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Allie
Disclaimer: All things QAF belong to CowLip. I take
liberties but they own them, I don’t.
Characters: All Queer As Folk characters
Pairing: Brian and Justin
Warning: Entire Thing will be NC-17. Spoilers for
like all Five Seasons.
IV - It Was How I Knew
Additional Notes:I would like to thank my beta for who without this chapter might have
been very, very different. So falconhawkowlyou
are now my queen and best beta girl and I already said this to you but omg thanks! I dedicate this chapter
to you!
“Hate leaves ugly scars,
love leaves beautiful ones.”
~ Mignon McLaughlin ~
Justin’s POV
I can’t sleep. I know Brian’s not sleeping either. We are just lying here in on the bed worn out because we just went three rounds in a row. The lights from the city illuminate our room in soft golds and blues. It reminds me of the lights above the bed in the old loft. We never close the drapes. In fact I don’t even know why we have drapes on the windows in the first place. I have no idea why I’m even thinking about this right now. Maybe it’s because I’m trying not to think about the fact that Brian Kinney just said he’s ready to marry me or that we might actually fucking go through with it this time. I hear him light a cigarette. I guess he’s not really trying to pretend to be asleep like I am.
“We should get tested.” Obviously I’m not doing a good job of pretending. Of course I was never really good at that in the first place.
“Yeah.” I say because I can’t really think about anything except of what that means. Getting tested. Fucking raw…fucking raw. My eyes snap open and I roll my head to look at him. He’s casually smoking his cigarette and looking up at the ceiling as if it’s the most interesting thing ever invented.
“Let’s do it Sunday.” He’s words come out in puffs of smoke.
“Get tested?” I ask furrowing my brow.
He turns his head to me. “Married.”
Sitting up in bed I look down at him as if he’s lost his mind, because I think he may have actually lost-his-mind. “You want to get married on Sunday? As in this Sunday?” I ask incredulously.
He shrugs and looks away from me. “Yeah, why not?”
I scoff. “Why not? Why not? Brian do you know what day Sunday is?”
He takes a long drag of his cigarette and exhales before finally looking up at me. “Yes.”
I look towards the windows but I don’t see anything. Sunday. My mind races trying to process the concept he’s laying on me. I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to even think about it. Sunday is eighteen fucking years to the date that I got bashed. If we got married then our anniversary would be on the same day as that anniversary. That’s just fucking weird and I don’t know...I look down at him trying to figure out what the fuck he’s thinking.
“Why Sunday?” I force the words out of my mouth.
Brian stubs out his cigarette and reaches for me. Wrapping his arms around me he pulls me to his chest. I can hear the low steady drum of his heartbeat against my ear. Moving down a little I drape my arms over his waist my fingers stroking his side as his fingers move into my hair.
“Well…” He says slowly.
“That was a fucking horrible day Brian.” I mumble into his chest.
“It wasn’t all horrible.” He says quietly.
“No.” I pause. “But I don’t remember the good parts.”
Silence fills the room with only our breathing to mar it. The resonance of his heartbeat lulls me toward sleep. My eyes start to close because I’m drifting…
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Brain’s POV
He’s falling asleep and I think about just letting this all go. I don’t even know why I said it. What the fuck was I thinking? I know what I was thinking but I don’t know that I can explain it. It’s not like I want to erase that day. I can’t do that even if I want to. That fucking day is embedded in us. Even if we wanted to extract it we couldn’t. That day is a twisted oxymoron in my head. Yes, it was a fucking shitty day, but before it turned into a nightmare it was, god help me, a beautiful ridiculously romantic moment in time. I stopped running that day. I stopped fighting him. I stopped fighting myself. He doesn’t remember that part which is probably why the events that happened later that same year transpired.
“Justin.”
“Mmm?”
“I want to…on Sunday.”
His arm tightens around my waist. “Why?” He says softly. “Tell me why.”
I run my hand through his soft blond hair. “I don’t know if I can explain it.” I say because I really don’t think I can.
“Try.”
I wrap my arms around him pulling him closer to me wondering if I can possibly get the words out of my mouth. “It was a fucking horrific day. You almost fucking died…” There is a catch in my throat because time and distance and fucking years can’t make me forget fucking baseball bats, bloody scarves, or him slipping away one drop of blood at a time.
