Etharei
Characters: Brian/Justin, Ethan
Rating: PG for language
Summary: You wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t been staring at
his eyes. Something in them changed, glazed over, and you feel a rush of fear
because it reminds you of that one time, when you were together, that he had
a really bad nightmare.
Beta: The lovely and most exceptional beathen
*huggles* All remaining mistakes are mine alone.
Disclaimer: Queer as Folk and all the characters and situations featured
therein are the property of Showtime, Cowlip Productions and their affiliates.
I’m only borrowing them for purely non-profit, recreational purposes, and promise
to replenish the condom and lube supply when I’m done.
Author's Notes: Written for 25fluffyfics.
Set in late S4, so spoilers up to about 409.
Just to warn you, I’ve been my usual experimental self and played around with
POVs. The POV switches between three characters, and it’ll be pretty clear when
I change character. I hope it won’t be too difficult to follow- if it is, I
heartily apologize. But I wanted to see if this would work, and the style kind
of suited the fic. :-)
The title is from the song “You and Me” by Lifehouse, which I can’t stop
listening to right now even though I’m not a big one for ballads.
Later you would try to tell yourself that hadn’t really expected to see him,
much less were looking for him, but you will conceded that you weren’t at all
surprised to spot his familiar figure from across the lawn.
It’s a semi-formal mixer for the art students at PIFA. For that reason alone
he would have actively stayed away (you’ve never understood why he never made
any effort to make friends at school) but a guest artist whose work you’d once
heard him admire is there, socializing as a PIFA alumnus and coincidentally
also promoting his new book, so there’d been a chance that even the elusive
Justin Taylor would deign to make an appearance that night, however brief. Besides,
your friends were going and you hadn’t seen them for a while, being busy on
tour, and it’s not as if you had anywhere else to be now that you no longer
have to play until your fingers freeze onto the fingerboard just to pay for
tomorrow’s dinner.
At first you don’t really believe it’s him, although there’s no mistaking that
hair and that smile, not when you’d lived with it for months and remember the
shining, glorious taste of both. You wonder what could have prompted such an
act of self-mutilation (for mutilation it is, o his poor lost golden beauty!)
and a part of you makes a secret, selfish wish that it’s something that could
deliver him back into your arms.
No, you’re not over him at all.
He still looks great, despite the ridiculously short-cropped hair, and with
every moment he’s in your sight you find it harder to not approach him,
not make your presence known. It’s been nearly two years, but you still feel
drawn to him; the hook he embedded into your soul by casting his pencil over
the pages of an unwitting concert program that fateful day so long ago is still
there, buried deep, and you’re dangerously close to throwing dignity to the
wind.
At the start of the affair, the music had been mellow and vaguely like something
you’d hear in an elevator, until a group of music students hijacked the sounds
system. Apparently they each have different tastes, because the music has been
jumping from the Beatles, to Eminem, to Mozart, to Madonna, to Shania Twain.
So far only Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody has been the only thing to receive unanimous
approval. As the evening progressed and the punch bowl went from being full
to half-empty with unidentifiable lumps floating in it, the concrete area in
the middle of the quad had become an impromptu dance floor.
An old friend bumps into you and you get drawn into a conversation. By the time
you look up and find him again, he is talking to the guest artist, and you know
he’ll probably leave soon after. You’re unreasonably pleased to see that he
seems to have come alone. You hadn’t heard a definite word about it- it became
glaringly clear how separate your worlds were, are, after you left Pittsburgh
to go on tour, because the only news your friends could give you of him were
momentary glimpses in school- but you’re pretty sure he went back to Brian after
you broke up. There’s no doubt in your mind that the asshole had taken him back,
no matter the bullshit he’d said to you about not wanting Justin back, because
who wouldn’t want Justin? Your body still responds to the memory of the
smell, the taste, the feel of him. Once again, you wonder how phenomenal Brian
must be that Justin worships him. You still believe that he doesn’t deserve
someone like Justin, and in the midst of your internal sonnet for his lost golden
locks you feel a flash of pleasure at what must be a sign of dissonance between
the two. You don’t doubt that Brian’s stayed the same, whoring himself out to
different men every night. Justin deserves better, he probably deserves better
than you, but at least you respect him more than Brian does. You made
a mistake, on a night when you were floating above the world on the promise
of a future long hoped-for, and surely Justin knows more than anyone the value
of second chances.
