Just keep breathing

[Alejandro Riviera]

Hmm. Warm. A warm body to hold, to hold him. Alejo's thoughts turned to the boyfriend who was out there in the same sleepy little town, staying with a friend. The boyfriend who accused him of being evasive, but glossed over the fact that he had tried to keep the fact that he was staying with a male friend from Alejo. Even given the chance to correct him, Judah tried to skip over it.

If he had nothing to hide, why didn't he correct Alejo the first time? Why did he let Alejo think it was a girl that he was staying with?

Why didn't he say it back—I love you—when Alejo said it to him?

That stayed with him all day, into the night. It was with him now while Jack's embrace warmed him inside and out, words spoken against his temple appealing to his inner demons. He was doing this for the job, though. Alejo was only here because he had a bad guy to catch. Right? He wasn't going through with it.

He smiled up at Jack, impish and already half-way drunk. Just drunk enough to think he wasn't drunk. Maybe his tolerance for alcohol wasn't as good as he thought. "If you take me home with you, know that I will make you late for work tomorrow." Alejo laughed, tipsy, warm, high. "Is that a risk you're willing to take?"

[Jack Ripley]

If only things were normal in Jack's world. It was a fleeting thought. What normal must look like. What normal must feel like. It wasn't as if he was without soul, without conscience, without thought. Perhaps, even, he had too much of all of it. Thought too much, felt too much. His conscience wasn't clean. Hadn't been clean in a long time but he still managed to sleep at night, sometimes with help. Often times with help.

"I was always going to be late for work," he confessed to Alejo. Whether or not Alejo was the one who went home with him tonight, he would likely have one hell of a hangover. He knew he drank way too much already. He was light-headed and the world was beautiful. Wonderful. Innocent as Alejo's eyes on him, that smile that made him smile. He leaned in, so close. Achingly close to a kiss. His nose brushed Alejo's.

"C'mon, sweetheart," he said as he tilted his head and nuzzled him instead. His arm wrapped genially around Alejo's shoulders like an old chum and he led him to the door. He slightly stumbled a step or two but it was okay. "My place is close."

And the cool night air would sober them up a little.

Oh! But the air was cold outside. It nipped at his extremities, the tip of his nose, his cheeks, his fingertips. But it was still nothing close to the cold from an eastern winter and Alejo said he was from the east as well. Funny how that worked; but he could hear it in his voice, in the way he said certain words.

"What do you do?" he asked as they started down the cracked pavement. The apartment building where he stayed was only a couple of blocks from nightlife here in Hazleton. Sunrise Apartments. Like most of the buildings in the city center, it was new and beautiful and meant to attract newcomers like himself.

"I gabbed about my job but you," he said with a gentle poke to Alejo's cheek. "You're still a mystery."

[Alejandro Riviera]

He wasn't really going through with it. He wasn't really going back to Jack's place to hook up with him, despite the evidence of words, actions and thought. Really, just as Alejo could have been anyone, so could Jack. It might have been the guy with the brilliant white smile or the one whose hooded eyes had been following him since he entered the club. Might have been the bartender or the DJ or one of the dancers up on stage.

Alejo was just hurt. Alone. Confused. His job was increasingly getting in the way of his personal relationships, putting distance between himself and the people he was supposed to trust with any secret. But some secrets, they couldn't be told. People didn't understand that. Alejo thought that Judah did but then... this happened. The friend happened. The lies... happened.

He tilted up into Jack, nuzzling nose tip to nose tip and smiling like he thought he was still in control. "Sure." His arm slid around Jack's waist as they eased out of the club, with the music still swimming through his veins, powering his heart beat. Outside it was chilly but Alejo only pressed closer to him. Nothing like the frigid New York winters that shut down half the city. Just a little bit nippy, really, out here.

"I'm... nothing." Alejo laughed with a sense of irony. Bait, he wanted to say. Glorified bait. He was here because he looked good enough and he was young, fresh-faced and eager to please—as always. But at the heart of it, he was here to lure out a predator. At a stop light waiting for the walk sign, he slid his other arm around Jack's waist and cuddled up to him to ward off the cold, resting his cheek against his shoulder. "Lost, I guess. I came out here hoping to find myself. Thought I knew who I was but... it's like going through a tunnel, thinking you know what's on the other side. But when you come out you realize there's a hundred different ways to go and you just..."

He trailed off, smiling wistfully at the pavement.

