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flowrs4opheliaTitle: Precious
Author: Sara (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flowrs4ophelia)
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Brian/Justin
Summary: Too many times it has taken some kind of tragedy to bring Justin and Brian closer together.
Previous chapters: Prologue | I | II | III | IV
p a r t | f i v e
The next day Brian comes into the diner after work to find Michael, Ben, Melanie, and Lindsay seated at the front counter with the kids.
“Hello, ladies,” he says, sitting at the last available seat next to Michael.
Most of them acknowledge him with a nod or wave.
“Honey,” Melanie says to Lindsay, “if Ben and Michael are going to have JR tonight anyway we might as well take Emmett and Ted up on their offer to go out with them tonight.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lindsay says. “I bet Debbie would be more than happy to look after Gus. How long has it been since we’ve been able to go out to the bars?”
“Oh, I see how it is,” Michael says jokingly. “You guys all go off and have fun while we do all the responsible Mom and Dad work.”
They laugh and Ben says, “No, we’re happy to take her.”
“Yeah,” says Michael, moving JR’s carrier sitting on the counter to be facing him. “Hell with Woody’s. I get to spend all night with this gorgeous girl.”
“Well, congratulations, Jenny R,” Brian says, looking at her. “You’re officially the only ‘gorgeous girl’ that Michael Novotny is ever going to spend a night with.”
“Or ever going to want to, I hope,” Ben says with a laugh.
“So, Brian,” Lindsay says while wiping some ketchup off of Gus’s face with a napkin, “we were going to go to the park before it starts to get dark. You with us?”
“Yeah,” he says, signaling to the waiter in front to bring him some coffee.
Lindsay waits a moment before then asking, “You think we should go by Jennifer’s and see if Justin wants to come? He hasn’t had a chance to see us or either of the kids.”
He looks over at her. “You think he’ll want to?”
“Well, it might be good for him to get out of the house for a while. He’s had a couple days now with nothing to do but deal with what’s happened. I could be wrong, but I would imagine that after a while it would start to feel like you just can’t get away from it.”
“That’s a good point,” Ben agrees. “He may not particularly enjoy doing anything right now, but he could probably use a break from just being at the house where he’s surrounded by it.”
Brian shrugs, sipping his coffee. “Okay.”
Before they leave, Melanie and Lindsay each remind Michael and Ben of several things they have to make sure to do or not do with JR in their care, to which they have to say, “Yeah, we know, don’t worry,” multiple times.
When Brian pulls up to Jennifer’s house he is glad to see no other visitors’ cars there. As he unbuckles his seatbelt, Lindsay turns to him.
“Maybe we shouldn’t all go in,” she says.
“Might be a little overwhelming,” Melanie says. “Three of us and a kid showing up unannounced.”
They are both looking at him, so he doesn’t have to ask who’s going to go inside. After he gets out and is in front of the door ringing the bell, he hears none of that inner noise of reaction and response one usually hears that tells them someone heard and is coming to the door. He is surprised when after that silence it opens, answered by Debbie.
She looks at him and opens the storm door to let him in without a word. If it’s possible, the house sounds even more silent than it did the last time he was here, possibly just because there are not so many people congregated in one area of it like before. He looks around for signs of where anyone else might be. Then Debbie just says quietly, “Upstairs,” pointing upward with a finger, and then leaves to go into the hall and back to wherever she was before.
After Brian goes up the stairs and reaches the hall on the top floor, the first door he comes to is open, and when he glances inside his stomach feels like it’s falling to the floor for a second and he stops walking as if momentarily paralyzed. In a second his eyes take in bright purple bedsheets, a Chicago poster, a junior high school level science book, a white porcelain jewelry box with cheap necklaces hanging out. Some things look a little disturbed, like someone has been in here since she was here last moving things where they don’t quite belong, or at least where a 13-year-old girl would not have put them, but for the most part it seems untouched. When Ted was in a coma and might have died his friends had to remove his potentially embarrassing possessions from his apartment before they were found. But nobody could have known what was going to happen to Molly. There is nothing here but an honest, uninterfered look at what she was, and now it is all her loved ones have left of her. But all these things are only the past, not at all what she would have become: advanced microbiology, diamond studs from some nice boyfriend for Valentine’s Day in place of the tacky necklaces, black and white photography of locations in France accompanying the movie posters on the walls. Maybe. They will never know.
He is distracted by the sound of pages rustling from the next room and walks on to the next door, which is slightly agape. It is open enough for him to look in and see Justin sitting at a desk looking through what looks like an old school yearbook. He pushes the door open a little more, knocking softly on one side of the doorway, and Justin looks up.
“Oh. Hey.” He closes the book and sets it on the desk, turning toward him as he walks in. He seems very different from when Brian saw him when they flew back from New York together, more like the blank page he was for a while after he was bashed but not quite that frighteningly not-Justin. It is a little like seeing the sun with all of the light pulled out of it.
Brian comes in and sits down on the bed in front of him, and doesn’t start talking right away. It is like how it used to be when they saw each other, when Justin would come over to the loft just to come over, and didn’t have to say anything like “I thought you might want to go to Woody’s together,” and if he didn’t say what he came over for Brian wouldn't say anything like “So what’s up?” Except at the same time it’s not anything like that. Everything is different. Maybe it just feels the same as it was in the past because they want it to be the same way, and Justin hasn’t asked what he’s doing here because he doesn’t want the day to have come when he feels the need to ask that instead of just accepting the irrepressible force that brings them to each other again and again.
“Oh, yeah,” Justin says again, standing up, like he’s remembering something. “I’ve got something for you.”
Unable to imagine what Justin would have to give him, he watches him go around the bed and pick up the carry-on he brought on the plane with him and open it up. “I had no idea this was in here. I thought I’d lost it. But anyway, I found it while I was getting some stuff out of here.”
He takes out a CD case and throws in onto the bed in front of him. Brian picks it up, opens it, and sees it’s a burned CD with a track listing written out on an insert in Justin’s loose, flowy handwriting.
“I made that forever ago as your birthday present.”
