FIC: prelude.

[surquelpied]

The message ticks in at an hour that reveals Jean-Baptiste has been dancing tonight, a quarter past two and with that slightly manic tone that sneaks into everything, post-performance.

Debuted mazurka in Études tonight, so naturally I thought of you. You just fucking disappeared, Claude, literally overnight.

I checked your company’s schedule and saw you’re dancing The Lady Saturday. I happen to have a long weekend coming up now. I’ve bought a ticket and will be in Luxembourg by four PM tomorrow, which – eh – I guess means later today.

You don’t have to meet up with me if you can’t. Or don’t want to. And feel free to tell me if it’s a bad idea, then I’ll stay away.

Just thought, you know, I’d try.

Having been on a pure rehearsal schedule for a week, no performances, while they prepare for Theme next week, Claude has hit somewhat of a slump. He is struggling with the male lead in Balanchine’s short Tchaikovsky-fuelled gem, the coaches sent by the Balanchine Trust not quite getting him and he not quite getting them. That is the sole reason that he tears up as he reads over the message, of course, this first real attempt at reaching out anyone in his old gang has made. It’s that time, then? He’s coming up for air? No more sinking, sinking, sinking.

Freefalling, freefalling, freefalling.

The reply takes too long in forming, his thumbs feeling uncooperative which is ridiculous, because Claude Bérubé’s got motor skills like a very hyper-active pro.

i didn’t disappear overnight, he starts out, then deletes, then retypes.

you knew where to look. it’s not me who didn’t want to be found, it was you who didn’t want to find me.

that said, you already know i’d never tell you not to come. or miss a chance to see you. it’s been too long, jean-baptiste.

i’ll pick you up at the train station at four.

congratulations on the mazurka. looking forward to hearing all about it.

The reply comes seconds after, it’s just a thumbs-up, there’s nothing else to it. Maybe, if Claude didn’t know how it works, that sudden collapse which usually happens four to five hours after a show, he’d have felt snubbed, but as it is, he imagines Jean-Baptiste kind of just falling, arms out to both sides, onto his bed, phone dropping onto the floor, forgotten for the time being, in his Left Bank basement apartment, if that’s still where he lives.

Claude hasn’t asked anyone, and neither has anyone taken the time to tell him.

~

Jean-Baptiste’s train is half an hour delayed, which is perfect, because Claude got held up at the theatre, discussing a sequence of steps with one of the Balanchine Trust coaches who wanted him to show more attention on the ballerina. Claude ended up snapping at him that he paid all the attention on her that he possibly could without effectively gorging his eyes out of his eye sockets and planting them in her cleavage. It hadn’t been a popular comeback. Benjamin had had to step in, ever the mediator, telling Claude to take a breather and come back with more careful attention and a better attitude tomorrow.

Claude, on his end, misses the first tram, then the second one, seething quietly underneath the roof of the tram stop, the rain a soft drizzle, breaking up every now and then to make room for a bright ray of sun. Typical autumn weather. When he finally makes it to the train station, Jean-Baptiste has sent him a photo of the big clock at the centre of the building, to indicate he’s arrived and waiting. Where, too.

Locating him is easy. One thing is the way ballet dancers all carry themselves, like a collective body across time and space, but the other is how Claude fucking knows Jean-Baptiste, he knows him like the back of his hand. They’ve been at the School together since they were both ten years old. Jean-Baptiste was the first boy he kissed, the first whose dick he sucked, the first he tried anal with. He could find him by smell. By feel, he could probably pick him out of a line-up.

If he were dancing, Claude could do it by sight alone. The curve of his shoulders, the way he unapologetically favours his right side.

It brings out an unexpected surge of emotion in him, when he sees him standing beneath the clock, head turned the other way, his strawberry blonde hair catching the light like a halo. Claude has to halt for a second, breathing hard through an open mouth, until he bites his lip, also hard, and then breaks into a run that, if nothing else, alerts Jean-Baptiste to his presence. The other man turns towards him, opening his arms to him mostly out of surprise, catching him in a big hug and swinging him around, because while he isn’t as tall as, say, Vincent, he’s a good five centimetres taller than Claude. When they were younger and less concerned for their bodies, they’d done deadlifts like that, Claude has hung above Jean-Baptiste’s head like some stout Giselle more times than he cares to count now.

Grunting, Jean-Baptiste eases him down on flat feet, Claude patting him on the back without stepping back, pressing his whole face in against his shoulder. Pat, pat, pat. Watch your back, he mothers him, needlessly. Jean-Baptiste has a mother and a very nice one at that, she has often driven Claude to and from events after his own relation to his mother soured.

