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Fic: Against the Day (Watchmen)
Title: Against the Day
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Byron, implied past Bill/Byron.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Alcohol abuse.
Summary: Mothman inspires some poetry.
Notes: Thanks tooudeteron for the beta!
Just in case you were in any doubt, this is the poem in question. I’ve fudged the timeline a little: Streetcar actually premiered in 1947, two years before the HUAC trials. Maybe it came out later in the WM universe, or something.
Whatever it is you’re looking for, I don’t think you’re gonna find it at the bottom of that glass.
That’s what Bill would have said, and if he was here, saying it, now, Byron would be sorry and would try to believe him, because he’s never been able to drink himself stupid enough to resist those puppy-dog eyes. But now Dollar Bill Brady’s at the bottom of a six-foot hole and Byron’s sitting at a bar with nowhere to look but down into his drink, so maybe he was the one who was right all along. He tips the last of the whiskey down his throat and gazes out through the bottom of the tumbler, a fish-eye lens past which the world swims by all indistinct and quiet. Like looking out the window of a submarine. And thinking of submarines Byron thinks of war, and then of gunshot wounds and blood and puppy-dog eyes glazed over in the lobby of a fucking bank—as if money were worth dying for—and before he knows it he’s ordered another drink to put a stop to all the damn thinking and is gulping it down, steadying himself on his barstool with his free hand.
He used to have wings. A little bit of grace he’d made for himself, put together with his own hands. Now he can’t even hold himself upright most nights. He looks through the bottom of his glass again and decides that he never should have called himself Mothman. He should’ve been something ridiculous, like—a flying fish. Yeah, that should’ve been the thing. Wear his absurdity on the outside.
The drunks and the bartenders appear small when he looks at them this way. But perhaps it’s all a trick, like a telescope in reverse. Perhaps they’re predators huge as sharks, and it’s only by chance that he’s managed to avoid catching their eyes as they drift past him and marking himself out as dinner. Byron shies back in alarm as somebody takes the barstool next to him, and sets his glass down, glaring. Silly little fish.
“I startled you,” says the man who is now sitting next to him, “I’m so sorry.” And Byron just stares for a second, because his voice is this soft Southern drawl that settles claws quietly into his heart and tugs at it, and he knows that any moment now it will crack apart, implode in dusty flakes, dead-wing flakes.
Dried-out husk on a window sill. That kind of moth he could be.
The man sitting beside Byron is still looking at him, head tilted to one side, beginning to look concerned. He can’t bear for anyone to look at him with concern right now. Perhaps ever.
“Don’t worry about it,” he mutters, and hopes that’s the end of it. He needs another drink. To moisten his desiccated heart, to keep it beating—though when he thinks again, he’s not sure why. He has no use for it himself, and there’s nobody else left alive who could possibly want it.
But another whiskey has already appeared on the counter before him, though he doesn’t remember ordering it. Byron shakes his head to clear it, but it just makes the world wobble perilously and he has to grab the edge of the bar to still it.
“By way of apology,” explains the voice at his side. After a second, he remembers that it belongs to the man who startled him, and who is now nursing a tumbler of his own.
“Uh,” Byron says. “Thanks?”
“You’re very welcome.”
Now Byron’s actually looking at him, the man seems vaguely familiar. Dark hair, moustache, a head that looks a little too small for his shoulders, and a genial grin perpetually on the edge of wavering. Diffidence covered up by sheer effort of will: Byron recognises that, easy, and is reminded of himself on those occasions when Bill managed to persuade him he ought to at least try being sociable.
Still can’t quite put a name to the face, though. He sticks out his hand, and is pleased when it doesn’t tremble.
“Byron Lewis,” he says. He doesn’t add, Pleased to meet you.
The man shakes his hand, and pauses consideringly for a moment. “Tom,” he says, at length. “Tom Williams.”
It’s not familiar, but Byron decides that it doesn’t really matter, anyhow. What does? He swallows more whiskey, gives a watery smile. “We both sound like we should be Welsh,” he points out, for something to say. “Funny, huh?”
The man quirks a smile. “Tennessee Welsh, maybe.”
Something clicks into place, then. He jabs a finger at the man—Williams. “You,” he says, “you’re, I saw your picture in the newspaper. Next to a review. You wrote a play. On Broadway.”
