dead and alive
the unsolvable mystery (or the continuing adventures of linus as he tries to decipher the danny-rusty relationship)
Linus decided, after the fifth time Rusty finished one of Danny’s sentences, that he would figure out exactly what the two men were to each other. Friends? Family? Something else?
He decided to make a chart (because he was a charts and graphs kind of person, except when he was picking pockets, and then he wasn’t so much anything as instinct and art) and it had three columns, two rows, labeled Friends and Family and Lovers, and then Danny and Rusty.
There were tallies, even rows of four with a flicked diagonal slash, in each and every box.
There were examples, too, listed neatly, copied from scribbled notes on napkins, paraphrased from that point of there! when Linus would see Danny or Rusty do something particularly them and make a note to himself, things like no concept of personal space and D. always has food when R. is hungry.
At the end of the week, Linus had a filled chart, pages of notes, and a headache. Half of his examples (reasons? assumptions?) could fit into all three categories, and some into none of them. When he went to Saul (because Saul knew them the longest, and he was the most approachable) he got a long, rambling explanation filled with various anecdotes about jobs he didn’t know and people he’d never met that basically boiled down to no one’s sure, and they know better than to ask.
Linus decided to give up.
---
Linus lied.
The “Danny-and-Rusty Problem” (which was what he was calling it, whatever it was, in his head) just wouldn’t leave him alone. It itched at him in the moments where the job was at a lull, the spare moments where Danny would go to Rusty’s room (or Rusty to Danny’s, more often, because everyone always met in Rusty’s) to go watch a movie or play cards or drink wine or whatever it was they did (as Rusty-and-Danny. Asthem.) and Linus would wonder, each and every time, what are they? Exactly?
This time Linus decided to go all out – graphs, charts, venn diagrams, crazy logic line trees. About half of those he hadn’t used since elementary school, and so his papers were covered with long, wiggly arrows pointing from one thing to the next and five different colors of highlighter and some notes that even Basher couldn’t read. (Linus had looked at some of the man’s ideas for a new type of explosive – he couldn’t even tell what was writing and what was diagram.)
And – and, well, he still couldn’t figure it out. He was leaning towards “friends with benefits” though. If by “friends” you meant “partners who knew what each other were thinking, feeling, etc.” and by “benefits” you meant “amazing, mind-blowing sex.”
At least, Linus thought it would be amazing and mind-blowing. He wasn’t – he’d never actually seen them, after all.
Having sex, that is.Not that he thought of Danny and Rusty having sex. Not at all.
---
“Oh – oh my – I – I’m, um – sorry!”
Linus slammed the door shut, face hot and embarrassed beyond belief. It was – Danny and Rusty were –
I think my brain just exploded.
The image of the two men was sharp in his mind, fragmented by embarrassment and lack of time to properly see – he imagined, remembered; hands buried in black/grey hair, Rusty’s flushed cheeks and half-lidded eyes, the sheen of sweat on golden skin, how would that taste how would that feel—
Linus panted. (From shock, he told himself. It was from shock.) He hurried back to his room before anyone could see him with his mouth open like an idiot standing in the hallway. And to take a cold shower.
Oh god. How was he going to work with them tomorrow?
---
All of the next day, Linus tried to avoid Rusty’s and Danny’s eyes, looking down at his lap when he talked, studiously scribbling nonsense in his notebook, definitely not recalling Danny’s mouth around Rusty’s cock, the long sinuous curve of Rusty’s body. He wasn’t.
All in all, it really wasn’t surprising when he was cornered by the very two people he was trying to avoid.
“So, Linus,” Rusty said, eating a handful of chips, “how was your night?”
“Peaceful?” said Danny.
“Undisturbed?”
“Um,” said Linus.
“You know if you’re really–”
“—really that curious–”
“—with the notebooks and all–”
“—we wouldn’t mind if you dropped by sometime.”
“With an appointment.”
“It’s no problem,” Rusty assured him, licking his fingers clean of crumbs.
Rusty’n’Danny strolled away.
“You’re doomed, mate,” said Basher.
“Yeah,” said Livingston.
Linus groaned.
---
“—and I still don’t know!” Linus threw up a hand (only one because the other was holding the phone) in frustration. “Dad! Dad, this isn’t funny!”
A low, rich chuckle rolled from the speakers. “Sounds pretty funny to me, son,” Bobby Caldwell said. “But take my advice: just leave them be. Those two, well, those two just can’t be explained. Not by you, not by me, not by anybody. Maybe not even by themselves. They are what they are, Linus. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“I don’t want to change them, dad, I want to understand them. I mean, how do they do the whole finishing-each-others-sentences thing? And doesn’t Danny have a wife? I mean, what is that, just a cover?”
