#i painted that star in his chest with my thumbnail because i was too lazy to look for a brush

[buwheal]

Without color

Trying to warm up because ive been slacking on the askbox!!! Yay!!!

[artificialqueens]

the way a knife loves a heart (Trixya) - meggie

A/N: This is non-AU, MLM, post-AS3. Please do pay attention to the TWs. Thank you, beanie, for inviting me to participate in the Trixya softness. I had so much fun. Come hang out with me, tell me what you think, distract me from trying to distance teach, whatever over here.

I love you the way a knife loves a heart, the way a bomb loves a crowd, the way your mother warned you about, essentially. (the way a human loves another human)

***

Things change between them on a Tuesday, which, he thinks, is an unremarkable day for your world to shift on its axis.

Changes, big ones like this anyway, are supposed to happen on Saturdays or Fridays or even Thursdays, but Tuesdays? The most unassuming day of the week? Never. But it is and it had and it was.

It’s a Tuesday and it’s the last lazy days of summer and he and Katya have been spending all their free time lazing around the pool at his apartment complex (when Trixie buys a house, he’s definitely building them a pool) or driving around town, sunroof open, sun burning the tops of their bald heads, Katya singing off-key, but at the top of his lungs along with the playlist Trixie put together for them.

Katya holds Trixie’s thigh in his left hand as they drive, his thumb tracing circles on the smooth, bare skin there, and it’s good. It feels like nothing was ever different, like Trixie never went away to All Stars and left him alone to his vices and Katya never went to Arizona without so much as a word and came back reassembled like a ceramic pot with tiny missing chips–essentially the same, but altered in an almost imperceptible way.

And it’s good.

It’s good in the way that the melted strawberry ice cream, dripping off Katya’s spoon and onto his bare chest is good; the way the coarse sand of the California coast between Trixie’s toes is good; the way Katya’s smile when he looks up at him with wide blue-green eyes is good.

It’s good.

They’re good, and Trixie is so relieved because for a little while he thought things might never be okay between them again. Because Katya’s missing chips were the ones that held their friendship and that little promise that there might be something more there someday if he could stop being so damn stubborn, if he could ever give in to the pressing realization that he is really, truly, madly, ultimately in love with his best friend.

He worried Katya was changed too much for them to ever be good again. It’s been a process, them reacquainting themselves with each other, and he feels like they’ve both changed in ways that maybe neither of them knows yet. But he’s aching to find out.

And the changes aren’t all bad. Katya is steadier, more calm in himself, and anchored in a way Trixie has never seen before. He’s trying hard not to treat his friend like the porcelain as which he sometimes perceives him. And it’s palpable.

Trixie has felt terribly grown up since he turned 29 a few weeks ago, and somehow he’s started looking at the two of them in a different light. He thinks it’s because they came so close to losing each other forever almost a year ago.

So Katya has changed, but he’s changed too.

Katya’s head is in his lap, eyes shielded from the sun behind a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses and Trixie smiles as he gazes down.

“You look like you’re thinking very hard about something,” Katya says quietly, reaching up a hand to rest on his cheek.

“You,” he answers simply. “And me. Us, I guess.”

“Ahh, the proverbial us… The metaphorical us,” he replies, her voice dropping huskily as she reaches for his hand and twists their fingers together. Familiar, comfortable. “You know… I never expected anything from you.”

“I know,” he answers, studying the way the thin black lines of all the tattoos twist over the sinews and muscle in Katya’s long arms.

He’s intoxicating, and Trixie wants to know every inch of him. Always has, he supposes, but now he’s openly admitting it to himself. So he tightens his grip on his hands and shifts slightly so his head is more at his knees before he bends down toward him and kisses him softly.

It’s more than a kiss because there aren’t cameras recording their every move and the fans won’t see this one. So Trixie’s tongue slips between his lips and measures every crevice of his mouth. And he’s breathless when he realizes that Katya tastes like summer and smoke and something that’s just Katya. It’s so familiar and so comforting that he feels himself falling deeper and deeper.

