes and was sitting on the remains. "Cake!"
He turned around while I rolled my eyes and went back to the video game, wondering how I hadn't noticed he had been baking half-naked. Or why our other roommate hadn't, either. Then again, that cat didn't spend much time here and was probably absent. Regardless, a few moments later, there was a slice of chocolate cake sitting next to me on a plate on the sofa. I looked around - he was nowhere in sight. I looked around again, my hand seeming to press the "Pause" button of its own accord. Again, I surveyed the room. No one nearby, right? My nose very much wanted cake. Was I really going to eat something that twerp had baked? One of my hands touched the fork, and my narrow eyes scanned the entire place. I even stood up to make sure no one was hiding behind a counter.
I took a bite, and my mouth had an orgasm. It was bliss in chocolate format. This was the flavor created if one were to put Heaven in an oven and inject it with a German bakery. Buddhists should give up on Nirvana and visit this apartment instead.
His face poked out from under the effing couch. "THE FUCK?!" I almost threw the plate at him.
"Cake!"
"So I'm broken."
It was three thirty in the morning. I needed to finish a paper in the next five hours. It had to be twelve pages long, and I had four. What the hell was he talking about? "Yeah, as far as I can tell." I didn't take my eyes off the computer screen. "What are you doing in my room?"
His voice was undead. Monotone coloring me translucent. "I think I'm going to jump off the porch."
"Have a nice flight," I muttered. I couldn't stand people who so blatantly sought attention, for the raw effect of getting it. He had wanted it all effing semester. Hadn't given me a break from it. Trying to hug me every time he saw me, trying to make me like him; acting like every other heart-hungry faggot whose parents hadn't continued to love them once they came out of the closet. This one just happened to have lost one of them recently.
I heard the sliding door open onto the balcony and rolled my chair backwards to glance around the corner out of my room. He was going through it. Back to the screen; more important things to do. "Close the door - you're letting in a draft." There was a moaning wind outside.
"I can't."
"Why the hell not?" Irritated, I stood this time to look again. He was standing on the banister, half-obscured by the cracked open door. Was he... really going to do it? Arms all flung out like some kind of angel on the prow of the Styx... a pained and unneeded misplacement... wind tossing his ears and tail. We were only two floors up, but a swan dive onto the sidewalk...
"If I get down, I'll lose my last chance to feel." His eye almost met mine over his shoulder. And then he started to tilt forward.
I don't know how I lived through that. Surrounded by broken glass, I roughly rolled him out of my arms onto the ground, stood to make sure I hadn't broken anything, and checked his pulse. Alive. "Can you get up?"
Tears leaked from the corners of both eyes, and he answered, "Yes."
I climbed the stairs back up to my computer and got to work after bandaging my cuts. God damn draft wasn't going away now, that was for sure.
I know how to lose myself in music. To dissolve my soul in the sound like Rufies in Everclear. My fingers caress the keys and my instrument answers my question. The droplets of sound effervesce through my ears and I recall tears I can't afford to shed. I can feel music writhe from my heart to my hands, while every sonic bubble lands and caresses my swimming head. My lips part to release the first of a yearning, grinding melody, trying in it to recall her...
I used to sing with her. Our voices were beautiful together: her dulcet tones and driving power melding with my growling baritone and making wings out of arias. We were sirens for gods. Audiences wept oceans for our rivers, and we washed their brains clean of grief and regret.
So now, singing without her is like playing with only one hand. I am a cripple, but I have to play; this is what I have of her. A bit of a memory summoned to remind me how much it hurts to know she isn't there, but it's as much as I can feel; as much as I can remember. Her voice, even, sometimes sounds in the empty air; her ghost finding me, singing with me like we used to.
My eyes are closed, and I play, and I sing. And somewhere between my memory and my ears, she sings with me. It's beautiful, like it should be. Like it used to be. I hang on to this, refusing to let go, refusing to even believe that it's just an illusion. She is there with me. Her voice picks mine up and carries it through the winds buffeting my lungs, the tornado that has kept me from loosing a single blissful breath since she left. I don't think about it. I just let her be with me. It's... eternity, for a few minutes.
Her fingers - delicate, soft, and warm - brush the back of my hand, and I smile, dissolved in my dream. The song ends with my eyes still closed, and I will not open them. Not until there is nothing left for me to feel. Seconds, and then minutes pass in silence, with that hand spectrally resting on mine. I can feel her in the room. I can practically smell her, she's so near. Her lips brush my cheek, a cool nose leaving wetness on my fur... and the dream comes to a close, when her fingers lifted off mine, and in my self-imposed blindness I heard the door close to the practice room I had taken.
A pained laugh choked out of me. It was three-thirty in the morning.
Only one person had seen me leave the apartment.
He was dancing. I... wanted to yell at him. I wanted to scream at him. Men don't act that way! Men don't twirl around, men don't wear... whatever the hell kind of skirt thing he was wearing, men only take their shirts off if they have something worth showing, men don't bake cheesecakes for other men, and men don't have... I didn't want to think about what he had done with other guys.
But I didn't say anything. He couldn't see me. He was facing the wrong way and his eyes were closed. He was smiling - a little, elfin smile as he held his hands up over his head and spun. I think he saw me, then, but the only indication that there had been any kind of recognition was that his smile may have become a smirk for just a moment.
It was the first time I had really looked at him; enthralled by my own hatred for him, I found myself studying him. Very pale, and so boyish that it hurt. It was like he had been untouched by the marring claw of maturity, his ivory chest silken and unblemished in the dim illumination of poor overhead lights. But that was impossible. He was filthy. He was... some kind of perverse traitor. And the dance wasn't fluid. Sometimes it was. Sometimes the way he twisted his body around and made that dark skirt flow was a lily spinning on a lake. But mostly, it was disjointed and unschooled, even if he kept smiling like it was some kind of private performance.
