FIC: Dark Magic AU
Jan. 16th, 2005 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emonyWith muchos thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
niannah and bitterbyrden who beta read for me and made this not suck. You guys :)
Follows on from this part of this fic.
It still needs a title. Answers on a postcard.
*
Andrew thinks he's won, and Warren wonders, not for the first time, just how much of this is simply a battle for attention between siblings with him playing substitute parent. But that introduces a whole new level of disturbing, and Warren's life doesn't need any more of those.
Months pass and life settles down to the staid, dull routine it always adopts between the brief periods of fury. It's like the quiet between aftershocks, although that would make the first time - their first meeting maybe, or the first kiss, he's not sure – an earthquake, and that only makes Warren laugh.
More often than not Andrew sleeps at Warren's, and while his eyes have taken on the sheen of cat-adoption and white picket fences, Jonathan looks permanently miserable. Warren shuts his eyes and tries not to think of anything at all.
The call comes as Warren sits at the wide oak desk in his always too cool, air conditioned office, his cell phone vibrating violently against the wood like a giant silver beetle having some kind of seizure. He knows from the number that it's a dirty payphone somewhere, and there's never any doubt that he'll pick it up, listen, feign disinterest, and then travel halfway across the country and back, but he tries to picture it for a few seconds as the cell starts to chirrup its distress.
There might be a second call in a day or two, then a third, and then it'd be over. He'd settle down, forget it all, maybe go for coffee with the pretty girl who always smiled at him over the copy machine. They'd get married, have some kids and a dog. Andrew would cry himself to sleep every night, and one of the children would have Tucker as a middle name, although the copy girl would never, ever know why.
But then a tiny gasp of fear catches in his throat, and Warren grabs up the phone to answer it before it stops ringing. The vision disappears, and Warren thinks it's probably best for the kids anyway, because he knows what growing up in a dysfunctional family can do to a person and he doesn't see why he should inflict that on anyone else if he doesn't have to.
The call comes from New Jersey, and Warren leaves a note on his boss' desk to say he's been called away and he'll be back in a couple of days.
*
"No."
It's such a quiet word, Warren almost feels a slight stirring of sympathy for the kid. Almost.
"You, you're supposed to be gone," Andrew says, rigid and damp-eyed. "You weren't going to come back this time."
"What," Tucker looks up from the couch, "you thought you'd won, kid?" His hair is longer now, like some kind of Jared Leto mid-90s retro thing, and it swings like a stupid shampoo commercial as he shakes his head and smiles a smile that makes Warren's heart skip. "You could never win this one. You know that."
Not long out of the shower, where he stands for hours, scrubbing at the blackness under his fingernails that just won't shift, he slips his feet up under the hem of the robe – Warren's, dark blue, a present from his mom, he thinks – and turns his attention back to some TV show about a group of women in bikinis living on a island.
Andrew just stands and stares, not quite knowing what to say. Warren wonders for a second how he might be feeling right now, but he's never been very good at that kind of thing, so he decides to just ignore Andrew until he goes away.
He glances back as he hears them leave, and Jonathan is smiling just a little as he follows Andrew out of the house.
"Was that too much?" Tucker asks vaguely, with just enough sincerity that Warren suspects he might actually care. "I mean, was it too mean? He is just a kid."
"He's twenty-six, I think he can take it," Warren says, unsure of the direction of the conversation. It doesn't normally go this way, and Andrew's wellbeing is never at the forefront of Tucker's thoughts.
But then, he has been different this time. He reads the newspaper now and then, and spends a lot of time staring out of the window, into the garden, thinking. He even watered the plants once – with actual water. Warren had pinched himself to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
Warren knows that everything that happened to him over the last few months, the last year really, since he went and picked Tucker up from Vegas – it changed him. He sees things differently now, his life, his work, Andrew and Jonathan and everything that surrounds him. There was some kind of link, some kind of bond between Tucker and him, and he thinks maybe part of Tucker leaked into him, corrupted his system and left him questioning everything he'd taken for granted before. Maybe, he thinks, as he watches Tucker rubbing his hands together and picking at the loose fluff on the robe, maybe it changed him too.
