Onyx feels more than sees Andres coming towards him, like the feeling you get when a storm’s about to break. He tracks one body moving with less rhythm, and more stiffness than the rest, and moments later that body is heading toward him.

He… honestly hadn’t expected this. He’d honestly expected Andres to just pull his costume back together (what little of it there was) and go back off to do what he had been doing, which, apparently, was bending over for everyone in the fucking building.

So the little spike of hope he feels is more nauseating than it is comforting. Because it’s hard to reconcile with yourself when you realize you have feelings for someone moments after stopping them from getting willingly railed by a stranger in bad makeup in a shitty club bathroom. And it’s even harder to go about the rest of your night with the solid assumption they’re just going to do it again.

Mentally he grinds that little spark of hope beneath his heel until it regrets ever considering its existence in the first place.

He doesn’t give Andres the satisfaction of a jump or a recoil, though the strike against the wall is hard enough for him to feel the shitty decor rattling from their hooks.

Onyx turns the full brunt of his exhaustion on Andres: a half-lidded, dead-eyed look of pure disappointment. It was a clever mask: it could be anything from faded anger, to mockery, to spite.

In reality, though, it was just him being tired. Having emotions was taxing, especially after not having them for nine-odd years.

“What was what?”

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

He’s still looking down at his legs, but this time he’s trying to remember what sweatpants feel like. He had worn them, before, and pajama pants and basketball shorts and all those fun things that belonged in his old life.

Before he answered, he let his head tip to the side, trying to imagine what would hide the evidence better in the inevitability he popped a boner during the next few hours of his evening. Unfortunately, this route of decision-making brought his eyes back to Andres’ waist which, despite his overall size being larger than Onyx, was somehow still impossibly slim. What the fuck, man. What the fuck.

“I don’t really have… this,” he said, gesturing broadly at the space around. “I mostly bounce in and out of hotels. I travel a lot. Don’t stay in one place very often.”

The movie speeds through the funeral montage and fades to black. It opens again with the group of friends, sans the dead one, striking out into the wilderness. Beautiful drone shots of landscape show mountains, and a dark, foreboding forest. There’s a trail sign that relays something to the tune of EXPERIENCED HIKERS ONLY in Swedish, as one man helpfully points out.

Onyx can’t help but laugh at himself. “It was… certainly a phase,” he says, snorting, looking down the couch at Andres as a smile curls up over his face. “They are not practical. Hard to get into. Harder to clean. And they tend to squeak if your thighs rub together at all, which they should in a normal human being.” For the briefest of seconds his eyes drop to Andres’ thighs, then back up again.

“I’ll try a pair of sweatpants.”

On the TV, the men set up a campsite.

andres buenaventura

☉

He’s so tired.

Any trace of soporifics has bled out of his system. He hasn’t had a drop to drink in hours. The heat and the noise and the constant mash of bodies and strobe lights is as distant as a fogbank across a Galarian river.

He’s so tired. Tired of fighting with himself. Tired of not recognizing who he is. Who he’s become. It’s a different kind of terror, this returning to things that once drove you, energized you, only to find they bring no joy, give you no power. Like clutching at the memory of something that turns to sand in your hands.

He was back where he had started, leaning against the wall next to the bar, half-lidded and unfocused gaze staring through the haze of vapor and mist. He’s slightly less rigid than before, and the look of constant irritation has been replaced with something dreamy, tired.

andres buenaventura
well what would YOU do if you realized you were falling in love with someone you used to hate
costume

☉

Onyx looks down at his legs as though considering them for the first time. It’s… it’s a good question. He spends a lot of time in his handful of favorite jeans. He mostly just sleeps in boxers. Having to travel around a lot meant that a large wardrobe was not feasible.

“I… guess I never really noticed,” he admitted, one brow quirking up in irritation because, of course, now that Andres had pointed it out, he wasn’t going to stop noticing. Like a sound that wouldn’t go away. Or being nose blind to a smell.

The robbers hold one of the characters at gunpoint while the main one hides. Through dialogue, you can hear the main character’s friend relenting to giving his valuables.

For all that the word dick coming out of Andres’ mouth threw him he did a really good job of not showing it, hiding it under another swig of beer while his brain conjured up images of him actually being pantsless with Andres--

He settle the bottle down a little harder than intended. Frowned at it, shifted it slightly in apology.

“I don’t… really do that,” he said, eyes flicking back up to the screen. “The… lounging at home part. I don’t own sweatpants. Just jeans.”

