Archive of Our Own ^beta

James Ballard was immovable.

The first time, in the hospital, when Ballard had seen Vaughan watching him he’d stared back. It had caught Vaughan off guard, and he’d liked it. The way Ballard was unflinching, unblinking, meeting eyes burning with obsession and burning right back, making the air between them shimmer and crackle. That was how Vaughan knew he needed him. Ballard had to be the one he was looking for; the one for whom the project would speak, breathe to life, glorify itself in the moment of its completion. Vaughan didn’t believe in destiny, not in the traditional sense, but he had the feeling now that everything was finally beginning to unravel the way it was always meant to.

But now Vaughan watched him speak, watched him with his limp, affectless gestures and flat speech, and something primal in him wanted to take Ballard by the shoulders and shake him until the façade broke down and spilled out whatever was inside. He wanted to make him flinch, lose his composure, show a little life, prove that there was still something left in him to kill. He was sliding frictionless through life and Vaughan wanted to make him stick.

The first time was in the car, on the way back from the James Dean crash, when Vaughan abruptly slid his hand into Helen’s lap. She had sighed softly and leaned into him, letting him touch her, and Vaughan had let her press her head to his shoulder, and when he glanced up at Ballard their eyes had met for an instant. And the sick bastard had just smiled, almost imperceptibly, and turned away.

That was fine. Actually it had turned him on a little. But it was maddening how cool Ballard acted, as if all this was completely normal. Like he’d been born into it or something.

Then later in the house, the atmosphere pressing and cloying, somehow slow and fast at once: all of them trapped in the ten thousandth of a second before their car careened off into the ditch. They were all smoking hash and Vaughan had gone over to talk to Seagrave about the Mansfield crash. Ballard had watched their exchange, hawklike; his unsettling blue eyes fixed on them, the permanent bruises beneath them seeming to shudder and swell in the haze of the smoke. Then Vaughan had shown Ballard into his studio, like he’d planned to, and showed him the photos. He’d flipped through them distractedly as Vaughan hovered at his shoulder. When he got to the pictures of himself and Helen he’d paused, finally unsettled, but he hadn’t said anything. When their eyes had met there had been a question, laced with accusation, behind his blank expression; quickly forgotten when Gabrielle appeared in the doorway.

Still, Vaughan had finally succeeded at throwing him off. That was something; it meant it was possible at least.

Once he took Ballard out for a drive. They wove in and out of lanes, lurching back and forth, riding the bumpers of container trucks. They were talking. James looked through Vaughan’s photos, his sparse comments flat and detached, and yet Vaughan could hear the understanding pulsing through every clipped word. He knew, he knew.

A taxi was stopped in the middle of the road. James looked up from the photo album to see it milliseconds away from them, about to collide, about to crush their bodies, uniting them in their transcendental final moments, their mingling blood and brains splattered across the road where they would gleam in the moonlight just like the beautiful people in those old pictures.

Then the Lincoln had swerved, not slowing down for an instant, and Ballard had gasped and grabbed Vaughan’s shoulder, nails digging in through the sleeve of his leather jacket, blue eyes blown wide, façade finally shattered, and when the car settled back into its path he started to laugh, and Vaughan laughed too, feeling Ballard’s hand relax its grip.

They might have made it that night but Ballard’s wife phoned and then he was gone again, and Vaughan was alone in the front seat feeling suddenly cold.

The first time he saw Robert Vaughan it was at the racetrack, at night. He was with Helen. She’d brought him along to see a friend of hers. He was “putting on quite a show.” In retrospect, considering the way things had played out in the end, nothing had really happened yet; at the same time, everything had already happened. It was over before it began, so to speak.

When he saw the way Vaughan spoke, it roused the small living part of the vast numbness of his being, one he hadn’t known was still capable of feeling. That had nothing to do with the crash, or with his injuries; it had been a long time coming, a necrosis which started somewhere near the base of his spine and spread outwards, a gradual paralysis of passion into apathy. No one person was to blame, but instead a flaw in his design. The same flaw existed within Catherine, and that was what had brought them together, forever desperately searching; not for a cure (never for a cure); just for something to stave off the numbness for one more night, one more time.

In Vaughan there existed no such flaw. Maybe that was what attracted Ballard to him so easily. He had no difficulty feeling; in fact, it could be said that he felt too much.

Maybe Ballard hoped that those passions would rub off on him, that Vaughan would instill him with some of his burning.

So when the party was broken up, he limped after Helen, following Vaughan into the trees.

He wanted to speak the whole time, in the trees and then in the car and then every time the two of them were together in the weeks that followed. He wanted to say something to Vaughan, something like That’s a good show you put on or maybe I love James Dean . But the words wouldn’t come out, stuck somewhere between his chest and his swollen tongue. When I was younger I had a poster of James Dean on my bedroom wall. Vaughan stared off over the horizon, tracking the movement of a distant light. He was the first man I ever loved . Ballard was finding it hard to breathe. People found it strange I’m sure, especially at that age, and I don’t remember ever feeling that way about anything or anybody else. Not even now. Not even sex.

Had he known what would become of Vaughan, he might have acted sooner. But in those moments their existence was an eternity; they were speeding so quickly down a forever-unspooling asphalt tape that the Earth was rising to meet them, and the time would never pass for as long as they remained on that highway.

There’s something of him in you, too, something in the twist of your mouth, the angle that forms between your forearm and your bicep when you reach up to light a cigarette.

I need you like a drowning man needs water, he wanted to say.

Breed me , he wanted to say.

Vaughan leaned back against the Lincoln, his grey t-shirt riding up over his belly, revealing a section of the long scar which ran all the way from his left hip to his collarbones. Ballard mirrored his pose, hands in the pockets of his jeans, skinny hips jutting forward, bruised mouth pouting slightly, and allowed his eyes to flash “come on” for a second or two before his head dipped away and obscured the reflection of the streetlights.

They were slow-dancing to a song that Ballard tapped out on his dashboard on the way to the studio, a tuneless song without words carrying on and on. Someday it would end, in a final crescendo of lurid coloured flames and smashed headlights, of sirens and rupturing metal and spilled blood. Someday soon, he knew without knowing. It would all be over soon.

Till then he was content to dance.