“A mix CD?” he asks. “That’s so very...uh...”
“High schooler, I know,” Justin says in a tone that seems to be missing something. If it was another kind of time, he would be laughing a little as he said it; Brian can hear it clearly in his head. “Though I guess when you were in high school they made tapes. Anyway, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to throw around that month, you know. I thought I would be able to be home the weekend of your birthday, but it turned out I couldn’t be, so I figured I’d just give it to you whenever.”
Brian nods and puts the CD in his pocket. “I’m sure it’ll play just fine even though I’m already a year older.”
Justin starts looking through the other contents of his bag. “Man...He didn’t even put any socks in here. Luke packed my bag for me. Fortunately I still have some clothes I keep in this room.”
“Good thing he was with you,” Brian says.
Justin must hear something in his voice, because he looks up at his face for a couple seconds’ delay before responding. “...Yeah. He was just on his way out, too. I was in the bathroom about to get in the shower and he told me my phone was ringing.”
Brian remembers his shirt on inside-out. There is a silence for a moment not quite as comfortable as the one there when he first came in. Then he asks, “You feel like getting out of here for a while?”
Justin doesn’t answer for a moment, thinking about it, and then sounds surprised by his answer when he says it. “...Yes. Please.”
They go downstairs and Justin gets his jacket and goes right outside, but Brian heads toward the living room to find somebody to notify that he’s stealing Justin for an hour or two. Before he makes his way there, he spots Emmett standing near the entrance of the kitchen facing away from him, leaning against a counter with his arms crossed, completely still like he’s off in his own world. Brian walks up behind him quietly and gooses him, making him whip around with a huge gasp, his hand flying to his heart.
“Jesus Christ!” he practically growls at him in an angry whisper, hitting him on the chest.
“What are you doing spooking around here?” Brian asks with an amused smile.
Emmett waits a moment for his heart rate to return to normal, and then puts his hands on his hips and says a little defiantly, “Making coffee. I came along with Debbie. To see Justin.”
“He was up in his room.”
“I know,” he says, looking annoyed again. “I already talked to him. Now Debbie’s in there helping Jennifer and these two girls who were friends of Molly pick out pictures to have out at the visitation.”
“Oh. When is it?”
“Tomorrow. And the funeral’s on Friday.” He turns to look at the coffee pot as it starts steaming and making a final bubbling noise. “You want a cup?”
“No, I’m just about to leave. Tell the others Justin went out with me and the girls for a while.”
There is a playground outside a school a couple blocks from where Jennifer lives, so they decide to walk there. For a while Brian walks in front with Gus riding on his shoulders while Justin talks with Lindsay and Melanie.
“You know that painting you gave us before we left?” Lindsay asks.
“Don’t tell me you actually kept that thing,” he says, and Melanie laughs softly and hits his arm.
“Yes,” Lindsay continues, “and we hung it right in the landing area so it’s the first thing you see when you come inside our house. We haven’t had one visitor yet who hasn’t asked about it.”
“Asked what? ‘Is that one of your kid’s finger paintings? How cute.’”
“Oh, stop,” Melanie says. “It feels pretty nice being able to brag about your friend in America who’s aspiring to be New York’s next great artist and how we own a painting that could be worth a fortune some day.”
Brian turns around and walks backwards for a second to say, “Don’t listen to him. He knows he’s a talented little shit no matter what he says.”
“Brian,” says Lindsay scoldingly. “Gus, don’t listen to your father’s foul mouth, okay?”
“Okay, mommy,” Gus says, although he seems too distracted looking up in the trees as they pass them to have even heard anything he said. Suddenly he says excitedly, “Daddy, look!”
“What?” Brian says, mimicking his excited tone and looking up to where he’s pointing in the tree they’re passing. “Well, somebody got their shoe stuck up there, didn’t they?” he observes.
“Can I climb up and get it?”
Melanie laughs. “No, baby, it’s probably really dirty.”
“That was creepy,” Brian says, looking at her. “I was about to answer in almost the exact same way.”
She laughs again. “Oh yeah, you being a normal parent? That is creepy.”
In response to that he playfully kicks her leg with his foot.
For the first time in what feels like forever, Justin can feel a small smile creeping onto his face as he watches Brian carrying Gus. He forgot how beautiful it was to see them together. He has often wondered if he ever would have fallen so hopelessly in love with Brian if Gus hadn't happened to be born that night they met. Up until the moment they ran into that hospital room, Brian seemed to him like something godlike and invincible, so much unlike him that he intimidated him. When he first walked into his loft, he was so scared with him he could practically hear his heart pounding in his ears. But then after they went to the hospital, Justin saw how awe-struck he looked standing there looking at his newborn child, and how he seemed almost scared when he took him into his arms and held him so carefully. Someone like him scared by such a tiny little thing; he never would have thought. It was the same way when he handled Justin later that night; he was so surprisingly gentle and careful, making it strange to remember later how nervous and afraid he had been before. And Justin realized he was not what he appeared to be at first, what he perhaps wanted to be. He was just a man. He was human, and felt things the same way anybody else did. And maybe he needed someone to help him realize that himself, tell him the things about himself he was unable to see like “You’re not your father. You love your son.”
It was no wonder that after he woke up from the coma four years ago unable to remember what had happened to him and suddenly everything was threatening and frightening to him, Brian was the only thing he felt safe about, the only one he could trust enough to let near him. At first he appeared emotionless and distant, practically unaffected, and when Justin asked him why he never came to see him he would just shrug it off with some careless answer that didn’t at all reflect the seriousness of what had happened. Then after Gus’s birthday party when he surprised him by saying, “You really freaked me out,” finally giving up the invulnerable exterior, and he found the blood-stained scarf under his clothes where he was wearing it like it was part of him, he thought he understood in a way. And after that they did perhaps for the first time what they would both call making love, at last feeling and healing together, and that was when he knew this all had hurt Brian just as much as it hurt him. He surprised him as much as he had the first time. As they lay curled together and connected it was like everything that had been going on inside each of them melded together so there was no hiding it anymore, and no carrying the weight of it around alone anymore.
