I know where beauty lives

[Angel Miguel Albares]

Julio had an engaging smile. Angel looked down when he was smiled at but he saw enough of Julio's smile to make him feel like smiling back. He didn't—but he wanted to. When Julio smiled his features softened and it was harder to see him as a weirdo taking advantage of guys he found in the alley. Not that Angel thought of him that way... anymore.

He held on to the phone, feeling kind of dumb in that schoolgirl seeing a cute guy for the first time kind of way, awkwardly hunched against the very end of the couch. Nothing scary? Really? Julio looked like such a tough guy with all of those tattoos and with his hair done that way. He didn't look much different from the men who had set upon Angel in the alleyway, to be perfectly honest, but they always said not to judge books by their covers...

DVDs though were fair game. Angel looked at the array laid before him. He didn't recognize most of them since he'd grown up overseas and was accustomed to foreign language films. But one caught his eye and he pointed to it. Still no idea what the signing meant but he assumed that Julio wanted him to pick.

"Steven Seagal?" Only he said it like 'seagull' and he knew it was wrong, but that was just how he pronounced it! It was his accent!

After a long moment, he set Julio's phone down onto the coffee table, having just realized that he could do that. "Why no horror films?"

[Julio de la Rosa]

Steven Seagull! Julio's smile turned into a silent laugh. He couldn't help it; it sounded so funny and the image of a seagull in the actor's likeness immediately popped into his imagination. Still grinning, he picked up that DVD and opened it. Action movies were probably his favorite. Not that he was delighted by gratuitous violence. It was just the fast pace of everything, the absurdity of the story lines, the silly fight scenes. They were fun; movies were meant to be fun.

As he popped the DVD into the old player's tray, he turned back to Angel, who wanted to know why he said no horror movies. His grin softened into something almost shy. Was it strange for him to hate horror movies? When it came to monsters and horror violence, he didn't have the stomach for it. Action movies were made to fun and silly and over the top. Horror movies, though... Their version of over-the-top churned something in his stomach.

While the DVD menu popped up, Julio grabbed the remote to hit play and then set it on the table  next to the first aid tin. Sitting beside Angel without encroaching on his personal space, he leaned over and took his phone so he could type, "I used to have nightmares about monsters coming to eat my mama's soul and I would stay up all night to guard her from them. After she died, I was sure they would come for me next. I know they're not real but horror movies still give me nightmares. Silly?"

[Angel Miguel Albares]

Yes well.

Steven Seagull could have been a thing maybe.

Angel wasn't exactly offended by the way Julio laughed at him but he felt a prickle of embarrassment that made him tug the hood down further over his head, half-hiding his face from view. The accent got him a lot of comments--not all bad. Most of the time people just wanted to know where he was from, usually cashiers at stores he went to since he didn't go out of his way to talk to people. It was all smalltalk, really, that didn't mean much to either the cashier or to Angel, who treated it like a necessary evil.

He watched Julio fiddling with the dated DVD player curiously. Not a lot of people had them anymore; most people had Netflix or something. DVDs were also conspicuously out of favor at the moment but Angel kind of thought it was interesting. Did Julio spend a lot of time browsing bargain bins? Or did he pick something up that looked interesting and a collection happened over time? He wasn't rich, that much was obvious, but that didn't really make much of a difference. He was still interesting in his own way--probably more so than any weird rich kid with blue hair and too much time on his hands.

Once he sat down, Angel had something to look at that didn't make him feel strangely awkward. He watched the opening credits until a phone came his way, and then he studied it religiously in lieu of looking up at handsome Julio. So that was it. Nightmares. His mama... She was dead. Another long pause occurred before Angel returned his attention back to the TV.

"No," he said to Steven Seagull on the TV. "It's not silly. I don't like horror movies either." It was the blood. He couldn't stomach the sight of blood after what happened to him before. Angel pulled at his sleeves, half-hugging his knees as he pulled his legs up onto the couch. He didn't look at Julio but he kept talking and he didn't know why. Just. Something about Julio's companionable silence made him want to open up. A little.

"I used to sit outside my parents' room when I was little... to warn them in case the monster under my bed came for them in the night." Similar kind of feeling of wanting to protect the people they loved, but... probably different receptions. Angel didn't think Julio's mom would stare at him in disapproval and roughly haul on his arm to drag him back into his cold, dark room with all the creepy shadows along the walls.