[Jack Ripley]

Nothing. There was the pain, showing through the veil of alcohol. They stood at the street corner and even when the light changed, Jack didn't step forward. His gaze dropped to the young man's hair, to the curvature of his cheek and the slope of his nose and the flicker of his lashes. Alejo was lost. Jack supposed he knew that when he said he was backpacking across the country. Most people only did things like that, not because they had a sense of adventure, but because something was missing.

"I'm nothing too," he said softly into Alejo's hair. He was nothing and it killed him. His parents didn't even love him, something people said of people who were nothing. When one's own creators didn't care, it was hard to learn to care for oneself, either. And he was traveling, too, looking, searching high and low for something that mattered. Somebody to care about and somebody that cared about him.

Philosophy always suited him but it was also useless. More useless ramblings, more useless thought experiments. It all hinged on what if this and what if that. It wasn't grounded in true reality. Some philosophers went so far as to teach a person how to unthink their previous thoughts. You see this chair, they would say, it doesn't exist. What you see with your eyes doesn't mean anything because there were so many things they couldn't see that still existed but... did anything really exist? If they couldn't define reality by things they knew to be true, by the ability to touch, taste, smell... How did they know it was really there?

Love was like that. One of those undefinable things that humans had been trying for centuries to define. But was it even real or was it just something they told one another to make this reality more bearable?

The lights changed again. Jack led Alejo across the street. Sunrise Apartments loomed ahead, a lighthouse in the only truly busy part of this tiny town. There were a couple of kids hanging out in front of the apartments, one on a skateboard, another crouched on the curb with his phone while his friend hung over his shoulder to read or watch whatever was on the phone with him. The sound of the skateboard's wheels followed him as they entered the courtyard of the apartments. Jack slid his keys out of his coat pocket.

"Here we are." He smiled at Alejo as he let go of him in order to insert the keys into the lock. His apartment was on the ground floor of the three story building. 1F. He opened the door to a sparsely furnished home with new wooden flooring. He flipped the light switch on. No art on the walls but there were several paintings leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung up. There was a nice area rug in the living room, a couch. A chair. A coffee table with nothing on it.

"It's not very homey yet," he apologized as he stood in the doorway, holding the door open for Alejo. "But it's getting there."

[Alejandro Riviera]

They were nothing together, was the flippant and flirty response, but Alejo wasn't in the mood to say it. Two nothings didn't make a something, just like two halves didn't always make a whole. He held Jack a little tighter, though. A little closer, as if they might meld and finally make one normal, unbroken person. The light changed and Alejo saw it flashing but for a second longer, a beat too long, he held Jack.

This was something Judah didn't understand. Judah grew up loved. And it wasn't his fault that Alejo had a fucked up family but he couldn't possibly know the kind of emptiness that was inside of Alejo, the depth of the bottomless hole that needed to be filled. It wasn't Judah's job to fill it, either. It wasn't his responsibility. He could only feel what he felt, love the way he was capable of loving, not the way Alejo needed to be loved.

And... for a while now, Alejo had suspected that there was another guy. A guy who pre-dated him, someone Judah loved with all of his heart and not only part of it. He could tell, he wasn't an idiot. The little smiles at his phone, the frowns, the awkward tension. Emotions dredged up from texting and talking to someone, as an observant cop, Alejo saw it. He didn't say it, paved over it with excuses, but now... This. The friend Judah was so careful to keep away from Alejo, his boyfriend...

He let out a sigh against Jack's shoulder. There was a tiny warm spot on the top of his head where Jack had spoken into his hair and it spread, tingling, electric, down to the soles of his feet. He hoped... Jack was just an ordinary guy. A lonely guy, a nothing guy looking for someone to fit the space in his heart where another human was supposed to go.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Alejo didn't say anything interesting; it felt like a contemplative kind of walk where he just watched Jack, his profile, the way his hair fell, the shape of his jaw. Then they were inside, warming up, and he noted with a little smile that Jack lived on the ground floor. Easy to get in and out. Easy to--no. Stop. He pushed those thoughts away.

He wanted to see Jack as a person right now, not as a suspect.

It was so... selfish, though. So ill-advised. He was supposed to be professional. He had a boyfriend. He was out here because they trusted him and without knowing jack shit about Jack (haha) he was... taken in. They were nothing people, disposable, expendable. Bait, right? Bait. Alejo reached for him as soon as they were both inside, hands sliding up to either side of his face. He tugged Jack down to him, to meet his pain with the pain that had been festering deep inside for what felt like forever.

