Archive of Our Own

They’re in the garden again, the porch swing rocking gently in the breeze, and Angel knows he’s dreaming it all over. Number sixteen in the last three months, but he’s barely keeping count anymore.

He sits down on the swing’s dusty cushions, looks up at the string of lights above him like a ritual. Every time they seem dimmer, and he can’t remember whether the flowerpot on the stairs was red or white - why can’t he remember?

Familiar footsteps sound on the creaking wood, and Dream-Husk leans down, tucks the same pink flower behind Angel’s ear with a brush of fingertips across his cheek. Angel looks at him and smiles, catalogs the touch over hundreds of other identical memories - does it feel the same now? Would I even know if it didn’t?

“Pretty,” Husk says softly, and lets his hand fall away.

Got room for one more? Angel thinks.

“Got room for one more?” Husk asks.

Angel pats the seat beside him and tries to focus on the glow of the moonlight, the scent of fresh-cut grass and overripe tomatoes. Anything to keep away the tears that sting behind his eyes.

“You know it, baby. C’mon.”

He can feel the weight of Husk sinking down onto the swing, the tickle of his coarse curls when he lowers his head onto Angel’s lap. This is his favorite part, even if can’t quite remember what the collar of Husk’s jacket feels like against his legs. His mind fills in the gaps - scratchy, rough, crumpled. He’s always been allergic to folding his clothes like I tell him to. 

“Can I ask you somethin’?” Husk’s gravelly voice comes through, right on time.

Angel’s hand wanders to Husk’s hair, stroking ever-so-lightly, like he might turn into dust right there if he presses too hard. “What’s that?”

“Where do you think you’ll be in twenty years?” Husk wonders, following Angel’s gaze up to the sky. He must think he’s looking because the moon is beautiful. “Think you’ll still have a place for me in that busy life of yours?”

Angel can’t help himself. He drops his head back down, meets those deep brown eyes that he’s gotten lost in so many times before. If he can’t have anything else, at least he’ll let himself have this.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Don’t go worryin’ about that, Husky. I always gotta place for you.”

—————————

They’d had toast in the morning. Angel’s dreams never seem to remember that, but they had, fixing it up with jam and softened butter from the dish in his Nonna’s kitchen. Angel’s was burnt, and Husk hardly touched his, taking it to be polite when he’d really preferred coffee and whiskey and a cigarette. ‘Course Angel didn’t know about the drinking back then, at least not the way it grasped Husk in its iron maw and wouldn’t let him go kicking and screaming.

They’d taken plates and mugs out to the garden again, talked about things that are mostly lost to the depths of Angel’s mind. He tries to drag them up sometimes, but there’s only emptiness left where Husk’s words should have been. Why hadn’t he paid better attention?

The garden is where the dream begins and ends, and if Angel’s lucky he’ll get the second feature. The night is skipped over - the night they’d spent in Nonna’s spare bedroom, so close together yet so far apart. Angel’d wanted to kiss him, more than anything. But bravery was better spurred on by liquor and Angel was sober. They’d fallen asleep in each others’ arms, and he’d woken early and just breathed in the cinnamon-whiskey-warmth of Husk against him while the sun turned the tips of hydrangea flowers orange.

The part his mind likes to revisit is the garden, over and over again, always the garden. So Angel takes an extra sleeping pill, and Dream-Husk leads him out to the little glass table in the middle of the rosebushes. 

“I wanted to kiss you last night,” Angel confesses, looking up at Husk with a spark of fear in his eyes. 

Husk just laughs. “Good, that’s good. ‘Cause I’ve been tryin’ to figure out the right way to ask you that.”

“Should we just kiss?” Angel asks, the hint of a smile tugging at his lips. The sun is so bright out here, so warm that he can feel the sweat dripping down his collar.

“Yeah.” Husk grins and runs his fingers over Angel’s jawline, feeling, mapping, remembering. “Let’s just do it.”

So he leans forward, his hand hovering beside Husk’s cheek, and Husk closes the distance like the gentleman he is. His lips are soft, soft, soft, and it’s only an instant, one split second Angel gets to memorize before he’s pulling away again.

