you're too young & eager to love

Fandom: Velvet Goldmine



He can be loud, raucous, and there is a certain unrefined quality to his gestures. To his talent. He wears open silk robes, naked in the raw light of early mornings except for leather pants and studded belts. He spills, every time, when drinking from a martini glass. The stem is too tiny for his fingers, and Curt is too clumsy with his body. And although the hotels they stay in while on tour are layered in silks and plush carpet, Brian and him are still doing lines of coke like schoolboys till their noses run red. Over the months, his accent gets harsher. Brittle around the edges, like the shadows under his eyes, or the marks on the insides of his sinewy arms.

Wired. Curt is wired now, drinking coffee and beer thirty minutes after waking.

In contrast, Brian is billowing, bordering on storming. His hair keeps getting darker shades of blue, while his voice is smoothing. Curt calls him a fucking brit, shoving him in the shoulders, in the back, around the room. It’s annoying, but personal. Intimate because, eventually, Brian will laugh. He will turn like a diva in platform heels and the two of them will fight. Curt has him pinned within minutes and for a few fleeting seconds there is no tour, there is no white girl or white horse, there is no spiraling fame and embers of disaster looming in the distance. Just them, Brian’s slender fingers wrestling with Curt’s electric eel of a body. The Demon never wins; Brian was wearing pin-stripe suits and lacquering his hair while Curt was surviving aluminum trailer parks, so it isn’t fair from the start.

Outside of the public eye, there isn’t a considerable amount keeping them afloat. The concerts are still sold out, but there’s too much. The crowds won’t go away, and the reporters are like insects hiding out in trees. The drugs keep being passed around, as often as the liquor bottles, as often as naked bodies. Curt isn’t really an orgy guy, but with a head full of coke and a stomach soaked in whiskey, he doesn’t stop to complain. Just keeps a watch on Brian the entire time, not sure of whose fingers are replacing whose mouth.

A lot of things, like that, those tiny character elements that make Curt himself, stop mattering. They get swept up by next morning along with cigarette ashes and bits of broken glass. But Brian keeps escalating, so Curt keeps following. He’s never able to identify the moment that changes him from a star into a shadow.




Shell-shocked and bitter. The taste of regret so overwhelming in his mouth that he smokes almost continuously. It isn’t heartache, because he’s not quite sure where to place the blame or how much he should be keeping for himself. But Curt Wild doesn’t think about these types of things. He just walks Berlin like a corpse, thinner than usual in his leather jacket, his hair an unnatural shade of blonde.

He gets his act together. Again.

The withdrawal would make him empty, but he hasn’t felt much in so long that the pain is almost refreshing. It burns his eyes, and his hands shake so badly that it takes two weeks before he can actually start working on any new chords. Jack is patient. If he makes it to the bathroom before his stomach is forcing its way up his throat, he slams the door. Jack wouldn’t have tried to help anyway, and he doesn’t say anything about whether or not Curt yells in the night. He waits, instead.

When he can sleep a full night, when he stops trembling, when he doesn’t break out into cold sweats, it’s over. He keeps his smoking habit. Cuts back, a little, on the drinking. He doesn’t ever piece himself back together full; it feels like bits of him are spread throughout the world -- some with Jack in Germany, chunks in America, and the remaining majority scattered around England. Now, he swallows a lot when speaking, hesitating around the shapes of the words. He’s horrible at interviews because of it, but at least he can be counted on to say something unlike his record partner. He’s lost nearly all of his vitality; growls and groans into the microphone, writhes around the stage floor instead of bounding across it.


It returns, in abundance, whenever he’s angry.

For a long time Jack’s silence unnerves him and, in the middle of the night, he unleashes. He has a habit of throwing things; they lose most of their ashtrays and a vase that belonged to Jack’s mother. He says fuck, and variations of it, every other word. Seething so that the air around him becomes almost palpable with his anger. He would have destroyed his guitar, beat it across the balcony railing, if Jack hadn’t intervened. Jack is taller, but he’s thinner and delicate in a way Curt is not familiar with, not in a man. So he shoves him a little too hard at first, but sits complacently after he’s managed to split his own lip and drinks the whiskey Jack gives him from the bottle.

The alcohol soothes him, makes his breathing return to normal. Jack drinks too, even though he’s never acquired a liking to the taste or the effects, but he knows Curt can’t stand to drink alone anymore. When Curt kisses him, his blonde hair half in the way and smelling of smoke, Jack kisses back. He’s been kissed a lot in his lifetime, sometimes unwantedly, but he’s never learned how to not respond. Curt doesn’t grip at his hair or complain about the foundation on his face. He works at the buttons of his clothing. The sharp fragility of Jack’s hip unnerves him again, but he doesn’t yell this time. He just bites a little on Jack’s lip and gets up from the couch, stumbling to his room, closing the door behind him.