[Jack Ripley]

Two nothings. Nothing could ever be anything. That was his real problem, chasing all these nothings and hoping they would fill up that emptiness inside. If they were nothing and he was nothing, they were doing absolutely no favors for one another. And yet here he was, yet again. With a pretty little nothing. A bold pretty little nothing, whose hands were on his face, whose lips were on his.

Jack used a foot to push the door closed behind them with a gentle click. It was just the two of them now. No more kids chatting and skateboarding. No more thumping club music, no more crowds. Just the two of them, alone together. The kisses deepened and Jack sensed a desperation in Alejo. The pain. His arms enveloped him as he drew him closer, to the couch. Crashing backward onto the couch, he pulled Alejo down with him. Another dizzying series of kisses and he was sliding hands up beneath Alejo's shirt, hands splayed over a flat stomach and around to the curve of his back. Skin on skin, in any capacity. Jack could never tire of it.

[Alejandro Riviera]

All alone now in the silence and the nothingness...

After the door clicked shut the rest of the world melted away. Alejo forgot about the kids hanging around outside, loitering in the cold. That could have been him once, innocent and young without a single care in the world. He used to like skateboarding too—what self-respecting kid didn't? He had his own friends like that, one laconic and perpetually unimpressed, another overly excited, others simply normal, ordinary boys. They hung around street corners after dark too and passed a cigarette around while talking about nothing: how school sucked, how their parents were getting on their cases, about the latest trends.

Where did all of that innocence go? Alejo knew he started pulling away from his friends. He had a Secret that he couldn't tell them, just like he had a Secret he couldn't tell Judah. His lingering glances had no explanation and he was afraid all the time. Fear of discovery made him tense and anxious, leading a fake life that drained every particle of individuality out of him. He wanted to please everyone—and ended up pleasing no one. Friends, family, they all faded from his life, leaving... nothing.

Did Jack know that too? His eyes said he did. There was a hollowness in his voice when he admitted that he, too, was nothing and it reached deep down into Alejo's soul. That was their connection. Nothing. They were nothing, reaching for something. Alejo tried to fill the void with a job helping others, hoping to please and so eager for acceptance. But his reward was this: bait. Still nothing in the eyes of his superiors.

He fell onto the couch with Jack, legs twining and insinuating between his. Alejo's hands slipped up into his hair as he opened himself up to him, feeling punch-drunk. High. Here was someone who finally got it, what it felt like to be nothing. And his touch, it felt so good. It had been so long since Alejo had been touched, waiting for Judah to come back, going off on his own assignments...

"Jack?" Alejo pulled back, taking a breath. "Jack... wait." He had to be sure. His gaze searched Jack's, half-drunk though he was in the moment. Alejo's hands didn't stop moving, though, pushing back his hair from his eyes, stroking the sides of his temples.

[Jack Ripley]

"Hm?"

He looked up at Alejo, who seemed to enjoy playing with his hair. Fair enough. The little mind reader. Jack liked having hands in his hair, on his face. With his eyes on Alejo, he observed him searching Jack's gaze. What was he searching for? Jack's fingers idly stroked Alejo's back.

"Having second thoughts?"

Sometimes they did, the ones he brought back home. Jack obviously hadn't done anything to Alejo's drink. The whispers had been fairly quiet since arriving in Hazleton, but it wasn't the place doing it. For the time being, he was on medication, although it didn't mix well with alcohol. Or so they said. Really, it just heightened the feeling of floating. They had floated serenely here to his home. The whole world had lost its hard angles and everything was left soft and blurry. Except those eyes. Those eyes on him. Searching.

He lifted a hand to Alejo's cheek.

"What are you looking for?"

[Alejandro Riviera]

"No..."

Everything came crashing together: the argument with Judah earlier that sent Alejo running into the nearest pair of arms, the demands of his stressful job, being at war with himself and his religion. Lying didn't come naturally to Alejo. He was good at what he did but that didn't mean he liked it. It didn't mean that spouting untruths and living another double-life was something he enjoyed and wanted to keep doing forever.

Who was he? Earlier when he told Jack he was doing some soul-searching, he hadn't been lying. Alejo didn't know who he was anymore. Was he the liar? The cop? He wanted to help others but not if he was going to lose himself in the process and every job like this, every argument he had with someone about being evasive and duplicitous, drove him closer and closer to the edge.

