Chapter Text
“Which one d’you think’ll fall first?”
“Ain’t you supportive!” He scolds, quickly drawing his eyes away from the routine. Irises catch on the polished stage floor, reflecting perfectly timed streaks of blackened lines. 5 years worth of reinforced corken leather, scraped and burned into the surface with each dredged out half toe tap.
The admonishment, along with any fleeting offense fizzles out entirely by the time it can tickle their ears. It’s drowned out by the theater's roaring bustle, the hooting attendees anything but reverently enraptured by the effort in the current performance, but with enough spirit for the dancers to take it in stride.
By the way his mouth moves or face scrunches, they hear regardless. They always do. And so their shoulders constrict, freezing up until the otherwise softened muscles of their back hunch over, bunching up until it hits the lower lobes of their ears. Their softened chin falls to their chest, sticking there, their eyes obscured by manufactured, purpled twilight. Dulled nails tense at the barstool they crookedly straddle, pushing into the shadowed leather cushion.
The cola glass in their clenched hand sways, casting shadows against the nearest he matching bendy straw bobs and tuts against the narrowed lip, beaten around by the iceless carbonation. Condensation beads over their soft knuckles, running halfway down the back of their hand.
His eyes, uncaring and weary, buckle in time with their legs, leaning to a useless tilt off the stool’s edge. He drifts to the stage, eyeing up the swinging lineup with quivering pupils and pursed lips.
“Joe.” A heavy handed finger points right to the stage, singling out a lone, bumbling dancer with lingering precision, “‘can barely keep his legs up half the time, Tommy’s talked his ear off about it for years, but does the kid ever listen? Course not, too busy ogling the lights.” He shakes his head, catching onto the faint stutter of the dancer’s uncoordinated steps and nearly getting a faceful of Tommy’s back. Air blows through his front teeth still chewing at his lower lip, “call it. He’s gonna fly too close to the sun, one of these days. Break a leg the old fashioned way. Hope he knows I ain’t paying a pension.”
The back of their head tosses back, then to the side, casting down until it clunks against his broad shoulders in sweetened giddiness. A brush of their bangs drape over, blanketing down to the bridge of their nose, all in effortless charm. A shrill laugh slips from their parted lips; a quickened anxiously tittering giggle, lost entirely by the stinging speaker above them bellowing a rendition of “Manhattan”.
At the fleeting sound, his chest warms considerably. The incessant wobbling of his palm at their shoulder, once tapping at it in a jumbled beat half resembling the song, lays hard against their melting muscles, clasping over it entirely. His fingers splay out, just grazing the very edge of their spine. He breathes in. The faintest sear of rubbing alcohol stings his nose, just barely penetrating the dizzying cloud of burnt tobacco.
So distinctly…them.
They pause and stave the next round of snickers silenced by their tongue, harshly bitten. The bubbled over, unsure half smile sinks under the weight of their own lips, fighting and failing to resurface in a pitiful display.
In a slow trudge, they rise, dragging the excited hand into the wettened, soft center of theirs, pressing it down to the cool bar counter. His palm presses flush against the cool surface. They don’t say a word.
Thank you.
He swallows. Their hand, icy and resolute, never quite leaves. It moves, ghosting over his last two fingers in careful calculation.
Numb.
The show dies out as it always does, manufactured fervor and half-drunken cheers, Tommy walking off with a wink, nod, and a bouquet’s-worth of bright, pretty plasticized roses they resell at the end of the night. 5 caps a piece.
“You know, as much as I worked for the Mojave, I’ve never sat still long enough for a show.” They say over their shoulder, captured by the wavering light in place of any trepidation.
He leans against the counter, roughly balancing the heels of his shoes on the rungs of the barstool. The glint of their eyes elude him. “Consider yourself lucky,” comes his painfully dull response.
He glances back just in time to catch the man in question stroll off backstage-way, shooting a humorously deadly glare to the fame-struck, would-be show killer. Then, a considerably less deadly look and drawling announcement is offered to the next act, dropping the microphone to him from just beyond the curtain with a show stopping smile.
