Chapter Text
Quite simply, it was one of those days. Where it was hard to get out of bed and hard to put on clothes and hard for Allen to drag himself out the door. Less because he didn’t want to go to class, more because he didn’t want to be awake. Not to mention that with all the dragging of feet and standing in the shower for half an hour while he slowly woke up, he had to dash off without time for breakfast.
It wasn’t a good morning.
Plus the momentary panic when he thought his card was going to get denied at the campus cafeteria because it was the end of the month and it was hard to sustain a diet like his off a government study pension. And the way he just had that vague fear that he’d walked into the wrong classroom for the first ten minutes of the lecture? Yeah, that wasn’t helping.
But it was fine. It was good, it was fine.
Well it wasn’t fine because it turned out it was actually the wrong lecture and he had to quietly pack up all his books and leave without making a scene. Which he managed to do, but. He could still feel the eyes of his not-classmates watching his back, and it made his skin crawl a little.
It was only once he was out of the room and breathing easily that Allen saw the handwritten sign scrawled on the door reading that his first class for the semester had been cancelled. Because it was a bad day, and the world wanted to persistently reiterate that to him.
Since it was also his only class for the day, Allen found all he could do was stare blankly at the hasty note and the small smiley face drawn at the end before turning on his heel and heading back to the bus stop at the front of the campus.
Luck shone tentatively when he found he only had to wait twenty minutes for the bus - ‘only’ being an optimistic outlook, considering the buses came every half hour. But it was fine. It was one hundred percent okay. It was an incredible inconvenience and a whole magnitude of fruitless labour, but it was fine.
The bus was full.
There were no perks to an eight o’clock class, and there were somehow even fewer when that class was cancelled. The main anti-perk being that, generally, the eight-thirty bus was packed with school-age students. Allen managed to find a place for himself wedged between the larger-than-necessary bag strapped to a primary schooler’s back and the sweaty armpit of a sixteen-year-old boy twice his size.
Every nauseating motion of the bus only served to shunt him one way or another - getting winded by a bag the size of the child it was attached to, or getting winded by the cloying stench of unwashed teenager. It was hard to breathe and he was feeling a bit lightheaded towards the end of the trip.
It wasn’t even as though he got the satisfaction of watching all those kids disembark so he could steal one of their seats and relax in the unscented air conditioning for a couple stops because, well. He ended up getting off before them.
Which was almost better, but he’d been really looking forward to sitting there and staring at nothing for a few minutes.
But hey, at least he didn’t step in any potholes or get hit by a car on his way back to the almost-sketchy apartment he was renting with Lavi. Although, the number pad of the security code did try its best to be difficult for the sake of being difficult.
And yet, despite all that, Allen made it into the building and onto the elevator without too much of a problem. It didn’t even make the disconcerting deathrattle when it ground to a halt at the third floor, which was almost comforting.
And! He had his keys! So he didn’t have to call Lavi pathetically from outside their front door and beg to be let into his own home.
Which Lavi certainly hadn’t been expecting, if his bandana-and-boxers getup was anything to go by, or the bowl of dry cereal in his hands, or the other bowl of weed by his elbow. Like… at least he was out on the balcony with it.
But that fucking day was so beyond real that Allen didn’t even bother to question it too heavily.
He had been living with Lavi for a year and he didn’t know how he hadn’t known that Lavi smoked weed.
When it came down to it, the revelation wasn’t very shocking.
After taking half a moment to actually look, it was more than just that Lavi ‘smoked weed’ - Lavi was a stoner. And Allen just… hadn’t known.
Thinking about it, Lavi did kind of scream stoner. Allen must have simply been around him for too long, he supposed. He’d known Lavi before he smoked, and Lavi had chosen to not make it a part of their friendship. Considerate of him, honestly. Hadn’t really hidden it, if his casual reaction to Allen coming home three hours early to find him on the balcony with a pipe and a bowl was anything to go by.
“Yo, Allen,” was all he said, reclining in his armchair with his feet on the railing. “Want a cone?” And that was that.
Allen realised Lavi assumed he’d known to some extent and had probably just kept it on the down low out of respect for him. After half a moment he decided it would be far too much of a bother to react now. Didn’t even really care enough to try, in all honesty.
So instead he said, “Sure,” with a shrug, dropped his bag by the sliding door and stepped onto the balcony. “Class got cancelled anyway,” he reasoned, fell into the matching armchair by Lavi’s and considered that he really would get the chance to stare at nothing for a while after all.
“Lucky for you,” Lavi grinned while he ashed the pipe into the potted plant beside him and packed it with green before passing it to Allen.
“Unlucky for my education,” Allen countered and accepted the small red-painted copper pipe. “How…?” he asked vaguely, gesturing to it.
Lavi struggled to pull a lighter from between the cushions of his armchair with a grunt, held it out for him to take. “Like breathing?” he shrugged and snickered a quick laugh. “Uh,” he gestured eloquently and rested his hands behind his head. “Never had to explain the finer points of smoking before,” he reasoned apologetically.
Allen arched a brow and looked down at the simple metal pipe skeptically. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out,” he reassured his housefriend and struck the lighter, lowered it to the bowl and brought the mouthpiece to his lips.
A small frown pinching his brows, he was acutely aware of Lavi watching him with no small amount of interest while he dragged lightly to try pull the ember throughout the cone. It was strangling and the heavy taste of dope sat uncomfortably on the back of his tongue, making his expression twist a little in distaste.
