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myhandisempty · 7 years

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here’s like the only thing i could manage to write in the last few months (4400 words of ??? idek)

misunderstandings, arguments, belonging, and home

It begins with — of all things — bedsheets.

Fucking bedsheets.

Mox is still rubbing sleep away, pulled out of it only a few minutes before by something tickling the side of his face and neck — something he'd imagined to be soft lips and stubble, though by the time he'd blinked his eyes open there was nothing there — forcing his t-shirt from the night before on over his head. The hole sticks until he tugs insistently at the collar, warping the fabric to sit unevenly at the base of his throat. The birds chirping in the early afternoon sun outside the window are wearing on his nerves as he sits there, the dull ache on the left side of his head not easing away or pounding until he has to grit his teeth. Just there, just enough that he can’t possibly forget about it.

When the door creaks open, Leakee bursts through, looking about as flustered as he ever gets, and maybe that should have been Mox’s first clue, might have possibly understood what that meant, if he’d tried. But he ignores the way eyes distractedly pass over him in favor of sweeping over every other surface first, taking in the general cleanliness of the room despite Mox’s presence there.

“Could you make the bed?”

Mox snorts, rolls his shoulder with a stretch and groans when he hears a satisfying crack. “Yeaaaah. Get right on that.” Proceeds to not do anything of the sort when Leakee disappears out of the room again — has never made his own, at home, and he's not about to start now. The sheets look better this way, anyway, a little lived in, a little rumpled, like he can trace the creases and folds and the story of how they got there along with the two of them, follow the entire thing from point A to point B, map out the journey both through the fabric and in the corresponding bruises Mox will surely find scattered across his torso and sucked into his hip later when he looks.

Last night was the fifteenth, twentieth, one-hundredth time they've laid in this damn bed, bodies hitting the squeakiest box-springs in such a way that the sound must carry through the walls to an unwitting audience. It wasn’t the first time Mox has wished for something more, for Leakee’s moans to shift into something slightly sweeter if not softer, his name rather than the usual encouraging filth, for what few lingering marks he was able to leave behind to sink beneath the surface of his skin, for the arousal in Leakee’s eyes to melt into affection somewhere along the way.

It wasn't the first time he’s wished for something more, but it was the first time he’s wanted it so desperately he can’t breathe without it.

Mox has learned to thrive with endless suffocation.

Several more minutes of rotating joints and scratching at his stomach find Mox pushing off of the comfortable seat and heading toward the bedroom door, just as it opens again. Leakee takes in the relaxed look on his face, the general disarray of the linens, and the scowl that crosses his face is something fierce. “How long could it possibly take to straighten the sheets?”

Mox can hear his laughter before he even realizes it’s coming from him, grinning and waiting for Leakee to smile, too. “Since when’ve I ever straightened anything?” Leakee doesn’t joke right back, though, just pulls this expression that deepens every furrow and crevice on his face, one that has Mox digging in for firmer footing where he’s planted, has him anticipating a shove and the need to push back.

“For fuck’s sake, Jon,” — at the sound of his name, not in the way he wanted, his amusement evaporates like it never even existed, leaving nothing but resentment in its wake — “I asked you to do one fucking thing. Could you not be a pain in the ass for two seconds and help me out for once instead of making everything a goddamn joke? Are you just completely incapable of accomplishing anything?” But clearly, Leakee isn’t in any sort of fucking hurry, stopping in his tracks to pick a fight. He’s never in much of a hurry to do anything, but Mox means to show him how it’s done, go for the jugular right away.

“Oh, m’sorry,” Mox drawls, making sure each word drips with enough venom that Leakee can’t miss just how sincere they are. “Must have missed the part where it’s my job to keep your apartment all fuckin’ tidy when between the two of us, I’m the one who’s workin’ and you’re just sittin’ pretty, ridin’ on mama and daddy’s coattails.” And he really is sick, maybe, that it’s such a thrill to see the spark behind Leakee’s eyes that so rarely flares to life, to know he’s hit a nerve, that Leakee cares about what he’s saying, one way or another. It’s always been Mox’s intention to keep him hanging on every word.