Billy Knight.
He groans, shoulder to shoulder with them now, head falling against theirs in a dizzying clunk of his own. The skin of his nose bumps against them, connecting to the side of their cheek, finally settling near their chin.
The sweater-vested kiss ass catches him in the crowd with a muted smile, running his mouth on a “joke” that wore out later than yesterday. He grimaces, “the hell hired this guy, anyway?”
“Me.”
“...”
“He’s not that bad,” they say, face helplessly affixed in the stage’s direction. Fleeting slivers of their giggle lingers, only to jump back to a favorable snort when the ‘comedian’ fires off another botched attempt at half-veilied bitching about the state of his room, “honest, too.”
Roaring laughter permeates the theater as Knight bleats off another, this time accented by a tacked on, overblown explanation on the groaner’s punchline. He’s heard them all before.
“If this fink’s considered a crowd pleaser…”
“No offense to the drifter, but I really broke the mold with hiring Billy…”
“Gee, try to keep it in your pants, why don’t you?” He grunts, the green on his tongue nearly palpable. “‘Can hardly have an opinion, you’re never in town for anything better.”
“And to think,” They muse, snubbing him, “The Aces lived without him for five years, and he was out front the whole time. And nothing really changed…”
“What luck,” He sighs, pressing against them insistently, subtly squirming against their frame. From below he points to them, his palm still pressed cool against their fiery will, “here’s the deal, you commit to one place for more than it takes to pay little Ben a visit, maybe we could change your mind.”
They stiffen, nearly bumping him off, “oh. I don’t. Have to ‘visit’ him if you don’t—“
“Don’t think my body would forgive me if I went and messed with that arrangement.” The free hand he uses to wave them off nearly sprains with the ferocity it shakes at the wrist, creeping into, overcoming, and tainting the nonchalant demeanor he sets.
They don’t turn to him then, though their shoulders slouch an inch, “I’m sure you'd get over it.”
“Not with the way you got me wired, baby.” He hums, halfway to a growl, tilting their downcast chin from the on-stage hack. His head shifts to the side, eyes honing in on their lips, half parted. He fits against them in a slow, all too chaste press, pulling off with a parting breath, taking in their labored exhale; Candied cherry syrup, doused in nicotine and carbonated caramel. “I mean, if you stuck around this shindig ‘stead of kicking up sand, we could see all the shows this place’s got.” His mouth clasps shut, working at his tongue, sparing his teeth from the repetitive grind that still manages to slip through even then, “…make it a weekly thing.”
A long, diluted sigh breezes against his cheeks. They drag away until his head dethrones from theirs, toppling down until his neck catches on. He blinks at them, the harsh stage lights and roaring crowd blending his mind, “Benny...”
He tenses, ignoring their slow starting murmur, “those cats out there don’t need you all the time, why don’t you let ‘em cry in the rain for a while?”
They open their mouth, the breath they suck in hesitant and flitting on the edge of bitterness treacherously.
With a breathless, quickened pace, he speaks again, “if you just stayed longer…a week instead of two days, I could make it swing better than anyone else. You know I could. People’ll finally see you the way they ought to. Could finally learn to dance–”
“Ben.” Both hands pinch his suit, steadying his waffling moth-like hover. The fingers still, slipping under the pressed front, slowly thumbing at the heart stitched, inner lapels.
Their head tilts, allowing the intentional spill of their perfect hair to slink in segments from their limpid eyes.
He can’t look away.
The big hunk of metal constricts over him like a coffin, tickling and pressing the around the hairs of his limp forearm in a crookedly uncomfortable, strangling squeeze. The interior padding—leather cracked from years of neglect—scratches at him shoveling against his skin until it’s beyond chafed.
What he wouldn’t give for jacket sleeves…
What he wouldn’t give for so me goddamn moisture in the overbearingly canned air, shrouding the worst of the passive Mojave heat, badly covered by 2 industrial sized, roaring AC fans.
