troubled waters (FierroChase AU)

twenty-two

The waiter stood some steps away from their table and was as shocked as Alex to see his shy, polite Magnus kiss this boy whom he brought here, so suddenly and passionately; it was as if a secret side of this boy he had believed to know had revealed itself in an act of violent liberation nobody could have possibly anticipated. He'd witnessed a view hard to forget, an act of affection so spontaneous and innocent and thus so impressively beautiful, that it seemed nearly unreal. And the waiter noticed that he wasn't the only one all at once starting to pay attention to the corner table where those two handsome boys, after having a rather unobtrusive conversation, came to experience a very special moment, now silently looking at each other, both seeming shaken from whatever had happened between them.

With a bit of a delay, Magnus' friend finally noticed that it was actually him who had caused all this attention, because without his letting the glass fall down, there certainly would not have been so much attention paid to the boys. Realising this he slightly blushed for several reasons, and quickly made his way back to the kitchen in order to clean up the mess he had caused. He would have to wait some time anyway before serving the drinks that they had ordered, for there was now undoubtedly a necessity of intense and private talk between them, that he did not want to disturb. As the other guests saw that nothing more was going to happen, and, while keeping the remarkable eye contact, Alex and Magnus had started talking again in an unsuspicious manner, they refocused on their own conversations, commenting the young couple-to-be with a little smile and their impressions before their own lives supplanted the others' again. It was a pleasant surprise, something to lift the mood and to smile about, what else. Nobody except for the waiter knew anything about these people, and Alex' hair colour was the only thing remarkable about them. In this area of town, in this restaurant that they were both boys didn't bother anyone; that fact might have even intensified some of the smiles shared, and so it was possible for Magnus and Alex to keep to themselves, and to talk in a quiet and calm atmosphere about what had happened, and what would be.

It was Magnus who started ending the meaningful silence between the two by increasingly blushing while somehow enduring the look in Alex' eyes. Not that it was hard to observe those generally, the energic differing eye colours creating a strange mix of intensity and sensibility, while oftentimes hiding this strong glare behind a veneer of a coldness seeming innocent and pure, and nonetheless forbidding in an absolute and unquestionable kind of way. The different attitudes and sentiments Magnus had seen these eyes express were contradicting in themselves, but even more surprising was a characteristic he had noticed quite early in their acquaintance; the coldness radiating from her eyes was contrasting the light, warm and tender colours, and the impression that one could have caught without the special glare of Alex' illuminating them would have been one of instant sympathy, often also attraction quite the opposite of what she wanted to show.

These massive differences had caught Magnus' attention early on, and as he kept looking at Alex, all those thoughts, the entire process of knowing Alex passed behind his eyelids, concentrated, contracted on these two tiny ovals in her face, as if they were two birthing universes, starting from nothing more than a singularity, out of time and space, and quickly expanding into the nothing surrounding them, vivifying everything they touched, filling out Magnus' glare, his head, his heart, the entire room, the entire world. Yet those two singularities were fundamentally different, brown and amber, dark and pale, the peaceful stability of the earth joining the joyful, burning glare of the sun, revealing beauty and truth in her light; Magnus remembered that amber was said to originate in the see-fallen tears, that the Norse goddess Freya shed over losing her husband, and it was the soft sensation of this goddess of love that Magnus felt, an etherical endless summer, linking with the depths of nature, a dark brown as of prolific soil and aging trees, like those beautifully covering the Appalachians, old, large giants of the woods, spruces and pines that spread over the hills and mountains and gave a deep, soothing shadow to anybody who was walking beneath them; this memory made his heart ache, and yet his mind understood now that Alex had begun to touch his soul on another level, capturing parts of him that had long been forgotten.