Tucker smiles. "Do you remember that plan I had?" he asks, pulling his hands up into the sleeves of the robe and wrapping his arms around himself. "We should do that."
Warren frowns slightly. "What plan?"
Tucker looks a little hurt that he doesn't remember. "Mexico, dude," he says. "We should go there. You and me, somewhere they can't find us." Warren isn't sure if he means Andrew and Jonathan, or Meg and her friends. He isn't sure if Tucker is sure either.
"I think they could probably find us in Mexico," he says, slowly. "It's not even that far away."
"There are places though," Tucker tells him, gazing darkly off into the ether. "Places so dark you can't see anything. Or be seen by anything."
Warren doesn't know what to say, and the silence stretches until Tucker turns and looks at him, tilts his head, smiles, breaks the moment.
"Isn't that what you wanted?" he asks, and Warren feels a tiny shiver inside. "We could disappear, slip off the radar for a couple of years, a couple of months even." There's just the lightest touch of desperation, and Warren can't help but admit it's an attractive plan.
"It'd never work out," he says, breaking eye contact and looking back to the TV. "It.. It just wouldn't."
Tucker stretches out and one foot appears from underneath the robe. "Don't you want to at least try?"
Warren stares blankly at the screen, trying to picture how things might be. It doesn't seem possible. Tucker's always promising things like this, and they never work out, or more usually they never even get started. However Warren pictures it, it always ends with Tucker leaving, or Meg showing up at the door one day and slitting his throat.
Recently-scrubbed fingernails brush lightly over his arm, and Warren looks over slowly, reaching down to catch Tucker's hand in his own.
"You're sure they won't find us?" he says, although he knows full well that Tucker will tell him whatever he has to to get Warren to agree to his plan.
Tucker nods, utterly certain. "Absolutely. They're a bunch of powerless wannabe losers without me anyway."
Warren can't help but smile at that. "And no magic?"
Tucker rolls his eyes. "Right, no magic, of course. So? Are we going to Mexico? Should I start packing?"
"You don't own anything," Warren points out. "All ‘your' stuff is mine."
"Still got to be packed," Tucker says, matter-of-factly.
Warren looks around his living room, at the books and computers and plants and random pieces of paper from work. None of it means anything. None of it's worth anything. When did I stop living, he thinks to himself. When did I die?
Tucker flicks him on the arm. "Hey, don't zone on me, man," he says. "I need an answer. I need confirmation. Confirm me!"
Warren blinks. "Sure," he says. There are a million reasons why it's a stupid plan in the first place, and another million why it will never work out. It won't be the first time they've tried it, disappearing into the wilderness where "no-one" can find them. They're always found. Or failing that, Tucker always gets itchy feet – itchy hands, itchy eyes, just itchy – and one day he's gone and Warren's stuck out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. All his cash and cards are missing, clothes shredded in an addict's pre-high frenzy, car or truck or whatever it was gone, or at least broken beyond repair. Last time Tucker had taken out the tires. Warren isn't sure why. He thinks maybe it's an instinct; he doesn't want to be followed and stopped, so he leaves Warren stranded and powerless. Sometimes he thinks it's because Tucker wants to pretend that if Warren is stuck there, he's got someone to come back to when he's got that one little hit he needs to feel good again.
Whatever it is that happens to ruin things, they always get ruined somehow. Life's not a song, and you don't always get what you want.
But then, if Tucker's pattern of using him and leaving is that predictable, Warren's pattern of taking it like a bitch is written in stone. "Why the fuck not," he says, finally. "Let's go."
Tucker looks surprised for a few seconds, which Warren thinks is stupid really because he always agrees to whatever Tucker suggests, then punches the air. "Yes, Mexico! When?"