A fist clenches, and even the birds go quiet — outside, a cloud passes in front of the light, Leakee’s dark mood spreading beyond the room, and Mox thinks if anyone’s larger-than-life enough to block out the sun, it’s him. “Leave them out of this.” It's low and cold, the way he'd perfected long before they ever met, and Mox laughs again, this time the edges of it curling and blackening in his mouth.

“Y’always say that ‘til it comes to their money, baby,” he spits. He's being an asshole, he knows, watching Leakee’s nearly imperceptible flinch, but something’s eating away at his chest, incapable of accomplishing anything, and Leakee’s wrong, he's wrong, there's one thing Mox has always been good at. “Think you taking it makes it yours? Fine. Your cash, your apartment, your shit to keep clean, leave me outta it.”

Leakee's jaw is set in a harsh line, the same angle Mox’s fist has knocked out of alignment on other faces one thousand times before. He seems to be having trouble forcing words out, and Mox would grin triumphantly if he didn't feel something like he was licking blood out from between his own teeth. Leakee’s stature, up until this point, had been enough to slowly have Mox backing up, and while he seems no less angry, now, his shoulders start to cave inward, glancing away for a moment before his eyes find Mox again. “I fucking thought — my apartment? I thought —”

His blood feels like it's vibrating, his entire body shaking with the force. “Yeah, your apartment! It sure as fuck ain’t mine! That’s not my fuckin’ bed! My things aren't strewn every-fucking-where” — Leakee might just have a heart attack, if they were — “look the fuck around you! Know whose shit I see? Yours! There's — there’so goddamn many things, and they're not mine. They're yours. Ain’t a fucking thing here that's mine!”

He's breathing so heavily, trying to blink past the red long since tinting his vision, that Mox nearly misses the way Leakee’s clenched hand slowly relaxes, slackening, the way his face slides flawlessly from one extreme to the other, could be carved from marble for all the emotion it shows. “Yeah,” he says, voice smooth and inflection dead, as if he could be having this argument with anyone else in the world and it wouldn't matter at all. Cold and perfect, Mox reminds himself, never should have expected anything else. “Guess I'm not, either.”

The bedroom door slams in his face, and Mox’s nostrils flare as his hand reaches halfway to the door, intending to rip it back open and give Leakee a few more pieces of his mind, ask what the fuck that comment was about and where it came from, but it's easier to turn and let his feet carry him in the direction of the front door, each step away from the peaceful wake up call he'd received not fifteen minutes earlier weighing like a block of ice in his stomach.

The fury lasts even after he walks through another front door, taking it upon himself to redecorate now that he’s living here alone, flinging anything he can reasonably lift at the wall, over and over again, until each thud and shatter against it no longer bolster the feeling of satisfaction in his chest. There’s a mess, around him, more things left broken than intact in the apartment, and Mox sits cross legged amongst the chaos, for just this moment finding a sense of calm.

It fades, of course; it always does, and his phone finds its way into his hands as if on autopilot, punching in one of the only numbers he ever remembers.

He doesn’t beg for a match. He demands one, pacing the short length of the living area until it’s all his vision, all his world narrows down to, this cage of a room and the voice on the line. If he mulls on anything else, right now, he thinks he might scream. Not tonight, they tell him, and the growl hasn’t even died in his throat before they’re speaking over his objections. Tomorrow. You know the time and place. Keep that edge. Come hungry.

Patience will never be his strong suit, but that, Mox can do.

He's voracious, tears into his opponents with all the focus and vigor he’s been saving for other things, nowadays — stands tall at the end, a single cut spilling red down his temple as he plants a boot on one of their chests, crouches down just enough to be sure his taunts are heard.

Mox expected to be soothed, comforted by the familiarity of it all, satiated, and maybe it worked, in some small way — he’s no longer angry by the time he returns to the apartment, still a wreck he can’t bring himself to clean up, but he doesn’t feel any better for it.

The laundromat around the corner is still the place Mox brings his clothes when they haven’t piled up on Leakee’s floor. Leakee’s picked him up in front of the building a few times, so Mox stops dead in his tracks outside the glass door when he sees a familiar angle of shoulders and head of hair leaning down to pull clothes out of the dryer.

