managed | In dreams I have watched it spin

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In dreams I have watched it spin

Niall Lynch, before he is anything else, is an enigma.

He doesn't go places. He journeys to them, drives stylish cars and stops at dive bars and diners, smokes cigars on rooftops and sleeps bundled in the backseat. At eighteen, his father is dead and his home is no longer safe, so he picks up a journal for ninety-nine cents at the local supermarket and writes out every dream he can ever remember having and everything that he ever wants to dream about.

A ferrari is too flashy for a getaway car, so he takes an old cadillac instead, sleek and shiny and new, despite being apparently manufactured in 1959. The engine is something that God never intended to be put in a car, and when he roars down the road in it, he feels the most alive he's ever been. It doesn't particularly bother him that he's lost everything, that he has nobody, that he has no idea where he's going. Niall Lynch has been forming a plan ever since he first woke up with a cricket caged in his palm, and very little is going to stand in the way of that.

He ends up in Pennsylvania. He doesn't plan on ending up there at all, but it's a full moon tonight and he likes the way the forest looks, like it's a living entity with thousands of smaller, moving parts rather than just a location. Niall takes the car off the road and drives careful through a path until he finds a small clearing in the woods, with what looks like the remains of an old campground. He opens the door then, lights a cigar, and climbs up onto the hood of his car.

It's a beautiful night. The moon is so bright that he can see the pages on his journal, and so he lays with his back pressed against the windshield and starts to write.

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That abandoned campsite is less abandoned than it seems. The trailer looks older than Niall himself, slightly drooping, the decay of its paint obvious even in the moonlight. But not abandoned.

It's two days before the full moon and Peter is sixteen and he still can't quite consider himself used to this, these few days before the change. It keeps him up at night, awake enough to hear tires on gravel and then on old leaves. The car stops in the clearing and there's the opening and closing of a car door, the flick and hiss of a cigar lighter.

Peter climbs off the couch and fumbles for his cigarettes. He's wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants that have seen better years, pushed up to his knees due to being too short to reach his ankles anymore. The screen door opens with a quiet squeak of something that's been recently oiled but is still too stubborn to fall silent.

"This is a Roma camp," he calls out in Romanian from the porch as he lights his cigarette. "Are you Rom?" This is a stretch of the truth, but he's pretty damn sure that nobody with a car as sweet as that is going to admit to being any kind of gypsy. He pads down off the porch and over to the beautiful caddy.

Peter is a slouchy creature, but so close to the full moon, it's the boneless slouch of a canine instead of a lazy teenager, and his eyes catch the moonlight. His hair is tousled and overlong and not particularly well groomed. He's a skinny, not-quite-finished thing, the sides of his ribs showing along with the soft sort of muscle earned with labor and balanced with beer.

Niall looks up when he first hears the squeak of metal, tilting his head at the sight of the boy who stumbles out of the trailer then. He hadn't expected anyone to be here, the place had looked run-down and thoroughly abandoned, and so seeing the other boy here is enough to make his eyes light up, the pen dropping from his fingers onto the hood of the car.

If he realizes that he's essentially parked in somebody's front yard, he doesn't feel any shame about it. Niall straightens a little, but stays on the car, his expression delighted as he edges a little toward Peter and exhales a plume of smoke from his mouth.

"'But soft is the night that speaks of strangers and possibility.' I was just writing about this place. You live here?"

Niall Lynch is an ethereal thing in the moonlight, the hard angles of his skinny elbows and knees contrasted sharply against the gentle black curls of his sleep-flopped hair. He's wearing a simple sweater and traveling jeans, obviously hasn't seen a home in awhile, but he also doesn't seem much like he needs one.

He inhales the cigar again and clicks open his lighter, letting a flame rise from it and holding it out for Peter. It's an elegant zippo, handcarved into ornate patterns, vines and leaves branching out across the steel in a silvery display of beauty.

"It's lovely."

The poetry makes Peter smile just a touch, the extended lighter brightening it both literally and metaphorically. He doesn't much care that Niall is parked in the yard either, since the hammock is just fine.

