i see trees that are green, red roses too

[sonofasock]

soulmate meme ;
▸ post your character ◂
▸ you're now in a universe where destined soul mates exist! ◂
▸ rng for the type of au and for the ~situation~ ◂
▸ tag around ♥ ◂

type of au;

1. tats, your character has a tattoo of the first words the love of their life will say to them
2. familiars, your character has an animal tattoo representing their soul mate on them
3. glow, the first time your character sees their soul mate, their chests glow!
4. world in color, life is literally black and white, until you see your soul mate for the first time
5. choose your own, i'm definitely missing a milly because i'm lazy, pick your own

situation;

1. first meeting, you've never met this person before.
2. childhood mates, you've always known this person -- but on one particular birthday, everything changes.
3. together, you've been in a relationship for awhile now! happily wed or not, you decide.
4. not together, you've known you're soul mates for a long time, and yet have avoided a relationship.
5. choose your own, self explanatory c:

 

Comments

[wontgraham]

Will doesn't quite have to hop out of the way to avoid Rust as the other man comes back through to the living room. Rust arcs around him in a practiced loop, grabs the whiskey off the little table, and keeps right on going.

Will hadn't really been feeling self-conscious about undressing - he would've crossed over into the bathroom if he felt like he needed a wall between his modesty and Rust - but the way Rust's eyes respectfully never linger makes him oddly relieved that no one else gets to ogle at the Mark staining his right arm.

Or notice the scar from his old shoulder injury, for that matter. Although that makes Will realize that he doesn't think Rust would care enough to comment - or if he did, it would be with the sort of knowing nod that comes from a man used to seeing scars. Will's never been shy about the injury, but he usually feels a bit testy about the way it still restricts his use of that shoulder. Even as a theoretical exercise, it's soothing to think that Rust might just not give a shit, just take it as another fact to know and move on with his life.

Will's just decided he's not going to bother putting his belt on with these jeans when Rust's voice creaks over to him again. Will looks up, a smirk pulling surprised at his mouth. "Well. I wasn't going to be, until you went ahead and brought it up." He says it flatly, with no trace of even false offense, slowly circling back over to the chair he'd knocked over earlier.

He picks the folding chair off the carpet, pulls it back out so it sits up on its own, wincing a little at the reminder of his little tantrum just a few minutes ago.

He's pretty confident he can just sit back down with his coffee and not address it, though, and again: trust that Rust is just taking what happened as another fact of life, and letting them both move on.

[littlepriest]

Rust has turned around and is planting himself back on the bed, one arm draping over a knee with acute precision that only comes from years of practice -- and the other, holding the mug of coffee up to his face. He knows that's humor Will's trying at, and doesn't look the least bit startled, as he calmly sips his coffee.

He watches Will like a sleepy cat knows there's a human moving around in the same room as it. "I just didn't feel like having to go back upstairs, to be honest."

Rust can barely be bothered to reach for one of the books in a stack on the floor a couple feet away: from the local library, anything and everything he could find about pagan religions and deities with antlers.

He feels an itch to start reading them, but the knowledge of having company keeps him tethered to his coffee mug instead. It makes him glance sideways to the blinded window, only having to hear the rain to know it's still going on outside. Glance back to Will, taking a mental note that he could end up being here the whole night.

Which is fine, really.

Rust checks the cigarette in the ashtray -- no longer lit, but there's a solid inch left on it, and worth smoking. He sets the mug down to free both of his hands for the endeavor. "D' you, uh...wanna...talk about Lecter s' more?"

He pauses to take a few puffs off his renewed cigarette, coaxing the fire to hold on to the exposed and sightly ashen tobacco. "Or, you wanna talk about something else?" It's an add on, but not an afterthought: rather, a cleverly laid alternative, and really, Rust's true intention.