The rage he'd felt fade in the last two days comes back with a vengeance, for a moment, because why the fuck would Leakee show his face here when he has his own washer and dryer back at his apartment complex nowhere near this part of town, when he knows Mox comes here — rarely, but he does.

And then it all drains out of him as quickly as it had flared up, leaving Mox feeling a cold ache in place of where something should be. There is always the chance that Leakee had been thinking about him, maybe wanted to say something but couldn't bring himself to pick up the phone, just yet, and Mox nearly wants to apologize because he can't get the dead look on Leakee’s face out of his head, eyes as empty as his chest feels right now. It's all at his fingertips, all he has to do is open the fucking door this time, but when Leakee turns it’s not Leakee, just some guy with stringy, greasy hair that looks nothing like his after Mox blinks to clear his vision, and he steels himself to turn away.

Because Leakee is probably sitting home in his apartment, not thinking about Mox at all, and he's not about to give Leakee the satisfaction of thinking he might be doing anything differently, whether the other man knows it or not.

It's just — he hasn't stayed in his apartment for awhile, now, and fuck, when he's alone at home Leakee is all he sees, the ghost of his presence everywhere, until his own place doesn't even feel like his, anymore. Until he's being made to share that against his will, too. Until he can't remember, doesn't want to remember, what it was like before.

—

He forgot what it was like to miss Leakee. Even after so long living in two separate worlds, only managing to overlap when it was convenient, somehow Mox came to take for granted the fact that he could head over to that apartment, barely a couple miles separating them, or have Leakee at his beck and call with nothing but his phone. A couple days bleed into three, three days stretch into five, and still.

Leakee doesn't call.

It would be a lie to say that Mox didn't expect to hear from him. This is hardly the first time he's had the door slammed in his face after an argument, but he never once anticipated that it could be the last.

He calls himself, eventually, because he's given it some thought, got it all figured out: Leakee will answer with some smart, scathing comment and Mox will laugh at the bitter taste it leaves in his mouth, swallow it down along with his pride and say, “Tell me we didn't break up over your fuckin’ bedsheets,” and Leakee’s face will do that weird thing the way he always tries to hide whenever Mox inadvisedly implies there's a together to begin with, even if Mox can't see it happen, and he’ll say “no, of course not, think we can salvage this,” and he might have to talk but at least he’ll see Leakee’s smile again after Mox wiped it off his face.

He lets the phone ring four or five times until the voicemail kicks in and it’s like whiplash, like a shot to the chest, Leakee’s voice on the line not directed at him or anyone in particular, bored and detached, telling him to leave a message that Mox already knew he wouldn’t. Mox has always been good at starting things, all swinging fists and the broken, chewed up glass that he spits out in the shape of words — despite talking a big game, has never quite been able to duplicate the same success with finishing them. He stays on the line, breathes through the splintering sensation in his chest, some small voice in his head telling him he has to see this through to the end. The beep sounds in his ear, though, as loud as the door closing on him, louder, and Mox wonders if this is the end.

He hangs up. Leakee will know it was him, anyway, doesn't matter what he'd say if he chose to leave a voicemail. This was so stupid, this whole thing was so fucking dumb, and Leakee will know it was him and pick up the goddamn phone that he's always playing with, and Mox will toy with the idea of asking him why did you want me to make the bed? Why were you so surprised that I called it your apartment?

Why did you say you weren't mine like it was ever even in question?

—

Leakee doesn't call.

—

Mox makes his own bed every day, after that.

It never looks quite right. He wonders if there's some sort of trick to it that he just doesn't get, a way to go about folding and tucking so it at least appears as if the different layers and pieces fit.

—

With each day that passes, Mox expects to look through the peephole of his front door and see a box that never materializes. He didn't think there had been much of anything of his at Leakee’s place, but little by little he finds himself continually missing something new, scouring his bedroom only to remember oh, that's hanging in Leakee’s closet or is thrown in the back corner of his dresser or is busy gathering dust in his kitchen cabinet, as if the two of them together had ever had a ghost of a chance at building something greater than the sum of their parts. Besides, that's what happens when people — when people — when they break up, right? They should get their fucking stuff back. Except, maybe it requires that their stuff, that they themselves, had ever belonged to the other person to begin with.