The arts pages are about the only parts of the newspaper Byron reads any more. Sports have never really interested him, the opinion pieces mostly make him want to puke, and the actual news is nothing but misery and death. Probably it always was. It was just easier to ignore, before.
He half-remembers a quote from the review, something about ‘relying on the kindness of strangers’. It seems pretty apt, thinking about it, since everybody Byron actually knows is either fucked up or dead.
“I did,” Williams is agreeing. He glances at his watch. “Tonight’s performance should be starting about now, in fact.”
“So why aren’t you there?”
“I don’t think a man ever got any new ideas by sitting around staring at his successes.”
It sounds like it ought to be true, but Byron’s spent the last few months doing nothing but sitting around staring at failure, and that sure hasn’t given him any ideas worth the having. He doesn’t realise he’s said as much out loud, until Williams gives him this weird look, curious but not unsympathetic.
“Were you close to them?” he asks.
“Huh?”
“Dollar Bill, the Silhouette? They were your friends?”
“I gue—wait, how did you…?”
Byron’s never guarded his identity as jealously as some of the others did—and a hell of a mistake that turned out to be—but he’s not exactly a media darling, either. He’s not photogenic like Bill or Sally, there’s no tantalizing whiff of sleaze about him, and he’s not exactly a patriot. He’s just kind of a sad, unmarketable little oddball, that’s all.
“I remembered your face.” Williams glances downwards, as though slightly embarrassed. “I’ve always been rather fond of moths.” Then the embarrassed look is gone and he smiles, as though that ought to be a perfectly adequate explanation.
Why shouldn’t it be adequate, though, really? Byron’s seen people stab each other for a fix, an imagined slight, a difference in skin colour, for no reason at all. This guy makes as much sense as most things he’s seen, as much sense as anything else in this goddamned city.
So: “Yeah,” he says, “they were my friends. They were good people. Better than—”
Better than Larry and Sally, with the dollar signs always in their eyes, better than Hooded Justice and Blake with their brutality barely veiled, better than that hypocritical fuck Gardner, who was just a costume stuffed to the gills with bigotry and held together by lies.
“Better than most,” he finishes, weakly.
Williams nods. “Seems that the best people in this world are often the most fragile, too.”
Byron frowns. ‘Fragile’ isn’t a word he’d ever have thought to apply to sharp-angled Ursula, with her tongue that could draw blood at fifty paces, or to Bill. Bill, who was like solid earth and daylight, the way nightmares crumbled in his presence, and Byron could no more have entertained the thought of living without him than that of living without oxygen, without the sun, without ground beneath his feet.
But Williams isn’t looking him in the eye any more. He’s drawn in on himself, like he’s thinking about some other loss, and so Byron doesn’t say anything. Besides, it doesn’t really matter if they were fragile or not. They got crushed anyway.
Though it’s not like he hasn’t wondered how it is he’s the one still alive, and not either of them, when he was always the one who found it hardest alone, who needed Bill’s strength and sweetness, or Ursula’s conspiratorial whispers in his ear, to keep going. He wonders, too, how long he’ll last. It feels like a fog surrounding him, the loss of them, dragging him down. Other people, he can tell, are repelled. Somehow they know. Maybe they’re afraid that they’ll get lost in it, too.
Not this guy, though. It’s almost like he was drawn in by Byron’s aura of loss, lostness, loserness, does it really matter what it’s called? Misery loves company, that’s the point. Maybe there are more of them out there, a whole invisible community of the bereaved. Maybe if Byron lifts up his head and starts looking he’ll find them, and they can all go sit underneath a tree in Central Park and drink away the pain until Judgement Day—and boy, that day cannot come too soon. He’d rather sit waiting for judgement than dish it out, now. He doesn’t know how he ever had enough arrogance to think that was a job for him.
His glass is empty again, he realises, once he’s blinked himself back to something like reality. He sets it down on the counter and looks at it mournfully, then fishes for his wallet.
“You shouldn’t let it eat you away,” Williams says to him. “You can start out drowning your sorrows and end up washing away what makes you yourself.”
The bartender sets another drink down in front of him as he speaks. Byron wonders who he’s trying to convince.