He doesn’t usually get to hear what Husk says after that. He thinks it might have been “Not bad,” but even that’s not a guarantee. Nothing ever is in his dreams.

———————

When the pill wears off, he wakes up alone, his Nonna’s bedroom replaced by drab curtains and a desk full of empty bottles. He curls down until you’d think him invisible, wraps his arms around his knees and sobs, sobs, sobs until he doesn’t know if he’ll ever breathe again. 

Husk’s clothes are still in his drawers, his toothbrush still in the holder in the bathroom. Angel can’t get rid of them like Molly and Cherri and Charlie and Vaggie keep telling him to - he has to keep them safe. Husk doesn’t like it when his things get ruffled through, and he absolutely hates when Angel messes with his system of organized chaos. They were good like that, together. The antithesis of a clean freak times two.

So Husk’s clothes are still in his drawers, and that means Angel can open the middle one and pull out a cashmere sweater that hasn’t lost his scent yet. It’s nearly there, but there’s something at least, so Angel slips it over his head, and cries, and cries, and cries all the way back to his bed.

It hurts like nothing had ever hurt before. Like his stomach is threatening to tear itself from his gut and leave him bleeding and broken in his clean white sheets. Like someone’s gone and siphoned half of his soul up through a power vacuum and left him with nothing but spiders in its place.

He cries until his voice grows raspy and his throat swells, cries until he’s starving and thirsty and the sun is well in the middle of the sky. Nothing matters. Everything he knows is pain.

If he goes back to his Nonna’s garden and looks for that swing, he won’t find it. She’d sold it for easy cash during the days when Angel still visited in the sweltering summers.

—————————

Sometimes Angel forgets. Sometimes he rolls over in bed and slings his arm over where Husk’s chest should be, finding only cold air and unforgiving sheets. Then, of course, he remembers, and the dam breaks into his pillow as he screams his throat raw and hoarse.

Charlie tries to coax him into eating; she and everyone else had long since started again, but Angel hadn’t. Everything is dirt and ash and sour in his mouth, so he doesn’t bother trying. He yells at her to get the fuck out of his home, then feels so guilty he calls her in tears when she’s already halfway down the street. She comes back, because of course she does — she holds him tight on his sofa and strokes his hair gently the way Husk does, which only makes him sob harder. 

Anything but this, he thinks. God, anything but this.

Husk had helped him get clean, stayed by his side while he shook and retched on the bathroom floor, so of course Angel gets back on the drugs. Downers, not uppers like before, because the more time he spends asleep, the less time he spends thinking about how he’ll never hear Husk’s smooth voice calling him baby, darlin’, sweetheart again. He’s sure he might vomit from grief if he ever tries to bring up those memories.

Dream-Husk comes less often, doesn’t stay with him quite as long, and Angel sorely misses him. In one night’s fit of desperation, he listens to an hour of Husk’s old voicemails before he cries himself to sleep.

Ah, fuck, it’s goin’ already. Look, Angel. I know you’re upset, but I just wanted to call and say I love you so goddamn much. I’ve been callin’ everyone tryin’ to reach you, but I guess you don’t wanna talk and that’s fine. Just, please, would y’give me a call back? Or a text’s fine. I ain’t mad at you and neither is Charlie. We just wanna know where you are and if you’re okay. So — please get a hold a’ someone. Anyone. I love you.

The line goes dead after that.

They don’t end up in the garden that night, to Angel’s surprise. Instead, he finds himself in his Nonna’s spare bed, Dream-Husk sprawled out across from him with a book resting open on his chest. He isn’t reading it, not really. 

Angel doesn’t waste a moment. He snatches the book away, tosses it to the floor and throws himself into Husk’s arms. It feels like home, and at least this time he smells like the right kind of cologne.

“Whoa,” Husk laughs, his hands curling around Angel’s back despite his confusion. “The fuck’s gotten into you, man?” 

“Don’t,” Angel mumbles, breathing in as deeply as his lungs will allow. “Don’t be him from tonight. I didn’t kiss him, and I should’ve. Please — just take us home.”