Lindsay has noticed that he’s gone quiet, and she tacitly puts an arms around his shoulders, walking close to him. He looks at her with an attempted smile.
“Okay, big boy,” Brian says, lifting Gus up over his head. “Daddy’s got to put you down. You’re not as little as you used to be.”
They have reached the block where the school is, and Gus runs off ahead of them to get to the playground. As they near a pair of benches, Brian drapes an arm around Justin’s neck to pull him along with him as he goes to one and sits down. Melanie and Lindsay sit together on the one beside it. They watch Gus quietly a while as he plays on the slide.
“I can’t believe how much bigger he’s gotten,” Brian says. “Just over seven months.”
Justin does not miss the veiled sadness in his voice. “I know.”
Brian looks back at him and says, “I came by last night to see how you were doing, but all the lights were out.”
“Yeah, Tucker convinced my mom and I to try to finally get some sleep. We’d barely had any in the last...forty hours.” He looks around at the playground which is sparcely filled with a couple other children and parents. “It’s so weird to be out here and see that everything’s going on just like before. In the house it feels like the world has just stopped.”
He puts his feet up on the bench, putting his arms around his knees, and looks back at Brian. “I think I really did need to get out for a while. I’ve been almost going crazy just sitting around not wanting to do anything but not being able to stand having nothing to distract myself either. It just feels so still...there’s got to be a better word to describe it, but it’s almost really...boring.”
Brian shrugs. “I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.”
Justin’s face changes a little, suddenly a shadow of a normal expression of amusement. “I saw Daph earlier today. She told me you had a few words with my father.”
Brian almost looks a little embarassed. “Yeah. Just a few.”
“I hope he wasn’t being too much of an asshole.”
He shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t very happy to see me and wouldn’t leave it alone. So I just had to get a little confrontational myself.”
Justin is quiet in thought for a second, and asks, “But will you come to the funeral?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I? Everyone else is going to go, and I’m not going to stay out of the picture just because of him. That’s why I had to tell him to just deal with it and lay off me.”
Justin looks vaguely surprised to hear him say that, just like he looked when he first saw him at the airport. He rests his head down on his knees, looking unusually small curled up into a ball on the bench like that. “Well, at least the reception’s at my mom’s.”
Gus comes walking back toward them, and Lindsay automatically calls to him. “Come here, precious! Hey - how do you always manage to get your face dirty?”
Brian and Justin watch as she goes and crouches in front of him, wiping some dirt off of his chin with her sleeve. Then she straightens his hat so it’s covering both of his ears and kisses him on three different places on his face before letting him squirm away again.
“Gus, what are you going to do with your grandma tonight?” Brian asks.
“I want to go to the light show!”
Lindsay and Melanie both laugh.
“You want to go again?” Brian says. “I don’t know if Debbie will be up for that. And you got scared, remember?”
“I wasn’t scared!” Gus insists.
Brian laughs and Lindsay rolls her eyes at him. “Brian, I told you that was a stupid idea.”
“It was Michael’s idea!” he says. “And he just didn’t like it during one song.” He turns to Justin, who looks a little lost, and explains, “Mikey and I took him to a Pink Floyd light show at the Carnegie-Mellon planetarium last night. He got a little freaked out during ‘The Great Gig In the Sky.’”
Justin shrugs. “Well, that’s not a bad idea. I’ve always heard those things are only worth seeing if you’re about five years old or stoned.”
“Yeah, but even with one of those factors in the equation it’s still a little lame,” Brian says.
The girls both give him a look. “Brian,” Lindsay says, “please tell me you were not-”
“No,” he interrupts. “Don’t worry, mom. I swear I did not and will not ever get stoned in front of our son. At least...not until he’s sixteen.”
Melanie sighs, “Oh, for God sake,” as Gus goes back over to them.
“Mommy, will you push me?” he asks, and it’s not even clear which mommy he’s addressing.
“In a minute, sweetie,” Melanie answers.
“But I want to take the swing!” he says, pointing at the playground where there is only one unoccupied swing still available.
“Come on, Gus, I’ll push you,” Justin says, standing up.
They walk back to the playground together and then Lindsay stands up to go take his place on the bench next to Brian.
“Looks like he’s going to survive okay,” she says, watching both of them.
“Justin?” Brian says. “He could survive anything.”
She nods. “Of course.”
He stays silent for a long moment, his eyes also fixed on him far away.
“He’s a lot stronger than me, at least,” he admits quietly.
“What?” she says with surprise. “That’s bullshit.”
“What do you know?”
“Well, I know even the strongest people can’t be that way without someone standing by them through the hardest times.”
“If he’s going to get through this okay, it’s not because I’m here.”
“That isn’t true!” She pulls on his arm to make him look her in the face. “You have no idea what it must have meant to him that you dropped everything and flew right over to New York to be with him right after you found out. It doesn’t matter how things have been between you two since he left. You still care deeply for each other, and you’re one of the people he needs the most right now. If he hasn’t been able to clearly express that, it’s probably because it’s a little awkward, what with you having been a total ass he hardly even heard from the past few months.”
“I thought you’d decided not to give me a hard time about that.”
She puts her hand over her mouth. “Oops.”
Brian looks back over at where Justin and Gus are. “I just don’t even know what the fuck I’m supposed to say. It’s not like I can even pretend to understand.”
It’s such an oddly innocent kind of thing for Brian to say, and it makes Lindsay smile widely at him. “Yes, well, when you’ve been off in your Neverland all your life evading reality, no one would expect you to understand things like this,” she teases. “Come on, it’s not like any of us have experienced something quite like this. Hell, I was really sad when my Granny Faye died. And you remember how much it upset me when I found out my Aunt Sylvia had cancer and only months to live. But that’s not quite the same as this, is it? Isn’t there some saying?...Losing a parent is losing your past, losing a spouse is losing your present, losing a child is losing your future, and losing a sibling is losing your past, present, and future.”
“That’s cheery.”
