[this is directly inspired by a friend's fic, which made me think about making a little one-off of Jules at a level of repression closer to what his source material's might be. Some story/sexy beats are similar to hers because our visions fully align on them lol. Title comes from Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill~]
[CW: alcoholism]
As soon as their lips touched, Julian knew they had done this before. He couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t even picture it in his mind. But he knew, in his body, in the way his hands understood exactly how and where to travel along Nate’s strong arms, shoulders, chest, that this was already a well-worn script.
--And why wouldn’t it be? Nate’s a good looking guy, even just objectively speaking, really, and you’re on the road for most of your life, the girls all start to blur together, seem more like an obligation than an attraction, and you thought it was just because you were in love at first, but it wasn’t, and you know none of the others see it that way. You know you’re missing something, or just wrong somehow. Still. No matter how hard you try. And he can’t help but show himself off every night, and you know it’s for the girls he thinks he’s competing for with you, but you still have to see it every fucking night and it’s so unfair, and some nights are harder than others and everything’s already upside down and you need to cling to something. Anything. So you drink it down. You drink until you can allow yourself to become possessed by it, let your body go through its motions to get what it wants, and you wake up the next morning in your hotel bed with only the faintest hints of shame lingering inside your soreness.
Alcohol as implicit permission had worked for a long time; it had given Jules such an easy, simple language to get what he wished he didn’t need: certain touches along the rims of glasses, certain brushes of fingers while passing bottles, particular ways of swallowing, licking lips, locking on and following the gaze of the guy you’re drinking with. Enough drinks in you and you can’t tell whether the warmth’s from the booze or the foot locked around and stroking your calf. Jules went for any scenario that granted him plausible deniability.
Sometimes, with particular men, the language evolved its own personal dialects. He remembered drinking with Greg, pulling long sips from his vodka-Perrier and swallowing them slowly, stroking the neck of the bottle, staring at Greg taking far less careful pulls from his stout, the swallows big enough to make his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He’d always get drunk slower than Greg. He loved watching his resolve weaken, he loved seeing that bodily possession happen to someone else, he loved feeling slightly more in control of it all. He couldn’t help but test how far he could get Greg to go before nerves overtook him and he had to match Greg’s drunkenness. The thrill of it had admittedly gotten a little addictive. He hadn’t thought anything of it until the year Greg left him and got married. “I was just drinking WAY too much. It was beginning to freak me out. I was beginning to freak myself out.”, he would say in more than one interview. He would say it, laugh a little, and a guilt would start to rise up from Julian’s stomach like bile. He drank that down, too. Vomited it up, sometimes. But usually drank it down and kept it down.
None of that guilt stopped him from drinking. If anything, it made him want it even more. He couldn’t stand himself; he felt disgusting, broken, torn between his career, his family, the promises of something approaching normal-- everything he was told he should need, everything he was told would keep him safe and make him happy, versus the one need that made normality impossible, the one need that ruined everything else for himself and everyone else, the one need that ensured he could never reach perfection, that he could never be understood by his family or his band, he could never be fully safe anywhere he went, he could never be good. He drank until that need didn’t bother him anymore. He drank until he couldn’t remember what he did to satisfy that need. He drank until he could kiss his girlfriend and not feel a dissonance, a missing piece; until he couldn’t remember the name of the club he snuck off to that night after he knew she was sleeping (lying was even easier when you truly couldn’t remember the details) and he couldn’t feel the guilt of it, the weight of it.
And now there he was, sober, his lips touching those of the man who had otherwise been motivating his drinking the most. The one that could dig up that need no matter how deeply Julian buried it within himself, who could do so with such an infuriatingly casual ease that it made Julian panic, shove him away, cling to his girlfriend’s hand tighter, ride in separate buses, sleep in separate hotels. Working with Nathan had originally been a dream come true. It had delivered him from the streets, from obscurity, from facing any of his old mistakes and griefs. Nathan saved him, and could just as easily destroy him. Jules couldn’t accept that. He couldn’t live with it. He drank it down. --Or so, that’s how it usually went.
But he was sober and Nathan’s lips felt so good to kiss he wanted to cry. He was kissing him, running a hand through his curls (beautiful, he admitted to himself again), breathing in the smell of his sweat, wanting all of it so much that he could forget that he was in the process of allowing Nathan to ruin him-- and then Nate's hand slid up his thigh, cupped his bulge; a moan escaped from his throat into Julian’s mouth. Jules was sober and he couldn’t bear it anymore. He pushed himself away from Nate and tried to keep it cool. “I-- I just need something to loosen up a little.”, He murmured with a twitch of a smile. Nate allowed him to pull further away to search through his suitcase; watched in a slight daze, breathing hard, sucking the taste of Julian’s mouth off of his lips. Jules found what he was after-- a handful of vodka, rum, and tequila nips-- opened one up without looking at its contents, and downed it in a single pull. He flashed Nate a mischievous grin. “Want one?” Nate shrugged-- also not one to pass up free liquor. “Hell yeah, dude, toss one over.”
