closed to gabe fletcher (tw: drugs)

[dormousesaid]

The bar isn't overly crowded -- it's not that kind of bar, it seems. Not like the ones Ignacio usually spent time in, even a year ago. But it's not empty, either, which means that people have less of a chance of remembering him later. Which is, strangely, his M.O. tonight.

It isn't usually, but Ignacio is pretty new to town, and there are things he needs to do. Things like set up regular, dependable business hours. Where 'business' reads 'people willing to buy Ignacio's product, which is crazy magical drugs.' He rarely feels bad about it. He offers a clean, superior product that gives people what they want, in a way that's usually harmless -- if they attend to their personal responsibilities as he does his own.

He looks up when someone comes toward the table he's sitting at, peering over the edge of his menu.

"Mussels?" he asks. A bar is pretty shit if it doesn't offer mussels. They're good with wine, which is the only thing he drinks, and even then, only a glass or two at most. Ignacio isn't a drinker. His father was a drinker, and that's every reason he needs to avoid it.

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[overdrawing]

"Ask the guy behind the bar," Gabe says, wiping down the counter next to him. He keeps his eyes carefully averted, afraid to stare or be caught staring. There are days like this, when handsomer men come in, that that becomes more of a trial. Just bus the tables and wash the dishes, he tells himself.

"But it's mostly what he calls pub grub."

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio is, truth be told, not always the very best at detecting why he's he's being stared at and, conversely, why someone might be avoiding eye contact with him. Mostly because he always assumes it has to do with flirting, but he also knows it's usually not. It's usually the tattoos, or his rather enthusiastic upper lip accoutrement. So he knows he's practically being avoided, almost even brushed off, but he's not sure why.

Bringing attention to himself is sort of counter to his purpose in being there that night, but also, there's something about the shyly averted eyes that bothers him enough that he's determined to insinuate himself into the guy's night.

"How long have you worked here? What do you suggest?"

Ignacio sets the menu down and leans his head to the side, trying to search out the avoiding pair of eyes.

[overdrawing]

"I'm not really the one to ask," Gabe says. He collects some stray glasses and forks into his tub and sets it back on the counter that he can slide to the sink. Staring at the counter, at his hands and their ragged, bitten nails, he keeps doing his job. "I've only been here for a month."

Uncomfortable, shoulders hiked up close, Gabe determinedly wipes the same spot over and over. He doesn't really ask for a lot of food off the menu, even though he could. Mostly, Gabe takes the staff meal that everyone gets and doesn't dare complain. Finn would give him more, if only he asked, but Gabe doesn't ask.

"The fish is local though. Fresh."

[dormousesaid]

"Here at the bar?" Ignacio asks, angular brows lifting up a dark, lined forehead. "Or here in town?"

Ignacio studies him for a moment more before offering an explanation for his curiosity, though the explanation isn't a full one. There are a lot of things about him that make Ignacio curious, especially the body language. There's a familiarity in the tenseness of his shoulders.

"I just got in town a week ago. Needed a change of scenery. I thought it was supposed to be colder in Maine."

[overdrawing]

"At the bar. And a month and a half in town, I guess." He shrugs, still tight and contained before he has to step away and clean off another section. People chat with him all the time, though Gabe can't imagine why, but he's here to earn his pay first and foremost.

He won't be a burden. Not to anyone.

"I don't think even Maine has winter in July," Gabe says, returning back to the customer. In an attempt at being useful, he hands over a menu.

[dormousesaid]

"That's true enough," Ignacio says. He makes a show of opening the menu, glancing over it, and handing it back. He gives it a little waggle, intent on having it picked up when his order is taken. It seems pretty obvious th other guy doesn't want to chat much, and is doing it purely to be polite.

But he hasn't brushed Ignacio off directly yet, and that makes Ignacio want to try to get beneath that cool politeness, and the tension in his shoulders.

"Loaded french fries?" he asks, and adds, "And maybe your name?"

[overdrawing]

"I'm not–Okay, I'll go put it in," Gabe says, a little distressed because he's not a waiter. He's a bus boy, just the bus boy. If he has his way, he attracts as little attention as possible, especially from handsome men.

"Gabriel," he adds, before slipping off to ask someone to put it into the POS system.

[dormousesaid]

"Gabriel is a good name," Ignacio calls after him when he turns to leave. "I got at least two cousins named Gabriel. Thanks for the help."

Ignacio can wait patiently for his food to show up. He's not seeing any opportunity for business here, but if Ignacio has it right, Gabriel should be getting off his shift soon. And he can eat his meal and catch him on the way out.

Not in a creepy way, though. Gabriel might be new, but with a face and a demeanor like his, Ignacio is almost sure every mama bear or papa bear on staff is going to have eyes out for any creepers trying to fuck with the kid. Ignacio likes to think he doesn't give off a creeper vibe.

