»opulence{miles kane x alex turner}

c o m r a d e

sorry it's been ages!! but I FINALLY got a new computer!! (its super high tech and corrects all my grammatical inaccuracies for me, so that's one less thing for you to have to deal with lmao)

sorry for keeping u waiting, thank u for being cool, hope u enjoy it x

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The next morning broke with a wintry sun over the horizon, jewelling the grass outside and sending wispy darts of dust shining through every window. It would probably have been one of the prettiest mornings that any of the men in this house had ever seen, but the sickening, drowning sense of fear and of horrendous expectation was leeching the enjoyment out of everything.

The tenancy agreement of this house had expanded by a whole new person last night. It wasn't just Miles and Jamie who spent the nights here now, not just the two of them to fill this huge, empty house. Alex Turner could not go home anymore. Alex Turner had to hide.

No one had actually told him what that entailed; for how long he'd have to keep his head down, to what extent he was going to have to drape himself in Miles' shadow and not leave the house- not even the barest estimate of how long or how serious this situation was. It involved someone breaking in and trying to kill Jamie on his behalf, it involved guns and threats and things that Miles had only ever hinted at before, but it still hadn't pierced Alex with the icy dagger that it should have done. He was a different person to the one he was before he left for Chicago- after all, who was Alex Turner beneath the arrogant sense of freedom and wardrobe full of designer suits?

That was the first problem he encountered as a result of staying at Miles' house without planning to. The wardrobe in the guest bedroom was heartbreakingly bare, and all the clothes he'd worn yesterday (and indeed the meagre collection withering away in his suitcase) were thick with sweat, smelling worse than he would ever care to associate himself with. Alex had woken from his begrudged sleep far too early, just as the white sun was rising over the tops of the browning trees, and had sat on the edge of the bed with a thick, unpleasant sense of dread beginning to make some sort of permanent home in his heart. No one could see any way out of this situation (not one that didn't involve extreme risk and violence, anyway). He'd sat like that, with his head in his hands and his fingers laced through his uncharacteristically greasy hair, thoughts spiralling into the dark in his head- for what seemed like hours, until there came a tentative, almost secretive knock on the door at about half six that morning.

Alex's reply was a sad sort of croak. "Yeah?"

He wasn't entirely sure who he was expecting, though somewhere in the bottom of his stomach he supposed he'd expected Miles. The figure that fell as a silhouette against the thick carpet wasn't tall enough to be Miles, though- and he looked up eventually to the unexpected (though definitely not unwelcome) figure of Jamie. Something didn't feel right, though, and the sense of something wrong only deepened past argument when the second man entered the room properly.

In the harsh light of the morning, Jamie looked even worse than he did yesterday. The dark of the corridors last night had lent him some dark, brooding mask- a tired man, but a man that was still a force to be reckoned with, a force that was all the more dangerous for being slightly tapped, slightly unhinged. Now, however, there was nothing brooding about him anymore. The tiredness was presenting itself as sheer exhaustion, granting Jamie the half-hunted look of a man who hadn't slept for a week or more, a man whose total eluding of sleep had shattered him from the inside out, almost ravaged by stress and fear and curdling in the bruises under his eyes and the thin slant of his frame that had never been there before; the almost imperceptible resignation in his stance.

"I'm sorry about this." Alex felt compelled to say something, to apologise for what he'd done to cause this total wreck of a man that stood before him.