Two Things that Never Happened to Kalan Porter and One that Never Will.
Title: Two Things that Never Happened to Kalan Porter and One that Probably Never Will
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart (originally posted under the username idol_girl )
Character: Kalan Porter
Date Posted: October 20, 2005
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Move along.
Notes: Written for a "three things" fic exchange for brittsays .
Situation 1: High school AU set back in the 1950s.
Pairing: Since no pairing was requested, I went with Jalan, cause I love Jalan.
Rating: Oh, let's say between PG and PG-13, for a few f-bombs.
Notes: Basically, my thought process went like this: See 1950s requested, think of 'Grease', write fic. So I think this part has 'Grease' written all over it. Hope that's not too bad. I had this part written way back at the start of October, and I really like it.
One
Early Monday morning, after a 7:30 a.m. Mathletes meeting, Kalan Porter was confronted with his one true fear for the first time that year.
The sign looked innocent enough: a long, fire-engine-red banner that spanned the length of the main hall at Caldwell High. Orange pumpkins, yellow leaves, and black bats were stenciled onto the banner, and glitter was sprinkled on at random. Those weren’t so scary, Kalan supposed. It was the big bold letters printed across it - HALLOWEEN HOP - that spelled his doomsday.
Kalan loathed dances. He was petrified of them. He’d only been to one - the Halloween Hop of his freshman year. He’d gone in the hopes of asking the pretty girl in his science class, Manoah Hartmann, to dance. Instead of dancing the night away, happy as a clam, he loitered around the punch bowl, got laughed at by Manoah when he got up the nerve to ask her to dance, and capped off the night by getting shoved into a locker by Jason Greeley, Josh Seller, and two other of their jock buddies, not to be found until morning by Larry the janitor. That was a traumatizing experience for anyone, let alone Kalan Porter, nerd and shyguy extraordinare. In four years, he hadn’t been to another dance.
It’d take one heck of a girl to get him to this one.
* * *
“Porter.”
Kalan jerked his head up. It was 5:30 p.m. two days before the dance. Kalan had just gotten out of a Quarks Club meeting, and was gathering his things from his locker in preparation to go home. The school was almost deserted, and half of the lights were off.
“What?” Kalan asked, eyeing Jake Hoggard warily as he walked slowly toward him. Jake’s black hair was slicked with grease, his white t-shirt was taught against his chest, his leather jacket was creased and worn, and a metal chain clanked softly against his jean-clad thigh. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips.
“I wanna ask you something,” Jake told him, leaning up against the bank of lockers.
“Okay...” Kalan said slowly. He’d never talked to Jake before. Sure, Kalan knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was - not that he was popular. The jocks, like Jason and Josh, were the popular ones. Jake was a greaser - greasers weren’t popular. Jake had been a good kid all through public school. Never got in trouble once. Then high school hit, and Jake came back from a summer in Detroit, completely changed. He was smoking, drinking, cutting class, dating a new girl every week, tuning up cars, and just basically being everything Kalan wasn’t. And more. Kalan wished he could be Jake sometimes - brave and game for anything.
“You wanna go to the Halloween Hop with me?”
* * *
The night of the Halloween Hop was cool and damp. Rain was on its way. Kalan entered the gym and peered around, trying to find his date. Black and orange balloons floated everywhere, and streamers hung from the ceiling. A punch table was set up off to one side, and a band, Johnny Dore and the Rockers, was playing up a storm onstage.
“Hey, there you are!”
Kalan turned around and smiled. “Hey, Theresa,” he said. Theresa was the girl he tutored and his closest - okay, make that only - female friend.
“This place looks great. Thanks for inviting me, Kalan, that’s so nice of you,” she smiled. “You wanna dance?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
* * *
The two danced for an hour to various Elvis tunes. Jake showed up half an hour later than Kalan. On his arm was Elena Juatco, the gorgeous leading lady of the Drama Club. Elena had split from her steady boyfriend Shane, the handsome leading male of the Drama Club, not 24 hours earlier. Jake and Elena didn’t dance - Jake sulked off to one side, and Elena hung onto his arm, throwing glances at a glowering, jealous Shane every so often.
When Johnny Dore and the Rockers finished their rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes” (apparently all they knew how to play was Elvis), Jake caught Kalan’s eye and inclined his head ever so slightly. Meet me outside. Kalan widened his eyes. It’s raining, we’ll get soaked! Jake shrugged his shoulders. I don’t care. Come on. Kalan paused a second and stared across the room into Jake’s hazel eyes. He nodded. Okay.
* * *
Jake was outside when Kalan was able to slip away from Theresa. He was already soaked through by the rain.
“I’m glad you came,” Jake said quietly.
