shine_again | Entries tagged with marcus

On a day like this, Dan doesn't mind the winter weather.

The flurries drifting down from hazy skies, a crisp forest scent filling his lungs, the solid thunk as the axe swings down and cleaves apart the wood-- he couldn't be further from the Overlook. Inside, too, the house is warm with more than the central heating they'll turn down a bit when he brings in the firewood.

He's gotten warm enough splitting wood that he takes his coat off, leaving him in short sleeves, the air clouding with the heat of his body and breath. The sweat beading in his hairline feels good too.

Dan feels alive, and not in the too-aware squirmy feeling that comes from talking to dead people. And if, when he hears the back door, he puts on a little bit of a show for his husband-- who can really blame him?

Five nights ago, Dan had been dozing off at the front desk in the middle of a rare night shift, when a woman missing half her face began screaming for her mother. She'd come back three times since, and it's only last time he could get her to say anything.

He'd known, of course, it was the Purge.

I needed the money to keep her comfortable, the ghost had wept, and he'd gone straight home to crawl into his husband's lap, to press his face into the safe space of Marcus's neck.

And so as much as Dan wants to ignore the upcoming Purge, he's here at the bunker with Marcus while they prep it. The woman with half a face waits outside, and Dan's deeply grateful for it.

There hasn't been much of a chance for dust to collect, and it'd been well taken care of, but Dan finds himself scrubbing and mopping anyway. It helps, but as usual, the real help comes when he circles back around to find Marcus, immediately letting himself be caught up in his husband's gravity.

"Think Darrow has something like Pine Sol?" he wants to know. "Bleach smells too much like work."

Nothing wakes him in the night, or jolts him out of his chair at work.

It's more like an itch at the back of his head, irritating and uncomfortable, building into an unpleasant drone that promises something's wrong. Something's different.

Dan's gotten better at sorting it out over the years, categorizing different ominous feelings by how fucking bad it's going to be. Today's feeling falls firmly into stay alert, but don't go poking around where you don't need to poke.

So he's not surprised when Marcus calls him, and there's not really a question of if, when they decide to meet up at the bunker. Dan stops at the front desk to take the rest of the day, and tomorrow too. One of the nursing assistants, Judy, offers to drop him off wherever it is his mind's taking him. She's seen him work, and she respects it enough that they drive over with the radio low, conversation minimal.

"Hey," he says, as soon as he's in front of the bunker, where his husband waits, drawing Marcus close as soon as he gets within reach. He fixes his eyes on the building behind them, extending himself gently. "Did you go inside yet?"

Dan stands at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to the empty landing, framed by faded and ruined wallpaper. Behind him, a dry clicking, bone on wood, keys on a typewriter, an empty glass on the bar.

"I'm not really here," he says, looking down at the axe in his hand. Pictures in a book, he almost says, but that's not true. "This isn't real."

"That doesn't mean it's not happening, handsome."

The smell of whiskey and old silk shoves itself inside Dan's nose, inside his head, and the clicking gets louder, takes on a rattle. "Empty devils," he says.

"Oh, that's not what's empty. You may have remembered what he forgot, but what did you forget, Danny?"

A clattering, a great storm of metal hitting thin, cheap metal, clasps and locks and tin lids, buzzing up in a cloud behind him even before the wind cuts through him. Dan turns, looks down the center of the maze, to all the empty boxes with their loose lids chattering like teeth.

"You never shut the door behind you, Danny. All the hungry ghosts."

Dan looks down, looks at the bottle in his hand, and can't move. The boxes chomp their jaw, and everything is hungry and empty.

Ever since the afternoon at Kagura, during the run-in with the guerilla marketing strategy of very aggressive mistletoe-- one he has to admit was entirely successful-- Dan's had an idea turning over in his mind. The timing hasn't lined up exactly, and he's wanted to be sure.

He really want to be sure, because that hot little spark in Marcus's head, the one Dan could nearly taste, persists and promises. Dan knows himself to be a private person, for a million damn reasons, but it isn't as if he's not equipped to know exactly how to pull this off. What the shine can't predict, he can plan for by timing things just right.