Instead of picking up more dust than he can sneeze in the Aces, he should invest in an ice machine, throw as much in the Colorado river until everything cools down.
Yeah…
He shifts uncomfortably against the booth cushion, soft enough to sink into, stiff enough to feel like his cushion took 5, its understudy being an uncomfortable as hell slab of pure bedrock, probably. The flood lights (at least, they feel like flood lights), too focused stage right to give him any sense of direction in the dimmed theater, still manage to catch in his eyes, leaving him with the solitary gift of a raging headache for the trouble.
“It looks stupid.” He says, talking around his tongue, folded and bunched in the middle of his mouth, habitually twisting and itching for something to wrap around. A toothpick, even, seeing the desperate twitching of his fingers under the irritatingly overbearing terminal slowly being welded to his forearm.
Not that he’d get anything.
They won’t even let him sit at the goddamn bar, the one with the better cushions. Not without wrapping him in a tarp tied to ten pillows filled with the down feathers of a rad-goose, surely.
“Ah, don’t be like that, Benny, the thing gives you panache, dig?” Tommy says off key, half turned in the chair across. A blackened shell hangs off his ear, the wire of which, coiled and crisp. It dangles down in a spiral plugged to a portable radiation king strapped to his raised leg, bouncing in an impatient rhythm. To Benny, it’s clear as day that he’s more set on patrons filling seats and the beaten clipboard holding his playbook rather than anything he has to potentially cry about, "underground fashion’s all the rage nowadays.”
On stage, a custodian he doesn’t recognize in the slightest sweeps off last show’s bounty–three dozen gaudy plastic roses; bought, thrown, and reused again, looking worse than they did last year. 20 a-piece. One day, once the coffers are full and then some, he’ll lower the price, easy as pie.
“I’m sure I’d be jumping for joy if I were some tourist with more caps to spend than I do gray- matter to think on.” Maybe, if he thinks hard enough, he’ll be able to accomplish both.
“It’s just to monitor your vitals.” Swank murmurs his way out of his vow of silence, fastening something on the defcon 1 eyesore’s underside. “They said the things-all inclusive. Heartbeat, head aches…”
Logs your birthday…
Brightening at the fleeting thought afforded, he tilts his wrist against the blinding sheen of the device’s screen. It doesn’t budge. He sends a glare Swank’s way, opening his mouth to hiss out one threat or another.
…
…well…?
His jaw locks, snapping closed.
Maybe it…doesn’t matter…
He shudders, lips schooling over his otherwise attempt at a ‘poised’, blankened expression. An odd wave of undiluted… something. Like a bighorner standing on its hind legs, a gecko turning down a meaty steak…
His brain itches.
The machine grinds in an aggressive, pneumatic hiss, tugging away his uneasy malaise. Hesitantly, he glances over to Swank’s hands, still toiling over his arm. His eyes catch a half blurred view, blinking in overt, irritated alarm, flashing out boldened letters he can barely make out clearly.
‘Genetic error, please return to–’
“--Don’t think this thing digs me, much.” Benny clicks his tongue, subtly pressing the device against the table’s surface. “Shame,” he tutters, trying his hand at a bumbling, twist of a yank. In response, the merciless device jerks. The cracked leather padding constricts further, trapping a big chunk of his dress shirt’s folded in sleeve under the padding crookedly.
He scowls, quickly reaching down to jam his fingers under the device. He pinches at the fabric sharply, tearing it from against his raw, sweat slicked skin with a low twitch of his eyelid.
“Good thing it doesn’t have feelings beyond red.” Swank says, poking at the ruby hued, glint-obstructed screen until it mellows back to a warm endless amber. He lies a cursory palm over the screen’s surface, wiping off imaginary dust with two swipes. Satisfied with the half assed inspection and cleaning (that Benny is thankful for, he would’ve bit Swank if he spat on it for the sake of a squeaky screen), he presses his back against his chair, bracing his hands on the table in front of them. “Copped us with an auto injector, too. Stocked it with Med-x if things get too bad, this button right here…just precaution’s’all”
Benny makes a face, “don’t need any of that shit.”
