After The Glitter Fades.
Category: Real Person Fic
Characters: Dee Plume, Julian Barratt, Mike Fielding, Noel Fielding, Other, Sue Denim
Pairing: Het Pairing, Julian Barratt/Dee Plume, Noel Fielding/Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding/Other
Genre: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Rating: NC-17
Warning: Character Death, Drug Use, Smut (graphic sex scenes), Violence - Heavy, Unspecified Warning
Status: Complete
Length: 10-20k words
Land of a Thousand Words – Scissor Sisters
Contents
Land of a Thousand Words – Scissor Sisters
I have no idea what time it was, but through the thick hospital glass I could see it was still dark, the blackness punctuated every now and then by a pool of orange brightness, pouring from an overhead street light or passing car. It couldn’t have been after 4 in the morning. I’d been asleep for 3 hours at most, but I didn’t care. He was alive, and being taken care of. That’s what mattered.
As I continued to gaze out from the chair beside his bed, which I had refused to be moved from throughout the night by various nurses, the occasional streaks of orange passing over my unblinking eyes, the previous nights events began to come back to me, little by little, as if my mind was trying at all costs to dissolve the traumatic memory before I had a chance to see it…
I had knelt on the cold bathroom floor of Noel’s apartment, shaking and whispering into his neck until the ambulance had arrived. It had only taken around ten minutes in hindsight, but when you’re clasping the dying body of the man you love, each second stretches out, like trying to run in a nightmare.
It was a nightmare, in every respect. I kept trying to trick myself into waking up next to Noel on my lounge carpet, reaching desperately for any shred of hope that none of this was happening. It couldn’t be happening.
But, as the paramedics pried my hands off his body and lowered him gently onto a stretcher, reality did begin to rear its ugly head, and as I watched him being wheeled out of his flat, carving a line through the heaps of scattered bottles and clothes, I began hyperventilating, and blacked out…
I was in a small white room, with no furniture, and nothing filling the empty space but my own huddled form. I looked up, and the ceiling disappeared above me, flying higher and higher the more I tried to focus on it, until it eventually disappeared into the shadows, high above me.
I looked back down at the ground, feeling dizzy and sick, and began peering at the four walls that surrounded me, counting the tiles.
Suddenly, I heard a loud bang behind my head, and spun round to see a door that I hadn’t noticed before. It was stainless steel, and had a small sliding hatch at the top, with bars across it for safe measure. It began to dawn on me that I was in a lunatic asylum, a theory which was confirmed as I tried to push myself up with my arms and found them wrapped tightly around me, fastened in a roll of white linen and leather buckles.
I began to cry out, not knowing or hearing what I was saying, but merely twisting my mouth into familiar shapes and screaming apparently meaningless, incoherent sounds.
The hatch in my door began to slide open, and two eyes, almost golden in colour, with black where the white should have been, were glaring in at me through the bars.
“Stop it!” the person who owned the cold eyes hissed.
“He’s not here.”
Who’s not? I screamed in my mind, as my voice remained detached from me, as if it was under some else’s control.
As if in answer to my silent, desperate question, the eyes disappeared to be replaced a moment later by two snarling lips, pressing through the bars.
“Noel. Stop calling him, he’s not here. He’s dying.”
With that the hatch slammed shut, the noise echoing round me infinite cell.
I turned my head, staring blankly at the wall opposite. As I was gazing at it, I began to notice that it wasn’t flat, like I had first suspected. there was a small, uneven lump protruding from the corner. As I watched this strange mound, it began to shift slightly, turning towards me. I began to see other colours against the blinding whiteness. Black, red and blue, not in any distinct pattern at first, just blurry balls of light, dancing before my eyes, but coming together slowly to form the most beautiful face I had ever seen.
The black twisted and spun, stretching out into shaggy feather-like fronds. The red melted into two pouting lips. The blue, at first hidden behind the black spikes, began growing brighter and took the form of two eyes, just as piercing as the satanic yellow and black ones from behind the door, but softer and more child like than anyone could imagine. They were his eyes, without a doubt, boring out at me from beneath the ruffled fringe of blackness.
They began to fill the entire cell with bright blue light, wiping away the clinical whiteness, and soothing me like a cool mist. Everything as going to be ok…
Suddenly, the beautiful, hypnotising blueness was shattered, as cracks began running up and down the walls, blinding lights of every colour pouring in, along with sounds, shouts, sirens.
My eyes snapped open, but were immediately slammed shut again without warning, as I felt a sharp slap on my cheek, followed by someone shouting my name in a voice I didn’t recognise.
“Julian? Julian Barratt?”