Justin finishes his conversation with the artist, and your feet deliver you
to him before you can finish composing your speech. He’s clearly startled to
see you, and appears to consider trying to slip away; your heart swells when
he doesn’t, instead meeting your eyes and saying, “Hey.”
#
Inwardly Justin curses his decision to attend the mixer. But Brian got irritable
when he passed over too many opportunities to go out in favor of staying at
the loft, no matter how much Justin protested that he hated these things, and
at least this event had fallen on a ‘good’ night between Brian’s radiation treatments.
So Justin has an easier time suppressing images of Brian choking on his own
vomit, Brian falling over and hitting his head, Brian overdosing on his meds-
Shit.
His hand had already slipped into the pocket where he’d put his cell phone when
he spotted the very familiar mop of curly hair weaving through the crowd towards
him. His first instinct was to just leave, since he’d already done all that
he came to do, but after the ordeal with Chris Hobbs Justin had promised himself
that he was done with walking away from things just because he couldn’t deal
with them. So he waited, and greets Ethan with a polite “Hey.”
Those dark eyes linger on Justin’s short-cropped hair, and he wonders what Ethan
thinks about it. “Justin,” he replies, smiling nervously.
Justin finds that he doesn’t really feel much about running into his one true
ex-boyfriend, other than annoyance at the prospect of having to delay his departure.
It strikes him then how inevitable his return to Brian had been, because no
matter how many times he’d told Ethan that he and Brian were over, there had
never been an occasion when the sight of Brian didn’t cause at least a twinge
in his gut. On the other hand, he’d told Brian that he and Ethan were over precisely
once, followed by a promise to give up violin music, and that was that. He’d
moved on; more importantly, he and Brian had moved on.
“Finished your tour?” Justin forces himself to ask, because country club manners
die hard and the sooner he wraps up this talk, the sooner he can leave.
“Yeah.” Ethan is grinning like a child being given candy, and Justin has to
force himself to not step away. “I’m in town for a month, then I start recording
my next album.”
“That’s great.” And Justin means it, too. “I’m glad things are going so well
for you.” Now, if only Daphne could come back from whatever dark corner she
and that hot guitarist had disappeared off to.
“Thanks. I’ve heard that you’ve been up to a lot of things yourself.”
Justin has to smile at that. “It’s been a busy year.”
Ethan takes a deep breath, his eyes taking on that pre-performance intensity,
and suddenly Justin knows, can guess what he’s about to say, and the annoyance
he’d initially felt burns into irritation. “Just-“
“I’m back with Brian now,” Justin calmly interjects, though his voice is steel.
“I know.” Ethan absently scratches the side of his neck. “Look, since I know
you like honesty… I just think you deserve better than him, all right?”
Justin knows too well what Ethan thinks of Brian, because Justin had pretty
much provided all the ammunition against him. That’s part of the problem- everything
Ethan knows about Brian is colored by what Justin had said of him at a time
when he’d been angry and upset and thought he knew what love was. Now he remembers,
remembers the strain and fear in Brian during his run with the Pink Posse (which
he hadn’t noticed until it was gone); a boxed-up computer waiting for him at
the loft (and the drama when Brian had first gotten it for him); the strolls
down Liberty Avenue with his nails digging into Brian’s arms (when he could
hardly bear to touch anybody else), the heroic “Justin, are you coming?”
(his last time inside the house he’d grown up in).
“No,” he says quietly. “No, I think Brian and I deserve each other.” Let Ethan
make of that what he will.