Calling enough, Allen pulled the pipe away and held it back out to Lavi who made a sharp, confusing gesture which only made sense to Allen as ‘inhale, dumbass’ half a second later - when he was coughing up the lungful of hot smoke which he’d let sit in his throat.
“Oh-” he wheezed, recoiling from the sharp, choking burn it had left. “Oh god,” he tried again and ended up coughing when his lungs rioted against the abuse.
Lavi looked like he was caught between sympathising and trying to stop himself from cackling at the hilarity and made no move to help Allen either way. “Dude,” he choked on a laugh, hysterics winning out. “How did I know that was going to happen?” He threw his head back and laughed at Allen’s bitterly offended expression, hand pressed to his stomach as though he were the one suffering the hellfire.
“Because you didn’t tell me?” Allen croaked out, hoarse and salty while he pushed himself out of the sofa chair, hunched over with a hand pressed against his mouth to stifle the coughing fits trying to shake him apart.
“I tried,” Lavi wheezed, heaved in a breath and honest to god snorted. “Your face - I swear it gets better, trust me,” he patted weakly at Allen’s arm as he stumbled past, heading back inside to get a damn glass of water. “Your - oh god I’m not even sorry,” he kept laughing and Allen was finding it difficult to maintain his staunchly offended expression.
“You should be a little sorry,” he croaked from the sink, still hoarse and burning. But like. He could breathe at least. That was an improvement.
“We’ve all been there man,” Lavi reassured through the open door, still laughing like an asshole. “Oh,” he sighed in blissful relief when he finally managed to pull in a full breath of air after all that hard work he put into cackling at Allen’s pain. “Like,” he giggled a little, shook his head and offered, “at least you didn't throw up?”
Allen shut off the tap and took a large gulp of water, dismayed to find it hardly helped. Considering the burn was in his windpipe rather than his throatpipe that made sense, but. Some kind of relief, please. “You gave me cancer,” he groaned pitifully, taking his glass of not-at-all-helpful water with him back to the balcony. “You could have had mercy but instead you gave me cancer.”
“I honestly think I have, like,” Lavi snickered, “scar tissue on the back of my throat.”
“It’s not like this every time,” Allen coughed out, still suffering, “right?”
“Fuck no,” Lavi snorted, put the pipe to his lips and finished Allen’s cone. “Just gotta get good, scrub,” he grinned easily, blowing the rest of the smoke away.
They talked easily from there, bantered the same as they always had. Allen drank his water and complained about throat cancer and Lavi called him a pussy and told him to suck it up.
Their conversation turned, of course, to food and the prospect of the banana bread Link had baked them (which they’d forgotten at Lenalee’s house and otherwise would have dived on). It was gone now, surely. Food laws stated that if cake was left behind it was forsaken, but Allen still stood by that every crumb was as important as the last.
It was only when he found himself saying, “No, Lavi, forks are the perfect utensil. You can eat the bulk of the cake however you want, but forks are the perfect shape and height for a dexterous person to flick the crumbs in a calculated movement so they land specifically on the flat part above the prongs,” that he realised just how fucking stoned he was, and couldn’t help the way that realisation made him burst into a giggling fit and double over to try contain his laughter.
Lavi mindlessly returned his hysterics, tried to counter, “But a butter knife has more surface area for crumb scooping, so you-” He paused to suck in a wheezing breath, trying to speak through the giggles, “so you can get more bang for your buck.”
Feigning a severe scowl, the effect somewhat lost by the way he was still hiccoughing with laughter, Allen retorted, “Have you ever tried to deepthroat a butter knife, Lavi?” and only managed to elicit another round of unstoppable cackling from the both of them.
And the worst thing about that, perhaps, was that Allen had fun. Because that meant he didn’t hesitate when Lavi offered again a couple weeks later when he came home from class wet and shivering from the sudden outburst of late summer rain.
The weather was still swinging between a light drizzle and irrationally heavy downpour when Allen made it through the door, but the second Lavi saw him walk in he ditched his cereal (which he’d been pouring milk into, for once) and dashed to the bathroom to get the biggest fluffiest towel he could find.
It turned out to not be a towel at all, but rather the marshmallow dressing gown that Lenalee’s brother had given her, which she’d begged them to take (and which Lavi had done readily and without reservation).
He threw it over Allen’s head and Allen wearily, painstakingly peeled off his sopping clothes right there in the entryway until he was down to almost-dry boxers. At long last he pulled that soft, horrendous-looking marshmallow around himself with a whimper of long-overdue relief.
While he’d been busy with that Lavi had been a flurry of activity, finding all the pillows and blankets in the house and throwing them on the lounge room floor with haphazard intent. Allen left him to his whirlwind, wandered into the bathroom with his wet clothes so he could strip off his boxers and also find a real towel so he could do something about his hair dripping icy drops down his spine.
The marshmallow was defeated when the water managed to get under it, and he’d just decided he was a fan, despite having vocally objected to Lavi’s insistence that they take it from Lenalee - and his subsequent refusal to throw it out.
Allen could hear more scrambling around outside while he tiredly attempted to dry his hair, gave up after ten-ish seconds and left the bathroom with the marshmallow wrapped around him and a towel covering his head like a shawl.
When he exited the bathroom, however, he was almost tempted to turn back around and make sure he’d gone through the right door and not like. A gate to an slightly skewed and infinitely more comfortable version of their shitty apartment.