"Loosen up," he murmured suddenly, and I noticed with a start that he had been moving himself closer to me. He slowed down his bending and turning and stopped, blinking and not really looking at me, as though he was nervous. He had reason to be nervous. Acting like some kind of... I don't even know. After a few seconds, he looked at me with his customary bright, cheerful smile and said, "You should dance."
I wanted him to start hitting on me, I realized. Because then I could really hate him. Then I could throw him down and call him a faggot and talk about his parents and how they had disowned him. Then I could hurt him. But shielded by his innocence, I couldn't touch him. "I don't dance."
"You should!" he chirped. "It's fun! My mom taught my sister how to dance, and once I was outed, my sister taught me a little." His... voice shook. He had never talked openly about his... preferences. Not to me. "I mean, you don't have to dance like I do. I know you think I look like a fairy-fuck. You could dance all macho." His eyes dropped from mine and he scratched his head with a distracted, weird smile on his face. "That's the term, right? I think... you called me that once."
"Yeah... you're a fairy."
"Fairy-fuck," he corrected me, with that unbreakable smile. I wanted to smash it, to rip it off his face, because he didn't deserve that kind of happiness! He was... but I... God DAMN it, I couldn't! Not without him doing anything to me.
"Get the hell away from me," I growled instead, knowing it would be completely ineffective.
"Dance!" he giggled. He struck a pose. A "macho" one, like a conquistador of some kind. His voice dropped dramatically. "A manly dance. For are we not men? Are we not... brothers?" He grasped one of my hands between both of his. "Cousins, at the very least. Very distant ones."
I shook them off. "NO. We're not." Something in me was trying to surface. I could feel my fury start to fizzle out. He was being silly. And if there is a human being on this earth that can completely ignore unadulterated silliness, I don't want to know that person. But screw me sideways if I was going to laugh at him. I turned away and started towards my room.
He tickled my sides. "FUCK OFF!" I shouted at him, once I had landed and nearly displaced plaster from the ceiling. He giggled again and darted away, and I flipped my middle finger behind me and stormed into my room, muttering every obscenity I could think of while blood rushed to my face.
"Fucking fairy cock-fuck of a fucking God-damned queer-sucking bitch damn hell slut cunt... damn it," I sighed into my hand as I fell into a chair. I couldn't help it. I couldn't get the image of him striking that pose out of my head. It was too stupid, too ridiculous, with him wearing that skirt. I smiled, and I waved my arms around. And I heard his laughter ring through the apartment.
Damn it.
"I miss my girlfriend."
He twitched a bit and paused when he heard me, trying to force himself to be harsh. It was hard for him. A butterfly saying, "No, I refuse to be colorful." But somehow, he managed it. "Do you?" He didn't quite look at me. He stood there and let me look up at him.
"Yeah." I kept looking for a few more seconds, then let my head fall to the pillow. I don't know why I had left my door open. His footsteps receded towards his room, and I closed my eyes. His door closed with them.
By now, I had saved his life, and he had saved my soul. I had kept him from cracking his body, while he had set a subtle glaze on the fractures that had rooted themselves in my mind. And when I had helped him, I had despised him and everything he was. And I was convinced that when he had returned the favor, he had hated me just as much. The time he met me at my door when I woke up just to say those three words to me seemed like proof.
I stood up, and I went to his door, and I knocked. I didn't wait for him to answer. "Thank you. And I'm sorry." I waited. Seconds dragged by, and then a minute, and then two, and there was no response. Back to my room, then, to hold a pillow as though it was she and to remember the smell of her hair.
"I tried to commit suicide. Do you know why?" God, his voice was so soft that it ripped open my skin. I shook my head. I had ideas, but no firm- "Because I wasn't invited to my mother's funeral."
"I-"
"She's the only reason I can dance."
"Wh-"
"I miss my mom."
We looked at one another in silence for a long time as the trembling in his voice squirmed uncomfortably through our immediate memories. Not a word was spoken between us. He seemed to be considering something, while I just waited. I had hurt him. It wasn't my place to do anything more.
His lips moved, but no words came out; only a dry, desert-through-glass-bottles sound. And then he tried again. And again. "Thank you." And again. "For..." And again, and again, tripping on his throat. "Thank you for not..." And again. "Letting me..." And again. "Thank you for not let-..."
I reached up, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him down on the bed with me, wrapping my arms around him and holding his small, child-like back against my chest. I didn't look at him. I didn't say anything. I rested my chin on his head and held him. It was all he had wanted from me. And besides... after what he had done that one night, it was like having her back, if only tangibly. So I lay there and breathed with him, for minutes just the slow expansion and relaxation of our bodies reminding us of something we both needed. And my hand could feel in his chest that he was almost on the point of tears.
Ten minutes later, into the static, he shifted a little bit and said, "So... tell me about your girlfriend." His hands were curled loosely around my wrists.
I blinked slowly, brushing his chest with my knuckles, having forgotten where I was. "What do you want to know?"
"Like..." I heard a small sound come from him, and the next words tiptoed on teasing. "Was she hot? Like, Smurfette hot, or...?"
My face broke into a grin. He was giggling. Slowly, hesitantly, nervously, I squeezed him tighter. And he sighed. And it was relief as when a storm, having given us the cloudburst, peters out, and you can breathe again.
"Why... is he sitting on your shoulder?"
I blinked. So did the creature perched above me. We exchanged glances and looked back at the questioner. "What?"
They stared a little bit. "Um. Never mind."
"Okay."
And I kept walking.