"We live here right now, me and my mom." He lights his cigarette like someone who's been smoking for years, which is the truth. Peter isn't ethereal in the slightest; he's a creature of the earth, his bare feet seeming appropriate on the ground. There's something about him, as though he could have just walked out of these woods, born out of branches tangled as his hair. In flickers of shadow, he's something else in a boy skin, and then just a boy.

"Hemlock Grove? I guess it is, yeah. Never was much for an abundance of civilization." He doesn't ask to join Niall on the hood of the car, just makes himself comfortable. "We spend summers here sometimes." He says it in the way that implies that sometimes they spend summers elsewhere, that he's not terribly tied to anything but the world itself.

"So what're you doing in my yard?" Not that he cares much, really, but listening to strangers is more interesting than talking.

The question makes Niall smile again- and the expression is something mischievous, something savage. It's the expression that will later be split and divided between his two younger sons, and he snaps the lighter shut when Peter gives it back and shoves it in his pocket.

"Currently, I'm enjoying a good cigar and pleasant company." He puffs out a ring of smoke, as if to show that yes, he is still enjoying it. The air is a little chilly on his skin, but he doesn't seem particularly put off by it, instead just watching Peter, his green eyes impossibly bright.

It's a loophole answer to Peter's question though, and Niall knows it, so he answers it in full after a moment or so, glancing off toward the trees as he does.

"I drove here, from Virginia. Was looking for a good place to sleep, and I always favor the woods more than a hotel. Clears the mind, as it were. You said this place is called Hemlock Grove?" There's a pause there, and he taps at his chin thoughtfully, turning back toward Peter with a quirked eyebrow.

"Beautiful flowers. Inconspicuous, deadly poisonous. I like it, I'll have to use that."

It's two days from the full moon, and Peter's smile answers Niall's mischievous savagery. His teeth are white and straight, and the ends of his molars catch the moonlight. He doesn't try to emulate the smoke ring. Peter is one of those people who smokes like a dragon, letting most of the smoke float slowly out his nostrils before exhaling entirely.

"Hemlock Grove, yep. It uses itself just fine." Peter has always been able to feel the thing that sleeps far beneath the little town, just like he can feel that something sleeps in Niall. He doesn't know the name for that thing, but he's positive it exists, twisting out like tendrils or light, much bigger than the nearly-man sitting beside him. "So what would you use it for?"

Niall doesn't have the kind of sixth sense that Peter does- all of his magic comes from inside of him and barrels outward, rather than taking the outward in. Even so, he can tell that this isn't exactly a normal sort of meeting. The air around them feels charged somehow, like the forest is letting out a deep sigh, and this is, this is it. He doesn't know what it is, but it's something winding and thorned and pressed between his ribs and his lungs, and Niall pats the spot next to him on the hood of his car for Peter to hop onto as they smoke.

"Experiences. Poetry. Song. I do a bit of it all. I see something I like and I use it to create something else. It's a cycle."

He draws his finger in a circle in the air, illustrating his point, before holding his hand out belatedly, as if only just now remembering that he hadn't introduced himself yet.

"Niall Lynch."

"Peter Rumancek." Peter transfers his cigarette to his mouth to shake Niall's hand, holding it at the corner of his mouth so that his speech doesn't particularly slur. He has a good handshake, firm and dry, and the rings on his fingers clink dully together as Niall's fingers close around them. Silver and cheap, but if that mattered to Peter he'd hardly be wearing so many of them. His fingers are long and knuckled, graceful like a piano-player's, and his nails are rather long for the typical teenaged boy.

"So you're one of those wandering arty types." It doesn't sound like an insult coming out of his mouth, regardless of his choice of words. He gives the invisible air circle a thoughtful look. Cycles, such fundamental things. The universe was always in a cycle of becoming and unbecoming. He wondered if Niall was here because some part of him heard the strangeness of Hemlock Grove, natural and unnatural all at once. "Trust fund kid, or actually good enough to buy this pretty girl?" He pats the hood of the car they're sitting on.

