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Gentle light - filtered into a room white, but not sterile, thick blackout curtains pushed aside from the scene of the street below - frames the figure in gentle silhouette. On the streets, the late May sun rises above the rooftops, pure and clean and bright, unopposed in a midmorning sky, direct from the open window. It shines on hardwood floors, muted, as if what was once carefully lacquered wood grew too old, too used; it casts long shadows on the open doorframe. The room is quiet, the sounds of city below muffled to uncaring ears, and it is empty, devoid of all influence of a life which used to reside there, vacant save for the figure in the high-backed chair, lit in perfect profile.
"I thought I would find you here," says the figure in the doorway, soft and explanatory and devoid of much feeling. The silhouette is silent, unmoving. The words die in the air as if they were never spoken. "There isn't much to looking for you."
There's a hum, quiet acknowledgement. The shadow turns away, into the light; some disgusting thought about the irony of it all creeps intrusive into his mind before he can stop it, something about the husk of a twisted caricature of a former self, finding something so bright, something poetic and ugly that can be thrown consciousness when the words really pierce through the haze of painful sobriety. Looking, they echo. For you. There is something that still stings about the words. There is something that still hurts.
"I needed to think," comes the reply, deep and automatic, words spoken without thought to answer those without emotion. There is an understanding that comes with them, that he does not need to say more. The spring has been as long as it has been painful, flowers fighting to survive the frost. Here, it is quiet, and there is sun.
It is a gentle, unspoken. The man in the doorway does not move, allows the space between them to stand stagnant and wanting. The breeze is cool, sweeps dust from the dark wood floors and into the air where it catches the light like dull stars before they settle and fall into their places. The room still holds the memories of all it used to be, woven into every space between the floorboards, every speck of dirt along the walls. Even the shadow, pale like the ghost of a grueling midwinter, resonates with it - reverberates, but out of tune, a sweetening note in nostalgic cacophony. Perhaps in the space between them, there were hours. Perhaps, mere moments.
Emptiness amplifies everything: the vastness of the blank spaces; the gentle wheezing of breath filtered through unfamiliar lungs; the silence of a tension built over what seems a lifetime in few short years; the rustle of a high collar where once there was none; the rhythm of shined chestnut shoes on aging walnut floors that sound with such a lightness of step. Side-by-side, they do not touch nor look nor speak. The man from the doorway rests his palms and back on the sill while the shadow in the high-backed chair can only sit, wood frame creaking against the weight of his shoulders.
It is when the pain flares, an old enemy tight in the chest and poison in the mind, heavy and black like tar in the pit of the stomach; a murky cloud, sliding with all the cold realization of metal through flesh, words hissing familiar and cruel as memory: Pity is not care. There can be no love from those who look at petty, broken things and want nothing more than to fix. You're not a person, you're a project. Look at you. Fucking disgusting — But the words fall silent with the cool pressure of the hand on his shoulder, and even still his heart is screaming. Still there is only silence between them.
"Tell me what's on your mind." Yet he has to stop, freezing, the words still too harsh and authoritative, edging order rather than request. He lifts his hand, placing it on the sill once more. Added, more softly, more familiar; "I can leave if you'd like me to, Leone."
"Stay." The word is already spoken before he has a chance to reconsider. It is met with only a hum, quiet, gentle, and the way he's chastising himself internally for being too quick, too forceful, too needy and wanting. An idiot who craves isolation but takes the company like a starving man takes a meal. The silence is thick and heavy and suffocating.
"I'm sorry," he says, finally, still hyper-focused on the buildings adjacent, doing anything not to be there, in that moment. He's somewhere else, somewhere far away where the guilt piles and constricts and makes a twisted mess of a man, somewhere dark and painful. The words don't come from a place of thought. His heart is ripping at his chest and begging to be laid on the operating table. His stomach is turning and churning and threatening to exit the body all together.
