Tripping down the stairs is an odd sort of experience, but it's an experience where you're aware of every little jolt of your back upon the wooden shelves of the decline, and then when you're at the bottom of the stairs, you've tuckered out and weary, with your limbs burning with damage and your breath shaky with an apprehension of it happening again, even at the lowest point you could reach.
In life, it is the same way. You plummet from the zenith of your career to the bottom of your career in intervals equal enough to count. You can sense every bump upon your existence, every notch tucked into your spine and carved by the sharp ledge of the staircase, every level you decrease as your life tumbles downhill and so do you. You can sense it all.
So if the seemingly stable Lucien Carr were to ever ask someone to push him down the stairs, that would be more of a blessing than rolling down a ramp into a bush of blades whose roses are stained scarlet with his blood, and he supposes it would be less painful, because at least he would still retain his ability to understand where he is falling and how far he is from the bottom. Upholding cognition is all he needs. He can't lose his mind when it's the thing he's the most proud of, and the staircase is the perfect weapon for that.
But now Lucien is finding himself somersaulting from one stair to the other, a lower one upon the terrain of security and decreasing security, all because a man whom he hasn't seen in a few years has waltzed back into his life in a place that is open to the public but not open to harassment by a ghost of a person, a ghost that Lucien swore he would never encounter again, a person that should've accepted that promise, a person that should comply, even if his old friend wound up in the same park as him, because that's how promises operate. They shouldn't be shattered in the dangerous impulsivity of excitement, and this man shouldn't be here.
However, he is here, and he's very clear in Lucien's line of sight, clear also in the notion that he is not leaving for anything that Lucien says to him, no matter how pleading, because what kind of regular human would abandon their old friend once more after just seeing them again? No one, but Lucien Carr shuns regular humans with all that he has, though they're still planted in his way like a sidewalk to a reckless driver, and this man is one of them.
Now, most people would think that your friend from when you were sixteen resurfacing at the ripe age of twenty-four would be a blessing upon your life of post-college existential crises, but to Lucien Carr, it is far from that, rather a blight upon his functioning, functioning that is supposed to be chugging along perfectly but is now wrecked by a faulty railroad pin who was run over only in the past and is being run over again right now, screeching metal against metal and anxiety against elation, Lucien Carr against David Kammerer, first and foremost the bane of his dreary old existence.
And now this David character is expecting Lucien to be sympathetic towards him, narrating a tale of love lost by the tumultuous sea of life, but Lucien knows that he's just like the rest of the boring humans, people that he loathes with every inch of his working fingers who draft his concern (and, admittedly, his umbrage) towards them in the parchment those boring humans will actually listen to, and David Kammerer sure loved to listen, though conveniently he never listened at the right times. He never listened to Lucien when he told him that this relationship between them was reckless and needed to be purged. He never listened to the premonitions in his dense skull of his that informed him that what he was doing was degrading. He never listened to himself when bits of his rage broke free of his shell and spun lies as clothing for those he should've protected.
David was never a person to confess to things, either. He never chose to confess that he is a monster and will remain to be a monster. He never chose to confess that he didn't want to leave Lucien when that's all that he wanted. He never chose to confess that he ruined the young life of Lucien Carr, and for what? Belt scars and booze. That's all.
When someone says, "I hate the things you do to me," we humans romanticize it, even when we shouldn't. We romanticize everything, it seems, everything that should be left to the underworld. We bathe in the assumptions of a happily ever after as if that's what victims are shouting about when they can finally shout. Romance doesn't steal a voice from its parties, as if a scar imposed by the belt from a person you should've been able to trust doesn't last as long as the fragment of someone else's kind soul instead of their acrimonious soul, as if memorizing the step of someone you despise is less important than memorizing the step of someone you're excited to see, as if shivering at someone's name is not because they're the monster of your life but the light of it whose energy sparks you time and time again. That is not reality. That is erasure.
And though David Kammerer was an abuser and an alcoholic and probably still is, performing all of those traits as he struggles to understand what he's doing wrong, he has no idea that he was a curse upon Lucien's life, Lucien's young life of sixteen fucking years old, an age where no one should be plagued by a man who is out for destruction with the inability to repent for their crimes, because they simply don't understand them, and that's perhaps the worst fate for a victim.
And now that lack of understanding has traveled with the twenty-four year-old David Kammerer all the way to the park where his beloved Lucien Carr sits on a bench, unsuspecting until a few moments ago and now simmering with antipathy in the form of memories and hostility derived from them, and David Kammerer has also never been able to understand where to stop, so here he is, trying to talk to the person who despises him with every aching in his chest and every belt scar on his back and every trauma shaking in his fingers as they gasp for parchment, and the worst part is that David looks sorry for what he did, for a crime that is irreparable, for nothing that Lucien will accept, but David won't back down.
"Lucien?" David investigates, checking to see if he left an indelible mark on someone that never asked for it, zooming in on the helpless man resting upon the bench, scooting towards him with no regard for personal space, reaching out his hand to see if this is all just a dream.
Lucien slaps David's hand away, a scowl his tacit venom, and David shelters his pain while attempting to deflect more, because now Lucien is heated and attacking from all sides, and he has got some important things to say. "Why the hell are you here, David?"
Lucien has sunk a cannon into David's morale, though it's nothing that David shouldn't have expected. He just showed up randomly in the sight of someone who hates him, assuming that he'd be delivered well, but that is not the case, and he needs to repair his claims, and it is with a quivering anxiety and a quiet voice that David replies, "I just saw you and thought I should say hello."
"The only thing you should be saying is a prayer." Lucien leans in, churning the alabaster of his teeth like water churns in his ocean eyes, as striking as one could ever see him. "Or goodbye."
"Lucien, this wasn't how we were before," David pleads, heaving his shoulders as if a coil of line over the edge of a ship, where David's life is plunging ever since this conversation began.
"And I'm glad for that! I have a friend now, an apartment, a hobby in which I can do whatever the hell I please."
David clips two hands to his hips, rocking back on one hip and bobbing a foot up and down with impatience. "And what would that hobby be?"
Lucien ducks his head to his lap, planning something that David is unaware of, and it is with a devious smile and an arrogantly swishing jaw that the man carries out his answer: "Writing."
A sickening pallor purgatories David's face, and his movement ceases to instead fall subordinate to the shock of what his old friend has disclosed with him. "Writing?" David whispers, disbelieving and frankly somewhat scared.
"Writing," Lucien repeats, allowing it to flick off of his tongue as he realizes that he's won. "Yeah, that's right. I finally have a place to channel my thoughts, a place that isn't you." Lucien's eyes are hard, frozen over by the wintertime, but they are steady, and they are convicting. "I don't need you anymore, David, so you might as well be gone."
Lucien has defeated his demons, and the blank sheet of sin is still upon the perpetrator.
~~~~~
A/N: David is a cunt and we're all dead
I was househunting with my parents and I don't want to move so I was just thinking "push me down the stairs" and then came up with that metaphor at the beginning so that just proves that I am not a good writer, rather a hermit caught in existential pain
~Dakotripping