Despair: A Love Story (Brimstone, NC-17)
Nov. 24th, 2003 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
buggeryFor the Spike's birthday. Contains content some readers may find disturbing, beyond what's simply par for Brimstone fiction. Other notes follow the story.
"But if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" --Matthew 5:13
"Blasphemy is a seasoning like any other." --the Jack
Zeke had had plenty of time to worry about what would happen once he finally sent all hundred and thirteen escapees back to hell. The Devil wasn't exactly known for keeping his end of bargains; it might have been lifetimes since high school, but he hadn't forgotten the plot highlights of Faust. He'd lain awake pondering different ways the Devil could have tricked him with ambiguous wording, until his imagination had given out, and then he'd just thought about all the possibilities he figured would simply never occur to him. Ezekiel Stone might have his devious and dishonest moments, but he had nothing on the Prince of Lies.
In the end, though, he wound up being so absorbed chasing down the last of the damned, and then fighting to keep her from sending him back instead, that he forgot his nagging worries about how he'd be rewarded until after her eyes shattered -- and doing it by hand never, ever felt anything like punching through glass -- and then he remembered the other reason he had to be afraid. He watched Hell reach up and drag one last soul back down, dread climbing up his spine with leisurely layovers at his gut, his chest, his throat.
The lightshow ended, and a sudden silence fell. Zeke stood up on unsteady legs. He was panting so loudly he almost didn't hear the dramatic sigh. "I'm going to miss you, Mr Stone," the Devil said as Zeke turned. He was dressed in head-to-toe black; he looked like a pallbearer. Zeke opened his mouth to say so, when he felt the familiar agony of the last tattoo burning itself from his skin, and the words were lost in his grimace. The Devil blew him a kiss, looking genuinely pained.
And then the agony spread through him like hellfire, making him scream--
--and he was face down in an alley reeking with garbage, puking up God only knew what, because it surely didn't look like anything he could have actually eaten. Finally the spasms stopped, and he clambered up, backing away from the steaming mess. He was shivering, he noticed, and then he realised he was freezing cold. Clutching his coat tighter around himself, he staggered out of the alley. Across the street was a McDonalds, all glowing lights and fryer vents blasting the smell of hot french fries out into the night.
Zeke ordered two Big Macs, two "super-sized" fries and a coffee. He'd bolted the first sandwich and most of the fries down before he realised how hungry he was. Not just craving food, or wanting to eat out of habit, but genuinely hungry.
He was alive.
The shine wore off his newly-regained status as a mortal all too quickly. It had been just before eleven when he'd sat down to dinner at the McDonalds, and he'd had no interest in staying where the employees glared at him like he was some homeless bum there more to be out of the elements than to be a paying customer, so he got a refill on his coffee and left. The bar next door was, perhaps, no more welcoming, but sufficiently apathetic to his presence. By the time he pulled his wallet out again, he was almost drunk enough not to notice that his daily allowance was no longer being replenished. That had drained away all the enjoyment of finding that he could indeed get drunk again.
He was in Manhattan: back where he'd started, although he wondered how precisely accurate that was. The McDonalds menu had at least told him it was no longer the eighties, its decadent deep-fried apple pies having been long since done away with to make room for stuff like the McVeggieBurger.
Regardless of what the food was, though, Zeke still had to be able to pay for it. As it happened, in New York City, there was always work for a strong-backed man with no ID and no experience he could lay claim to who needed to be paid the same day. But it was never pleasant labour.
"I'm sick to death of rat-trap motels and flophouses," he muttered to himself as he climbed the last flight leading to his eighth-floor-walkup room, and wound up laughing so hard he had to sit down right there on the step, laughing himself sick. And then he really did get sick, with his neighbours pounding on the shared bathroom's door when it took him too long to bring enough up to quell the nausea and the heaves. At least it was normal vomit by now. It had taken days for his other bodily functions to normalise, which he supposed was pretty fast recovery for a body that had been dead two decades. The things that had come out of him that first week had been downright hellish -- to see, to smell, to expel.
And now it was weeks later, and what had he done with himself? Now that he needed food and drink and sleep again, instead of just wanting to go through the motions, most of his days were taken up with earning the money he needed to satisfy those needs; and yet that wasn't quite excuse enough for his aimlessness. Zeke Stone had always been a self-directed kind of guy, but the return from death that had been his ambition, once achieved, seemed to have left him rudderless.
It wasn't just his ambivalence over Ros, either. He'd come to the point where he could be glad she had such a rich life now. She had always wanted kids, and now she had two, and a marriage that made both her and her new husband happy. He was mostly glad about it, most of the time. Even if she had kept pining over him and stayed alone until he could have come back to her, he was a lot younger than she was, now, physically at least. And that was the least of the problems that would have attended any attempt to resurrect their relationship.
On top of all that, as far as he could tell, he still didn't officially exist. He'd found the time to go look at his own gravestone, to check the records that showed he'd died in 1983, to match the fingerprints he wore now to the ones in his file. He might be alive, but that left him in a whole new kind of limbo. And this time there was no explanation; no guide, however annoying, to explain what exactly Zeke was supposed to do with himself. He almost missed having depraved damned souls to hunt down, though the day-to-day grind wasn't leaving him any time for playing vigilante even if he'd been inclined to.
He almost missed the way the Devil himself always used to show up and deliver obnoxious commentary on Zeke's handling of his afterlife.
The hell of it was, Zeke kept thinking he was seeing the forked-tongued bastard. Something would catch his eye -- a suit of a certain cut, or hair in a certain style -- and he'd be sure he'd seen the Devil until he looked again, closer, and it was always just someone who bore a passing couture resemblance. After the first few days, he knew he wouldn't be seeing old Scratch any more, at least not while he stayed alive -- and if he kept his moral balance sheet in the black. Mortals had tended not to be able to while Zeke was still dead, so it stood to reason that he couldn't now that he'd rejoined the ranks of the living. Of course, all the intellectual certainty in the world didn't stop his gut from insisting yes, that was Lucifer back there (if Zeke would only look) several times a day, every day. It was as bad as having him actually be there, in its own way.
He felt like he was being watched a lot of the time, too. Being in New York as he was, some of the time that was true, and oftentimes it was even some half-mad street person with a sermon to deliver about the state of Zeke's soul, or a warning about the demons coming to kill him, or some other message God entrusted only to schizophrenics. But even in the City, there wasn't always a convenient crazy to blame for the neck-prickling sensation of being observed. Zeke hated feeling paranoid.
And then there were the dreams.
Sometimes they were relatively innocuous, the Devil just standing in for Zeke's own subconscious to berate him for letting the forces of Heaven and Hell play him like a pawn and then dump him in an alley like so much garbage. He'd dream that his co-worker at the loading docks was the Devil, and he'd have to listen to his smug condescension through the whole shift. He'd dream he still had escapees to return to Hell, and the Devil was still dogging his steps, turning up at his table when he ate, appearing in his bed when he slept. Or he'd dream that he'd never died at all, but the Devil was his new next-door neighbour and kept trying to seduce Ros away from him... or, sometimes, Zeke away from her. Sometimes the dreams weren't innocuous at all. He'd dream he was back in Hell, and wake screaming. He'd dream the Devil was going down on him, eyes burning into his and mouth burning around him, and wake screaming for entirely different reasons.
After those dreams, Zeke would wipe himself off with his one ratty hand towel -- or, if he hadn't come in his sleep, he'd finish himself off, rationalising that he couldn't be bothered to go down the hall for a cold shower and couldn't get back to sleep with a hard-on. Then he'd lie awake anyway, and think about the two times the Devil had actually kissed him.
The second time was more of a Judas kiss, a distraction right before the last of Ashur's co-conspirators had ambushed him. The first kiss was what he could have blamed the dreams on, random as most of the Devil's appearances. Zeke had been startled enough that he hadn't pushed the Devil off, hadn't jerked his own head away, even when that inhumanly sinuous tongue had twined around his own and sucked for the briefest moment before his tormentor made another of his trademark abrupt disappearances. In the darkness, in the certain solitude of his new life, Zeke could admit to himself that he might not have moved to escape that kiss, if it had gone on long enough for him to get over his reflexive shock and react to it.