Jules had finished his second by the time Nate was through with his first. “This usually comes first, with me. And usually with classier choices than what I can ‘lift from a checkout aisle”, Jules admitted with a nervous laugh, “But I guess you’d know that.” Nate shrugged again. “Yeah, I know. I get it. But…” He paused. Unscrewed the cap of his second nip and drank half of it.
...But he wanted to really feel it all, for once. Jules always seemed to already be halfway to somewhere else already, and Nate wanted to keep something from him, have something of his. Just in case. He wanted to-- “…I wanna remember it, I guess. For some reason. This time.”, He muttered. Downed the rest. His head swam just enough for him to add, “...Don'tchoo wanna remember it sometimes?”
Yes. God yes. And no, absolutely not. Jules fumbled at the cap of his fourth nip. His hands were sweaty; he couldn’t get a grip. He wanted to drink until he drowned. He wanted his hand in Nathan’s hair again more than anything. He wanted to fucking die. He wanted to see what Nate looked like desperate and on the verge of cumming; he wanted to keep him right at that edge for as long as he could, he wanted to know how it felt, he wanted to hear Nathan beg for him, he wanted to see and feel his entire body, he wanted to die he wanted to fucking die he couldn’t take this he needed another drink just get this FUCKING bottlecap off I need a fucking drink--
Nate placed a hand carefully over Julian's. “Here. Gimme.” Jules’ grip loosened and Nate pulled the two of them close again, kissed him deep, and grabbed and tossed the plastic bottle over his shoulder. He let out a giggle as he heard it hit the wall with a sharp thud. Jules rolled his eyes with a heavy sigh. “God, Nathan, you truly never think, do you—” Nate licked his ear and nipped it with another laugh. “And you think too much.”, Nate said, “No matter how much drink you got in ya”.
Julian’s entire body was stiff as a board. There was still time. Things hadn’t gotten too deep yet. He could shove Nate away again. He could straighten out his clothes, bolt from Nate’s hotel room, find the nearest wine bar. He didn’t have to let Nate ruin him; he didn’t have to ruin Nate even if he was inviting him to. Everything could remain locked up behind drinks and long nights and excuses. They were just bored. They were just lonely. They were just drunk and a hand is a hand, you know how it is--
Nate lifted one of his arms up, sunk his other hand into Jules’s hair, and gently pushed his head towards his armpit. Jules couldn’t resist leaning forward and breathing in, against all judgement (the alcohol had taken some of that away already anyhow). It was an instant regret. Nathan smelled incredible. He always did after shows-- clean sweat and a more wonderfully dirty musk overpowering the remnants of cologne, a singe of cigarette smoke, the warmth of his skin mixing with the heaviness of the outside air. Jules hated it. He pressed his face fully under Nate’s arm, breathed in even deeper, moaned out a defeated “fuck” through grit teeth. He'd tipped past the point of no return and he knew it, but pleasure was quickly overtaking nerve and dread.
He wanted to remember.
He knew it when he ran his lips and tongue from Nate’s armpit to his bicep, bit it, lightly sunk his teeth into it. He knew it when they wrapped their arms around each other and tipped onto the bed (letting gravity take some of the blame for it all). He knew it when he felt their cocks throb against one another, when they threw each others’ clothes off, when he felt and kissed and licked every bit of his chest, when he sucked him; when Nate fingered him, opened him up-- almost surprisingly gentle, but then again, it made sense he’d be good with his hands--, when Jules carefully got on top of him, when he felt every inch of Nathan gradually fill him and felt those previously-gentle hands grip him with a reckless confidence (shifting to fit the task at hand)--
It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. He knew he’d probably regret it as soon as they were done. He knew he might even regret that he had the memory of it to begin with. At that moment, he didn’t care. Something in him knew he had to have it. He wanted to remember. He had to remember it: the instant charge of it, the full-body surge of feeling, the wanting that started in a place so deep in him it felt instinctual. He needed something. And if everything in his life was already in the process of being destroyed or otherwise destroying him, what was one more thing to add to the bonfire? At least it’d be a helluva pretty bonfire. If nothing else, Julian Rajani was always going to crash and burn with style. So, to hell with it all:
I want to remember.