It's early February, and they've gone out to dinner at a restaurant they've visited enough that Dan can time their meal to end about half an hour before closing. He flirts just a little more than he normally would, lets Marcus see that he has every intention of taking him home to bed immediately after dinner.

Only he doesn't.

After the check is paid, Dan rises, leaning down to kiss Marcus with the heat and urgency that's been building in him all evening. Very quietly, he murmurs, "Wait just about a minute, then meet me in the bathroom."

Mouthing buzzing, Dan heads toward the men's room, where he finds a sink to lean against and waits.

The idea's been in Dan's head since that first trip to East Hallow, but he's not about to indulge it there. What it means that he feels Darrow is safer than that place, or safer than the world he'd left behind, he'll unpack later.

A few different places fit the bill, and Dan picks the corn maze furthest out from the city proper, one that's going to be low on people and low on being anything but an acre or two of cornstalks, hay bales, and some cheap Halloween decorations. There's a reason most of the teenagers don't come here, and a reason no one brings the smaller children.

It's as neutral as Dan could hope to find.

And still, it sets his heart to thumping, bumping under the skin of his wrist as he stands in front of the entrance with Marcus.

"It's something I want to do," he says, again, for his own benefit. Marcus knows about the power of the hedge maze, and Dan reaches out for him, seeking to loop their fingers together. The touch of Marcus's skin grounds him, always, and just maybe, there's a chance for adrenaline over dread.

The demon has been sent back to wherever it came from-- Hell, Dan supposes, but he doesn't care. Maybe Hell is real (there are other worlds than these) and maybe Dan ought to believe more in God, but there's really only the one thing he cares about right now, in the quiet aftermath.

He takes Marcus home as soon as everyone agrees it's safe, and he makes some promises, and he sends Sabrina with her quartet after she's been able to tearfully talk with Marcus too. There's not much of a fuss; it's the best thing for him, and Dan has the sense that it's best everyone involved gets a chance to curl up somewhere quiet with loved ones.

Forgoing anything else, he gently guides Marcus to the bedroom, where he sits down on the bed and then eases Marcus into his lap and his arms, careful of the marks on his back but not too careful. He lets the quiet settle again before he whispers, "We're home. You can tell me what you want, or I can just take care of you. I think you need to be clean, and maybe have something to eat or drink, even just a little, and then we need to just be here."

Dan kisses Marcus's cheek, almost delicately, and then the rest of his face, raining kisses down before he presses his mouth, just as carefully, to the edge of Marcus's split lip.

There isn't much to move into the house, really. Dan's sure that he spends more time parting with his ghostly neighbors than he does packing, and he can't say that it bothers him. There's only one thing he really wants to bring, and he doesn't have it until he passes by a secondhand store and sees it in the window.

The chalkboard isn't as massive as the one he'd once had, but it has a good feeling to it.

He knows he's imagining it, but having it makes him feel closer to Abra.

So besides some necessities, that's what he takes when he goes to live with Marcus. Unpacking is done in only an hour or so, and the other residents, be they teenage girl or animal or whatever Salem is, have thoughtfully cleared out. All of it is the kind of thing Dan had always thought outside his reach, and he feels an easy, warm contentment curling through his veins as they make dinner, eat and clean up, and end up on the couch in front of some random movie.

Curling up against Marcus, he leans over to kiss him on the jaw. "This might be one of the best nights I've ever had," he murmurs. "Well, not just might."

They aren't the only couple that packs up and leaves early, and Dan suspects they're not the only couple that doesn't actually leave, either. Something about it only drives his pulse up, and he shoots a dizzy, crooked grin at Marcus as he wraps a hand around his wrist and nearly drags him along. He thinks he can be forgiven for the slight sense of urgency.

He's taking his boyfriend back for some backseat groping-- well, not quite backseat, but in a truck-- and he can't wait to get there.

