The first time Julio sees ‘Star, it’s like a punch to the stomach.
Shatterstar moves like he’s dancing. He is lithe and wiry, made of hard lines and angles sharp enough to cut. His hair twists behind him like a banner, burning copper-gold in the cool sunlight, trailing bright, hot lines across Julio’s vision. He is breathtaking.
Later, they meet for real:
“Rictor, this is Shatty,” Tabitha says.
Beside her, standing a good ten inches taller, Shatterstar grimaces. “Shatterstar,” he corrects stiffly. Up close, Julio can barely stand to look at him.
“Right, yeah,” says Tabby. “Shatty, this is Ric.”
“Rictor,” says Julio. “Hey.”
Shatterstar only nods in response. Julio remembers thinking that he’s so much more up close––taller, and radiating heat like his bones are burning under those miles and miles of skin. Julio remembers thinking that if he stood there for too long, he’d vaporize.
Of course, Julio doesn’t permit himself the luxury of articulating this to himself at the time; he refuses to think about it. The first time Julio sees ‘Star, he feels things with terrifying implications, and the ugly, ashamed monster in his gut rears back and beats it all to a bloody pulp before he can put a name to it.
#
Shatterstar doesn’t smile often, and when he does, it isn’t nice.
He fights with crazed, feral joy. To Julio, it is a welcome chance to see what lies beneath Shatterstar’s marblesque exterior––in battle, he surrenders to something wild. He doesn’t move; the fight carries him from opponent to opponent, and Shatterstar unwraps each tidy package of flesh and blood and bone with methodical but savage flourishes of his blade. It is sickening and awful and dizzying to watch; looking at Shatterstar in the middle of battle leaves Julio feeling as if the ground has been yanked away.
Julio thinks Shatterstar is an adrenaline junkie––’Star only laughs if half his blood is outside his body and his fingers are curled tight around the grip of a sword.
A sword erupts through the chest of the person in front of Julio and cleaves it in two; the halves fall away to reveal a blood-spattered ‘Star, blades raised, breathing heavily and favoring one leg.
“Shit,” says Julio. “You okay?”
Shatterstar’s eyes are bright as he says, “You take the left,” and plunges past Julio to his right.
Julio takes the left. They fight back to back, shoulder to shoulder, slowly clearing a circle in the chaos of the battle. Julio watches out of the corner of his eye as Shatterstar twists and lunges and even takes blows with the kind of grace Julio can only dream of moving with.
When the simulation ends, Shatterstar, face bloody, body battered, gives Julio a long look that freezes his breath in his lungs before turning and heading for the showers with the rest of the team. Julio can do nothing but follow.
Julio aches in the pit of his stomach. He leans his head against the wall of the shower cubicle and decides that this can’t be allowed to continue. He tells himself that he’s just tired, or that it’s admiration, that he needs to get out more. Or it’s…
He fails to conjure another reason.
He thinks about Shatterstar, and tries not to think about Shatterstar, and waits for the water to wash his confusion down the drain with the rest of the blood and grime.
When the water turns cold, he shuts it off, grabs his towel, and steps back into the locker room. Shatterstar is leaning against the lockers, shoulders bare, working through strings of damp red hair with his fingers.
It’s so fucking unfair. It really is. Shatterstar’s skin is wet from the shower, and in the sterile light of the locker room, he looks like he’s made of a thousand panes of glass. His body is geometry, Julio realizes, and every angle and curve from the slope of his jaw to the curl of his fingers is calculated precisely to drive him up the fucking wall.
Shatterstar’s eyes are cast downwards, and Julio can see droplets of water caught in his lashes. His tattoo––the star mark––burns darkly against his tan skin; it dares Julio to close the gap between them, to reach out and touch it, to––
Shatterstar’s eyes snap up to Julio’s face. Julio does his very best not to stifle the strangled noise in his throat.
“Hello,” Shatterstar says, slightly awkward, perfectly neutral.
“I, uh,” Julio chokes out. “Hey.”
He hurries towards the lockers, heart hammering in his throat. He can feel ‘Star’s eyes burning holes in his back.
#
It can’t be avoided. Of course it can’t––Julio lives with the guy. He has no other choice than to continue to function as Shatterstar goes about his business, dragging Julio along behind him like cans tied to the fender of a speeding car. He’s a rip current, he’s a tidal wave, he’s forty-seven knot wind, and he knocks Julio off his feet every time he tries to stand back up. Julio catches himself wondering how anyone can have the audacity to do to a person what Shatterstar does to him.
