Written for Ashley for the 2008 xmas_rocks exchange
| This story is a work of fiction and therefore completely untrue. No harm or libel is meant or implied about any of the individuals named within this work and it was written without their involvement or permission. No profit is being made. |
|
"I need," a tetchy Syd clears his throat and leans awkwardly toward the microphone hovering in front of him, "I need a break. Please." He's still not quite used to this whole studio...thing. Music, he understands; writing music, playing music, breathing music. He understands beating on the backs of grinning, bobbing tortoises with drumsticks; he understands taking a fiddle bow to the sinew strings that twine up a giraffe's neck and squeezing the bellies of cartoon geese until he's surrounded by a squawking, honking orchestral overture. But these viciously white walls, these hot lights, the big prison window with blank-faced people scrutinizing each note that is birthed from his guitar onto the stale air in a timorous puff ...he just doesn't get it. And it is draining all of his blood right into his boots. "Alright, Syd," David is made of television behind the forbidding glass, hunched over the intercom with threads of stringy blonde striping his face. His eyes are up and trained steadfastly on Syd even as he addresses the men at the controls, "let's break for about an hour and then regroup, yeah boys?" "David, I don't need a whole-" comes a protest cut short by the crushing gravity of that unfaltering bitterblue stare, Syd's mouth suddenly too heavy to keep on working. "Right then," Syd utters, ducking his head and plucking clumsily at his guitar strings. He doesn't lift his face as the crew egresses, certain that somehow keeping it bowed will mitigate the disgraceful heat radiating from his cheeks. Haw, Syd: probably they can't even feel it behind that great big prison window anyway. And so they are alone together again. And all the white walls turn up into big white toothy grins because they all know what happens when Syd Barrett and David Gilmour are alone together. David, remaining in the booth to observe Syd through the window like a spectator at the zoo, shakes a cigarette loose from his soft pack and slides it up-and-out with his teeth. Sharp silence rings through all the world save for: the metallic clink of a lighter closing. Every planet creaks to a stop and stillness shakes the cosmos save for: a fat cloud of smoke unfolding hypnotically against the glass. All the while David keeps his eyes trained brutally on Syd, charmed as always by his anxious fidgeting. Christ, if ever anything could make David Gilmour feel like an adult - a man - a séducteur - it was the ruffled sweetness of cagey little RK Barrett. Syd is strumming timidly - don't know, no title, suppose it's called Dominoes - as David finally steps out of the control room and approaches. He drops into an easy crouch in front of the seated Syd and folds his arms atop his shaking knees. Syd's guitar shudders into silence and his lungs overheat at the contact, breath quickening stridently--like panic, like breathing into a paper bag with a hole in the bottom, like flapping birds caught up in a rotary engine. Syd switches his three-leaf-clover unlucky green eyes up to David's face and David lifts a hand to too-carefully move Syd's hair away from his cheekbone so that he might take a look at the bruise painted there. A fresh blue-purple-yellow bruise punctuated by a slow rotting cut. The saccharine touch makes Syd recoil. Brutality, he understands; being made prey, a martyr, an object. He understands being fragile and beaten. He understands being slammed against the wall and having the wind knocked out of his belly until he's a coughing, wheezing orchestral overture. But these viciously tender hands, the earnest gentleness, the big empty prison window reflecting and revering the malicious brand left on his face...he just doesn't get it. "Cheers for the souvenir," mutters Syd, slipping a hand over David's to take the still-burning cigarette from him. David's response is but a smirk as he rises back to his full height, somehow still possessed with his trademark lazy, languid grace even in the face of the flagrant eagerness with which he's prepared to once again thrash the living fuck out of his sick little guitar naïf. The silence is irritating like wool against Syd's skin as David prowls the room to click/turn/key every lock in sight. Then he slips back into the booth, leaving Syd to fret over the increasingly clinical nature of it all. The first time hadn't been so