#Dream of Gluttony Salty Crackers

[party-time]

Have this shitpost i made for the DoG server a few days ago, it also works as an Introduction to my new OC Salty Crackers (ft. @dream-of-chao OC Whipped Cream)

[believerindaydreams]

but never jam today

oh look who felt like writing existential despair (the tale of Tuco and Blondie meeting). 

(I never actually write existential despair when I’m depressed; it requires too much concentration. And elegance. Though I wouldn’t read it if you were, y’know? 

should be tagged for suicidal thoughts, can’t cos I got blocked from the tag for it. (I need a citrus scale for trigger warnings, is wot)

Anyway. Fic. 

It’s not the winter that breaks his heart, harsh as it is; there’s a strong-willed petulance in him that resents its cruelty too much to let it break him. 

He counts up his faults with dutiful enthusiasm, still. Used to long after them, recite the list ferociously at confession, each one a bright thunderbolt to light storm-tossed skies. Anger, every time he hears his confirmation name (the brothers never say it right, not ever). Lust, at the sight of that stupid, fluff-haired acolyte who can’t stop stumbling over the responses at mass; gluttony, the hunger he warded off every fast day with hidden rations of honey and crackers. 

But all his sins are faded now, into these endless unstinting days, and his throat closes with a misery made paradoxically livable by its sheer potency, the hot slow planning of his martyrdom. It lasts him out until spring, a spring that blows over his flat, waterless hell with no more kindness than the snows, when the last small misery comes to claim him at last. 

(one gorgeous mother-of-pearl rosary his mother gave him, gone missing forever. no money to join a field trip at the port, to see boats that travelled from the wide encompassing sea. his fluff-haired fellow made an altar boy, for no reason he can understand with any degree of charity. it doesn’t matter which it was. any of them, all of them, this is when he learns that indifference for the past.)

And so. Today is the strangest Saturday in all the year, the one day when God moves in neither earth nor heaven; the perfect day for suicides, then.

(this was the light of his hope- two chocolate bars and a stolen orange- and as they’re caught and confiscated, so the storm gives way at last to dreamless blank; this, he thinks, is what they call despair.)

(he feels like he might have staved off the mortal sin, if they’d only let him have the orange and take the whipping for it afterwards. A whipping he could have coped with so much more easily, no worse than the knock-down fights back home.)

(he doesn’t miss home, now. too many letters, telling of their bottomless pride, and it stopped being a place he even wanted. New York without his parents would be a godless heaven, and where else is there to be?)

It takes no little difficulty. To congeal the wet, shapeless grossness of his presence into a worthy candle, fit to burn, is exhausting labour, only hard-won- but he knows something now about self-denial and the martyr’s reward. 

The martyr’s reward being this: jam. 

Lots of jam. 

There’s a locked room in the cloisters where nobody’s allowed to go. The room where all the sugared blackberry and strawberry and cherry-apple-blackcurrant and everything else is kept in storage for the secular truck drivers, who’ll come take it away without a word. To his sharp, intense disappointment (how can he still muster the energy, to be upset by anything further? and files it away as one more complaint to hold his despair fast)- there are no huge jelly vats in the forbidden place, no wine press filled to the brim, no treacly pool of delight to provide the elegant, dark and endlessly sweet drowning of which he’s dreamt. Only rows of jar after tiny jar, joy strictly measured out by the ounce, delights too rationed to kill quickly. 

(only slowly)

But hope springs eternal. Up in a creaky loft, there’s a huge barrel of oranges put by for making marmalade, with a top he only manages to pry off after a solid quarter-hour’s effort; he figures that’ll do. Balancing his weight on the cold weight of a metal stool, peering into the salty, citrusy interior, he catches a scent that might almost be the sea; and lets himself wonder for a moment, if that’s all it will take to hold him safe. 

(it doesn’t)

He plunges his hand in and takes a nibble from one iridescent segment. Drops it again, shuddering all over at its unspeakable taste- such a beautiful fruit, to be more bitter than lemon. Curdling in his mouth. Enough. Enough of this. 

The door opens, gentle and noiseless. Someone enters, to call him by name. 

“Hey,” he says. “Tuco- it is Tuco, isn’t it? Saw that on your letters.”

Tuco glances down the loft ladder, judges trajectories and distance. He could, he figures, pull the stool in after him. Weigh himself down enough to drown in this barrel, before anybody could get him out again. 

“The hell’s wrong with you? You’re teacher’s pet, you’re everything they want you to be. And studying on a scholarship, too- why risk all that to come looking for me here?”

“Because I thought I could do something about it.”

Tuco finds himself shuddering again, and not for his own woes. There’s boastfulness in those words and tone, a self-regard that has nothing to do with God or man or kindness to him, but simple command. Thou shalt not, let that suffice you. 

Who do you think you are, eh?

“I brought you a bacon sandwich. You’ll have to come down to get it.” Pulls out the rich fatty delicacy from a paper bag, tosses it teasingly in the air, and Tuco wavers for a moment, very giddy. Then drops back into Spanish for the first time in months, to swear at him with the right mouth-filling oath.

(the thing he hadn’t appreciated about this state of mind; the smallest mercies become miracles, and he's not spiritual enough to hold to a fast in the face of that temptation)

But it's like waking from a dream- why in god's name would he do harm to himself, with his body clinging on to life with such patient insistence, sure in its wants and appetites, so reassuring in its joys? Other sins he craves, he'll take in their plenty; not this one, never this one.

(They leave that night, unseen, and part ways at the next truck stop; he doesn’t see Blondie again for a long time to come.)

(By then, they will both be very different; and yet every inch the same.)