When he walked through certain parts of the City, now, he got... looks. Not imagined ones or crazy ones, and not often from women; looks that were part inventory, part offer, all assumption of something he didn't want to admit could be showing to anyone else when he was only just on the cusp of showing himself. Some of the looks came with suggested retail prices, and those were easy enough for Zeke to discount. Only sometimes the appraising looks came from guys wearing a certain cut of clothes, a certain length of hair, and Zeke found himself wondering, heard his own inner voice remind him he did have cash enough to spare now, ask him what the harm would be. And he never did more than return the looks, but he started to imagine hearing a faint, sweetly bitter echo of familiarly mocking laughter. So he looked more.
Eating brunch at the counter of a greasy-spoon diner after an all-night shift that commemorated his third month back on earth, Zeke felt the absence of presence on the stool beside his own like a column of ice, a thermal negative of the Devil's infernal heat. His soup-spoon fell into the gravy spilled over his instant potatoes and country-fried steak, and he had to lick it off himself, eyes snapping suddenly open when he realised he was making as leisurely and sensual a production of it as the Devil himself would've done. Nobody in the half-deserted diner was paying any attention, though. Appetite gone, Zeke pushed his plates away and stood up. He looked around for the waitress, found her in a corner of the smoke- and grease-soaked place that was amazingly darker than the rest of the dump, bill pad in one hand while the other tried to pry loose the grip some drugged-looking creep had on her waist.
It felt so good having a legitimate excuse to hit somebody. Zeke didn't realise how much he'd gotten into it until he felt the waitress pulling on his free arm, and his head cleared enough that he could see the guy he knelt over was already out cold. He startled back, away from the slack, bloodied jaw, and wound up knocking the waitress down with him.
"Sorry," he said, turning to offer her a hand up. She looked like Ros might in another ten years, if she had never had love in her life, just the endless grind of life wearing away her spirit. The woman snapped her gum, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. Zeke looked down at the rest of her, the faded uniform, the support hose that hadn't prevented rich lacings of varicose veins. He could put his hand on her thigh for balance, on her ass to help her up, brush her breast once she was back on her feet, and she'd never object, maybe never notice.
Taking a deep breath, he kept his hand where it was until she clasped it, and they struggled up together. Zeke looked down at the man he'd beaten unconscious. "We should call the cops," he heard himself say.
She was shaking her head. Marilyn, her crookedly-pinned plastic badge named her. "Naw, that only makes him madder the next time he comes in. Just drag him out to the alley." How had he not noticed when he'd ordered that her voice was as deadened as her eyes?
The guy was meth-junkie thin, easy to manhandle down the diner's concrete steps and over to the mouth of the alley, where he wouldn't be close enough to the diner to drive away any more business than the alley itself did. His wallet was an obvious bulge in the guy's leather coat. It was a nice coat, nicer than what Zeke had been making do with. Too big for the guy, which meant he'd probably stolen it, from a store or from somebody like Marilyn without the wherewithal to fight the scumbag off. The wallet was conveniently in the coat. Any New York cop or ex-cop worth their salt knew where and how ID and credit cards could be offloaded. There was a good chance there'd be cash in the wallet to cover the guy's bill and a generous enough tip to make up for his behaviour inside. He'd only spend his money on more drugs, anyway -- and Zeke gasped, because that last thought had not been in his own mental voice.
Leaving the guy with his wallet and jacket intact, Zeke went back into the diner long enough to lay down a twenty for his own bill and hurried back out to the street and the wind's chill embrace. He'd been planning to fit a nap in between the overnight shift and his day work, but suddenly sleep was the last thing he wanted, so he just walked. Then he worked all afternoon into the evening, his bruised knuckles throbbing whenever his hand flexed, walked the dozen-odd blocks over to where he had taken the sketchy moonlighting job, worked through the rest of the night. A support beam painted a particularly bloody maroon made him twitch when he passed it, his peripheral vision processing the pillar as a red-clad figure every time. The way the light glinted off a certain broken pane of glass looked entirely too much like a crooked smile of the same shape. He kept seeing lounging, leaning, looming Devils in irregularly-shaped shadows. By the time the job was finished, Zeke wanted to close his eyes, cover them with his palms, which would probably look like he was simply tired to the rest of the crew but damn them anyway. He grunted a short, humourless chuckle.
For a moment, an instant, the solicitous hand on his back felt perfectly long and bony; it even seemed to warm him through layers of clothes and winter-numbness supernaturally well. When he turned, though, his own hands falling away from his face, of course it was just one of the guys he'd been working with. Full of too much youthful energy, although he didn't look like he was actually that much younger than Zeke appeared. The dark hair falling from its center part to frame the narrow face in shoulder-brushing curves made him seem younger, while a closer look at the jaded cast to the serpentine eyes banished that first impression. The guy's cheekbones were improbably high, seeming almost to strain at the skin. Zeke tried to remember his name. Nick?
"Everything all right, Mr Stone?" he asked, voice liquid-dark as oil, and Zeke felt painfully grateful for the muffling layers of his thermals and jeans as his dick twitched and swelled. He just nodded, mouth gone dry and tacky with the aftertaste of eggs he hadn't eaten, and fled.
When he did finally sleep, that morning, his dreams were undisturbed. Zeke woke haunted by the lack.
He started to seek out temptation, to crave standing beside a sleek car he'd like to take for a joyride or some scumbag skel who richly deserved a beating until he imagined he could hear a slickly-smooth voice enticing him to give in to his baser nature. He spent so much time walking certain streets, looking, that he stopped getting looks in return when the trade recognised him as the type who wasn't buying. He found other streets to do his walking on.
On his way to another one-night-only special shift, crossing through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, Zeke discovered an unexpectedly tempting lure. Everything about the area was upscale: the buildings, the cars, even the trees in the sidewalk planters. It all looked so legit that it took him half a block to realise that everyone else on the street was a pro, or shopping for one. He let his gaze linger too long on one guy, and got caught looking. With his elegant ponytail, three-piece suit just a touch more flamboyantly than datedly vintage, and manicured nails shown off in a studiedly casual gesture, he almost looked more like a pimp... and yet clearly, he wasn't. Especially with the way he looked Zeke up and down, and the way he smiled. Zeke found himself returning the smile, even if it was just the merest curl of his lips. The hustler was pretty in a way that had nothing to do with femininity, enticing in ways Zeke wanted never to acknowledge. He resented the fact that he had to keep going if he was going to make it to that job on time even as he was grateful for it, and didn't consider just blowing the work off for more than a couple of minutes once he got there.
His dreams after were full of a Devil alternately taunting him, stripping and spreading for him, quoting prices to him. Zeke hadn't had so many wet dreams in one night since his teens, and he didn't even have a full night's worth of sleep to fit them into before his alarm squealed, reminding him he had precious little time to dress and eat before his day job.
There was no special overtime on offer that night. Zeke thought about going straight "home" -- and there was an uplifting thought, the fifth-floor walkup he'd recently moved to with its private bathroom and space for bed, table and chair still being a decrepit, roach-infested hellhole -- he was exhausted from the two shifts of work with only a few hours of unrestful, interrupted sleep in between. But his feet were already taking him in another direction without waiting for his decision.
To his relief and disappointment, the pro who'd caught his eye wasn't around when Zeke arrived at the street he'd passed through the night before. He made something of a show of looking around, then went back the way he'd come, around a corner to a bar whose shingle promised pub food. Eating an overpriced greasy sandwich and overpriced soggy fries didn't kill much time, so he chased his first beer with two more. He pondered going ahead and getting drunk, pondered how much more he'd have to drink before he'd start swinging at men unprovoked or pushing women against the wall until they fought back or attracted defenders. He considered skipping out on the tab, decided flashing his roll of hundreds as he paid it had the potential to bring much more interesting results. Inflated as the prices were at the place, there was no way he'd make an appreciable dent in his pocket money there without buying rounds for the house; Zeke had come this way prepared to be well and truly tempted.
