Slip - one-off short.

[alexdraven]

It was a tombstone secret, that Tell slipped back here on the nights when Mike was working lates. The kind you take to your grave, where you have to believe that everyone else there will keep, and that the people who wouldn't understand would never ever know, or you'd just go crazy worrying.

Tell didn't want to hurt the guy. He kind of half way loved him, sometimes, but out there in the so called real world, with the manners and the regular jobs and the responsibility he could only ever be halfway anything. Everything else had to be crammed down behind a façade of acting right and being grateful, so he came back here sometimes, on the nights when Mike was working lates.

Mike thought he'd rescued him from places like this. This place itself, actually. Mike thought a lot of things, and he was only halfway right about most of them. Mike assumed that, because it was Mike's worst nightmare, that Tell must have hated every minute of it too. Mike thought that it had scarred him, that it had been forced on him, that he'd needed rescuing, and that really Tell was a nice guy, just like Mike. Sometimes Tell half wished that that was true.

Sometimes, though, he had to get back here, and paint himself up, get out there and ride the crowd again, because if he didn’t get rid of that bland mask of being nice and being normal, he'd go completely crazy, no half measures at all. He wasn't normal, and he wasn't nice like Mike, and the grabbing hands and the sparkle of sequins and the bass vibrating in his chest and the catcalls and the heat of it weren't the only things he missed. He needed.

He needed the strangers and the spotlights and the show, needed the setting so that he could be really and truly himself. Needed somewhere that didn't just allow dirty fucked up greasepaint dresses and hard muscles balanced on half-penny heels, somewhere that demanded it, with customers who screamed and creamed for him, forced him to know that he could do anything to them and they'd only beg for more. That someone who was quick with hands and tongue and attitude could be a whole person and wanted for it.

He needed somewhere where he didn’t have to know the name of the host who kissed him hello to scrape away the normal and leave lipstick there instead, nor what to call the ticket boy who winked and held him hard to crunch glitter out of Tell's hair and make him shine again. Somewhere where he didn’t have to know shit like names, because they saw what was his new day-to-day for what it was, and wanted it gone, so he couldn’t hide any more.

Nameless strangers who saw more of the real him than the partner who thought that Tell needed rescuing and was a nice guy really. Sometimes Tell found himself wishing he was nice, but other times he knew that for what it was – a role trying to seep in around the edges – and when Mike was working late, Tell slipped away, down the stairs and away from all the costumes, and painted his face and nobody winced when he was all of himself.