Uninterested in whatever Swank’s cooking up to convince him otherwise, he scans the new addition to his arm.
The off-white text contrasts with the barely glowing sepia backlight, featuring the winking sorry excuse for a cartoon those tin can dwellers treat like Jesus. The straw blonde, beady eyed freak featured on many-a-billboard with that tacky thumb fades out, replaced by a darkened, splayed out figure, his limbs sectioned off like not unlike a corpse. Crucified, maybe. Oh baby, maybe that cat really is some kinda old world god.
He’ll have to put some time looking into that one, once his temples stop beating in time with the little heart shaped monitor, pulsing wildly in the right corner by his thumb. And on the left…
The left.
A jumbled up string of words. A sentence. Short one. One word. He can’t read it at all. But it’s a word. A name? Maybe. That…it would make sense. Thing’s gotta belong to someone, whatever desecrated corpse Swank’s pretending he didn’t swipe it from.
Benny squints, sitting up in his rock-seat until his head shadows the screen’s entirety, honing in on it.
S...
He starts, then stops, choking down a grunt. The words shift again, still keeping the same form, but different in every conceivable way.
Frustrated, he leans further, sharp static tickles the tip of his nose. His brain pulses, straining for any sense of connection or coherency between any of the letters. Nothing.
He tries, harder.
Swank, Tommy, the Aces, the world itself fades, leaving only Benny and the letters. The letters, and Benny.
Still a load of nothing.
His eyes cross, spotting an E that might actually be an A or a weird looking C until he’s so unsure he forgets again. It’s another language entirely, one he’s known his whole life, but can’t, won’t, never, grasp. His eyebrows knit together along with the folding lines of his forehead. The mental equivalent of forcing a lock with an assault rifle.
S…I…L…
He gasps, cringing at the searing pain that greets his head in full force.
The head on the starfished false underground god blinks rapidly, outlined in a bleeding red.
‘Warning: Syn-ap-ic o-er-loa–’
Unprompted, the his unwitting halt on reality snaps. With the ferocity of a thousand shattered wine bottles and promises long broken, his ears strain. They ache down his ear right to the drum, bringing on a long, bleeding ring.
The low whispers and warbling conversations of the outer theater increase tenfold, rising and crescendoing into a flurry of nothing, and everything. Against his will, his mind splits to pieces, attempting to pick up on every last remnant of frivolous chatting and endless useless small talk. Benny’s vision swims. The little blinking man on the screen blurs, catching onto the stagelights overwhelming beams above him, mixing and intermingling until his vision is infested with a flatly bright, glazed over film. His temples throb wildly, overcoming and losing time with the endlessly increasing beat of that tiny pixelated heart. Soon, the name adjacent is lost entirely, burning his retinas in an endless string of useless letters. The dried lump in his throat waters, fit to retch up all the nothing he’s managed to keep.
“Shit–”
Silently, he keels over, head clunking against the table with a dismal thud. Cool, damp relief floods his forehead, balancing the world as if nothing happened at all. Weakly, his finger twitches, the pad ghosts over the back button with impossible intent, faltering.
He’s better than that.
“Say, you doing alright, there?” Tommy asks, oblivious.
“Just peachy.” He slurs with a prolonged breath of defeat, lipping at the boothside table’s tar tasting surface. Soon, he feels like he’s one with the wood entirely. He wonders what tree the wood came from, if it remembered the axe.
“You’ll need all the help you can get,” Swank pauses, not looking at anything in particular. Not the stage, the now quieted bumbling patrons, or him. Instead, his attention points downcast, eyes glazed over, knee rising and falling against the table’s bottom in a rhythmic thump. A thin, seethrough piece of cocktail napkin glides on the surface in a mindless spin underneath his fingers, wisping over Benny's face with every movement, “he almost iced you good, you know.”