The music in the background, which has been genre-hopping since some music students
launch a coup de stereo, changes from a Pink Floyd song to something slow. Probably
someone had finally noticed that a majority of the party-goers had congregated
to the center space, forming an impromptu dance floor. Quite predictably, as
if controlled by some shared inner human instinct, the mass of bodies begins
dissolving into pairs.
A wave of uneasiness washes over him, though he doesn’t know why. Where the
fuck is Daphne?
The bass beat is soft, gentle. He remembers sunlight streaming into the loft,
expensive furniture pushed against the walls to make a space. Empty space. A
void, a black hole in his own brain that has always been utterly dark, because
not even light can escape its gravity. But he sees light now, like that painful
cliché about the ends of tunnels, only his light looks more like a spotlight
on a distant floor, in which two black-clad figures may or may not be dancing.
The soft, gentle beat hits him like lead bullets, like a splintered bat, and
he feels a line of fire racing across his skull, centering on a thin line that
can’t even be seen anymore except with fingers and skin. He suddenly gets a
weird feeling that the line is glowing right now, hot and bright and red as
the rust on his tongue oh God what the fuck is happening why does it fucking
hurt-
“Justin.” Mom? “Honey, you look beautiful.”
#
You wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t been staring at his eyes. Something
in them changed, glazed over, and you feel a rush of fear because it reminds
you of that one time, when you were together, that he had a really bad nightmare.
You had managed to get him to lift his eyelids, but he hadn’t really woken up
yet, and his eyes had possessed that blankness spreading over them now.
“Justin?” you call loudly, at a loss. In your bedroom it had just been a matter
of waiting it out, calling his name repeatedly and waiting for him to come out
of it without losing your wits first. (You’d had vague memories of your mother
describing something like that happening with your grandfather, especially on
the birthdays of the family members he’d lost to the death camps.)
He closes his eyes, face scrunching up, as if he is fighting with something
inside him. He makes a little gasp- it sounds like pain. Around you people are
beginning to notice. You want to reassure them that nothing is wrong, but you
don’t believe it yourself, especially when he begins to stagger back and forth
like he’s losing his balance. You think about stepping forward and holding him,
but he’d hated being touched after nightmares, and he once told you that he’d
pushed over his own mother when he was in a rage.
“Justin!”
Clearly someone doesn’t share your concerns, because you’re suddenly shoved
to one side when a girl with long, curly brown hair rushes forward, taking hold
of Justin’s arms. Justin proves your instinct right when he bats away her hands,
whispering a fervent, “Don’t touch me!”
“Justin!”
Wide blue eyes swivel around in a panic. Around you the crowd only gathers in
closer, with such helpful whispers of “Is he all right?” and “He’s having
some sort of seizure!” flitting from mouth to mouth. Daphne glares at everyone,
and when she notices you her expression darkens, automatically though silently
accusing you of instigating this. She yells at everyone to back the fuck
off, points a finger and practically screams at a guy who’d begun
to dial for paramedics on his cell phone.
Then you’ve been pushed sideways, and would have fallen had it not been for
the press of bodies around you, preventing you from hitting the ground.
#
On bad days, Justin stayed at the loft, jumped up any time I so much as wheezed
even when he was up against a deadline on a big project for school. And days,
now, are either bad or good. Good is when I can actually get some work done.
Really good days are when the stuff I eat goes through my mouth only
once, on its way in. I try to get Justin to get out of the loft at these times,
but he argues that I owe him my hours of consciousness for all the time I’ve
been pretty much knocked out. Suffice to say that a man who spends most of his
waking hours on his knees before the porcelain throne is no match for an ex-twink
who had, until recently, been running around at night beating up straight homophobes.
But when I spotted a flyer for the PIFA mixer and recognized in the list of
expected guests the name of a visiting artist whose work Justin has fervently
ooh-ed over in the past, I put more effort into looking less corpse-like than
usual and convinced him that I could survive on my own for a few hours.