He also knows that some people don't like tattoos or Floridians.

[overdrawing]

And he has four brothers named Michael, Raphael, Uriel, and Ezekiel. There's not much to being an archangel in a family full of angels and virtues. These days, he doesn't even think he deserves the name; he's not living up to it.

The staff is indeed protective of him though it has far less to do with his romantic prospects and more to do with how they see Gabe as fragile, standing on the edge of being something completely broken. A waitress used to flirt with him until others stepped in. Gabe had been both humiliated and grateful.

"I'm not a waiter, by the way," he says. Gabe's whisked off to another corner of the bar, collecting plates and glasses, stacking them neatly into bins for him to go back and wash. He needs to do that, before they stack up, but now he's been roped into serving.

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio knows, of course, that Gabriel isn't a waiter. That didn't, wouldn't, stop him from inserting himself into a conversation to get what he wants. But he has it now; a name.

Ignacio finishes his meal when it comes, lingers for a little while longer, and then escapes, when the timing is right, to the side of the building. Ostensibly, to smoke a heavily vanilla-scented cigarillo. He waits for Gabriel to leave.

When he catches him, he lifts his voice again.

"Sorry if I wasted your time earlier in there," he says, apologizing earnestly as the blue smoke drifts thinly out of one side of his prominent nose. Frequently, Ignacio thinks, it is much easier to beg forgiveness after the fact.

"You probably don't get payed enough to deal with my bullcrap, yeah?"

[overdrawing]

"I'm paid to collect dishes and wash dishes. And if someone asks for food, I bring them food." Gabe shrugs. He still feels as though he doesn't deserve to enjoy any kind of freedom, especially in this place. Every day, he knows he should be calling home and repenting to his parents, confessing the mistake he made and begging them for their forgiveness.

Every day, he knows with growing certainty that if they know, then there will be one less Fletcher child.

It doesn't matter if he turns on his phone to call them. He can't go back. Can't go home.

The melancholy is hard to keep out of his expression.

"I hope you liked your fries."

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio stubs the cigarillo out and slides it back behind one ear. He presses himself off the wall and holds out a hand to Gabriel.

"Eh, they were pub grub, but everything's better with sour cream, diced tomatoes and bacon. I never gave you my name. Ignacio."

And Gabe sounds positively deflated, and Ignacio wonders why. More than he's wondered about anything in a long time. He's not sure what makes him care so much, except that he thinks he's heard that tone of voice before. In a different accent.

[overdrawing]

"Everyone says Finn makes them special," Gabe says, unable to help a little defense of his place of work. Because it's polite, he shakes Ignacio's hand, the grip brief as if his touch might give something away.

Shrugging, he looks down at his shoes and scuffs his toes into the pavement. He needs a new pair soon. These are the only ones he'd had when he came to town and constant use is wearing them down.

"Those are bad for you, you know. Smoking."

[dormousesaid]

He's defending his boss, and Ignacio laughs. It's not a mean-spirited laugh. He gets the sentiment, or maybe the instinct, completely. Of course Gabe's gonna defend the guy who's giving him work. But Ignacio also isn't the sort of person to go back and apologize or censor his opinion about the food. Not, at least, when he hasn't said anything outright uncalled for or offensive. Opinions, of course, are like assholes. Everyone's got one, and they usually shouldn't shove them in other people's faces too often in public.

"Yeah, I know. Passive suicide and all that caca."

He looks down at Gabe's shoes too. What's left of them, anyway. "You leave home in a hurry?" he hazards. He knows the type. Gabe is too young for the situation to be almost anything else, in Ignacio's (admittedly particular) experience.

[overdrawing]

Gabe still turns pink when Ignacio laughs, looking away. It's not directed at him and yet Gabe feels as though he's said something terribly personal that makes him nervous.

"Self-murder," he says. His mother called it that once.

At this point, there's not much reason to lie and Gabe nods. "I bought a bus ticket and rode it until the end of the line," he says. "And here I am." End of story.

[dormousesaid]

"Yeah, but that makes it sound too much like a crime of passion. Or like I hate myself." And neither, really, are true. Ignacio isn't really passionate. He is not reserved, either, but there is still a sense that he carries about himself that what's really good in life, what's really exciting, comes from outside. And as far as self-esteem went, Innacio's is, compared to most of fucking America, pretty healthy.

"Sounds familiar," Ignacio says. He already misses the cigarillo, but suddenly lighting up again seems morbid. "Got a job early as I could. Saved up cash until I had enough to pay off a shitty used car. Then I was out of there." There's no 'end of story.' Leaving Miami is far from the end of Ignacio's story. But it's not all relevant.

[overdrawing]

"That does sound more romantic than it really is." It's a sin and it's selfish, he'd been taught. It runs away from problems rather than coping with them. Just the way Gabe runs from his problems but on a physical, living plane.

