Maps and legends - Brian and Justin embark themselves on a journey around the US, their adventure filled with moments of imminent despair at finally knowing each other, and of closeness that builds towards a future together. ("Nobody was there when you made me care about doing art again, or when you saved me from having to drop out of school even though I'd fucking walked out on you, or any of the other zillion things you've done for me when no one else was looking. They don't know the way you touch me when we're alone. The way you look at me...They could never understand how much you give me every day. Every minute. And if anyone really believes you're the asshole you pretend to be, then they're fucking stupid.")
The house at the far corner of the lake - Brian is a writer and Justin a painter, they both are successful until a writer’s block hits Brian and he becomes obsessed with the new book he is to write, he dehydrates and is closer to the brink. Justin takes him away to a house at the lake. There strange occurrences start to happen. Brian feels like someone invisible is constantly touching him. He asks questions and finds out that Edward Caldwell is the spirit trapped in the house. He learns about the history of Jeremiah and Edward and that they have been searching each other for 100 years. They are brought together at last. (“I asked him once why he didn’t take a wife and he told me with tears in his eyes he (Edward) had loved once in his life, but it was a love so strong and so wonderful that he knew he could never find anyone who could compare with what he had lost. It was tragic for Edward to be alone. He was such a wonderful, caring man,”)
Through a mirror darkly - The mirror is a distorted window though another dimension. It can open only when the guardian allows it. Brian goes to a club in Chicago, high on drugs the mirror seems like any other, only it is not. One dimension: Brian wakes up not knowing who Justin is, not seeing his son for over a year because Lindsay and Mel never got back together and that Michael never persuaded Ben. The second dimension: Brian wakes up asking for Justin only to find out that nobody knows about him, he tries to find him, first his family, then Daphne that leads him to a graveyard where Justin’s remains are. He died the night of his prom because Brian never knew him and never stopped Chris, never showed up at the prom. The verdict: You don’t belong here.
Atavism(s) - Justin’s apartment building in NY is engulfed by fire so he loses everything. Brian comes for him and takes him to Pittsburgh. There J is given the chance to start again: he has Britin, a job at Kinnetik and, of course, Brian. When given the choice to go to NY he chooses what makes him happy. (“Brian,” Justin began, turning his body to face me and taking my hands in both of his. “I suddenly realized that the most beautiful, stunning and powerful piece of work I’m capable of creating is not in New York…it’s here. It’s inside me and it comes from you, and it’s always between us. It’s nourished by our love, it lives through us.”)
A throw- away world - Brian’s elevator breaks down and someone is called to repair it, that someone is Justin. (He shrugged. “One of the office buildings I work for had some problems with it. I could have fixed it for them but after someone burned a hand, no one else would touch it. They wanted me to just haul it down to the dumpster, but I took it home instead. I had it working flawlessly by the time I went to bed that night.” His smile faded. “Isn’t that just typical? Any little thing goes wrong and people’s first instinct is to throw it out.” He gestured around to indicate the rest of his kitchen and perhaps the rest of his apartment. “Almost everything I have, someone else decided was broken, and therefore useless. They never even pause to think that things can be repaired and made good as new again. Better, even. What’s wrong with people?”)
The Lark still bravely singing(s) - Historical AU-WWII - In a time of intolerance and prejudice, one man is brave enough to come out of the shadows to give another person what has always been denied to him. This is, in essence, a love story.
Between the crosses(s) - The war ended (WWII) and Justin and Brian plan to return to US as fast as possible, they fly from Syracuse to Valencia, and most time are apart, because soldier Justin Taylor is dead. They meet Julian, one of the Lost Boys and thus Justin takes his name becoming: JAY MOIR. But is the war entirely over? Brian has to learn the hard way that until every party yields it is still war. (“I was thinking of love,” he replied with a smile, his gaze also flicking over to where I lay. “But yes - of course, Brian. His love is your light. And your love is his. You’re the only real light I think he’s ever had in his life.”/ "There were times that we would have to worry about ‘then’ and ‘when’. But without a ‘now’, there could be neither. To cherish and accept life in the moment, I felt, was to truly live. \To live… and to love.\And love was a risk I was willing to take.")
Testimony to love - - Having to fake his own death, Brian Kinney disappears to San Francisco where he enters witness protection. Grieving and no longer having the passion or the motivation for his art, Justin starts to look for a new direction and upon completing his teacher training course in Graphic Art, takes up a position at a San Francisco business school; an opportunity to start a new life in a new city. But what happens when Justin meets a man who re-awakens his passion for art and for life and realizes he’s falling in love again and that things aren’t necessarily what they seem?
A haunting affair - Justin was murdered 30 years ago, the night Brian had been born. He haunts the Taylor house and is relieving the scene every year.
Your kingbird - Justin is a hustler (Brian, who kept making so many goddamned exceptions to his own rules for Justin. /Brian, who never wanted to be a hero, and kept acting like one anyway - Brian who took Justin’s breath away with his fucked-up mixture of cynicism and caring, and Brian, Brian who wasn’t the face of God, wasn’t anyone’s saviour. /Who wasn’t anything more than a fucking beautiful, fucked-up man that Justin was falling rapidly in love with. /Fuck. How could he have been such a moron? /Brian was an opportunity, all right. A real one, not just some guy in search of a charitable tax deduction. Brian was all that possibility of maybe, maybe someday Justin could wake up next to someone every morning, maybe have a living, breathing life model, a partner - maybe, maybe if Brian wanted it too, it would work./And maybe it wouldn’t. But fuck, nothing else had worked for as long as Justin could remember, so for all he knew, karma owed him one./Instead of taking the chance, Justin would have been lost forever in this stupid fucking trap. Let the trick take him home. Let the guy fuck him.../No. No more. /God, Brian. He wanted to go back, wanted Brian to wrap him up in blankets, sit him down, curse at him - wanted Brian to believe, to say ass-backward things like “Why the hell don’t you think you’ll get through this?” Justin wanted to feel Brian inside him, gentle and unhurried. Wanted to feel Brian when neither of them was going anywhere.)
