Fic -- Donald Strachey Mysteries -- State of Grace
Title: State of Grace by NyteFlyer
Fandom: The Donald Strachey Mysteries
Pairing: Donald/Timmy
Rating/Category: NC17/slash
Word count: 12,400 in 4 parts
Prompt: Reaffirmation
Spoilers: The ones for SttS and IB are so tiny, if you blink you’ll miss them.
Summary: Donald’s known all along that he’s been living in a state of grace. Now he finally has official confirmation.
Disclaimer: Richard Stevenson created them, Ron Oliver interpreted them, Chad Allen and Sebastian Spence brought them to life. Legal stuff notwithstanding, we all know that Donald and Timmy belong completely and exclusively to each other. Sometimes I get to be a fly on the wall, though….
Gratuitous groveling/ acknowledgements,/pointing the unwavering finger of blame:
*I can’t thank nanuk_dain enough for creating Donald and Timmy’s Advocate covers for me. She’s both an artist and a wizard, and she put them together in record time!
*The front page of the Albany Times Union I have Timmy reading from on the morning after the vote is the actual one that came out on June 25th of this year. I thought it would be fun to share the front page here.
*A thousand hugs go to storyfan , for lending her professional expertise via her beta!
*This story was originally written for smallfandomfest , but it was also the result of a quiet little challenge between storyfan and me. We each agreed to write a piece about our boys finally getting to tie the legal knot, with her focusing on the bookverse guys while I covered the same basic ground in movieverse. Her piece, "Long Time Coming" is completely terrific, so be sure to check it out!
*In the first sentence, I allow Donald to pilfer and slightly misquote a line from Animal Farm. Hopefully George Orwell’s ghost won’t be pissed off enough to seek vengeance.
Author’s Note: A year and a half later, and I finally get to write the sequel to “And In the Darkness Bind Them.” It’s about fucking time. I reference incidents and/or resuscitate original characters from a few of my other fics past as well, including “Justice,” “Handyman,” and “Send in the Clowns.”
Leap!
There is nowhere to fall but into the arms of grace.
~~ Marta Davidovich Ockuly
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Albany, NY
About a year and a half ago, the state of New York decided that while all men are created equal, some are more equal than others.
I guess you could say I was bummed, but not exactly surprised. My life had pretty much been shaped by the general consensus that I was a second-class citizen and a third-rate human being. Not that I’m complaining about my life, because I’m not. I’ve got a home and my own business and Timmy. Most of all, I’ve got Timmy. If that doesn’t add up to a life that’s better than most and a helluva lot more than I deserve…Jesus. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m smart enough to know a good thing when I’ve got it. And all you have to do is take one look at Timothy J. Callahan to know that I’ve got it all. So when Senator Platt’s colleagues nixed the idea of legalizing gay marriage back in ’09, I was a little disappointed and a whole lotta pissed, but I got over it.
Timmy was totally fucking devastated.
It just about broke my heart, seeing him that down. Not that I blame him. He’d worked so goddamned hard to see that stupid bill pass, given more of himself to promoting it than he had to anything since the Safe Zone project. When all his efforts went up in smoke, he felt like the machine had broken down, that the system he’d always believed in, the system that he’d poured his sweat and blood, heart and hope into had turned its back on him. In other words, he did what he’d always said a politician should never do - he took it personally.
I’ll never forget that night. He walked through the door looking as worn out and beaten down as I’d ever seen him, and there I was, stretched out on a blanket in front of the fire like some kind of idiot, a bottle of champagne chilling on one side of me and two dozen roses - red ones mixed with white for the holidays - on the other, and sprigs of mistletoe hanging in every doorway of the house. I hadn’t heard the outcome of the vote yet - I hadn’t wanted to. I’d had this crazy idea that if I kept flipping on CNN to check for updates, I’d jinx it somehow, but if I waited for Timmy to get home and tell me himself, the two of us would have something huge to celebrate together.
Stupid, the mind games I try to play with fate sometimes. Of course, the second I saw Timmy’s face, I knew the game had been over for hours and that our team had lost. He kissed me hello like he always did, smelled the flowers and managed a smile we both knew he didn’t mean. I had another surprise for him, a black velvet box I’d hidden between the cushions on the couch, but I knew giving it to him right then would just rub salt into a wound that was already stinging. Instead, I just pulled him down beside me and helped him undress, then gave him what both of us knew he needed most, not so much making love to him as soothing him with a physical lullaby, a reaffirmation that we were what we always had been and always would be, whether the state of New York recognized it or not. Then I stuck the champagne in the back of the fridge and the flowers in a vase and led him upstairs to bed.