“I don’t think Theresa is going to like it when she finds out that I’m here to be with you, you know,” Kalan said with a wry smile.
“She doesn’t have to find out,” Jake said, and reached out and pulled Kalan a little bit closer. “Kalan, this is going to sound fucking insane, but... I’ve been crazy about you since tenth grade. We were in the same math class... although I shouldn’t have been in there, everyone was smarter than I was. I remember watching you try to solve a tough problem - you’d stare at it, scratch your pencil across the paper, erase a few things, scribble some more, and then your eyes would light up, you’d smile, and would write the answer with a bit of a flourish. You never needed a calculator. It was all up there, all in your head. And I suddenly started wondering what it was like up there in your head... what you thought about, what you dreamed about, what you were afraid of... and the next thing I knew, I’d totally fallen for you. Talk about a mindfuck. I bet this whole night your mind has been as screwed up as mine was then.”
Kalan’s mouth was completely dry; he’d found something that scared him more than school dances.
Jake moved in close to Kalan. His arms were on Kalan’s, and his face was getting closer...
“No, Jake. Stop.” A firm, determined tone.
“Why?” A soft whisper. Confusion.
“Because. This is wrong. You falling for me... it’s wrong. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. We’re both supposed to be with dates, FEMALE dates, at this dance. We’re not supposed to date each other. We’re supposed to grow up, fall in love, and get married. To women. We’re not supposed to... supposed to... supposed to fall for each other!” Kalan cried
out.
“Why not?”
“Because... I’m Christian! Homosexuality is a sin! I can’t do this!!” Desperation clung to every word, and despite his determination, he let tears glide down his cheeks.
“Kalan... I’m not a Christian; well, not any more, anyway. But I know that, above everything the Bible says, the most important thing is that God loves you and that He wants you to be happy. All you need to do is find out what makes you happy.”
And before Kalan knew what was happening, Jake was kissing him. It was a kiss full of longing and regret and satisfaction and need and happiness and bliss. It was wrong, it was a sin, it was against everything Kalan had ever been taught. And Kalan had never been happier..
Situation 2: Kalan and Josh work in the same grocery store.
Pairing: Joshan.
Rating: PG. No wait, make that G. This is so incredibly tame.
Notes: 'Grocery Store' setting was so easy to write - I've worked at one for two and a half years. Woot. So I've decided that I can't write Joshan. Not really. I think it was a cute bunny, but I don't think I did the pairing justice. I really tried, though, so hopefully it doesn't suck too badly. Oh, and the brown sugar anecdote? Totally happened.
Two
“Kalan and Josh to receiving, please. Kalan and Josh to receiving,” came the disembodied voice over the PA system. Kalan sighed, chugged the last of his Sprite, and tossed it into the recycling bin as he left the break room. Apparently his break was being cut short again.
He tied on his Loblaws smock as he headed for the receiving dock at the back of the grocery store. Kalan had been working at Loblaws for almost two years - ever since he’d dropped out of first-year college to try his hand at the music thing. Yeah, that hadn’t gone anywhere. So here he was, with nothing but a high school education and a $7.50-an-hour job to his name. When Kalan reached the receiving dock, he couldn’t help but groan. There had to be about a million boxes of snack-size potato chip bags sitting there. He’d been stocking Halloween candy, chips, chocolate, and costumes for a month now. He was sick of it.
“Three more days and we’ll be getting out the Christmas stuff,” chuckled Josh from behind Kalan.
Kalan turned around. “Oh man. I’m so stoked,” he said sarcastically.
Josh punched him on the arm. “We’re not in California, man,” he laughed, “don’t use the word ‘stoked’. You can’t pull it off.”
Their boss, Zack, came in from outside. “Okay guys, we need all of these stocked in the Deal Zone, pronto. They’re cleaning us out this year,” he told them.
“Yes sir,” the two men mumbled, avoiding his gaze. Zack could be fun at times, but mostly, he was just scary.
* * *
“103... 104... 105,” counted Kalan, forty minutes later. “We have 105 boxes left and no room to stack them.”
“Don’t sweat it, Kay,” said Josh, stepping down off the small ladder they were using. “We’ll hide them in the back, and blame Kaleb if Zack finds them.”
“Works for me,” Kalan agreed. “It does sound like something he would do.”
“For shizzle.”
Kalan snorted. “So I’m not allowed to say ‘stoked’, but you can get away with ‘for shizzle’?”
“Damn straight!”