[Julio de la Rosa]

Ah. Julio nodded, knowing the feeling of acting as sentry to a parent all night long in an effort to save them. They had that in common, a common bond. They loved their parents so much that they sacrificed themselves to keep them safe. Julio wasn't able to save his mother from what ailed her. Maybe Angel still had time. He turned his gaze on Angel and smiled softly, reaching up to touch his cheek. Just the barest touch, a flutter of a butterfly's wings.

No horror movies, then. They both agreed. Which was just as well, because Julio didn't have any in his collection and he didn't plan to add any in during this lifetime. Noticing the way Angel was curling up, Julio tilted his head slightly and made the sign for cold. It was almost a self explanatory sign, since it involved a shivering motion. He pointed to Angel--the sign for you.

With his phone, he typed out: "Do you want a blanket?"

[Angel Miguel Albares]

He really wanted to say that he was sorry Julio's mother was dead but he couldn't find the words. They all sounded weird in his head, maybe inappropriate. Normal people would have said it without thinking, and most without really meaning it. Angel meant it, which was why he didn't say it; he kept it bottled up inside, like all the things that mattered.

One shoulder came up in a slight flinch when Julio touched his cheek but it wasn't out of discomfort or pain. Surprise. He half-turned to look at Julio, wary again, startled, skittish. But he felt the heat long after Julio's hand slipped away to sign, and then to type on his phone. Was that his way of getting Angel to look at him?

Or...?

Quickly Angel shook his head. "I'm okay. Thanks." He hugged himself tighter and fixed his eyes back onto the movie but now he wasn't taking much of it in. The light touch still tingled on his cheek. He wanted to touch the place Julio's hand grazed but... he didn't want Julio to think he was being creepy or anything.

It was probably his way of getting Angel to look at him. Surreptitiously Angel's eyes slid over to him, though his head didn't turn. Then just as quickly they returned to the TV, where Steven Seagull was beating some people up--in typical fashion. "Just like a superhero," he said quite without thinking, half-smiling despite the split lip.

[Julio de la Rosa]

Wasn't he cold? The apartment wasn't too bad. Greenwood had problems sometimes, with their heating and AC units and Julio couldn't afford to have either of those running constantly. Mostly he just opened windows if he needed air and if he was cold, there were blankets. But Angel wasn't cold. Just... scared. Julio wanted to reassure him, to embrace him and hold him. That was what Julio wanted when he was scared. But... probably not from a stranger.

So he didn't. He left well enough alone, turning his gaze to the movie, in all its silly glory. Oh, it was so hammy. The acting, the fight sequences. Julio couldn't help grinning at some of the sheer absurdity and he'd seen this movie many times before.

When Angel spoke, Julio looked at him. Just like a superhero, huh? Steven Seagull, superhero. He laughed silently at that, amused at the very picture of Steven Seagal as a Seagull based superhero. He gently nudged Angel in the side before he grinned and showed him his phone, "Steven Seagull, the newest Marvel superhero! He has a seagull outfit and his power is flying and detecting garbage food."

[Angel Miguel Albares]

Nobody was going to say that the movie was fantastic but it was a good way to pass the time and to help take his mind off of things. Angel liked action films but he also preferred them on the fantasy side and preferably with lots of superheroes. Sometimes he imagined himself as one of them, beating up bad guys with super strength or running circles around them like The Flash or something.

Sadly he was just human. If he'd had superpowers he could have defended himself against those goons out in the alleyway... For a moment he dropped his head, inspecting a tear in the knee of his gray jeans. Then a light prod in the side made him look up, into Julio's smiling face.

"Does he flap his arms when he tries to fly?" Finally he cracked a half-smile at Julio, amused by the idea of Steven Seagull in a seagull wingsuit. "Maybe he fights the garbage men over food."

[Julio de la Rosa]

Another silent laugh. All right, he could see Steven Seagull flapping his wings uselessly as he tried to fly away. No actual flying, though. Just attempting to fly with cloth wings that were useless. Maybe he didn't have any special powers at all; he was just a crazy man in a winged suit going around acting like a man-sized seagull. This struck Julio as terribly hilarious--he laughed so hard tears came out of the corners of his eyes.

"And the garbage men are his nemeses," he signed, before he thought. It felt so much like being with some of the guys that understood him that it just sort of happened. With a half grin, he wrote it down on his phone, along with, "And he doesn't know he's not a real superhero, just a crazy old man who thinks he's part seagull!"