Warren shrugs, "Right now?"
Again, Tucker looks surprised, eyebrows raised and slightly suspicious. "You sure?"
Warren smiles. "Not much of a disappearance if we wait around to say goodbye, and leave a forwarding address," he says.
Tucker stares for a second, then grins widely and stands up, leaning down and kissing Warren soundly. "This is why I like being with you," he says, before turning and padding upstairs silently to throw things into a bag.
The room is suddenly flat and empty, meaningless without Tucker to lend it context. Colors seep and run until everything stares back at Warren in watery shades of black, white and grey. There's no life, no depth, and Warren feels nothing but absence.
Whatever happens in Mexico, however long it takes for Tucker to leave him, or however long it takes Meg to find them and slit his throat once and for all, it's worth it. Even if it wasn't, he'd still go. He can't not.
*
end
niannah and bitterbyrden who beta read for me and made this not suck. You guys :)Follows on from this part of this fic.
It still needs a title. Answers on a postcard.
*
Andrew thinks he's won, and Warren wonders, not for the first time, just how much of this is simply a battle for attention between siblings with him playing substitute parent. But that introduces a whole new level of disturbing, and Warren's life doesn't need any more of those.
Months pass and life settles down to the staid, dull routine it always adopts between the brief periods of fury. It's like the quiet between aftershocks, although that would make the first time - their first meeting maybe, or the first kiss, he's not sure – an earthquake, and that only makes Warren laugh.
More often than not Andrew sleeps at Warren's, and while his eyes have taken on the sheen of cat-adoption and white picket fences, Jonathan looks permanently miserable. Warren shuts his eyes and tries not to think of anything at all.
The call comes as Warren sits at the wide oak desk in his always too cool, air conditioned office, his cell phone vibrating violently against the wood like a giant silver beetle having some kind of seizure. He knows from the number that it's a dirty payphone somewhere, and there's never any doubt that he'll pick it up, listen, feign disinterest, and then travel halfway across the country and back, but he tries to picture it for a few seconds as the cell starts to chirrup its distress.
There might be a second call in a day or two, then a third, and then it'd be over. He'd settle down, forget it all, maybe go for coffee with the pretty girl who always smiled at him over the copy machine. They'd get married, have some kids and a dog. Andrew would cry himself to sleep every night, and one of the children would have Tucker as a middle name, although the copy girl would never, ever know why.
But then a tiny gasp of fear catches in his throat, and Warren grabs up the phone to answer it before it stops ringing. The vision disappears, and Warren thinks it's probably best for the kids anyway, because he knows what growing up in a dysfunctional family can do to a person and he doesn't see why he should inflict that on anyone else if he doesn't have to.
The call comes from New Jersey, and Warren leaves a note on his boss' desk to say he's been called away and he'll be back in a couple of days.
*
"No."
It's such a quiet word, Warren almost feels a slight stirring of sympathy for the kid. Almost.
"You, you're supposed to be gone," Andrew says, rigid and damp-eyed. "You weren't going to come back this time."
"What," Tucker looks up from the couch, "you thought you'd won, kid?" His hair is longer now, like some kind of Jared Leto mid-90s retro thing, and it swings like a stupid shampoo commercial as he shakes his head and smiles a smile that makes Warren's heart skip. "You could never win this one. You know that."
Not long out of the shower, where he stands for hours, scrubbing at the blackness under his fingernails that just won't shift, he slips his feet up under the hem of the robe – Warren's, dark blue, a present from his mom, he thinks – and turns his attention back to some TV show about a group of women in bikinis living on a island.
Andrew just stands and stares, not quite knowing what to say. Warren wonders for a second how he might be feeling right now, but he's never been very good at that kind of thing, so he decides to just ignore Andrew until he goes away.
He glances back as he hears them leave, and Jonathan is smiling just a little as he follows Andrew out of the house.
"Was that too much?" Tucker asks vaguely, with just enough sincerity that Warren suspects he might actually care. "I mean, was it too mean? He is just a kid."