systematic. The first time it had been spontaneous, wicked, fervent, lovely, cathartic. That night, David had confronted Syd after being subjected to his relentless stare-down from the front row during one of his earliest gigs with the Floyd, and they had fallen in together most organically, their mutual hostility manifesting itself in cuffs and blood and pain and sex. Progressively, though, it has become more meticulous; habitual motions and motions like putting a needle to your arm long after the romance and effectiveness of the drug have worn away. Like putting a needle to your arm just to keep from being sick. David tunes the radio to BBC2 and flips on the intercom to drown out the impending massacre, causing the raucous but familiar perversion that is rock-un-roll to spill out of all the speakers thick, warm and rich like birth blood. Glancing up for a reaction shot, David notes that Syd has risen and is pacing shoeless, shuffling restlessly, and has been dragging so agitatedly on his second-hand cigarette that it is now nothing but a quivering, brittle tower of ash. Self-satisfied by the remarkable anxiety he's been able to - wordlessly, no less - instill in the exquisitely battered poet, David steps back into the studio proper and begins, without pause, to advance on him. All mired in the beat-storm of relentless drum-bass-guitar-nuclear-apocalypse thrumming he forces Syd to stumble backwards, still inhaling/exhaling puffing smoke like a silent freight train even as he is stuffed into a corner, troubled saucer gaze flicking about the steadily unwinding reality hanging over David's shoulder; big-eyed, pretty prey. David's smile is calm and gangrenous as he wraps his cool fingers around Syd's exposed throat. He takes the abused cigarette from the abused versifier and sucks a final drag before grinding it out underfoot while the exhaled smoke leaks odiously into Syd's face. David uses his grip on Syd's neck to lift his chin before leaning in to take a biting taste of his bottom lip. As Syd flinches, David presses him bodily into the wall, to which he responds with a muffled, mmphing sort of sound, like he's afraid to acknowledge aloud that it's quite pleasant, actually, this strange dynamic, this strange rigidity digging into his thigh, these strange thick lips on his neck. "Does it make you less guilty, David, leaving me cracked apart in a pile of my own teeth?" Syd grates, an inverted mirror of David; anxious and diffident. David chuckles low and sinister right into his ear, causing a sick tremble to ruffle Syd's frame. Then, abruptly: astral projection and stars rushing in like flood water and hard, glass-sharp clouds collapsing on Syd's head as he finds a heavy fist slammed into his middle. He doubles over with a pained grunt and hangs there for a long moment like a snapped and silenced radio tower. When he finally straightens up it is with a strained, bitter little laugh. He's laughing because this cherub, this quiet, soft skinned baby faced halo haired fucking cherub...well, turns out he actually has a rather good fist on him, hasn't he? Isn't it funny how something can be so serious to one person, and that same thing is sort of a joke to another? Syd says, or maybe he doesn't say it but thinks it loudly enough that David can hear; either way it earns him a sharp backhand to the face. Syd's laughter is cut short as his head is thrown to the side by the impact. He sucks his bottom lip between his teeth to taste the damage, the sharp tang of iron and vitriol filling his mouth. He is lovely; all heated and broken, blood smeared on his mouth and eyes narrowed into livid dark slits. David drags him away from the wall by the collar before using that same leverage to drop him to the floor. "Delighted I could amuse you, Syd," David, still standing, pries off his shirt while cutting breathless orders to the boy on the floor, "make yourself useful and take it off yourself, you worthless sod. All of it." Syd opens his mouth to protest the crudeness of the command, the utter lack of imagination behind it, but is at once shamed into silence by the stern set of David's features. And so Syd, feeling awkward and clumsy and somehow sullied also, sits up to scrupulously peel the thin and clinging shirt from his sharp shoulders. It takes some teeth-in-the-bottom-lip reserve on David's part to keep from diving back onto him at the sight of that bare bone chest, decked with scratches, all bruised and ugly like overripe fruit. But he manages to maintain his fortitude as he towers above, strong and naked and stoic as Syd struggles