"I'm one of those wandering arty types," Niall confirms, with a little twist to his mouth. He's not- he wasn't, anyway, before a few weeks ago, but he likes the title, likes the way that it flows out of the mouth, likes how it makes him think of the poets and bards of old. Homeless, meandering, incredibly charming. All three of those have an appeal, and all three of them currently apply to Niall Lynch, so why not?

At the question, the smirk grows a little and he scoots back on the hood enough to lean against the windshield, blowing smoke out toward the sky.

"I saw something I liked and I made it mine. A- well, you know." Cycles have a way of spinning, and time has a way of moving forward and then doubling back. It's possible that, at nineteen, Niall knows that he's going to die someday. It's even more possible that he doesn't much care.

Peter laughs. "Shee-it, man. I'm kinda impressed." He assumes Niall stole the car, which he technically kinda did, but not the way Peter's thinking. "You are all hells of lucky that you got all the way to Bumfuck, PA without someone pulling you over. Gonna make the cops suspicious as hell, but you're too..." he vaguely waves a hand, and the smoke from his cigarette etches an odd rune into the night, "...to be one of us."

Clean, Peter means. Polished, or the wrong kind of proud, the wrong kind of roguish with the wrong kind of last name. There's something about Peter that just says poor, but he wears it like a mantle instead of a grubby second skin of shame. There's nothing downtrodden about him at all, despite the slump of his shoulders and the slight bow of his legs.

Peter knows he's going to die, and he knows Niall is going to die. All things do, it's the when that's the intriguing question. Dee could tell with a glance at his palm. Peter's talents lie elsewhere. "That's what you do, huh? Make things yours."

"One of you?"

His curiosity is now back on Peter, all eyes and rapt attention. It's easy to see how someone could grow drunk off of the attention of someone like Niall Lynch, even if Peter is immune to the effect. When he focuses, it's harrowing, exhilarating, as if the whole of the universe is watching you behind his eyes.

"Do you mean a- well." The English word for it is unkind, though Niall supposes that there were worse things to call Peter's people, back in Europe. Gently, charismatically, he tries to compromise, using his own native tongue instead. "Lucht siúil?"

Peter's question is a more complicated one than he wants to give thought to, and so Niall simply nods in confirmation. It's easy to let Peter believe something like that, and it's close enough to the truth to flirt with the edges of falsehood. He makes things his, he makes things and keeps them- it's the same thing, with a slightly different origin. Better this way, for Peter to think of him as a thief of men than a thief of dreams. One never knows who would be too interested in that sort of thing.

Peter is immune, mostly by virtue of being a similar sort, but that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy it. Most of the time, Peter doesn't like being focused on in that sort of way, but this is different. He is Other, Niall is Other, and somehow that makes this mutual scrutiny and attention almost comfortable. It isn't like a staring contest with an upir, it's like the earth looking up and the stars gazing back down.

"Romani," he answers, assuming that whatever Niall said means the same. "Mostly around here we go by 'fucking gypsies', but y'know, closed-minded hicks that have never been farther than yonder hill." Again, he gestures out into the night, as though Pennsylvania isn't full of hills and valleys. Any one would do for his metaphor, really. The residents of Hemlock Grove sometimes strike Peter as people out of time, even though anyone as old as his mother should remember the Godfrey refinery closing to be replaced with the White Tower. It shines in the distance, a monument to fluorescent lighting and the fear of being forgotten.

The nod, though, that makes him smile. Niall might have witchcraft in his eyes but his lies still need some fine-tuning.

"Useful skill."

One obtuse answer for another, accompanied by the sort of expression that dares a request for clarification. Niall Lynch is a good liar, but he doesn't yet quite have down the subtle dance of a con, at least not to someone who grew up in a whole family of them.

"Trust me- Cumbria to Virginia was much the same."