She smirks. “Don’t worry. It’s natural to feel like you’re supposed to be able to give some kind of profound insight that will help somebody accept these things, but in the end there’s really nothing you can say. But it’s enough that you’re just here. That you came to see him today.” She pauses, realizing something. “And come to think of it, that you’re actually concerned enough that I’m having to give you this kind of advice. Five years ago I never could have imagined having a conversation like this with you.”
“Well, I hope I wasn’t too much of a heartless prick when Aunty Sylvia died.”
“You were in Mexico when it happened, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” He pulls up his sleeve to show her his shell bracelet, at which she nods. “Did I at least bring you a souvenir, too?”
“No, but you sent me a postcard of a really sexy lady in a bikini on the beach. I seem to remember it bringing a smile to my face while I was so down.”
He laughs.
Lindsay crosses her arms, staring off in thought a while. “You know what I thought after that happened?”
“What?”
“Well, it was a long while before I was in any state to be able to think about it in such a positive way, but...when you think about it, death is kind of an illuminating and revelatory thing. You realize love really is astonishingly powerful if it can make you hurt that much.”
“I could tell you that without anybody falling dead,” Brian says.
“But don’t you see? That’s a good way to look at it.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Because think about the other extreme. How amazingly good it can also make you feel. Like the day Gus was born. It was the single happiest day of my entire life. I can’t even explain it with words.”
“But with both extremes in the spectrum a possibility, is it even worth it?”
“Of course it’s worth it!” she says, as if even asking such a question is lunacy. “All of life is one huge risk. But I just try to be aware of that all the time. Every single day I am thankful for the life I have with my two beautiful children and a wife I am still falling more and more in love with all the time.”
“I guess the dreaded Lesbian Bed Death really is just a myth.”
She sighs exasperatedly. “The point is...It’s important to hold onto the things you care about and keep them close. Don’t just let it all slip through your fingers before you even realize what you have.”
“I seem to be hearing that a lot recently in more or less the same words.”
“I wonder why that could be?” she asks sarcastically.
He looks to the side at her seriously. “By the way...”
“What?”
“I...have missed you, too.”
She smiles. “Well, that’s a good start. And it only took you...hmm...about thirty hours to say it back,” she says, looking down at her watch.
“Really.”
She looks back up at him warmly, leans over and gives him a kiss on his cheek.
On the walk back to the house, Justin asks Brian for a smoke and they fall behind the others as he gets out two cigarettes, gives him one, and lights it for him. They stay walking side by side but don’t say much at all. Justin remembers something Daphne said once when talking about her then-boyfriend about how you know you’re really close to somebody when you don’t always feel like you have to talk when you’re with them. As he recalls, all he said to that was some joke about how Brian would always rather be fucking anyway. But now he thinks about quiet days they used to spend in the loft, like one afternoon when they were just hanging around with Miles Davis playing on the stereo cooking omelettes for lunch and sitting at the bar looking through magazines, and Brian once snuck up behind him while he was cracking eggs to grab him around the chest and steal a kiss, but they hardly talked at all, and when he thinks about that it makes a lot of sense.
When they reach the house, Melanie and Lindsay both say goodbye to Justin and get into the car, and Brian walks him up to the porch. They stop in front of the door and before saying anything come close together and hug, holding it for a long time, Justin taking in a long, chest-heaving breath.
When he pulls away Brian keeps his hands on his shoulders, and he says, “Um...I guess I’ll see you whenever.”
Brian thinks a second, and answers, “If you want to see me anytime, just come over. You know when I usually get home from work.”
“I’ll make sure I call first. I wouldn’t want to show up when you’ve got a hot threeway started or something.”
Brian doesn’t smile or laugh. He just looks at him with an unreadable expression and then says again, “Just come over.”
Justin’s eyes lower to focus on some part of Brian’s jacket instead of his face and he nods. Brian’s hands move from his shoulders to the sides of his neck, and he leans down and kisses him. He almost expects it to feel like kissing a ghost, but Justin responsively moves his arms around his waist and for a moment it feels like the only thing warm in a world that seems to have gone cold and numb is the place where their lips are lightly touching.
Then he says, “See you,” and his hands slide down both his arms, one stopping to grasp his hand for just a second, almost too briefly to be noticed, before he completely lets go of him.
When he gets in the car, where Lindsay is sitting in shotgun, she asks him, “You want to go out for a few drinks with us tonight?”
“I’ve got some work to do at home,” he says as he starts to drive off. “But maybe for just a little while.”
He did not even think about it until Justin reminded him of it, but he has not brought any guys home for days, and going to Babylon has not even crossed his mind. At work earlier that day, Cynthia’s mouth was pouring out from memory a long list of important messages she had taken on the phone which barely registered in his head, and when she realized he was not really listening she actually said, “Brian, what the hell’s going on? Are you okay?” Besides that, other people at Kinnetik keep acting surprised when they give him bad news in a nervous, bracing voice and he doesn’t get pissed off. It is almost like he is mourning, too.
Continue to part 6...
Author: Sara (
flowrs4ophelia)Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Brian/Justin
Summary: Too many times it has taken some kind of tragedy to bring Justin and Brian closer together.
Previous chapters: Prologue | I | II | III | IV
p a r t | f i v e
The next day Brian comes into the diner after work to find Michael, Ben, Melanie, and Lindsay seated at the front counter with the kids.
“Hello, ladies,” he says, sitting at the last available seat next to Michael.
Most of them acknowledge him with a nod or wave.
“Honey,” Melanie says to Lindsay, “if Ben and Michael are going to have JR tonight anyway we might as well take Emmett and Ted up on their offer to go out with them tonight.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lindsay says. “I bet Debbie would be more than happy to look after Gus. How long has it been since we’ve been able to go out to the bars?”
“Oh, I see how it is,” Michael says jokingly. “You guys all go off and have fun while we do all the responsible Mom and Dad work.”
They laugh and Ben says, “No, we’re happy to take her.”
“Yeah,” says Michael, moving JR’s carrier sitting on the counter to be facing him. “Hell with Woody’s. I get to spend all night with this gorgeous girl.”