out of his trousers and socks, uneasy and intensely vulnerable. With both of their clothes discarded Syd draws his bare knees toward his torso and wraps his arms around them. Naked and really naked there in the harsh lights and the still air with his skin all showing. A thoroughly uncivilized David is already stroking himself, stepping close enough to prod tastelessly, detestably at Syd's cheek with his vile, sharp cock, in response to which Syd only throws him a vicious sneer. "Fine, we'll do it your way," David hisses while reaching down to grab a fistful of Syd's hair, quite forcing him up onto his knees without much concern for his comfort. Syd squints and makes a sort of yelping sound as he is pried up. As he is forced to take David into his mouth he is, however, careful to be only as remonstrative as his role requires. Eventually he acquiesces completely, opening up all over, degraded and lowered and blissfully defeated. The further Syd submits, the harder David must bite down against the back of his own thick forearm to stifle the satisfied groans rising up from his chest as he slides repeatedly into that too-warm, too-wet, too-good-- "Stop. Syd, stop, I can't--I'm going to--" But Syd doesn't stop: he wants it to end but he doesn't really want it to end, right, and either way he just works more furiously until, "Goddamnit, Syd," David withdraws forcefully and uses his grip on Syd's hair to shove him callously onto his back again, "I said fucking stop," climbing over him all slick and sweet with his saliva. Coarse and agitated, he hinges Syd's legs over his shoulders and roughly yanks him forward while Syd covers his face with his hands, smearing the water leaking from his eyes and dragging black smudges of eye pencil down his cheeks, feeling filthy and debased but needing to feel filthy and debased. They don't speak - what is there possibly to say - or even look at one another, Syd turning his head to the side, resigned, as David shoves crudely into him. By the time the BBC has unwittingly launched its warheads, David is slamming Syd against the floor, burning his back, fucking him so ruthlessly that they almost manage to drown out the radio--almost, groans and grunts cutting the radioman-man into severed static: This - The Pink - latest - gumma this one's - side comprise - corded and performed in - called - omy Domine. Almost. Familiar chords begin to drip down the walls, transcendent and startling enough to shock them each into complete silence for a moment. David's voice bulges the speakers unsympathetically, Lime and limpid green... And "Oh, Christ," says Syd. A roguish grin splits David's face into something menacing and pleased. Syd presses his palms against his ears to drown out his own misused, distorted poetry; to quiet the voice swelling all around him like a stranger in the room. It hurts like a fist to the mouth never will. "No," David pries his hands away and pins his wrists to the cold floor, hissing, "fucking listen to it." Syd fights against the restraints, voice cracked with hateful, hiccupping saltwater tracks, "I hate you. I fucking hate you. Christ, I fucking hate you. Do you even know what the bloody fuck you're singing about? Do you - god - do you even know..." Syd finds it difficult to spit out coherent rebukes as he is effectively being fucked right into dementia praecox. David can't recall having ever heard Syd speak so improperly. Ultimately, it only serves to spur him on in his cruelty: "Do I even know what I took from you?" rasping and relentless, "Yeah, Syd, I do. I've been meaning to thank you." "Fucking cunt. Fucking soulless cunt bastard. Christ, I hate you, Gilmour," Syd is struggling against his bonds so vehemently that it sort of worries David in a way, enough to force him to break character for an instant: "Do you want me to stop, Syd?" he asks, winded, only causing a frustrated Syd to fight more violently against David's pin, trying desperately to get free enough to crack open David's shoulders and chest and face. The obvious, furious 'no' comes out more like fuckyoufuckyoufuckyouyouratcuntbastard. Which propels David to crash into him ever more feverishly until the snapshot framed below him - Syd, at his most beautiful with his head tipped back and his eyes pressed shut, swirling in ecstasy and agony, greatly pained and with steadily leaking eyes, looking quite like the little sacrificial victim he is - is too much too much too much and the sight of it causes David to lose everything, going dizzy and empty and faint with a heady, sharp cry aimed at the falling-down ceiling.
|