SPACE STATIONS > The Libra

Life in Black and White

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Zero Undead:
Deacon drifted out of the theater with his hands shoved in his pockets, letting himself be carried along with the throng of people doing the same. If you had asked him what the movie he had just watched was about he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Like everything else these days it was all just noise and shapes and flashes of dull color.

Going out had been a stupid idea. Maybe not for someone else, but for him it just didn’t matter anymore and nothing he was doing was helping. Deacon had tried to do things that would bring him enjoyment, things he typically loved doing, but it was like all the color and pleasure had been sucked out of the world and left him with something gray and cold. His favorite foods tasted like ash, the words of his books blurred together into meaningless black lines, and even making a nuisance of himself was a half-hearted effort at best.

He didn’t recognize Libra anymore, and worst of all he could hardly recognize himself.

It was like everything that was Deacon had been ripped apart and scattered, but even as he tried to pull himself back together the pieces just didn’t quite fit anymore, like parts of him had simply gone missing altogether.

For now he was able to focus on one thing, and because he felt so disjointed he clung to that thing and stewed on it like the miserable bastard he was. Firefly had given him a crash course on some interesting elf stuff. Eit had never told him a thing about resonances and this whole soulmate thing that was clearly super fucking important. Deacon wasn’t sure what to really do with the information. Should he feel insulted that someone who he thought was pretty damn close to him hadn’t even bothered to mention something like that?

Maybe Eit just hadn’t thought to tell him about it because it hadn’t come up. He had never seen or known his partner to be particularly close to anyone else, so it could just be Eit hadn’t found this resonance person yet and so had never brought it up. That just brought up a whole different batch of unpleasant feelings bouncing around in his head.

Someone neither of them had probably ever even met yet had some exclusive, ordained by fate, dibs on Eit’s love. It was irrational and stupid to be this jealous of someone he didn’t even know. Whoever it was, Deacon already knew they would never be good enough for his partner. He didn’t need to meet them to know that. Hell, he sure as hell wasn’t good enough for Eit either, but he couldn’t lie to himself about never thinking of a whole slew of what-ifs. Of course it was much too late for all that now. Not only was he dying, but Eit was already taken, if only on reserve for now.

Well if he didn’t think he had a shot before then he sure as shit knew he had a snowball’s chance in hell now. Maybe it was all for the best that Eit was meant for somebody else. Humans were short-lived and fragile anyway.

It would have never really worked between them.

Deacon knew that Eit was going to live a long time, but he’d never actually thought about it. Of course he was probably going to be long gone and nothing but a distant memory one day – if he was remembered at all.

The thought of being forgotten was enough to convince him he needed one hell of a drink.

Actually it was enough to convince him he needed quite a lot of drinks, as it turned out, because before Deacon knew what was what he was fumbling with the front door at three in the morning, barely able to hold himself upright. He couldn’t wait to collapse into bed and just forget about the whole shit day.

Not that he made it that far. He was lucky he remembered to bother shutting the front door once he staggered inside. Seeing the empty couch, he unsteadily made a very wobbly beeline for it. Deacon threw himself down on it face first. His arms wrapped around a throw pillow and he buried his face against it. He didn’t know if Eit was in his bed or if he’d finally decided to go home, but either way he wasn’t in the mood for lectures or spooning.

nephero:
   Eit was… tired.

   It wasn’t the type of tired that could be resolved with ice water or a nap. It wasn’t the type of tired that really could get better. It was an existential kind of tired, a cosmic kind of tired, the type of tired where the sun simply had no more fuel left to give and just couldn’t hold itself together in quite the same way it had before.

   It was a thousand year old tiredness, a ten thousand year old tiredness, a million year old tiredness that would just continue to build and build and build until it just—

   Stopped.

   And that was the worst part of it— Eit knew that there was a point where it would stop. Where it would end. Where this lingering tiredness would cease to exist and be replaced with something altogether worse: the emptiness that followed when such a constant presence of feeling in his life vanished. When the tiredness left, all he would have was void, and that somehow was more terrifying than any lingering malaise that could ever take hold of him.

   Eit tried to make the best of it. He tried to stay close, to make dinner, to do all the little domestic things he’d thought of and considered and even daydreamed about. The little romances of vacuuming a rug. Fragments of alternate universes and realities and what ifs made manifest only for a moment— the briefest moment where Eit could play pretend like this was his life. Where he could pretend like this would work out. Where he could pretend like he’d have all those memories to keep him warm at night long after he’d relearned to sleep alone.

