## Preface

Temple() // Get You Safe
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/2034624.

Rating:
  Mature
Archive Warning:
  Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category:
  M/M
Fandom:
  Transistor (Video Game)
Relationship:
  Grant Kendrell/Royce Bracket
Characters:
  Grant Kendrell, Royce Bracket
Additional Tags:
  Backstory, drug mention
Language:
  English
Series:
  Part 2 of Become()
Stats:
  Published: 2014-07-28 Words: 2,529 Chapters: 1/1

# Temple() // Get You Safe

by _digital cairn (Schemilix)

Summary

> We all have our addictions, sweetnesses turned to hollowing-out - all rely on something or someone more than we aught.

Notes

> Thanks to uropygid for beta-ing!

See the end of the work for more notes

## Temple() // Get You Safe

Rarely, once in a now-distant past, they would let it rain. In those times the city glittered less, grieved far more, and in the shifting phalanx of numerous umbrellas there was a unity. It would rain after sad news, when the people who ruled the sky would wish it softly weeping.

One night there is a storm, some flicker of chance. Wind from an unseen sun catches at clothes and hair, lightning tears across a uniquely blackened sky. Inside, they warn, and Royce with his arms outstretched into it clambers out of the window, says his first and last prayer to an unseen god. It is solitude, this moment his alone, open as a wound to the vagaries of the sky -

And then a voice, the words unclear. Through the window Royce had climbed through, a second frame climbs through. Grant's long dark hair is plastered to the contours of his face. An image that Royce will recall far later, on dry nights, smoking.

“You'll hurt yourself, fool boy,” the administrator scolds, even as he lets go the guard rails to lower himself down beside Royce.

“Yes but it – is – my choice. Isn't it?”

Grant watches him, his black curls wet against his collar like kraken toes. Soaked through, he shifts his weight to make space for Grant. As the pair of them move their hands meet, and Royce does not draw away – does not even flinch as though he might. With dull surprise Royce looks at that, as if unsure of his own body's reaction.

“Perhaps this means that we're – friends. Of a sort,” he says, to the offending limbs. Grant takes his hand away to fold them both against his chest.

“Friends,” he concurs, distractedly. Royce rests his head on his hands like a child, blinking through the drops of rain on his eyelashes. For a long time neither speaks, resting as they are with their feet above oblivion, and a great darkness high above.

At last, Grant sighs, loudly over the wind. “Royce. I'm tired of games. Be with me.”

“I am – with you. Where else could I be?”

“No, I – with me.”

Royce's eyes widen for a moment, before turns away from Grant to watch the gulls over the foaming sea. “...where else could I be?”

He pauses a moment and says, tentatively,

“I'm... yours, then.”

“Don't say that. You're solely your own.”

They explore together – the places of the city unique to one another, and so the lie of the other's skin. Carefully, so gingerly-like Grant draws the reclusive young engineer into places where he might watch the nightlife, sample if only distantly the lives of Cloudbank's people. In return Royce finds byways, parks, hidden underbellies of bridges for him.

Fairview's forests are desolate, at the right time, that uneasy twilight-calm of solitude. Grant keeps his hands at his sides warily while Royce walks on ahead, blithe.

Goldwalk is bright with faces, filled with things – all manner of things – that draw the eye, distract the ear, pull on the nose with scents. At first Royce wanders with undisguised interest, but Grant soon catches him straying to corners, behind things, and takes him away by the hand.

“You make me realise how very different we are,” Grant says, fondly. Royce toys with his hands, marvelling at the way his fingers entwine with Grant's as if he'd never seen a human hand before.

“Isn't that why we – we meet people, you know, to share? Why share what we already have?” he replies distractedly, and folds both his palms over Grant's. He blinks with surprise when Grant lifts his hand to kiss the backs of his knuckles.

“You're right, of course,” he says.

Royce's bones are bird-fragile, written as stark as words under his skin. Spending time with him that so few others have been allowed to, Grant understands why; so rarely does he see him eat, subsisting almost entirely on sugary coffee that his body metabolises into pure, unrestrained mental energy.

So he coaxes him, not by taking him to where the people impressing upon him flay his nerves, but by sliding quietly into the seat next to him and pressing food into his hands. The way Royce eats is quick, distracted almost, as though only grudgingly acquiescing to his body's need for food – but ravenous, also, unable to contain the need.

A rainy night, fresh-cool like cleansing. Grant watches him often – the way he walks on his toes when his feet are bare, his hesitation at touching anything, engaging with anything in this world. And yet there are moments, all-or-nothing it seems, where in days of sleeplessness he imbibes entire districts worth of experience, responds to pain and pleasure both with the same unfiltered curiosity.