I got some work done on my computer, but after having Justin around pretty much
on all hours of the day, the sudden cessation of having my nerves being continuously
grounded felt a little weird. Especially when Babylon- heck, Liberty Avenue-
is not really an option in my state. I’d looked at my watch and decided, on
the spur of the moment, to pick Justin up from PIFA.
A bad feeling is tap-dancing its way down my spine by the time I manage to get
parking from some early leavers. I open the door and step out. Keeping in mind
that Justin may well be happily socializing with kids his own age and enjoying
his time away from an invalid, I decide to hunt down a bathroom before giving
him a call. A security guard gives me a once-over, but probably decided that
a guy who looks like death inadequately warmed-over is not much of a threat.
He directs me to the nearest restroom, which also happens to be on a corridor
through the front building leading out into the quad, where the party’s happening.
I piss and wash my hands. A kid comes into the restroom, setting off my ‘closet
gay’ radar, but the girlfriend waiting outside (and maybe the beginnings of
a pain in my insides) kills any ideas right off about doing anything more than
make a passing glance.
Occupied with trying to gauge if a Technicolor yawn is forthcoming, I don’t
really hear it, at first. But maybe the brain can overcome the body when
it needs to, because suddenly the ill feeling changes, shifts. Doesn’t lessen.
The nausea, if anything, intensifies, but it feels like it’s coming from somewhere
deeper, even deeper than the cancer and the poisoned cells.
“Justin!”
I’m rushing out of the restroom, operating on instinct. I feel a surge of panic;
it’s a big party, and Justin’s not exactly the tallest of people. But the good
thing about a crowd- usually, it’s a bad thing, but tonight I’m grateful for
it- is its tendency to coalesce around anything that looked like it could turn
into something interesting or entertaining. Soon enough, I see a number of people
turning around and gathering around something in the far corner of the quad.
Running, shoving aside people in the way, (because, fuck, if they can’t move
faster than a guy undergoing radiation treatment then they really deserve to
be shoved), I cut a path right into the center of the crowd.
Sure enough, Justin is there, one arm wrapped around his middle while the other
is pressed against the side of his head. Daphne is busy keeping everyone away
while trying to think of a way to hold Justin without physically touching him.
But it’s not a full-blown freak-out; aside from breathing like he was running
a marathon and looking like someone who’s having a root canal, Justin’s quiet.
Something like this can be passed off as a really bad migraine, as long as people
don’t make a big deal out of it. My panic dying down a little, I realize that
I’m breathing hard from the short jog, and feel disgusted with myself.
I step towards him. Someone touches my arm, saying, “He doesn’t want anyone
to touch him.”
Wondering who the fuck could be telling me this, I glance to look at
the body and face connected to the hand on my elbow. Brown eyes. Dark, curly
hair. Looks familiar. Very familiar. Definitely not someone I’ve fucked.
Struggling through major pain on at least three fronts, I blink, feeling the
rivulets of sweat on my brow. Ah, yes, the Fiddler. What the fuck?
Not important. Never was. “I’m not just anyone.” I brush his hand away and close
the distance between myself and Justin.
#
Some sort of dance music is throbbing in his head. Or maybe his head is just
throbbing so bad that he’s starting to hallucinate. The pain hasn’t lessened,
but at least it has lost its sharpness, allowing him to take in his surroundings.
He doesn’t remove his hands from either side of his head, only peeks out between
close eyelids, inwardly mortified at the attention he’s drawn to himself.
Daphne, at least, is making sure he has breathing space. He wonders if she’s
seen Ethan there, but maybe even she’s gotten over him, gotten over the inanity
of posing as Justin’s girlfriend of all things, because so far there’s
been no sign of spilled guts or a rolling head. Or maybe she’d just quietly
disposed of the body.
All at once his nose is assaulted by familiar, expensive cologne, and a sort
of jolt goes through him, a shocking sense of fusion, making him think of a
plug sliding into a socket. And suddenly Brian is there, not just in
front of him but in his head.