"He's twenty-six, I think he can take it," Warren says, unsure of the direction of the conversation. It doesn't normally go this way, and Andrew's wellbeing is never at the forefront of Tucker's thoughts.
But then, he has been different this time. He reads the newspaper now and then, and spends a lot of time staring out of the window, into the garden, thinking. He even watered the plants once – with actual water. Warren had pinched himself to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
Warren knows that everything that happened to him over the last few months, the last year really, since he went and picked Tucker up from Vegas – it changed him. He sees things differently now, his life, his work, Andrew and Jonathan and everything that surrounds him. There was some kind of link, some kind of bond between Tucker and him, and he thinks maybe part of Tucker leaked into him, corrupted his system and left him questioning everything he'd taken for granted before. Maybe, he thinks, as he watches Tucker rubbing his hands together and picking at the loose fluff on the robe, maybe it changed him too.
Tucker smiles. "Do you remember that plan I had?" he asks, pulling his hands up into the sleeves of the robe and wrapping his arms around himself. "We should do that."
Warren frowns slightly. "What plan?"
Tucker looks a little hurt that he doesn't remember. "Mexico, dude," he says. "We should go there. You and me, somewhere they can't find us." Warren isn't sure if he means Andrew and Jonathan, or Meg and her friends. He isn't sure if Tucker is sure either.
"I think they could probably find us in Mexico," he says, slowly. "It's not even that far away."
"There are places though," Tucker tells him, gazing darkly off into the ether. "Places so dark you can't see anything. Or be seen by anything."
Warren doesn't know what to say, and the silence stretches until Tucker turns and looks at him, tilts his head, smiles, breaks the moment.
"Isn't that what you wanted?" he asks, and Warren feels a tiny shiver inside. "We could disappear, slip off the radar for a couple of years, a couple of months even." There's just the lightest touch of desperation, and Warren can't help but admit it's an attractive plan.
"It'd never work out," he says, breaking eye contact and looking back to the TV. "It.. It just wouldn't."
Tucker stretches out and one foot appears from underneath the robe. "Don't you want to at least try?"
Warren stares blankly at the screen, trying to picture how things might be. It doesn't seem possible. Tucker's always promising things like this, and they never work out, or more usually they never even get started. However Warren pictures it, it always ends with Tucker leaving, or Meg showing up at the door one day and slitting his throat.
Recently-scrubbed fingernails brush lightly over his arm, and Warren looks over slowly, reaching down to catch Tucker's hand in his own.
"You're sure they won't find us?" he says, although he knows full well that Tucker will tell him whatever he has to to get Warren to agree to his plan.
Tucker nods, utterly certain. "Absolutely. They're a bunch of powerless wannabe losers without me anyway."
Warren can't help but smile at that. "And no magic?"
Tucker rolls his eyes. "Right, no magic, of course. So? Are we going to Mexico? Should I start packing?"
"You don't own anything," Warren points out. "All ‘your' stuff is mine."
"Still got to be packed," Tucker says, matter-of-factly.
Warren looks around his living room, at the books and computers and plants and random pieces of paper from work. None of it means anything. None of it's worth anything. When did I stop living, he thinks to himself. When did I die?
Tucker flicks him on the arm. "Hey, don't zone on me, man," he says. "I need an answer. I need confirmation. Confirm me!"
Warren blinks. "Sure," he says. There are a million reasons why it's a stupid plan in the first place, and another million why it will never work out. It won't be the first time they've tried it, disappearing into the wilderness where "no-one" can find them. They're always found. Or failing that, Tucker always gets itchy feet – itchy hands, itchy eyes, just itchy – and one day he's gone and Warren's stuck out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. All his cash and cards are missing, clothes shredded in an addict's pre-high frenzy, car or truck or whatever it was gone, or at least broken beyond repair. Last time Tucker had taken out the tires. Warren isn't sure why. He thinks maybe it's an instinct; he doesn't want to be followed and stopped, so he leaves Warren stranded and powerless. Sometimes he thinks it's because Tucker wants to pretend that if Warren is stuck there, he's got someone to come back to when he's got that one little hit he needs to feel good again.