“Just let it be, Linus,” said Bobby. “And your mom sends her love.”
Click.
---
Linus decided that Tess embodied Danny’s repressed desires for a normal life. She didn’t know about Danny’s thieving tendencies (not tendencies; more like pathological need) and was very much a white picket fence woman, in a slinky, sexy kind of way.
Not that Linus thought she was available, after Rusty told him that she was Danny’s wife. Ex-wife. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive, it was just the fact that she was Danny’s wife that made her unattractive. Well, not unattractive, more like –
Whatever. Linus knew what he meant.
What was important was that Tess wasn’t in on the thieving business, and that meant that she wasn’t in on Rusty’n’Danny. And that meant that, really, Danny wasn’t as much into her as he was to Rusty.
(Oh god he didn’t just think that.)
Right. No more of this. Any more of this and he was going to go mad. (Not that he was far off from that at this point, mind you.)
“Liiinus,” Rusty sang from two doors down.
Damn.
---
In the end, he ended up drunk and blowing bubbles from those stupid little commercial bubble-plus-bubble-blower bottled solutions where you dipped in the plastic circle attached to a cap and blew while Basher and Turk cheered on the card-dart (though how cards could be thrown hard enough to embed themselves in anything was a mystery to Linus) game Rusty, Virgil, Yen, and Danny were playing. Yen was winning.
He blew some bubbles. They landed, intact and stuck, on the ruffled spikes of Rusty’s hair.
“’S gel,” said Livingston, nodding wisely. “Oth’wise th’ bubbles’d pop, see?” and he tried to poke one.
“Ow!” said Rusty as Livingston poked dangerously near his eye. “Watch that! It was a good throw too,” he added mournfully. “Fifteen points.”
“I thought it only went up to ten,” said Saul. “When I played, bullseyes only had ten points.” He sounded faintly accusing.
“It’s different now, Saul,” Danny began.
“Because–”
“—now there’s Velcro—”
“—and plastic packaging—”
“—and ridiculously huge department stores that are laughably easy to—”
“—steal from.”
“Not that they didn’t have plastic packaging when you were young, of course,” added Danny soothingly.
“What?” said Saul.
“I didn’t get it either,” said Reuben.
Linus just laughed. (Snorted, really. He was that drunk.)
He decided to make a chart (because he was a charts and graphs kind of person, except when he was picking pockets, and then he wasn’t so much anything as instinct and art) and it had three columns, two rows, labeled Friends and Family and Lovers, and then Danny and Rusty.
There were tallies, even rows of four with a flicked diagonal slash, in each and every box.
There were examples, too, listed neatly, copied from scribbled notes on napkins, paraphrased from that point of there! when Linus would see Danny or Rusty do something particularly them and make a note to himself, things like no concept of personal space and D. always has food when R. is hungry.
At the end of the week, Linus had a filled chart, pages of notes, and a headache. Half of his examples (reasons? assumptions?) could fit into all three categories, and some into none of them. When he went to Saul (because Saul knew them the longest, and he was the most approachable) he got a long, rambling explanation filled with various anecdotes about jobs he didn’t know and people he’d never met that basically boiled down to no one’s sure, and they know better than to ask.
Linus decided to give up.
---
Linus lied.
The “Danny-and-Rusty Problem” (which was what he was calling it, whatever it was, in his head) just wouldn’t leave him alone. It itched at him in the moments where the job was at a lull, the spare moments where Danny would go to Rusty’s room (or Rusty to Danny’s, more often, because everyone always met in Rusty’s) to go watch a movie or play cards or drink wine or whatever it was they did (as Rusty-and-Danny. Asthem.) and Linus would wonder, each and every time, what are they? Exactly?
This time Linus decided to go all out – graphs, charts, venn diagrams, crazy logic line trees. About half of those he hadn’t used since elementary school, and so his papers were covered with long, wiggly arrows pointing from one thing to the next and five different colors of highlighter and some notes that even Basher couldn’t read. (Linus had looked at some of the man’s ideas for a new type of explosive – he couldn’t even tell what was writing and what was diagram.)
And – and, well, he still couldn’t figure it out. He was leaning towards “friends with benefits” though. If by “friends” you meant “partners who knew what each other were thinking, feeling, etc.” and by “benefits” you meant “amazing, mind-blowing sex.”
At least, Linus thought it would be amazing and mind-blowing. He wasn’t – he’d never actually seen them, after all.