In his head, standing in front of him. Black jacket, black shirt. Silk scarf,
completely white. Breath-taking, as usual.
Whole.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t be caught dead in a room full of eighteen-year-olds.”
He hears it in his head. But he must have said it as well, unless Brian really
has Rage’s mind-reading power, because the strong body that had been holding
him loosely tenses, stiffens, fingers digging into his upper arms. The blur
in his head slows, catching up with the music.
“I thought I’d recapture my lost youth.” Again, the words are in his head, and
he feels a phantom hand trailing suggestively up his coat; he hears the words
breathed into his ear, very real arms tightening around him. He thinks he hears
Daphne gasping, very far away, even as she smiles at him in her gorgeous pink
dress and made-up hair.
The pain leaves, not exactly gradual but not as quickly as it had erupted. A
moment of disorientation as he’s aware of the same music being played at different
times, but the one in his head is racing to synch with the one streaming into
his ears. By some instinct Brian knows to put one hand on his hip and laces
the other with Justin’s right hand, holding it up. Holding them both up. He’s
surprised to find that his feet are moving easily, apparently having received
instruction via some back channels.
He chances a glance around them, past the protective circle of Brian’s arms,
sees that the open space around them has gotten wider, though the crowd looks
denser from people gathering in to watch. There’s something vaguely ironic about
the whole thing, but he decides that it’s fitting that they’d have an audience
now, too.
At last, he’s hearing not two songs but one. As the last note, lyric, falls
into place, matching past memory with the present moment, he trembles violently.
A large tremor passes through his damaged hand; he wonders if he’s going to
be ill. He registers that Brian is shaking, too, though not obviously- he wouldn’t
have been able to tell if they weren’t standing so closely together, touching.
Looking up, he meets the older man’s eyes, edged with pain but nevertheless
brimming with emotions he can’t name. He remembers the cancer, feels the underlying
weakness in Brian’s body, even while feelings of euphoria bubble up inside him,
almost three years late, from whatever sinkhole they’d been locked away in.
One last shudder- and it’s like he’s able to breathe again. He nearly stumbles
in the sudden freedom, but for Brian’s slowly faltering support. The pain leaves
him- he realizes that it’s been waiting to leave, ever since he aimed that gun
at Chris Hobbs, like a vindictive kid, and walked away, without the gun, like
a grown man- leaves him breathless and light-headed and empty, leaves him his
stolen memories, leaves him for good.
Thank fucking God.
He looks up at Brian. Smiles. Brian smiles back at him, his expression something
Justin hasn’t seen in a long time; it reminds him of that dance at the end of
the Pride parade, only more.
With a jolt, he realizes that he can remember that look now; from a moment
in an empty space, gliding over a polished floor, below a lone spotlight in
the dark. No longer in the distance, but there, in his head, within reach.
The people watching probably think they’re a little nuts. Or, if they’d heard
about what had happened to Justin, feel sorry for him. It doesn’t matter. In
his prom, it had been about messages and final farewell-fuck-you’s and standing
up for who he was; this one, three years later, is just for them. A tying of
loose ends, a farewell to an old shadow, an acknowledgement of things that have
changed and things that have stayed the same.
Their movements are nowhere near as smooth as they had been that first night.
Both of them a little unsteady; but the wonder is there, the connection that
hadn’t appeared before or since. He feels Brian tensing and can guess what the
other wants to do; it may have been years but he knows that a piece of Brian
will always be trapped in that night, inside that circle of light, and maybe
this is his way of reclaiming that piece. But he’s in pain already, exhausted
from holding everything together, and Justin knows that falling over now will
harm more than heal.
“Don’t do it,” he whispers urgently, fingers digging into Brian’s shoulder.
The shirt is damp from sweat, and the muscles underneath are trembling. “It
doesn’t have to be the same. It’s come back now, Brian. It’s all right. I’m
all right.”