Getting back and getting the truck open seems to take forever and no time at all.

Dan pitches the blanket and the couple of cushions into the cab of the truck, and doesn't bother going to his side. He gets up on the bench and scoots back, looking a little messy and flushed, and reaches for Marcus. "Come here," he murmurs, even though he doesn't think has to, "come here."

Dan spends his time in captivity finding out what it might have been like if the Overlook had been a medieval dungeon run by fucking goblins. He feels precisely as helpless as he had in the worst of it there, at the beginning, when he's aware of everything. They beat him, of course, because it's a goblin dungeon, and one of them is sneering about tenderized meat. His coat and flannel and t-shirt are taken, though he's left with his jeans and boots. Something about foot-rot, they say. Not very appetizing.

He tries to frighten them, spits more of that strange language at them, and it earns him a cell of his very own, it seems. Now, this has nothing on the Overlook, cramped and slightly wet and cold; he's held to the wall with an honest to god chain, and all he can see from the gaps in the bars is a passageway, and a door on the other side, and fire beyond that door.

Dan thinks he might honestly have been dragged to hell.

The shining is of no use; all he feels is the terror and despair and angry helplessness of others in other cells. And then the dark waves again, which drag him down for hours at a time, and leave him shaking and gagging against his bonds.

He can't think, he can't think for all of the noise of everyone else's thoughts. Oh, but he tries. He thinks of Abra's light shining so brightly, that even across worlds, it might give him something to see by, he thinks of his mother fighting with everything to keep them alive. He thinks of the moment when he'd thought he was safe, his arms around Marcus and Marcus holding him so tight, the warmth of his breath, the little flicker of light kindling in Dan's chest.

He tries to get it back.

He's just so cold, and it's so loud inside his head.

Dan Torrance keeps his eyes open until they’re out of Colorado.

In theory, the devils and ghosties are gone or settled, and whether or not they’d stamped out every last soulless bit of True Knot, the head is off the snake (and what a viper she had been). Billy tells Dan near half a dozen times he can rest, reminds him that the EMTs had cleared Billy to drive. But he’s leaving Colorado for the last time, and he wants to watch it pass by him. There’s no sense of paranoia or even triumph over this place that has wanted to consume him since he was a child; it’s as natural as helping the dying pass over. He’s leaving this place and these things, and the scenery flying by serves just as well as lights turned off in the house of the human soul.

Billy asks him if he wants out at the state line, sensing this threshold nearly as well as Dan does.

He says no.

He said his goodbyes and goodnights with a kiss to a man who had, despite the attempts of the shit that drags a soul down beneath the waves of darkness and selfishness and evil, loved Dan as best he could.

But he does finally cry when they pass the sign that cheerily informs them they’re leaving Colorado. Dan feels the tears escape without any particular pain, simply falling and getting his t-shirt wet. He watches the dark splotches grow until the grief really does well up, and then he sobs, wracking painful noises that push him forward hard enough his seat belt catches. It’s like opening a final lockbox that he hadn’t known sat on the shelf of his mind, and he cries until it’s empty, with Billy rubbing his back.

They keep driving, and Dan lets himself sleep then.

It’s a dreamless, untroubled sleep, something he’ll later wonder about, that he too can fall asleep and travel the passages of worlds without even knowing.

A gentle bump and sway, the ceasing of motion awakens him, and he knows he’s not in the truck before his eyes open.

He reaches out first with the shine, and it’s a shock. He’s surrounded by so many people, so many thoughts, and they slam into him hard enough that he’s falling from his seat while the people pass by, gagging for breath.

Billy and the truck can’t be anywhere near here.

Dan stumbles to get off the train, and then onto the platform. He has a weird moment of clarity, knowing he probably looks not that much better than he did thirteen years ago. He’s filthy and sticky with sweat, a little scraped and bruised, his eyes red-rimmed and only a bit less pale than, say, an elderly woman dying of cancer.

His knees buckle and the floor comes toward him at a dizzying rate.