- about
Style: Novel
Character(s): Alexei, Eremiel
Warning(s): Gore-ish, basically Alexei eats a bird
- chapter 2: it's happening
Alexei swears he can feel when his mom comes home from work. He doesn’t hear the car in the driveway or the screen wire door creaking on old hinges. But his spine shakes, senses a shift in the air, a deepening in the hue of his bedroom wall like a warning.
Then there are bright voices downstairs and eager footsteps. The ringing in his ears stops, the conversation cutting through the cacophony of his breathing. His mom calls for him distantly. His ceiling provides no guidance.
“I’m sure you remember Eremiel and his dad Emil,” His mom says when he gets down the stairs, tone chipper. “They’re gonna be staying with us for a hot minute while they tour some houses in the neighborhood for a bit, but Emil’s gonna be leaving in a few days to get back to work.”
“Good afternoon,” Alexei says, sees the face of a ghost in his living room, and feels nothing.
“Hi,” Eremiel smiles. The boy he sees is a choppy mop of dark brown hair with bangs that sweep to one side and cover most of his right eye. But Alexei watches his lips, sees the abuse from nibbling on it, and watches as he continues to chew on the inside of his cheek. His shoulders are slouched but it's not enough to hide the wide frame of his shoulders that will only widen even further as he grows into the late stages of his teenage years. All he’s wearing is a black sweater with the sleeves scrunched up halfway and grey sweats. Alexei swears feels nothing when he makes eye contact with him, but there’s a tremor in his fingers he can’t seem to still and he hears his heartbeat in his ears.
Eremiel is sitting in between Alexei’s mom and his dad, all three of them crammed into the couch and untucking the afghan blanket that covers it. He looks like an innocent man. Someone honorable and distinguished you’d pass in the streets of suburban America. They almost look like a family.
But he knows it’s not all that true. Emil is a sturdy man, someone who stands their ground and doesn’t let up, Alexei has discovered after years of anecdotes from his own son and light conversations during early mornings, whenever Alexei would come pick up Eremiel for school. He watches Eremiel lean away from him.
“G’dafternoon, Alexei.” Emil smiles from the couch. “You’ve gotten so tall already!” Alexei offers the best smile he can manage. Emil’s just saying that to be nice.
“I was hoping you could show Eremiel around whenever you get the chance?” His mom continues, placing an old hand on Eremiel’s shoulder. “I have work, and Emil has to fix up the room and all. I bet Eremiel would be real bored down here where there’s nothing to do.”
Eremiel offers him another soft smile and fixes his glasses. They start talking about something wildly uninteresting to Alexei, but he sits down on the ottoman on the opposite side of the coffee table anyway, because his mother taught him how rude it was to disappear from a conversation without saying anything. He offers an occasional smile and laugh, if only not to feel a bit useless.
The boy he used to know as a child is the same one sitting before him, hard knuckles and sharp teeth. Alexei wonders if Eremiel still sees him the same way. The same scrawny kid who used to point to flowers in the grass and ask why they were the color that they were. Why do birds sing? Why is the sky blue? He loved trying new foods. He’d eat anything Eremiel put on his lunch tray.
Eremiel catches his eye for a few seconds and they both look away like it never happened, but a lump forms in the back of Alexei’s throat as evidence. Of embarrassment or something else, he doesn’t know.
So he rests his ankle on his knee and waits for it to disappear.
The next time he sees Eremiel, the sky is still a midnight blue between the curtains. Time is a lost concept to him. He’s still cold and his nose is raw from it, clogged with all the snot.
Socked feet hit the linoleum and thump through the quiet air of his house at dawn. Everything feels so fragile. That’s what he loves, the stretch of night into morning when the world holds its breath. Alexei used to imagine that these hours belonged to him, no one else in the world, just a kid with too much imagination and energy that can’t be burned off within four walls. Sometimes he was being reckless for the sake of it. Sometimes he would be chasing the beating heart of his town. Point Lucius—where nobody goes and nobody stays—because it was his town, and he loves his town. And that's what you do when you love something anyway. You stay through the dark and the cold. The radio silence of it all.
Sometimes he would be chasing Eremiel. He knows Eremiel loved him, not so sure if Eremiel loved him that way.
It’s not dark enough for him to switch on the under cabinet lighting, but just dark enough for him to imagine shadows coming to life below the archway into the living room. It’s not a big house. He could get from one end to another in probably ten wide strides. It was really only meant to have enough room to fit his mom and him, and even then he feels he grew out of this house fast.
The microwave reads five forty seven when he grabs milk. His mom will be getting up for work soon.