The curtains were drawn over the sliding glass doors and all the lights were off. Lavi, the pyro, had lit candles on the coffee table and kitchen bench to make it feel warm despite their lack of heating, while the rain stepped up to another downpour outside. Lavi was poking a stick of incense into one of the flames in the kitchen, trying to light it, and when Allen craned his neck to see over the back of the couch and into the lounge room he noticed first the carpet of pillows, cushions and blankets - including the ones from Allen’s bed, he noticed with a wry grin - and saw second the gatorade bottle and bowl of chop on the coffee table.
The warm smell of incense gently filled the apartment and when Allen glanced over he saw Lavi had poked the stick into one of the candles and was carrying the spoils of a raided cupboard towards the pillow-carpeted lounge room.
Offhand, he only acknowledged his magic transformation of their apartment with a shrug while he commented, “I was stockpiling some snacks for the weekend, but you definitely need this sooner rather than later.”
Allen, still kind of mindblown, trailed after Lavi into the lounge. His feet sank into the pillows and it was like heaven to lower himself to his knees and lay himself out across it all. “Lavi…” he said quietly, cheek pressed into a cushion and eyes on one of the steady candle flames. He could feel pressure building up behind his eyes and his throat was getting sore and if he hadn’t known better he’d think maybe getting caught out in that rain had made him sick. Sucking in a shuddering breath, he started to say, “Lavi-”
“Nope,” his housefriend overrode him, popping the ‘p’. “Lavi’s not home. You’re not allowed to tell him lies.”
Heedless, Allen rolled and pressed his burning face into the pillows beneath him and grumbled, not sure if he wanted to scream or cry, “I don’t deserve th-”
“Nooooo!” Lavi exclaimed and forced a winded sound out of Allen when he hit him as hard as he could over the back with a feather pillow. Allen rolled over, feeling Lavi wind back for a second hit, and only ended up catching it in the stomach while Lavi yelled, “You’re perfect, you’re worth it, you deserve it!”
Gasping and laughing, Allen wheezed out, “Cause girl you earned it,” and thought it was definitely worth choking on his words when Lavi hit him in the face with the pillow.
Once Allen finished his midterms, passing all his classes with honestly pretty reasonable grades, Lavi decided it called for a celebration. Said celebration honestly had very little preemptive planning involved, considering the idea was only introduced when Allen fell through the door and collapsed onto the couch with a throaty groan which slowly turned into a scream, muffled by the sofa cushions.
Lavi arched his brow, looking on from where he sat a few inches away cradling a cup of probably-coffee-maybe-hot-chocolate in both his hands. He let Allen yell himself out and, once he ran out of air, asked, “You good?” Less concerned so much as ambivalently surprised.
“I’m dead,” Allen corrected, getting a mouthful of couch cushion, and turned his face so he could breathe.
Lavi seemed to contemplate that for a moment and took a sip of his steaming beverage. “Good dead or bad dead?” he asked at length, and Allen rolled himself off the couch so he could flop down to sit properly.
“Both?” he hazarded, dropping his head to fall against the backrest. “I’m just. Dead. Midterms. It’s fucked. I’m fucked. Like,” he heaved a gusty sigh, “I’m done and I’m fine, but I am just…”
“Fucked?” Lavi guessed and Allen rolled his head to see him watching Allen expectantly, lifting the mug back to his lips.
“Basically,” he admitted wearily and rolled his head back to its original position, letting his eyes fall closed.
Lavi was quiet for a long moment before announcing, “We should celebrate your temporary freedom from the shackles of standardised testing.”
“And how,” Allen started to ask and realised he knew the answer halfway through forming the question but decided to finish it anyway for the sake of exasperation, “are we going to do that?”
He lifted his head and Lavi lowered his mug, and they glanced at each other for a long moment, both incredibly aware of what was coming next. At long last, Lavi spoke up. “So do we smoke a cone and then go buy snacks, or do we go buy snacks and then smoke a cone?”
Allen opened his mouth and hesitated, more stymied with the choices than he’d thought he would be. Slowly he asked, “Will... we… be physically able to buy snacks if we smoke a cone first?”
Lavi seemed to consider that for a long moment, cocking his head and twisting his mouth aside as he hummed. “I mean,” he allowed after a long moment, “we won’t know if we don’t try, right?”
Allen arched a brow. “Right,” he agreed, not agreeing at all. He could definitely see where this was going to leave them.
As it was, it took them almost half an hour from the first cone punched to actually get to the corner store down the road from their apartment. Allen wasn’t entirely sure why it took that long, but it probably had something to do with Lavi deciding to try find clothes after smoking his, which kind of led to an impromptu game of dressup and resulted in Lavi wearing beige chino shorts and mismatched knee high socks, a white button-up shirt and a chic red scarf. And shades. The fucker had aviators. So insufferably white that Allen felt as though he really was about to go blind.
When they actually got to the store, oh boy. Allen was wishing he’d taken the sunglasses, honestly. He kept blinking and rubbing at his eyes, certain they were dry as anything. Spent a solid three minutes looking over the packets of of sweets and trying to decipher the actual, like. Value of money written on the price tags.
Lavi came around from the other side of the shelf with two packets of chips in his hands. “Who?” was all he said, holding them up.
Allen glanced over and blinked owlishly at him, then between the two bags. Thinking heavily on it, he lifted a finger and began to point towards the sour cream and chives, but upon realising how terrible of an idea that was he swung his finger at the last moment to jab at the salt and vinegar. “Her,” Allen announced eloquently, and Lavi nodded as though he’d said something very wise indeed.
“She,” Lavi agreed with a sagely nod and went back around the shelf to return the light blue packet from whence it came.
Allen turned his slow attention back to the candy. At length he said, “Skittles,” to no one in particular and crouched down to pick a packet from the hook. He glanced up as he stood, making hazy eye contact with Lavi at the end of the shelf.
