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Arthur hears the window open beside him. He takes a longer drag of his cigarette, keeping the burning of it in his lungs as he automatically holds it out for John to take as he sits beside him. The night has been cool, pleasantly so, but having John’s knee bump against his own, the warmth of their fingers brushing on the pass of the cigarette, is better. He feels it so deeply, like smoke, like blood. The fire escape creaks around them.
He can hear the tobacco burning on John’s inhale. His voice rumbles against Arthur’s side amid the sounds of the city below them, makes him the very center of everything as he speaks around it in his mouth. “You’ve been out here a while.”
“I’m enjoying it,” Arthur responds and breathes through the haze of John’s resulting smoke. He perches his elbow on his leg to loosely hold his hand out for the cigarette again, less a demand than it is the implication of wanting it back. John takes another drag from it as Arthur continues, “The sounds. The feeling of humanity. I had missed it.”
John gives a cough that Arthur can’t help a small smirk at, which John obviously catches and grumbles a curse at him for. John only ever smokes when Arthur does, and his body makes it known, to his great chagrin. Still, he places the cigarette back between Arthur’s waiting fingers with care, nudging the tip of the middle one back away from the center of heat. “The small things,” John intones, a smile around the phrase.
Arthur fiddles with the cigarette, slouching against the brick of the wall behind them as he picks the tone apart. The memory lights in his mind suddenly, the panic at his newfound blindness (among other things) coloring the edges to make it that much more hazy. He leans into John briefly, humming. “Yes. The small things.”
John’s pleased by that. He makes no outward indication, but Arthur doesn’t need it. John holds their humanity close to his chest like something precious and Arthur can understand, even if it isn’t quite the same for him. To gain something through your own merit rather than to have it to begin is entirely different. Arthur kept what was already his; John fought tooth and nail to create himself. He deserves his life. He deserves to live it.
“And as much as I believe that,” John begins and Arthur waits until he continues for the next pull at the cigarette, “you’re sure there’s nothing else that’s sending you out here like a brooding teenager?”
Arthur nearly splutters, turning his head toward John for the full wide-eyed effect, “Brooding? Am I brooding?”
John makes a noncommittal noise, makes sure to ruffle the sleeve of his coat as he motions, “It was the closest word I could come to, so yes. I think you are. For the entire day you have been, in fact.”
Arthur can’t even defend himself against that. He knows. Fine, yes, maybe he had been brooding. Maybe he needed some time to himself to ponder why that was, exactly. All he can think of is the titter in the woman’s voice, how it sounded alongside John’s and the variable of them float around in his head unmoored with nothing but the barest question on his tongue to tether them. He hasn’t been able to reach the conclusion yet.
He lets the smoke eek between his teeth through a resigned hiss. “Okay.” The cigarette is halfway gone, still just enough for him to pick at the seam without burning his fingers. “Maybe I have been.”
John makes another one of those grumbles, the things Arthur used to label as growling whenever he’d do them inside their head. Despite it, he’s gentle when he denies his turn at the cigarette. Arthur knew he would, but he still offers it out of habit from smoke breaks with Parker, with Bella.
“Why?”
And it’s so simple, isn’t it? John asks and Arthur answers. That is what finally solidifies his question.
“Did you ever…” He resists the urge to stuff the cigarette in his mouth as a distraction, just pushes the word out, “yearn, before?”
There is only one Before. Arthur’s life and John’s stay in the Dark World are always named, not to be confused. There is Now and there is Before. Separate. Together.
John stiffens so briefly if Arthur didn’t know him as he did, he could’ve missed it. The touch of their shoulders widens by a near imperceptible distance and Arthur aches all the more for it. Christ, he shouldn’t have said anything.
“It’s just,” Arthur continues, finally allowing himself the drag. His shrug touches their arms back together, so he keeps his there. “I’ve been ruminating, I suppose. With the woman today, and how I pushed you a bit when you first mentioned Lily. I feel as though I don’t really know how it works for you.” He remembers his curiosity at the time, an almost out-of-body need to know if John had felt something, if he was capable of it.
John shifts so Arthur knows he’s being looked at, “Wait, so, by ‘yearning’ you mean… for another person?”
Arthur turns his face toward his, nodding. He knows there is smoke curling out of his nose from how tightly he’s keeping his mouth shut before confirming, “Yes, um. Yes, I do.”