The main character was hiding behind a shelf as his friend was refusing to give up his wedding ring. You could hear the pleading in his voice and then the sound of a gunshot. There’s a slow-mo silence that follows with glass breaking, crying, and a montage of police.

“I did go through a leather pants phase, briefly,” Onyx said, which was both a joke and the truth. Maybe all this domesticity was connecting him back to his sense of humor.

andres buenaventura

☉

Onyx can’t shake the feeling that they’re like two astral bodies, caught in each other’s gravity, forced to orbit around one another in perpetuity. Like no matter how far apart they get they’ll always be pulled back to one another.

It’s a disconcerting feeling, like a weight he can’t shake. It makes him feel bad. It makes him feel shame. Like Andres is drowning and he’s the concrete feet pulling him down.

He looks at Andres then, thinking. Face blank.

Could he still be happy?

“I don’t think so,” he says, and his voice is quiet, though it isn’t clear to what he is responding to.

After a beat of silence, he rolls his shoulder. Looks away.

“I think I’ve had my fill of moping for the day.” There’s a brusqueness to it, a bit of his old personality, the old Onyx. Dismissive. Not too much, but it’s there.

His eyes flick back towards Andres.

“Catch you around.” A knife grin, as he turns to leave. “At least, I always seem to.”

andres buenaventura
local asshole feels too much, story at 11

☉

Andres' bark of laughter is like fuel on the fire. Onyx wants to grab him and shake him-- but the thought of it, of slamming his head against the wall and laughing as he falls, doesn’t sit the way it used to. Doesn’t feel the way it used to.

So, for the briefest of moments, while he and Andres are staring each other down, he imagines leaning in the final few inches and kissing him. And that image elicits in him the old feelings, the rush in his veins. The chase he’d been after for so long.

This was different. He knew he was attracted to Andres-- physically, at least. You’d be a fucking moron not to be.

But this was different.

The realization hits him in the same moment that Andres curses at him, and that, too, feels different. Andres’ hand is hot as his collar and their foreheads collide, Andres having to crane his head down to glare at him because the man is so fucking tall. His eyes go wide for a half second because as Andres is telling him to look inward that’s exactly what he’s doing.

But he also has to look outward, too. He’s out of his element. The effect that Andres has on him in this stupid, skimpy, slutty costume is-- it’s unbalancing. It’s unreal. Like a rubberband snapping, Onyx ricochets off the multitudinous graffiti etched into the walls of the bathroom stal and reverberates back into his body.

Very slowly-- deadly slow-- he reaches up and slips a thumb against the flat of Andres’ hand, in the curve of his fisted palm. He disentangles the fingers gripped into the collar of his shirt, and gently presses it away.

His eyes have gone glassy. His movements are slow and methodical. He bounces open the stall door with his elbow and, robotic, steps back, and walks to the bathroom door, unlocks it, lets it fall closed behind him as he escapes into the stifling heat and bone-rattling electrohouse of the club floor.

andres buenaventura
well what would YOU do if you realized you were falling in love with someone you used to hate
costume

☉

Andres scatters a number of pieces of candy over his chest like his pectorals are an artful dinner arrangement at a Michelin star restaurant. He pauses in his snacking only to give Onyx and incredulous look, returning Onyx’s confusion with flat-note response that almost makes him snort with laughter.

It’s like a dumb moment in a meet cute, as they both regard each other with misunderstanding, bewilderment.

“...and?” Onyx responds, head slightly cocked, genuinely wondering what the fuck Andres was on about. There was no malice or anger in his voice-- just a genuine perplexity.

A tiny voice at the back of his head cheered for Andres wanting to get him out of his pants. Onyx Old Yeller’d it behind his common sense.

The movie shifts to the pivotal opening scene, of the main character and his friend entering a liquor store to buy booze. Not long after, a group of robbers come in to hold the place up.

Onyx isn’t watching the movie. He’s still looking at Andres.

“What are joggers?”

andres buenaventura
he doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'comfort'

☉

He seems to stall, to flounder. Just like Onyx had been doing. Andres’ accidental admission had given the man a foothold, something with which to climb back out of the mire he was sinking in. he grabs it with both hands, pulls, twists.

Andres steps back just as Onyx steps forward. Inwardly, he thinks, it doesn’t feel as good as it used to. Doesn’t come with the same kind of reward, the same electricity.

Outwardly, his face is steel.