In a moment of stunning, burning clarity, in the room that used to be a base, a headquarters, a home before its inhabitants outgrew it, the sea of desperation and self-torture parts and lets the sun shine on the darkest, ugliest parts, the parts of him translucent from sheltering, soot-stained and jaundiced. There is no distraction from them. He's looking at the street below. He does not see it.
The words hang heavy in the air, unexplained, unchallenged. Dense meaning packed into syllables that cannot contain them, vague and nebulous. For a second, there is a hope: maybe it needs no explanation. An apology for an entire life, plain, simple. Unsatisfying. A plaster over a gaping wound not yet scarred over. The skin is still too tender, too new. The silence scratches at the scabs, pokes at the fresh blood as if to say go on, go on, and for the briefest of moments, there is only hatred. How dare you be so patient. How dare you be so selfless.
Somewhere, something breaks.
For the briefest of moments, he is not a monster, or a mistake, or a tool to be used and disposed of. For the briefest of moments, Leone Abbacchio feels like a human being.
What he feels is the hand that slides to meet his on the windowsill, and for a moment, his world is in that hand: with its tiny scars and slim fingers and earthy complexion, with its clipped nails and calloused palms. He memorizes the feeling, every tendon he can see and every crosshatch across the knuckles and every single line in the palm, just in case it never happens again. When the breeze stirs, the hand shields him from the chill and the symbolism is tearing at his chest.
“I couldn’t finish anything, could I?” It is small, and it is quiet. The blankness of the empty room is now a closeness, as stuffy and intimate as a confessional and holds all the weight of one. He tries to speak, opens his mouth to, but the words catch in his throat and threaten to choke him. The guilt is a burden that ties the noose around his neck, tightens the knot and urges him to jump. The hand is everything that holds him from doing so.
He expects a lecture, some carefully practiced, prepared motivational speech, words that will tumble into open air like a paradox, meaning everything, meaning nothing. It does not come. There is only silence, here; silence and the gentle breeze, silence and warmth of the sun. The man from the doorway is not here to speak of what was, of what if or what could have been, only what is now.
There are no words when there is touch, and when there are words, touch seems meaningless, far-away and disingenuous. Perhaps it is the downfall: the intimacy. Perhaps all of it a terrible, terrible mistake. The rule of touch is meant to be broken.
“Bucc— Bruno.” There is so subservience among equals. The habit has yet to die. “I can’t be everything you need me to.”
There is too much in too few words, words filled to the brim of their syllables and threatening to spill, the weight of a two months filling the empty spaces between them. Two months since the disaster. Two months since the miracle. Two months since the world stopped having a place in it for old ways and old things and old frames of mind, since the world around them crashed and burned in the pyre they started. Two months, and the shadow in the high-backed chair lives still in the ashes, in the nightfall, for the shadow has no place in the dawn.
He says, far more quietly, “But I’m trying.”
Eyes find each other, then, somehow. The morning light catches in them both and lights them like glass; a pair blue as the sea, and the other as the sky, and the light pressure from where hands meet is the horizon between them. At length, they stare, both bare-faced and unmoving as statues of bronze and ice. There is another conversation, silent and emotional, and words are far too meaningless to hold the weight of the heart. Meaningless and forgettable.
There is movement, then, and the world shifts to the spaces between, the place where lips meet forehead and gentle breaths ruffle unpinned stray hairs, where tears roll hot and unbidden below. The world is changed, now, too alien, too different from what once it was, but here, in a house abandoned, was home.
“Come back,” the man from the doorway whispers against skin, now less like an order and more like a plea.
“There’s no place for me there now.”
Comes the answer in breaking hearts: “You told me once I was your home.”
The shadow in the high-backed chair pulls the light closer, still seated, until his head rests mere layers of fabric above where there are the scars, grips the back of pristine jacket in balled fists, and shudders. Quietly, against the linen, the words are shaking. “You are.”
“So come home.”
The room is empty now, late in the evening, magenta light streaming in from closed windows. In the dust on the floor, two sets of tracks leave in perfect step, aside the larger, the occasional indent of a cane. At the doorway, they stop, face each other, and continue down the hall.