“Take your word for it.” Benny says, not looking up. He turns his wrist, this time, gagging when he catches sight of the screen. If he wants an extreme life altering headache with a side of faint regret, he’s got better ways, starting with his room, a bender, and about thirty broads. Instead, he stares at the scratches on the dials and long clouded over plastic buttons glint under the shifting light, “h-how’d you even get one of these things…”
“Dono from ‘21.” Swank murmurs, voice uncomfortably low and swift. The napkin halts, his thumb comes up in a nervous pinch, warping the loose paper until it tears. “Seemed real concerned.”
The skin of his brow sticks against the table as it scrunches, and he never commits fully to raising his head farther than it takes to speak, “don’t say…what gives? Thought those shut-in’s hated sharing.”
“Doesn’t matter, I pulled a few strings while you were in the big nap.”
“Tell me about it. You got lucky.” Benny’s eye twitches. Something that’s nothing lingers off the crown of his head. Real lucky. Barely sobered, he lifts up, taking the journey back into a halfway decent posture fit for who he is, eyeing the now all too dulled screen with a wavering glare, “should’ve given it to Ca—“
Swank coughs, cutting the name off his tongue. “Look, I asked, and received. We don’t gotta go and talk about it more than we need to, okay?!”
“Wow.” Tommy says, choking off the better part of something mildly resembling a chuckle. Kind of. It’s a percentage less cooled than usual.
Benny smiles at that, guffawing at the strange look plastered on Tommy’s usually unflappable on a bad day demeanor, “tell me about it. You’re both acting like you took a trip to the cuckoo's nest and stayed for drinks.” He rises his finger, swirling it around his temple with a low, cooing hoot.
“If you only knew.” Tommy raps at the table with his knuckles, grinning back.
It’s his stage smile.
“We’re fine, Benny,” Swank says, a wave of exasperation crashing into his tone, coinciding with the pitiful deflation of his bearings, “the attack’s just got the boys shaken’s all.”
“‘That why none of them can look me in the eye?” Benny asks dully, his eyes catching on the lashes, flickering to his second in command disparagingly, “and shakin’s right. You gotta lay off the jet, Swank, I mean it.”
Swank sputters, jumping from his gloomy haze, “the hell?” It’s nearly funny, seeing him sputter like a kid caught with his hand in the chem box, “I haven’t touched that trash in years and you know it!”
“Bullshit. I saw you cozying up to that Gomorrah girl last week.”
“Gommorrah girl?” There’s a breathless edge to Swank’s tone, a lowering of the eyebrows that makes Benny nearly–just nearly–hesitate. Even in the darkened room, he can see the reddening of his ears. Too easy. “Benny, that was five y…”
“--Back me up, Tommy.”
Momentarily, the man in question turns his chin an inch, never truly sparing a glance from his clipboard, halting his leg, or leaving the shell at his ear be, “‘does look like he flew the coop, don’t it?”
“What’s your goddamn damage?!” Swank hisses in the man's direction, voice teeming with desperate exasperation to no real response or beyond a played off scoff.
Gone for a week and they’re already trying to ice each other out. Funny, it’s usually the other way ‘round with him and them.
“Calm the hell down’s what you gotta do; both of you! I’m the one that got…” Benny halts, lingering on the sentence.
He did get hurt, didn't he?
Yes. He’s not stupid.
There was a flash, he thinks. Blue, then nothing. Then…hurt. Yeah. Hurt bad.
His eyelids clench, his whole brain along with it in an attempt to recall anything of note. He grunts, stomach twisting as his head strains, then decompresses in a dull low ache, along with any thoughts he might have. Around then, he figures it isn’t worth the trouble.
He’s alive. Must count for something.
“Least I’m not hooked on that sugary junk.” Swank stiffly points his pinkie to the table, singling out the culprit of the dampened surface. A rocket shaped bottle, the paper straw already bloated and half jammed into the neck; undrinkable, ‘lest Benny wants a mouthful of ‘mache.
“Dunno, been on a kick with the stuff.” He says with fondness as his hand weakly wraps around the wet glass, tilting it back to take a barely registerable swig. The weak sizzling, barely there to begin with and muted by the papery filter soaks into the artificial swirl completely. He sighs at the barely familiar taste and texture, pawing at his chest for the sleek case and lighter tucked in his phantom jacket pocket, finding nothing. His hand grazes down the shirt, settling at his missing left pocket. Nothing.