A toothpick-thin blond teenager decked out in a white miniskirt and pink tank top strutted up to Josh and, smiling flirtatiously, asked him where she could find soup. Josh lead her to aisle 4 and its big sign that read “Soup!”, and Kalan scowled a little. It wasn’t that this girl was so ditzy - he’d met his share of very ditzy girls since he started working at Loblaws. (About three weeks ago, one girl had asked him where the brown sugar was, and when he showed her, she popped her gum and said, “Oh, I saw that. But I thought it was too light to be brown sugar.”) But this girl wanted more than just soup. And Kalan didn’t like people wanting his Josh.
Well, okay, Josh wasn’t actually his. But Kalan wanted him to be. He’d had a crush on him for about four months now. Josh was fun, and smart, and was someone to look up to. He was putting himself through school to become an engineer. At first, Kalan hadn’t wanted to believe that he was interested in Josh. Kalan was straight. That was a fact. And Josh was his friend. But after awhile, Kalan had to admit it to himself: the way he thought about Josh just wouldn’t be welcome in the red states.
Josh returned, shaking his head. “Girls,” he said. “Could they BE any more obvious?”
Kalan smiled, secretly glad that miniskirts and perfume didn’t always lure Josh in. “Oh, probably. Then again, she’d have to stick a ‘You’re Hot, Come Do Me’ sign on her forehead.” Josh laughed, and Kalan felt a little jolt in the pit of his stomach. He loved making Josh laugh.
As the two loaded the boxes back onto the dolly to be returned to the back, an old classic came on over the store’s radio. Josh grinned, and with a cry of “I love this song!”, snatched up a tall orange-and-black candle and began to sing into it like a microphone.
“I thought love was only true in fairytales!” he belted out. “Meant for someone else but not for me!” Josh waggled his hips and danced around the ladder. “Love was out to get me, doo doo doo doo doo, that’s the way it seemed, doo doo doo doo doo, disappointment haunted all my dreams!” He threw himself into a slide on his knees. “Then I saw her face! Now I’m a believer! Not a trace of doubt in my mind! Sing along, Kalan!”
Blushing, Kalan joined in. “I’m in love! I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her if I tried!”
Josh grabbed him and the two did some sort of stomping, leaping, clapping dance around the boxes of chips. They couldn’t stop laughing - Kalan was sure his spleen was about to burst.
“Hey! Did you guys forget to take your sanity pills this morning or something?” interrupted a laughing female voice.
The two boys looked up. “Oh, hey!” Josh broke out into a huge grin, and went over to the smiling brunette. “Kalan, this is my girlfriend Jenna. Jenna, this is my buddy Kalan.” She smiled at Kalan, and he smiled weakly back. “My shift’s over, Jenna, so let’s go. See ya tomorrow, Kalan!” Josh wrapped his arm around Jenna’s waist and the two disappeared around the corner.
Kalan kicked at a potato chip box with his scuffed up sneaker. So this was how it felt to have a broken heart..
Situation 3: Kalan is in a retirement home with Jacob.
Pairing: Jalan again! Yay!
Rating: Erm... let's say PG. There might be one F-bomb.
Notes: Okay, I've only ever had two jobs in my life, one at a grocery store and one at a retirement home. So again, setting was perfect for me to write.
Three
A buzz rippled through the retirement home like a pesky fly who wouldn’t stop flitting around your head. Word had it that a new resident was coming to stay today - some famous guy. No one knew anything, other than the fact that he used to be in some semi-popular rock band half a century ago. The women in the retirement home giggled like schoolgirls, fussing with their white hair and trying on different flowery dresses in various shades of lurid pink, while the men paced around impatiently, puffing out their chests. The new resident was already twenty minutes late.
Kalan sat in a green rocking chair away from all the hubbub. He’d seen so much in his lifetime - television cameras, crowds of screaming girls - to get too excited about meeting a washed-up old has-been. He just wished that everyone else would shut up about it.
The front door of the retirement home banged open and in swept three things: an elderly man, a suitcase half his size, and about six million red and orange maple leaves. The man grinned and dropped his suitcase on the floor. “What’s up, roomies?” he cried, cackling in delight.
Kalan wasn’t sure when his buttocks left the seat of his chair, but he was definitely standing. His eyes barely saw the old man and his strange clothing ensemble: red tartan pants, a yellow dress shirt, a green sweater vest, and a baby blue bowler hat. His eyes barely took in the man’s thick eyebrows and crooked teeth. Kalan was hardly seeing the man at all. His mind was a whirlwind of colour and noise - a snaggletoothed grin... glinting eyes that smiled upon introduction... water spraying everywhere as bathing suit-clad teenagers ran for cover... laughter... summer rain... tears running down pasty cheeks... a kiss goodbye... whispered phone calls at three in the morning... a promise of forever...
When Kalan’s brain cleared, Jacob had already headed off to his new room.
* * *
“HAHA! Bingo, you shitheads!”
