"Oh okay lisack religous guilt! I can probably just drabble it. I'm sure it'll stay short......"
4000 words in like four hours okay whatever
NOOO idea how to post fics on tumblr. So i'm just going to put it here and hope it's not total shit. For @thats1llyfairy !!!!!!!!!!
Thanks to my friend @whorechataaaaaaa for sharing her experiences it was very helpful love youuuu :))
Liam had grinned at him then, broad and immediate and completely without shame, and Isack had experienced, for maybe half a second, the very distinct sensation of forgetting what they were arguing about.
Which kept happening, to Isack's disdain.
He felt often, when hanging with Liam, a sense of floatiness. Not that he’s ever been especially grounded or focused, and he has always been prone to fidgeting. He wouldn’t claim any of that, but spending time with Liam makes it all worse. Makes him worse. All the sorts of things he used to pinch and hit himself over rupture out of his chest, the tiny place by his lungs he’s tucked all of them in.
“You should just come over,” he said, words blurred together sleepily. “My place is closer.”
Immediately, without any forethought; “No.”
Because your apartment is terrible.
The mattress on the floor situation, for one.
Isack had spent the first twenty years of his life being informed by various adults that sitting too close to the television would destroy his eyesight and sleeping on bad mattresses would ruin his back and drinking bottled water would probably somehow kill him. Liam seemed determined to test every piece of conventional wisdom, not even with words but through his ignorance of Isack’s conviction.
The mattress wasn't even the real issue.
That would have been a respectable issue, at the very least.
Liam's apartment had exactly one mattress and exactly one blanket. It was the sort of setup that implied either optimism or poor planning. Knowing Liam, a little bit of both mottled into one. Optimism before adult life had worn him down.
He'd stayed over once before. Only once, and never again.
The memory surfaces now, and it is followed by alarm, as though something shameful had occurred.
Which is a stupid thing to notice, because really nothing had happened.
That's what makes it so embarrassing.
Nothing happened except that Liam had fallen asleep almost immediately and Isack had spent hours becoming aware of increasingly menial details:
The sound of traffic outside, the neighbor's dog barking somewhere down the street. Liam breathing – that especially.
He’d spent the entire night acutely aware of Liam breathing six inches away from him.
The next morning he'd gone home feeling strange, though not strange enough to give the feeling a name. He'd spent three days convincing himself there was no feeling at all, which was usually a reliable indicator that there absolutely was.
Liam looked unconvinced.
“Just think you should stay here, it’s dark. Sort of dangerous, even for you huh?” He punches Isack’s arm, to emphasize his point. Right.
The thing about Liam was that he said nearly everything like he was about to laugh. Not laughing. About to. Isack envied him for that, sort of. Every emotion he’s ever felt is displayed in his everything – his face and his posture and his furrowed brows. Liam always seems like he’s joking.
And that makes sincerity difficult to identify.
Unfortunately, Isack had become fairly good at identifying Liam's versions of things.
He knows, for example, that Liam buys Red Bull almost every day but only drinks about two-thirds of the can before forgetting about it somewhere.
He knows Liam's new workplace is three metro stops further than the old one and that he'll complain about the commute despite spending half of it asleep.
He knows which route to take if he ever needed to get to Liam's apartment quickly…not that he'd ever need to.
He wants to stay, of course he does. But he’s not going to go because he knows better than that.
"Sorry, mate," he says, offering a small shrug and a smile, one that Liam does not seem keen to return. "Maybe next time?"
For a little while, things became blessedly physical. Bend. Stand. Kneel. Forehead against mat. The body memorizes what the mind fails to organize, and he doesn’t think much as he prays.
There’s comfort in repetition sometimes, in being told exactly where to place your hands, exactly where to look, exactly what will come next.
People talk about memorizing prayers as though it's difficult. Maybe it is for some people. Isack used to complain about it constantly when he was younger.
He remembers long drives with his parents, staring dramatically out the window while declaring that there were too many words and none of them made sense and surely Allah would understand if he skipped a few.
Regardless of his pouting he had learned and kneeled and memorized.
And lately it seems to be memorizing far too much about Liam Lawson.