Nobody seemed to be following him, but Zeke saw the guy with the ponytail as soon as he rounded the corner, and lost interest in picking a fight. Lounging against a brownstone's banister, he wore a long leather coat, matching fedora and suit even more fey than what he'd had on the night before. He looked up as if feeling Zeke's gaze, and smiled; instant recognition. Up close, he smelled freshly-showered, with just a hint of expensive cologne. Zeke wondered what he'd expected: that a high-rent whore would reek like a sleazy whorehouse? Money paid for all kinds of differences.
"You came back," he said, voice a soft, wrong tenor; but the knowing smirk, the mischief glinting in the dark eyes, the way he traced an idle finger down Zeke's lapel, were perfect.
Zeke's mouth worked, unable to settle on an expression, much less a verbal answer. He'd been hard before the guy had touched him, and he felt lightheaded from how much blood was still flowing south, or maybe that was the beer he was feeling. He shifted uncomfortably, and that was a mistake; the wantonly possessive hand teased apart the flaps of Zeke's overcoat, stroked a single finger down his fly as nonchalantly as if it was his lapel.
"Mmm," he purred, "is this for me?"
"I," Zeke began, and he almost didn't recognise himself, but he felt his own throat and mouth working around the sound. It is abomination for a man to lie with man, the familiar voice seemed to murmur in his ear, and Zeke had never believed that God-hates-fags crap, but he'd learned since his death that the Almighty was a lot less forgiving than most people liked to think. His dick flexed like it didn't care, or like the threat of damnation was just one more turn-on. "I can't do this," Zeke blurted, "I'm sorry." He yanked the hand away from his crotch, yanked again to let it go when his fingers wouldn't open, and all but ran down the street.
Bringing himself off in his own bed back at his new apartment, Zeke wondered how much of a sin masturbation was, and the stray thought was all it took to push him over the edge, grunting and gasping and gunking up his hand. He blinked. "Do you want to go back to Hell?" he asked himself under his breath. It had been meant as rhetorical, but saying the question aloud forced him to realise he didn't know; and maybe that was an answer in itself.
If he dreamed that night, he didn't remember, waking with nothing but a dim and fading sensation of melancholy, of having lost something precious and forgetting even what it had been.
He didn't have time or inclination to dwell on the feeling. He'd overslept, and the errands he'd planned to do before work would have to wait. Finishing his shower, he toweled off, lathered up to shave, then stopped, staring at his reflection in the age-flecked bathroom mirror. It hadn't stopped seeming strange that he still looked a mere thirty-something. He wasn't used to seeing his upper body unmarked yet, either, and he thought about replacing some of the runes with mundane tattoos. Didn't the Bible say something about it being a sin to dye the skin?
Zeke shook his head at himself. He was doing the things he was doing to prove he could resist temptation; wasn't that the whole point? He could remember the torments of Hell, the way you remember dreams, incompletely and through heavy filters of conscious interpretation, or the way you remember that stubbing your toe hurts and yet you always yelp in shock and pain when you do it, stunned that it hurts quite so much. Of course he didn't want to spend eternity in agony, denied even the release of having lungs to scream with.
"And what if I'm going back anyway?" he asked the haunted-looking guy in the mirror; and that was the question, wasn't it? Had the escaped souls he'd sent back earned him cosmic credits -- or demerits -- or was he back where he started, with a murder to atone for on top of all his venial sins? Zeke scowled. "I'm not going to be late for work. I know that's not a sin."
The day's labour was surprisingly therapeutic, in its own stinking, back-breaking way. There wasn't much room left for existential crisis when you were choking on the stink of carbonising metal and trying to focus enough not to send your arm into one of the presses. Not that his brain didn't try. But the fourth time he nearly lost a finger put the situation neatly in perspective; the state of his soul could wait until a time when he wasn't surrounded by potentially deadly machinery whirring and squealing in full, uncaring automation.
Which thought just brought whole new levels of meaning to the term gallows humour.
Zeke spent the rest of the shift trying to keep the grin off his face. Not that smiling in general would be completely out of place; he couldn't actually see himself, but somehow, the way his lips wanted to peel back from his teeth just felt... cracked. The kind of smile even the most trusting, innocent child knew to avoid.
Though his co-workers didn't get seem to that message at all. Maybe, Zeke considered, he should make more of a effort at workplace camaraderie, because the slightest show of good humour, or anything that could be taken as such, attracted them, moths to a flame. Was he culpable if someone else got maimed because he distracted them?
And that thought just made the smile crack wider, and the other guys drift closer, and Zeke's mind offer up increasingly fucked-up simile to kick the cycle around again: Flies to a pile of shit. Kids to crack-laced chocolate. Hookers to a roll.
It was never going to be a surprise, finding himself back on that street. He wasn't actually thinking about it on the way there, just breathing in the city air, shaking off the fumes and the friendliness and the unwarranted wholesomeness of his shift at the shop. Just walking and feeling his fingers get numb from hanging out of his pockets ungloved.
The guy was there, decked out in winter white, long wine-dark scarf muffling his mouth and covering his hair, but Zeke recognised him easily. "What's your name," he said, and he didn't know when he'd gotten near enough for conversation, not that his rough, blank, blunt tone approached conversational. Yet there they were.
His demeanour wasn't stopping the guy from pulling the scarf down from his face, revealing a smile that looked almost genuine. "Luke," he answered, and it might even be his name. "Changed your mind, ...?" There was a pause in the question that asked Zeke's name. Classy, Zeke thought, and wasted on him.
For some reason, he said, "Stone."
"Ooh," Luke cooed. Lifting the loops of his scarf over his head, he settled it over the back of Zeke's neck. Cashmere or mohair or something, luxuriantly soft and warm. "So, Stone, what do you want to do tonight?"
"You have somewhere we can go?"
Luke was sauntering backwards, drawing Zeke along more by suggestion than the ends of the scarf he still held. "You want to get in out of the weather?" It was cold enough that their breath left curls of vapour when they spoke.
"No."
Not so much as a blink. "Kinky."
It was down a couple of narrower streets, a tiny courtyard crammed between such tall buildings it couldn't get more than a couple of hours of sunlight a day. Luke had a key to the gate at the alley entrance. The windows in the buildings showed apartments; curtains, suncatchers, plants and stuffed animals lining the sills. Anybody could look down and see them. It was ideal.
There was a stunted, bare-limbed tree and a bench under it. Zeke took hold of Luke's wrists, stopped them in the dry brown grass before they reached the cobbles around the tree. No need to be cruel. "Here."
Luke smiled agreeably. "Here, what, Stone?"
"Down on your knees."
He stepped closer instead, pressed right up against Zeke, hands wandering purposefully as he murmurred a price in Zeke's ear. Zeke stepped back long enough to count out what the figure rounded up to, folded the handful of bills over, pushed the wad into Luke's palm.
Secreting the money away, he licked his mouth, so sensuously it almost didn't seem like an act. And he dropped fluidly to his knees, cream-coloured trousers contrasting starkly with the dirt and leaf litter. Zeke got his jeans half open, then decided to let Luke take over.
God damn, he'd forgotten how good a blowjob felt -- and yet... Luke's mouth was hot, so hot Zeke's slickened cock was steaming in the wintry air, but somehow not hot enough. Luke sucked expertly, teeth and tongue teasing with perfected skill, until Zeke couldn't help but thrust into that wicked mouth, fingers clenching and mussing Luke's hair, and it wasn't enough. Zeke held on and fucked Luke's face, and he took it like only a pro's experience could allow, and even that wouldn't have been quite enough to make Zeke come except that Luke was a pro and getting the customer off was his job. The orgasm, even, wasn't enough, even when he made Luke swallow it all. It just wasn't enough.