Having sex, that is.Not that he thought of Danny and Rusty having sex. Not at all.
---
“Oh – oh my – I – I’m, um – sorry!”
Linus slammed the door shut, face hot and embarrassed beyond belief. It was – Danny and Rusty were –
I think my brain just exploded.
The image of the two men was sharp in his mind, fragmented by embarrassment and lack of time to properly see – he imagined, remembered; hands buried in black/grey hair, Rusty’s flushed cheeks and half-lidded eyes, the sheen of sweat on golden skin, how would that taste how would that feel—
Linus panted. (From shock, he told himself. It was from shock.) He hurried back to his room before anyone could see him with his mouth open like an idiot standing in the hallway. And to take a cold shower.
Oh god. How was he going to work with them tomorrow?
---
All of the next day, Linus tried to avoid Rusty’s and Danny’s eyes, looking down at his lap when he talked, studiously scribbling nonsense in his notebook, definitely not recalling Danny’s mouth around Rusty’s cock, the long sinuous curve of Rusty’s body. He wasn’t.
All in all, it really wasn’t surprising when he was cornered by the very two people he was trying to avoid.
“So, Linus,” Rusty said, eating a handful of chips, “how was your night?”
“Peaceful?” said Danny.
“Undisturbed?”
“Um,” said Linus.
“You know if you’re really–”
“—really that curious–”
“—with the notebooks and all–”
“—we wouldn’t mind if you dropped by sometime.”
“With an appointment.”
“It’s no problem,” Rusty assured him, licking his fingers clean of crumbs.
Rusty’n’Danny strolled away.
“You’re doomed, mate,” said Basher.
“Yeah,” said Livingston.
Linus groaned.
---
“—and I still don’t know!” Linus threw up a hand (only one because the other was holding the phone) in frustration. “Dad! Dad, this isn’t funny!”
A low, rich chuckle rolled from the speakers. “Sounds pretty funny to me, son,” Bobby Caldwell said. “But take my advice: just leave them be. Those two, well, those two just can’t be explained. Not by you, not by me, not by anybody. Maybe not even by themselves. They are what they are, Linus. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“I don’t want to change them, dad, I want to understand them. I mean, how do they do the whole finishing-each-others-sentences thing? And doesn’t Danny have a wife? I mean, what is that, just a cover?”
“Just let it be, Linus,” said Bobby. “And your mom sends her love.”
Click.
---
Linus decided that Tess embodied Danny’s repressed desires for a normal life. She didn’t know about Danny’s thieving tendencies (not tendencies; more like pathological need) and was very much a white picket fence woman, in a slinky, sexy kind of way.
Not that Linus thought she was available, after Rusty told him that she was Danny’s wife. Ex-wife. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive, it was just the fact that she was Danny’s wife that made her unattractive. Well, not unattractive, more like –
Whatever. Linus knew what he meant.
What was important was that Tess wasn’t in on the thieving business, and that meant that she wasn’t in on Rusty’n’Danny. And that meant that, really, Danny wasn’t as much into her as he was to Rusty.
(Oh god he didn’t just think that.)
Right. No more of this. Any more of this and he was going to go mad. (Not that he was far off from that at this point, mind you.)
“Liiinus,” Rusty sang from two doors down.
Damn.
---
In the end, he ended up drunk and blowing bubbles from those stupid little commercial bubble-plus-bubble-blower bottled solutions where you dipped in the plastic circle attached to a cap and blew while Basher and Turk cheered on the card-dart (though how cards could be thrown hard enough to embed themselves in anything was a mystery to Linus) game Rusty, Virgil, Yen, and Danny were playing. Yen was winning.
He blew some bubbles. They landed, intact and stuck, on the ruffled spikes of Rusty’s hair.
“’S gel,” said Livingston, nodding wisely. “Oth’wise th’ bubbles’d pop, see?” and he tried to poke one.
“Ow!” said Rusty as Livingston poked dangerously near his eye. “Watch that! It was a good throw too,” he added mournfully. “Fifteen points.”
“I thought it only went up to ten,” said Saul. “When I played, bullseyes only had ten points.” He sounded faintly accusing.
“It’s different now, Saul,” Danny began.
“Because–”
“—now there’s Velcro—”
“—and plastic packaging—”
“—and ridiculously huge department stores that are laughably easy to—”
“—steal from.”
“Not that they didn’t have plastic packaging when you were young, of course,” added Danny soothingly.
“What?” said Saul.
“I didn’t get it either,” said Reuben.
Linus just laughed. (Snorted, really. He was that drunk.)