Whatever it is that happens to ruin things, they always get ruined somehow. Life's not a song, and you don't always get what you want.
But then, if Tucker's pattern of using him and leaving is that predictable, Warren's pattern of taking it like a bitch is written in stone. "Why the fuck not," he says, finally. "Let's go."
Tucker looks surprised for a few seconds, which Warren thinks is stupid really because he always agrees to whatever Tucker suggests, then punches the air. "Yes, Mexico! When?"
Warren shrugs, "Right now?"
Again, Tucker looks surprised, eyebrows raised and slightly suspicious. "You sure?"
Warren smiles. "Not much of a disappearance if we wait around to say goodbye, and leave a forwarding address," he says.
Tucker stares for a second, then grins widely and stands up, leaning down and kissing Warren soundly. "This is why I like being with you," he says, before turning and padding upstairs silently to throw things into a bag.
The room is suddenly flat and empty, meaningless without Tucker to lend it context. Colors seep and run until everything stares back at Warren in watery shades of black, white and grey. There's no life, no depth, and Warren feels nothing but absence.
Whatever happens in Mexico, however long it takes for Tucker to leave him, or however long it takes Meg to find them and slit his throat once and for all, it's worth it. Even if it wasn't, he'd still go. He can't not.
*
end
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 08:47 am (UTC)So sad it's over. Such a perfect, buttersweet ending. Maybe Tucker won't leave him this time. He does seem different, after all... I'll just keep telling myself that.
Also, robe!!!
<3<3<3<3<3 :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:07 pm (UTC)I'm really glad it's over. Hurrah! You know what this means - it means I've finished *two* fics now! Two! :D
Your robe comment was totally what inspired this part, you know. When I said, "I've had an idea for how DMAU can end.." I mean, "what it needs is Tucker in a robe! The rest will fall into place around that image." And so it did. *g* <3
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:10 pm (UTC)Well done on finishing 2! *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:15 pm (UTC)Thank you :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 09:03 am (UTC)Yes! Ha! *dances*
I love this ending. Sort of happy, but really not. I hate happy endings anyway. Though, I do want to know what bikini show Tucker was watching. ...And what station it's on.
You spelled tires wrong. Unless it's some funky English tire. Is it a funky English tire? :-P
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:10 pm (UTC)I never really like writing happy endings, so I'm glad this one worked out the way it did. It's less happy and more sort of futile hope. But I kind of like it :) The bikini show .. well, it's based in the future, of course, so keep an eye out in your fall schedules this year for the Mysterious Women of Bikini Island! ;D
Thanks for the tire/tyre thing. My spell checker picked that up and I went "wtf? Tire can't be right?" But apparently it is. Have changed it now. I think we spell it tyre. I think. I could be wrong, of course. Spelling isn't really my strongest skill. *cough* Thanks though :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 11:42 am (UTC):)
Interesting that Warren's fantasy world isn't with Andrew. Guess he really is a substitute for his brother, after all.
I really like this line: Warren thinks it's probably best for the kids anyway, because he knows what growing up in a dysfunctional family can do to a person and he doesn't see why he should inflict that on anyone else if he doesn't have to.
Ok, I like a lot of lines, but I can't quote them all. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-16 12:12 pm (UTC)I'm afraid he is. Warren only ever falls back on Andrew when he needs but can't have Tucker. It's sad but true. But then, Andrew falls back on Jonathan when he can't have Warren, and Tucker falls back on Warren when he can't stand the magic-crack anymore and needs something else to keep him going for a bit, so they're all suffering. And Jonathan .. Jonathan falls back on whiskey, bless him.
Thank you :) I'm glad you liked it :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-17 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-19 10:25 am (UTC)