He wants to spend a lot of his time with Liam.
Friendship, probably, was supposed to feel a little bit like this.
Then again, most of his friendships had happened almost by accident. If you sit next to somebody long enough ,maybe they become akin to furniture. That's probably a terrible way to describe your friends, but it's true. There are people he's spent six years with whose birthdays he couldn't tell you, and Liam has been in his life for less than one and somehow Isack knows all the exact ways Liam laughs, which ones are authentic and which ones are put on.
The worrying possibility is that it's normal to know those things and Isack simply hasn't liked anyone enough before to find out.
Shit. He doesn’t even really know what Rakah they’re on, everybody has moved on and he has simply been mirroring the movement around him.
Although he’s left wondering when he will find some peace for himself.
In Islam, intention is maybe the most important thing.
At least, that’s what he’s always been told.
You are judged by what you mean to do. By what lives in your heart when you act. Allah, being merciful and all-knowing, understands the shape of effort even when people fail inside it.
Maybe that would be comforting, probably, if his own intentions did not feel increasingly difficult to identify.
If he intends to lean away, and doesn’t, he wonders if that absolves him of anything.
God, he’s so fucking sloshed right now.
It’s not even really a good kiss, which feels almost irritating after all this buildup. There’s nothing cinematic about it. Liam tastes overwhelmingly like vodka-redbull and mint gum, one hand clumsy where it catches briefly against Isack’s jaw before slipping again. Mostly, he’s slung his arms over Isack’s shoulders and braced against him. Their noses knock together hard enough that Liam laughs into his mouth a little.
“Sorry,” he mutters, still too close.
And because Isack is operating tonight with approximately four functioning brain cells and all of them seem dedicated to Liam, he laughs too.
The alley behind the bar smells powerfully of cigarette smoke and wet pavement and something rotting sweet in the dumpster nearby. Somewhere out front, muffled through brick walls, somebody is singing terribly to music Isack vaguely recognizes from primary school.
Liam is still standing close enough that their shoes touch occasionally when one of them shifts.
There should probably be more panic than this, that’s the most alarming part. Not that the panic is absent, because it isn't, Isack can feel it sitting somewhere underneath everything else.
It's there. He knows it's there. It's just been softened tonight by vodka and exhaustion and the fact that Liam is looking at him with an expression so genuinely uncertain that it keeps interrupting every attempt at a proper crisis.
If Liam looked smug, or pleased with himself, or even embarrassed, then Isack would know what to do with that. Instead he looks like he's waiting. Waiting for Isack to decide what this means, whether it means anything, whether they're about to become a problem to each other, and the joke of it is that Isack has spent the better part of six months avoiding exactly that responsibility. He has become extraordinarily skilled at not deciding things.
Give him a friendship, a crush, a moral dilemma, a life-changing choice, and at least he can solve that by shelving it for later. As long as it is distant, he can avoid reckoning with it. But Liam is anything but distant, he’s pressed up in between Isack and a wall right now. So maybe he kind of can’t ignore that so much.
Liam opens his mouth as though to speak, and then closes it again. He repeats that exercise enough to look like a gasping fish, and that gives Isack an excuse to laugh again. To roll away from him.
Which is nice, he had been really close to straight up vomiting. And he’s not that drunk, is he?
“Don’t what?” Liam blinks, squinting a little suspiciously. Isack feels a little like he’s going to topple over, and if the look on Liam’s face is any indication, him too probably maybe.
“Make it weird. Please don’t make it weird I just—...”
Liam stares at him for one long second and then, disastrously:
“I don’t really see why it’d be weird. Why does it have to be weird??”
“It’s just like. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, y’know cause I’m not.”
“Get over yourself, mate.” Liam scoffs, and suddenly his posture has changed. He withdraws his arms and places them in his pockets and heaves a sigh. Fine then. “Me neither, so I think maybe you’re the one making it weird.”
You leaned in first. He clearly thinks and does not say.
There had still been laughter tangled through the conversation somehow, light and breathless and slightly disbelieving.
Isack had felt it threatening at the corners of his own mouth despite the fact that this is, objectively speaking, probably one of the worst situations he has ever deliberately participated in. And now he’s gone and ruined it. Because Liam makes him worse.