“You’re trying to teach me self-preservation?” he snorts, instead of asking. “I don’t think there’s much worth preserving.” Though he is doing a kind of preservation, he guesses. Embalming himself from the inside out. He pictures his face looking out from inside a jar, bobbing up and down in vinegar among the gherkins, and he giggles.
Williams doesn’t laugh. “You’re interesting,” he says. “Perhaps I’ll write about you sometime.” His expression is inscrutable, but suddenly Byron feels skewered by it, a specimen pinned to a board. He blinks, hard, to hide his unease.
“Better be careful if you wanna do that,” he says, grinning mirthlessly. “They’ll arrest you.”
“I can think of worse things to be arrested for.”
Byron squirms under Williams’ thoughtful, solemn regard, and finds himself beginning to resent it. He came here to get some peace, not to play muse to some stranger who can’t understand what he’s been through, not really, because this isn’t loss in the abstract, it’s not some universal thing, it’s him and it’s Bill and it’s personal, and he doesn’t fucking want to share it. He swallows.
Then he tosses a fistful of bills onto the counter and manoeuvres himself off his stool, only a little unsteady on his feet.
“I gotta go,” he mutters.
“I apologise if I presumed,” Williams says. “I only—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Byron is already pushing his way through the growing crowd of drinkers, making for the door. The place is starting to fill up fast now; it’s almost dark.
But in the doorway he stops.
He has to crane his neck to see the sky, and he’s consumed, for a moment, by the conviction that he is in the wrong world. This one is too big for him; it was made for giants, not for a small and scared human being. And it’s not resentment he feels towards Williams—he realizes that with a sudden finality which surely ought to scare him more than it does. He doesn’t care if somebody else wants to peer in upon his grief. He just doesn’t want to be written about, because he doesn’t want to be immortalized, he doesn’t want to be in the world any longer than he has to. He’s done.
He turns on his heel, because in this instant that seems to be a very important thing, and he thinks that he ought to share it. But he can’t see through the crowd, he doesn’t know if Williams is still sitting at the bar, and he falters, and after a moment he turns back again and steps outside.
Twilight is coming down fast now, a curtain soft and gentling against the day. Byron hunches over, hands in pockets, and is grateful for its shadows. He will not look up at the city lights; he will not close his eyes and think of better days. He is alone, and he is done.
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Byron, implied past Bill/Byron.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Alcohol abuse.
Summary: Mothman inspires some poetry.
Notes: Thanks to
oudeteron for the beta!Just in case you were in any doubt, this is the poem in question. I’ve fudged the timeline a little: Streetcar actually premiered in 1947, two years before the HUAC trials. Maybe it came out later in the WM universe, or something.
Whatever it is you’re looking for, I don’t think you’re gonna find it at the bottom of that glass.
That’s what Bill would have said, and if he was here, saying it, now, Byron would be sorry and would try to believe him, because he’s never been able to drink himself stupid enough to resist those puppy-dog eyes. But now Dollar Bill Brady’s at the bottom of a six-foot hole and Byron’s sitting at a bar with nowhere to look but down into his drink, so maybe he was the one who was right all along. He tips the last of the whiskey down his throat and gazes out through the bottom of the tumbler, a fish-eye lens past which the world swims by all indistinct and quiet. Like looking out the window of a submarine. And thinking of submarines Byron thinks of war, and then of gunshot wounds and blood and puppy-dog eyes glazed over in the lobby of a fucking bank—as if money were worth dying for—and before he knows it he’s ordered another drink to put a stop to all the damn thinking and is gulping it down, steadying himself on his barstool with his free hand.
He used to have wings. A little bit of grace he’d made for himself, put together with his own hands. Now he can’t even hold himself upright most nights. He looks through the bottom of his glass again and decides that he never should have called himself Mothman. He should’ve been something ridiculous, like—a flying fish. Yeah, that should’ve been the thing. Wear his absurdity on the outside.
The drunks and the bartenders appear small when he looks at them this way. But perhaps it’s all a trick, like a telescope in reverse. Perhaps they’re predators huge as sharks, and it’s only by chance that he’s managed to avoid catching their eyes as they drift past him and marking himself out as dinner. Byron shies back in alarm as somebody takes the barstool next to him, and sets his glass down, glaring. Silly little fish.