Jacob’s voice, raw with age, tore across Kalan’s ears as he entered the living room later that evening. Wednesday night Bingo (this one, in honour of Halloween, used Halloween words instead of numbers) was well underway, and ten residents were huddled around a long table, piles of quarters sitting near their quivering hands. Kalan made his way into the room and stood for a minute behind Jacob before anyone took notice of him.
“Kalan! There you are, you old dog. You’ve been hiding in your room ever since lunch!” rasped Margie, her cigarette-damaged voice tugging him into the spotlight.
“Did you meet Jacob here yet, Kalan?” asked Roger, nibbling on a chocolate cupcake with orange icing and pointing a browned, wrinkled finger at somewhere around Kalan’s navel. “Jacob, Kalan here was something of a little celebrity himself, back in the day. Won some talent competition and everything. Had a few records.”
Jacob turned around in his chair and his eyes came in contact with Kalan’s for the first time in sixty years. Kalan felt as if his entire body had just stepped into 30-below weather without a jacket on. Jacob’s eyes, eyes that hadn’t aged in the slightest, didn’t even blink.
“Well hey there!” Jacob grinned. “We’ll have to talk life on the road sometime - do popstars even tour? Or do they just put out one bad music video after another?” He laughed and turned back to the table. “Roll the balls again, Caroline, I’m on fire!”
* * *
“WHO THE HELL IS BANGING ON MY DOOR AT THREE IN THE MORNING?!” bellowed Jacob from his room. He yanked open the door and found Kalan standing there, dressed in beige slacks and a black polo shirt. “Well, I sure wasn’t expecting dinner guests after midnight. I thought the tea party was next week.”
“Don’t screw with me, Jake.” Kalan pushed past him and into his room.
“Woah there, buddy. What’s going on?”
Kalan’s eyes blazed with a sixty-year-old anger that had been almost forgotten. “You tell me what’s going on, Jake. You completely barge out of my life when I was twenty. I never hear from you since. Not a, “Hey, how are you?” phone call. Not a, “How’ve you been?” letter. And then you just barge right back into my life. What gives?”
Jacob sighed, his eyes finally beginning to show their age. Kalan could see a mark where Jacob's infamous lip ring used to pierce through his flesh. “Kalan, you can’t think that I knew you lived here, all right? I had no idea. I haven’t seen you for sixty years - how could I have known you were here?”
“Fine,” Kalan spat. “But you didn’t have to ignore me and insult me.”
“I just... I’m sorry, okay? I haven’t seen you in forever. I loved you. I didn’t know how to act. You know I never know how to behave.”
“Jacob...” Kalan paused, his attention caught by a framed picture sitting on top of the television. “Who’s that? Is that... Elena?”
“Yeah,” sighed Jacob, resigning himself to the inevitable. “We were married for forty-seven years. She died last year.”
“You couldn’t even put that picture away, could you? Not while I’m here?” spat Kalan.
“I didn’t know you were going to stop by at three-fucking-a.m.”
“Jake, do you remember what you said to me, the day you walked out of my life completely? Without telling me?” asked Kalan suddenly.
“What?”
“My twentieth birthday. You phoned and said you were running a little late, and would be there in about an hour. You never showed up. Jake, you said that you loved me. That you always would.”
“And I always did, Kalan,” Jacob said desperately. “Look, I can’t justify my actions. I was stupid and an asshole and I didn’t want to be ragged on by people anymore for falling in love with you. So I left, okay? It was the biggest mistake of my life. I’ve never regretted anything more.”
“You were the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Kalan...” Jacob said, a pleading note creeping into his voice, “Kalan, don’t.”
“Remember how we promised to write each other letters, the day you were voted off Idol? You said we weren’t allowed to email - it all had to be done on paper. Emails can be deleted, you said. They’re too easy to get rid of. Write everything down on paper, you told me. That way we can’t pretend like nothing ever happened.”
Jacob was silent. He remembered that day - how sad he was to be leaving his best friend. The person who understood him the most. The person who, with only a word or two, could make everything seem all right.
“Well, Jacob, I wrote you. I wrote you every day. And you wrote me back. And, like the idiot I am, I saved those letters. I saved every last one of them, because I thought they meant something. I thought they stood for something, something bigger than the two of us.” He pulled a few sheets of paper out of his pocket, and Jacob could recognize his own sloppy handwriting on the pages. “You were right. On paper, it’s harder to pretend things never happened between us.”
Coldness and disgust emanating from his watery blue eyes, Kalan tore up the letters into small pieces and threw them at Jacob. Jacob could see words on the papers - love, friend, never, always, remember, forever... - his whole life was swirling around him, torn to shards by the person he cared about most. Kalan’s eyes never once left Jacob’s.