"How much more for me to suck you?" he asked, panting, and Luke grinned up from where he was tucking Zeke professionally away. Zeke peeled more bills from his roll, the amount quoted and another two hundreds for good measure. "Condom." He knew Luke would have one, and he wasn't disappointed. Sinking slowly to his own knees, Zeke almost wished he was reckless enough to do this bareback, but he wasn't quite so far gone yet that he wanted to tempt the kinds of death exchanging fluids with a street hustler could bring.
After a glancing instant of eye contact to ascertain Zeke didn't want the honours, Luke rolled the condom onto himself. Zeke stared at the latex-sheathed erection lolling up at him between where his bracketing hands were clenched in the spread corners of Luke's pants fly. He was actually going to do this. It should have been frightening, or at least uncomfortable, but it just felt freeing.
The latex was nasty on his tongue, making his mouth want to pull down as if he'd bitten into the rind of a rotting lemon; just how he needed it to taste. He had to lick around the circumference to get Luke's cock to move easily in his mouth, and apparently that was good for more than one reason, because Luke started moaning above him. He took a deep breath redolent with frost and tannin and propylene compounds, sucked the unwieldy shaft to the roof of his mouth, worked his lips further down the shaft, breathed again, sucked. "Oh, yeah," Luke muttered, hands brushing his hair soft as wind-tossed leaves. "Yeah, that's good." Zeke swept his tongue around again, opened his jaw a little more, and tried to go down. Too-thick flesh crowded the back of his throat, condom crinkling, and he gagged so hard it hurt. He pulled off, gasping and trying not to cough.
Luke shifted as if to move back, but Zeke tightened his fists in the ivory wool of his pants, holding him still while he caught his breath. He slurped Luke back into his mouth before the guy could offer any more words of well-meaning encouragement. Up and down, lips loose, letting saliva do its work, then he pushed forward again, breathing out slowly to relax his gag reflex. It almost worked; Zeke refused to pull back this time, locking his jaw, then trying to swallow down the urge to force the obstruction out of his mouth. That did the trick, maybe was the trick, and Zeke really started to think so as Luke groaned in unfeigned pleasure above him, hands drifting to his shoulders. He swallowed again.
It made all the difference, let him slide up and slowly, slickly down, finding a rhythm that Luke's hips would twitch to. Zeke didn't pull off again until he had to stop to breathe, and damn, this would've been so much easier if he was still dead, but he gasped in a few deep breaths, licking and breathing on Luke's cock to keep the cold from wilting it. The fingers on his shoulders grew bold enough to squeeze, gently, as he found his angle and his rhythm again, learned how to take a shallow breath at the top of a stroke, finally swallowed away the last of the bitter latex flavour -- and suddenly it was over, Luke grunting, the condom tip swelling soft with liquid and then going slack. Zeke's own cock spasmed painfully, trying to come again far too soon.
Luke's eyes opened just as he stood back up. A hand cupping his jaw sufficed to keep him from offering any commentary on Zeke's performance beyond a smile. Tugging at his pants, Zeke looked down; his knees were cold where the damp, detritus-dusted fabric of his jeans clung to his knees, and Luke's formerly pristine pants looked in even worse shape.
Zeke winced, took his somewhat shrunken roll of money out one last time, tucked a handful of bills into Luke's hip pocket. "Buy yourself something pretty," he said, and walked away while Luke was still refastening his fly. He didn't know where he was going, he just wanted to walk, to be elsewhere, to think.
He thought about going back to his apartment and waiting for sleep to come.
He thought about trying not to do that again, every night, for the rest of his life.
He thought about spending the rest of his life a penniless philanthropist, devoting all his free time to volunteer work, always wondering whether it was enough.
He thought about at least sending Ros a letter, but decided that would just be cruel.
The mouth of his gun kissed the underside of his chin, colder enough than the chill air to burn the thin skin. Head tilted back, Zeke felt tears standing in his eyes, and squeezed the trigger before they could spill.
Darkness.
A faint smell of sulphur.
No pain, not yet. But then the anticipation was the worst part. The anticipation'll kill you, Zeke thought; he wanted to laugh, and couldn't figure out how.
Darkness, darkness, silence and nothing.
Maybe this was the punishment for making impatience a mortal sin: to wait forever.
He couldn't pace, couldn't talk to himself, couldn't do anything to pass the time. He couldn't find his body at all.
Then, finally, a light, or something like one. He'd been waiting so long he wondered whether he was just hallucinating, wondered whether it was possible to hallucinate without a body.
The light shone as if from a long distance away, rays reaching out and attenuating. It looked a little like the light at the end of a tunnel.
Zeke's bowels would have contracted if he'd had any, he would have stepped back, he would say, "No."
The light got brighter, closer.
"Oh, Ezekiel, Ezekiel. I should have known you were clever enough to choose suicide."
His throat ached. Did he have a throat? He tried to swallow, and it didn't work, but his throat hurt more. There was light all around him, burning hot.
Zeke wanted to say he knew what the Devil meant. Guaranteed damnation, and without having to do harm to anyone else. Typical of him, he supposed the Devil would say. But that wasn't why, and Zeke wanted to tell him that, to explain. If he could just find his mouth...
Searing white hands touched him, left him feeling the freshly delineated bounds of his body, paralysed him with welcome agony, refreshing as pleasure after the Void.
The Devil was still talking, a thundering peal of Voice that he recognised with glad terror. "Do you know the punishment decreed for ending the life God saw fit to grant you?"
He could feel himself shaking. He tried to make his head shake back and forth, tried to reach out, tried to draw a breath.
"Doomed to be forever cut off from God and all other souls, to suffer your penance in solitude."
It was unfair and exactly what he deserved and the irony of the divine retribution judged fitting for the two of them did not escape him.
"Eternally alone... with only me for company."
Zeke's eyes opened, and light poured into them.
He wept hot tears of relief as he was enveloped in a shining promise, an embrace, a kiss.
Intellectual Property Diclaimer: Brimstone belongs to Warner Bros. Television; Ezekiel Stone belongs to the Devil; the Devil belongs to God; and John Glover belongs chained to my bed.
Sanity Disclaimer: I haven't been suicidally depressed since 2001; I simply continue to mine the rich source of inspiration that the experience was.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Nicole, for feeding me tapes in the first place; to Koi and Meridel for their beta aid; and to Te, for beta beyond the call of duty, for enthusiastic enabling, and for all but carrying me through the rough spots.
Soundtrack: This wasn't by any stretch a songfic, and I don't typically list what was playing while I wrote, but Die Krupps's Odyssey of the Mind, particularly the track "The Final Option," was essential to keeping me in the right frame of mind at crucial points.
more fiction, Brimstone and otherwise
Despair: A Love Story
"But if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" --Matthew 5:13
"Blasphemy is a seasoning like any other." --the Jack
Zeke had had plenty of time to worry about what would happen once he finally sent all hundred and thirteen escapees back to hell. The Devil wasn't exactly known for keeping his end of bargains; it might have been lifetimes since high school, but he hadn't forgotten the plot highlights of Faust. He'd lain awake pondering different ways the Devil could have tricked him with ambiguous wording, until his imagination had given out, and then he'd just thought about all the possibilities he figured would simply never occur to him. Ezekiel Stone might have his devious and dishonest moments, but he had nothing on the Prince of Lies.
In the end, though, he wound up being so absorbed chasing down the last of the damned, and then fighting to keep her from sending him back instead, that he forgot his nagging worries about how he'd be rewarded until after her eyes shattered -- and doing it by hand never, ever felt anything like punching through glass -- and then he remembered the other reason he had to be afraid. He watched Hell reach up and drag one last soul back down, dread climbing up his spine with leisurely layovers at his gut, his chest, his throat.
