momebie

A/N: For the LJ Idol Home Game. This is a part of a larger thing I'm having lots of trouble with currently. As before, Neutron Star is still uncomfortably personal. Maybe that's why I keep feeling like I need to distance myself from it. Maybe it will be better in the end if I don't. But I guess you can all decide that.

Eli started to laugh. He could tell, by the look on Grant’s face, that this wasn’t a laughing matter. He couldn’t help himself. “Do you have any idea how sanctimonious you look right now? How you’ve become everything you said you hated? Do you even remember why we started doing this?”

“People change,” Grant said. “We’ve all changed, and you aren’t keeping up. I thought we’d have a chance at something new when we found out you were still alive. It was a miracle. It was the thing I’d been wishing for every night, and I was wrong. My desires are a monkey’s paw and they shouldn’t be heeded.”

“How is everything about me, down to my sizzling, collapsing atoms not new? I am literally worlds away from who I was at the start.”

“You’re still acting out in that way you always have. You’re still killing. You-”

Eli could feel his skin tingling. The white hairs on his dark arms were starting to stand up, giving his emotions away like not even his voice would have before. Fuck it, he thought. Might as well burn us down. “You and Mar dragged me into fucking space. You tried to kill me!”

Grant lifted an inch or two off the ground and a small ripple of wind brushed across Eli’s forearms. He was so angry that he didn’t seem to notice he wasn’t standing on the ground anymore. He stamped his foot impatiently into nothing. “We were saving you!”

And there it was. Eli’d forced Grant to pull the pin on the grenade they’d been hot potatoing back and forth since his return. “Okay,” he said. “So it’s okay if it’s me. Eli’ll die anyway, right? It’s okay when I kill myself, literally, for this city over and over again. It’s okay, because I’ll come back. Never mind the consequences. It’s okay when you conspire to have me killed once and for all, to what? To save me from this pain? From a mind that fractured with each new life? It’s okay, because the way you love me is the right way?”

Grant shifted from one foot to the other, still not touching the ground. So wrapped up, as he was wont to be, in the immediacy of his emotions. Eli could tell he wanted to speak, but Grant had said enough over the last several months. It was Eli’s turn.

“It’s not the right way, Grant. It’s not okay. It’s just the way you know. And these deaths aren’t okay when it’s you? Because my love, my desire to keep you safe is lesser than your desire to keep me safe? Your desires which you now don’t trust? Because I’m the unstable one? Because I don’t think things through? How am I supposed to bear this weight? How do you expect me to do it alone, without trying to help? Just because I’m more willing doesn’t mean that I’m stronger.”

“You don’t understand,” Grant said, his voice soft enough that it would not have disturbed the smallest mote of dust collecting around the Milky Way.

“I understand just fine.”

Grant’s eyes were wide, and in them Eli could see the reflection of the ripple of light starting to roil off of him as the star reacted to his emotions. Eli could also see that Grant was having trouble reconciling who Eli was now with who he had been and who Grant had always wanted him to be. Grant’s expectations rested more heavily on him than any loss of life ever had, including his own.

“You don’t know what it’s like to fall short to you over and over again,” Eli said. “Do you ever stop to examine why you feel so secure? Is part of it because I’m always looking for you to be exactly who you are, because that is exactly who I want you to be? That pedestal you look down on me from? I put you there.”

Grant’s mouth twitched and Eli knew he was holding back an incredulous laugh of his own. They simply didn’t see each other the same way. That was the crux of the problem. This realization brought him a moment of calm he hadn’t known since his last death. The light burned off of him, the star backed away, and everything around him came into focus more clearly.

“No, let it out,” Eli said. “It’s a feeling we’re sharing for the first time in months. For the first time in months we know exactly how the other feels. And you know what the punchline is? It’s the rest of our lives. So fucking let it out.”

Grant dropped to the floor. “I’m going on patrol,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eli turned around and started climbing the stairs to their bedroom. “You have a good night out with Mar and the city, with your women. I’ll be asleep when you get in, or pretending to be. I’ll be out before you wake up. Congratulations. You wanted me flung off? You’ve succeeded.”

Eli reached the second story landing and kicked at the bannister, frustrated that the stairs wouldn’t just take him back up to his collapsing star, where the simple weight of living was nothing. Where the click of the lock on their back door didn’t echo through his head for hours.