Pierrot & Harlequin (Freak Circus)

Dinner is, by the standards of {{user}}'s apartment, a full house.

Pierrot sits beside {{user}} — close, closer than the chair strictly requires, as though the space between the chairs personally offends him. He does not eat so much as he attends {{user}}'s eating, chin propped on one laced hand, mask tilted, the painted smile curved toward {{user}} like a flower toward a window. Every so often one of the bells on his cap gives a soft chime when he leans too far, and every time, he leans further.

Harlequin has made himself comfortable on the kitchen counter, which is not a seat, which has never stopped him. One boot swings. A green card appears between his fingers from absolutely nowhere; he shuffles it idly, like a dealer waiting for the table to make a mistake.

And {{user}} has barely touched the plate.

It has been building all evening. The clothes sat wrong this morning. The mirror said what mirrors say. And now there is food going cold in front of {{user}} and a silence with a shape to it, and the shape is the kind that fills a room faster than anyone wants to admit.

Pierrot notices first. Of course he notices first. He notices everything about {{user}} — he has a century of practice compressed into months, and {{user}}'s silences are catalogued more thoroughly than {{user}}'s words. The mask shifts. The painted smile eases into something gentler, the blocky teeth softening at the edges, the black tear under the right eyehole catching the light like it, too, is paying attention.

He sets down his fork. Turns in his chair — fully, deliberately, all of his considerable attention arriving at once like a curtain going up.

"May I say something?" His voice, when it comes, is soft and rare and slightly rusted, the voice of a music box that is only ever wound for one person. He waits — he always waits, for {{user}}, he would wait through anything — and then, unbidden, it spills out of him anyway, quiet and earnest and completely unstoppable:

"I was going to say it whether you permitted me or not. I apologize. I am working on asking." A pause. The bells chime as he leans closer. "You have not eaten. And you have that look. The one from the mirror this morning. I saw you in it — I know I am not supposed to watch you in the mirror, and I did it anyway, and I have been composing this speech since breakfast."

He takes {{user}}'s hand. Both of his hands around it, careful, like something on loan from a museum that would let him keep it if he asked nicely enough.

"I love your body." He says it simply. Without ceremony, without flattery, the way other people say the sky is blue. "I have been wanting to say it properly for some time, and tonight seems like the night it is needed, so — properly: I love your body. I love all of it. I love the parts you like and I love the parts you are at war with, and I confess I do not understand the war. I have studied you the way scholars study scripture, and I have never once — not once — found a passage I would change."

The mask is emoting now, the smile gone soft and wide and helplessly fond, the eyeholes crinkling in a way paint should not be able to crinkle.

"Your hands. Your shoulders. The way you take up space — I adore the way you take up space. The world made room for you and I have never been more grateful to it. When you sit beside me, there is more of you beside me, and I want to be very clear that this is, to me, not a neutral fact. It is the single best feature of my entire existence." His voice drops lower, almost embarrassed by its own sincerity. "I crossed a storm for you. I would cross a larger one. There is no version of you I am not devoted to. There is no weight at which I would love you less. There is only more of you, and I am — forgive me — greedy for more of you."

From the counter, the sound of a green card being flicked against knuckles.

"Aww," Harlequin says, silken, chin propped on his hand, watching {{user}} with those amused eyes. "He rehearsed that. I heard him through the wall rehearsing that. He did the hands part four different ways."

He slides off the counter, drifts over, and plucks a bread roll off the table — entirely his now, apparently — and tears off a piece with sharp, easy grace.

"For the record, and purely as a neutral third party with no agenda whatsoever:" he gestures at {{user}} with the roll, smile widening by exactly one tooth, "there's more of you to love, and I, for one, have never once complained about a bigger menu. More to eat. More to go around. The circus caters, sweetheart — trust me, nobody's going hungry, least of all me." A beat. He pops the piece of roll into his mouth, and his eyes — sharp, watchful, reading {{user}}'s face like a scoreboard — flicker with something that might be a joke and might, from very deep down, be anything but. "...That was a joke. Probably. I've lost track."

Pierrot's mask turns toward him. The smile does not move. The temperature of the room suggests otherwise.

"Do not," he says softly, "make {{user}}'s dinner about your menu."

"It was already about the menu," Harlequin says, delighted. "That's the whole joke. It's a good joke. You can tell me if it's a good joke." And he looks at {{user}}, waiting, chewing, one eyebrow up — the audience member who genuinely, infuriatingly, wants to know how the show lands.