They sit in front of the television together late at night, almost comfortable in silence, and Julio endures Shatterstar’s endless crusade through the channels. Nothing on TV is worth watching when ‘Star is right there, face cast in pale, flickering light, stone-still save for the continuous click-click-click of his thumb against the buttons of the remote. Julio tries to tell himself it doesn’t mean anything, but he finds more and more that he is thinking of midnight, one AM, two-thirty, when it is only him, late-night talk shows, and a boy made of sharp edges and fire.
It’s weeks before Shatterstar seems to really relax around Julio. The first time he says more than four words at once is to ask Julio what he wants to watch, to which Julio responds, “I don’t really care.” The second time––
“Would you like to share the blanket?” ‘Star says. His manner of speech is awkward and formal, but Julio tries not to take it personally.
It takes him a moment to process the meaning behind the words––it catches Julio completely off-guard and sends him reeling.
He manages to choke out, “What?”
Shatterstar repeats himself.
“I, um.” Julio clears this throat. “That’s okay. But thanks.”
He’s the dumbest fucking asshole alive.
Shatterstar’s face is still. He does not offer again.
They spend the next couple of nights in loaded silence. Julio wonders what would happen to them––if he can even say there is a them––if the television disappeared. As they sit in silence that has lost any veneer of comfort, Julio stews. He asks himself over and over and over why he could not just accept Shatterstar’s proposal––something that didn’t mean anything! But the ugly, ashamed thing in the pit of his stomach stirs, and Julio is reminded just how much weight it would carry.
A week passes, and the tension mounts, and then one night, Shatterstar doesn’t show.
Julio goes to the gym. He wants to lose his feelings between movements of his arms. He wants to stationary-bicycle away his brain.
It doesn’t work.
‘Star could have bailed for a million reasons, but Julio can’t think of anything. He is loathe to assume that he means so much to ‘Star that his declining a blanket would affect him at all––but then again, when there are so few actions taken between the two of them, what little there is must be amplified.
Julio goes in circles with the false wheels of the machine. Around and around and around. The day disappears.
That night, he gathers up the duvet from his own bed and knocks on Shatterstar’s door. There’s a long moment where Julio is almost afraid Shatterstar is ignoring him on purpose, but the door inevitably opens, spilling yellow light over the floorboards of the darkened hallway.
‘Star is… ‘Star. Every time Julio sees him, he feels like he’s looking into the sun, and now, silhouetted against the brightness of his room in a ratty tank top and boxers, Shatterstar is radiant as ever.
“Hey,” says Julio. “Uh. Missed you last night.”
Shatterstar’s expression is almost one of surprise.
“Movie?” Julio says, slightly helplessly. He’s starting to think this was all an enormous miscalculation.
Shatterstar considers him for a moment, before nodding. “Alright,” he says.
They can’t sit against opposite arms of the sofa and also share the duvet, but Julio places himself as far from Shatterstar as he can. There’s still a good foot between them, but Shatterstar radiates heat like a furnace. Julio can’t focus on anything else.
He aches for proximity. It gnaws at his flesh and burrows into his bones, a throbbing desire to sink his whole body into Shatterstar’s right side, to drown in his hair, to just touch him, even once. Even once.
He doesn’t register what he’s doing until his cheek brushes the bare skin of Shatterstar’s shoulder. Contact is like fire; it burns white-hot into his flesh, searing an imprint into Julio’s skin, sending smoke twisting up into the air to spell words Julio cannot repeat.
Shatterstar tenses beneath him, and for a moment, Julio is afraid that he’s fucked it all up. But then Shatterstar shifts so that Julio can lean against him easier, and Julio melts against him.
The next day, he wakes raw and blistered with the memory.
#
It’s battle again, only for real this time, and Julio doesn’t want to be there.
He never wants to be there. He hates it––he can’t breathe right pumped up on adrenaline. Everything races a hundred thousand miles a minute, and he doesn’t know that he can keep up.
They’re on a mountain, and the nature of mountains is such that Julio is balls deep in snow. The cool air stings his skin even as he feels sweat at the collar of his jacket. Moving is twice as hard. He hates it.
Shatterstar, of course, is fine––more than fine. He is entirely in his element, eyes alert, hair glinting like copper in the crisp morning sun; he prowls across the snow with the feral grace of a wild cat, wiry and agile and angular. Julio cuts his eyes on his sharp edges each time he glances over.
Julio is not fine. Julio is possibly the dumbest lovestruck asshole he’s ever met. Julio doesn’t notice when the baddies show up.
#
Julio misses the fight.