John doesn’t stop staring. Arthur can practically feel it, now, and tries to picture what they look like, as he always does. Shapes and faces are harder for him to visualize, now, but he still tries to get the impression of it from the descriptions of themselves John has given. Eyes, gold and brown, meeting each other through smoke and city. “I’m not sure,” John says, finally. He looks away, his longer hair brushing Arthur’s temple as he gives his own lean against the brick. “Nothing like that could spawn, let alone survive, in the Dark World. Even before that, when I was the King…if I did, it wasn’t in any way like what you’re defining it as. With you it was different.” Arthur knows what he means and blinks anyway, his entire body feeling as though it is suspended in falling for that second. Then John corrects, “In you.” That’s worse. “Before. Experiencing it through your lens.”
Arthur decides to be kind. “As a human, you mean?”
“Maybe,” John says slowly. His voice has become lower throughout the conversation. It loses its roughness, when it’s like this, turns to velvet in its sincerity. “How would I know?”
Arthur has to take a very deep breath. All his descriptions for longing, pining, only conjure dim impressions that he can’t make sense of right now, with John sitting so presently. He clears his throat, pointing with the cigarette. “Well, is it different now?”
“No,” John answers at once, but the catch in his breath at the very end of it makes Arthur think the haste had been accidental. Still, he finishes his thought. “I...” John’s next breath is deep, nudges Arthur’s elbow with the expanding of his ribcage. Arthur can almost feel it as his own, the air filling his lungs in perfect synchronization so their sides are entirely flush. “I think I’d call it more.”
“That would make sense,” Arthur responds in the softest tone he can manage that isn’t entirely falling apart. He has to take a quick puff of the cigarette once the heat in his face reminds him of the rapidly approaching heat of the flame approaching the first knuckle of his fingers. The headrush of the nicotine and a timely honk from a distant car helps him become clear enough to speak, finally.
“So anybody I would know?”
It evaporates all the tension Arthur finally realises had been building between them, the strings of it snapping so John melts against Arthur in his exasperation, knocking their heads together with the motion, “Arthur.”
“I’m serious!” Arthur protests, even as he begins laughing. The darkness he had felt creeping up on the edges of himself recedes as the movements repeat back through John, in a quieter, snickering refrain. “Not your nurse, I know that now and apologize for my forwardness.”
“I didn’t even know that was what you’d been getting at, then. I thought you were in some kind of shock and fixating.”
“Yes, well,” Arthur says faintly and, quite, “it may have been just a bit of that aswell, frankly.”
John gives a final warm chuckle. He curls his right leg so his knee bends and presses to where Arthur’s is doing the same with both his own. “No, not Lily. I think the phrase for it would be love at first sight.”
Arthur stops focusing on where the bones of their knee caps are fitting together to startle. “What?”
John shakes with a silent laugh even before he answers, “Lorick and me, I mean.”
“Oh, piss off.” Arthur shoves at him, a motion echoed back by John a moment later. “You– You muppet.”
“Muppet, ” John snorts, “that’s the best you can come up with? Fucking muppet?” Arthur shoves him again.
“So there really is no one?” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as direct as it does, knows John picks up on it by the way his laughter tapers off, and still Arthur can’t stop. “You just felt all this, with nothing tethering you to it?”
How? He doesn’t ask, because that would be an admission of guilt, of feeling, and Arthur can’t afford that with how rapidly he’s realising this really shouldn’t be affecting him as it is. The fact he even thinks to ask–
And fucking still, he wonders.
John looks at him again, the back of his skull turning against the brick they both lean against. Arthur knows it to be all the more damning, yet still he refuses to mirror the gesture, resolutely getting at the very last drags he can out of his cigarette.
“You mentioned a woman from today.” Arthur wishes for his bad luck to give him the one favor of having something heavy fall on his head, right this second. “Why? Which one?”
Which one, he asks, and Arthur can only bend to press the last knuckle of his thumb between his eyebrows briefly because of course, of course John doesn’t even remember. “Which…” He sits back up, nose to the sky. “The woman, while we were in the book shop. I didn’t catch her name, I had been asking the owner about the ledger, but it sounded like…”
“Like what, Arthur?” There it was, the undercurrent of frustration stitching a rough patch through the velvet. Arthur wants to run his hand along it, along John’s voice, his throat. He wishes, not for the first time, it was still inside his head, so he might feel it.
It had sounded exactly like that at the shop. It’s what alerted Arthur to the conversation, keeping one ear out as Alice the shop owner rummaged through the drawers of the front desk. John is so central in his world as it is, it really wasn’t very hard to divide his attentions. Yes, of course, he responded to Alice, as the woman asked John about the book he was looking at. Her voice had been high, a sharp contrast to John’s responding bass, but Arthur studied people for a living to know well enough why she then praised his taste. They had been very close, she had made it so.