The lightshow ended, and a sudden silence fell. Zeke stood up on unsteady legs. He was panting so loudly he almost didn't hear the dramatic sigh. "I'm going to miss you, Mr Stone," the Devil said as Zeke turned. He was dressed in head-to-toe black; he looked like a pallbearer. Zeke opened his mouth to say so, when he felt the familiar agony of the last tattoo burning itself from his skin, and the words were lost in his grimace. The Devil blew him a kiss, looking genuinely pained.
And then the agony spread through him like hellfire, making him scream--
--and he was face down in an alley reeking with garbage, puking up God only knew what, because it surely didn't look like anything he could have actually eaten. Finally the spasms stopped, and he clambered up, backing away from the steaming mess. He was shivering, he noticed, and then he realised he was freezing cold. Clutching his coat tighter around himself, he staggered out of the alley. Across the street was a McDonalds, all glowing lights and fryer vents blasting the smell of hot french fries out into the night.
Zeke ordered two Big Macs, two "super-sized" fries and a coffee. He'd bolted the first sandwich and most of the fries down before he realised how hungry he was. Not just craving food, or wanting to eat out of habit, but genuinely hungry.
He was alive.
The shine wore off his newly-regained status as a mortal all too quickly. It had been just before eleven when he'd sat down to dinner at the McDonalds, and he'd had no interest in staying where the employees glared at him like he was some homeless bum there more to be out of the elements than to be a paying customer, so he got a refill on his coffee and left. The bar next door was, perhaps, no more welcoming, but sufficiently apathetic to his presence. By the time he pulled his wallet out again, he was almost drunk enough not to notice that his daily allowance was no longer being replenished. That had drained away all the enjoyment of finding that he could indeed get drunk again.
He was in Manhattan: back where he'd started, although he wondered how precisely accurate that was. The McDonalds menu had at least told him it was no longer the eighties, its decadent deep-fried apple pies having been long since done away with to make room for stuff like the McVeggieBurger.
Regardless of what the food was, though, Zeke still had to be able to pay for it. As it happened, in New York City, there was always work for a strong-backed man with no ID and no experience he could lay claim to who needed to be paid the same day. But it was never pleasant labour.
"I'm sick to death of rat-trap motels and flophouses," he muttered to himself as he climbed the last flight leading to his eighth-floor-walkup room, and wound up laughing so hard he had to sit down right there on the step, laughing himself sick. And then he really did get sick, with his neighbours pounding on the shared bathroom's door when it took him too long to bring enough up to quell the nausea and the heaves. At least it was normal vomit by now. It had taken days for his other bodily functions to normalise, which he supposed was pretty fast recovery for a body that had been dead two decades. The things that had come out of him that first week had been downright hellish -- to see, to smell, to expel.
And now it was weeks later, and what had he done with himself? Now that he needed food and drink and sleep again, instead of just wanting to go through the motions, most of his days were taken up with earning the money he needed to satisfy those needs; and yet that wasn't quite excuse enough for his aimlessness. Zeke Stone had always been a self-directed kind of guy, but the return from death that had been his ambition, once achieved, seemed to have left him rudderless.
It wasn't just his ambivalence over Ros, either. He'd come to the point where he could be glad she had such a rich life now. She had always wanted kids, and now she had two, and a marriage that made both her and her new husband happy. He was mostly glad about it, most of the time. Even if she had kept pining over him and stayed alone until he could have come back to her, he was a lot younger than she was, now, physically at least. And that was the least of the problems that would have attended any attempt to resurrect their relationship.
On top of all that, as far as he could tell, he still didn't officially exist. He'd found the time to go look at his own gravestone, to check the records that showed he'd died in 1983, to match the fingerprints he wore now to the ones in his file. He might be alive, but that left him in a whole new kind of limbo. And this time there was no explanation; no guide, however annoying, to explain what exactly Zeke was supposed to do with himself. He almost missed having depraved damned souls to hunt down, though the day-to-day grind wasn't leaving him any time for playing vigilante even if he'd been inclined to.
He almost missed the way the Devil himself always used to show up and deliver obnoxious commentary on Zeke's handling of his afterlife.
The hell of it was, Zeke kept thinking he was seeing the forked-tongued bastard. Something would catch his eye -- a suit of a certain cut, or hair in a certain style -- and he'd be sure he'd seen the Devil until he looked again, closer, and it was always just someone who bore a passing couture resemblance. After the first few days, he knew he wouldn't be seeing old Scratch any more, at least not while he stayed alive -- and if he kept his moral balance sheet in the black. Mortals had tended not to be able to while Zeke was still dead, so it stood to reason that he couldn't now that he'd rejoined the ranks of the living. Of course, all the intellectual certainty in the world didn't stop his gut from insisting yes, that was Lucifer back there (if Zeke would only look) several times a day, every day. It was as bad as having him actually be there, in its own way.
He felt like he was being watched a lot of the time, too. Being in New York as he was, some of the time that was true, and oftentimes it was even some half-mad street person with a sermon to deliver about the state of Zeke's soul, or a warning about the demons coming to kill him, or some other message God entrusted only to schizophrenics. But even in the City, there wasn't always a convenient crazy to blame for the neck-prickling sensation of being observed. Zeke hated feeling paranoid.
And then there were the dreams.
Sometimes they were relatively innocuous, the Devil just standing in for Zeke's own subconscious to berate him for letting the forces of Heaven and Hell play him like a pawn and then dump him in an alley like so much garbage. He'd dream that his co-worker at the loading docks was the Devil, and he'd have to listen to his smug condescension through the whole shift. He'd dream he still had escapees to return to Hell, and the Devil was still dogging his steps, turning up at his table when he ate, appearing in his bed when he slept. Or he'd dream that he'd never died at all, but the Devil was his new next-door neighbour and kept trying to seduce Ros away from him... or, sometimes, Zeke away from her. Sometimes the dreams weren't innocuous at all. He'd dream he was back in Hell, and wake screaming. He'd dream the Devil was going down on him, eyes burning into his and mouth burning around him, and wake screaming for entirely different reasons.
After those dreams, Zeke would wipe himself off with his one ratty hand towel -- or, if he hadn't come in his sleep, he'd finish himself off, rationalising that he couldn't be bothered to go down the hall for a cold shower and couldn't get back to sleep with a hard-on. Then he'd lie awake anyway, and think about the two times the Devil had actually kissed him.
The second time was more of a Judas kiss, a distraction right before the last of Ashur's co-conspirators had ambushed him. The first kiss was what he could have blamed the dreams on, random as most of the Devil's appearances. Zeke had been startled enough that he hadn't pushed the Devil off, hadn't jerked his own head away, even when that inhumanly sinuous tongue had twined around his own and sucked for the briefest moment before his tormentor made another of his trademark abrupt disappearances. In the darkness, in the certain solitude of his new life, Zeke could admit to himself that he might not have moved to escape that kiss, if it had gone on long enough for him to get over his reflexive shock and react to it.
When he walked through certain parts of the City, now, he got... looks. Not imagined ones or crazy ones, and not often from women; looks that were part inventory, part offer, all assumption of something he didn't want to admit could be showing to anyone else when he was only just on the cusp of showing himself. Some of the looks came with suggested retail prices, and those were easy enough for Zeke to discount. Only sometimes the appraising looks came from guys wearing a certain cut of clothes, a certain length of hair, and Zeke found himself wondering, heard his own inner voice remind him he did have cash enough to spare now, ask him what the harm would be. And he never did more than return the looks, but he started to imagine hearing a faint, sweetly bitter echo of familiarly mocking laughter. So he looked more.
Eating brunch at the counter of a greasy-spoon diner after an all-night shift that commemorated his third month back on earth, Zeke felt the absence of presence on the stool beside his own like a column of ice, a thermal negative of the Devil's infernal heat. His soup-spoon fell into the gravy spilled over his instant potatoes and country-fried steak, and he had to lick it off himself, eyes snapping suddenly open when he realised he was making as leisurely and sensual a production of it as the Devil himself would've done. Nobody in the half-deserted diner was paying any attention, though. Appetite gone, Zeke pushed his plates away and stood up. He looked around for the waitress, found her in a corner of the smoke- and grease-soaked place that was amazingly darker than the rest of the dump, bill pad in one hand while the other tried to pry loose the grip some drugged-looking creep had on her waist.