Katya moves beneath him, shifts ever so slightly to pull his mouth from the kiss. Trixie misses the pressure immediately.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Trixie asks in a hoarse whisper. It’s what he’s really wanted to know all along. Why his best friend didn’t come to him when he felt like his world was falling apart around him. Why he went back to the demon he knew he couldn’t face alone instead of the one constant he knew he had. “When you started struggling again, why didn’t you call or text or come over or, God, just let me know somehow?”

Katya shrugs and licks off the taste of him. “I guess I didn’t think you cared.”

“That’s so stupid,” he breathes, and he knows instantly that it isn’t the best answer he can give–it’s barely an answer at all, and it definitely isn’t the one he needs–but it’s all he has in the moment. Katya pushes herself to sitting on the warm sand and his hands find Trixie’s waist as he climbs into his lap and presses their lips together again.

Things are different then; irrevocably, forever different.

Trixie holds onto the back of his neck and tries to pull them closer and loses himself in the feeling of their bodies pressed together.

He could get used to this; it would be frighteningly easy for him to get used to this.

It’s true, Trixie thinks, as Katya’s lithe body falls over his, presses him farther into the sand, further into love. You really do fall in love slowly and then all at once.

***

They don’t have to talk about what happens next and he thinks he’s grateful for that as he drives them back toward his apartment, their fingers laced tightly together the entire way.

The setting sun paints his bedroom in oranges and pinks, yellows and reds, and Katya is resplendent as he kneels in front of him, captures his lips again, grips his hips with strong hands, fully in charge and in control of the moment.

Katya runs his thin hands under Trixie’s thin tank top; nimble fingers make short work of the button and zipper of his shorts.

It briefly occurs to him that there’ll be sand in his sheets when they’re done—it clings to their calves and thighs and arms; he can feel it fall like glitter all around them as he traces muscles and sinew, veins and tattoos. Then Katya grips his ass in both hands and gives a firm squeeze and simultaneously bites his lip and after he gasps and tries not to cum immediately, all he can focus on is the electricity that pops between them.

So he slips his T-shirt over his head and bares his chest to Katya.

It’s not the first time (hardly; Katya’s seen him naked before, for Christ’s sake), but it feels like the first time. Desire burns behind Katya’s blue eyes and he tilts his head in question. Trixie nods without speaking and they kiss again and it’s so right because yes, of course it was always supposed to be the two of them just like this.

There’s fumbling with clothes and fumbling with a condom and the bottle of lube, and soon (but not soon enough), they’re connected. Katya is sheathed completely inside him and the world tilts, rights, shifts on its axis and pauses, hinged on the moment that Katya stills and looks down at Trixie before they lace their fingers and Trixie gasps Katya’s name and tilts his hips to draw him deeper.

They fit. Just like they always have. Just like he always knew they would.

***

So things are different, but it’s a comfortable silence in which they lie after.

His life, Trixie knows, will forever be divided into “Before Katya” and “After Katya,” but this is a new level, another layer in the complicated parfait that is their relationship.

“Umm,” Katya says, his deep voice sending reverberations through the mattress into Trixie’s spine. “So that happened.”

“It did,” Trixie responds and they laugh and any trace of tension that might have lingered dissipates.

There’s a moment of silence that passes, its edges silver and beaded in the moonlight, before Katya sighs and clears his throat and says, “I didn’t want to make you feel responsible.”

The words come quickly, jumbled, manic almost, but Trixie is still sex-drunk and illuminated, so he blinks lazily before he replies. “Responsible? For what?”

“That’s the real reason I didn’t call you when I… Back… Well. You know.” Katya picks at the skin on his thumbnail and shrugs. “I just didn’t want to make you feel responsible and I thought… I knew you would.”

Trixie sits up and switches on his bedside lamp. The sun set without either one of them noticing, but the delicate softness of the moment between them has disappeared, and now Katya’s features are muted and wrong under the orange glow of the streetlights that filter in through the window.