He didn’t get up for almost two days.
I wasn’t worried. Not really. He hadn’t slept at all the night before the vote - he’d been way too keyed up to even come close to dozing off. But once the excitement was over and those dickheads in the senate had not just rained on his parade, but also pissed on it, he did a major crash-and-burn. Who could blame him? I stuck close to home, too, napping off and on with him since he always sleeps better if I’m there to share his pillow and hog the covers, forcing a bottle of water down his throat every time he woke up enough to make a bathroom run, and bringing him turkey sandwiches and fruit so he wouldn’t have to trudge up and down those stairs while he was groggy. It took a lot of sleep and TLC to recharge his batteries, but I’ll tell you what, the second he threw back those covers and his feet hit the floor, Timothy was on fire.
My robotic pit bull, with the words “next time” always on his lips. He’d bounced back just the way I’d known he would, hitting the ground running as he drafted memos and wrote speeches, organized rallies and held fundraisers - all with his boss’ support. I give Platt a hard way to go sometimes, but I gotta admit, she really had his back on this one. Knowing how much it meant to him, she gave him as much free reign as she could without compromising her own agenda, letting him devote as much time as possible to promoting marriage equality and the push to end DADT.
It wasn’t like the senator didn’t have a personal stake in all this herself. Her baby brother, the pretty-boy cellist Tim was such good buddies with, was as out of the closet as you can get and live, and I remember her mentioning that her great-aunt had been in a “Boston marriage” with another old gal for almost half a century. She couldn’t afford to be seen as a one-issue politician, not if she wanted to hang onto her job and maybe move on to something bigger and better when the time was right. But that didn’t stop her from endorsing Timmy’s pet projects. Platt trusted him and knew covering her ass from a P.R. perspective would always be at the top of his priority list. She was willing to go out on a limb for him - just not so far out she was in danger of falling off.
He was still manning the helm at Safe Zone, of course, and he was still Platt’s one and only right-hand man. But more and more, he was delegating the small stuff, the stuff that didn’t really need his personal attention, to someone else. He had to if he wanted enough hours left in a day to eat, sleep, and say hello to me once in a while as we ran past each other, both of us in a hurry to get to wherever we had to be as opposed to where we wanted to be.
Passing the shit assignments on down the line gave Timmy a chance to let the junior staffers stretch their wings. And although he never said as much, it also gave him a chance to see who was a dead-ender and who was promotion material, who was gonna get left by the wayside and who he could groom to take over his position when he was ready to do a little wing-stretching of his own. Platt’s no fool, and she knew how Tim’s mind worked almost as well as I did. The day was gonna come when he decided to run for office himself. She wanted to make damned sure they were both batting for the same team when he did.
The time Timmy devoted to gay rights on the job was just a drop in the bucket compared to the hours he spent drumming up grass-roots support off the clock. As often as he could, Timmy dragged me along for the ride. And yeah, I still did some obligatory kicking and screaming along the way. I’ve got a rep to maintain, after all, and I wouldn’t want him to think I was going soft after all these years. But this wasn’t the usual snorefest circuit of stuffy, black-tie events. These were Tuesday night gatherings in high school gyms, caucuses held in small town civic centers and factory meeting rooms, weekend barbeques and even a ride on a float or two during pride month.
According to Timmy, most politicians who were sympathetic to our cause and even organizations like HRC wasted too much breath preaching to the choir - left-wingers and educated folks who already knew what’s what. He took a more blue-collar approach, counting on common sense combined with that famous Callahan charm to get his message across.
Over the next few months, it became his mission to convince Joe Blow that your average gay man doesn’t go around fornicating in the cereal aisle at his friendly neighborhood Price Chopper, defiling churches and drowning kittens, or wagging his wienie at little Joey Jr. on the school playground. Timmy courted truck drivers and plumbers and Wal-Mart cashiers, making them see that the institution of marriage wouldn’t crumble and society wouldn’t end just because guys like us had the same rights as guys like them. What’s more, he talked them into calling their senators and congressmen and anyone else who’d listen and telling them the same thing.
