(no subject)

[thebloodyglue]

It's warm enough that they can risk retracting the glass roof on Newt's garden without fear of killing everything that they'd managed to save from the late snow. Newt's out there in jeans that are ripped out at the knees, a thin t-shirt got threadbare along one shoulder. His hands are protected by heavy gloves, but only because he's pruning fruit trees.

He sings while he works.
He never, ever thought he'd be this happy.

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[mitsubishievo]

The birds had followed them home, and Kavinsky didn't think he was capable of this sort of joy. Here he was, in a little house with a little garden, open and bare with two boys who adored him, with two boys he adored; friends he could smile and laugh with; touch and comfort he hadn't had since he was a small child, back in Bulgaria. There were hard days still, but they were fewer and farther between.

He'd been in the garage for most of the early morning after he'd woken up. When he stepped in for water, he didn't see Al, but he might have just stepped out for a minute or two. He crossed to the backyard, hearing the birds, Newt's soft, loamy voice.

With ease, he started to collect the pruning that was collecting under the trees.

[thebloodyglue]

Kavinsky starts gathering pruning and Newt glances down, mouth open to say something and sees the words written in stark black letters on his boyfriend's back. Kavinsky has an odd sense of humour somethings, but that's bizarre, even for him.

"Uh..." Newt frowns. "When'd you get that shirt, Joe?"

[mitsubishievo]

"Huh?" Kavinsky looked up from the branches, setting them aside, contemplating bins and containment. The bold little bird--he was thinking of naming the little guy at this point--swooped down and landed on his shoulder. He peered over the other shoulder, trying to get a glance at his back.

"It's just a shirt?"

[thebloodyglue]

"Yeah, but what's written on it...?" Newt steps down off the ladder, reaching out to rub his fingers across the lettering. "That's...dark even for you, man."

[mitsubishievo]

Whatever it was Newt was seeing on the shirt, Kavinsky couldn't get a good angle on seeing. On the very edge of his vision, there seemed to be something, but he couldn't quite tell what. Like when he dreamt and there was something there, but he couldn't tell what it was.

He tried to tug the shirt a little. There hadn't been anything on the back of the shirt when he put it on that morning, he thought? "I don't know what you're...?"

[thebloodyglue]

"I dreamed them back," reads Newt, eyebrows raised. "I...Don't get it, Kav." His mouth works for a moment. "What's it...why would you wear that?"

[mitsubishievo]

The words, in Newt's mouth, and that look on his face, filled Kavinsky with a dread he hadn't known in years. He'd told Newt, obliquely, about Prokopenko. It had been a study of frameworks. It had been a story of nuance and terror and self-loathing. And it still was.

He turned around, putting his back to the trees and the fence instead of to Newt. He tried to reach around his back, like he expected to feel screen printing on the shirt that had been blank when he put it on.

"It wasn't there when I put it on, I--" His breath hitched, gaze trained down. "It's nothing."

[thebloodyglue]

"Doesn't feel like nothing," says Newt, quietly, his voice dropped to a low hush. By now, they're starting to get used to this place shucking with them. He just thought that they might have gotten a little bit more time to be happy before the next bloody thing. He reaches out to Kavinsky but doesn't actually touch him, just offering his hand.

"Let's go inside. Let me get a proper look?" Trust me.

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky wanted to say that Newt seemed to have already gotten a pretty good, proper look. Proper enough that he could see whatever it was that had ended up on the back of his shirt. And it wasn't funny. He tried to think he knew about any of it. Newt did, with Prokopenko. And Ronan. Besides that?

He scrubbed at his arms, just his fingertips a moment, and then the edge of his nails. Gently, he shooed the little bird off his shoulder.

"Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let's go inside, I guess."

[thebloodyglue]

Kavinsky doesn't take his hand but Newt doesn't take it personally. He just turns and walks into the house ahead of Kavinsky, into his office which, increasingly, feels like a nest, feels like a safe space.

"Okay," he says. "Come here."

[mitsubishievo]

Somehow, knowing he was bringing all this into the house seemed worse. Even in the safety and warmth of the office-den-second bedroom, he felt like he was harboring a fugitive in his own skin. Surreptitiously, Kavinsky ran his nails down his own skin again, trying to ground himself.