   That part was the hardest; knowing that he’d have so few memories to keep, and knowing there was no time to make more. Time was, as always, against him— it was against all of them. It was against him, and it was against Gray, and it was against Deacon.

   Eit was not a religious man; he was especially not so when he considered just how many bad lots Deacon had been dealt. Between his mother, between his own sickness…

   And that was something Eit could never hope to help. Deacon had already made his choice. Had made his peace, such as it was. Had placed his canoe, set his course and paddled firmly onward. All Eit could do was try to catch up, to paddle faster, to maybe hopefully be able to keep his eyes on Deacon’s back all the way to the edge of the waterfall.

   He wanted to be there for this. Eit needed to be there for this. He woke up so many nights in a cold sweat, thinking he had somehow missed it, had somehow failed to be there and Deacon had gone and died alone, and—

   Those nights were the hardest. Those nights were what dragged him from the couch and down the hall, and sank him down into the bed and up against Deacon’s back, taking solace in the gentle rise and fall of his ribcage and the deep, settling knowledge that Deacon was yet still alive.

   Still.

   But even that solace was falling apart. His partner, his mage, his friend and the other half of his harmony was fading. And with it so too went his want to be… anywhere. Least of all, near Eit.
 
   Eit had tried to give him some distance. Slunk back to his own home and did little things to occupy himself. Showered. Cleaned the living room he hadn’t used in weeks. Threw out the fridge of food he hadn’t eaten and restocked it again. But all of this carried with it the distant, lingering anxiety that This Was It. That him doing all these little things was keeping him from that waterfall moment, that he’d wander on back to find Deacon already gone and he hadn’t been there for it, he’d missed it and Deacon had left all alone—

   Eit sucked in a deep breath, and fought the urge to panic. The waves of fear crashed against his bones, whittling them down just a bit more and a little bit more still. He pressed his palms to his eyes in the dark, took another steadying breath, and looked to find the clock had only changed by a mere few minutes. As it had only done so for the past several hours.

   Wherever Deacon was, it wasn’t home. And whatever Deacon was doing, it wasn’t here. Eit had tried relaxing. Had tried drinking (beer was nasty and you couldn’t possibly tell him otherwise). Had tried doing a little cleaning around Deacon’s apartment to maybe catch a little bit of that aspartame-romance again.

   Eit gave up somewhere around midnight, and shuffled into Deacon’s bedroom. For a few minutes he just stood there, staring at the personal space without quite breaching it. Looking at all the little things that said someone had lived here— that Deacon had lived here, that Eit’s—

   The elf took another breath, and moved to fall into the bed. Cold, of course. But he did at least have the memory of warmth to hold onto. Maybe if he just sat and concentrated on that, curled the blankets just so, it’d be enough.

   It took about another hour for it to work, and even then the sleep was fitful at best. Everything seeped into his dreams, from the rattle of the vents to the thrum of the station to the sound of locks tumbling open and a door being opened and shut—

   The door. Eit snapped awake, stared at the glowing light of the bedside clock and read the hour.

   The door.

   Eit sat up, listened more, head angled to catch the sound of shuffling footsteps, a mismatched gait and then finally the soft thud of a body. And like that, the elf was up, covers thrown aside as he made a beeline for the living room and the couch and Deacon—

   His panic subsided. The fear that Deacon had gone, really gone, abated. And in its place some new feeling surfaced, a bitterness like cinnamon mixed with sour, stale beer, and Eit bit down hard to where he could hear his teeth scraping against one another.

   It didn’t take phenomenal senses to know Deacon was piss-drunk. The reek of alcohol was obvious even from here, and as Eit’s eyes adjusted to the dark he could see the other man hadn’t even taken his shoes off. Just collapsed onto the couch and curled up there without so much as a god-forsaken blanket to keep him from catching a quicker death of cold and—

   That bitterness rose up, and became something even uglier. Eit moved over to the couch, nostrils flared and voice wavering harshly as he grabbed onto Deacon’s side (only barely remembering not to grab his shoulder) and shook him roughly awake.

   “Hey. Hey! Did you just get in!”

Zero Undead:
Alcohol and the very late (early?) hour made certain that the moment he hit the couch Deacon was out cold. He couldn’t care less that his shoes were still on or that there was nothing to keep him warm draped over him. At that point it was just a miracle he hadn’t simply collapsed on the floor to sleep the liquor off.