He held the packet up. Lavi looked horrified.
In a harsh, loud whisper he scolded, “Allen! You can’t just eat the gays!”
Allen glanced down at the red bag in his hand and read the iconic byline. Hardly trying to hold it back, he sputtered a laugh and ducked his head to snort. With that movement his laugh turned into a gasp of wonder, eyes going wide when they fell on the holy grail. “Lavi,” he breathed and pulled the paper packet from the shelf, looking at it with something like adoration before holding it up for Lavi to see. “Raspberry licorice.”
Lavi’s expression sank into a catlike grin and he gave a slow appreciative nod. “You’re damn fuckin’ right, raspberry licorice,” he agreed and Allen clutched his two finds to his chest while he took a few steps to stand beside Lavi and glance around the store with him, eyes distantly scanning the shelves for whatever else they might need in terms of supplies for their two-man party.
Lavi lifted a finger and twisted on his heel like he was sourcing water and pointed behind them at the drinks fridge. “Cola,” he said and Allen made a sound of thorough agreement.
Then they actually had to face the cashier, who had watched the whole thing with skeptical understanding.
Yes, hello fellow person. We would like to exchange these paper strips for your goods. Thank you and have a wonderful day.
As they were heading for the door, each carrying a bag, Lavi remarked, “Money is so fucking weird,” and Allen had to cackle another ugly laugh because he’d just been thinking the exact same thing.
The walk home felt weirdly like astral projecting - or as though everything was sped up while Allen’s mind was working at the same pace as always.
His legs weren’t going faster than usual, were they? They felt like they were going faster than usual. Every ten meters or so he’d blink like he’d just awoken in an alternate version of their multiverse that he kind of felt like he belonged in, but it also kind of felt like he’d just died in a different reality and his consciousness had be transposed into that one.
Weird.
He was definitely surprised when they arrived at the apartment building. Somehow, despite how quickly it had all been happening, the pavement had felt almost like a mobius strip. They would forever walk that path, groceries in hand, and never reach their destination.
While Lavi keyed in the access code, Allen asked without any kind of indication of premise, “Do you ever feel like you’re living a shitty rendition of Waiting for Godot?”
Lavi blinked at him and pushed the door open. “Of what?” he asked, confused.
Allen tilted his head while he thought about that. What, indeed. “It’s a play, I think,” he said. “Of two homeless guys just. Sitting around, waiting for someone called Godot. Talking about stuff.”
Lavi only seemed more confused. “What’s it about though?” he pressed, walking through the foyer to the rickety elevator.
Allen opened his mouth before realising he didn’t have an answer. “Nothing, really,” he said after a short moment. After another beat he reasoned, “I guess that’s the point.”
Lavi considered that for a long stretch of seconds until the elevator creaked open in front of them. “That’s. Pretty profound, actually.” They walked in and he pressed their floor number, and the two of them turned to face the door. “Where’s Godot?”
Allen shrugged, watching their dull, distorted reflection in the dented stainless steel of the doors. “Dunno,” he admitted, “he never turns up.”
The contemplative silence stretched between them for a long moment before the elevator rattled and creaked to a halt, the doors sliding open. “D’you reckon it’s a metaphor?” Lavi asked at length while they stepped out and walked shoulder-to-shoulder along the corridor.
“I mean,” Allen reasoned, “it’d be dumb if it wasn’t.”
There was a homeless man sitting outside their door.
Well, like. Not their door, but. He was propped against the short stretch of wall between their door and their neighbor’s, with his head leaned back and his legs stretched out across the hallway. Allen and Lavi glanced at one another, then back at the hobo-looking guy with his thick glasses and messy hair, few-days-old stubble and scruffy clothes.
He turned his head and looked back at them.
In a moment his dead bored expression sprang alive into a grin that might have been charming, if only it weren’t being worn by some sketchy stranger sitting next to their front door. “Evening,” he greeted amiably, voice deep and confusingly cultured. “Are you from three-one?” he asked, jerking a thumb at their door.
Allen and Lavi glanced at each other again, both with matching expressions of vague incredulity. “Uh,” Lavi uttered, “yeah?”
“So,” the man propositioned but didn’t seem hopeful enough to actually push himself to his feet despite his happily friendly expression, “my cousins locked me out.”
Allen arched a brow and asked, “Why?” almost scathingly before he could remind himself that engaging was probably the last thing he wanted to do.
His smile quirked into an amused grin and he countered, “Because they’re assholes,” in a similar tone and arched his own brow behind the thick glasses.
Allen’s eyes narrowed. Had he imagined the bite in that? The sharp sarcasm? Interesting, coming from a guy who looked as though he was moments away from asking their help. Help that, granted, everyone in this hallway knew he wasn’t going to get. But... Yeah. Interesting.
In a blink the sharp edges of the man’s smile had mellowed back to something generally amicable and Allen was almost too occupied with trying to decide if it had really been there or if he was getting paranoid about nothing to hear what he actually wanted.
“Okay,” he laughed ruefully and Allen decided no, he wasn’t too occupied to hear this, “I know how this sounds, but. If I could climb over your balcony it would make my life a lot easier.”
“Pfft,” Lavi puffed out a disbelieving laugh and commented while he unlocked their door, “yeah, I’m sure it would.”
“Uhm,” Allen ducked his head on a biting laugh, “no offence, but. You can see why we’d say no, right?”