It's not — fuck, it's not like he doesn't want Leakee to be his, no matter how implausible the idea has always seemed. It’s not enough to just tell Leakee that he is, though, it’s not Mox’s decision to make, and if Leakee tells him that he isn't, then he isn't. If he doesn't want to be, that's one thing that, despite his best efforts, Mox can't strong arm him into. He'd sometimes thought, through his endless teasing, that there was a sliver of a chance he'd gotten lucky, stumbled onto something he'd never even dreamed of wanting, and occasionally fooled himself into believing Leakee felt the same way.

And, maybe at one point, he did. That’s the thing, though — temptation tastes much sweeter than the caustic twists and downturns of his scowl of a mouth, and Leakee was bound to figure that out sooner or later. Mox knows he's always been the sort of thing that's better to have when you don't actually have him, the ideation more than the reality can measure up to, and for months now he's been throwing himself with desperate, silent cries of keep me, keep me, keep me at someone who never had any real intention to. He's a phase to pass through, and while he was busy having the time of his life, apparently Leakee was busy growing up.

And still, there's no box, there’s no call, there's no closure, Mox’s chest a gaping wound that he doesn't know how to sew up on his own. He used to be so good at taking care of himself, at patching himself up. Isn't sure how to go about figuring it out all over again.

—

A day or two later finds Mox hearing his name called across a bustling bar, alone and three beers in with no plans for stopping anytime soon. He can't place the voice, and when he turns, bottle dangling loosely from his fingertips, the face is only just familiar enough to categorize it as one of Leakee’s friends. Mox can't slink out of his seat fast enough, but the guy follows him despite the clear not now, asshole vibes he's trying to relay on all frequencies.

“You seen him around? Leakee?” Nameless Goon asks, and fuck, why can't he just learn to ignore things he doesn't want to look at? Why does he have to bite at every little thing?

“Do I fuckin’ look like I got a leash on the guy?” It's said with a sneer, like it isn't the other way around entirely, the tail-end of the tie wrapped ‘round Mox’s neck flapping in the breeze, unsure of where to go now that the grip that should be holding it is gone. His hand twists up and around to allow him to chew at his thumb, because Mox is pathetic, he's not leaving now and they both know it.

The guy — Mark, Matt, doesn't matter and Mox doesn't care — shrugs, a bit taken aback. “Isn't like him to ignore messages unless he's back home, but I never heard he was going back,” and Mox laughs at this poor, sad sack, like he has any clue what goes on behind closed doors, Leakee always rolling his eyes at any barrage of texts when he has better company to keep.

Then again, it's not like Mox knows what sort of company he's keeping nowadays, now that he's not a better option — or, apparently, any kind of option at all. “Wouldn't know, an’ I don't care,” he mutters, but that sharp glass normally present in his words is worn down into dust, and he can't pretend he doesn't, even the friend eying him skeptically.

“Whatever. When you see him, just tell him it's been awhile.” There's a moment before he realizes, a split second where all he does is nod his head in distracted agreement before the guy walks away, and then Mox laughs at the assumption of when rather than if, the sound of it punched out of him so sharply and unexpectedly it comes out a little broken. His hand grabs at the wood ledge on the wall behind him, keeping him upright in the dusty, dim back hallway while the rest of his body doubles over, the noises he’s making sounding wilder and wetter until he pulls himself the fuck together. He’s not doing this, he’s not losing it in the back of some run-down bar filled with the same sort of washed-up losers the entire world’s been promising him he’ll be.

Mox belatedly realizes he still has his bottle in his hand, fist strangling the neck of it. He’s exhausted with sulking, sick of feeling caught between the rock of lashing out and revealing too much emotion and the hard place of doing nothing, letting the one thing he might care about more than wrestling slip through his fingers. Because wrestling is what he goes out and does, what he loves, but Leakee is what he comes home to, the life that fills in the moments behind that, doesn't know what to do with all that space left behind.