It felt so good having a legitimate excuse to hit somebody. Zeke didn't realise how much he'd gotten into it until he felt the waitress pulling on his free arm, and his head cleared enough that he could see the guy he knelt over was already out cold. He startled back, away from the slack, bloodied jaw, and wound up knocking the waitress down with him.
"Sorry," he said, turning to offer her a hand up. She looked like Ros might in another ten years, if she had never had love in her life, just the endless grind of life wearing away her spirit. The woman snapped her gum, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. Zeke looked down at the rest of her, the faded uniform, the support hose that hadn't prevented rich lacings of varicose veins. He could put his hand on her thigh for balance, on her ass to help her up, brush her breast once she was back on her feet, and she'd never object, maybe never notice.
Taking a deep breath, he kept his hand where it was until she clasped it, and they struggled up together. Zeke looked down at the man he'd beaten unconscious. "We should call the cops," he heard himself say.
She was shaking her head. Marilyn, her crookedly-pinned plastic badge named her. "Naw, that only makes him madder the next time he comes in. Just drag him out to the alley." How had he not noticed when he'd ordered that her voice was as deadened as her eyes?
The guy was meth-junkie thin, easy to manhandle down the diner's concrete steps and over to the mouth of the alley, where he wouldn't be close enough to the diner to drive away any more business than the alley itself did. His wallet was an obvious bulge in the guy's leather coat. It was a nice coat, nicer than what Zeke had been making do with. Too big for the guy, which meant he'd probably stolen it, from a store or from somebody like Marilyn without the wherewithal to fight the scumbag off. The wallet was conveniently in the coat. Any New York cop or ex-cop worth their salt knew where and how ID and credit cards could be offloaded. There was a good chance there'd be cash in the wallet to cover the guy's bill and a generous enough tip to make up for his behaviour inside. He'd only spend his money on more drugs, anyway -- and Zeke gasped, because that last thought had not been in his own mental voice.
Leaving the guy with his wallet and jacket intact, Zeke went back into the diner long enough to lay down a twenty for his own bill and hurried back out to the street and the wind's chill embrace. He'd been planning to fit a nap in between the overnight shift and his day work, but suddenly sleep was the last thing he wanted, so he just walked. Then he worked all afternoon into the evening, his bruised knuckles throbbing whenever his hand flexed, walked the dozen-odd blocks over to where he had taken the sketchy moonlighting job, worked through the rest of the night. A support beam painted a particularly bloody maroon made him twitch when he passed it, his peripheral vision processing the pillar as a red-clad figure every time. The way the light glinted off a certain broken pane of glass looked entirely too much like a crooked smile of the same shape. He kept seeing lounging, leaning, looming Devils in irregularly-shaped shadows. By the time the job was finished, Zeke wanted to close his eyes, cover them with his palms, which would probably look like he was simply tired to the rest of the crew but damn them anyway. He grunted a short, humourless chuckle.
For a moment, an instant, the solicitous hand on his back felt perfectly long and bony; it even seemed to warm him through layers of clothes and winter-numbness supernaturally well. When he turned, though, his own hands falling away from his face, of course it was just one of the guys he'd been working with. Full of too much youthful energy, although he didn't look like he was actually that much younger than Zeke appeared. The dark hair falling from its center part to frame the narrow face in shoulder-brushing curves made him seem younger, while a closer look at the jaded cast to the serpentine eyes banished that first impression. The guy's cheekbones were improbably high, seeming almost to strain at the skin. Zeke tried to remember his name. Nick?
"Everything all right, Mr Stone?" he asked, voice liquid-dark as oil, and Zeke felt painfully grateful for the muffling layers of his thermals and jeans as his dick twitched and swelled. He just nodded, mouth gone dry and tacky with the aftertaste of eggs he hadn't eaten, and fled.
When he did finally sleep, that morning, his dreams were undisturbed. Zeke woke haunted by the lack.
He started to seek out temptation, to crave standing beside a sleek car he'd like to take for a joyride or some scumbag skel who richly deserved a beating until he imagined he could hear a slickly-smooth voice enticing him to give in to his baser nature. He spent so much time walking certain streets, looking, that he stopped getting looks in return when the trade recognised him as the type who wasn't buying. He found other streets to do his walking on.
On his way to another one-night-only special shift, crossing through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, Zeke discovered an unexpectedly tempting lure. Everything about the area was upscale: the buildings, the cars, even the trees in the sidewalk planters. It all looked so legit that it took him half a block to realise that everyone else on the street was a pro, or shopping for one. He let his gaze linger too long on one guy, and got caught looking. With his elegant ponytail, three-piece suit just a touch more flamboyantly than datedly vintage, and manicured nails shown off in a studiedly casual gesture, he almost looked more like a pimp... and yet clearly, he wasn't. Especially with the way he looked Zeke up and down, and the way he smiled. Zeke found himself returning the smile, even if it was just the merest curl of his lips. The hustler was pretty in a way that had nothing to do with femininity, enticing in ways Zeke wanted never to acknowledge. He resented the fact that he had to keep going if he was going to make it to that job on time even as he was grateful for it, and didn't consider just blowing the work off for more than a couple of minutes once he got there.
His dreams after were full of a Devil alternately taunting him, stripping and spreading for him, quoting prices to him. Zeke hadn't had so many wet dreams in one night since his teens, and he didn't even have a full night's worth of sleep to fit them into before his alarm squealed, reminding him he had precious little time to dress and eat before his day job.
There was no special overtime on offer that night. Zeke thought about going straight "home" -- and there was an uplifting thought, the fifth-floor walkup he'd recently moved to with its private bathroom and space for bed, table and chair still being a decrepit, roach-infested hellhole -- he was exhausted from the two shifts of work with only a few hours of unrestful, interrupted sleep in between. But his feet were already taking him in another direction without waiting for his decision.
To his relief and disappointment, the pro who'd caught his eye wasn't around when Zeke arrived at the street he'd passed through the night before. He made something of a show of looking around, then went back the way he'd come, around a corner to a bar whose shingle promised pub food. Eating an overpriced greasy sandwich and overpriced soggy fries didn't kill much time, so he chased his first beer with two more. He pondered going ahead and getting drunk, pondered how much more he'd have to drink before he'd start swinging at men unprovoked or pushing women against the wall until they fought back or attracted defenders. He considered skipping out on the tab, decided flashing his roll of hundreds as he paid it had the potential to bring much more interesting results. Inflated as the prices were at the place, there was no way he'd make an appreciable dent in his pocket money there without buying rounds for the house; Zeke had come this way prepared to be well and truly tempted.
Nobody seemed to be following him, but Zeke saw the guy with the ponytail as soon as he rounded the corner, and lost interest in picking a fight. Lounging against a brownstone's banister, he wore a long leather coat, matching fedora and suit even more fey than what he'd had on the night before. He looked up as if feeling Zeke's gaze, and smiled; instant recognition. Up close, he smelled freshly-showered, with just a hint of expensive cologne. Zeke wondered what he'd expected: that a high-rent whore would reek like a sleazy whorehouse? Money paid for all kinds of differences.
"You came back," he said, voice a soft, wrong tenor; but the knowing smirk, the mischief glinting in the dark eyes, the way he traced an idle finger down Zeke's lapel, were perfect.
Zeke's mouth worked, unable to settle on an expression, much less a verbal answer. He'd been hard before the guy had touched him, and he felt lightheaded from how much blood was still flowing south, or maybe that was the beer he was feeling. He shifted uncomfortably, and that was a mistake; the wantonly possessive hand teased apart the flaps of Zeke's overcoat, stroked a single finger down his fly as nonchalantly as if it was his lapel.
"Mmm," he purred, "is this for me?"