The man cracked a wry grin at that and shrugged helplessly. “Yeah,” he allowed with another rueful laugh, “that’s probably the smart answer.” Letting his head fall back against the wall, slumping back into resignation to waiting while that smile still teased the corners of his mouth, the man lifted his hand in a half hearted farewell and bade, “Have a good evening, boys.”
Lavi glanced over his shoulder at Allen, eyebrows lifted above the frame of his ridiculous sunglasses while he unlocked the door.
Allen pressed his lips together, scuffed his heel against the carpet and cast the homeless man one last not-really-apologetic-but-still-amused smile when he stepped past into the apartment.
As soon as they were inside, Lavi was doubled up with barely-stifled laughter, bags dropped on the floor. “Have a good evening,” he wheezed, looking up at Allen with his eyes tearing-up.
“Boys,” Allen added, blinking distantly and shaking his head as though he couldn’t understand.
He couldn’t, in honesty.
“Oh my god,” Lavi sounded like he couldn’t decide if he was meant to be laughing or sobbing. “He was gonna steal their shit right, like...?”
Muffled, from outside the door right behind them, the homeless man’s smooth voice called, “Not that it’s important, but I can still hear you,” but he sounded too amused by it to be anything like offended.
Allen and Lavi caught their breath for a moment, locked eyes. Glanced over their shoulders at the door for a moment before the both of them broke back down into hysterical cackles.
In a moment, Lavi caught his breath in a sharp, dramatic gasp, snapping up ramrod-straight. “Wait,” he hissed, fingers clenched in Allen’s arm, “wait, wait. He’s.” He looked at Allen, eyes wide behind his ridiculous sunglasses. “He’s a homeless guy.”
Allen blinked, and then caught on. “Wouldn’t there be two of him?” he reasoned.
Lavi was already going back to the door.
Sliding the deadbolt home, he opened the door against the chain and peered out of the wedged crack at the homeless man. “Hey,” he called, and there was a vague sound of question from outside the door. “Are you waiting for anybody?”
A beat of silence. “What do you mean?”
“Not a man called Godot?” Lavi tried.
The man laughed, and Allen was surprised at the rich cadence of it, his unapologetic amusement. “Wouldn’t I be waiting with a friend, if that were the case?” he reasoned, and Lavi whipped his head around to pin Allen with a wide-eyed look.
“He just said the exact thing you said,” Lavi breathed, as though Allen hadn’t heard him.
He rolled his eyes a little, lips plucking up at the corners. “I didn’t say that exact thing.”
“But you said something like it,” Lavi insisted, then glanced suspicion through the crack in the door.
“I don’t even know what you’re trying to get at,” Allen said, and reached down to pick up the bags Lavi had dropped.
“There’s a conspiracy here somewhere,” Lavi said, staunch, and Allen’s snorted scoff mirrored the one that came through the door. Lavi’s eyes, somehow, grew wider. He glanced quickly between Allen and the homeless man. “Are you,” he said slowly, “the same person? No,” he shook his head quickly, “you’re, um. You’re…” His face cleared and he snapped his fingers. “You two are the homeless people!” he announced, glowing smile directed at Allen. “Wait,” he continued, quickly turning back to contemplation, “does that make me… Godot?”
“I’m not homeless,” Allen said with a small shrug. “Obviously. I’m not the one sitting out in the hallway waiting for someone to invite me to steal their shit like a real live Arsene Lupin. Or a hobo vampire.”
“Scathing commentary of my unfortunate position aside,” added the man outside the door, dry amusement lacing his voice, “the point is that we’re all homeless and there is no god.”
“Well, no,” Allen frowned, taking a couple of steps to the door and shouldering Lavi aside to peer through the crack, “because there’s also the man who fancies himself something to be revered as the ideal, and the slave who dances to entertain him.”
A slim dark brow arched above the rim of the man’s thick glasses, a question.
“Well,” Allen huffed, rolling his eyes a little, “you have the two homeless people settling for degradation while waiting for Godot to save them, you have the bourgeois, and the proletariat class dancing when they say ‘dance’. You,” Allen stressed, “are a homeless man waiting for God. I’m a slave who thinks because the rich people told me to think, and Lavi is without a doubt Godot.”
“How so?” was all the homeless man had to say. “Is he going to let me use the balcony?”
“No,” Allen said, and flashed him a sugary sweet smile, eyes slipping closed with his grin, “but you’re going to keep sitting out here waiting for him to.”
He closed the door smoothly, a gentle and effective punctuation to his on-the-spot analysis of a play he’d seen once maybe six months ago. Walking towards the kitchen, he grinned when he heard the man’s quiet laughter through the door and lifted he and Lavi’s shopping trip spoils onto the bench with an odd feeling of victory.
“I have never,” Lavi said, digging into the bags to pull out the salt and vinegar chips, “heard anyone,” he punctuated by tearing it open, “talk shit the way you do.”
“Aww,” Allen shrugged his shoulder in mocking endearment, casting Lavi that same sweet smile and reaching into the packet to take some chips, “thanks, Lavi. I’ve never heard someone invite a questionable stranger into conversation like you.”
“Look,” Lavi pointed at him with the packet, put some chips in his mouth and bit down with a loud crunch. Speaking through them, he said, “Are you gonna keep talking shit, or are you gonna thank me for the opportunity to prove your tertiary education is actually doing you some good?”
“I could not have said half of that half as quickly if I was sober, so I’ll throw in a bonus and thank you for the weed too,” Allen grinned, and tore open the packet of skittles.
It seemed a bit late to remark upon, but: Allen smoked marijuana and he enjoyed it. It happened.
And then it kept happening.