“I startled you,” says the man who is now sitting next to him, “I’m so sorry.” And Byron just stares for a second, because his voice is this soft Southern drawl that settles claws quietly into his heart and tugs at it, and he knows that any moment now it will crack apart, implode in dusty flakes, dead-wing flakes.
Dried-out husk on a window sill. That kind of moth he could be.
The man sitting beside Byron is still looking at him, head tilted to one side, beginning to look concerned. He can’t bear for anyone to look at him with concern right now. Perhaps ever.
“Don’t worry about it,” he mutters, and hopes that’s the end of it. He needs another drink. To moisten his desiccated heart, to keep it beating—though when he thinks again, he’s not sure why. He has no use for it himself, and there’s nobody else left alive who could possibly want it.
But another whiskey has already appeared on the counter before him, though he doesn’t remember ordering it. Byron shakes his head to clear it, but it just makes the world wobble perilously and he has to grab the edge of the bar to still it.
“By way of apology,” explains the voice at his side. After a second, he remembers that it belongs to the man who startled him, and who is now nursing a tumbler of his own.
“Uh,” Byron says. “Thanks?”
“You’re very welcome.”
Now Byron’s actually looking at him, the man seems vaguely familiar. Dark hair, moustache, a head that looks a little too small for his shoulders, and a genial grin perpetually on the edge of wavering. Diffidence covered up by sheer effort of will: Byron recognises that, easy, and is reminded of himself on those occasions when Bill managed to persuade him he ought to at least try being sociable.
Still can’t quite put a name to the face, though. He sticks out his hand, and is pleased when it doesn’t tremble.
“Byron Lewis,” he says. He doesn’t add, Pleased to meet you.
The man shakes his hand, and pauses consideringly for a moment. “Tom,” he says, at length. “Tom Williams.”
It’s not familiar, but Byron decides that it doesn’t really matter, anyhow. What does? He swallows more whiskey, gives a watery smile. “We both sound like we should be Welsh,” he points out, for something to say. “Funny, huh?”
The man quirks a smile. “Tennessee Welsh, maybe.”
Something clicks into place, then. He jabs a finger at the man—Williams. “You,” he says, “you’re, I saw your picture in the newspaper. Next to a review. You wrote a play. On Broadway.”
The arts pages are about the only parts of the newspaper Byron reads any more. Sports have never really interested him, the opinion pieces mostly make him want to puke, and the actual news is nothing but misery and death. Probably it always was. It was just easier to ignore, before.
He half-remembers a quote from the review, something about ‘relying on the kindness of strangers’. It seems pretty apt, thinking about it, since everybody Byron actually knows is either fucked up or dead.
“I did,” Williams is agreeing. He glances at his watch. “Tonight’s performance should be starting about now, in fact.”
“So why aren’t you there?”
“I don’t think a man ever got any new ideas by sitting around staring at his successes.”
It sounds like it ought to be true, but Byron’s spent the last few months doing nothing but sitting around staring at failure, and that sure hasn’t given him any ideas worth the having. He doesn’t realise he’s said as much out loud, until Williams gives him this weird look, curious but not unsympathetic.
“Were you close to them?” he asks.
“Huh?”
“Dollar Bill, the Silhouette? They were your friends?”
“I gue—wait, how did you…?”
Byron’s never guarded his identity as jealously as some of the others did—and a hell of a mistake that turned out to be—but he’s not exactly a media darling, either. He’s not photogenic like Bill or Sally, there’s no tantalizing whiff of sleaze about him, and he’s not exactly a patriot. He’s just kind of a sad, unmarketable little oddball, that’s all.
“I remembered your face.” Williams glances downwards, as though slightly embarrassed. “I’ve always been rather fond of moths.” Then the embarrassed look is gone and he smiles, as though that ought to be a perfectly adequate explanation.
Why shouldn’t it be adequate, though, really? Byron’s seen people stab each other for a fix, an imagined slight, a difference in skin colour, for no reason at all. This guy makes as much sense as most things he’s seen, as much sense as anything else in this goddamned city.
So: “Yeah,” he says, “they were my friends. They were good people. Better than—”
Better than Larry and Sally, with the dollar signs always in their eyes, better than Hooded Justice and Blake with their brutality barely veiled, better than that hypocritical fuck Gardner, who was just a costume stuffed to the gills with bigotry and held together by lies.
“Better than most,” he finishes, weakly.