"I," Zeke began, and he almost didn't recognise himself, but he felt his own throat and mouth working around the sound. It is abomination for a man to lie with man, the familiar voice seemed to murmur in his ear, and Zeke had never believed that God-hates-fags crap, but he'd learned since his death that the Almighty was a lot less forgiving than most people liked to think. His dick flexed like it didn't care, or like the threat of damnation was just one more turn-on. "I can't do this," Zeke blurted, "I'm sorry." He yanked the hand away from his crotch, yanked again to let it go when his fingers wouldn't open, and all but ran down the street.
Bringing himself off in his own bed back at his new apartment, Zeke wondered how much of a sin masturbation was, and the stray thought was all it took to push him over the edge, grunting and gasping and gunking up his hand. He blinked. "Do you want to go back to Hell?" he asked himself under his breath. It had been meant as rhetorical, but saying the question aloud forced him to realise he didn't know; and maybe that was an answer in itself.
If he dreamed that night, he didn't remember, waking with nothing but a dim and fading sensation of melancholy, of having lost something precious and forgetting even what it had been.
He didn't have time or inclination to dwell on the feeling. He'd overslept, and the errands he'd planned to do before work would have to wait. Finishing his shower, he toweled off, lathered up to shave, then stopped, staring at his reflection in the age-flecked bathroom mirror. It hadn't stopped seeming strange that he still looked a mere thirty-something. He wasn't used to seeing his upper body unmarked yet, either, and he thought about replacing some of the runes with mundane tattoos. Didn't the Bible say something about it being a sin to dye the skin?
Zeke shook his head at himself. He was doing the things he was doing to prove he could resist temptation; wasn't that the whole point? He could remember the torments of Hell, the way you remember dreams, incompletely and through heavy filters of conscious interpretation, or the way you remember that stubbing your toe hurts and yet you always yelp in shock and pain when you do it, stunned that it hurts quite so much. Of course he didn't want to spend eternity in agony, denied even the release of having lungs to scream with.
"And what if I'm going back anyway?" he asked the haunted-looking guy in the mirror; and that was the question, wasn't it? Had the escaped souls he'd sent back earned him cosmic credits -- or demerits -- or was he back where he started, with a murder to atone for on top of all his venial sins? Zeke scowled. "I'm not going to be late for work. I know that's not a sin."
The day's labour was surprisingly therapeutic, in its own stinking, back-breaking way. There wasn't much room left for existential crisis when you were choking on the stink of carbonising metal and trying to focus enough not to send your arm into one of the presses. Not that his brain didn't try. But the fourth time he nearly lost a finger put the situation neatly in perspective; the state of his soul could wait until a time when he wasn't surrounded by potentially deadly machinery whirring and squealing in full, uncaring automation.
Which thought just brought whole new levels of meaning to the term gallows humour.
Zeke spent the rest of the shift trying to keep the grin off his face. Not that smiling in general would be completely out of place; he couldn't actually see himself, but somehow, the way his lips wanted to peel back from his teeth just felt... cracked. The kind of smile even the most trusting, innocent child knew to avoid.
Though his co-workers didn't get seem to that message at all. Maybe, Zeke considered, he should make more of a effort at workplace camaraderie, because the slightest show of good humour, or anything that could be taken as such, attracted them, moths to a flame. Was he culpable if someone else got maimed because he distracted them?
And that thought just made the smile crack wider, and the other guys drift closer, and Zeke's mind offer up increasingly fucked-up simile to kick the cycle around again: Flies to a pile of shit. Kids to crack-laced chocolate. Hookers to a roll.
It was never going to be a surprise, finding himself back on that street. He wasn't actually thinking about it on the way there, just breathing in the city air, shaking off the fumes and the friendliness and the unwarranted wholesomeness of his shift at the shop. Just walking and feeling his fingers get numb from hanging out of his pockets ungloved.
The guy was there, decked out in winter white, long wine-dark scarf muffling his mouth and covering his hair, but Zeke recognised him easily. "What's your name," he said, and he didn't know when he'd gotten near enough for conversation, not that his rough, blank, blunt tone approached conversational. Yet there they were.
His demeanour wasn't stopping the guy from pulling the scarf down from his face, revealing a smile that looked almost genuine. "Luke," he answered, and it might even be his name. "Changed your mind, ...?" There was a pause in the question that asked Zeke's name. Classy, Zeke thought, and wasted on him.
For some reason, he said, "Stone."
"Ooh," Luke cooed. Lifting the loops of his scarf over his head, he settled it over the back of Zeke's neck. Cashmere or mohair or something, luxuriantly soft and warm. "So, Stone, what do you want to do tonight?"
"You have somewhere we can go?"
Luke was sauntering backwards, drawing Zeke along more by suggestion than the ends of the scarf he still held. "You want to get in out of the weather?" It was cold enough that their breath left curls of vapour when they spoke.
"No."
Not so much as a blink. "Kinky."
It was down a couple of narrower streets, a tiny courtyard crammed between such tall buildings it couldn't get more than a couple of hours of sunlight a day. Luke had a key to the gate at the alley entrance. The windows in the buildings showed apartments; curtains, suncatchers, plants and stuffed animals lining the sills. Anybody could look down and see them. It was ideal.
There was a stunted, bare-limbed tree and a bench under it. Zeke took hold of Luke's wrists, stopped them in the dry brown grass before they reached the cobbles around the tree. No need to be cruel. "Here."
Luke smiled agreeably. "Here, what, Stone?"
"Down on your knees."
He stepped closer instead, pressed right up against Zeke, hands wandering purposefully as he murmurred a price in Zeke's ear. Zeke stepped back long enough to count out what the figure rounded up to, folded the handful of bills over, pushed the wad into Luke's palm.
Secreting the money away, he licked his mouth, so sensuously it almost didn't seem like an act. And he dropped fluidly to his knees, cream-coloured trousers contrasting starkly with the dirt and leaf litter. Zeke got his jeans half open, then decided to let Luke take over.
God damn, he'd forgotten how good a blowjob felt -- and yet... Luke's mouth was hot, so hot Zeke's slickened cock was steaming in the wintry air, but somehow not hot enough. Luke sucked expertly, teeth and tongue teasing with perfected skill, until Zeke couldn't help but thrust into that wicked mouth, fingers clenching and mussing Luke's hair, and it wasn't enough. Zeke held on and fucked Luke's face, and he took it like only a pro's experience could allow, and even that wouldn't have been quite enough to make Zeke come except that Luke was a pro and getting the customer off was his job. The orgasm, even, wasn't enough, even when he made Luke swallow it all. It just wasn't enough.
"How much more for me to suck you?" he asked, panting, and Luke grinned up from where he was tucking Zeke professionally away. Zeke peeled more bills from his roll, the amount quoted and another two hundreds for good measure. "Condom." He knew Luke would have one, and he wasn't disappointed. Sinking slowly to his own knees, Zeke almost wished he was reckless enough to do this bareback, but he wasn't quite so far gone yet that he wanted to tempt the kinds of death exchanging fluids with a street hustler could bring.
After a glancing instant of eye contact to ascertain Zeke didn't want the honours, Luke rolled the condom onto himself. Zeke stared at the latex-sheathed erection lolling up at him between where his bracketing hands were clenched in the spread corners of Luke's pants fly. He was actually going to do this. It should have been frightening, or at least uncomfortable, but it just felt freeing.
The latex was nasty on his tongue, making his mouth want to pull down as if he'd bitten into the rind of a rotting lemon; just how he needed it to taste. He had to lick around the circumference to get Luke's cock to move easily in his mouth, and apparently that was good for more than one reason, because Luke started moaning above him. He took a deep breath redolent with frost and tannin and propylene compounds, sucked the unwieldy shaft to the roof of his mouth, worked his lips further down the shaft, breathed again, sucked. "Oh, yeah," Luke muttered, hands brushing his hair soft as wind-tossed leaves. "Yeah, that's good." Zeke swept his tongue around again, opened his jaw a little more, and tried to go down. Too-thick flesh crowded the back of his throat, condom crinkling, and he gagged so hard it hurt. He pulled off, gasping and trying not to cough.
