Song Short: As It Was

this new series, Song Short, will be updated on the third Friday of each month! each short (~1.5-2k) is a queer snippet based around some of my favorite songs. these are written in a one hour sprint and never really edited, so please consider forgiving typos. join my patreon to suggest songs and let me know what you think of these shorts!

today’s short is based on Hozier’s “As It Was” from his album Wasteland, Baby! Listen here: YouTube Link and read below. cw for: alcohol, mentions of drugs, death, suicide, and zombies.

With very little exception, kissing John Anderson was the first thought Harrison had when he woke up, and the last thought he had before he went to sleep.

There were the occasional nights when the cold was too biting to allow for thought, the mornings when waking up was a scream from across the camp — those days, Harrison didn’t think of Anders’s kiss first. He thought of him, alone, dead, or dying. He thought of losing him.

With very little exception, Harrison was in love with Anders. It was potent. Dizzying, like alcohol, but with a sharp bitter aftertaste like poison. Harrison had often likened it to the woozy feeling after too many pills, where gravity shook and bodies melted. Anders had only hummed out a bored, non-committal sound at the comparison, neither agreement nor rebuttal.

Tonight, with Anders a drink too drunk, sitting across the blazing bonfire from him, he looked like part of the flame. His eyes were as bright as the glowing white moon, and his grin was even wider than the sky itself — he looked like part of nature. Part of the universe, like starlight and fire had crafted him just so that he could sit here, now, laughing, and so that Harrison would ache.

He took another long, burning swig of liquor. It didn’t matter which kind; a long time ago, before things changed, he might have cared. Now, Harrison didn’t drink for the taste, or the buzz, or to forget. He drank because without it, he was an exposed nerve, rubbed raw.

Harrison had loved Anders for all his life.

For part of it, Anders had loved him, too.

“There’s a roadway,” Anders said, eyes sharpening. He sat straight, back ramrod and shoulders pulled back, ever the fearless leader they’d been following for years. His eyes were glassy from the drink, cheeks rosy even only lit by flames and stars, but no one else noticed. Only Harrison knew Anders ticks well enough to see that he was far too drunk to be strategizing.

“Muddy. And full of foxglove.” Harrison interjected.

“It’s the quickest route,” Anders said almost as quickly. His glare was nothing more than a raised eyebrow, a displeased twist of his lips, but Harrison felt it like a blow.

“We’d never make it,” Harrison said anyway. Though it felt like standing in a windstorm, he knew no one else in the camp would say it. Would know to say it. The others were watching them warily. Harrison drank again to give reason to the sudden reddening of his cheeks.

“That’s your problem, Harrison,” Anders’s voice was low and cool. No one else would hear the teethed bite to it. “You have no faith.”

Harrison’s lungs sank. He felt them touch to the ground and slowly, inhale by inhale, they came up bit by bit. No one else spoke — the sound of shuffling boots against the ground, the crackle of the fire, the uncomfortable breathing of too many people watching too intimate a fight, filled the expansive campground. Harrison stood up on shaking legs and forced himself to step away.

“Excuse me,” he said, already half-way gone.

He heard the voices pick up almost immediately. It wasn’t quite shame that filled him, but by the time he darted behind the sleeping cabin to lean against the cold wood, he was up to the brim with something thick and dragging.

Harrison scrubbed his hands down his face. Jesus, he thought. Jesus, what am I doing? What are we doing here?

He’d asked himself the same thing every day since they first came to this camp; since he and Anders and the few others from the start had built the cabins and armed the fences and set up sentries, since the beginning of the end of the world.

He asked himself that since the first time that he and Anders had kissed, all sharp edges and gnashing teeth, drunk or high or desperate or both. He’d asked himself that since the first time Anders told him he loved him, and Harrison had been too goddamn cowardly to say anything back.

He’d never found an answer.

Harrison shouldn’t have been surprised Anders found him. Despite everything, they’d never been good at leaving each other all alone.