He should go back to bed. But then he hears a door click open upstairs and suddenly Eremiel is standing before the kitchen peninsula, watching Alexei drum an unclear dissonance into the rim of his mug. His bright orange cat mug. His dad bought it for him. Somewhere far away. In the city, where you could find everything.
“Mmn,” Eremiel rubs his eyes, voice slow and bitten with sleep. Alexei notices the lack of his silver rimmed glasses. Without the reflection of light, he can see his eyes now. Impossibly dark but somehow still so clear. They’re sunken like his, but in a masculine way and not a sickly, vampirish way. He shouldn’t look so perfect. “g’morning.”
Alexei hums in response. Eremiel pulls out a stool next to him on the kitchen island and sits with his chin on the palm of his hand, back hunched and eyes closed. And Alexei doesn’t know what to do with himself so he just stares out the window.
“Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
Alexei licks his teeth. “That's none of your business.” Eremiel offers him an awkward smile, and Alexei feels guilt gnawing at the back of his mind but doesn’t apologize. He lets the feeling linger in the air, and silently wills Eremiel not to talk anymore.
But he’s still Eremiel from eight years ago, so he does the exact opposite of what he wants, and decides to dig further into his skin.
“Your mom was telling me about how you would wake up in the middle of the night sometimes,” He’s interrupted by a yawn. “And told me I should take the opportunity to walk around with you.”
“You don’t need me to look around where you grew up.” Alexei blinks. He’s still looking out the window but he feels Eremiel’s eyes on him nonetheless. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the feeling. “And at five in the morning?”
“I suppose so.” He shrugs, and when Alexei finally gathers up the courage to look at him, he’s staring right back at him, his familiar hollow eyes tearing right into his skin, and he feels it in his heart.
He thinks he could recognize those eyes anywhere. His presence in a room flooded with people. The sound his feet made when they struck the earth, the soft melody of his breathing, so close to him like it was yesterday. There had never been quite a boy like Eremiel, and he doesn’t think there ever will be again. It scares him. And he’s scared it’ll scare Eremiel, and drive him away like it did all those years ago.
They don’t talk about it anymore.
Alexei’s mom used to say that everyone felt their love differently. Whether it be a flutter below your stomach or a numbness in your fingers you can’t seem to rub away. An ache in the apples of your cheeks. A warmth in your heart.
Alexei has always felt it like a tear through his torso, soul crushing and unnecessarily visceral.
He had a dream like this once; Split knuckles digging into wheaten sand, searching for any imitation of relief, his shirt is damp, a deep stain of red spilling out from his heart and slowly being taken adrift by salty waters. He can’t feel it beating, but he can still feel it feeling.
Bony knees burrow into the ground and start to push in a strange dissonance. He doesn’t know where in the world he is, and has long abandoned the will to even find out. He knows this is a beach, knows there's a row of trees right before the sand, but can’t figure out where the puzzle pieces begin to connect. His neck is heavy. Everything is heavy. The stale air digs its claws into the underside of his spine, whispering something far away into his ear.
There’s a dove that wasn’t there before pecking into the shore a few feet in front of him. Alexei stopped crawling and held his breath. The bird's feathers glisten and shine against the beige, tempting enough to steal his attention and familiar enough to still Alexei’s heartbeat. He blinks, and even as his tears subside to clear his vision, the feathers brighten. The bird pecks some more, flaps its wings, then turns its head to stare at him. Its beady eyes meet his, and he can’t look away. Black, lined with golden honey that pulls him in deeper. He can almost see his reflection in its eyes. Alexei crawls a little closer, but the bird doesn’t seem to fly away.
“Hurt?” It seems to say. He looks at his knuckles, bright carmine with his fingertips almost blue. He contemplates entertaining the dove. The dove hops closer on little red legs, its beak just as bright as its eyes. It shines like an answer. “Angel.”
“Angel.” It sings again when he doesn’t say anything, long and beautiful. He inches closer, listening to the melody, and his tears make its little round body shimmer like a divine being, with the glitter of a god and the softness of something familiar and the glamor of a war criminal. Its body starts to blur with the beach. His hand cranes to search for it. There’s a radiating warmth where it is—was,—coating his entire hand and crawling up his arm, all the way to his neck and to his face and the apex of his skull.
The flame burns ever so bright, as he feels the air around him crackle and sear to life. He feels like icarus, the bird feels like the sun. Two wings to hold him up, and waves of heat beat down at him. The ocean is right there. Becoming is right there.
Icarus had done something amazing, defying the limitations of the human condition in order to take flight like the birds he envied from the tower, where he and Daedalus stayed captive. To finally be free of constraints and to feel the wind through his hair as he became one with the creatures of the sky. Icarus had won. Alexei will fly. And will laugh as he falls, because to fall means to once have soared.