He downs the rest of the beer, pulls his hood over his head and finally makes a fucking decision — Leakee may not be his, but he's damn sure gonna try to sink his teeth in and hang on for as long as he can.

The downpour outside matches his mood as of late, but even that isn't enough to deter Mox — sloshes his way through gathering puddles and gets caught under a gutter that breaks and dumps its load all over his back at one point, but if he treats the soaking clothes as part of whatever penance he's paying for being a dick, well, could be worse.

That doesn't mean the trudge to Leakee’s place is anything but miserable.

When he pounds on the front door, it's a while before there's any answer, Leakee eventually pulling it open just to stare at him. Mox hates the accuracy of the nickname he'd chosen for him, hates that after nearly two weeks of no contact he's almost too bright to look at, hates whatever complicated thing his face does because he's sure it can't be good.

“Did you swim here?” It's nearly a scoff, Leakee looking disgusted with him, and Mox hates that he loves that, too, that any attention from him, good or bad, is better than none.

“Are you lettin’ me just soak into the hallway? Management ain't gonna appreciate that very much,” and there's a touch of a scowl around the edges of Leakee’s mouth but apparently Mox’s point was made, tugging him into the apartment a little roughly, which is probably deserved.

There's a towel being shoved at him before Mox can even process anything else, starts stripping out of the wet clothes because they've been here before, knows how this goes, and if Leakee isn't going to say anything then he certainly doesn't want to be the one to bring it up.

That doesn't last long, though. “Didn't expect you to be showing up anytime soon,” and it's all Mox can do to bite back the bitter words, yeah, well, you don’t want me to, don’t want me, as he attempts to dry his hair, raising the towel to see Leakee sitting on the arm of the sofa, his own arms crossed, staring him down.

“Y’know me, always inconvenient.” There’s a distant sound of thunder that rattles a bottle on the coffee table in its place, Mox’s eyes drawn to that for a second before he looks back at Leakee, mouth drawn in a grim line, and now’s just about the time when his stomach starts to sink. “I'm— I didn't mean—”

“You picked a good time to storm off,” his stuttering is interrupted, thank fuck, Leakee’s eyes boring into him, though he's instantly wondering what's meant by that. Isn't kept waiting too long, “My parents arrived about fifteen minutes after you disappeared.” And that...answers some questions that Mox had, but that's not exactly how it went.

“‘Scuse me, sunshine, think I recall havin’ a door slammed in my face,” can't forget, actually, those last thirty seconds replaying in his mind over and over again every time he's tried to sleep since.

“I figured you wouldn't want to be around to see them toss some more money at me.” And Mox tries not to cringe at that, the sound of Leakee’s voice and the way his face screws up even now, no longer in the heat of that argument, and anger is a lot easier to reach for than shame.

“Yeah, well, past experience says they wouldn't appreciate being joined for high tea or whatever by your fuckin’ low life b—” Mox manages to cut off the word just barely, because they aren't, they're not, they never have been and this is all about sex anyway and that's never going to happen, is it.

Leakee doesn't bite, though it looks like he wants to, eyebrows raised before he shakes his head a little. They're not talking about it, apparently, about the train wreck between them, and his heart is warring between being relieved and disappointed in that. Mox tries to stifle a sneeze in the silence between them, before he's up and herding him towards the bathroom. “Take a hot shower, don't want you getting sick,” and before Mox can feel too squirmy about that concern, he tacks on, “Don't want you getting me sick.”

The water’s running, fogging up the mirror, Mox just having stepped under it when he thinks he hears over the spray, “Don't want you to leave, again, either,” but when he pokes his head out from behind the curtain, Leakee is nowhere to be seen.

And it was all too little too late to avoid illness after all, Mox laid up in Leakee’s bed for a couple days and not in the good way, the way Leakee hovers nearly stifling in its unfamiliarity, but Mox can't help thinking about coming home, how this feels like the first time he ever has.

#fic #moxlea #i'm begging you to keep on haunting me #i lost all motivation at the end but i didn't want to not finish it

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