Andres is hiding something. He knows it. He hasn’t lived this long surviving off of instincts and his own two fists to not know it.

But part of him doesn’t want to know. Part of him is happy to be disarmed, so he allows himself to relent, to settle. Files the little piece away for later, a sliver of a blade, stuck somewhere to prepare for forging-- this secret that Andres doesn’t know he knows. His hackles go down. He steps back, makes space, and sighs.

“I wish I was,” he says, voice lit with the remnants of his fire, cranked up so quickly and diminished in rapid succession.

“I haven’t been back to see her,” he says, then, going back to Andres’ original question. “I… dislike cemeteries. And I’m worried that if Galar gets its claws in me I won’t get out. Again.”

andres buenaventura
local asshole feels too much, story at 11

☉

Andres rolls his eyes at him and he-- he can’t decide if he’s two seconds away from strangling the man, or-- or something else. “I’m not exaggerating," he hissed, face somehow floating closer to the wavering, alcohol-loose man, despite the fact that his every instinct was streaming to let go and walk away.

He doesn’t mean to hurt him, to jostle him and shake him ever so slightly-- which, given their history, is a new occurrence. If anything it just makes him hold tighter, trying to stabilize Andres while his thumbs dig imprints into the front of his hips, feeling the tug and pull of the (outrageously muscular) man’s obliques beneath his fingertips.

“You know, that’s a good fucking question,” he says, no longer shouting, voice dropped an octave and gone hoarse with-- with rage, he thinks, it has to be rage, please be rage-- “‘cause it seems like you’ve been my fucking problem for a long damn time.”

Looming ever closer, surely seconds away from disaster.

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

Onyx doesn’t realize that Andres’ behavior has been honed and learned over his young-adult lifetime, just as Onyx’s has. The killer instinct he’s slowly but surely crocheted into the fabric of his own being is mirrored in the party-boy, knock-’em-dead salaciousness that Andres exudes from every pore. It isn’t always a conscious decision.

Onyx doesn’t realize that. He doesn’t realize a lot of things.

He takes the cold beer from Andres and again pointedly avoids looking at him in any fashion. He smothers his request to ask him to put a shirt on by taking a long drink and squeezing his eyes shut for a half-second longer than a standard blink. He can do this.

But it raises the question of when was the last time he had-- done this, that was. Sat on a couch and watched a movie. A memory blinks into his head of him and his sister at opposite ends of a couch, Jett eating popcorn and throwing all the half-popped kernel-y bits at him. They bounce off his chest and crunch against the back of the couch before he loses his patience and kicks the bowl out of her hands, sending popcorn everywhere.

Andres returning to the living room, blessedly clothed (Onyx isn’t sad about that, he’s not, go away) drags him from his thoughts. He watches the other man sit down and wonders what’s worse: his strange ferality when it comes to Andres or the sickening nostalgia that pinches through him when he gets lost in recollections of his old life.

The latter, he thinks, as Andres urges Chuchi to rush off to bed, the sound of the door shutting cutting off the last line of defense he had to keep his mind out of the gutter.

You’re smaller than me rattles through him in a way he thinks it should not. He looks down at himself: jeans, leather jacket, t-shirt, and his face goes sort of confused for a moment because he doesn’t understand--

“Is this… not comfortable?” the question rises unbidden as he looks back down the couch at Andres.

He lives in his work clothes, after all.

The movie opens on a group of friends sitting in a bar-- they’re shooting the shit, discussing a boy’s trip. One friend throws out the idea of backpacking through scenic country.

andres buenaventura
he doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'comfort'

☉

It had been a fluke, what killed his sister. A mishap of genetic inconvenience. Errors in the minute instructions that made her genetic code-- a T swapped for a C, a G for an A.

It had been fast, what had killed his sister. Healthy to bedridden to dead in a handful of weeks. A condition so rare the doctors had been thrown with her deterioration. Fluids and feeding tubes can only keep you alive-- alive alive-- for so long.

His sister. Braindead and still in the hospital, her chest moving to the beat of a mechanized pump.

Andres’ voice jerks him back from that moment, those memories.

“She wanted what?”

The idea lit a fire in his blood: that Andres could know something of Jett’s final moments. Something he was not privy to. He was her twin. It was a strange, sickening, irrational sort of rage, cold and envious and slithering in his veins.

He ignores Andres’ question. He repeats himself, voice colder, but less of a yell.

“She wanted what?”

andres buenaventura
local asshole feels too much, story at 11

☉