Some days he felt like he could just. Snap.

Alejo closed his eyes to the soft strokes at the back of his neck, feeling fuzzy and warm despite his inner turmoil. The hand at his cheek made something in his heart twang painfully. "I want to know... who you are," he said softly, opening his eyes again. He touched upon the slope of Jack's jaw, up along his cheek, cupping his face. Alejo leaned down again to kiss him, feeling the pang of guilt as he remembered Judah. His boyfriend. Who was out here reconnecting with 'old friends.'

[Jack Ripley]

No you don't.

Nobody really wanted to know Jack Ripley. He came from a broken background and he spent his entire life stitching up the holes that undoubtedly crept throughout his life. He was on medication. While there was no history of arrests, there were... incidents. Jack Ripley wanted things so deeply that he hurt those he thought he loved most because he didn't know any other way. Even when he was trying to fix things, he only managed to put them back together insofar as one could fix anything broken: there were still cracks, fragility, things were never the same after they broke.

Slowly, his eyes closed, their lips meeting. Just the softest whisper of a kiss. Another soft kiss followed and Jack's fingertips slid up Alejo's temple, sifting through his hair. His eyes opened slightly, lips brushing Alejo's as he spoke.

"What do you want to know?"

[Alejandro Riviera]

For more than two years, Alejo had been tracking down a single man. He spent more time than he cared to admit poring over the case files, staring at the vivid images of young men with pale blue lips and closed eyes laying on a metal slab. He read through the reports over and over, analyzed the psychology of the killer, trying to find a connection between this and that, drawing lines from A to B in the hopes of finding some sort of pattern. Some clue. One misstep was all it took but the man was careful, meticulous.

Still, he knew things. Things like the fact that he had a habit of moving around the country, never staying in one place for too long. Like the fact that he had a degree, which Alejo deduced from the fragment of a diploma they found at one of the crime scenes. The man had been living there for a while; he'd grabbed his things in a hurry, it seemed, to head off the raid. By the time they got there, the apartment was empty. Only careful combing of the crime scene brought the fragment of paper to light.

Alejo wondered about him. Thought about him. Dreamed about him. He was borderline obsessed with tracking down the killer, loathe though he was to admit it. He got that way sometimes, with his job, with his possessions, with... people. Maybe that was why he felt so strongly about this man in particular. There were signs—signs that they shared something in common. Signs of holding on too tight, afraid of losing the little that they both had. When you had nothing, what little you did have became everything.

In a fucked up way, he felt as if he might as well be in a relationship with this faceless, nameless man—he'd spent more than enough time profiling him, given up days and nights solely to discovering his identity.

Alejo didn't know if Jack was that man but he thought he saw signs. There were certainly suspicious clues laying about, like bread crumbs leading him to some inevitable conclusion. His heart beat faster as they kissed at the thought of finally tracking him down, and yet... he felt sad, too. If he found Jack—if Jack was the man he'd been searching for all these years—what next? After this case closed... how did he move on? What did he move on to? He'd held on for so long that this case had formed a part of his life and he couldn't give that up so easily, could he?

So he had to be sure. He had to know for a fact before he made any moves and that was why he paused, putting the brakes on.

"What made you nothing?" He didn't go far, since Jack didn't seem to want him to go far. Alejo's own hands buried themselves in Jack's hair too, stroking, petting, grasping, nails raking gently against his scalp. He kissed him again, tenderly, deeply. "What made you this way?"

[Jack Ripley]

A natural question. What made him nothing? What made anybody nothing? What made Alejo nothing? Were they all really like this inside, with some so good at pretending otherwise that nobody was any the wiser? Sometimes, Jack had to wonder. But then he saw something inside some people, something that could never be nothing. Those people with the lively smiles, the way their eyes seemed to truly hold a spirit so strong and full that they could never be reduced to this--to nothing.

And where did one even begin with describing what made them nothing? How did one describe nothing when it was the total absence of anything? What made Jack Ripley nothing, he wanted to know. Did he hope to connect their pain? To connect to the most vulnerable parts of Jack?

He smiled, a smile with eyes that were too sad to match. They just met. Alejo wouldn't know what it meant to know Jack's emptiness, the nothing that bore through his heart, widening with every misunderstanding, with every promise that broke, that left more cracks in his heart.

"I don't think something made me this way," he confessed. "I think I was born this way. From the moment I arrived in this world, my mother must have looked into my eyes and she saw... nothing. We never had that connection between mother and son. My earliest memories are not fond ones."