“Well, congratulations, Jenny R,” Brian says, looking at her. “You’re officially the only ‘gorgeous girl’ that Michael Novotny is ever going to spend a night with.”
“Or ever going to want to, I hope,” Ben says with a laugh.
“So, Brian,” Lindsay says while wiping some ketchup off of Gus’s face with a napkin, “we were going to go to the park before it starts to get dark. You with us?”
“Yeah,” he says, signaling to the waiter in front to bring him some coffee.
Lindsay waits a moment before then asking, “You think we should go by Jennifer’s and see if Justin wants to come? He hasn’t had a chance to see us or either of the kids.”
He looks over at her. “You think he’ll want to?”
“Well, it might be good for him to get out of the house for a while. He’s had a couple days now with nothing to do but deal with what’s happened. I could be wrong, but I would imagine that after a while it would start to feel like you just can’t get away from it.”
“That’s a good point,” Ben agrees. “He may not particularly enjoy doing anything right now, but he could probably use a break from just being at the house where he’s surrounded by it.”
Brian shrugs, sipping his coffee. “Okay.”
Before they leave, Melanie and Lindsay each remind Michael and Ben of several things they have to make sure to do or not do with JR in their care, to which they have to say, “Yeah, we know, don’t worry,” multiple times.
When Brian pulls up to Jennifer’s house he is glad to see no other visitors’ cars there. As he unbuckles his seatbelt, Lindsay turns to him.
“Maybe we shouldn’t all go in,” she says.
“Might be a little overwhelming,” Melanie says. “Three of us and a kid showing up unannounced.”
They are both looking at him, so he doesn’t have to ask who’s going to go inside. After he gets out and is in front of the door ringing the bell, he hears none of that inner noise of reaction and response one usually hears that tells them someone heard and is coming to the door. He is surprised when after that silence it opens, answered by Debbie.
She looks at him and opens the storm door to let him in without a word. If it’s possible, the house sounds even more silent than it did the last time he was here, possibly just because there are not so many people congregated in one area of it like before. He looks around for signs of where anyone else might be. Then Debbie just says quietly, “Upstairs,” pointing upward with a finger, and then leaves to go into the hall and back to wherever she was before.
After Brian goes up the stairs and reaches the hall on the top floor, the first door he comes to is open, and when he glances inside his stomach feels like it’s falling to the floor for a second and he stops walking as if momentarily paralyzed. In a second his eyes take in bright purple bedsheets, a Chicago poster, a junior high school level science book, a white porcelain jewelry box with cheap necklaces hanging out. Some things look a little disturbed, like someone has been in here since she was here last moving things where they don’t quite belong, or at least where a 13-year-old girl would not have put them, but for the most part it seems untouched. When Ted was in a coma and might have died his friends had to remove his potentially embarrassing possessions from his apartment before they were found. But nobody could have known what was going to happen to Molly. There is nothing here but an honest, uninterfered look at what she was, and now it is all her loved ones have left of her. But all these things are only the past, not at all what she would have become: advanced microbiology, diamond studs from some nice boyfriend for Valentine’s Day in place of the tacky necklaces, black and white photography of locations in France accompanying the movie posters on the walls. Maybe. They will never know.
He is distracted by the sound of pages rustling from the next room and walks on to the next door, which is slightly agape. It is open enough for him to look in and see Justin sitting at a desk looking through what looks like an old school yearbook. He pushes the door open a little more, knocking softly on one side of the doorway, and Justin looks up.
“Oh. Hey.” He closes the book and sets it on the desk, turning toward him as he walks in. He seems very different from when Brian saw him when they flew back from New York together, more like the blank page he was for a while after he was bashed but not quite that frighteningly not-Justin. It is a little like seeing the sun with all of the light pulled out of it.
Brian comes in and sits down on the bed in front of him, and doesn’t start talking right away. It is like how it used to be when they saw each other, when Justin would come over to the loft just to come over, and didn’t have to say anything like “I thought you might want to go to Woody’s together,” and if he didn’t say what he came over for Brian wouldn't say anything like “So what’s up?” Except at the same time it’s not anything like that. Everything is different. Maybe it just feels the same as it was in the past because they want it to be the same way, and Justin hasn’t asked what he’s doing here because he doesn’t want the day to have come when he feels the need to ask that instead of just accepting the irrepressible force that brings them to each other again and again.
“Oh, yeah,” Justin says again, standing up, like he’s remembering something. “I’ve got something for you.”
Unable to imagine what Justin would have to give him, he watches him go around the bed and pick up the carry-on he brought on the plane with him and open it up. “I had no idea this was in here. I thought I’d lost it. But anyway, I found it while I was getting some stuff out of here.”
He takes out a CD case and throws in onto the bed in front of him. Brian picks it up, opens it, and sees it’s a burned CD with a track listing written out on an insert in Justin’s loose, flowy handwriting.
“I made that forever ago as your birthday present.”
“A mix CD?” he asks. “That’s so very...uh...”
“High schooler, I know,” Justin says in a tone that seems to be missing something. If it was another kind of time, he would be laughing a little as he said it; Brian can hear it clearly in his head. “Though I guess when you were in high school they made tapes. Anyway, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to throw around that month, you know. I thought I would be able to be home the weekend of your birthday, but it turned out I couldn’t be, so I figured I’d just give it to you whenever.”
Brian nods and puts the CD in his pocket. “I’m sure it’ll play just fine even though I’m already a year older.”
Justin starts looking through the other contents of his bag. “Man...He didn’t even put any socks in here. Luke packed my bag for me. Fortunately I still have some clothes I keep in this room.”
“Good thing he was with you,” Brian says.
Justin must hear something in his voice, because he looks up at his face for a couple seconds’ delay before responding. “...Yeah. He was just on his way out, too. I was in the bathroom about to get in the shower and he told me my phone was ringing.”
Brian remembers his shirt on inside-out. There is a silence for a moment not quite as comfortable as the one there when he first came in. Then he asks, “You feel like getting out of here for a while?”
Justin doesn’t answer for a moment, thinking about it, and then sounds surprised by his answer when he says it. “...Yes. Please.”