Something terrible claws at his ribcage again. It feels like needles down his throat, fiberglass in his lungs. Something between a choke and cry escapes from between clenched teeth. A colony of spiders making home in the twist of his intestines, a beetle scurrying through the undergrowth of his spine. The thought that this is all his fault lingers in his mind, stains his teeth with something slippery. It doesn’t quite taste like guilt. Something isn’t right, something isn’t right. Something isn’t right. until it isn’t.
In his stomach is the most warmth he’s ever left, a steady thrum to replace the once unsteady ballet it danced. A static buzzes through him, all the way from his heart and to the tips of his fingers and the tips of his toes. He sinks into the ground, swallowed by this strange hug. Almost a little drunk on it.
He blinks hard and opens his eyes. The dove was never there. In lieu is another red stain. When he looks around him, to the pink under his fingernails and the slippery red on his hands, he realizes what he’s done.
He’s in the sand again, and while he’s not bleeding out, he feels it in his bones. Weak, confused, a heart that stills in his chest. Alexei pointed in a different direction, but when Eremiel asked he had smiled at him with a softness he hadn’t seen in years and Alexei is not a strong man. It could be that Eremiel just knew his weak points, where to strike, but they haven’t seen each other face to face in years. He doubts Eremiel would remember much about him.
Alexei watches him poke into the sand with a stick from a distance, right where tan grain meets grey chateau water. Alexei stands the farthest he can. From Eremiel. From the water. From Icarus.
Alexei remembers a lot of things too. He always regarded it as his best quality, but he would only ever remember the mundane and useless things. Like how the first time they ever went out on their own as teenagers, Eremiel was wearing a silly brown and beige vest like the boyscout he was. He remembered how he liked to keep a headband around for his bangs. He remembers that Eremiel was the one who told him what counting sheep really meant. Once, Alexei bought him pink hello kitty clips as a joke, but he wore it like a medal anyway. Remembered how he used to accompany him to the cafeteria to buy rainbow strips. It happened one time. But he remembers. It feels so vivid. It feels so useless.
“Alex! Look!” Eremiel jumps up from where he was, trotting over to Alexei with his hands held out to him like he’s cupping water. His grey sweatpants are damp at the ends from the seawater, and his black hoodie is covered in a thin coat of sand. There’s a small shell where his hands are, barely the length of the pad of his thumb. It's a chalky kind of white, but when the clouds part for the sun to breathe, it almost looks opalescent.
Alexei leans in closer. Eremiel does too, and Alexei feels that in his bones. Again.
“There was a little crab.” Alexei can hear the smile in his voice without looking. “I saw him earlier, I swear.”
“I guess he’s shy.”
Eremiel hums and sets the conch shell down on the sand, his lower lip jutting out in a small pout. His thinking face, Alexei remembers. After all this time, he looks like the same Eremiel from fifth grade.
They start walking home then. The road is just a lonely strip of gravel surrounded by grass. They pass by the occasional bodega and house, but it's nothing picturesque. No white picket fences and apple trees with a family on the porch. But they would never be able to escape the beach.
They start walking home then. The road is just a strip of gravel surrounded by grass.
It’s a little dizzying to think that they both grew up here, spent years of their lives biking on this very gravel past these very houses, and that they knew the people within these homes. They all slowly emptied through the years. Everyone’s moved to the city. Bigger opportunities, closer to society. Everyone’s so far away now, and nobody has the time to come back to this forgotten town. They say something only really alive from the amount of people remembering it, and Alexei is starting to think Point Lucius is on its last legs.
“This place really is beautiful,” Eremiel says, breaking the silence. “You know Cassandra’s been talking my ear off about coming back? I can see why.”
“Cassie?”
Eremiel lets out a huff that sounds more like an exhale than a laugh. “I can’t believe she lets you call her Cassie,” he says, entertained, “She would bang my head into a wall if I ever called her that.”
“How is she?”
“Well, I saw her a few days ago,” He shrugs, “Just doing normal city girl stuff. Starting her own business, thinking about moving out, that sort of stuff. She has a boyfriend too.”
“Ah.” Alexei rarely ever checked social media apps now, much less used his phone. He wouldn’t know what anyone was up to anymore. He’s cut off a lot of people over the years. What's a few more?
“So, tell me,” Eremiel says, changing the subject. Small mercies. “What is there to do around here now?”
Alexei used to really love his phone. Sometimes he thinks he was addicted to it. It was his gateway into the real world. Into communities and ideas he holds so close to himself now that he would have never discovered if it weren’t for the great invention of the world wide web.