He ran a thumb over Alejo's lower lip.

"What makes you nothing, Alejo darling?"

[Alejandro Riviera]

Gently, his thumb passed over Jack's brow, tracing the natural arch of it. Such sad eyes. Such a lonely, empty smile. It tore into him, how well he knew that look in Jack's eyes and how familiar his smile was. Alejo felt that way too, some days. Some days the emptiness was too vast to be contained and it leaked through, exposing him behind the mask that he wore. Most of the time Alejo got through the day just fine but some days... days like these were hard to bear.

"Your mom never loved you," he concluded, lowering his head to kiss the pad of Jack's thumb as it drifted over his lip. He chased his hand too, nuzzling into it with his eyes closed, feeling that ache in his chest expand with Jack's words. Was that better, or worse? To never have known a mother's love, instead of having it and then losing it?

"Mine did love me," Alejo confessed softly, eyes still closed, head down. "And then she—they—took it back. When I came out, they took it back. I wasn't their son anymore. I wasn't... anything anymore." He opened his eyes, full of the same sadness, aching and cold inside.

"I have a boyfriend. He's in love with someone else. I was only ever a stand-in. I've never been anything to anyone, you see. No matter how hard I try, I can't..." His smile twisted into a bitter little thing. Even this... It was a meaningless hook-up, wasn't it? Alejo used his job as a cover but he knew how the evening would turn out the second he walked into the club. The only stroke of fate was Jack, and maybe even back at the club when their eyes first met, he saw that emptiness and his own hollow heart reacted to it.

"Is it us? Is it our fault?"

[Jack Ripley]

No, she never loved him. As a child, it filled him with so much unrestrained rage and anguish. Jack was an unruly child, the kind that acted out, threw tantrums, screamed and cried unconsolably. Only when he was young. It only took a couple of years to realize that nobody cared. His mother used to lock him up in a carseat and leave him for hours alone in a closet so she didn't have to listen to him cry. It didn't matter, to her, what it was he wanted. All she heard was greed, something stealing her time away from men, from drugs, from sleeping endlessly on the couch.

Why did she keep him? Jack struggled daily with the fight to stay alive; wishing his mother never granted him the curse of life, wishing that if she couldn't bring herself to kill him, that she gave him away. But she didn't. Why? Why? Why did people like her exist? Why did they allow people like Jack to exist?

Which is worse? he wondered silently, as his gaze dropped, as he nuzzled Alejo. To have known love once and lost it? Or to never have felt it at all? Perhaps it had been posed by a poet and a playwright but the question was philosophical in nature.

A boyfriend. Jack's smile was rueful. It didn't bother him, the fact that there was a boyfriend. If he mattered, or if he cared enough, he wouldn't have pushed Alejo in this direction. A boyfriend in love with somebody else. Now the rueful smile was bitter. He knew all about that. Why wouldn't he? He was nothing, the same as Alejo. He had experienced that same feeling of loving somebody and finding out that it wasn't reciprocated. Not the way he needed it.

"No," he said. It wasn't their fault. Jack was not at fault for being born. Alejo wasn't either. He wasn't at fault for giving his heart to somebody. He was brave and he was rewarded with a spit to the face. By his family. By his boyfriend.

"They're the ones who make us nothing."

[Alejandro Riviera]

See, Jack knew. Jack understood. Nothingness was a part of their identities now, made so by the people who pushed them out of their lives. All they wanted—Jack, Alejo—was to be significant in someone's life. Alejo tried to claw his way into prominence in the force, with Judah, with his own goddamn family, but none of them got it. Nobody got him.

He smiled at Jack, at Jack's knowing and bitter smile. Jack understood him perfectly. The sense of rejection grew with each person that came into and went out of his life like it was a revolving door. Like it didn't matter what Alejo wanted, only what they wanted. And Alejo, he tried so hard not to blame them. He blamed himself, his job, his secrets, he made one excuse after the other for them, absolving them, putting them in the right and himself in the wrong.

He made himself out to be nothing... when they were the ones who did it to him.

"All I want..." he lowered his voice, sharing a deep, dark secret. His Secret. He nuzzled Jack again, nose tip to nose tip, just like they did back at the club. But this time it felt so much more intimate.

"Is to be a part of someone."

Jack had to know what he meant, what he wanted—needed—to be to someone. Anyone.