Hardly a week went by without me seeing my guy on the morning news at least once or twice. He was always popping up between the pages of the Times Union, and pretty soon he had an Advocate cover of his own to stick in a frame next to mine. He did talk radio gigs, TV interviews, even a segment on Good Morning America where he butted heads with some fundamentalist stuffed shirt from the DOMA side of the fence. It got pretty bloody, and Stuffed Shirt came out looking like an idiot, of course. But there’s no way my Timmy could ever come out looking anything but beautiful.
Every once in a while, bits and pieces of me popped up on the news, too. The back of my head here, an elbow or shoulder there. Timmy vaguely referred to me as “my life partner, an independent business owner” during interviews, and he was very careful to keep my face out of camera range so my business wouldn’t go under thanks to overexposure. Timmy’s face, though? That gorgeous face of his was quickly becoming the face of the gay rights movement in New York.
It was a long year and a half, with that black velvet box I’d been wanting to give him for so long burning a hole in my pocket the whole time - figuratively speaking, at least. It was back up in its attic hiding place, getting covered in cobwebs and mouse shit and God knows what else, patiently waiting for the New York state senate to get its head out of its collective ass. I was waiting, too, but not nearly so patiently.
Timmy wasn’t waiting for shit. He was out there doing something about it.
When Obama finally signed the DADT appeal, Timmy took it as a good omen. He and I had a long, hard talk about finances, and we decided it was time for him to request a temporary leave of absence from his job so he could push for the gay marriage bill full time. He was on top of the world and breathing fire, swearing we’d be standing in the city clerk’s office before the year was out, shelling out our forty bucks for a marriage license.
As usual, Timmy was right.
* * * *
When the marriage bill went up for a vote last month, I didn’t buy flowers or champagne, and I sure as hell didn’t booby-trap the doorways with mistletoe. But I did get that little black box out of hiding, and I carried it around in my pocket for a couple of days as I went about business as usual, rubbing my finger against the soft velvet as I interviewed new clients or BSed with Kenny, chanting Timmy’s mantra in my head. Next time, next time. And all the while I was hoping that next time was now.
The news broke late on a Friday night. I was home alone, bored and surfing the net, when a news byte caught my eye. In the same instant, my cell phone chirped and a text came through from Timmy.
Have you heard? 33-29! Come get me!!!
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I was in a suit and on the road in five minutes flat.
I caught up with him on the steps of the capital building, holding court with a swarm of reporters. He was flushed and breathless, but still in control and looking like he’d just won the lottery. When he spotted me, he held out his hand, beaming. I sidled up next to him, tangling my fingers with his and giving him a quick hello kiss in full view of the cameraman from Channel 6.
“In case anyone’s wondering, this is my husband, Donald Strachey,” he said, laughing. For once, he didn’t give a shit whether or not my face was plastered all over the news and neither did I. This was his night, the night he’d waited for so long, and I intended to spend every second of it by his side, showing both him and the world how proud I was that he was mine.
Timmy was tired, though, and God only knew when he’d eaten last. He was fading fast. As soon as I could do it without looking like a total jerk, I eased him away from the fawning masses and led him toward the car. I held the door for him as he slid into his seat, then sprinted around to my side and cranked up the engine.
“Thank you,” he said, pulling me into another kiss. “If I’d had to answer one more question about whether I was planning to leave the senator’s staff and run for office myself, I may have been forced to borrow your gun and shoot someone’s camera. Or at least ask you to shoot it for me, since we both know my history with firearms.”
“Are you?” I had to ask
“Planning on asking you to shoot something? I’m not sure. That annoying woman from ABC-”
“That’s not what I’m asking, Timothy.”
“I know what you’re asking,” he said, sounding so weary I coulda kicked myself for pressing him. “I don’t want to think about that right now. I’m too tired to think about it. This has been an incredible night, and all I want to do right now is relax and savor the moment. And the only person I want to savor it with is you, preferably as far away from here as we can get.”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” I said, rubbing his cheek with the back of my knuckles. He had a little bit of a five o’clock shadow going on there, reminding me just how long a day he had put in. I shifted the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “Which do you need more, food or sleep?”
“I haven’t had anything except very bad coffee since this morning,” he said. “I’m starving. Feed me?”
State of Grace -- Part Two