Something flashes in Brian’s eyes, and he relaxes by a hair. As the song winds
down, Justin is still spun around, but this time both his right foot and Brian’s
left are the unmoving pivots as they circled in place. It ends with Justin pressed
flush against Brian’s body, breathing in the cologne and sweat and a faint hint
of bile; he feels like he’s filled to bursting, horny and high at the same time,
so good that it’s excruciating. Brian is leaning him backwards a little, so
that Justin’s resting some of his weight on Brian’s hand and arms. His mouth
is greedily taken in a scorching kiss that, cancer or no cancer, is as spectacular
now as it had been that night, filling him even further until he’s intoxicated
and breathless and half-expected his skin to be glowing.
Justin thinks this dance, their dance, must be the most ridiculously
romantic dance ever in fucking history.
#
Just like everybody else, you can’t quite pull your eyes away from the sight
of them. Dancing together to a cheesy ballad, the sort of thing you’d think
the both of them would hate; anyone else doing what they’re doing would have
been sniggered at by tonight’s audience of artistic Goths and musical skeptics.
But there’s something too… raw about them, too bright, too genuine. Knowing
what you do of both, the scene feels painfully intimate, maybe even more intimate
than if they were actually having sex. (You’re reasonably sure about this, because
Brian doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be shy about having sex in public,
and Justin had once hinted at his skill in initiating numerous adventures in
various backrooms.) You don’t think it’s even occurred to anyone to stop them,
to tell them to go elsewhere; you feel like averting your eyes, like your gaze
is glued to their every move, both at once.
They do make a beautiful pair. No, that’s not quite right. By themselves, they’re
beautiful men. Together, they’re something else; the sort of vision that makes
an artist feel mortal, that in turn fuels the creation of a tribute immortal.
Still, maybe you’re not as enthralled as you thought, because you notice that
Brian is slouching more than normal, and the light makes gems out of the sweat
on his forehead. He looks like someone who’s been sick, and you can’t help but
think, so the mighty Brian Kinney is mortal after all. Conversely, Justin
gets steadier, surer, with every step, until he must be leading them. Eyes only
on each other, they somehow avoid bumping into people; or maybe the crowd is
just moving with them, keeping them always at the center. Everything is quieter,
you don’t really hear much aside from the music now, so you know that nearly
all eyes in the quad are on them.
What finally makes you breathless, though, is the pure joy on Justin’s face.
You don’t remember ever having such a look directed at you, even by your most
ardent admirers, certainly not by him. And if Brian’s expression isn’t one of
utter adoration, you’ll break your violin in half.
You understand, then, that maybe Justin hadn’t been meant for you, at least
not in the way you’d thought. You’ve been brought up by the belief that God
works in mysterious ways, and you can’t help wondering if this is what
had been meant for you. Not him, but them. Not Justin, but Justin
and Brian, and that thing they have that is more than love- at least more than
the normal, mundane love the rest of humanity live on. It’s something you can
put into your music- you need to put it into music. The great inspiration
of your life, ruining you for the world. You’ll never be able to think of love
without thinking of them.
They spin around, and the very intense finale kiss receives a murmur of approval
and a smattering of claps from the audience; you’re convinced you can feel the
heat of it, five feet away.
No wonder that homophobic asshole tried to kill Justin, you wonder in your head,
after having seen them like this. There’s something disconcerting, frightening,
unmanning, in the intensity of what they have, especially if the observer wants
to believe that it is wrong. Easier to swing a bat than to face something unshakably
right.
A touch on your arm. Your friend asks if you’re OK, probably recognizes Justin
and worries that you’re heartbroken.
Maybe you are. But only a little.
Your eyes take in one final look of the two of them, just swaying quietly to
the end of the song and the beginning of a new one while the crowd around them
breaks up, before you turn to leave yourself. It’s not like you’re even going
to try getting between them now.
You smile. “I’ll survive.”