One such night, he must have been awake and burning-high for days. It could be some internal furnace, or maybe only chemical - drunkenly spinning, half dancing with his arms wide as if to embrace the concept of the world. Grant intercepts him mid-twirl, standing firm so their chests press together from the momentum. One hand he places on the back of Royce's heated neck to pull him closer, the other he leaves near the engineer's hip, without yet touching. Grant kisses him, carefully but earnestly – resting his hand now, only resting so that Royce might duck away.

Royce raises his hands with a twitching uncertainty, stiff from alarm. When Grant fails to bite him, he eases, going so far as to tip his head tentatively aside.

It is all Grant can do to say, “Can I?” with his free hand tense, not touching, until Royce understands and, meeting his eyes just long enough to convey sincerity, mutters a 'yes'. He breathes out through his nose sharply at the feeling of a calloused hand under his shirt. Unfamiliar – and – his hands are still erring in the air, so he tangles them in Grant's grey-black hair for lack of a better option.

Grant's thumb lingers over the curve of a rib for a moment, before he takes Royce's wrist and leads him to sit on the couch. With his fingers splayed he pushes Royce's chest – sit – no – further – until Royce is on his back and looking up at Grant, blinking curiously. His fingers pluck uncertainly at the fabric of the cushion when Grant kneels by him.

“Stop me if I -” Grant mumbles, but falls silent when Royce puts a hand over his mouth momentarily and shakes his head. So overwhelmed – does Grant think that he is hurting? The thought drops out of Royce's head like a little stone when Grant slides his shirt up – he arches to let him, until he feels the chill air across his overheating chest and moves a hand to keep the fabric rucked up against his collarbones. He watches Grant kiss the curve of his navel with his thumb between his teeth, lets his eyes drift close and his head fall back. Quietly, he finds himself humming.

“You screamed so loudly I thought my mothers might have heard you and tutted...” Grant mutters as he touches the scratch-marks on his back with a hiss of discomfort. Royce runs his lip over the red-marks with a careful curiosity, tracing with his fingers the lines of muscles and ribs. Grant can feel the softness and the stinging ripple down his back like charges, and with an odd feeling of prurience closes his eyes.

By day Royce is content to lay his long body out alongside Grant's, a book or a pen in hand, and match their breathing. But at night he is isolate, cocooned, and brings his body up around himself in the confines of sleep defensively, folded up like a leaf. Grant watches the rise and fall of his chest, the breathing so often too uneven for true rest, and does not touch him.

Sometimes, on nights where the dryness crackles or there is a burning in him, Royce will shift his weight backwards, to press the blades of his shoulders against Grant's chest, and there think, but not sleep.

First it was some casual yearning, curiosity and interference like white noise on the looking at him – now, it is a signal, a lighthouse that points him to the teeth of the cliff. Like all lighthouses, it is wise to flee, not to follow, but still he finds himself on the young man's doorstep, wrapped up in the cage of his arms, so willingly dashed on those rocks.

He crashes into him splintering – teeth on neck, kisses his fingertips, knuckles tangled in windswept black hair. The taste of whiskey and smoke in his mouth, his chapped lips. Then he finds the puncture marks, red against the medicine-pale of Royce's inner elbow.

“Royce –“ he starts to say, but the engineer only pulls his hand back sharply to fold his hand over the wounds. “Royce. Those are - “

“Yes, yes, I know – go on – speak as if your words, your judgements will help this,” Royce cuts him off, acidly. But Grant only shakes his head.

“It's not safe. That's all I care about. You don't have to tell me why just... what. So I can help.”
The surprise in Royce's eyes is as difficult for Grant to look as the vulnerability; usually his eyes are stone-chips, flat and unreachable.

“Help?”

“Yes. Fix what – makes you need to do this maybe. Help you find something more constructive -”

“No.” Royce's voice flattens out to a thin line.

Grant's eyes slide closed with frustration, but his voice is free of it when he says, “At least I can find you safe equipment. Disinfectant, sterile needles.”

“You'd – you'd do that?”

“If you – no, no conditions just. Be safe. God, Royce, just be safe for once, will you?”

Behind the door of a nurturing instinct lies a little monster, whose name is jealousy. Royce might leave it, this slumbering thing, so quiet and unassuming it is – but that is not his way. So, he knocks, and failing that, darts into the confines of its lair and pulls on its long and spiny tail.