It was hardly what Allen would call a habit - no more a habit than it was for him to crack a beer or two on a Friday night. Just that when he did crack those beers, Lavi more often than not would emerge from his den in boxers and a bandana with a bamboo bong in one hand and the engraved brass bowl of weed in the other, and ask Allen if he wanted a cone.
And Allen just… said yes.
It was fun, and it wasn’t as though it dragged on him any more than those beers did. It wasn’t as though he was suffering from getting high with his best friend.
But as those weekends slipped by and the months rolled past, Allen began to realise that he was suffering without it.
Not through withdrawals, or anything to that effect, it was just. It was just how he was. It was just who he was. It was his messy past and his messy upbringing and the mess of his ingrained mentality. Without a distraction, Allen’s brain tore itself to shreds and that was just who he was.
So he smoked, because getting high with his best friend was the kind of distraction that stopped the brewing hurricane of his own thoughts. He smoked more, then more and more and more until he was saying yes to each of Lavi’s offers for a sesh. Because it was the only thing that felt good in a world that felt like it was falling apart around him.
He knew it wasn’t helping. He knew there were better things to do, better ways to get out of the rut his own thoughts had driven him into.
But that wasn’t what Allen wanted, and Lavi had always helped him with those kinds of ruts anyway. One way or another.
It didn’t change the fact that there were bad days, of course. That was just life. But it was… reassuring to have something up his sleeve for those days. Maybe it wasn’t an ace of professional therapy, but a pair of twos still had a chance.
One of those bad days caught him with the momentum of a freight train, all the niggling frustrations and anxieties he’d been ignoring crashing into him with a carefully aged and distilled punch. It had him walking back to he and Lavi’s apartment from the bus stop at about the time his class was starting.
A haunting kind of hopelessness had settled itself cold and heavy into the marrow of his bones. Dread swallowing his panic down, down, down until it felt like the terror was choking and drowning deep in his chest. And really - really. It was just the same old shit.
Just the same old everyday shit that had been growing on him and growing and growing and growing and leaving his wallet at the apartment had been the brisk wind that had snapped the camel’s spine and pulverised its legs under the weight of its own self-flagellation.
And, you know. Usually he didn’t mind the rain.
It always made him think of Cross, and that wasn’t always a bad thing. But it had been drizzling when he’d dashed out of the building five minutes late, and in the ten minutes it had taken him to run to the bus stop, catch his breath, hail the bus, realise he didn’t have his wallet, and sit in the shelter trying to breathe deeply so he wouldn’t scream or cry or just tear his fucking hair out of his skull, the light drizzle had picked up into a stinging shower.
He was cold and soaked through and his distracted feet had found a pothole - so not only was his canvas bag surely starting to soak up the rain, but his shoe was full of gritty water and his leg was drenched halfway up his shin.
But, you know. It was fine.
It was fine.
He wasn’t having a breakdown in the middle of the street and he hadn’t been passed by a car travelling fast enough to be worth jumping in front of, so he was really. Really. Fine.
He made it back to the building with his shoulders tight, head ducked, the unintentional tightness of his jaw working a headache into his temples. His chest was a churning mess of agitation and frustration, the urge to sob or scream sitting right below his clavicle.
As soon as the elevator doors started to close, Allen let his eyes slip shut and slumped back against a mirrored wall, hands curled around the banister tight enough to turn his knuckles white. The doors caught and he jolted up instinctively, eyes flashing open.
Allen blinked at the same homeless man who had talked Waiting for Godot with him that one time, took a moment to recognise him, and put a smile on his face so his scowl wouldn’t have to weigh on anyone else.
It wasn’t hard to keep his voice level.
It was distressingly easy, in fact.
“Morning,” Allen greeted pleasantly, and wondered if the guy really did have family here or if he was just… casing the joint or something.
“A good one?” the man arched a brow and his mouth twitched a little in amusement. “Doesn’t look like it,” he commented, pulling his glasses off to clean the rain from them.
Allen blinked at him for a moment, caught out by his words and the pretty mole under his eye. Um. Words. Words, yeah. “It’s only nine,” he gave a small smile, didn’t have to check his phone to know it was a quarter past, because nine was when his class started and he’d been keeping an anxious eye on the clock until that moment came and went before forcing himself out of the bus shelter and trudging home.
Part of him was outraged when the man put his glasses back on. It was offensive, somehow. He was beautiful, but now he just looked like an unwashed homeless man caught out in the rain, and that was just. Allen was offended.
“Didn’t take long for things to go sour then,” he commented with a grin, and Allen wished elevators weren’t paved in mirrors because there was nowhere for him to look that the man wouldn’t see his smile slip into a quick scowl. He laughed at Allen a little, but it didn’t sound mean in the least. Almost sounded as though he was agreeing . “We’ve all had those,” he grinned and leaned against the wall.
“More and more, lately,” Allen sighed, no longer bothering to hold up that smile, what with this guy on the same page and the elevator doors sliding open anyway.
“So what’s up?” he asked, stepping out of the shaft with Allen.
He scoffed a laugh and dug in his pocket for keys, stopping mid step to sigh bitterly when he realised he’d left them inside. “Well, it started when I stubbed my toe on the door,” he gritted, falling back into step, “and hopefully it’ll end with me forgetting my keys.”
The man sucked in a sharp breath and winced in sympathy. “Hate to think what happened in between it all,” he offered as condolence.
“It is what it is,” Allen shrugged and came to a stop at his door, rapped his knuckles sharply on the wood.
“How many times have you told yourself that today?” he laughed and did the same at the neighbouring apartment.