A sense of panic flashes in his chest, quickly dampening moments later.
He shrugs his body's reaction off with a sigh.
Not the same, but it’ll do.
“And you call me the addict, you freak.” Swank says, no attempt to shroud the clear burning irritation dripping from his tone, “don't think I don't know why you're tonguing that thing, you hate plain Jane cola.”
“Not like you'll let me have anything else.” He laments dully, glancing over to the ashtray built into the booth’s center. The glass, still half clutched in his twitching fist, tenses. “Won’t you let me have one? Just a puff—“
“No. Doctor’s orders.”
“I’d rather be dead.” Benny sighs, imagining his corpse with a crisp cigarette balanced in his imaginary pallid, blue lips dust coming over from his poorly powdered cheeks. Some kitschy little parlor on the edge of town, hosting a guest list consisting of everyone he’s ever had the pleasure of bedding. Weeping, of course. The flickering lights, a eulogy by Tommy. Swank worrying over someone else for a change. And pair of warm brown hands; One bound with a twinkling stone on the fourth finger, lying over the casket’s edge in a soft, slow tuneless tap. The other dips, his lucky lighter clutched tight, but still revered.
The speakers hovering above whine in a sizzlingly whining feedback loop. An audible, sickened yelp slips from his throat, gracefully covered by the equally startled crowd and rapidly dimming lights. A small, near useless blessing for his still pounding head and endlessly sickened throat, still rapidly watering on the verge of nothing. It’s a mercy he begrudgingly takes, nonetheless.
“And next up for the evening, it’s the King Of…wait, hold on…The King Of..…bill…uh…night! Bill night!…?? The unwitting announcer stutters, nearly tripping over his own planted shoes.
Part of Benny dies along with the ringing, still fading from the very center of his ears. So much for a warm welcome. With ‘entertainment’ like this…maybe the parlor ain’t such a bad idea.
That kiss-ass? As if his night (day?) couldn’t get any worse.
“The script, Joey—the script!!!” Tommy cries to the unwitting announcer with a harsh pinch to the shell of his ear, his thumbnails scratching at the playbook in pure desperation, cut only by exasperated fits of helplessness, “kid’s gonna be the death of me…” he stands from his seat with an equally excruciating drag that loudly catches on every single tile and crack it passes, lifting up his arms in large pantomiming motions to the helpless chairman in training.
In training is an understatement. What’s a snot-nose like Joe doing up there, anyhow? Can barely lift his feet up the stairs on a good day.
The comedian strolls out with all the confidence of a skeevy used car salesman, a smarmy skip in his step, donned in the bright vomit-colored sweater vest he never bothers to change.
Who the hell hired that guy, and who the hell does Benny gotta pay to change that? Who thought it was a good idea to have two less than stellar excuses for jokesters in the lineup? ‘Least the ghoul doesn’t try to kiss his ass every other joke.
Swank muscles in with a harsh poke to his bicep, “Benny.”
He jumps. Something from within mentally slaps him for the thought. Did that assault really turn him into some kinda pansy? He’s been hit worse than whatever went and did it this time around, surely.
“Had another episode, didn’t you? Your head, I mean.”
Benny blinks. From beneath him, the wrist-watch-computer-thing dims to match, “another?”
Swank pauses, tongue pushing against his closed lips, “didn't lie about the chems being prescribed. None of the guys would hold it against you if you need a few doses. You’re no junkie.”
“Been through worse,” Benny says, and means it. What man would he be, abstaining all his life only to fall for something as meaningless as some unknown injury he’s recovered from in near full stride? “My face’s more important than getting rid of…of—whatever the hell that was.”
A fink. He thinks, That’s what.
“Face?” Swank pauses, lips on the verge of words that never come, mouthing over the humorous piano riffs and drum stings that slide off of every one of Knight’s half baked punchlines lost on Benny’s blood filled ears, pounding with each canned laugh, “what else do you got to prove?”