He doesn't have a story. There's no arc or ending. He's just a kid who got on a bus and ran away, who probably has no one waiting for him.

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio thinks that he's allowed a little running from his problems. He doesn't do much of it, preferring to confront his problems even when he probably ought to not. That he moved from city to city was less an avoidance of problems and more an escape of any before they might actually come up. Sometimes running is wisdom.

It's almost certain that smoking isn't wisdom; that's a habit, and Ignacio's not yet had the patience to break it. Intelligence and retrospect make him regret that he'd ever started.

He coughs into his fist and shrugs.

"Not the most romantic thing I've ever said. You should hear me talk about my grandma's buñuelos."

[overdrawing]

Gabe has always been, as his parents said, blessed with thoughtfulness and obedience. For the better part of nineteen years, they had served to provide him with a calm upbringing up until everything he'd been raised to believe had crashed into his own actions.

So he'd run. This guy doesn't look like the kind of person who fears confrontation, especially when sodomy is concerned.

"I don't know what those are," he says instead, head hanging.

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio is blessed with neither thoughtfulness or obedience. The opposite virtues, if one could call them virtues, belong to him; too much shrewdness and a certain propensity toward rebellion. Nothing has ever been calm for him.

But that suits Ignacio.

"Deep fried dough balls covered in sugar syrup," he says, brutally honest, and clearly finding his description incredibly pleasing. He wouldn't say no to some right now. "She made them every Christmas. The syrup was anise-caramel, that's how they made them where she grew up. Then you make 'em even worse with some powdered sugar. Can't go wrong. They are the shit."

[overdrawing]

"Like donuts?" he supposes. Gabe tries to isolate the flavor of anise in his memory, but mostly the thought summons up the taste of gingerbread cookies. It's nothing like the exotic-sounding flavors that Ignacio describes.

They sound wonderful.

"We have gingerbread at Christmas. And lots and lots of prayers." He knows now that that isn't anyone's idea of normal except his. "I guess that makes us weird."

[dormousesaid]

"Like donuts, yeah. Or like, donut holes? Right? Something like that."

He laughs. It's a weirdly innocent thing for the guy to say. Maybe, if he were less standoffish, and Ignacio were less painfully aware of other people's boundaries, it'd deserve a hair fluff. He doesn't fluff Gabe's hair. He just imagines himself doing it.

"That ain't weird. Believe me, there are things that make people weird. Praying on Christmas isn't one of them. Now, if you were to tell me your family stripes naked and prays in the snow on Christmas, that'd be weird. Mostly because snow is some bullshit."

He turns black eyes on Gabe, humor a wet flash in the corners on the dark sidewalk.

[overdrawing]

They're the kind of eyes that invite people to drown, he thinks. They're slick and black, like a seal he saw at the zoo once. Inscrutable and innocent and neither. He forces himself to look away.

He doesn't say what his family does on Christmas or how many of them there are, because Ignacio will probably thin he's the weird one. Gabe isn't accustomed to being ashamed of his family, but mostly he thinks he's just ashamed of himself. "Do you believe in God?" he asks instead.

[dormousesaid]

"Woah, that's a loaded question," Ignacio says, and gives the kind of laugh that suggests that it's not his first time answering, either, and even that he doesn't mind loaded questions. You grow up bisexual, you grow up like Ignacio, you get used to people asking loaded questions, some of them the kind with no right answer at all.

"I'm Catholic, if that's what you're really asking. Obvious, right? Or if what you're really asking is past that, then the answer's yes. I don't go to church anymore, because I don't believe in church anymore. I believe in Jesus, too, but I also think my conversation with him is between me and him. I don't need to play telephone in a confessional."

[overdrawing]

"Having a religion and being a believer aren't the same thing," Gabe says. He's thinking of the hypocrites he'd known at church, kids his age who were just following along but would proudly swear they were atheists when they thought they were in like company. Gabe had simply said nothing and turned away.

"I don't think God wants anything to do with me anymore."

[dormousesaid]

Ignacio knows that well. The same folks he saw in Church the night before were the ones he'd see in the grocery store, slapping their kids across the face and cursing them out in public. Then it'd be back to church again later that week, pretending to be different people entirely, pretending to be Church-going people with their Church-faces on.

"I think that's some bullshit," he says, wishing he hadn't stubbed out his smoke now. "Maybe God's just taking a step back to let you figure things out on your own for a while? That's part of being a good parent, too."

[overdrawing]

When Ignacio says it like that, God sounds loving and parental, more forgiving than even his own parents. It's hard to let himself believe in that kind of God. The God he knew in the Bible had been angry and jealous, swift to mete out vengeance to his weaker devotees.

The God Ignacio describes sounds almost friendly. Kind.

"Is that why my parents aren't looking for me?"