Chapter Text
1964
Lou creaked open the door with its cracking white paint, a few limp gray snowflakes melting in his curls. The top of a tall bottle protruded from the pocket of his corduroy jacket, and he carried an empty wooden crate in his arms. ORANGES, it read.
He nudged the door closed with his foot and set the crate down by the fireplace, full and orange with dying embers. "Cale! Firewood."
John emerged from his bedroom, wrapped head to toe in a giant, shabby wool blanket, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Lou smirked. "Man, look at you. You grew a winter coat. Like some fucking...bear or something. C'mere. Help me break this thing up."
Settling on the threadbare rug in front of the fireplace, John forced himself awake. "If I was really a bear, I wouldn't have to do this." He gestured vaguely at the crate, then glared at Lou, who was reclining with his legs splayed out, not helping, looking more comfortable than he surely was. "I would be asleep. Hibernating. That doesn't sound so bad." This was his second winter in New York, and felt colder and deader than the first, despite the renewed excitement of his friendship with Lou, new music, new ways of thinking, new drugs, or at least new ways of doing them. He pried a nail out of the corner of the orange crate with his longest fingernail.
"Aw, but I'd miss you, you fool." Lou smiled in what John supposed he believed to be a winning manner. "Reminds me. I brought you something, darrrling," he said, drawing out the word campily, taking the bottle of amber-colored liquor out of his pocket.
John bristled at the word darling. He almost said something like You wouldn't miss me. Or You barely know me. They had only been living together for around a week. But he held his tongue and gestured at the alcohol. "Where did you get that?"
"Oh, around."
"Did you pay for it?"
"What do you take me for?" Lou opened the cap and grinned, thrusting the bottle theatrically into the air. "To hibernation!"
John chuckled. Lou took a drink and passed the bottle. While John drank, Lou had a go at the crate. He tried to wrench a board off the side of it, but only got agitated and threw it down. "Damn it! You think we could just burn this thing as it is?"
"No, it wouldn't be right," said John, setting the bottle down. "You have to make--" he made a triangle shape with his hands-- "a little house. Like a pyramid. Traps the air, I think."
"All right, man, you're the boss." Lou shook his head in disbelief. "Why do you know so much about this shit anyway? You been moonlighting as an arsonist... man, the tabloids would eat that up. Remember that next time we need some cash."
John frowned and worked another nail out of the crate. "No, it's just that the house I grew up in didn't have heat either."
"Really? You know, you never talk about your childhood." Lou took another sip.
"You never talk about yours," said John, deflecting weakly.
"That's because mine was boring as hell and then they put me in the mental hospital." He said this matter-of-factly, as John had noticed he liked to do, because it tended to freak people out, not just the information but Lou's perceived indifference to it.
John was not affected in the same way. "So was mine."
"What, mental hospital and all? You're fucking with me."
Okay, all right, he decided, maybe there was an opportunity here, for some new connection between them. "It was just a hospital. But they put me in solitary confinement. They thought I might have meningitis."
"Oh."
"It was really, I think, an attack. A nervous breakdown. They told me I was yelling in my sleep and wouldn't stop."
Was that awe in Lou's eyes? Admiration? "That's fucked up."
John made a noncommittal noise and took another drink from the bottle.
"You do talk in your sleep a whole lot."
This was news to John. He turned his eyes away from Lou and pulled a third nail from the crate. "What do I talk about?"
"Nonsense sleep stuff, or about your life, music, I guess. But you mumble. And I'm pretty sure sometimes you're speaking some other language."
"Oh. Welsh."
"Is that it." Lou took a drink. "Tell me about that."
"What's to tell? It's your turn. Tell me something about your life."
"I don't know, man... I was in a band in high school called the Shades, get it, 'cause we wore shades, and we were all right, but when we finally got in the studio they told us there was already a band called the Shades and we had to change our name. So we changed it to the Jades, but then wearing the shades didn't make any sense anymore."
"The Jades," John said thoughtfully.
"Yeah, some special kind of rock or whatever. Wasn't my idea."
"That's what we're supposed to be doing, some special kind of rock or whatever!" John finally freed a board from the side of the orange crate.
Lou cracked up. "Words are supposed to be my fucking thing, man," he said, grinning. He moved closer to John and took up the crate. "I see how you're doing this, you gotta pull the nails out." He tried to get his fingertips around the head of a nail, but his fingernails were too short and he couldn't get a grip. "You're so fucking methodical about everything, how do you do it?"
"I don't know. I didn't think I was. I like chaos, but, I suppose, controlled chaos."
"You can control my chaos any time."
"What?"
"Nothing." Lou set down the crate and had another sip. "You tell me something now."
"Okay, ah..." Here's something that'll shock him, John thought. "I got high for the first time when I was seven."