“But it’s not impossible.”
end.
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart (originally posted under the username idol_girl )
Character: Kalan Porter
Date Posted: October 20, 2005
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Move along.
Notes: Written for a "three things" fic exchange for brittsays .
Situation 1: High school AU set back in the 1950s.
Pairing: Since no pairing was requested, I went with Jalan, cause I love Jalan.
Rating: Oh, let's say between PG and PG-13, for a few f-bombs.
Notes: Basically, my thought process went like this: See 1950s requested, think of 'Grease', write fic. So I think this part has 'Grease' written all over it. Hope that's not too bad. I had this part written way back at the start of October, and I really like it.
One
Early Monday morning, after a 7:30 a.m. Mathletes meeting, Kalan Porter was confronted with his one true fear for the first time that year.
The sign looked innocent enough: a long, fire-engine-red banner that spanned the length of the main hall at Caldwell High. Orange pumpkins, yellow leaves, and black bats were stenciled onto the banner, and glitter was sprinkled on at random. Those weren’t so scary, Kalan supposed. It was the big bold letters printed across it - HALLOWEEN HOP - that spelled his doomsday.
Kalan loathed dances. He was petrified of them. He’d only been to one - the Halloween Hop of his freshman year. He’d gone in the hopes of asking the pretty girl in his science class, Manoah Hartmann, to dance. Instead of dancing the night away, happy as a clam, he loitered around the punch bowl, got laughed at by Manoah when he got up the nerve to ask her to dance, and capped off the night by getting shoved into a locker by Jason Greeley, Josh Seller, and two other of their jock buddies, not to be found until morning by Larry the janitor. That was a traumatizing experience for anyone, let alone Kalan Porter, nerd and shyguy extraordinare. In four years, he hadn’t been to another dance.
It’d take one heck of a girl to get him to this one.
* * *
“Porter.”
Kalan jerked his head up. It was 5:30 p.m. two days before the dance. Kalan had just gotten out of a Quarks Club meeting, and was gathering his things from his locker in preparation to go home. The school was almost deserted, and half of the lights were off.
“What?” Kalan asked, eyeing Jake Hoggard warily as he walked slowly toward him. Jake’s black hair was slicked with grease, his white t-shirt was taught against his chest, his leather jacket was creased and worn, and a metal chain clanked softly against his jean-clad thigh. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips.
“I wanna ask you something,” Jake told him, leaning up against the bank of lockers.
“Okay...” Kalan said slowly. He’d never talked to Jake before. Sure, Kalan knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was - not that he was popular. The jocks, like Jason and Josh, were the popular ones. Jake was a greaser - greasers weren’t popular. Jake had been a good kid all through public school. Never got in trouble once. Then high school hit, and Jake came back from a summer in Detroit, completely changed. He was smoking, drinking, cutting class, dating a new girl every week, tuning up cars, and just basically being everything Kalan wasn’t. And more. Kalan wished he could be Jake sometimes - brave and game for anything.
“You wanna go to the Halloween Hop with me?”
* * *
The night of the Halloween Hop was cool and damp. Rain was on its way. Kalan entered the gym and peered around, trying to find his date. Black and orange balloons floated everywhere, and streamers hung from the ceiling. A punch table was set up off to one side, and a band, Johnny Dore and the Rockers, was playing up a storm onstage.
“Hey, there you are!”
Kalan turned around and smiled. “Hey, Theresa,” he said. Theresa was the girl he tutored and his closest - okay, make that only - female friend.
“This place looks great. Thanks for inviting me, Kalan, that’s so nice of you,” she smiled. “You wanna dance?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
* * *
The two danced for an hour to various Elvis tunes. Jake showed up half an hour later than Kalan. On his arm was Elena Juatco, the gorgeous leading lady of the Drama Club. Elena had split from her steady boyfriend Shane, the handsome leading male of the Drama Club, not 24 hours earlier. Jake and Elena didn’t dance - Jake sulked off to one side, and Elena hung onto his arm, throwing glances at a glowering, jealous Shane every so often.
When Johnny Dore and the Rockers finished their rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes” (apparently all they knew how to play was Elvis), Jake caught Kalan’s eye and inclined his head ever so slightly. Meet me outside. Kalan widened his eyes. It’s raining, we’ll get soaked! Jake shrugged his shoulders. I don’t care. Come on. Kalan paused a second and stared across the room into Jake’s hazel eyes. He nodded. Okay.
* * *
Jake was outside when Kalan was able to slip away from Theresa. He was already soaked through by the rain.
“I’m glad you came,” Jake said quietly.
“I don’t think Theresa is going to like it when she finds out that I’m here to be with you, you know,” Kalan said with a wry smile.