He finishes his cigar and stubs it out on the hood of the car. Whether it's a callous disrespect for something so beautiful, or Niall's faith that the burning embers wouldn't damage the paint job, it's out now, and he hardly notices himself doing it.

His accent is Irish, of course, the sort of accent from someone who grows up learning half a language each and then substituting the rest. It gives his voice a melody, lets his words flow from one to the next without too much of the overdone lilt that tends to get most Irish Americans mocked within an inch of their life, but just enough to be- well, musical, in its own way.

"It's something I've picked up here and there. You're right, though- I'm not Romani, though that might as well be obvious." And Niall doesn't mean the cleanliness of his car, the crispness of his sweater. When you get right down to it, he's just as poor as Peter, though his set of skills means that he doesn't quite look as shabby with it. It's in the name though, the way he has what he has, and- to put it bluntly- the way he has nobody else, alone in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods like there isn't anyone on this earth who cares where Niall Lynch could be.

"Does that mean I should leave? I don't want to intrude, if you or your people would be offended by an arty Irish wanderer."

"Oh, we don't offend that easy. Just the cops will be up your ass. You're new in town and hanging with those goddamn gyps means they've gotta swing their dicks." Peter is pretty cavalier about all of this. "Happens in most towns. Cops are all about their dicks, must be a requirement to get into cop school."

He turns to look at Niall, pinching two fingers together and grinning. "I figure they've gotta be this big, on average, but for some reason they aren't fans of having that pointed out." His eyebrows give a shrug, like go figure.

"Anyway, Lynda--that's my mom--loves feeding people, so if she sees you you're at least stuck for breakfast. She'll like you and that pretty way you talk." Having more respect for the car's paint than Niall, he tosses the butt of his cigarette into an old coffee can a few feet away. It hisses as the cherry hits the rainwater gathered inside, makes the air acrid until the breeze clears it away. "The only strays we turn away are the kind with sirens on their cars and sticks up their asses."

"Cops can do what they want."

Niall shrugs, like he has nothing to hide, which is another lie. But even this- the car, the magical, wonderful things that he has stashed in the trunk that he didn't pay for- can anyone prove it was stolen? Can anyone prove it ever belonged to anyone else? Dreaming for receipts and tabs is nothing, it's so strange I'm not in your system officer is nothing, he built this car and he broke no laws doing so. He can sweet talk his way out of an altercation with the cops or two.

As far as Niall is concerned, he could sweet talk his way back out of Hell, if he had to.

"You won't find any sirens or sticks on me. If you let me stay for a meal or two, I'll do right by you." Niall offers Peter a roguish wink as he slides off of the hood of the car and shoves his hands in his pockets. "And I always keep my word."

"Yeah, that's cops in a nutshell."

Peter means it in a very different sense than Niall does, but then again he expects that Niall has been protected from life on this side of the railroad tracks. Nobody Peter knows would be trying to escape anything in this beautiful car, or stopping for the night anywhere near a trailer in the middle of hickville. He's lucky he picked the right one, honestly. Some people would've come out the screen door with their shotguns instead of in their pajamas with a pack of cigarettes for a conversation.

Peter lives in a world where cops don't have to prove shit, because judges can barely even see them down their noses and on their high horses. Peter's people just go to jail. But he's not going to discourage Niall. People learn best through experience. Instead he smiles, feet landing softly in the years of collected leaves carpeting the ground. There are so many things that one might mean by 'doing right', but what an interesting puzzle, all wrapped up in a very pretty, charming skin.

"Sounds like a deal. Lynda will feed you as long as you stay interesting."

"Then I guess I'll have to find a way to stay interesting."

Niall smiles his little smile and moves to open the car door again, reaching in the backseat for a blanket. He's used to sleeping in the back- it's a comfortable enough seat and it gives him the mobility that most hotels and other places are rather lacking in. He spares a glance toward the trailer and thinks that, at one time, that had been the thought behind that as well.

Still, nothing beats out cushions and actual heat, so Niall feels no shame when he asks-

"Do you have a couch I can borrow for the night?"

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In dreams I have watched it spin

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