[wontgraham]

Does he want to talk about Lecter some more? Will's eyes close, eyebrows going up, mouth opening in a horrified pain that quickly recedes back into a self-deprecating smile. "You know, I think I've talked about him enough for the rest of my life?" He sits back a bit heavier in the chair, thighs each pressing against either arm of it, staring at his coffee. "Or at least until tomorrow. The after-I've-slept tomorrow, not... This is technically tomorrow, I guess." Nearly there, at least. Will barely cares enough to glance at his (weatherproof, or he'd be in trouble) watch and confirm that it's a few minutes past midnight.

Will looks over, watches Rust start his deposited cigarette back up again. The smoke curls into the room, a scent Will had never really cared for but apparently got adjusted to while he was busy dripping all over the man's carpet. The renewal of the scent is the only thing that reaches him, stuffy and hot and aching in his own chest.

The procrastinator's suicide. To be fair, Will thinks that phrase fits a lot of behaviors a lot of people have, to be fair. "Actually, yeah." Will sips his coffee, the only prop his habits are offering him while he sits in Rust's lawn chair in Rust's living room. "Did you want to explain why you've got a whole carton of those in your cabinet? I was looking for a spoon and found your end-of-days stash."

*

He doesn't mean to fall asleep. Will so rarely wants to fall asleep, even when he's tucked himself into bed at home, dogs on the floor by the fireplace.

Mud squelches under his feet, nearly sucking him in and catching his ankles. Will keeps walking, slow and steady, ignoring everything except what's ahead. The lake gathers around his feet and then under. Walking soft across the lake's surface, feet causing ripples and no more, Will comes to the center of the water and looks down.

His own corpse stares back at him, green and pale and eyeless.

Will jerks awake, eyes opening to a flurry of motion right in front of them. He realizes, after listening to them bounce off the arm of the chair, that his glasses just fell off.

He heaves a sigh, rubbing at his eyes with one hand, leaning the other elbow into his thighs while he rocks forward. He's pretty sure he wasn't talking in his sleep, and he didn't yell when he woke up, just-- startled breathing.

It's almost pitch-black, but Will thinks he saw what woke him. "Rust?" There's only slats of light coming in from street lamps outside. Even the distant kitchen light is off. In a room that's only newly familiar, Will takes a moment to orient himself. He clearly fell asleep in the lawn chair. Rust's bed is in this room. So, logically, Rust was turning off the lights and heading back over to...

Will's words come on the tail end of a heavy, grounding sigh. It's far from the worst nightmare he's ever had, and they've all been less gripping after the encephalitis was treated. He's already shaking it off. "Sorry, I didn't mean to pass out on you in your bedroom."

[littlepriest]

Rust notices, in between waves of silence when his thoughts capture him and pull him away from the shore of the present, that Will's consciousness is gradually fading. Sleepiness also comes in waves over him, like hypnotic lulls between small bursts of responsiveness.

The world works in waves, patterns. Heartbeats, the pattern of wave crashes, the rise and fall of the sun... It's natural. Exhaustion finally grasps Will and pulls him under the surface of sleep...

And Rust doesn't mind.

The guy needs it; he has been shy about sharing details about his mental health, but apparently sleepwalking hasn't stopped with the encephalitis and brainwashing. Something about turning over to setting his empty coffee mug on the table and seeing Will slumped and still in the chair comes to Rust in the form of mild relief.

Rust thinks he's going to spend the next couple of hours trapped within wakefulness -- he grabs books, his notepad, case notes, and sprawls across the floor just at the foot of his bed, intending to work.

It's maybe an hour later that he catches himself drifting. Sleep, real sleep beckons; it confounds the detective, almost draws ire from him as he forces his eyes open to re-read the same sentence in a well-worn paperback book another three times.

It must be Will's breathing: that deep, slow rhythm of lung expansion and contraction. It's the only sound in the room once the rain finally relents and lightens up to a gentle, crystalline tapping outside. Rust's eyes close heavily, lids dropped like two solid anchors into an ocean.