“She doesn’t have to find out,” Jake said, and reached out and pulled Kalan a little bit closer. “Kalan, this is going to sound fucking insane, but... I’ve been crazy about you since tenth grade. We were in the same math class... although I shouldn’t have been in there, everyone was smarter than I was. I remember watching you try to solve a tough problem - you’d stare at it, scratch your pencil across the paper, erase a few things, scribble some more, and then your eyes would light up, you’d smile, and would write the answer with a bit of a flourish. You never needed a calculator. It was all up there, all in your head. And I suddenly started wondering what it was like up there in your head... what you thought about, what you dreamed about, what you were afraid of... and the next thing I knew, I’d totally fallen for you. Talk about a mindfuck. I bet this whole night your mind has been as screwed up as mine was then.”
Kalan’s mouth was completely dry; he’d found something that scared him more than school dances.
Jake moved in close to Kalan. His arms were on Kalan’s, and his face was getting closer...
“No, Jake. Stop.” A firm, determined tone.
“Why?” A soft whisper. Confusion.
“Because. This is wrong. You falling for me... it’s wrong. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. We’re both supposed to be with dates, FEMALE dates, at this dance. We’re not supposed to date each other. We’re supposed to grow up, fall in love, and get married. To women. We’re not supposed to... supposed to... supposed to fall for each other!” Kalan cried
out.
“Why not?”
“Because... I’m Christian! Homosexuality is a sin! I can’t do this!!” Desperation clung to every word, and despite his determination, he let tears glide down his cheeks.
“Kalan... I’m not a Christian; well, not any more, anyway. But I know that, above everything the Bible says, the most important thing is that God loves you and that He wants you to be happy. All you need to do is find out what makes you happy.”
And before Kalan knew what was happening, Jake was kissing him. It was a kiss full of longing and regret and satisfaction and need and happiness and bliss. It was wrong, it was a sin, it was against everything Kalan had ever been taught. And Kalan had never been happier..
Situation 2: Kalan and Josh work in the same grocery store.
Pairing: Joshan.
Rating: PG. No wait, make that G. This is so incredibly tame.
Notes: 'Grocery Store' setting was so easy to write - I've worked at one for two and a half years. Woot. So I've decided that I can't write Joshan. Not really. I think it was a cute bunny, but I don't think I did the pairing justice. I really tried, though, so hopefully it doesn't suck too badly. Oh, and the brown sugar anecdote? Totally happened.
Two
“Kalan and Josh to receiving, please. Kalan and Josh to receiving,” came the disembodied voice over the PA system. Kalan sighed, chugged the last of his Sprite, and tossed it into the recycling bin as he left the break room. Apparently his break was being cut short again.
He tied on his Loblaws smock as he headed for the receiving dock at the back of the grocery store. Kalan had been working at Loblaws for almost two years - ever since he’d dropped out of first-year college to try his hand at the music thing. Yeah, that hadn’t gone anywhere. So here he was, with nothing but a high school education and a $7.50-an-hour job to his name. When Kalan reached the receiving dock, he couldn’t help but groan. There had to be about a million boxes of snack-size potato chip bags sitting there. He’d been stocking Halloween candy, chips, chocolate, and costumes for a month now. He was sick of it.
“Three more days and we’ll be getting out the Christmas stuff,” chuckled Josh from behind Kalan.
Kalan turned around. “Oh man. I’m so stoked,” he said sarcastically.
Josh punched him on the arm. “We’re not in California, man,” he laughed, “don’t use the word ‘stoked’. You can’t pull it off.”
Their boss, Zack, came in from outside. “Okay guys, we need all of these stocked in the Deal Zone, pronto. They’re cleaning us out this year,” he told them.
“Yes sir,” the two men mumbled, avoiding his gaze. Zack could be fun at times, but mostly, he was just scary.
* * *
“103... 104... 105,” counted Kalan, forty minutes later. “We have 105 boxes left and no room to stack them.”
“Don’t sweat it, Kay,” said Josh, stepping down off the small ladder they were using. “We’ll hide them in the back, and blame Kaleb if Zack finds them.”
“Works for me,” Kalan agreed. “It does sound like something he would do.”
“For shizzle.”
Kalan snorted. “So I’m not allowed to say ‘stoked’, but you can get away with ‘for shizzle’?”
“Damn straight!”
A toothpick-thin blond teenager decked out in a white miniskirt and pink tank top strutted up to Josh and, smiling flirtatiously, asked him where she could find soup. Josh lead her to aisle 4 and its big sign that read “Soup!”, and Kalan scowled a little. It wasn’t that this girl was so ditzy - he’d met his share of very ditzy girls since he started working at Loblaws. (About three weeks ago, one girl had asked him where the brown sugar was, and when he showed her, she popped her gum and said, “Oh, I saw that. But I thought it was too light to be brown sugar.”) But this girl wanted more than just soup. And Kalan didn’t like people wanting his Josh.