Allen paused, tilted his head and considered. “A number of times, at least,” he stated, not at all an answer. But he honestly didn’t know, so whatever.
Lavi wasn’t opening the door so he was either in the shower, out shopping, or still asleep. Allen was betting on the last.
Pulled his phone out of his pocket to try calling him and found the screen wouldn’t turn on. Like, it was just. Dead. Hopefully because he hadn’t remembered to charge it, possibly because he’d just been thoroughly rained on.
He closed his eyes and slumped against the door, forgot what’s-his-name was there for a moment and breathed, “Fuck.”
“Here.” Allen peeled open his eyes to see him almost-grinning, holding his phone out to Allen with the facebook search bar open. “Message him,” he offered, definitely amused.
“I feel bad, considering we didn’t let you use our balcony,” Allen offered an abashed smile and accepted the phone, typing in Lavi’s contact.
He shrugged, still grinning, and reasoned, “Probably the cleverer thing. If I wasn’t me, I’d say you made the right choice.”
Allen laughed a little and pushed his wet hair from his eyes, thanked whatever gods were listening that Lavi didn’t give two fucks about online privacy, and opened a message to him. “Do you, too, often refuse to help strangers?” he asked with a genuine smile, the opposing evidence in his hands.
“Not if they’re pretty young men,” he smiled.
Allen didn’t feel creeped out, but he probably only felt that way because he’d seen what this man was hiding behind those ugly ass glasses of his, and he admittedly felt quite shallow that his entire perception had changed because of that.
Also because he’d offered Allen his phone at the end of a very long, very brutal morning, but Allen was on a mission with these self-destructive thoughts, and considered that to be secondary. He was vain and kind of an asshole and this guy was helping him anyway.
Allen, naturally, was going to hate himself a little bit.
“So you know how that didn’t sound creepy in your head?” he said regardless of his actual impression, and handed the phone back with an amused laugh.
“You don’t sound creeped out,” the man countered with a grin and murmured, “Excuse me a moment - my cousins are ignoring me again,” before turning to knock loudly on the door, enough to shake it a little against the latch. “Open this goddamn door or I’m leaving,” he threatened, and Allen only realised how warm his tone had been with him once he’d heard it all icy with frustration. “Sorry,” he offered to Allen with a graciously abashed smile, his demeanor immediately melting back into… polite flirtation? “They’ll be along in a moment.”
Sure enough there was a short clamour from within the apartment and Allen arched his eyebrows at the childishly put-upon voice from the other side which cried out, “Mommy, the stinky man is threatening us again!”
“I can smell him through the door! He’s not leaving!” came a second muffled voice.
Allen arched his brows at the exhausted-looking, scraggly dressed man in front of him and murmured, “Stinky man?” despite kind of understanding where they were coming from. Not that he smelled noticeably of anything, except perhaps a faint musk of cigarettes, but he kind of… kind of looked like he should.
“They think they’re funny,” he muttered back and kicked the door lightly, eliciting shrieks from inside. “Road!” he pleaded, a tone louder. “Make them open the door!”
“I dunno,” came a third voice, light and teasing and probably ready to lock the man out forever just for a laugh, “did you shower before you came here?” she giggled and Allen couldn’t help but snicker at the man’s frustrated scowl.
“If Lavi comes soon,” he offered between stifled laughs, “you can use our balcony.”
He sighed and began to mutter, “That just might be nece- un necessary,” he corrected himself sarcastically when the door finally wrenched open and a blonde head peeked out.
“Who’re you whispering to, Stinky Tinky?” the person (Allen just… really couldn’t tell if they were a boy or girl or what) taunted from the opening.
“Weak,” he commented drily and slipped his foot in to jam the door open before his cousin could slam it again. Turning to Allen with his shoulder pressed against the door, he smiled and graciously offered in that warm voice, “Have a good day, boy. You deserve one,” before shoving it open and slipping in amidst shrieks, curses and villainous cackles.
Allen realised he was laughing and leaned himself against the wall between their doors, his grin slowly dropping to a small smile as their arguing voices disappeared into the apartment. In the next half-minute he realised that while that soul-deep weariness was still crushing down on him, the suffocating swirl of agitation and inadequacy in his chest had flattened and smoothed, eased by the hobo-man’s charming laugh and easy words.
He gave the extraordinary impression that he carried his mood around with him like a charismatic sun, leaving a few rays with whoever he touched.
Incredible, and Allen was still smiling when Lavi made it to the door all scowly and bed-head-y and ready to throw a pouting fit. “I’m muting you from now on,” he glared daggers at Allen and left the door open for him.
“Surprised you even woke up,” Allen’s grin was back and he followed Lavi to the kitchen where he was putting on the kettle, door swinging shut behind Allen.
“After fifty messages?” Lavi grumbled and tossed his phone on the bench. “And who the heck is Tyki?”
Allen snorted at his strange use of censorship and pulled the phone closer, unlocked it and opened Tyki Mikk’s messages while Lavi set about scrounging up some breakfast.
Something like… yeah, about fifty messages, all reading ‘oi’, and then one like ‘go get your pretty friend he’s waiting miserable outside and both of us being locked out means neither of us are getting in’ and another along the lines of ‘I’m going to climb into your apartment and beat you with a pillow in a minute’ then something like ‘wit hmy duck actuakfjdzxxxxxxccxxxxxxddv’ and then ‘please disregard that last one’ and at this point Allen was laughing again and Lavi looked like he was struggling not to.
“I can't believe he did that,” Allen snickered and dropped his head, pushing the phone back to Lavi.