They go downstairs and Justin gets his jacket and goes right outside, but Brian heads toward the living room to find somebody to notify that he’s stealing Justin for an hour or two. Before he makes his way there, he spots Emmett standing near the entrance of the kitchen facing away from him, leaning against a counter with his arms crossed, completely still like he’s off in his own world. Brian walks up behind him quietly and gooses him, making him whip around with a huge gasp, his hand flying to his heart.
“Jesus Christ!” he practically growls at him in an angry whisper, hitting him on the chest.
“What are you doing spooking around here?” Brian asks with an amused smile.
Emmett waits a moment for his heart rate to return to normal, and then puts his hands on his hips and says a little defiantly, “Making coffee. I came along with Debbie. To see Justin.”
“He was up in his room.”
“I know,” he says, looking annoyed again. “I already talked to him. Now Debbie’s in there helping Jennifer and these two girls who were friends of Molly pick out pictures to have out at the visitation.”
“Oh. When is it?”
“Tomorrow. And the funeral’s on Friday.” He turns to look at the coffee pot as it starts steaming and making a final bubbling noise. “You want a cup?”
“No, I’m just about to leave. Tell the others Justin went out with me and the girls for a while.”
There is a playground outside a school a couple blocks from where Jennifer lives, so they decide to walk there. For a while Brian walks in front with Gus riding on his shoulders while Justin talks with Lindsay and Melanie.
“You know that painting you gave us before we left?” Lindsay asks.
“Don’t tell me you actually kept that thing,” he says, and Melanie laughs softly and hits his arm.
“Yes,” Lindsay continues, “and we hung it right in the landing area so it’s the first thing you see when you come inside our house. We haven’t had one visitor yet who hasn’t asked about it.”
“Asked what? ‘Is that one of your kid’s finger paintings? How cute.’”
“Oh, stop,” Melanie says. “It feels pretty nice being able to brag about your friend in America who’s aspiring to be New York’s next great artist and how we own a painting that could be worth a fortune some day.”
Brian turns around and walks backwards for a second to say, “Don’t listen to him. He knows he’s a talented little shit no matter what he says.”
“Brian,” says Lindsay scoldingly. “Gus, don’t listen to your father’s foul mouth, okay?”
“Okay, mommy,” Gus says, although he seems too distracted looking up in the trees as they pass them to have even heard anything he said. Suddenly he says excitedly, “Daddy, look!”
“What?” Brian says, mimicking his excited tone and looking up to where he’s pointing in the tree they’re passing. “Well, somebody got their shoe stuck up there, didn’t they?” he observes.
“Can I climb up and get it?”
Melanie laughs. “No, baby, it’s probably really dirty.”
“That was creepy,” Brian says, looking at her. “I was about to answer in almost the exact same way.”
She laughs again. “Oh yeah, you being a normal parent? That is creepy.”
In response to that he playfully kicks her leg with his foot.
For the first time in what feels like forever, Justin can feel a small smile creeping onto his face as he watches Brian carrying Gus. He forgot how beautiful it was to see them together. He has often wondered if he ever would have fallen so hopelessly in love with Brian if Gus hadn't happened to be born that night they met. Up until the moment they ran into that hospital room, Brian seemed to him like something godlike and invincible, so much unlike him that he intimidated him. When he first walked into his loft, he was so scared with him he could practically hear his heart pounding in his ears. But then after they went to the hospital, Justin saw how awe-struck he looked standing there looking at his newborn child, and how he seemed almost scared when he took him into his arms and held him so carefully. Someone like him scared by such a tiny little thing; he never would have thought. It was the same way when he handled Justin later that night; he was so surprisingly gentle and careful, making it strange to remember later how nervous and afraid he had been before. And Justin realized he was not what he appeared to be at first, what he perhaps wanted to be. He was just a man. He was human, and felt things the same way anybody else did. And maybe he needed someone to help him realize that himself, tell him the things about himself he was unable to see like “You’re not your father. You love your son.”
It was no wonder that after he woke up from the coma four years ago unable to remember what had happened to him and suddenly everything was threatening and frightening to him, Brian was the only thing he felt safe about, the only one he could trust enough to let near him. At first he appeared emotionless and distant, practically unaffected, and when Justin asked him why he never came to see him he would just shrug it off with some careless answer that didn’t at all reflect the seriousness of what had happened. Then after Gus’s birthday party when he surprised him by saying, “You really freaked me out,” finally giving up the invulnerable exterior, and he found the blood-stained scarf under his clothes where he was wearing it like it was part of him, he thought he understood in a way. And after that they did perhaps for the first time what they would both call making love, at last feeling and healing together, and that was when he knew this all had hurt Brian just as much as it hurt him. He surprised him as much as he had the first time. As they lay curled together and connected it was like everything that had been going on inside each of them melded together so there was no hiding it anymore, and no carrying the weight of it around alone anymore.
Lindsay has noticed that he’s gone quiet, and she tacitly puts an arms around his shoulders, walking close to him. He looks at her with an attempted smile.
“Okay, big boy,” Brian says, lifting Gus up over his head. “Daddy’s got to put you down. You’re not as little as you used to be.”
They have reached the block where the school is, and Gus runs off ahead of them to get to the playground. As they near a pair of benches, Brian drapes an arm around Justin’s neck to pull him along with him as he goes to one and sits down. Melanie and Lindsay sit together on the one beside it. They watch Gus quietly a while as he plays on the slide.
“I can’t believe how much bigger he’s gotten,” Brian says. “Just over seven months.”
Justin does not miss the veiled sadness in his voice. “I know.”
Brian looks back at him and says, “I came by last night to see how you were doing, but all the lights were out.”
“Yeah, Tucker convinced my mom and I to try to finally get some sleep. We’d barely had any in the last...forty hours.” He looks around at the playground which is sparcely filled with a couple other children and parents. “It’s so weird to be out here and see that everything’s going on just like before. In the house it feels like the world has just stopped.”