Well, okay, Josh wasn’t actually his. But Kalan wanted him to be. He’d had a crush on him for about four months now. Josh was fun, and smart, and was someone to look up to. He was putting himself through school to become an engineer. At first, Kalan hadn’t wanted to believe that he was interested in Josh. Kalan was straight. That was a fact. And Josh was his friend. But after awhile, Kalan had to admit it to himself: the way he thought about Josh just wouldn’t be welcome in the red states.
Josh returned, shaking his head. “Girls,” he said. “Could they BE any more obvious?”
Kalan smiled, secretly glad that miniskirts and perfume didn’t always lure Josh in. “Oh, probably. Then again, she’d have to stick a ‘You’re Hot, Come Do Me’ sign on her forehead.” Josh laughed, and Kalan felt a little jolt in the pit of his stomach. He loved making Josh laugh.
As the two loaded the boxes back onto the dolly to be returned to the back, an old classic came on over the store’s radio. Josh grinned, and with a cry of “I love this song!”, snatched up a tall orange-and-black candle and began to sing into it like a microphone.
“I thought love was only true in fairytales!” he belted out. “Meant for someone else but not for me!” Josh waggled his hips and danced around the ladder. “Love was out to get me, doo doo doo doo doo, that’s the way it seemed, doo doo doo doo doo, disappointment haunted all my dreams!” He threw himself into a slide on his knees. “Then I saw her face! Now I’m a believer! Not a trace of doubt in my mind! Sing along, Kalan!”
Blushing, Kalan joined in. “I’m in love! I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her if I tried!”
Josh grabbed him and the two did some sort of stomping, leaping, clapping dance around the boxes of chips. They couldn’t stop laughing - Kalan was sure his spleen was about to burst.
“Hey! Did you guys forget to take your sanity pills this morning or something?” interrupted a laughing female voice.
The two boys looked up. “Oh, hey!” Josh broke out into a huge grin, and went over to the smiling brunette. “Kalan, this is my girlfriend Jenna. Jenna, this is my buddy Kalan.” She smiled at Kalan, and he smiled weakly back. “My shift’s over, Jenna, so let’s go. See ya tomorrow, Kalan!” Josh wrapped his arm around Jenna’s waist and the two disappeared around the corner.
Kalan kicked at a potato chip box with his scuffed up sneaker. So this was how it felt to have a broken heart..
Situation 3: Kalan is in a retirement home with Jacob.
Pairing: Jalan again! Yay!
Rating: Erm... let's say PG. There might be one F-bomb.
Notes: Okay, I've only ever had two jobs in my life, one at a grocery store and one at a retirement home. So again, setting was perfect for me to write.
Three
A buzz rippled through the retirement home like a pesky fly who wouldn’t stop flitting around your head. Word had it that a new resident was coming to stay today - some famous guy. No one knew anything, other than the fact that he used to be in some semi-popular rock band half a century ago. The women in the retirement home giggled like schoolgirls, fussing with their white hair and trying on different flowery dresses in various shades of lurid pink, while the men paced around impatiently, puffing out their chests. The new resident was already twenty minutes late.
Kalan sat in a green rocking chair away from all the hubbub. He’d seen so much in his lifetime - television cameras, crowds of screaming girls - to get too excited about meeting a washed-up old has-been. He just wished that everyone else would shut up about it.
The front door of the retirement home banged open and in swept three things: an elderly man, a suitcase half his size, and about six million red and orange maple leaves. The man grinned and dropped his suitcase on the floor. “What’s up, roomies?” he cried, cackling in delight.
Kalan wasn’t sure when his buttocks left the seat of his chair, but he was definitely standing. His eyes barely saw the old man and his strange clothing ensemble: red tartan pants, a yellow dress shirt, a green sweater vest, and a baby blue bowler hat. His eyes barely took in the man’s thick eyebrows and crooked teeth. Kalan was hardly seeing the man at all. His mind was a whirlwind of colour and noise - a snaggletoothed grin... glinting eyes that smiled upon introduction... water spraying everywhere as bathing suit-clad teenagers ran for cover... laughter... summer rain... tears running down pasty cheeks... a kiss goodbye... whispered phone calls at three in the morning... a promise of forever...
When Kalan’s brain cleared, Jacob had already headed off to his new room.
* * *
“HAHA! Bingo, you shitheads!”
