Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	"pulp song" stellastarr*
Entry tags:	ficciones, random fandom

we can build our own world.
the mechanics of keeping score
affleck, affleck, damon and phoenix: various combinations thereof.
notes: for lassiterfics, in return for this lovely little gem, which is much better than this. beta'd by verocious. blatant disregard for a wee thing we call summer phoenix. also, i have no idea where the fuck damon lives so i just said la. if i'm wrong.. i don't care. also also, i reserve the right to make casey talk like an intellectual, because he went to columbia and majored in physics for god's sake.



game

If it started with Joaquin, neither of them is going to admit it.

Because, see, it might have — it might have been that night, that fucking night in New York, Casey just moving into his apartment on Joaq’s floor and an impromptu housewarming party, which ended up being a sort of impromptu den-of-drunken-debauchery-warming party, and that sweating pile of limbs and flesh on Casey’s new mattress that may have been (was) Joaq and Casey, and Ben leaning on the doorframe shitfaced and totally confused and watching with wide eyes —

Yeah, okay, it might have started there.

But you won’t get Ben or Casey to admit it, because neither of them remember that night or if they do they still claim not to, lying through their teeth in that enchanting Affleck way. Ben passed out on the floor by the apartment door and Joaq and Casey woke up on separate sides of the mattress, naked but none the worse for wear, and none of them remembered any of it.

But privately they both call it the Beginning. Because that is, probably, what it was.





set

You can probably get them to admit this, however: if Joaquin was push, Damon was shove, Damon had always been shove, right through Good Will Hunting and into Gerry, which involved a lot of late night “script rewrites” and “character studies,” which was code for drinking games and naked shenanigans, respectively; yeah. Damon was a whole fucking load of shove.

Casey and Damon had a lot of conversations that went something like, blah blah blah Ben blah did you sleep with him blah are you telling the truth blah blah, and it wasn’t necessarily Casey always asking the questions. Damon had this twisted idea about brotherly affection, or maybe just about relationships in general— or maybe it just turned him on to think about Casey and Ben fucking. Damon was in love with Ben and both of them knew it, but if Casey was fine with being a stand-in, well, so be it.

Ben wasn’t happy, though, and he made this clear: pissed-off signals radiating from LA to Death Valley. You can’t fuck my best friend was his best argument, but Casey always replied with a cheery and how’s Jennifer and that was, well, that. They were brothers after all, had unspoken claims on each other, were equally betrayed, and could do nothing about it.

One night, though, Casey had Matt pinned to the mattress beneath him, chest slippery with sweat, and he leaned forwards and whispered you’re thinking of Ben, aren’t you, digging his fingers into Matt’s hair and pulling as he said it, and Matt arched his back and his Adam’s Apple pulsed in his throat and replied, yeah, but so are you.

And that was the end, because relationships last only as long as the lies they’re founded on, and anyway, shooting had wrapped. Bags packed. There was nothing to do but go their separate ways, so they did it amicably, and Casey went back to New York and Matt to LA, and Casey stopped turning his cellphone off whenever Ben called. And life went back to normal just like they all knew it would, and normal was somewhere between lonely, depressed and confused as shit, which was all right because at least, at the very fucking least, it was familiar territory.

And that was B, or as Casey calls it, the point of consciousness, or, as Ben calls it, the point where everything got really fucked up in really subconscious ways. Which, really, is the same thing.





match

So it comes down to this:

Ben and Casey in Casey’s apartment for days on end, Casey allegedly a refuge from the Jennifer Feeding Frenzy, as Casey called it (although they had been over for months at that point, Ben and Jennifer, only no one seemed to pick up on it until Jennifer started going home with all her notorious ex-whatevers, as she was wont to do when publicity started dying down). They’d been drinking for days, everything blurry and muzzy with a haze of liquor and unshaved beards and a shower that had gone unused for a week, and they weren’t doing anything, not really, just sitting around and occasionally smoking what was left of Casey’s Parliaments (only smoked on momentous occasions), and talking, about a lot of things, about nothing at all.

It comes down to this:

Damon casually cropping up in conversation like what happened between you two and we were both just trying to convince ourselves that the relationship was what we wanted, only it wasn’t, it was just a substitute and Casey’s hand unsteady where he gripped his beer and Ben’s eyes narrowed — in his ‘perceptive and dashing’ mode – and substitute for what bubbling out of Ben’s mouth and Casey going nothing, nothing, hastily, all folded up in his corner of the couch and Ben moving, moving over and putting his hand on Casey’s arm —

It had to have been the hand on Casey’s arm, because a hand on Casey’s arm became a hand on Casey’s hand and fingers interlocking with Casey’s fingers and then a mouth on Casey’s mouth and, well. After that it was a question of mechanics, mechanics and morality, only Casey had always been fond of the phrase you have to consider the possibility that morality does not exist, a paraphrase straight from Palahniuk, and Ben had always been good at mechanics.

It comes down to this:

mouths

teeth

tongue

hands

and Ben going softly brothers, but we’re brothers

and Casey going the problem with language is it limits meaning

giving things names makes them finite

I don’t know about you but I’ve always wanted to be

impossible.