Williams nods. “Seems that the best people in this world are often the most fragile, too.”
Byron frowns. ‘Fragile’ isn’t a word he’d ever have thought to apply to sharp-angled Ursula, with her tongue that could draw blood at fifty paces, or to Bill. Bill, who was like solid earth and daylight, the way nightmares crumbled in his presence, and Byron could no more have entertained the thought of living without him than that of living without oxygen, without the sun, without ground beneath his feet.
But Williams isn’t looking him in the eye any more. He’s drawn in on himself, like he’s thinking about some other loss, and so Byron doesn’t say anything. Besides, it doesn’t really matter if they were fragile or not. They got crushed anyway.
Though it’s not like he hasn’t wondered how it is he’s the one still alive, and not either of them, when he was always the one who found it hardest alone, who needed Bill’s strength and sweetness, or Ursula’s conspiratorial whispers in his ear, to keep going. He wonders, too, how long he’ll last. It feels like a fog surrounding him, the loss of them, dragging him down. Other people, he can tell, are repelled. Somehow they know. Maybe they’re afraid that they’ll get lost in it, too.
Not this guy, though. It’s almost like he was drawn in by Byron’s aura of loss, lostness, loserness, does it really matter what it’s called? Misery loves company, that’s the point. Maybe there are more of them out there, a whole invisible community of the bereaved. Maybe if Byron lifts up his head and starts looking he’ll find them, and they can all go sit underneath a tree in Central Park and drink away the pain until Judgement Day—and boy, that day cannot come too soon. He’d rather sit waiting for judgement than dish it out, now. He doesn’t know how he ever had enough arrogance to think that was a job for him.
His glass is empty again, he realises, once he’s blinked himself back to something like reality. He sets it down on the counter and looks at it mournfully, then fishes for his wallet.
“You shouldn’t let it eat you away,” Williams says to him. “You can start out drowning your sorrows and end up washing away what makes you yourself.”
The bartender sets another drink down in front of him as he speaks. Byron wonders who he’s trying to convince.
“You’re trying to teach me self-preservation?” he snorts, instead of asking. “I don’t think there’s much worth preserving.” Though he is doing a kind of preservation, he guesses. Embalming himself from the inside out. He pictures his face looking out from inside a jar, bobbing up and down in vinegar among the gherkins, and he giggles.
Williams doesn’t laugh. “You’re interesting,” he says. “Perhaps I’ll write about you sometime.” His expression is inscrutable, but suddenly Byron feels skewered by it, a specimen pinned to a board. He blinks, hard, to hide his unease.
“Better be careful if you wanna do that,” he says, grinning mirthlessly. “They’ll arrest you.”
“I can think of worse things to be arrested for.”
Byron squirms under Williams’ thoughtful, solemn regard, and finds himself beginning to resent it. He came here to get some peace, not to play muse to some stranger who can’t understand what he’s been through, not really, because this isn’t loss in the abstract, it’s not some universal thing, it’s him and it’s Bill and it’s personal, and he doesn’t fucking want to share it. He swallows.
Then he tosses a fistful of bills onto the counter and manoeuvres himself off his stool, only a little unsteady on his feet.
“I gotta go,” he mutters.
“I apologise if I presumed,” Williams says. “I only—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Byron is already pushing his way through the growing crowd of drinkers, making for the door. The place is starting to fill up fast now; it’s almost dark.
But in the doorway he stops.
He has to crane his neck to see the sky, and he’s consumed, for a moment, by the conviction that he is in the wrong world. This one is too big for him; it was made for giants, not for a small and scared human being. And it’s not resentment he feels towards Williams—he realizes that with a sudden finality which surely ought to scare him more than it does. He doesn’t care if somebody else wants to peer in upon his grief. He just doesn’t want to be written about, because he doesn’t want to be immortalized, he doesn’t want to be in the world any longer than he has to. He’s done.
He turns on his heel, because in this instant that seems to be a very important thing, and he thinks that he ought to share it. But he can’t see through the crowd, he doesn’t know if Williams is still sitting at the bar, and he falters, and after a moment he turns back again and steps outside.
Twilight is coming down fast now, a curtain soft and gentling against the day. Byron hunches over, hands in pockets, and is grateful for its shadows. He will not look up at the city lights; he will not close his eyes and think of better days. He is alone, and he is done.