He doesn’t have to be able to see John to know he’s handsome. Arthur knows he’s tall and broad, dark despite his hair being threaded through with white, like spiderwebs, which Arthur had vehemently vetoed as a descriptor. Yet he holds things gently, every movement real and purposeful. His ichorous eyes wouldn’t even be the first thing to notice about him.
John presses closer. On purpose. “Arthur,” drawn out and exactly the way Arthur knows it best, wants it best. Entirely correct in his mouth, as if it’s his just as much as it is Arthur’s.
Jesus Christ. Arthur is a goddamn idiot. He is so fucking stupid.
“Were you jealous?”
Even the city goes silent, he thinks. All of it, every last person holding their breath as Arthur does. Yet he doesn’t miss it. John continues breathing, breathing, breathing.
Arthur gives in to the inevitability of turning toward John. It feels like setting a bone right, pain and perfect relief in a single motion. He breathes again.
“Yes. I was.” John makes a noise he deigns to call a gasp. Arthur stubs out the cigarette at his outer hip, flicks it away. “I am.”
John says absolutely nothing, for once, and that’s how Arthur knows he’s made a mistake.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur says abruptly. He doesn’t turn away, because what good would that do, now, but he does shut his eyes. He can’t bare whatever John might find in them right now. “I am, I know, I—”
What does he know? Right now, really not a fucking thing. Every single thought has collapsed into the Oh, into John.
“Arthur.”
“—I don’t even really know when it started—”
“Arthur.”
“—John, I-I’m so sorry—”
“ Arthur,” John grabs his hand, their hand, tugs him somehow closer so their brow bones mash together, one on top of the other. The hand is led flat against John’s chest. His heart is strong, practically pushes up against Arthur’s palm like a purring animal. “Jesus, breathe. Breathe.” His mouth has somehow migrated to speak against Arthur’s temple, directly against his skull. It feels like before. It feels right.
John murmurs, “I don’t even remember the woman’s goddamn name.”
“Well I know that now,” Arthur gets out shakily. “But it seemed, then. It sounded like—”
“Me trying to shake off an annoying person who wouldn’t stop pawing at my arm like an overly manicured poodle for being able to read?” Arthur blurts out a delirious laugh. “I couldn’t exactly tell her to fuck off, Arthur, but believe me when I tell you I really would have liked to. I’ll have to iron my suit jacket again.”
Arthur shakes his head, mashing John’s nose against the crown of it. “Even then, if it had been—”
“But it wasn’t—”
“If you wanted something like that,” Arthur manages to continue and feels the need to sit back, just enough so this is an actual conversation. “I shouldn’t be like this about it. You’re allowed— God, of course you’re allowed, I just mean—”
John’s hold on him tightens. There’s something there, suddenly, that Arthur hadn’t taken note of, a desperation that can only match his own despite the way the words reverb off the bricks, “I don’t want that, Arthur. Fuck.”
“Then what?” Arthur throws back. If he can’t be defensive, offense is his only choice. “You yearn for what, exactly?”
John’s final breath before speaking, shaky and altogether fortifying is all the warning Arthur gets. “What,” and John is in his face now, their noses a hairsbreadth from touching where everything else already is, “you think you’re the only one that gets to fucking feel it? Yearning, jealousy, you’ve got the entire fucking monopoly over all of it?” John pushes their hand back against Arthur’s chest but doesn’t let it go. “I’m jealous of your hand for still getting to be a part of you. I’m jealous of the air you breathe because it gets to be where I can’t anymore. I’m jealous of the sun when it can touch your smile in the mornings, the way I wish—”
John stops himself in the same fitful way a car brakes for a deer running across the road. Arthur can almost hear the screech of it, though maybe that’s just the sudden ringing in his ears. The variables are making a lot more goddamn sense now.
Neither of them pulling away must be sign enough. It has to be. It’s enough for Arthur, at least, and John’s nails are beginning to dig into the back of their hand, as if trying to make his way back in. Arthur would let him.
He speaks so low, terrified. “Ask me what I yearn for again, Arthur.”
Arthur swallows hard. He knows John should be able to feel it with where the tops of his fingers rest against the base of Arthur’s throat. He presses that hand down to keep it there as he gets theirs out from under it, grazes it up to touch John’s jaw, fit his thumb to the corner of his parted lips. “I’ll hazard a guess,” he breathes as he leans into the center of them both. “Just tell me if I’m close.”
John makes a fucking brilliant sound into his mouth immediately, startled and genuine. Arthur wants for it again, immediately, tips completely to the left but doesn’t get very far because John is surging forward. One hand grips his collar and the other darts out to clutch at Arthur’s sleeve where he’s slid his arm around John’s waist.