“Everything.” He spits, lips clenched to a sneer, his lower left eyelid hikes up, halving his vision.
Swank stares him down. Foreign, just nearly readable in a way he can’t for the life of him grasp. It’s fleeting, soon wiped off with one deflating eyeroll. Unfavorably, he looks Benny up and down, shrouded tired eyes lingering on the machine attached to his arm. He looks to the side, staring off into the crowd with a slow, arduous shake of his head.
“I heard our dear leader Benny’s finally outta the lurch–”
Benny’s ears perk up, catching onto Knight’s voice with a painfully annoying amount of clarity for his state. Great, now the smarmy fink’s gonna rake him through the metaphorical coals for the sake of comedy.
In an instant, Swank’s at attention, his face curdled, soured, and rotted. He doesn’t speak when he braces his hands on the table, not when he pushes off of it in a loud, teeth grinding drag, “cut the music!” He yells to the stage, fiercely uncaring of the faceless crowd.
Maybe Benny would find it funny, if he wasn’t so bewildered at the sight of his for the most part docile second in command being now painfully red in the face, shaking and trembling like mad. Pissed off…now, that would be an understatement if there ever was one, “show’s over, Billy, pack it up!”
“Aha…” Billy swallows, bouncing on his heels in some awkward pace of a gait before stilling again, much to the blurred mass's vocally awkward delight. “some jokes don’t land, folks… just like that has-been’s micro-beam to the boss's dome! (Did he just say that?!)”
“Billy!”
“Jesus, alright!” Knight shouts back, taking the last remnants of showman's flair with him. With a deadly look of his own, the low excuse for a joker drops the mic back onto the stand, storming off stage in a huff he can hear, even from his place at the near end of the theater, “Better get my pay…”
The grouped mass at the front tables still, murmuring amongst themselves. A big heap of silhouettes and nowhere voices, contained in one space bleating off conversations he can’t bear to hear in any regard, apparently.
Maybe that devil of a machine that still clings to his arm like wonderglue injected him with more than the mere threat of med-x. Mentats, maybe. Daytripper? Jet??? The hairs on his neck tweak at the thought, the pound of his head skipping three beats to a flinch. Some things are better left alone.
Tommy’s voice booms through the speakers, one hand on that shell to his ear, the other on the box now propped to his raised knee, “ain’t he a ham, folks? The cost of showbiz! Ammirite?” He jumps from his own chair, further breaking the uncertainty with his tried and true half dimpled smile; his own patented Tops damage control. Slowly, he strolls over to Swank, and with a bated, deceptively warm chuckle, launches a stiffened hand over his shoulder, glancing over the crowd, “Don’t wait up! The Lonesome Drifter’s on the hour!”
The audience, unsure at first, takes the tonal encouragement in stride, the conflicting voices of approving shrug and booing haws, mellowing out into gray, begrudging acceptance. Faintly, Benny wonders where the person starts, and the mass begins. After a while, they all become one, always falling into the same over tread characters. The high roller, low loser, alcoholic meek, traitorous rat…
A dull slam pulses in his ears. Swank comes tumbling to the table, the dice shaped cuff link flits about his wrist, clinking down with a dull twinkle.
Benny stares in blank wonder, the loose jewelry bouncing against his eyes. Something nags at him, as if he's forgotten something.
“Swanky, Swanky, cool it! You know I got things under control!” Tommy says, settling his palms over the table.
“Didn’t mind too awfully.” Benny starts, seeing his words dissolve to mush under the scuffle.
“Like hell you do! What right do you got, approving a script like that? Letting Billy go through with it in front of all those people!” Swank hisses over Tommy’s shoulder, smacking at the table with his closed fist. It falls wrong, bumping off the side in a painful thud.
“Ain’t bad by ‘zing standards.” Benny tries again for the hell of it, dragging his nails against the surface’s stickied sheen.
“Laughter’s the Top’s medicine—Torini prescribed. Customers get antsy if you don’t clear the air.”