“Relax,” he says. “We’re both straight, and drunk? Basically this doesn’t count.”
Which should not make him laugh again, when he’d been wound up tight just a second ago. It’s not even really funny, he can’t tell if its a joke at all. But his mind is alcohol-soggy and he feels, like always, a little bit like a weak gust of wind could pick him up and lift him into the sky. And a weak word of stupidity from Liam can make him laugh to tears, really.
“Shut up,” he mumbles, once he schools his expression.
Liam says, with the absolute confidence of a man talking directly out of his ass, "Pretty sure mates do that - this, like all the time."
“Do they.” Isack scrunches his nose. His face feels warm, his head hurts, and he is overall cold. He wonders if Liam is too.
“Modern masculinity is evolving.”
Isack can’t stop himself from beaming. He is never, never drinking out with Liam again.
Never drinking with Liam again. Never drinking again.
He’s made a lot of mistakes today, but he hadn’t intended any of them.
A cold gust of wind cuts through the alley, sharp enough to make both of them flinch. Liam immediately reaches up and pulls the hood of Isack’s sweatshirt over his head with absent familiarity, tugging it down too far on purpose. The world disappears, and Isack swears.
When he raises it over his head, Liam is still grinning at him, all loose-limbed and pink-cheeked from alcohol and cold, curls sticking damply to his forehead. His nose is a little red. Isack notices this with the same involuntary precision he notices train schedules out of this city lately, information lodging itself in his brain before he can decide whether he wants it there.
He thinks suddenly, absurdly, of prayer.
Not the parts he struggles with, because there are plenty of those these days and dwelling on them while drunk in an alley behind a bar seems like an excellent way to ruin a perfectly decent evening.
Not belief, either, nor the uncomfortable feeling that there are certain conversations he keeps having with Allah that never seem to get any easier.
It's the repetition that comes to mind, returning over and over again.
The strange comfort of knowing where you'll be tomorrow and who will be there with you.
He hopes he will see Liam tomorrow.
The alley falls quiet for a second afterward, though not uncomfortably quiet. The city is humming around them still, car doors opening and bottles clattering into a trash can, and none of it pauses for them.
Liam sways a little where he’s standing and then steadies himself by grabbing Isack’s sleeve without thinking about it.
Isack is about to let him, but then he thinks properly for the first time in ages and swats him away.
There are people still filtering in and out of the bar behind them, all laughter and cigarette smoke and winter jackets, little bursts of noise every time the door swings open. Nobody is paying attention to them. Nobody cares. France is full of drunk men hanging off each other at two in the morning.
Isack doesn’t care right now. He’s happy right now, so who cares?
He cares now. Stupid stupid stupid.
His limbs are lead and his walking is stumbling and he’s such a fucking idiot.
The facts are, firstly, that he kissed Liam.
The facts are, secondly, that Liam kissed him too, but it’s different for him. Okay for him.
And the facts are, thirdly and most catastrophically, that Isack hadn’t minded it.
Not quite in the abstract, either. It’s not like the way people enjoy attention, or validation, or being wanted. Those are explanations he tries on briefly as he walks and immediately discards. They fit poorly.
He had liked the actual kiss. Which is in equal parts an important distinction and also a terrible one.
By the time he lets himself into his apartment he has already constructed and dismantled six separate arguments in his own defense. None survive contact with reality.
He flicks on the overhead light, and it is immediately too bright, far too sterile. The walls felt like they were pressing in, humming with the echoes of a steady voice in his head telling him to calm down, calm down, calm down. He didn’t need to calm down. He needed to keep moving.
There is an acrid, rusty tang in each breath he takes. None of them feel enough to fill his lungs with any satisfying amount of air.
Isack is not an angry person.
He’s been told that he is, over and over again. But wrath is a sin – and Isack is not wrathful. Hotheaded, sure, whatever. Everyone has outbursts here and there, he’s not sure why he especially gets shit for it.
But he’s angry now, with himself. It doesn’t count the same if he’s angry with himself. He can’t break anything, or punch walls, so he paces and lets his thumping heart try to grind itself to dust.