Lou stopped trying to pry a nail out with his teeth. "What the fuck, man?" He looked intrigued, though not as unnerved as John had anticipated. "On what?"
"Opium. They put me in the hospital because I couldn't breathe. Fed me this cough syrup... it made me see things, things that weren't there. The walls had lungs and were breathing, sighing at me." He twitched his head. "I think it helped make me the way I am."
"I gotta thank it." Lou inched closer. "Why couldn't you breathe?"
"I don't really know. They told me it was all in my head. But it could have been the coal dust, or the rain and dampness."
"Coal dust?"
"My father was a miner, he would come home covered in it."
"Man." Lou took up the crate again and set it in his lap. Finding a nail that protruded a little from the wood, he slowly and tentatively worked it back and forth until the soft wood compressed around it and it was no longer stuck in so tightly. Satisfied for the moment, he picked up the bottle, took a sip, then held it to John's lips.
Lightning struck in John's eyes and he froze stock still. Gently, he took the bottle from Lou's hand, drank, and shifted his weight slightly to be just a bit further from Lou.
"You've really lived a whole damn crazy life without me, haven't you?" said Lou, trying to puncture the moment, fiddling with the nail in the crate but not dropping his gaze from John's dark eyes.
John put the bottle on the floor. His hand shook, making it teeter a bit. "Are you jealous?" he said delicately.
"Of what?" He was going to make John say it himself. He wrenched the nail around in a circle.
John chose his words carefully. He couldn't say what had gone through his head. "Of my damn crazy life," he settled for, tossing Lou's phrase back to him.
"No." Lou grabbed the bottle and drank, playing casual. "Except maybe the opium." Back to the nail, twisting it, worrying it. Lightning struck in his stomach.
"What, then?" To hell with it. "Do you wish you'd known me?"
Lou yanked the nail out of the crate. "What do you want me to say?" he said sharply, suddenly agitated. He tossed it onto the ground. "I'll say anything you want. Fuck, Cale, what are you trying to do!" This was not so much a question as a despairing cry.
"I'm trying to find out what the hell it is you want from me," John said harshly, "from this." He mimicked holding the bottle to his own lips. "You're toying with me."
Lou cackled. "You're the one mincing around all are you jealous do you wish you'd known me. Man, I don't want your coal miner's life!" I want your life as it is now, he thought but would not say. "I'll show you toying with you." Lou sat up, pushing the crate to a corner, raising up on his knees and looking down on John, who still knelt primly on the rug.
Lou grabbed John by the shoulders and shoved him down to the ground, and John let him.
"What's w-wrong with you?" John meant to shout, but his voice trembled.
He didn't really move, didn't fight, just lay there, and Lou was stymied for a moment before obeying his first urge: pressing John down hard against the carpet, laying close down against him, getting all up in his face, speaking in his ear.
"Nothing is fucking wrong with me except you. All that other shit, that doesn't matter. It's just you, Cale, your fucking fault I'm so fucked up." His breath was hot against John's neck. "I hate you."
That was the first time Lou had said that to him. To punctuate it, he ground his pelvis against John's in rough sharp thrusts.
"Get off me!" John twisted his body furiously and managed to wriggle out from under Lou. Scrambling backwards, he aimed a kick in Lou's general vicinity but missed. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Fuck you!"
A strange thrill went through Lou seeing John so agitated. His face was red, he was breathing heavily, his voice was deep and melodic, and his dark eyes glared brilliant daggers straight into Lou's heart. Lou felt the distinct urge to close his eyes, tilt his head back and sigh in ecstasy. He didn't, of course. But this riling John up business was more fun than he'd thought it'd be.
John stood up straight. Lou got up and squeezed his hands into fists. He stood there tense a moment, twitching, flicking his eyes around rapidly, looking for anything in John's face that would reveal his next move.
But all John did was stare at him. "I will never understand you, Lewis Reed." That hypnotic stare tore into Lou, wrenching something in him.
"You liar." Lou laughed bitterly. He picked up the orange crate and contemplated throwing it at John, smashing his face in with it. "Stick around much longer and you won't have a choice." John wouldn't look too bad with a black eye and a nosebleed, he thought. "By the way, call me Lewis again and I'll hit you with this thing."
"No, you won't, Lewis."
Well, now he had to. He hurled it at John with most of his strength. John instinctively put his hands in front of his face to shield himself. It crashed against his forearm. Ought to leave an ugly bruise, mused Lou. He wondered if he'd ever get to see it. Not likely with the cold these days. The crate skittered across the ground and stopped at Lou's feet.
"Bastard!" screamed John. "Motherfucking perverted bastard!" And without a backward glance he fled to his room and took up making long loud scraping noises, up and down a fucked up octave, on his viola. Lou spat at nothing and threw the crate haphazardly into the embers.
It didn't catch.