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Love, Lyric thought, didn't exist half as much in those chaotic songs as they did in the lips crashing into his, there just as soon as the last boxes clasped tight.
Tim's lips were dry by the result of a glass-spilling misstep and the fervor of impossible recollections. He kissed like he could pour all the adrenaline he never got anywhere else—only stages and slaughter—into him, like it was being alive, itself, that he wished to share with Lyric.
Up against the backstage door of some shitty theater: that was where Tim would show him the joy of rising from a tomb he hardly knew he had, as if he couldn't tell how Lyric seldom felt less dead than he did within his presence.
The clicking of eyes beneath lids, the couldn't-stop-looking: the bunching of Lyric's shirt in his hands as Tim tried to pull her ever-closer, despite the melting of their bodies. That was her paradise without rapture, for her heart hammered life against its ribs. Blood had a knack to course through her veins fastest at the promise to display on her face.
Then, Tim was pulling back, only so far as he needed to rest his own burning cheek to hers. Panting, the scratch of his beard on skin and hot breaths across her ear did to Lyric what she imagined each note of that guitar upon his back did to him. It was life's mischievous ways which prowled when a then-distant voice, turned fond in laughter upon spotting them both, had, not an hour prior, sung the tune heralding his greatest loss.
There went a hiss, a shove, and another.
Love was in the way that Lyric didn't have to open his eyes to know whose hand, so sweetly, tilted his chin to the side. The callus upon the thumb tugging at his lower lip, making it part that much more, was the same as, through centuries, it always had been.
Something meek, like the legs which trembled doubly in that moment than they had through introductions and applause, escaped his throat. For an instant, he cringed at himself—brow twisting.
No later, cooing joined the panting in her ears; wobbly pride joined the embarrassment reigning her chest, heaving in time with Tim's.
Ashes hardly kissed her as they caressed her lips with their own. Sapping, rather than generous, and equally all-consuming.
Lyric couldn't tell for what reasons they shuddered.
Rich smoke lingered in their mouth. She could almost imagine the scent was stronger from the inferno-glint song had snuck into their eyes. Such blazes dwarfed the cigarette embers crammed into the cab ride on the way there: the one where they'd glanced to her and, teasingly, asked if she wanted them to put it out on her.
They had to know that they didn't need the lighter in their pocket to set him aflame.
With each day taking to his mind as if it was a race, Lyric rarely understood what they all meant when they spoke of time stretching on endlessly—save for in moments like those. Held by two, it was impossible to do anything other than savor the eternity of every second, same as he did the soft stick of painted lips.
But eternity was rarely long enough, and its end, as it often did, came from clawed hands and the twist of a doorknob. Its cry: stumbling, shouts—roaring laughter.
The door swung open from the three, nearly taking them down in a heap. Clutching fingers grasped, frantic, at his shirt in a panic, pinching skin in their clumsiness.
A yelp: his.
Ashes drew back; Tim's weight became hers.
Lyric didn't fall.
Love, maybe, bizarrely, was the tail curled behind her waist, keeping her—mostly—upright.
Mostly.
Blinking, it was safer on her heart to process the squabbling already starting up at her front. Head spinning, nausea trying to creep up from her stomach, Jonny and Tim's cursing took a moment to register as words in the first place, and then they didn't need to have been anything, for wooden hands were plucking her, by the armpits, into the air.
One quick hint of coherent thought, popping into life and gone again: odd, how, of the two, it was Lyric who felt like the doll just then.
The Toy Soldier spared no second to begin chatting away in the space somewhere above his fuzzy head—or maybe that was just the clacking of its boots, not its jaw. Both were equally probable.
Through thin cloth, he got a picture of exacty how much he burned. Just the ambient temperature of its frame might as well have been an icicle to his flesh. The stab of reality that was nearly as uncomfortable as the fingers harshly digging into him.
Another arrived when it deposited him onto the floor, right into the open side of a jacket—no, trench coat, actually.
It itched against his skin, getting dropped just as soon as he was inside, if not situated.
Nastya sat with her knees to her chin, hunched too far over herself to use the wall she'd cornered into a backrest. By the reflection in her glasses, Lyric watched her eyes dart to him; by the abrupt chill stinging skin, he felt her hand rest upon his side. Whether it was stiff for the quicksilver lulled in her veins or merely cramped from the viola laid against the hardwood before her, he didn't know.
Neither was he sure if he could have known—and it was nice.