“Ain’t gonna be any need for medicine if you go and sign his death certificate, early!”
“Chopped liver.” Benny grunts in defeat, strangely unbothered by the snub. With drooping eyes, he turns against the grain, blindly tweaking his fingers at the dial of his wrist with an experimental tapping. It vibrates once, so far attached that it tingles against his bones.
A high tuned, beeping sound rings in his ears. From below, the on his arm screen shifts. He knows better than to look.
He wonders, for a brief moment, who the previous owner is (or, was). Maybe they gambled the thing off, or sold it for 100 boxes of assorted snack cakes, or maybe, they really did have a bad case of heart bleed for the likes of him. Fascinating.
Fascinating…? Fas-ci-n-at-ing.
Stupid word.
Funny word.
He lingers on it, the tangled blob hikes upward to push against his teeth, lingering on other words that sound vaguely entertaining.
Flab-ber-gast-ed. Flum-moxed. Frat-ri-cide.
Coop.
His eyes narrow, swishing around blood and plaque.
No, Coup.
“—ole thing is downright cruel and you know it—“
Benny squints, watching Tommy’s mouth move along, the words not at all matching.
“Cruel?! He’s getting worse every d–”
He wonders if Swank ever gets tired of it. Being a stick in the mud, all day.
“--aybe he deserves to kn–”
And if Tommy ever gets tired of…well, tired doesn’t get tired of anything. Admirable.
He blinks slow, awkwardly curling his fingers inward. Ad-mir-a-ble
“--ead explodes and you’re respons–”
The fingers fall flat. Ex-plode.
Benny’s lips awkwardly close in on themselves, puffing out with an audible pop. His interest ceases.
Lazily, he eyes the homogeneous, shaded sea of people with vague disinterest, feeling tired.
He wonders if all those somebodies in the crowd ever get tired of being nobodies. Must be tiring, being stuck in that endless abyss of boring generic dull–
Color catches his eye.
Benny stops, his chin rising slightly. He squints hard, eyes crossing over the masses again in search of the glint, only to catch onto another. There, in a lone corner, cozied up right against the stage’s edge.
Platinum.
Compared to the masses with their blinking jewels and ritzy suits, they’re unbelievably plain, uninteresting by every possible metric. And somehow, they're the one he sees clearly. He blinks, finding himself ensnared only by the figure, bathed by the angelic flecks of a thousand starred pinpricks of light refracted from the rafters, bouncing from the umber of their skin up into the endless comfort of their unassuming tousled curls. Their shrouded visage burns into his eyes, blinding him to a muted blurred stupor.
His mouth moves on its own, cracking his lip’s dried center.
It's all so patently…Them.
His body jolts, sending a wave of tingling giddiness up his numbed thighs.
It’s them.
Who?
Someone who matters.
At, with growing, unknown curiosity, his shrouded mind fractures in a meek crack, parting with the slightest of ease. And this time, the misted veil lifts an inch. His heart catches in his chest curiously, filling with a staunch warmth that has him gulping around the swollen mass still lodged in his mouth.
A sense of overwhelming blanketed warmth that has his ears blissfully muffled drifts over, his mind strangely…sated. Quiet. Empty. Painless. Clear eyed for the first time in his life, clouded over all the same.
He breathes in, not bothering with the next, and sits slack jawed, until he sinks, half folded against the booth’s center. The angle blinds him entirely from the stage, the argument, their presence. He blinks rapidly and blissfully unaware of anything in particular, finding that none of it matters anymore.
Did it ever?
What was…
It courses beneath his skin, right beneath the pip-boy’s buzzing padding, wriggling with and pulling at his soul with a wistful, dejected tug, begging for attention he can’t give. A foreign, unobtainable, impossible sting.
A harsh voice strikes his center, crying out in pitiful, unheard agony. That fleeting feeling, in all its horrendously impossible glory.
Against gravity, his arm rises in a slow trudge. His palm feels iced as he holds it to the ceiling, reaching.
Reaching for them.