snippet: as lit by fire

[clofic]

‘What are you doing?’ Sascha mumbles as Andy kicks aside the door and sets him down just inside the nearest of Wimbledon’s palatial shower cubicles, easing him down to the tiles. It’s incongruous to see him sprawled out against the stark white, all long, skinny legs and the over-saturated crimson on his chest a startling burst of colour against the tile. There’s sallow tint to his skin where he’s gone pale beneath the shock of blond, like a knock-off Michelangelo where the painter hadn’t quite got the colours right.

There’s also a tear tracking down his cheek, the first Andy’s ever seen. Sascha never cries, not since he was a tiny ten year old skinning his knees on the hard courts at Mischa’s practices, not since he’s been winning and losing finals, laconic and self-assured through all of it.

Until now and any lingering doubts Andy might’ve had about this, about compounding Novak’s bad life choices and Andy enabling them, disappear.

‘We’re fixing this,’ Andy tells him. He tugs down the sleeve of his hoodie to wipe Sascha’s face dry because it’s a firmly practical thing to do, and he remembers his mother doing the same for him after he lost here in Wimbledon in 2012, catching him just outside the locker room and sacrificing her favourite scarf. The soft cotton was somehow grounding on salt-raw cheeks, being treated like a child exactly what he needed when he didn’t feel up to coping with the world or anything in it and it seems it works no matter the disaster, Sascha’s eyes fluttering shut with some of the tension easing from his frown. ‘Alright?

‘Have to fix it faster,’ Sascha mumbles. He’s right; his breath is coming shallow and rasped to razor-thinness, heartbeat skipping too hard, working overtime to keep running on pure stubbornness but starting to slow. Novak’s almost done, Andy can hear him locking the main door, but there’s no time.

Making the impulse decision based on that reasoning – and perhaps guilt if he allowed himself time for that self-reflection; that crossbow was meant for him – Andy reaches down to tangle a hand in the sun-bleached mass of blond, tight, not letting himself be gentle because it’s kinder not to lie about what he’s offering. He waits for Sascha to blink up at him, hazy and half-focused.

‘Sascha,’ he says, forcing his voice into ruler-neat lines to keep it from shaking, ‘I need you to drink something for me.’

‘Don’t drink,’ Sascha mumbles, faint. ‘Regretting that a bit now.’

‘Wait ‘til you win your first Slam,’ Andy tells him, with a wince for the memory of his. ‘But, not the life choice I’m talking about.’

He meets the red-rimmed blue eyes and sees the instant they widen, knows Sascha’s watching the fangs curving down, feeling the points pressing into his lower lip. They haven’t rounded off in a year, still just as wicked sharp as when he woke up in his own bedroom with Novak leaning over him, grey with exhaustion and relief that he was still alive. Andy’s bitten through his own tongue more than once in the year since and he’s careful now when he brings his own wrist to his mouth, tasting the salt-tang of the thin skin.

When he bites down the pain is a sharp focus, the relief of taking action like the winding plunge of an ice bath on a hot day: bite, feed, drink, keep Sascha alive. Small steps. Sascha’s watching him the entire time and somehow that level regard settles the panic still thumping in Andy’s chest, keeps his hand from shaking when he brings his torn, red wrist down to the German’s mouth.

‘Drink it,’ he says softly, aware his mouth is full of fangs and blood and making no attempt to hide it.

He can count on one hand the number of people who’ve seen him like this, really seen beyond the glimpse of a horror movie over their shoulder before there’s nothing more than teeth and waking the morning after, Novak’s light touch all over their memories and the belief they’ve had nothing more than a bad night’s sleep to explain why all their bones feel sandpapered. Novak loves the chase, the stalk, letting the object of his attention get just close enough to the truth to be a thrill before he bites down but Andy draws out the intervals between feeding as long as he can, until practices become an unending slog and Novak’s silent concern a tension that crackles between them every time his hands drift over Andy’s fresh sunburn.

There are people who volunteer – Andy was one himself, after all, even if it was only ever for Novak – but they want to flirt or fuck and Andy’s never their ideal of a vampire anyway, too reluctant, too awkward and always drawing back too soon. He’d rather be a forgotten bad dream than someone’s fantasy.

So he’s never had someone look at him like Sascha’s looking up at him, paper-white still with pain and shock written in furrows around his eyes but nothing like fear, only an intense – curiosity, Andy thinks, if he had to put a word to it. Slowly, without ever looking away, Sascha parts his lips and the soft, wet slide of his tongue over torn skin is an acknowledgment, knowing exactly what he’s agreeing to as the blood spills into his mouth.