Any thought that wanted to form had to fight to rise above that one: that it was nice—comforting, even.
Nastya's hair fell across his collar as she tilted her head, weighting Lyric's own with it. A corner of her glasses jabbed into his scalp, yet it was as easy to ignore as the breath he found himself taking.
If not her signal, those stiff, erratically jolting fingers tapped against his waist, right where a sliver of his shirt had risen up. Lace kissed at chipped nails.
Sitting there, for once, his heart felt a brief moment of calm—of normalcy: comfortable as much as it was comforting.
He, too, put an arm around her, and she hummed a sound akin to the purr he hadn't yet discovered was coming from himself.
Respite.
Lyric, with a nod, faced ahead: to the crowded backstage room filled with yelling that seemed to never quiet—not there, not anywhere amidst the crew. It was the constant background noise of her life, as it was. Which was to say: it had been for far longer than it hadn't.
At her level, she watched Ivy, sitting with a book atop a growing pile of equipment—her throne—stick out a foot as Marius passed.
There, none caught him. Hardly anyone even turned their gaze to the clatter and crash.
However, politely, Ivy tucked it back in when Brian stared at her, who, in turn, had no issue walking over the more prominent obstacle that was Marius throwing a fit on the floor.
Despite herself, Lyric still winced with the crunch of bone, less so with the spurt of blood across half a dozen sets of shoes.
Not for a moment—not because of that—did she think poorly of herself for just how fast her face turned to match Marius' pout. Outwards, sprung the the lower of her lips just as soon as he rolled enough for her to spot it.
Somewhere, out of immediate sight, but not hearing, metal feathers twisted over themselves as the Toy Soldier crouched over the pooling crimson-sludge puddle. Happily, without pause, it splatted its hands into the mess.
Blood—if it could be called that—met the last pairs of shoes that had been fortunate enough to miss the first wave. Notably, Lyric's was one such set. Not that it mattered, for Marius had crawled his was over, deciding to plop his complaints onto her boots only a scarce few seconds later.
Wet curls brushed stickiness into socks, and his smile brought another, smaller one to her lips.
She meant it with love—and, secretly, a hint of mischief, too—when she told him, in no uncertain terms, that he would not be receiving any get-well kisses so long as an inky black trail dribbled from the edge of his mouth.
It was she with the bigger smile after that.
Up again, her eyes shot, as a passing palm patted her head—and flicked Nastya's.
Jonny: the bastard. Lovely in coexistence alone.
The quick stamping of her feet might have had something to do with how, since Lyric last looked, Tim had freshly introduced his face to the floor.
Second time was the charm, apparently.
Lyric had half a mind—and only half a mind, generally speaking—to step in before the pistols poking out of his jacket made their way into the fray, but, well, she had no good excuse.
Still, her feet stayed firmly planted as they were.
Close, by Lyric's twitching ears, Nastya had taken to humming tunes from their set. Marius was, without any of the effort both knew he could give, and had given, that night, mumbling along the lyrics from below.
She was comfortable—and cooling, and breathing, and loved.
Damn the fluttering heart in her chest; it, too, could rest.
As if pulled by Jonny's tail swishing out first, Ashes slipped through the exit, cigarette box in hand. Before the smoke clouds even puffed into the air, separated only by cheap plaster and a grimy window, Lyric had a nagging certainty they'd offer her one on the ride back, too.
Tim had found his way onto Raphaella's lap, rightfully flinching backwards each time she giddily prodded at his broken nose—just to jolt forward again when he found himself in range of Ivy. All those in the room knew who, of the two, was her favorite scientist.
Only the Toy Soldier seemed to care for the band's equipment-turned-furniture, though, perhaps, not enough to do more than bounce on its heels beside Ivy.
A water bottle—actually sealed!—pressed into Lyric's empty hand.
Oh!
Holding the lid by only two fingers, Brian kept his body away as she grabbed the water.
She stumbled over her thanks where exhaustion, finally catching up, turned her tongue heavy in her mouth.
With only mild melted plastic, Lyric stole away the cap and cut off her poor attempts of speaking with a sip, one made less pleasant for the chuckle she earned.
Not cold, but kind. She'd take it—just as she did the blanket of Brian's shadow as he leaned himself against the wall. Their wall.
Him at one side, Nastya at the other, Marius at her front: there was so much life in view, through clear air and less-clear glass. The bustle, the breaths, the bursting energy of her crew and no one else.
This, she thought, was love.