All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
Away again
She dreams a champagne dream
--Fuel

Brian still shimmers as he slumps against the lightpost, or maybe that's the rum and the sleeplessness talking. Curt rubs his eyes with the back of his hand as he trudges out of the pub onto the sidewalk, but no, Brian is still shimmering after all.

"A true friend stabs you in the front," Brian says, but it's apologetic, because he can't speak in anything but one Wilde proverb after another, and Curt knows the trick. Curt remembers the nights they stayed up until dawn with the dog-eared book of Wilde quotes, smoking and rewarding memorization with kisses and sucks until the paperback fell to pieces, pages spilling out over the floor and crushed underneath them.

Curt reckons he may be just a little strung out.

"There are many things we would throw away if we were not sure others would pick them up," Brian says, meaning that he isn't quite through with them yet, and Curt realizes that the rasp of Brian's voice hadn't been a trick of the sticky pub phone, that he's been working himself to the limit.

But then again, Brian's best talent had never exactly been his voice. It makes Curt smug enough to collapse against Brian—he'd kind of been planning on that anyway—and he gladly shares the rum still on his tongue.

If not exactly enthusiastic, Brian is at least compliant, allowing Curt's weight to press him back into the dirty metal of the lightpost and his tongue to slip past his lips, his fingers to skim Brian's waist under the leather jacket that isn't Brian's. Brian's leather is never his own, and Curt may be the only one who knows that, who knows all his secrets; they settle against Curt's shoulders, crushing him down into Brian, into the lamppost.

When Curt straightens a little, Brian neither holds him back nor pushes him away, and the three-day binge has been long enough that the passive aggression is endearingly familiar rather than infuriating. Or, again, maybe that's the rum, but Curt doesn't care so much as he reaches a thumb up to smudge Brian's eye shadow. It's hard to tell he's done anything, since Curt wouldn't swear it wasn't the same makeup Brian was wearing when he left, but the twitch of a frown that it earns from Brian is what Curt's really after anyhow.

Brian's shimmer is fading, even three days away is enough to see the disintegration he was too close to see before, but he finds that he likes this stage of the chromatic progression better than the ones before it, it doesn't make his head pound like the blue-white-lightning stage did. Brian's colors are bruises now, in the stage where everything can only get worse until it’s a relief when they start going yellow around the edges.

Curt knows that the modern science of costume and makeup can paint the blue-white lightning right back on anyhow.

"Take me home," he says, his own voice so scratchy with alcohol and acid that even he has no idea what he says, so he repeats, "fuck, take me home."

Curt knows Brian must have a quote under the keyword 'home' stored up someplace, but even Brian must be sick of all the Wilde, since he straightens and pulls Curt's arm around his shoulders. The press of Brian's hand against his hip makes Curt want to sing and fuck and scream, like it always has, and Curt wants desperately to do all three, but any one of them will make him vomit spectacularly, and contrary to appearances, Brian detests messes.

"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex," Brian says at length, irritated, as though he's been trying to hold it in and can't manage it.

"Yes," Curt agrees, feeling sleep digging the heel of its hand into his skull, pressing him into Brian's side. "Fuck yes."