He slunk closer to Newt, gravitating to the balm of his voice, trying to find the calm of happiness he had felt before Newt had repeated the words on his back.

"I swear," he whispered, "I don't know how it got there."

[thebloodyglue]

"Is it one of those weird shucking city things?" he asks, eyebrows raised as he traces the shape of the letters on Kavinsky's back. "Is it shucking with us again?" He tugs up Kavinsky's shirt. "Shit. It's on your skin, too."

So changing his shirt isn't going to help.

[mitsubishievo]

"I don't know," Kavinsky said, voice gone a bit petulant for a moment because he didn't know. He didn't know when the words had shown up or where they had come from, or why they were on him. Why him, always him, not Al or Newt or Peter or...

He froze.

"What do you mean, it's on your skin?"

[thebloodyglue]

"They're on your skin," says Newt again, not sure how he can he can put it more simply. He swipes his hand over the skin of Kavinsky's back. "Not written on. Sort of...stamped? Not coming off."

[mitsubishievo]

A shiver ran through his whole body. He could feel Newt's fingers tracing on his skin, tracing over letters he couldn't feel there on the skin, that he hadn't been able to see on the shirt, hadn't seen on his skin before he'd put the shirt on, that showed through the shirt.

"Fuck that," he said. His voice broke in the middle. He tried to step away. "Fuck that. No, I--I'll figure out a damn way to get it off..."

[thebloodyglue]

"Don't do anything to yourself." Newt hates the way his voice gives with very real fear in the middle of that statement. "Promise me. Please."

Them? Newt doesn't ask. Not yet.

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky breathed, shakily, through his nose. He did step away then, resentful for a moment, until he could push his spine against the door frame and slide down it. The resentment passed, though, faster than it ever had in Henrietta for anyone he had harbored the same dark, caustic feeling against. He breathed, shakily, through his nose again.

"I was having," he started, and then laughed, "a really fucking good day, too."

[thebloodyglue]

Newt's knee protests, but he sinks down next to Kavinsky on the floor. He sighs, closing his eyes.

"It's always shucking you," he says. "I'm sorry, love." He worries the inside of his lip for a moment. "Them, Joe?"

[mitsubishievo]

The truth of it--it's always you--bit at Kavinsky as hard as the resentment had a moment before. He breathed in and out again. In and out. He hated himself.

Finally he said, "Prokopenko. And my father."

[thebloodyglue]

Newt had known about Prokopenko, what part of it Kavinsky had told him, but the father thing? That was brand bloody new. He watches Kavinsky for a moment, sitting quietly beside him.

"Do you want to tell me?"

[mitsubishievo]

"This feels an awful lot like already told," Kavinsky said, curling his knees up to his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed in and out. In and out. Dreamed them back, Newt had said. Newt knew all the details. All about his dreaming, about Prokopenko's death--and now about his father's--and, now, concretely, about how they were not dead because he could not stand that.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

[thebloodyglue]

"You never told me about your father," says Newt, his voice calm, mild, no hint of accusation. "I thought you might want to." He shrugs. "You know I don't want anything you don't want to bloody give me, Joe."

[mitsubishievo]

In and out. In and out. All Kavinsky wanted was to find some way to get these words off his skin, or at least invisible. These were words he already lived with, a truth that was simply that: truth.

He took a more shuddering breath.

"I don't know what you want me to say," he whispered a second time, more wrecked, more terrible. "He was dead and. I dreamed him back. He thought I was a demon. I am a hard thing to kill."

[thebloodyglue]

Rage, unfamiliar and dark, bubbles up in Newt's core then. He closes his eyes for a moment, breathes through it. He's said it before, meant every syllable of it - he would tear something apart for the boy in front of him.

"Oh, love," he says, softly, managing to keep all of that rage out of his voice. "I'm so bloody sorry."

[mitsubishievo]

With the anger leeched out, Newt's voice just sounded pitying. Kavinsky curled over his knees, arms protective around the back of his neck, like he could shield himself from that.

"Don't--God, don't..." The last thing he wanted was to field pity from someone he adored.