Talking to Eremiel got him thinking. About old connections, people he used to know better than they knew themselves. He’s watching an instagram story of his old friends hanging out. They all have a group chat together. He had never heard of this plan to meet up.
It's fine, he tells himself. It's not a big deal, he didn’t need to be there. With them.
But it’s like being on the other side of a great party. You can hear the laughter and the fun. You want in on it, but you’re not welcome.
So he leans against the door with an ear pressed into it. He sees great things, greater smiles, greater company. And he realizes they never wanted him there with them at all.
There’s nothing that tells him that specifically. It could just be his own impossible fears. But there's always going to be a voice in everyone’s head whispering insincere things. It just so happens that Alexei’s is louder than his own voice. And it tells him he brought this onto himself. Always. Always. Always. Again and again, telling him nobody else is at fault. Don’t blame little old Cassie. She wouldn’t have even known you’re alive.
He supposes it's just the idea of it. The thought that they didn’t ask him whether he wanted to make the effort to travel hours just to get into the city, to meet with them. Yes, he would have probably said no, but he wants them to at least ask. Is it selfish of him to want them to ask? Is it an attention seeking thing for him to want? Is it weird that he wants to be remembered? He wants to have voice cracks in a cramped karaoke booth too.
What if he wants to be there too? What if there’s nothing waiting for him, and he still wants to be there anyway?
There’s a small ache in the crown of his head that's beginning to form and it makes him feel nauseous. If he went out with them, he would have to deal with loud voices on top of this headache. He probably wouldn’t have even felt it if he was so caught up with them. Having so much fun. They’re eating at a hot pot restaurant. He knows he wouldn’t be able to pay for the entry fee.
“Oooh! S’that Cassandra and everyone?” Eremiel bends over Alexei's shoulder to peek at his phone. Alexei is sitting at the kitchen island, an uneaten sandwich on his plate as his breakfast. The ham is cold and the sourdough isn’t toasted like he wants, but it’s protein and carbohydrates whether or not they’re warm. “They’ve been wanting to go to that place for a while, I think.” Eremiel abandons him for a bit, pulling out apple juice and a mug. One of Alexei’s own, since Eremiel didn’t bring any of his from the city. “Looks too rich-person for me, I feel.”
“You could pull it off.”
Eremiel looks at him for a moment with a crinkle in his brow. “That's not what I meant. I meant like,” His tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip. He shoves the carton back into the fridge and pulls out a stool halfway, sitting on it at a weird angle with one leg off the chair. He really looks at him now. He’s abandoned the monochrome look for bright purple shorts and a shirt with some wildly popular band he’s definitely heard of before, but doesn’t care for as much as Eremiel. And he's wearing socks with his black slippers. Which have watermelon print on them. He drags the pad of his finger around his mug—Alexei’s mug—before opening his mouth, “I don’t know, actually. I think being around them is a bit jarring, is all.”
Alexei nods. It’s dawn now, and the rising sun is soft between the curtains. It’s all still very grey, but the plants on the windowsill thrive in it. The lightbulbs hang over the kitchen, each on a long cord of silver that reaches to a high ceiling. There’s a cobweb in the far right corner, and even that seems to shine in the sun, the dust dancing in the air like glitter. Beyond the window is a view of their backyard. All rolling hills that are that certain sterile color of green. The kind you’d only find somewhere far away.
If the light was kind to his home, it paints Eremiel reverently. The sun brushes against his cheek so lovingly. Within him is something bigger than life itself. It sounds dramatic but he’s looking at him with such certainty that Alexei feels like he’s choking on his own heart. His eyes turn honey and golden, like the dove, and briefly he wonders if this is the angel it was talking about.
Alexei watches Eremiel's mouth move. He can’t catch the words, but he watches him smile his perfect upstanding citizen smile before it disappears behind the rim of his mug. Alexei’s mug. Why can’t he stop thinking about that?
At first, Alexei never thought he’d ever come around to understanding Eremiel. At least, not in a way that would matter. Not in a way the both of them would be able to realize. Maybe it’s because their lives have been so deeply intertwined that trying to compartmentalize everything seems pointless. Maybe it’s because Eremiel looks at him like he knows something he doesn’t.
Whenever Alexei meets Eremiel’s eyes, even for just a split second, even across a crowded room, it feels like he’s being undressed in that very same room. It’s not sexual. It’s being exposed. Embarrassed. A little terrified. Eremiel is stripping Alexei down to the bone, meticulously poking everywhere he shouldn’t. The xylophone of his ribcage, the length of his spine, the hollow of his stomach, the dip of his hips. It’s humbling. It’s humiliating.