Dream-Husk seems to understand. He nods softly, rubs circles into Angel’s back, and before Angel can register the change, his Nonna’s floral wallpaper morphs into the popcorn ceiling of their first cheap apartment. 

“Yeah, this’ll do,” Angel sighs, snuggling deeper into Husk’s warm chest. “Tell me somethin’, Husky. Why’d you go?”

“Go where?” Husk asks, ruffling Angel’s still-damp hair. “I’m right here.”

“No, you ain’t,” he whispers, and leans up to take another kiss while he can still get it. “You left me. I hate you so, so much.”

Husk tastes like cinnamon and orange peel again. He pulls his lips from Angel’s slowly, like he’s savoring the moment just the same as Angel is. 

“Baby, I think you’re tired.” He guides Angel back down, presses a kiss to his drying waves and lets it linger. “Let’s talk tomorrow. You had a real long day.”

Of course, there isn’t any tomorrow, at least not one where Husk is still holding him. Angel buries his head into Dream-Husk’s T-shirt again, sobs and sobs until he can feel blood rising up the back of his throat. It bubbles up in his mouth and foams out past his lips, soaking Cabernet-red into Husk’s clothes as he pulls Angel closer.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he’s murmuring as Angel’s mind begins to swirl, the winding bedsheets fizzling out like static into his own unwashed blankets. “Let it all out. We’ll clean later.”

Angel grips his shoulders tight, opens his fluid-filled mouth to beg him to wait. But the picture-frame flashes once, twice, three times, and then it’s nothing but his own four walls as far as he can see.

————————-

As the clock ticks everlastingly forward, Angel forces himself out of bed more often than he doesn’t. He stands under the lukewarm stream of the shower, stares blankly at Husk’s bottle of 3-in-1 that still sits on the shelf beside the washcloths. He almost wishes he could cry, but the ducts of his eyes seem to stem from his soul, dull and arid no matter how he tries to dredge up that familiar ache.

He goes back to work. He swallows down noodles from Styrofoam cups burnt around the edges, and he meets Charlie for coffee at their usual shop on the corner of the road. None of it means anything to him. He just moves his body, like sticking a hand into a bucket of gel and trying to slide it forward. Slow. Labored. Helpless to make a sound while he struggles his way to the other side.

Dream-Husk almost never visits anymore. On the rare nights that he does, Angel cries into his arms as the unmistakable scent of him slowly disappears. Sometimes he screams at him, balling his fists and pounding them against Husk’s torso while he airs his grievances. Fuck you, Husk. I need to be held. I need to dance with you again. I need to steal a cigarette straight from your lips and give you a kiss in return. I need you to carry me back to bed and tell me everything will be okay. And you took that all from me, you fucking asshole. 

Other times, they laugh until their cheeks are burning, Angel holding his stomach tight as Husk leans against the wall for purchase. Sometimes they fuck, sweet and slow or hard and dirty depending on which memory Angel’s mind had sent him to that night.

When Husk comes to him for the last time, somehow Angel knows that he won’t be back. He doesn’t cry. He’s done enough of that by now.

They’re standing together on the beach in the middle of January, Angel’s arms full to the brim with sand dollars and cracked shells he’d plucked from the tidepools. This one isn’t real, Angel remembers. We’d promised to take this trip. But he was getting sicker and I was too lost in my own head to think that it might have mattered. 

Husk turns to him while the waves roll and crash before them, offering one of those little half-smiles that mean I’m here, I love you, and I ain’t got much more to say. 

“You gettin’ cold yet?” he shouts over the roar of the tide. 

Angel stares out at the ocean, the deep blue waters and the graying sky overhead. He thinks of that first night in his Nonna’s garden, suddenly recalling that the pot on the stairs hadn’t been there at all. Husk’s foot had caught the brim on the way out to the deck, and they’d hid the remnants together in the old toolshed while they giggled like children. That’s why Husk had walked back with a flower, Angel waiting on the swing for his head on his lap and an empty promise of forever. 

“Nah,” Angel smiles back, snatching up Husk’s hand in his cold one and tugging him towards the sea. “Couldn’t be anything but warm as long as I got you around.”