Finally, Jean-Baptiste draws back. Looks down at him. “Who’s watching yours these days?”

“I’ve got people,” Claude shrugs, stepping back as well, following Jean-Baptiste’s lead, because that’s what he does with most people, unless they’re from the Balanchine Trust.

He doesn’t say, not you.

And Jean-Baptiste doesn’t ask for an elaboration.

~

When they walk out of the train station and head towards the tram that’ll take them back to Kirchberg and Claude’s apartment, it’s stopped raining, the sky blotchy blue in most places. Jean-Baptiste is sitting opposite of him on the tram, looking past his shoulder at inner City passing by, stop by stop. He looks contemplative.

“Never imagined you anywhere but in Paris,” he admits finally, sounding apologetic, like he doesn’t really want to bring it up, but does anyway, because the thought won’t leave him. The discrepancy between their backdrop and Claude in the middle of it. Claude is sitting with his legs wide spread and hands hanging loosely, folded between his knees. Manspreading. He shouldn’t, but here they are.

“Shit happens,” he just replies, looking out as well. As they pass the theatre, he points it out to Jean-Baptiste who takes a quick snap, probably for Instagram. Claude stopped actively following the whole POB months ago. He doesn’t believe in tormenting himself like that.

After today, maybe he’ll start following them again. Take the hand extended to him, crossing all of Northern France. Because in their world, if just one makes the first move, they’re all going to follow, it’s in their very design, it’s how they were brought up, how they were taught.

~

One step inside Claude’s apartment and Jean-Baptiste gestures to his barre space at the foot of the bed, clicking his tongue. “No football field floors,” is his only comment. Claude walks over to the bed and digs out the same duvet Vincent had slept in last time, bedlinen newly changed, then an extra pillow and throws both things at the other man, expecting him to catch.

He does.

“Expensive here,” he asks, walking up next to Claude and spreading out the duvet next to Claude’s, the pillow next to Claude’s pillow. They’ve slept like that in too-narrow beds so often, this is honestly no problem.

“What do you think,” Claude laughs, reaching up and ruffling his hair, the shaggy bangs down across his forehead. “We’re talking the coin slot of Europe’s fucking vending machine.”

“You don’t mean its casino,” Jean-Baptiste retorts, raising an eyebrow and grabbing Claude’s hand as he withdraws, whirling him into a small spin, twisting his fingers around Claude’s wrist the way they’re taught to make the slide easier and to avoid injuries. They can really whip the girls around that way. Or each other. Claude pushes his whole flat left hand against the other man’s chest and pulls himself to a full stop, precise, fast, snappy.

“Trust me, Luxembourg doesn’t need more than one opening to fuck people over for money.”

They both laugh, standing close and Jean-Baptiste smells exactly right, like things lost and regained and memories forgotten, memories made.

~

Later, they go downtown, sitting with a view over the Plateau du Rham and eating ice cream with little, brightly-coloured plastic spoons. Tourists and locals walk by, easily distinguished by their clothes, because only local Luxembourgers still wear completely pristine Armani shirts on the way home from their banker jobs. Or spotless high heels, if they’re women, tap tap tap. Not a speck of mud. No dust anywhere.

“Seeing anyone at the moment,” Claude asks rather than answering Jean-Baptiste’s muttered, what is this place you’ve ended up.

“Yeah,” Jean-Baptiste replies, making Claude’s heart sink in his chest for too many reasons to name them all. Jealousy. Sadness. Loneliness. “Stéphanie. She’s amazing. First girl I’ve met who’s actually fine with keeping it open, when she says she’s fine with it.”

And for all those same reasons, Claude’s heart rises again. Jean-Baptiste gives him a look out the corner of his eye that says, I saw that.

“What about you,” he inquires, then. Claude licks the last dribbles of melting ice cream off his spoon, Jean-Baptiste following the trek of his tongue intently. “Found yourself a nice banker?”

A scoff.

“Does my kitchenette speak of any such sugar daddies, you think?” At the back of his mind, he remembers Vincent’s arm draped over his hip, the weight of it as he’d pulled it all the way over his front, the breadth of the other man’s chest against his back. How warm he’d been, through duvets and those final traces of sleep.

Claude is done with sugar daddies. Vincent has explicitly told him not to call him pops, after all.

“So you’re not seeing anyone,” Jean-Baptiste insists. Claude rolls his eyes and leans back, looking right up into the at this point cloudless sky.

“No,” he tells him. Not sure why he doesn’t let him in on the whole Vincent thing, but for some reason not ready to share that secret yet. Some things you can only reveal in a context of complete confidence and security. He might have known Jean-Baptiste since he was ten, fucked him and been fucked by him when they were both fumbling around with labels and identities, but for all intents and purposes, they’ve only just connected for a hot minute here.