I opened my eyes again, cautiously this time. Two faces loomed above me, both of which I recognised as paramedics from earlier.
“You alright? You passed out.” The left face said, looking concerned.
I mumbled something that they took as a yes, and both faces immediately disappeared, returning to whatever bodies they had been occupying before I distracted them. as I began to grow aware of my surroundings I realised I was lying on a bench in an ambulance, surrounded by paramedics in green scrubs crowding around a stretcher in the centre of the vehicle, shouting things like
“Oxygen, now!” and
“More bandages.”
My head was still swimming from my dream, and I couldn’t understand what was going on for a few moments, but, as I sat up slowly, images jumped into my mind with so much velocity I couldn’t separate what I was seeing before me and what was memory.
Noel’s flat, syringes, breaking down doors, hinges, Noel on the floor, blood, razor blades, more blood, phone, Noel, more blood, dying…
As the horrific images pounded my head like a sledge hammer, each blow bring with it another scene of death and blood, I began to realise exactly what was happening. I was in the ambulance which was taking Noel to the hospital.
We arrived a few minutes later, rushing though doors, wards, lifts, corridors. Nurses and Doctors were speeding in and out, changing all the time. Eventually I was told I had to go to the waiting room, and after some arguments and shouting on my part, I gave in.
As I sat for hours on end with my head gripped in my trembling hands, I contemplated calling Noel’s Mum and Dad, or Mike, but as I doubted he’d ever want them to know.
He’d be discharged tomorrow, and then go back to his life, never letting anyone but me know about what had happened over the last few weeks.
When a someone finally came down and told me I could see him, I was a mess; my eyes were swollen and rubbed raw, my hair was wet with ice-cold sweat and tears, and tangled from my hands constantly running through it, and I’d bitten my nails right back.
When we finally reached his room, I barely recognised him. His hair had been pushed back off his now almost transparent face, his eyeliner was smudged right down his porceline cheeks, his lips had lost all their colour. He looked dead, and completely not like Noel.
The same Nurse who had brought me to his room asked me for his details, and how I was related to him. I whispered
“Noel. Fielding. I’m his best friend, Julian Barratt.”
She gasped and jumped a little, her eyes lighting up, but immediately composed herself as I gazed blankly up at her through my moist fringe.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” She said immediately said, looking shocked with herself.
“I just… Oh Christ!” I could see she was visibly shaken, and even thought I saw tears welling in her eyes as she looked at Noel over the top of her clip-board.
She didn’t look like the typical Boosh fan, no coloured streaks through her hair, though it was feathered, no Camden Market-style accessories, but as she stretched her arm out, which was shaking slightly, I noticed the Boosh logo tattooed on her wrist. I smiled weakly at her when I saw this, and she smiled back, and there were definitely tears in both our eyes now.
She left after a few minutes, and I turned and collapsed into the chair beside his bed, pulling it close, and just sat there, watching him sleep until I eventually did too, many hours later…
I sighed as I came out of my reverie, and turned my head away from the window to look at him, taking in the bandages around his wrists, the machines monitoring his heart rate, the cold, clinical bed sheets, so different to the soft, colourful ones he was used to at home. I looked up at his face, expecting to see him sleeping peacefully, but when I did, I was confronted by 2 huge staring blue eyes, boring to my soul, smiling at me.
“Alright, Ju?” he whispered with a weak grin, his voice cracking.
Tears welled in my eyes. He sounded like a sleepy child waking up on the morning of their birthday, not a grown man who’d tried to kill himself not 24 hours before.
I cannot describe the relief that flooded me as I heard his voice, with all its innocence and charm and character back in it. I wanted to just scoop him up in my arms and take him home, and forget any of this ever happened. We could just go back to that beautiful day when we had slept side by side, exhausted from our love making. Fuck, we could go back to before that, and I’d be alone in a club, watching him get off with Meg or Megan or something. Anything! I just wanted with all my heart to forget all of this, to pretend it had never happened. But I had to know…
“Noel… “ I kept my eys locked on his intently, but heard my voice wavering slightly. “Why?”
He sighed, and his eyes flicked around my face briefly, before coming to rest on mine once more.
“I couldn’t stand it, Ju…” His face was serious now, and I wondered whether he was about to break my heart again.
“You couldn’t stand what? Being with me? Having me love you?” I stood up and began to pace around the foot of his bed, unable to stay still. I could feel myself beginning to tremble again, and I didn’t want him to see it.
“God, no, Ju! I… I couldn’t stand loving you… so much…” His voice broke as he said this.
I stopped pacing, and turned to look him in the face. There were tears in his eyes, and he was reaching out to me. I walked round to him and sat back in my chair next to his bed, taking his hand in mine, careful to avoid the bandaged wrists.