He wakes up on the sofa in the rec room, head pounding, tucked in under a duvet he doesn’t recognize. Sharp pain stabs through his abdomen when he tries to sit up. Broken ribs, maybe, or worse. Thankfully, Julio is wearing a shirt, and he doesn’t lift it to check the damage.
When he swings his legs over the edge of the couch and stands, his head swims. He is standing on unsteady ground, but he stumbles to the kitchen, chasing his balance.
Stupid, says a voice in his head. There is truth in this; logic says the smart thing would be to first assess the damage before doing anything to potentially exacerbate the wound. But pride takes precedence any day.
Julio takes a half-empty cup from the counter and dumps it out in the sink before refilling it from the tap. He drains it, refills it, drains it again, then decides he’s going to finish the night in his own goddamn bed.
Walking up the stairs with broken ribs is like doing anything with broken ribs; it hurts. It doesn’t help that Julio’s legs can’t seem to remember the strength it takes to say upright. He clutches the banister and soldiers to the top.
There is only one light in the hallway, slipping around the edges of a door leaning slightly ajar. As Julio approaches––his room is furthest from the landing––he realizes that it is Shatterstar’s; he sees him sitting on his bed, bare legs tangled in the sheets, flipping through a magazine. Julio makes to move on past, but the floorboard creaks, and ‘Star’s eyes catch him through the crack in the door.
He finds himself unable to move. Pinned against the darkness under Shatterstar’s unflinching stare, the phrase heart in throat takes on meaning for Julio. He swallows and does his best to ignore the sweat on his palms.
“Are you okay?” says Shatterstar after an eternity.
“What?” says Julio, because ‘What?’ is an appropriate response to concern.
Shatterstar repeats himself.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” says Julio. His ribs throb.
‘Star’s brow furrows. “You are not actually fine,” he guesses. “You are just saying that because it is social convention.”
Julio laughs, surprised, and then winces. “Yeah,” he says again. “No, I… I mean, it hurts, I just… I haven’t looked yet.”
“It was not too bad,” Shatterstar tells him. “Three broken ribs. There was no damage to any vital organs.”
“Oh,” says Julio, unsure of how to respond. Despite himself, he wonders if Shatterstar had helped to patch him up––stupid. “Uh, thanks.”
Julio realizes he can’t stay there in the hallway just outside ‘Star’s room. There is a moment of painfully awkward silence in which Julio debates the merits of two options: he can say goodnight and go to bed, or he can join ‘Star and… and what?
He’s about to turn and keep going when a third option strikes him.
“Hey,” Julio says, opening ‘Star’s door a little more. “Wanna watch a movie?”
Turns out, at four in the morning, there aren’t any movies on that are worth watching. Shatterstar cycles through the channels a few times before settling on a rerun of Star Trek.
Julio had thought it had been hot before, but that had been embers, that had been a sunburn. Julio can’t pretend it’s just the pain in his ribs––this is six feet of roaring wildfire. This is out of fucking hand. He and ‘Star sit in silence as the TV chatters on, and it’s only for a moment, but that is all the time required for the fire to eat its way deep into Julio’s chest. He is being consumed inside out––he feels it in his fingertips, under the skin of his face––and he once again finds himself unable to move.
This early in the morning, time has stopped. This early in the morning, time doesn’t exist.
Having turned his head without realizing it, Julio finds himself face to face with Shatterstar, whose eyelashes are impossibly long, and who, illuminated by the flickering light of the television, burns just as hot as Julio.
Because it is four in the morning, because Julio is on fire, and because time doesn’t exist, he allows himself to revise that thought: Shatterstar is not burning––Shatterstar is the source of the flames. Somehow, this is worse.
It doesn’t matter what Julio wants to say, because the words die in his throat. This close, he can see that Shatterstar’s blank eye isn’t really blank; the iris and pupil are light and faded almost to obscurity, but they’re still there. Shatterstar blinks once, the movement languid, decadent, even. Julio wants to look away, but something stops him.
“I did not…” starts Shatterstar, painfully uncertain.
Julio wants nothing more than to cup the sides of his face and trace the star mark with his thumb, to reassure him, to…
“I wanted you to be fine,” ‘Star continues. “I want…” His voice breaks on want, and he stops.
Julio is frozen. He can’t speak––he can’t even breathe. He barely processes when ‘Star leans forward.
Julio doesn’t plan to lean in, he doesn’t plan to shut his eyes, he doesn’t plan the sound he makes in his throat, but these things all happen. He realizes that time must have started again. He realizes that probably means something, and that should be terrifying.
In the moment, he doesn’t care.