Title: Vapor 
Author: Scynneh 
E-mail: scynneh@yahoo.com
Feedback: Yes, I take mine strong, thank you. 
Disclaimer: Alex is in Sweden, Alex is in Sweden, does that answer any questions about ownership? 
Rating: R. 
Spoilers: CYN, if you have not seen the episode, run far away and deny that it ever happened, the bad, bad thing.
Author’s Notes: I got to a very strange place after all of the fic that flooded the list; some might call it bad- I say reflective. It’s a bit Au-y, takes place years later-things are different, but some have not changed… 
April 2001

*
Charles I ended up with his head in a basket.

    George Washington lost 9 and won 3, he was 'brilliant in retreat.'

    What does it matter if someone is important, they still end up in the same place, the ground?  Wet, sucking, eager dirt, filled with so many creatures that long to eat and obliterate what the corpse animated meant to those waiting in the lunch line.

Back when people liked knee-high stockings and silk breeches, blood was very much a part of their lives.  It could be filled with ‘malignant humors’, and then had to be drained off.  Yes, draining off enormous amounts of the thick red liquid did work to some degree.  It is true that removing large amounts of blood can lessen hysteria.  But if too much pours out holes in flesh where it should not, there will be a much-reduced rate of respiration, then the heart will follow.  If an impact is involved, the shut down is much faster, and the gouged form will succumb to death even faster.  The young never liked to think of those things.

    Something else they didn't understand was silence.  Screams, ravings, moans and threats were fine and well within parameters, and easy to comprehend.  But the absence of those led to bewilderment.  That confusion filled the intruder of the small apartment until they swayed with their aimlessness.

    The room was cold, and the air temperature was not what struck the hardest. Emotions had been hurled into a freezer of immense size, and were never to be let out again.  Further steps brought the couch into view, that much was disturbing, fabric torn, the stuffing hanging off the armrests like some kind of cerebral drip that had come on suddenly and been unattended, deadly but not feared.

    Roman roads were made out of beautiful cut stone.  Beautiful cut stone that could be pried out and used to build fences.  Michael replaced the bones of the earth with hurtful words and events, the effect being the same, isolation.  There was no sign of habitation; only a flier of some club in downtown Las Vegas, where there were even less laws to restrict the violence which had erupted as atomic powers forgot atrocities and then expanded on the grief of mothers.  War-zone was the simplest term for America the beautiful, the ‘land of the free.’  Nowadays, even pain had a high price.

****

Taste has been important; filth could never sit easily on the tongue, and it should not.  But the decay of spirit leading into damnation might, somehow be savored, bottled and labeled and has timelessly, been held up as a fine thing to sample.

And the City called Vegas had become one massive distillery for the tastes of Satan's children. Music stumbles out of clubs designed to properly shape textures of flesh, making them limp and more easily transported to conclusions that are known but left unspoken for fear of repercussions of the mythical variety.

Because the Law had been thrown from its perch and molded into another thing entirely.  It now played games with those who tried to oppose, then threw them into spins which end in annihilation.

The rain was sentient.  Such thoughts were ridiculous, he knew, but there was comfort in the contemplation of impossibilities.  Like the longing for heat in his bathroom, the workmen never could figure out what was wrong with the room, never mind how much he paid them.  Then he left, drawn back to the town where he grew up, and the clue led him to another ghostly city.

*
The small building stood where he had watched blond hair and darker experience hold a room still.  He knew where that throat was, and under the spell of maggot-ridden eyes, she would no longer bring the lost to heel with kindness.  Dreamers had vanished as well, to learn what they could, knowing that to return was to admit defeat, and they could never do that.  A faithful girl, small, and stronger than most suspected, disappeared, he had not tracked her.  Nor the shadow of pride and haughty perfection, which wasted after Song and Light, were taken away.  The precipitating loss was what had not been considered, the most fundamental of characters breaking them before they could stop it.  All had run to the winds shortly after the funeral.

He did not know why he sat on the water warped old barstool nor why the stage was his point of focus.  A singer was cued, and he smiled to himself.

*
The bartender understood from observation that not using one's voice for mere conversation did something to an individual.  The rock star cliché was just that, old, tried, and worn in the shoulders.  But it was always a classic, and when she watched him slump into a roomful of people uninterested in art or literature, and step carefully up to whatever sound system was available, and then he sang.  

Still, he was odd, and when he was not entertaining, she could not, for the life of her, make out what about him was so damned attractive.  Tall, not too much, thin, as if he were a scarecrow that had lost its way from the field to the farmhouse.  Coming into clothes that were synthetic and hung off his frame in places that made most dismiss him as a vagrant about to be thrown out.

    But, more than once, he had quietly moved to the bar and made it clear that he could hold a crowd, given the chance.  Husky was his voice, a melody that swelled with rakings of emotion, and the sound could make one weep.  Because after he stepped off the wooden platform, nothing was said until the next time, and that interval between performances depended on the reception that he got.

Here though, was an audience that wanted his words, they wished to be carried off, and all eyes closed in on his shape as he moved forward.   He had the unfocused beauty of a dreamer, aged by experience and then sweetened with hope.  His eyes were cold, blotted with what could have been makeup, had Sorrow put out a line of skin care products. Nails were short, the armor of polish favored by the young was absent, but there was no need for such conformity; rebels grouped together or apart always recognized another contemptuously passing government and all authority off as some drug-induced hallucination gone for the worse. 

    His hair was short, curling slightly, whiskers gently coating his chin, a razor was luxury, niceness he'd not had in a long while.  Boot heels chipped, scuffed, even the hem of his jeans made its weariness known in the way that it fell to the ground unevenly.

    The world was given the gift of attention for as long as he was capable of focus, and the shadows cupping his lower lashes were clear in that he was unable to bear the strain of mortals' souls twanging brutally on the keys of basest sensation.

    Slow at first, he moved with the music, taking it inside himself until the two were one and the same.  Then, the glacier gave itself to the room, and notes of rasping intimacy came forth.  The man in the corner looked at the singer, not really understanding for a second, then his mouth slackened with astonishment and disbelief.

"Guerin?"

Fin