Games after all, aren't they? Royce needn't say much, do much – the odd comment, so carefully placed, the suggestions thrown in like bones.

“I don't like it,” Grant says, tired at last of noticing Royce's pawing with only the faintest frown. Royce, chewing on a cigarette, smiles brightly.

Playing with fire, but only playing. After all, would Grant hurt him? Never once has Royce seen that sharp tongue, let alone those muscles put to use for anything short of righteous. Some stirring part of thing thinks – could I make him? Grant's sidelong look suggests probabilities, but then mathematically speaking, is anything truly impossible?

But the flare of ill humour passes and Royce says,

“You've no need for concern. You're the closest thing I have to... Hm.” He looks down and away at that, not finishing. He hears the catch in Grant's sigh from across the room.

“I'm yours. Do you not remember – that I'm yours? That I... belong,” Royce mumbles against his neck. Grant tightens his grasp of Royce's curls slightly, enough to keep him just where he is.

“Here. Filters, alcohol – that sort of thing.”

Grant hands over the wrapped package, which Royce takes awkwardly with one hand; the other holds the top of a whiskey glass. He looks between it and Grant with a questioning look.

“It's portioned out. For god's sake don't do something stupid like doubling it, will you?”

Royce only grunts dismissively, then says, “Don't they wonder who – this – might be for? For you?”

“They're not suspecting me personally but – that is a risk,” admits Grant.

“Pull some strings for me, maybe? Isn't that what – it is what men fuck boys like me for?”

“You're not a boy. You're a grown man,” Grant says, with a deepening frown.

“Ah, go on. Don't pretend like you're not trying to, trying to fix me. That you're trying to fix me, that you want that.”

Grant wants to deny it. For a politician, however, he was ever a poor liar. “If you know so much about me, what do you want?”

“I'm confused. You're – just – taking advantage, aren't you? Poor-young-Royce...” he trails off, lifting the glass as if he might drain it – but Grant's hand is over it, and his black eyes are on his with sudden clarity.

Firmly he says, “Stop it. If you think that, leave.”

Royce's response is an odd and extended hum, lowering in note to near a rumble in his chest. Given that he is not leaving, Grant can only ask,

“What is it you want, then?”

“To – belong. I think. Doesn't everyone?”

Grant can only sigh deeply. “Try to get yourself off it.”

Sunny afternoon, warmth on the window. Royce is sleeping, curled around his stomach with his arms folded tight, like he may break cleanly apart.

The cramps – like his thigh muscles wish to break his bones in half. Grant has never seen Royce cry before, not once, even in moments where he folds into himself and will not speak for hours, he does not cry. Royce tells him not to let go even as he scratches the back of Grant's neck half to bleeding.

“You're not meant to quit all at once,” Grant mutters, stroking Royce's hair regardless of how sweat-slick it is.

“No I'm not – I'm not weak I can – do anything –”

“Weak,” Royce hisses, and drops the tourniquet on the seat by Grant without looking at him.

A yielding body – so blessedly, irresistibly yielding below him – and such a barbed and unwelcoming mind. Grant holds Royce's narrow frame tightly in his arms, but his eyes – they always look away, somewhere distant or inside. Perhaps Grant is dreaming of a man with his back turned, the way he turns his head to show eyes like cold and clear-cut glass. But this man who watches the rain with sleepless fervour, he is too far away.

Break and crash like waves... Curling white fingers always reaching, but can only wear the sand away.

For so long he aches, reluctant even to fill that ashen space in his bed with another, not to draw them into the same dream-weaver-trap. What fool was Grant to hit the ground so hard, for what now seems like so little? And yet he has trouble finding his feet. As he stands, he slips. So it goes until the ice thaws, but it takes long – so long – to purge his ribcage of ghosts.

Retrospectively, it seems so obvious. The distance here is safe and not chafing. Leaning over the railing the balcony in Grant's apartment with their elbows far apart, smiling easily. Discussing thoughts and not motives, plans and not gains. How much older Royce seems now, with his scars healed, a haircut, his posture changed to stand tall.

“A 'Transistor'? Mundane, isn't it?”

“No – the – not a, the. Singular. Just one Transistor and... far from mundane. Let me show you, old friend, show you my magnum opus.”

Royce looks out over the Processed districts across the water, where rainclouds grow. The first time in over a decade – he feels younger to look at it, somehow. Time to go home.

## Afterword

End Notes

> Acearo Royce is my headcanon, but who understands themselves right from the offset?

> I was listening to 'Hurt Me Now' by Austra more than makes sense while working on this.

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