[white rabbit hurries madly down the hole]

Well, this is the last bit, and I'd hoped to wind up with more of a bang, but my inspiration has run dry. This is for J. Bast, who I hope won't mind my tweaky public tribute to a particular story of his. J, you've posted on the matter, and expressed a sense that people might not want to read your work because of its subject matter--man/boy sex, in short. However, it's a beautiful piece. This tiny blurt of mine may not be enough to pave the way for your posting, though I live in hope. And it's small potatoes indeed compared to yours--runty tubers, in fact--so I certainly don't worry about stealing any thunder. 

*

Guys and Dons [eye roll]

*

Mulder had gone down to the backs to study, slinking around buildings and sloping, head ducked, across quads streaming with other students, who were laughing, chatting, and hurrying to class, or stealing time in small sociable clumps to kick hackysacks madly amongst themselves. He didn't want to see anyone, didn't want to be hailed or assailed, and by the time he reached the banks of the river Cam he had been nearly shaking with relief.

On good-weather days, the river was always edged with people, engaged in everything from solitary studying to group snoozing to games of chess. But it had been quiet that day, and Mulder nested against a tree and declined Latin verbs until calm enveloped him. Eventually he'd looked up from his book, gazing out across the river, where a few punts were sliding--almost drifting--by. Willow trees hissed as a light breeze sprang up, thin flat clouds scudded across the sky, and down the bank a group of girls shrieked with laughter.

Mulder, fifteen years old and out of his element, was miserable. Why hadn't he botched the tests? He thought of that only now, too late. Scores assessed, strings pulled, connections taken up, and presto here he was, shipped off to a safe distance where he wouldn't be a pox on both their houses. His dad's doing, mostly, abetted by his mother's indifference. His latest psychiatrist, Dr Brucker, had been vocally and vehemently displeased, but given a choice between Brucker and Oxford, Mulder had given in to his father's pressure with an ambivalence heavily braided with relief.

But here, now, he was in something closely approximating hell. There was one redeeming, saving grace to this misery. One only, but it was a merciful one, so sweetly uplifting that sometimes now Mulder almost felt hopeful about what the dreary future might bring.

***

He knocked on the door, entered shyly at his tutor's muffled invitation, poking his head in hesitantly, then slipping his body around the ancient oak and shutting it behind him. Relief. Safe port in an unending storm. Fire in the fireplace though it was well over sixty degrees outside, books stacked to the ceilings in all the three rooms, and everywhere a sprawling mess of tomes, manuscripts, mysterious packing crates, small, intricately beautiful mechanical devices with no obvious utility, couches draped with sweaters and footed by heaps of shoes, umbrellas leaning here, walking sticks leaning there, skull on the mantel, marble busts gathering dust, a Constable here, a Grimshaw there, a Hockney, a de Kooning, a Frankenthaler--all mixed with haphazard aesthetic madness and half-obscured by obscene and virile African carvings, all of this a catalogue of unknown quantities to Mulder until Nicholas, with delighted readiness, had given him the guided tour. Victrola. Scrimshaw elephant's tusk. A quite ancient-looking Greek urn scandalously filled with aggies, wearing an incomprehensible neck-sign: "Elgin's marbles--dun't tuch, ye fewl!" Stuffed parrot, horror, in an ornate, free-standing bird cage. Many plants tenaciously clinging to life amidst the clutter and the draped dim.

He loved it. He dumped his books, undid a shirt button, and then another, and went to the fire to greet Macho, the inexplicably named Pomeranian. Macho, curled in his nap-box, tongued him, eyed him with depthless jet beads, then ignored him contentedly.

Mulder, after cocking an ear to the inner chamber--Chopin--made tea and curled up on a couch. Tutorial was perhaps not the right word for this sort of aimless interlude, but Nicholas did have more disciplined days, when they actually sat down at the scarred table under the window and read together. He was ostensibly teaching Mulder modern English literature, but he was given to passionate tangents and they rarely got through three lines of Pound before some ancient Greek philosopher or Japanese poet was exhumed from a shelf and tossed into the dusty sunlight.

A door banged open. Nicholas was on his cellular, gesticulating wildly as if his correspondent could hear him. "Elvis fulfilled the terms of the contract. Excess, deterioration, self-destructiveness, grotesque behavior, a physical bloating and a series of insults to the brain, self-delivered. His place in legend is secure. He bought off the skeptics by dying early, horribly, unnecessarily. No one could deny him now. His mother probably saw it all, as on a nineteen-inch screen, years before her own death--look, really must go--drinks at the Bar, later? Right." He snapped off the phone, tossed it in the direction of a chair and knocked a small porcelain bowl skittering across a table. It slid and turned like a skater on thin ice, whirled on its base, teetered on the edge, then fell with a thump to the carpeted floor. Nicholas, catching Mulder's alarmed gaze, tossed a brow-raised glance that way. "Don't worry, love," he said with amiable nonchalance, "it's two bloody thousand years old, if it's survived this long I'm not likely to kill it now." Mulder nodded, blinking. Before he could blink again, Nicholas was on his knees in front of him, cupping his face, thumbs roving wildly across the points of his cheekbones and then his lips. Mulder caught a breath.

"You're so fucking gorgeous. I must be mad." His blue eyes twinkled, pulling into thin, kind fans of flesh at the corners, and his thick gold curls haloed his face in disarray. He swooped in, demanded a kiss that left Mulder breathless and then withdrew, licking himself thoughtfully. "Ah, marmalade. Don't know how you eat that stuff. Bloody awful. Must have the scout make you some proper lunch later. One of those big dripping American-style burgers, I think, yes? You look like hell. Christ, Mulder, chin up. You've got three and a half years to go, love, assuming you pass your mods, which I assure you you could do in a dark room with no roof in a thunderstorm with a headcold."

Mulder felt tension drain from his body in a descending rush that left him limp and nearly happy. He tried to pull his face from grave to grateful, but his tiny smile was thumbed flat and he relaxed further. Nicholas expected nothing. Not good manners, not good sense. After fifteen years of grim, tacit pressures from all sides--sit up, keep your voice down, take your tears into the bedroom, clear your plate, *that's life*--the relief was inexpressible. Another kiss and he was moaning, distracted from care into a shared, sensual indulgence.

When they stood, Mulder's head came just to Nicholas' chin, a difference of height the older man always took advantage of, digging his jaw into Mulder's hair as if this expressed some unspoken benediction, an approval of body to body that needed no other acknowledgment. He felt slight, safe, enveloped by the other man's presence, a limpet clinging to a rock, a kitten snugged into a sheepdog. Age reassured him, tethered him, felt proper, for he knew he could relinquish all his problems here and they would be solved or dismissed with what seemed to Mulder the blunt good sense that lurked under the eccentric exterior.

It was good to be cared for, and when Nicholas tumbled him in front of the fire on the thick rugs overlapping there and screwed him with slow, deliberate turns into a state of ecstatic, trembling surrender, Mulder felt again that he could have stayed here forever.

Always and forever.

*

Mm. The Elvis passage is stolen verbatim from Don DeLillo's "White Noise", one of the most brilliantly, subtly lunatic books I've ever read, a favorite for years now. Thanks to everyone who wrote me, publically or privately. I try to answer all mail, private at least, but I've let myself get behind, so just give me a wee while if I haven't written...grateful hugs to Kat, sweet lovely thing, for her licks. And to all of you. I'm too blessed. [shy, blissful smile]

smooches, ta-ta, all done, bye-bye