Broken image - Brian has an unexpected brain aneurism that leaves him semi paralytic. He slowly begins his treatment and physical therapy, but an injury to your dominant hemisphere makes you frustrated and depressed. Fortunate Michel and Justin are there for him (“But equally remarkable was the fact that Brian had chosen to erase, obliterate that step using some convoluted logic that had transformed the bashing into the deus ex machina to reverse time. To undo shared feelings. And the pain of that ripped into Justin's core.” )
That happy feeling - Brian begins to wonder if he and Justin are really happy with how things turned out. Justin is in NY and Brian visits every weekend for 6 months. He calls Justin to come home and for the first time he tells Michel and Lindsay the truth about who he is. He tells them that he won’t be their Brian anymore, the Brian before Justin. He insists Lindsay brings his son home.
Silence and tears - Brian and Justin fall apart after J leaves for NY. Justin has almost given up on Brian after he stopped calling him. Jenifer and Cynthia conspire to get the boys together to the same skiing venture in Canada. While there Brian injures himself on the slopes and Justin takes care of him. (“Maybe, but at some point, invisible to me, it became love. I love all the truly terrible things about you, Brian. I love your gruff, sophisticated boredom with all things romantic while underneath you are the most ridiculously romantic man in the world. I love your sex machine persona, even when you direct it at some other guy. I love seeing how other men react to you, and that fierce freedom in your style. I love knowing that even when you’re fucking them, you still love me. Only me. I love your toughness, how you act like testicular cancer is a vacation in Ibiza, how you finish that bike race in agony, how you let Gus move to Canada with his mommies, even though it broke your heart. But I also love how underneath that iron man exterior is vulnerability so raw it takes my breath away. I love how you protected me from my father’s hatred. I love how you came to the hospital every night when I was bashed. I love how you tried to recreate that dance for me. I love how you wore that bloody scarf next to your heart. I love your completely fucked up self-esteem issues and your ambition and your absolute decency. I love Brian Kinney. Not some domestic clone of Brian Kinney. I never want to change you. If you change as the result of experience or age or whatever, fine, I’ll love that version of you, too. But don’t do it for me. Don’t force it because you don’t want to lose me.”/ “I love your courage, Justin. The way you came back after that bashing, the way you stood up to your father, the way you call me on my shit,” he says with a smile. “I love your talent, your artistic eye, your creative mind, your perfect ass. I love the way you cried when I told you I didn’t believe in love, only in fucking, and yet you still wouldn’t give up. I love the way you had the balls to come after me following your fiasco with the fiddler, and how you wouldn’t let me walk away. I love how you can care for me without smothering me, without making me dependent. I love the way you play me, sometimes, reminding me of what matters, of who matters. I love that you saw beneath the Kinney façade and still wanted what you found there, quivering and cold,” he reaches out and touches my face. “We let other people, other circumstances come between us, Justin. The way others perceived us, and what we should need from life, had a terrible impact on our relationship. We operate best in a vacuum of our own creation. It’s not a relationship others necessarily understand or admire or want to emulate, but who gives a shit? If it works for us, why do we let other people and their conventions, chip away at what we know is right? They tell you that you deserve more, better, and maybe they’re right. They tell me I need to commit to you, be a steady partner, and yet in the same breath they tell me I need to let you go, so you can follow your dream, and maybe they’re right. But they’re also inconsistent. They say what they want to say when they want to say it, and let’s be real. Most of what they say is fucking hurtful. You let Michael convince you that you really wanted domestic bliss. You let Lindsay convince you that you really needed to move to New York. I let Michael convince me that I really want to be a party stud until I die, and I let Lindsay convince me that I was causing you to make a terrible sacrifice in order to be with me. Fuck Michael. Fuck Lindsay. What we need to decide is what Brian and Justin need and want. We have to shut off the outside world, because that’s the only way we really seem to work.”)
Mechanical Michelangelo - Justin left for NY and Brian never went after him. At first he survived by being a hustler, but then Breven, a tattoo artist recruits him after seeing the improvised tattoo pistol and what Justin had done to his hands with it. Justin becomes a renowned tattoo artist. He comes to Pittsburgh for a tattoo convention and runs into Michael. Brian finds out he is in town and comes to see what happened to the twink that once loved him. What he discovers is a new Justin, with tattoos (a dragon on his back), earrings, who listens to heavy metal - he loves every bit of him.
Why not me - Justin is in NY and Brian is missing him and having flashbacks and memories from his past that start to hinder his life and his sleep. Justin comes home and convinces Brian to see a psychologist, Dr. Stevenson, who taps into Brain’s subconscious and helps him overcome some issues of the past like: he is deserving, why his parents never loved him, his suicide attempts, why he tricks, does drugs or drinks. Thus he brings Brian and Justin together. (The wave is crashing down pushing toward the edges of the painting, pushing the viewer -- but there is nothing out there. All the beauty in the painting is behind the wave; it has tremendous forward momentum, strength. But it’s going straight into nothing. From beauty to nothingness.)