He puts his feet up on the bench, putting his arms around his knees, and looks back at Brian. “I think I really did need to get out for a while. I’ve been almost going crazy just sitting around not wanting to do anything but not being able to stand having nothing to distract myself either. It just feels so still...there’s got to be a better word to describe it, but it’s almost really...boring.”
Brian shrugs. “I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.”
Justin’s face changes a little, suddenly a shadow of a normal expression of amusement. “I saw Daph earlier today. She told me you had a few words with my father.”
Brian almost looks a little embarassed. “Yeah. Just a few.”
“I hope he wasn’t being too much of an asshole.”
He shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t very happy to see me and wouldn’t leave it alone. So I just had to get a little confrontational myself.”
Justin is quiet in thought for a second, and asks, “But will you come to the funeral?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I? Everyone else is going to go, and I’m not going to stay out of the picture just because of him. That’s why I had to tell him to just deal with it and lay off me.”
Justin looks vaguely surprised to hear him say that, just like he looked when he first saw him at the airport. He rests his head down on his knees, looking unusually small curled up into a ball on the bench like that. “Well, at least the reception’s at my mom’s.”
Gus comes walking back toward them, and Lindsay automatically calls to him. “Come here, precious! Hey - how do you always manage to get your face dirty?”
Brian and Justin watch as she goes and crouches in front of him, wiping some dirt off of his chin with her sleeve. Then she straightens his hat so it’s covering both of his ears and kisses him on three different places on his face before letting him squirm away again.
“Gus, what are you going to do with your grandma tonight?” Brian asks.
“I want to go to the light show!”
Lindsay and Melanie both laugh.
“You want to go again?” Brian says. “I don’t know if Debbie will be up for that. And you got scared, remember?”
“I wasn’t scared!” Gus insists.
Brian laughs and Lindsay rolls her eyes at him. “Brian, I told you that was a stupid idea.”
“It was Michael’s idea!” he says. “And he just didn’t like it during one song.” He turns to Justin, who looks a little lost, and explains, “Mikey and I took him to a Pink Floyd light show at the Carnegie-Mellon planetarium last night. He got a little freaked out during ‘The Great Gig In the Sky.’”
Justin shrugs. “Well, that’s not a bad idea. I’ve always heard those things are only worth seeing if you’re about five years old or stoned.”
“Yeah, but even with one of those factors in the equation it’s still a little lame,” Brian says.
The girls both give him a look. “Brian,” Lindsay says, “please tell me you were not-”
“No,” he interrupts. “Don’t worry, mom. I swear I did not and will not ever get stoned in front of our son. At least...not until he’s sixteen.”
Melanie sighs, “Oh, for God sake,” as Gus goes back over to them.
“Mommy, will you push me?” he asks, and it’s not even clear which mommy he’s addressing.
“In a minute, sweetie,” Melanie answers.
“But I want to take the swing!” he says, pointing at the playground where there is only one unoccupied swing still available.
“Come on, Gus, I’ll push you,” Justin says, standing up.
They walk back to the playground together and then Lindsay stands up to go take his place on the bench next to Brian.
“Looks like he’s going to survive okay,” she says, watching both of them.
“Justin?” Brian says. “He could survive anything.”
She nods. “Of course.”
He stays silent for a long moment, his eyes also fixed on him far away.
“He’s a lot stronger than me, at least,” he admits quietly.
“What?” she says with surprise. “That’s bullshit.”
“What do you know?”
“Well, I know even the strongest people can’t be that way without someone standing by them through the hardest times.”
“If he’s going to get through this okay, it’s not because I’m here.”
“That isn’t true!” She pulls on his arm to make him look her in the face. “You have no idea what it must have meant to him that you dropped everything and flew right over to New York to be with him right after you found out. It doesn’t matter how things have been between you two since he left. You still care deeply for each other, and you’re one of the people he needs the most right now. If he hasn’t been able to clearly express that, it’s probably because it’s a little awkward, what with you having been a total ass he hardly even heard from the past few months.”
“I thought you’d decided not to give me a hard time about that.”
She puts her hand over her mouth. “Oops.”
Brian looks back over at where Justin and Gus are. “I just don’t even know what the fuck I’m supposed to say. It’s not like I can even pretend to understand.”
It’s such an oddly innocent kind of thing for Brian to say, and it makes Lindsay smile widely at him. “Yes, well, when you’ve been off in your Neverland all your life evading reality, no one would expect you to understand things like this,” she teases. “Come on, it’s not like any of us have experienced something quite like this. Hell, I was really sad when my Granny Faye died. And you remember how much it upset me when I found out my Aunt Sylvia had cancer and only months to live. But that’s not quite the same as this, is it? Isn’t there some saying?...Losing a parent is losing your past, losing a spouse is losing your present, losing a child is losing your future, and losing a sibling is losing your past, present, and future.”
“That’s cheery.”
She smirks. “Don’t worry. It’s natural to feel like you’re supposed to be able to give some kind of profound insight that will help somebody accept these things, but in the end there’s really nothing you can say. But it’s enough that you’re just here. That you came to see him today.” She pauses, realizing something. “And come to think of it, that you’re actually concerned enough that I’m having to give you this kind of advice. Five years ago I never could have imagined having a conversation like this with you.”
“Well, I hope I wasn’t too much of a heartless prick when Aunty Sylvia died.”
“You were in Mexico when it happened, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” He pulls up his sleeve to show her his shell bracelet, at which she nods. “Did I at least bring you a souvenir, too?”
“No, but you sent me a postcard of a really sexy lady in a bikini on the beach. I seem to remember it bringing a smile to my face while I was so down.”
He laughs.
Lindsay crosses her arms, staring off in thought a while. “You know what I thought after that happened?”
“What?”
“Well, it was a long while before I was in any state to be able to think about it in such a positive way, but...when you think about it, death is kind of an illuminating and revelatory thing. You realize love really is astonishingly powerful if it can make you hurt that much.”
“I could tell you that without anybody falling dead,” Brian says.
“But don’t you see? That’s a good way to look at it.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Because think about the other extreme. How amazingly good it can also make you feel. Like the day Gus was born. It was the single happiest day of my entire life. I can’t even explain it with words.”