Anders leaned against the cabin wall beside him. He hadn’t realized he was cold until he felt the heat radiating off Anders. The air felt colder, when Anders body was there to feel warm.

“It’s a suicide mission,” Harrison’s voice was close to a plea. He knew he must have looked something awful, all wet eyes and parted lips, looking at the man who had broken him again and again in a million different ways. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, anyway.

Anders seemed just as reluctant to move his gaze, though there was nothing weak or soft to it. He looked every bit the righteous warrior that he’d always tried to be. Harrison wondered if he was looking at redemption or retribution. He felt something almost like sorrow in his throat and forced his gaze away.

Anders's voice was softer when he spoke again. “Are you saying you won’t come?”

“Whatever here’s that’s left of me is yours,” Harrison said, eyes screwing up. He swallowed hard, the heady vow between them as pointed as any weapon. “Just as it was.”

When he opened his eyes again, Anders stared through him. He felt like a ghost — barely there, barely alive, barely real. There was something like sorrow on his face, and Harrison was still in his own shawl of mourning.

When their lips met, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Despite everything, this had always been the closest they felt to being real.

And, like every time, no matter what else was going on, no matter how badly they were bleeding from each others’ words, it was just as it was.

The drug, the dark, the light, the shame — kissing Anders was some of it and all of it and none of it. Kissing Anders was the only time Harrison truly felt his pulse. 

Anders’s hands were tight in his hair, one leg roughly slotting between Harrison’s, body pressed tight together. He could feel his chest rise and fall with each breath; he could feel the muscles and ribs beneath their shirts press into his own.

Harrison had one arm winded around his waist, holding him flush against himself, and the other hand curled into his arm, fingernails biting into the skin there. He smelled like smoke and sweat, a familiar, heady scent that Harrison had grown to think of as home as quickly as he had to misery. He ached so deeply from the smell of it that he felt it in his bones.

Anders tasted like whiskey. Harrison knew he did, too. He also knew neither of them cared.

They kissed until their lungs burned, until staying together was as physically painful as possible. Even when they did manage to wretch away, Anders’s hands just fell to his face, cupping him gently, and Harrison pressed his thumbs into the small of his back, fingers wrapping around his ever-thinning waist. 

“Tell me,” Anders said in the shape of a gasp, forehead bruisingly pressed into Harrison’s. “If somehow, some of it remains…”

He trailed off.

Harrison sucked in an exhale so sharp, he felt it like winter-ice in his lungs. “How long would I wait?”

Anders nodded, miserably. His eyes were closed. The camp’s faithful warrior had faded; here, he was just John. Here, he was Harrison’s.

But Harrison could no more take what was being offered than Anders could stand to give it come morning light. The hard way, they learned that this was a love shaped like a doorway, and the shape that they were now didn’t fit.

The end of the world had taken it all from them. All but this — painful, desperate kisses stolen beneath the scornful light of the moon, and a hope that when they went, it was together.

“It’s…” Harrison didn’t know what to say. Anders didn’t want to hear him promise things they knew weren’t theirs to offer. He knew that what he wanted wasn’t any more phrasable than what he himself wanted.

“Just as it was?” Anders asked. 

He swallowed hard, and they moved away from each other. Harrison’s hands fell; Anders stepped back; Harrison shifted to the left, chin nudging Anders’s hands away. Step by step, they unwound, and Harrison’s heart slowed in his chest, beat by beat by beat, until it was still. It would remain that way, barely pulsing, until the next time they spilled over.

Across the camp, the fire roared, and the last few survivors planned their route across the roadway that would lead to, for some of them, certain death.

Harrison stole one last look at Anders; his expression hardened, bit by bit, until he was the terrible, bleeding version of himself that he had to be again. The night sky billowed around him, only half as dark as his expression, and only half as beautiful, too.

Quietly, he agreed. “As it was.”