Maybe in time.

Hopefully in time.

~

Saturday morning, Claude leaves Jean-Baptiste with a key to his apartment and goes to work. Throughout the day he gets frequent photos sent his way of all the places in City that Jean-Baptiste is visiting, some ballet pose or other breaking up the monotony of a landscape he knows too well at this point.

He reconciles with the Balanchine coach and pays better attention to Heidi, his ballerina for the opening. They move well together; he knows the speed she favours and how she doesn’t mind if he pushes it on the trust falls. It’s a good day.

At noon, the cast for the night’s closing performance of The Lady of the Camellias get off duty to go home and get ready for showtime. Claude waits for Jean-Baptiste in his dressing room, the other dancer finding it effortlessly and peeking inside to make sure he isn’t disturbing before getting the tour of the place. Naturally, it’s no Palais Garnier or Bastille, Luxembourg’s Concert Hall, but it’s fairly big for such a small capital – like everything else Luxembourgish. These false ideas of grandeur.

Then, finally, kissing both Claude’s cheeks, Jean-Baptiste wishes him toi toi and ventures out into the audience seats to find his spot. He’s bought an expensive ticket. For some reason, that touches Claude more than the rest of it.

He gets dressed. He gets ready. As with most performances, you rarely really know what for.

~

After the show, they walk home through the, once again, rain-glistening streets, though there’s no active drizzle to get them wet.

“You’ve grown so fucking much, Claude,” Jean-Baptiste says after a while of silence. “I almost didn’t recognise you.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Claude laughs, feeling a big dizzy and definitely hangry. Glad that the other dancer didn’t point out the sloppy corps work, the places where it showed how tired everyone was. “It’s not Paris, but I like it here.”

“Who knows, maybe you’d never have had this in Paris,” the other man replies, walking close enough that their shoulders bump, brush, rub, rub, rub. Claude shakes his head, knowing it’s true – and he wouldn’t have had it under any circumstances with Rainier breathing down his neck.

Yet, his answer is a rough, don’t say that, before he gestures for a kiosk on the corner between two side streets, stopping by the charming little building to buy cigarettes. He picks one out before holding the packet out to Jean-Baptiste who accepts. Neither of them truly smokes, but on occasions like this? They both do, a little bit.

“What do you want me to say instead,” Jean-Baptiske asks in between an inhalation and an exhalation, big smoke ring, two puffs through his nostrils afterwards. Disjointed smoke signals.

“How’s Rainier Coupe doing?” Claude doesn’t know why he asks. He doesn’t want to know, to be frank.

They stop next to each other by the end of the street, the nearest tram stop fifty meters down the main road. Jean-Baptiste turns his head to look at him directly, openly, a pained expression on his face. The half-smoked cigarette gets dropped on the ground, pushed into the cobblestones with one heel.

“He writes well of Sébastien Laffon now.”

Claude nods, saying nothing.

~

If someone cared enough to ask who initiated, Claude wouldn’t know what to answer. They’re standing in the dancing shadows of his studio apartment, at the foot of his bed and they’re kissing, Jean-Baptiste’s lips uncharacteristically soft and pliant. He usually kisses a bit like you’re hitting a wall of want, head-first. At least, how Claude remembers it. It’s been a few years and God knows, a lot can happen in those.

But he feels familiar and well-known and like home, like Paris, like lost and found and Claude clings to him, both arms locked around his neck, dragging him down on his level as their tongues push up against each other, parting only to undo shirts, ties, layers, layers, layers. Until they’re naked chests and underwear and underwear off, and Claude could be sixteen again. None of this shit could’ve happened. They could start afresh.

Except, it happened and nothing will ever be the same again.

As Jean-Baptiste sucks him off, he closes his eyes and thinks of Vincent. As he sucks Jean-Baptiste off, afterwards, on his knees, hands spread out over his buttocks, spreading them, fingers digging in, he thinks about Vincent’s sunflowers.

He comes up for air once the other man’s climax has died down, only looking up at his face when he’s ready for what he’ll see.

Almost didn’t recognise you, he thinks.

~

They go at it for hours. Like two seventeen-year-olds in a dormitory deserted over the weekend. As soon as Jean-Baptiste collapses, front down in his duvets, naked ass sticking up like two perfect spheres of biteable roundness, Claude pads across the naked training space and sits down at the ridiculously small kitchen table, checking his phone, naked as the day he was born. He spends five minutes re-friending a bunch of people across various media platforms, then he just sits and stares at Vincent’s name a the top of their latest text correspondence.

A long look at the bed. At Jean-Baptiste.

It’s that time, it seems.