“But with both extremes in the spectrum a possibility, is it even worth it?”
“Of course it’s worth it!” she says, as if even asking such a question is lunacy. “All of life is one huge risk. But I just try to be aware of that all the time. Every single day I am thankful for the life I have with my two beautiful children and a wife I am still falling more and more in love with all the time.”
“I guess the dreaded Lesbian Bed Death really is just a myth.”
She sighs exasperatedly. “The point is...It’s important to hold onto the things you care about and keep them close. Don’t just let it all slip through your fingers before you even realize what you have.”
“I seem to be hearing that a lot recently in more or less the same words.”
“I wonder why that could be?” she asks sarcastically.
He looks to the side at her seriously. “By the way...”
“What?”
“I...have missed you, too.”
She smiles. “Well, that’s a good start. And it only took you...hmm...about thirty hours to say it back,” she says, looking down at her watch.
“Really.”
She looks back up at him warmly, leans over and gives him a kiss on his cheek.
On the walk back to the house, Justin asks Brian for a smoke and they fall behind the others as he gets out two cigarettes, gives him one, and lights it for him. They stay walking side by side but don’t say much at all. Justin remembers something Daphne said once when talking about her then-boyfriend about how you know you’re really close to somebody when you don’t always feel like you have to talk when you’re with them. As he recalls, all he said to that was some joke about how Brian would always rather be fucking anyway. But now he thinks about quiet days they used to spend in the loft, like one afternoon when they were just hanging around with Miles Davis playing on the stereo cooking omelettes for lunch and sitting at the bar looking through magazines, and Brian once snuck up behind him while he was cracking eggs to grab him around the chest and steal a kiss, but they hardly talked at all, and when he thinks about that it makes a lot of sense.
When they reach the house, Melanie and Lindsay both say goodbye to Justin and get into the car, and Brian walks him up to the porch. They stop in front of the door and before saying anything come close together and hug, holding it for a long time, Justin taking in a long, chest-heaving breath.
When he pulls away Brian keeps his hands on his shoulders, and he says, “Um...I guess I’ll see you whenever.”
Brian thinks a second, and answers, “If you want to see me anytime, just come over. You know when I usually get home from work.”
“I’ll make sure I call first. I wouldn’t want to show up when you’ve got a hot threeway started or something.”
Brian doesn’t smile or laugh. He just looks at him with an unreadable expression and then says again, “Just come over.”
Justin’s eyes lower to focus on some part of Brian’s jacket instead of his face and he nods. Brian’s hands move from his shoulders to the sides of his neck, and he leans down and kisses him. He almost expects it to feel like kissing a ghost, but Justin responsively moves his arms around his waist and for a moment it feels like the only thing warm in a world that seems to have gone cold and numb is the place where their lips are lightly touching.
Then he says, “See you,” and his hands slide down both his arms, one stopping to grasp his hand for just a second, almost too briefly to be noticed, before he completely lets go of him.
When he gets in the car, where Lindsay is sitting in shotgun, she asks him, “You want to go out for a few drinks with us tonight?”
“I’ve got some work to do at home,” he says as he starts to drive off. “But maybe for just a little while.”
He did not even think about it until Justin reminded him of it, but he has not brought any guys home for days, and going to Babylon has not even crossed his mind. At work earlier that day, Cynthia’s mouth was pouring out from memory a long list of important messages she had taken on the phone which barely registered in his head, and when she realized he was not really listening she actually said, “Brian, what the hell’s going on? Are you okay?” Besides that, other people at Kinnetik keep acting surprised when they give him bad news in a nervous, bracing voice and he doesn’t get pissed off. It is almost like he is mourning, too.
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Date: 2007-02-10 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 10:08 pm (UTC)It leaves me with the same feeling I had at the end of each week's show, the anticipation of what the next airing or chapter will bring.
My heartfelt thanks to the author.
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Date: 2007-02-10 10:23 pm (UTC)Your pacing is making me a little itchy, which i think is really good. Makes me feel like I'm in the story rather than just reading it. But, omg, I want them to get things resolved! Am looking forward to more. :)
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Date: 2007-02-10 11:48 pm (UTC)Like another commenter said, Lindsay is really terrific in this, too. She always has such unconditional love for Brian, and yet knows how to be blunt with him when he needs to hear it.
A wonderfully told story! Looking forward to more :)
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Date: 2007-02-11 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 01:14 am (UTC)Lindsay and Brian's conversation was very natural.
Looking forward to more,
Cheers!
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Date: 2007-02-11 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 11:07 am (UTC)i love how you described their relationship as without words...cuz i often wonder...what do brian and justin actually talk about?
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Date: 2007-02-12 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-19 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 04:37 am (UTC)Also, that whole paragraph when Justin reflected on the night Gus was born was beautiful.
At this point in the story there seems to be a lot of tension over what it's focusing on, but it's definitely saved from being a mess by the fact that this fic didn't begin with the death and presents itself as being about multiple conflicts coming together all at once.
And just for the record, you commented earlier that writing this was really difficult because you're never lost someone close to you or seen someone go through that, but the thing is you actually did when Natalie died. The friends who were closest to her didn't grieve her death in the way you expect people to from how it's always portrayed in movies, and the way that you're writing Justin - kind of disconnected and anxious - reminds me of that, and I think makes it more realistic, even though it's not written quite like you'd expect an angsty deathfic to turn out. After somebody dies you expect it to be the only thing that anybody talks about, but in reality they just try to move on, so it's good that the story isn't just exhaustively focusing on Molly.
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Date: 2007-04-03 04:47 am (UTC)And just for the record, you commented earlier that writing this was really difficult because you're never lost someone close to you or seen someone go through that, but the thing is you actually did when Natalie died. Still, that's not the same as losing a child or a sibling, which was what I meant. Nevertheless Natalie is a little present in this story, as it's the closest experience to that that I have to take from, which you might be able to see a little in the next part. I couldn't really help that.
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Date: 2007-04-04 01:24 pm (UTC)This was so beautiful! :X