“What are you talking about? Responsible for what?” Trixie finally says. “For you? For taking care of you? For wanting you to be happy? Newsflash, honey, I already do. I do feel responsible for that.”

Katya rises to sitting and looks at Trixie, surprised. “But why? Why, Trixie? Why? I don’t deserve that.”

“Because…” Trixie shrugs. “Because you’re my best friend and I love you.” He swallows hard. “I’ve never… Look, you’re the first person I ever felt really comfortable around. Jesus, this sounds like something out of every fucking straight romantic comedy bullshit movie, but it’s true. Okay? It’s… stupid; it’s stupid that I see your face—your name even, like when you call me— and I just want to make you laugh or smile or just feel better. You tell me you’re sad and then I get sad all I want to do is fix it, but I know how you are and I know that all I can do is make a stupid joke and hope you laugh.” He laughs a little, broken and bitter. “So you never had to worry about making me feel responsible because I always have.”

“Trixie.”

“It didn’t work, by the way. You not telling me. I definitely felt responsible for you going away,” Trixie says quietly. “Jesus, fuck. How could I not?”

There’s a silence, a heavy pause where the air grows thick and stagnant and Trixie hangs his head to study the weave pattern of the blanket and Katya’s still picking at the skin beside her thumbnail.

(If it weren’t Trixie’s own apartment, he’d get up and leave, but he doesn’t want to kick Katya out; he’s pretty sure that wouldn’t bode well for their already fragile relationship.)

“You know,” Katya begins, pausing to take in a deep breath. Trixie can almost see him itching for a cigarette, his index finger pressing against his thumb that now bleeds. He shakes his head, sucks on his thumb, sighs, and presses on. “One of the things they made me do in this rehab is make a list. And it wasn’t a list of people I’ve wronged or anything like that because I’ve done that, and it doesn’t work. Maybe for some people, but not for me. It just made me feel guilty as hell and basically reconfirmed my fears that I’m a piece of shit garbage human being.”

Normally, Trixie would lift his head, make a crack about Katya actually being a piece of shit garbage human being in the hopes that Katya would laugh. (Those times when he fails to make actual sounds and just wheezes and flails until he finds purchase with Trixie’s wrist or thigh or waist are his favorites.) But it doesn’t seem like the time, even if he’s desperate for Katya to laugh (and grab helplessly onto his wrist or thigh or waist).

“Anyway. They made me make a list of my reasons why. Why I wanted to get sober, for reals this time, you know? What was going to make this time different than the other times? Make it stick. They wanted three things. And you know what I wrote, Trixie? Do you know what the first thing that popped into my head was?”

Trixie feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes, but he won’t allow himself to cry. He won’t be that person, not right now. Not on this Tuesday evening when the earth has already been twice rocked off its axis.

“It was you, you dumb bald idiot. All three of my reasons were you.” Katya shakes his head. “Well, technically they wouldn’t let me write your name three times, so I wrote Brian, that bald faggy fuck; Trixie, that blonde Barbie bitch; and the love of my life. Somehow they didn’t put all that together.”

“Are you sure?” Trixie presses his lips together into a tight line. “Like. I’m gonna need you to be sure because I get attached. I need you to like me for real.”

“I do, I do like you! And I know,” Katya breathes. “I know, and honestly, that’s part of why I’ve been so fucked up over it but like, I don’t want the hookups and random guys anymore because I just want you, what we have. That’s what I want.”

Trixie considers for a moment, bites his lip, then nods. “Okay.”

***

Trixie takes out his guitar later that night, sometime after their third or fourth go, when Katya has fallen asleep, face-down, arm hanging off the side of the bed. He’s even snoring a little, which just makes Trixie smile as he sits with his back against the wall and strums his guitar.

Sometimes, every now and then, Trixie will experience a moment and just know it’s going to be a song lyric. There have been a lot of those around Katya, but this one feels… Different, nicer. He isn’t sure where he’ll go with it later, but he’d heard the line as soon as Katya had uttered the words and he’d formulated the melody as they kissed and whispered and grinned at each other.

“But I do, and I do like you

And I do, and I do like you…”