“Fucking hell,” he mumbles, knocking the heel of his palm against his forehead.
Knows about the drinking and the kiss and the months preceding both, all the tiny moments Isack keeps trying to separate from each other as though maybe they become less incriminating individually. He knows about every time he let himself sit too close, every time he checked his phone hoping for a message and then pretended he wasn't hoping, every prayer spent trying not to think about Liam that somehow ended with him thinking about Liam anyway.
And maybe that's the part that frightens him.
The kiss, not so much – it had been five seconds, maybe ten, and regardless it had been shit. He’s still thinking about it, but even that doesn’t frighten him as much as the other bit.
The frightening bit is that if tonight had never happened, if the alley had never happened and the vodka had never happened and Liam had never let Isack lean in, Isack would still be standing here in exactly the same apartment with exactly the same problem.
He'd been pretending all year.
Not in some elaborate, deliberate way. He’s never been organized enough for self-deception on that scale. Mostly he'd just been blinking away his thoughts, if he looks at his thoughts as individual pieces, it isn’t incriminating.
Liam texts first sometimes.
I like spending time with him.
I think about him a normal amount. People do this all the time and it’s normal.
And maybe that last one should have been the giveaway, because nobody who thinks about someone a normal amount has to keep reassuring themselves of it.
The apartment feels too small suddenly. He is sure he is focusing too much on the little noises around – the sound of blood in his ears, and the hum of the vent. Too loud, even if he is at fault for noticing the sound at all.
He starts moving again. It’s only a lap around the living room.
Then another, then another. Trying to outpace his own thoughts. But the facts are right there; he knows that Allah knows. The thought keeps returning despite all of its unpleasant grime.
About more than just tonight, tonight with the vodka and the kiss. He knows about the months prior, every stupid excuse Isack has made to stay another twenty minutes. Or every time he’s seen something, and immediately wanted to tell him.Every moment he'd spent hoping his phone would light up, desperate and embarrassing and sad.
Allah knows all of him really, and usually that thought has been comforting. But now he’s not sure – knowing and understanding are not necessarily the same.
"Stop it," The words come out hoarse.
He doesn’t really register his limbs much in the moment. There is corporeal fearall around him – thinking about the body he’s been given wouldn’t really help.
Although being conscious of himself might. Because he’s not paying attention, and a stupid, forgotten drinking glass sitting too close to the edge is taken in consequence.
Isack feels a lurch in his chest, and he has maybe two heartbeats to register the glass being swept off the counter and toppling towards the ground.
He grabs at it wildly, and for one hopeful second it looks like it might steady itself.
But since nothing is working for him today, it wobbles once too harshly and collides with the ground. He doesn’t even cut himself, but the sound of it..
Isack flinches so violently he stumbles backwards.
He stares dejectedly for a moment, hand twitching in acknowledgement of his failure. Failure failure failure, he’s on a generational run. And really he should stop.
But clearly he hasn’t taken enough from himself tonight – he tries to sweep together the pieces by hand. He’s not thinking,really. He just needs to fix what he’s broken.
Unsurprisingly, a sharp sting flashes across his palm.
Common sense evades him up until then – he jerks back and examines the thin line of red welling across the side of his hand.
It’s not even anything serious, he’s had worse papercuts, but something about it finally snaps whatever miserable thread had been holding him together.
He could scream or break another thing or be brought back to reality by his stupidity.
One moment he's standing and the next he's sliding down the kitchen cabinets until he's sitting on the floor amongst the mess, knees pulled up, injured hand tucked uselessly against his chest.
The adrenaline leaves first; then the anger, then everything else.
He’s really, really tired.
The tiles are cold beneath him.
The apartment is quiet again.
And suddenly, with the shattered glass glittering across the floor and his heartbeat finally slowing to something survivable, he feels very young.
Astaghfirullah. I seek forgiveness.
A tired, frightened hope, that Allah will be merciful.
That maybe Liam will text him tomorrow.
He repeats himself, again and again, but there is never a response.
And eventually, when it becomes clear that silence is all he's getting tonight, Isack bows his head and lets himself steep in it.
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