“Did I—” and speaking allows him to taste the nicotine, the mint of toothpaste before that behind John’s teeth.
“Yes,” John answers, even as Arthur manhandles his jaw with the hand he has splayed there. He wants to angle them closer, blur the edges that define them individually and he understands, then, what John had meant by his own jealousy.
Then there’s a crash in the alley below, a yelled curse. It’s impossible for them to separate, honestly, but they still yank apart where they had been busiest.
“Inside,” Arthur gasps, dragging John upright with him, “Inside, John.”
John’s breathless in a way Arthur’s never heard from him before, which is absolutely thrilling, “Yes, I got that, Arthur.”
They tumble back in through the window, one of them or both of them shutting it with a satisfying click of the lock. The curtains follow.
Their flat is warm, an entire world of difference. Where the sounds of everything outside calmed Arthur, this is where it all feels truly real. The permanent smell of Arthur’s coffee and John’s tea, the low crackle of the radio playing everpresent. He settles, breathing deeply. John is doing the same, one shoulder pressed to the wall where Arthur leans against him.
“I didn’t even know you liked men,” is the very first he can come up with. They’ve had a running theory at least one of his deaths knocked something loose in his head. He adds this to their mental catalogue of evidence.
John shakes his head, Arthur feels it. “I just want you.” Arthur straightens as if shocked, yet still John continues, shrugging against Arthur’s collarbone. “I can maybe see the appeal of men in general. But no one will ever be you, Arthur.”
Arthur wants, not for the first time, not for the tenth or hundredth, to look at John in that moment. Just the one time, just to know if it’s Arthur he’s looking at the way he sounds. “John.”
John fumbles for the hand Arthur still has on his waist to pull the arm more firmly around himself, forcing Arthur to take a step forward that smudges them back together. “You are my yearning. The meaning of the word, for me, starts and stops at you. Even before, when I was you, when we were us and I already had everything I possibly could, I wanted.” Arthur had thought himself the only one shaking until John shifts to lean their temples against one another and it’s all one big tremble they share between them. “Does that quench your incessant fucking worrying?”
Arthur nods, squeezing his eyes shut briefly. “I heard you with her and understood there was a possibility you didn’t feel the same, and that I would have to deal with that. I wouldn’t have stopped you, I just hadn’t even considered it. It hadn’t so much as crossed my mind.”
He knows he sounds a bit delirious, but he feels that way, entirely lightheaded as he exhales a laugh around the words. “I-I’m entirely yours. Everything you could want from me you have, and more. You–You make me feel as if I have so much more to give than I once thought. You have to—” He risks pulling back, entirely for John’s benefit. Just so he can have what Arthur can’t and see that he means this. “John, you have to know you are what makes me whole.”
John barely lets him finish before he’s seizing both hands up into Arthur’s hair, clutching his head to drag him forward with a punched out, “Arthur,” that ends inside Arthur’s own mouth. Arthur takes it, shoves a hand up into John’s shirt, flattening it right up against the warm small of his back as the other palms at his hip. John is beautifully sensitive, has been since the very start, and Arthur could only imagine, had only imagined—
The way John gasps, high and broken, melts into it entirely. His elbows spill over Arthur’s shoulders so he’s leaning on him and Arthur takes it all. The hands in his hair lose their roughness, the desperation shifting to petting it back, away and out of Arthur’s face. “Please,” John mumbles, and Arthur can only hold him tighter.
“John,” Arthur manages as John trails a kiss against his cheek, the hinge of his jaw, possibly following the trail of beauty marks John obsesses over poking at. It feels as though everywhere he does it lights up, renewed. Still, Arthur is starting to have to lean back as John relaxes further into him, and he has a bad, well, everything. “Darling,” Arthur insists, breathlessly, and that does the trick. John is away and staring at him instantaneously, pulse quickening where it rests against Arthur’s own. Arthur can’t help but bark a laugh at his haste. Then another.
John joins in and it can only devolve from there. There’s absolutely something approaching mania to it. Their foreheads touch, and Arthur can’t resist the urge to rub the tips of their noses against one another. John returns the gesture more enthusiastically. Arthur couldn’t handle even an ounce more of love in his body, he thinks. He’s full. Complete with it.
“Okay,” Arthur says, kissing John briefly, as it is only right when he’s in range, “alright.”
John rumbles his response, rocking back on his heels so Arthur can straighten once more. The motion still ends in John having him there, but it is less the clutch it had been before. He buries his flushed face into the side of Arthur’s throat.
They’re hugging, Arthur thinks, and holds him closer for all the times he wished he could before. In that moment, he doesn’t want for anything else.