Turning more toward Angel, he pointed to Angel's bag and made the sign for draw which also was self-explanatory--it was a pinky finger drawing a squiggly line down his palm.

[Angel Miguel Albares]

The whole signing thing was kind of mystifying. A whole other language. Angel tried to make sense of what Julio was saying but all he got was... Well he didn't get any of it. That was what he got out of it, that maybe he needed to learn sign language or something. Because... some day he might need it. Some other day.

He couldn't help bursting out laughing when he read Julio's comment and quickly stuffed a fist against his mouth to hide it. Then the fist pressing against his lips made it throb painfully and he winced and stopped, gingerly touching the swollen area. It wasn't bleeding anymore though--Julio did a really good job of patching him up.

His hand settled on the bag when Julio pointed to it but he sort of got it. Maybe. "You want me to... sketch it?" The half-amused smile returned. He pulled the sketchbook out, in all of its crumpled, bent state and flipped it open. A stark study of Logan appeared, one of his profile, looking wistfully at someone. At another dancer. Angel hastily flipped over to a blank page--avoiding Julio's gaze--and reached for the pen he saw on top of the coffee table, sitting over a pile of random papers.

"Okay let me see..." His ears burned but luckily the hood hid them. Julio didn't say anything about the drawings earlier but some of them were really intimate and really important to Angel. He didn't show them to just anyone, especially not ones like these. Clearing his throat, he began to draw a picture of a man in a patched-up seagull costume, with spindly thin legs, a scruffy long beard and a crazy cartoonish expression of rage on his face. He laughed as he penned in some rough images of burly garbage men running away from him--wheeling garbage bins.

[Julio de la Rosa]

Ah, now his own smile grew, eyes lit up in amusement. Angel had a cute laugh, even if he was shy about it. Or maybe that was what made it cute. Julio angled his head to try and get a better look at Angel's split lip afterward--worried by the grimace he made that he might have hurt himself. But he seemed fine. He wasn't bleeding.

He nodded, at the same time making the sign for yes! for emphasis. With curiosity and interest, he watched Angel pull his sketchbook out. It was a shame it had been torn up the way it was. Julio did his best to save every piece of paper he could find and put them in the bag for him, not knowing what images meant the most to him. He imagined they all did, in their own way. He was an artist, after all.

Blinking, he noticed there was another picture of Logan; was this the third one he'd spied so far? Julio thought he must be in love. That was why he was there. To see Logan. But he'd captured something in that sketch of Logan that Julio never saw before. Was it fantasy on Angel's part or had he really seen that look on Logan's face?

As the new image took shape, Julio could not help laughing some more, at the costume, at the legs, at the face. Somehow, it was Steven's face, in all its cartoonish glory. It was clearly him, in drawn form, hunting down and scaring off garbage men.

Once the laughter subsided, Julio rested against the back of the couch, tired but amused, relaxed and content. Normally when he came home after work, it was just him and something to eat, one of these DVDs, maybe, for company before he went to bed. It was nice to be with somebody else for a change. Somebody that wasn't stuffing money down his underwear or trying to coax him into spending an evening with them at exorbitant costs.

"It's perfect," he typed.

[Angel Miguel Albares]

Julio's silent laugh was cute. Angel sort of filled in the silence with what he imagined it might sound like, with what he thought Julio's voice could have been if he had been able to talk. What happened? Why couldn't he speak? There was no scarring anywhere near his throat so it wasn't an accident. He was born this way?

There were lots of questions but he didn't feel comfortable yet asking them. The atmosphere was definitely more relaxed though, and there was no more tension from earlier when Angel was first carried inside. He laughed too, more freely, as he added knobbly knees to crazy old Steven Seagull and some actual seagulls hovering above in the sky--sidekicks. Then he drew one pecking a garbage man, and added flies to the bins for effect.

There. Now it was complete. Once the laughter died down, he doodled some more things absently on a fresh page and then glanced over at the screen pushed at him. Angel half-smiled, still on the high of... whatever this was. A normal moment with a normal person. Laughing over something he drew, which filled him with an odd kind of pride.

"Thanks," he said and added without thinking, feeling good and amused and still thinking about Julio's smile and laugh, "So are you."

[Julio de la Rosa]

He signed, "No problem," with a smile. Angel was polite. He shifted to look at the other random doodles on the fresh page, then looked up with surprise. What? Did he just say so are you? That was... ah. It was cute but...