“Oh wait,” Lavi squinted as his phone chimed, “there’s more.” He snorted and passed it over, yawned and scratched his stomach while he poured cereal into a bowl.
Allen grinned and read it aloud, “‘honestly though offence intended you’re simply a horrible person if you let him keep looking that sad. It’s like he saw a rabbit get slaughtered or something.’ Oh there’s another,” he remarked, laughing hard enough to scrunch his nose up. “Here,” he read, “‘mister eyepatch, if you do not want to be that slaughtered rabbit, I suggest you wake up immediately’ aaaand,” he continued, typing a message of fervent reassurance when another came in, “‘I would hate for him to have to see that; please don't force my hand.’ Oh my god,” he laughed, pressing send and sliding the phone back to Lavi, who had settled in to eat his dry cereal with his fingers. “There’s no milk, by the way,” Allen remarked, an entire minute too late.
Lavi looked down at his bowl in surprise, then glanced nonplussed at Allen. “Isn’t there?” he asked, and lifted his fingers to his mouth. “Oh,” he added, glancing at his phone when it chimed. “He says… ‘smiley face’. Well, not like,” Lavi rolled his eyes and made an annoyed sound. “Like, ‘colon, close parenthesis’,” he corrected. “Who is this guy?” Lavi squinted and leaned over the screen, tapping onto his profile. “Holy fuck,” he stated sharply, squinting harder and leaning closer. “He’s hot as shit, no wonder you aren’t diving into the shower.”
“Why would I be diving into the shower?” Allen scowled, coming around the bench to peer over Lavi’s shoulder.
“Um,” he remarked blatantly, pushing the phone for Allen to see, “because he’s flirting outrageously and I’ve never seen you react positively to that, ever?”
“Was that flirting?” Allen asked, looking down at his profile picture - a gorgeous photo of him, cheekbones and all, with the glasses pushed up into his rugged hair, a cigarette burning between his smirking lips and a well-tailored suit showing off the set of his - wow, broad - shoulders. Like. No offence, but holy fuck. It was more than Allen had ever imagined. “Oh my god, I hope that was flirting,” he breathed, swiping for the next photo.
Lavi snorted and crunched some cereal. “He called you pretty, dude. And said he’d slaughter me to appease you.”
“Actually,” Allen corrected, eyes locked on the black-and-white fucking studio image of his profile - convex nose and shapely chin and gorgeous fucking lips and just - god, “he said he wouldn’t slaughter you to appease me.”
“I mean,” Lavi grumbled, “isn’t that more impressive? If he’s given to that sort of thing,” he amended with a snort and continued, eye squinting distantly, “but he’s the one who brought up slaughter in the first place - and rabbits , no less… so maybe he is given to that sort of thing,” he hummed in consideration.
Allen frowned at Lavi, took a surreptitious sniff of his shoulder and announced, “Hmmmmmmmm.” After a long second Lavi looked back at him, still crunching his dry cereal, and Allen denounced in a heavily fake Australian accent, “I smell mara-waaaaa-naaa!”
Lavi snorted and choked in Allen’s face and turned to bend over the bench while he laughed, coughing up the cereal he’d inhaled. “Fuck,” he wheezed, laughing and struggling to breathe. “Holy fuck we have to watch Big Lezz,” he cackled and Allen might have considered saying no, might have decided to take his wallet and try make it to his second class of the day - probably would have done it, but for that crushing exhaustion still weighing him down.
He could smile, yeah. And he could laugh and talk shit and be flirted with by a surprisingly handsome probably-not-homeless man. But that wasn’t what this was and he knew it would only take something like getting splashed by a passing car for him to want to walk in front of the bus instead of get on it.
So maybe staying home and getting high with his best friend was the preferable option for a day like today.
He shot one last look at that profile image of Tyki Mikk and grinned, tossed Lavi his phone and said, “I can’t believe you stopped to smoke a cone before letting me in.”
Through the familiar vitriol of self-destructive thoughts, Allen realised with desperate, crushing panic that he was in a downspiral.
Like cataclysm reaching a crescendo, his marks for the semester read forty-three, thirty-six and fifty-two. He hadn’t passed.
Not a single class.
He fucking…
His throat curled and crushed tight under the weight of terrified disappointment, his eyes ached, bone-deep exhaustion dropped from his lethargic limbs.
He wanted a cone, he didn’t want to keep looking at six months amounting to failure. Began to push the laptop off his legs and made it halfway off his bed before he clenched his jaw tight enough that he could feel his teeth protesting, temples throbbing with a sharp headache on the rise.
He shouldn’t have a cone.
He shouldn’t smoke.
He shouldn’t go and get high after this shit.
That should have been a reward for doing well, not a consolation for his failure. It never should have been a contributing factor, but it was. He’d fucked up. He’d gone and fucked himself and it was no-one’s fault but his own.
Lavi smoked with him, yes. Lavi offered him a sesh now and then. But Lavi couldn’t open Allen’s mouth and talk for him. Lavi wasn’t the one who’d said yes every time he offered.
He locked his jaw, locked his hands in tight fists around the corners of his laptop. Kept himself rooted on his bed and forced himself to look. To look at his failure, and understand what it meant.
He breathed deeply, forcefully. Lips twitched in a sneer of self-disgust, and refused to let himself cry. He didn’t deserve that act of pity. It was his fault, and they were his consequences. So he’d deal with it.
He’d pull himself together, stop with the stupid, stupid distractions, and fix his mistakes. He’d stop smoking. That was where he’d start.