All right. Rust will reap the side-effects of Will's presence, asleep in his chair beside his bed. He can practically hear Marty's voice in his head, nagging at him like always, telling him how he needs to 'take better care of himself,' and yet, Rust feels much less reluctant to oblige than usual.

The lights in the apartment are out, save for the bedside lamp, when Rust drops down quietly onto his mattress. He lets his body relax, feeling aches and tension in his back that had been easier to ignore while he upright and much more awake. He lets his body take half a minute to sink into the bed, let the bobbing-rhythm of water-like waves rock his mind to and fro. Shit, he might actually get some real sleep tonight.

The stretch of silence, all in sound and air and gravity, is like a bubble so gently rupturing. For an unnaturally extended moment, nothing but the hum of space and waves dulls out every sound, until the clattering of equally tired raindrops slowly punctures the barrier of nothingness. Eyes heavily lidded and eerily still, Rust finally reaches up with incredible precision, fingers silently wrapping around the rotating swatch for the lamp. With a grinding snap, the light goes out.

The suddenness of a sound has Rust launching back into awareness -- he doesn't know if he's sitting up yet or not, only that he can simply feel his mind is spinning as it tumbles out of sleep. He has no idea how long his eyes were shut, but it seems like it was only a few seconds, given that his skin hasn't even had time to fully warm the surface of the bed where he's been laying.

Will's voice speaks his name, and Rust's hand clamors back for the light switch. "What-- what, what is it," he groans low and tiredly, rolled onto an elbow and looking around the room. Will sounded startled, did he hear a noise outside--?

The response he gets is an apology, for falling asleep. Rust sits on his elbow and stares at Will with glazy eyes, looking as though he's trying to fight being annoyed, and is only half-successful. "It's...fine. That's what bedrooms're for." Insert humorous counter-argument that this is actually the living room, yeah yeah, Rust knows.

A deep breath hisses into Rust's lungs as he leans back, free hand scrubbing at his eyes. "If I was really an asshole, I'd 've made you drive home... You're prob'ly safer sleeping here for a few hours 'fore you get back on the road."

[wontgraham]

The room is nothing but grey-on-slate until the light flashes on, and Will blinks away from the lamp with a wince. Even when he spares glances over as his eyes adjust, Rust is just a brightly-eclipsed silhouette in front of his lamp.

"Ugh-- jesus, that's bright." Will's squinting over the arm of the lawn chair, looking for his glasses. He fumbles them up and tries to hook them into a familiar pocket of his jacket and misses, which is how he remembers he's wearing Rust's sweatshirt.

"--As long as you're aware of what you're agreeing to, inviting me to sleep here." He stares down at the absent pocket, glasses in hand, and ends up just hooking one of its arms over the neckline of the sweatshirt, since it's the kind without a front kangaroo pocket, presumably because Rust isn't a college-bound girl.

But Rust is in bed, and the lights were all off, which means Rust just...went to sleep, some time after Will accidentally passed out on him. Rust, who has heard about the encephalitis and the hallucinations before, who must have heard about the sleepwalking since everyone at work still gossips about it, since there was actually a complaint filed several months back by a neighbor who was startled by Will standing in her driveway at 3am.

The room was deeply quiet, before. It's deeply quiet in between the spots where they talk, now. It's warm and now it's bright, but for the brief moment while Will woke up and was trying to shake the cobwebs of his dream, it felt like a barren cave. There's a certain comfort in that sensation of shared solitude.

He doesn't think he'd mind going back to sleep, is the thing. But that decision keeps catching on a snag from what Rust said. "I wouldn't think you were an asshole if you wanted me to clear out for the night, just for the record."

It's possible that talking about it more will just make it harder to handle. That a spotlight will bleach away any sense of normalcy in the fact that they were about to wordlessly share a sleeping space. But Will can't help but scratch at the itch of uncertainty under his skin, make sure Rust isn't going to change his mind about him if an unexpected incident wakes them both up a lot more unpleasantly later.