"Me?" he signed with a half smile. "Perfect? No."

It wasn't the first time somebody said he was perfect. But that was a different context and not a pleasant one, either. Julio had grown so tired of it. All the sweet nothings that came with the price of company. Compliments that were showered on him because he showed up to look good and favor the person with the pleasure of his skills. The money supplemented what his other jobs couldn't pay. Jobs at mechanic shops, jobs as a grocery clerk, a janitor, a stocker. He was unskilled labor. That was what they called it.

But as a child? As a child, he had been a dancer. And as a teenager, an athlete. His mother was so proud of him. If she knew what he had to do to start paying off her enormous hospital bills and all the debt she left behind, she would have been so hurt and so horrified. Not by what he was doing but what she felt she was making him do. And it killed him inside but... a person had to do what he had to do.

When he found stripping, it was the best day of his life. It had its ups and its downs, like any job. But he was actually skilled for once, at something less demeaning. Maybe it was to some but it wasn't the same as prostitution, although some people likened them to the same thing.

He was still paying off those debts but at least it was by a different means now.

Still... he didn't think he was perfect. He had that gap in his teeth that he had been bullied over for years. No money for braces. By now, he accepted it as a quirk but boy, did he hate it for the longest time, refusing to smile unless he covered his mouth.

Angel, he thought, was perfect. Underneath all those bruises, he had perfect bone structure. He was slim but he looked like he might be athletic, not skinny. Hard to tell with all those layers and the hoodie. Gently taking the pen from Angel's hand, he wrote on the page, "Perfect is Overrated." Then he drew a speech bubble around it, coming out of a circular head with a dark-haired bun and a gap-toothed smile.

[Angel Miguel Albares]

Yes. Him. He was perfect. Angel didn't need to know sign language to be able to see semi-incredulous disbelief in the way Julio pointed to himself. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder maybe but Angel thought he was perfect in his imperfections. The gap between his teeth when he smiled, the inherent shyness of those same smiles, the way his action juxtaposed his appearance, all of it was unconventional and strange and perfect.

Perfect is Overrated.

He gave up the pen and watched a little Julio emerging from the page alongside his scribbles and doodles of the movie scenes. Bun, gap-toothed smile. Cynical speech bubble. Angel reached for the pen again. His fingertips grazed the side of Julio's hand lightly and he jerked the hand back.

"Perfect people never think they're perfect," he said instead, eyes on the screen.

[Julio de la Rosa]

Julio's smile slowly faded as he watched Angel. Did he do something wrong? He had gone for the pen, then decided not to and now he was steadfastly staring at the TV. Confusedly, Julio looked over at the page and at his own drawing, his own words. Perfect people didn't know they were perfect, he said. Maybe that was true. It felt to him like maybe Angel didn't think he was perfect in any way.

Maybe he wanted Julio to say he was perfect back. Did he hurt his feelings? Tapping the pen against his own chin, he glanced hesitantly over at Angel, who seemed determined to watch Steven Seagal punching bad guys. Furrowing his brow slightly, Julio struck out the Perfect is Overrated and replaced it with Angel is Perfect and is not Overrated. :)

Julio gently slid the pen beneath Angel's fingertips to give it back to him. He made the sign for sorry, a slide of the fingers over the back of his hand.

[Angel Miguel Albares]

The word struck a nerve, that was all. Not a bad one or anything, just A nerve. Perfection was expected; perfection was a state meant to be achieved by the age of 8, when he ought to be old enough to know not to make a fuss in public and to stay still and attentive at whatever functions his parents hauled him off to.

He tried. To be perfect. But he knew he wasn't and it seemed like perfection was synonymous with love, so... Being imperfect took some getting used to. Angel glanced over when the pen moved, but only to tap Julio's chin. He watched the words being struck out and new ones added, an untruth overtop a cynical comment.

But it still made him smile slightly. He held the pen rather tightly for a moment as Julio signed again. Then he reached over to cross out Angel and wrote down Steven Seagull as a compromise. Neither of them were perfect but Steven Seagull was. There. The smile widened a little and he doodled a small Angel beside the small Julio with headphones around sticky-out ears and hair all in his eyes. So emo. So blue all the time. It was his favorite color and his permanent state of being. Blue.

"You're pretty good at drawing." The likeness of himself was good!