I try to rein my emotions, try to ignore Justin’s body tensing in my arms, try to forget why I fucking thought this was a good idea. What the fuck am I doing? I refuse to close my eyes because I know what images wait for me behind closed lids, instead I push on. “It fucking tragic but it made me realize-”
Fuck! Why can’t this be easy? Why after eighteen year is it still a fucking hardship for me to tell the person I love that I love him? That when I danced with him in that room full of eighteen year olds that I claimed him, that I wanted him, that I knew, I fucking knew he was it and that it fucking scared the shit out of me. That when I was holding his hand in that ambulance, his blood sticky and warm between our hands, that all I could think was that he would never know, if he died he would never fucking know and god please, please don’t take him away because he should fucking know.
His leg slides over my hips until he is lying on top of me. His fingers wipe the moisture away from my cheeks that I didn’t even feel until he touched me. “Brian?”
Where it comes from I don’t know. Somewhere from deep inside it just comes out of me and I feel powerless to stop the words that rush to escape my lips before my mind catches them and closes the gate. “That day something was taken away from you, away from me, and for a long time after I wanted you to fucking remember the good part, the best day of your life part. Justin, there was just so much going on that night and I-”
His fingers reach out and cover my lips. “Why are you telling me all this Brian? It’s in the past. It’s over and done with. We can’t change it.” He looks away and back at me. “We can’t fix it by getting married on Sunday.” He says quietly.
I kiss his fingers before removing them from my lips. “I know.”
“Then why do you want to get married on Sunday?”
“Because that day, that one almost perfect fucking night, made me realize that…I…loved you.” In my head it made sense. In my head it made perfect fucking sense but as soon as the words are out I want to take them back.
His hands rest on my cheeks. “That’s a pretty big secret you’ve been keeping.” I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know that I can say anything. He searches my eyes and for once I don’t hide. I let him see me, open and exposed like I’ve never felt before but it’s been eighteen years, we’re about to fucking get married, so why hide…from him?
Leaning down he kisses me softly on the lips, chin, jaw, until his lips are pressed against my ear. His breath is hot and damp as he whispers, “Sunday it is.”
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Gus’ POV
I get home and go straight to my room praying I don’t run into anyone because I don’t think I can fucking deal right now. When I’m in my room, the door closed, I kick off my shoes, and strip off my clothes. I take my medicine, the anti-depressant I’ve been on practically since I was out the sliding glass doors of the hospital, and the sleeping pill I’ve been on for about three months. I wouldn’t even have to take that one if parents didn’t notice shit like their kid not sleeping. I pretended to throw a fit when it was first mentioned. I didn’t need the fucking things. I was sleeping just fine. I told my Moms to fuck off, I told Dr. Rabaud to go to hell, and for good measure I told Jenny to leave me the fuck alone. In truth, I was grateful. I couldn’t sleep because when I did it was just nightmare after nightmare of twisted metal, blood, and Ash’s terrified face.
Lying back on my bed I flip off the lamp. Waiting for the drugs to kick in I stare up at my ceiling not that I can even fucking see it because my room is pitch black. I can’t stand to have any light coming into my room when I’m attempting to go to sleep. When I visit Dad and Justin in
Rolling over I press my face into the mattress and try to wrap my tired mind around the fact that my fucking father is fucking married. The man who once said, a fucking million times, “We’re queer. We don’t need marriage.” is married. It isn’t that anyone, including me, didn’t expect him to be with Justin for a long time, hell they’d made it this long, but marriage and my Dad just do not belong in the same sentence. I roll onto my back and stare into the darkness. Suddenly I think that maybe I don’t know my Dad as well as I think I do. Over the years I’ve spent practically every summer with him. He’s been here countless times but what if all those times I just saw what he wanted me to see, that it wasn’t really him at all? My mind races trying to catalogue every fact and truth I know about him, trying to find where I might have misjudged. I come up empty.
Flipping onto my stomach I pull the covers up. I didn’t realize how fucking tired I am or maybe it’s just my meds kicking in. Whatever it is, I close my eyes and seek out the dark place in my mind, the place where he is and there isn’t a look of terror on his face, just the look that he gave me at that party so long ago because I’ve kept him waiting.