Alexei’s cheek is resting on his closed fist and he’s watching Eremiel with all the intent of an eager student but he still doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Eremiel is looking at him expectantly so Alexei just nods and that seems to satisfy him enough to keep going. He wants to focus. He does. But no part of himself can bring him to come out of his daze he walked in on. His eyes are comfortable watching the steady expression on his face as he explains something far away.
He wants to focus. He does. But he doesn’t want this to end. If the moment disappears, it’ll never happen again. He can’t forgive himself for that.
He and Eremiel used to know each other for a long time. His name was always the first in his contacts, in his messages, in his notifications, in his everything. Always there, omnipresent like a ghost. He doesn’t know when it started to become something greater than him, than the both of them combined. He can’t pinpoint the moment because he feels it's always been the moment. It's always been that way. It’s cheesy and so juvenile but it’s the truest thing he’ll ever admit to himself and the one truth he’ll say out loud.
At some point, he supposes, he started taking Eremiel a little too carelessly. Held him too close, and tore down so many of his walls that it left his back exposed. And Eremiel didn’t want that. Because Alexei was so explicit with himself that he thinks it scared him away. He doesn’t remember much of those years, but during the rare moments where Eremiel would tell him about it, years and years later where the wound has scarred into new skin, it always went the same way.
He was too loud about his life.
He doesn’t blame Eremiel for walking away. He never did, but it doesn’t mean the scar will disappear because of it. It wasn’t the worst years of his life, because he can’t remember those years, so he’s made peace with it. Even during late nights, dark nights, when Eremiel would tell him about the things he’s seen. About how Alexei would lock himself in his room for days on end and not talk or eat or do anything but go to the bathroom. And even those were rare because he wouldn’t have anything to expel. Eremiel didn’t talk to him for a long time after those years.
Eremiel waves a hand in front of his face, pulling him from his daydream.
“I wasn’t paying attention.” Alexei was never the best at lying anyway.
“I knew it.” Eremiel smiles, no real bite in his voice, no real reprimand in his eyes. Never with him, Alexei’s noticed over the many years of their lives spent together.
It irritates him. There are plenty of things Alexei has held against Eremiel. Plenty of things Alexei has done to wrong Eremiel. But he could never be truly angry with him, either. Not enough for it to get in the way.
But Alexei always had the nagging feeling that he should. Eremiel should punch him, yell at him, anything that will make Alexei feel a little less like an asshole.
Eremiel leans back in his chair so leisurely, and Alexei thinks he might find a way to be pissed at that, too. “I think I'm gonna go back to sleep. It’s so nice to breathe in salt instead of car exhaust.”
“What did you mean?” Alexei hears himself say before he feels the words form in his mouth. “What did you mean when you said it’s jarring to be around Cassie?”
Eremiel doesn’t look at him then, finding something else over Alexei’s shoulder to scrutinize. He seems to scrutinize it well if the lump between his brows says anything. “It’s just. They feel a bit out of touch with reality, don’t you think? There’s a gap between me and them and it’s definitely related to our social statuses. I can feel it and they can’t.”
Alexei watches Eremiel’s gaze slowly trace the dip of where his shoulder meets his neck, and then to where his hair rests on his nape. He can’t tell if this is what Eremiel wants him to see or if he’s doing this unintentionally. Maybe it's a reflex. They haven’t seen each other in years. What does he know about him?
“Yeah, I get that.” Alexei says, and he does. He does get that. It’s a thought he’s always had tucked in his pocket because of how much he thought about it. “They’re rich and I’m not.”
“It’s more than that.” Eremiel mulls, quietly. Eremiel’s always been a loud personality, but he gets quiet when he thinks. Like he’s letting the room hold the weight of his words instead. Alexei can feel it. “It’s like they think they’re better than the people who stayed here because of the amount of money it took for them to move into the city, when in reality they’re struggling to uphold their rich, socialite images. It feels so… disconnected. And very jarring.”
“Eremiel, don’t you literally live in the city too?”
“Why do you think I’m bringing bags filled with clothes back here, Alexei Medvedev?”
Alexei taps his foot against the kitchen island. “Touche.”
Eremiel, ever the saint, hops off the bar stool to put his—Alexei’s—mug in the sink. “I think my dad’s gonna be up soon. If you’re still pushing around that sandwich on your plate, tell him I said not to make breakfast for me. I’m gonna knock out for at least five more hours.”
“Yeah, okay.” Alexei blinks back to his plate. He’s not that hungry anymore. “Goodnight.”