Deacon would have been more than happy to simply remain there undisturbed for at least a few hours, time enough to at least let a little of the alcohol work its way out of his system, but that wasn’t to be. It was jarring to be shaken awake so suddenly and with such force, or for the unsteady voice of his partner to pierce through the haze of alcohol as he started awake. For a moment he looked around confused, genuinely not remembering making it back home at all, even though it had been less than two minutes since he’d walked through the door.

“What?” First he hissed in grumpy confusion, before he sort of (but not really) focused on Eit and that the elf seemed upset. Why was he angry?

“What?” He repeated with more venom, clearly annoyed at the disturbance. Deacon hadn’t even gone into the bedroom! It wasn’t like he had stumbled in and just rudely woken Eit up with his drunk mess of a self. An act especially considerate considering it was his fucking bed.

Oh, Eit had asked a question, hadn’t he?

“I don’t fucking know. Maybe? What does it matter?” Deacon really didn’t know what time it was or how long he’d actually been passed out for. Now that he was awake – or as awake as he could be intoxicated as he was – he felt his anger and resentment bubbling back up. What even right did Eit have to be angrily asking him something like that? He was a grown man and this was his place, he could stumble in at any goddamn hour he pleased.

nephero:
   Somewhere, in the back of Eit’s mind, he knew that going at this all fire and brimstone had been a terribly bad idea. But he had been so tired, so worried, so wound up that it didn’t matter how bad of an idea it had been to shake Deacon awake, Eit didn’t care. He just wanted to take all that vile bitterness in his chest and throw it everywhere, let it infect everything, make everything else in the room feel as poorly as he did.

   So when Deacon posed the question about what it mattered, Eit got to throwing.

   “What does it matter?” he spat back, pulling back to stand his full height and narrowing silvery eyes down at the other man. “You’re sick, Deacon! What if something happened?”

   It was irrational, of course. Deacon was an adult. He’d made his decision to refuse treatment and he’d made his decision to spend some of his lingering moments like this: drunk, careless, and presently pissed. If he was feeling a little more fair, and less like he wanted to grab Deacon and shake him while screaming at the top of his lungs, Eit might have to admit that it’d be… probably the exact same thing he might do.

   It’d probably be exactly what Eit would do, later. In however many minutes he was afforded between now and then. When it all finally stopped and Eit was left with that deafening silence and the only thing he wanted to do was hasten his own trip down that waterfall.

   But, on the other hand, this was not a time where Eit felt like being fair, so instead of calming down and trying to express how he felt in a heartfelt and sympathetic manner, instead all he managed to say was—

   “I was worried! I was up all fucking night and you didn’t even tell me where you were! You could at least afford me that courtesy in between trying to kill yourself!”

Zero Undead:
Any other time the posturing probably wouldn’t have mattered, but drunk and angry, Deacon forced himself to stand up, an action that was accompanied by a wave of dizziness and nausea that he stubbornly ignored. If this was a fight he didn’t like Eit towering over him, and part of him was itching for a fight, at least when he was pissed off he felt something besides emptiness and dread.

“So fucking what if I’m sick?” Honestly at this point his illness seemed a fairly moot point to take into consideration on whether or not he should do something. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, right? “Would it make you happy if I just stayed in bed for the rest of my short, miserable fucking existence? Excuse me for wanting to go out and do something for one goddamn night. Who cares if it was something stupid? At least I managed to go do it.”

Deacon couldn’t summon the energy or willpower to leave the house a lot of days, and he knew it was going to get worse. That was all logic in the back of his head, but he couldn’t make a logical argument right now, just like he couldn’t sympathize with Eit’s feelings on the matter in that moment.

“And I never asked you to worry about me. Not one fucking time did I ask you to do that. It isn’t your job to worry about me.” He conveniently ignored the fact that if their positions were reversed he would have been just as annoyingly fussy and frustrated. If Eit were dying he didn’t know what he would do. Probably not handle it nearly as well as Eit was handling Deacon’s own impending doom.

In the back of his head Deacon knew that he needed to stop talking, because he was only going to end up hurting them both, but he couldn’t stop that alcohol-driven locomotive.

“I have a great fucking idea, go find yourself a resonance to nag instead and leave me the hell alone.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth they reignited his earlier hurt and resentment that he had tried so hard to drown in booze.

This was all Eit’s goddamn fault - at least in his liquor-muddled mind.

“Oh yeah, Firefly told me about resonances earlier today, like how all of you have one. Funny that I would need to learn that from some stranger in a chatroom instead of from, I don’t know, my idiot partner.” Deacon honestly didn’t know which bothered him more – that Eit had one or that he hadn’t told him about it.

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