“You… What?” I could feel my own eyes pricking with scalding tears now.
“You didn’t think I loved you back? I was the one who… who told you…” My voice trailed away as I realised what I had told him. I had never said love. I had told him that I wanted him, that I needed him. I never had the courage to tell him how I really felt until I thought he was dying before my eyes.
My tears began falling thick and fast, and I couldn’t look at him anymore. I buried my face in my hands.
“You didn’t know I loved you back… because I never told you. You did all this because you thought I was… I was like all the others. Just… just wanting you for the moment…” I broke down as my emotions flooded me, and I felt him squeeze my hands gently.
I wiped my eyes roughly on my sleeve, and looked up at him again. He was smiling at me through his tears.
“Now I know.”
I threw my arms around him, and collapsed into his warm embrace as I began crying uncontrollably. He pulled away and stared into my eyes, searching my face to see whether they were tears of happiness or despair. I didn’t know myself. All I knew was that it was all going to be ok now.
We had held each other silently until the first murky rays of morning sun crept in through the window, lighting up the tears on his eyelashes. I couldn’t hear him breathing now, but I could still feel his light body rising and falling against mine, in perfect harmony to my own heavy breaths. He felt so much smaller and more fragile than I ever remembered him being, like he was about to slip through my fingers and float away forever.
I tightened my grip on him as I thought this despite myself, wrapping my arms right round him, like I was protecting him from the dirty grey light, which was bringing with it all the ugly, painful shit from the outside world, the world that had made this happen, the world that tried to take him from me.
I reached up and touched his face, checking to see if he was still there, still noel. He sighed as my hand brushed his cheek, and I pulled away, not wanting to wake him again, but he wasn’t asleep. His eyes opened effortlessly, and he was gazing at me, not with the flirtatious mixture of lust and innocence I was used to seeing in him, but with a new mixture, a strange one, that felt both unfamiliar and exciting to me.
But as I stared deep into the curious eyes, it dawned on me that it wasn’t a mixture at all. It was one solid emotion, washing away all other little gimmicks hidden inside his strange mind, and the reason it was unnerving to me was that I had never seen Noel so concentrated, so focussed on one thing, one feeling. Everything he said and did was tinged with amusement, or confusion, or lust. Even when he was screaming, you could see the rage being permeated with his childishness, his ability to be distracted by anything new.
But this was different. Nothing was seeping through, there was no subconscious joke lingering in the back of his mind, no hint of confusion or curiosity, no flicker of red hot lust darting across his face making my head swim and my body tingle. This was absolute and unquestionable. This was pure love, and I felt it washing over me, pouring out of those blue orbs, just like the calming mist in my dream. Only this was a real, solid emotion, and wasn’t about to be shattered by bright lights and two happy-slapping paramedic faces.
There was no way in hell of mistaking that look for anything else, and I couldn’t help but frown as I wondered whether I’d ever given him the same look. I was sure I had, so many times, but if that was true how could he not have known how I felt? Wasn’t that the look he’d caught me giving him that day I his room when this all started? Wasn’t it the look that had let Dee know I loved him too that night? Wasn’t it the look I’d felt in my own eyes whenever he was near me, and had to force myself to wipe of my features? Or was that a different look, of guilt and suppressed desire, which I tried to used to hide my true feelings, even from myself?
I sighed, feeling more ashamed of myself than I ever have before. Everything about how I had treated him screamed suppressed lust, not love. Everything I said had a shallow undertone of “I only want you for the night. I don’t give a fuck about you, but you are fucking hot.” All my glances at him that he caught were guilty and dirty, looks of want and jealousy, not love. No wonder this happened. I was too much of a coward to tell him I loved him, even through a look.
Another constellation dies,
Do what you want cause it’s your own sky.
Just call me when the phone stops ringing,
Thanks for stopping by.
I’m just glad I’m on your good side.
Where it’s smoldering or freezing,
It’s never all that easy to decide.
This is the land of a thousand words,
But it seems so few are worth the breath to say,
Except I’ll be looking after my own world,
And you just keep on saving the day.
I’ll try to stay but it’s in vain when you’re far.
I’m on the run to wherever you are.
And that’s the nature of the chase;
You fall so far behind you end in first place.
Pass the torch this time we’re running,
To each their own regret.
There’s no harm in playing hard to get.
Boundlessness deceives me,
Baby you may turn the corner yet.
This is the land of a thousand words,
But it seems so few are worth the breath to say,
Except I’ll be looking after my own world,
You just keep on saving the day.
I’ll try to stay but it’s in vain when you’re far,
I’m on the run to wherever you are.