Luke shifted as if to move back, but Zeke tightened his fists in the ivory wool of his pants, holding him still while he caught his breath. He slurped Luke back into his mouth before the guy could offer any more words of well-meaning encouragement. Up and down, lips loose, letting saliva do its work, then he pushed forward again, breathing out slowly to relax his gag reflex. It almost worked; Zeke refused to pull back this time, locking his jaw, then trying to swallow down the urge to force the obstruction out of his mouth. That did the trick, maybe was the trick, and Zeke really started to think so as Luke groaned in unfeigned pleasure above him, hands drifting to his shoulders. He swallowed again.
It made all the difference, let him slide up and slowly, slickly down, finding a rhythm that Luke's hips would twitch to. Zeke didn't pull off again until he had to stop to breathe, and damn, this would've been so much easier if he was still dead, but he gasped in a few deep breaths, licking and breathing on Luke's cock to keep the cold from wilting it. The fingers on his shoulders grew bold enough to squeeze, gently, as he found his angle and his rhythm again, learned how to take a shallow breath at the top of a stroke, finally swallowed away the last of the bitter latex flavour -- and suddenly it was over, Luke grunting, the condom tip swelling soft with liquid and then going slack. Zeke's own cock spasmed painfully, trying to come again far too soon.
Luke's eyes opened just as he stood back up. A hand cupping his jaw sufficed to keep him from offering any commentary on Zeke's performance beyond a smile. Tugging at his pants, Zeke looked down; his knees were cold where the damp, detritus-dusted fabric of his jeans clung to his knees, and Luke's formerly pristine pants looked in even worse shape.
Zeke winced, took his somewhat shrunken roll of money out one last time, tucked a handful of bills into Luke's hip pocket. "Buy yourself something pretty," he said, and walked away while Luke was still refastening his fly. He didn't know where he was going, he just wanted to walk, to be elsewhere, to think.
He thought about going back to his apartment and waiting for sleep to come.
He thought about trying not to do that again, every night, for the rest of his life.
He thought about spending the rest of his life a penniless philanthropist, devoting all his free time to volunteer work, always wondering whether it was enough.
He thought about at least sending Ros a letter, but decided that would just be cruel.
The mouth of his gun kissed the underside of his chin, colder enough than the chill air to burn the thin skin. Head tilted back, Zeke felt tears standing in his eyes, and squeezed the trigger before they could spill.
Darkness.
A faint smell of sulphur.
No pain, not yet. But then the anticipation was the worst part. The anticipation'll kill you, Zeke thought; he wanted to laugh, and couldn't figure out how.
Darkness, darkness, silence and nothing.
Maybe this was the punishment for making impatience a mortal sin: to wait forever.
He couldn't pace, couldn't talk to himself, couldn't do anything to pass the time. He couldn't find his body at all.
Then, finally, a light, or something like one. He'd been waiting so long he wondered whether he was just hallucinating, wondered whether it was possible to hallucinate without a body.
The light shone as if from a long distance away, rays reaching out and attenuating. It looked a little like the light at the end of a tunnel.
Zeke's bowels would have contracted if he'd had any, he would have stepped back, he would say, "No."
The light got brighter, closer.
"Oh, Ezekiel, Ezekiel. I should have known you were clever enough to choose suicide."
His throat ached. Did he have a throat? He tried to swallow, and it didn't work, but his throat hurt more. There was light all around him, burning hot.
Zeke wanted to say he knew what the Devil meant. Guaranteed damnation, and without having to do harm to anyone else. Typical of him, he supposed the Devil would say. But that wasn't why, and Zeke wanted to tell him that, to explain. If he could just find his mouth...
Searing white hands touched him, left him feeling the freshly delineated bounds of his body, paralysed him with welcome agony, refreshing as pleasure after the Void.
The Devil was still talking, a thundering peal of Voice that he recognised with glad terror. "Do you know the punishment decreed for ending the life God saw fit to grant you?"
He could feel himself shaking. He tried to make his head shake back and forth, tried to reach out, tried to draw a breath.
"Doomed to be forever cut off from God and all other souls, to suffer your penance in solitude."
It was unfair and exactly what he deserved and the irony of the divine retribution judged fitting for the two of them did not escape him.
"Eternally alone... with only me for company."
Zeke's eyes opened, and light poured into them.
He wept hot tears of relief as he was enveloped in a shining promise, an embrace, a kiss.
Intellectual Property Diclaimer: Brimstone belongs to Warner Bros. Television; Ezekiel Stone belongs to the Devil; the Devil belongs to God; and John Glover belongs chained to my bed.
Sanity Disclaimer: I haven't been suicidally depressed since 2001; I simply continue to mine the rich source of inspiration that the experience was.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Nicole, for feeding me tapes in the first place; to Koi and Meridel for their beta aid; and to Te, for beta beyond the call of duty, for enthusiastic enabling, and for all but carrying me through the rough spots.
Soundtrack: This wasn't by any stretch a songfic, and I don't typically list what was playing while I wrote, but Die Krupps's Odyssey of the Mind, particularly the track "The Final Option," was essential to keeping me in the right frame of mind at crucial points.
more fiction, Brimstone and otherwise
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2003-11-23 11:24 pm (UTC)And I'm sorry I don't have better feedback than that, but...yes, indeed.
*guh*
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Date: 2003-11-24 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 05:57 pm (UTC)Aye, that's the question, isn't it? ::evil pointy grin::
Thanks for the feedback -- glad you derived so much from it!
(Your fandom is so Jack?)
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Date: 2003-11-24 06:14 pm (UTC)::ogles your icon::
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Date: 2003-11-24 06:52 pm (UTC)And yeah, despite my productivity in SVdom, I am indeed all about the rareslash. Are you doing while we tell of
Wow!
Date: 2003-11-24 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 09:55 am (UTC)Death stories with happy endings. Gotta love them.
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Date: 2003-11-24 06:08 pm (UTC)The whole story concept came from my trying to write a happy-ending fic for Spike's birthday. Of course Brimstone kind of skews what can be considered a happy ending...
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Date: 2003-11-24 12:31 pm (UTC)Reccing this to everyone.
Thank you.
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Date: 2003-11-24 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 02:00 pm (UTC)Congratulations. You officially made my day gooder.
Thank you.
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Date: 2003-11-24 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 09:32 pm (UTC)I am printing it out to take to school tomorrow but I am already dancing. *g* Disturbing content. mrrrrrrrr.
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Date: 2003-11-25 10:35 pm (UTC)*sniffle*
thank you, jack. *grin*
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Date: 2003-11-26 10:18 am (UTC)I'm just glad you were pleased with it, Spike dearest. Writing for you is a delight.
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Date: 2004-04-02 11:37 pm (UTC)It was such a good, unique show, that never really got a chance, but thanks to the fans, it will (hopefully) live on for a good while.
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Date: 2004-04-24 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-23 01:22 am (UTC)Damn.
In a good way.
Great story. It would be nice if I could come up with the ways it's a great story, but I really do suck at feedback, so I think I'll stick with, "Damn. Great story." for now.
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Date: 2004-04-24 02:05 am (UTC)Thanks for taking the time to comment! I'm actually dreadfully behind on commenting and replying to comments, myself, so I sympathise.
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Date: 2008-06-26 02:42 am (UTC)The latex was nasty on his tongue, making his mouth want to pull down as
if he'd bitten into the rind of a rotting lemon; just how he needed it to
taste.
You are such an amazing writer, you know.
He thought about spending the rest of his life a penniless philanthropist,
devoting all his free time to volunteer work, always wondering whether it
was enough.
And oh, as a former Christian, this resonated through me to the depths of my soul. But then this entire amazing story did. What a fitting capper to that show; what an incredible story this is, even beyond fanfiction. Thank you so very much for this.
Отличный блог!
Date: 2011-06-09 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 12:48 am (UTC)