Jacob’s voice, raw with age, tore across Kalan’s ears as he entered the living room later that evening. Wednesday night Bingo (this one, in honour of Halloween, used Halloween words instead of numbers) was well underway, and ten residents were huddled around a long table, piles of quarters sitting near their quivering hands. Kalan made his way into the room and stood for a minute behind Jacob before anyone took notice of him.
“Kalan! There you are, you old dog. You’ve been hiding in your room ever since lunch!” rasped Margie, her cigarette-damaged voice tugging him into the spotlight.
“Did you meet Jacob here yet, Kalan?” asked Roger, nibbling on a chocolate cupcake with orange icing and pointing a browned, wrinkled finger at somewhere around Kalan’s navel. “Jacob, Kalan here was something of a little celebrity himself, back in the day. Won some talent competition and everything. Had a few records.”
Jacob turned around in his chair and his eyes came in contact with Kalan’s for the first time in sixty years. Kalan felt as if his entire body had just stepped into 30-below weather without a jacket on. Jacob’s eyes, eyes that hadn’t aged in the slightest, didn’t even blink.
“Well hey there!” Jacob grinned. “We’ll have to talk life on the road sometime - do popstars even tour? Or do they just put out one bad music video after another?” He laughed and turned back to the table. “Roll the balls again, Caroline, I’m on fire!”
* * *
“WHO THE HELL IS BANGING ON MY DOOR AT THREE IN THE MORNING?!” bellowed Jacob from his room. He yanked open the door and found Kalan standing there, dressed in beige slacks and a black polo shirt. “Well, I sure wasn’t expecting dinner guests after midnight. I thought the tea party was next week.”
“Don’t screw with me, Jake.” Kalan pushed past him and into his room.
“Woah there, buddy. What’s going on?”
Kalan’s eyes blazed with a sixty-year-old anger that had been almost forgotten. “You tell me what’s going on, Jake. You completely barge out of my life when I was twenty. I never hear from you since. Not a, “Hey, how are you?” phone call. Not a, “How’ve you been?” letter. And then you just barge right back into my life. What gives?”
Jacob sighed, his eyes finally beginning to show their age. Kalan could see a mark where Jacob's infamous lip ring used to pierce through his flesh. “Kalan, you can’t think that I knew you lived here, all right? I had no idea. I haven’t seen you for sixty years - how could I have known you were here?”
“Fine,” Kalan spat. “But you didn’t have to ignore me and insult me.”
“I just... I’m sorry, okay? I haven’t seen you in forever. I loved you. I didn’t know how to act. You know I never know how to behave.”
“Jacob...” Kalan paused, his attention caught by a framed picture sitting on top of the television. “Who’s that? Is that... Elena?”
“Yeah,” sighed Jacob, resigning himself to the inevitable. “We were married for forty-seven years. She died last year.”
“You couldn’t even put that picture away, could you? Not while I’m here?” spat Kalan.
“I didn’t know you were going to stop by at three-fucking-a.m.”
“Jake, do you remember what you said to me, the day you walked out of my life completely? Without telling me?” asked Kalan suddenly.
“What?”
“My twentieth birthday. You phoned and said you were running a little late, and would be there in about an hour. You never showed up. Jake, you said that you loved me. That you always would.”
“And I always did, Kalan,” Jacob said desperately. “Look, I can’t justify my actions. I was stupid and an asshole and I didn’t want to be ragged on by people anymore for falling in love with you. So I left, okay? It was the biggest mistake of my life. I’ve never regretted anything more.”
“You were the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Kalan...” Jacob said, a pleading note creeping into his voice, “Kalan, don’t.”
“Remember how we promised to write each other letters, the day you were voted off Idol? You said we weren’t allowed to email - it all had to be done on paper. Emails can be deleted, you said. They’re too easy to get rid of. Write everything down on paper, you told me. That way we can’t pretend like nothing ever happened.”
Jacob was silent. He remembered that day - how sad he was to be leaving his best friend. The person who understood him the most. The person who, with only a word or two, could make everything seem all right.
“Well, Jacob, I wrote you. I wrote you every day. And you wrote me back. And, like the idiot I am, I saved those letters. I saved every last one of them, because I thought they meant something. I thought they stood for something, something bigger than the two of us.” He pulled a few sheets of paper out of his pocket, and Jacob could recognize his own sloppy handwriting on the pages. “You were right. On paper, it’s harder to pretend things never happened between us.”
Coldness and disgust emanating from his watery blue eyes, Kalan tore up the letters into small pieces and threw them at Jacob. Jacob could see words on the papers - love, friend, never, always, remember, forever... - his whole life was swirling around him, torn to shards by the person he cared about most. Kalan’s eyes never once left Jacob’s.
“But it’s not impossible.”
end.