ficlet: miles
Title: Miles
Rating: R
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: Why is this night unlike all others?
Warnings: Major 510 spoilers.
Notes: For mclachlan, as a return for the amazing gift!fic she wrote me called "Set the Fire to the Third Bar". Her exact request was "QAF, angst, and a happy ending", which was just so specific. I hope you like it, darling. You're a mind-blowing author and I couldn't possibly hope to equal your gift, but I hope it conveys my thanks and love.
Brian thinks that the bombing of Babylon brings everything full-circle.
When he’s screaming Justin’s name in the burned-out ruin of his investment with smoke tunneling down his throat and scraping it up like sandpaper, he expects the chilliness of spring to be around him and not the stifling heat of fires still desperately trying to be put out. As he pulls away from the tight, tight, tight embrace he had Justin in and sees the blood in his hair, he wonders why Justin’s talking to him, why he’s able to speak and why he’s not on the ground, unconscious.
He wants to find Mikey - dammit, harsh words at the wrong time and it’s just too fucking late now but there’s never any regrets -- but even when he does, he wonders why it’s not Justin strapped to the stretcher, why it’s not him climbing into the ambulance. He’s done this before; he knows the moves. So why can’t he complete them?
More than anything he may or may not regret saying to Mikey, he may or may not regret even more not staying with Justin in the mess of police and ambulances and fire trucks and fucking freaked out people. He volunteers to take Debbie to the hospital, but even as he’s guiding her with his arms around her shoulders to the town car he rented to take him to the airport, he doesn’t want to leave Justin here. He knows it’s impossible and ridiculous to think he’ll come back in an hour or two and Justin won’t be able to draw; knows him winding up in a coma for two weeks is laughable, not when he was talking to him and holding him not ten minutes before.
He goes anyway, because Mikey is his oldest and dearest friend and no manner of words, harsh or not, will ever erase that.
But whenever he’s not screaming at doctors to take his blood, motherfuckers or holding Debbie’s hand in the shitty little hospital chapel, he’s thinking of where Justin might be now, what he’s doing, what he’s saying. He’s thinking of the car he hired to take him to the airport and how, if he’d told the driver to shut the damn radio off when he climbed in like he almost had, he wouldn’t have known. He would be on a fucking plane, cellphone off as per airline regulations, with not a clue in the world. He’s thinking of the shitty past several weeks when he passes Justin on the street and they smile and they wave hello and they chat it up, pretending something’s alright when it clearly isn’t.
He’s thinking of time wasted and growing older and all the regrets he never let himself have, even though he knows he shouldn’t be.
He’s sitting in the waiting room maybe two and a half hours after they brought Michael in with his hand on his forehead and his foot tapping out a tattoo on the linoleum floor while they wait for news they know isn’t going to come in more than dribbles. Ben is sitting across from him and he doesn’t remember where Debbie is, just that Ben told her to go somewhere to fight off the urge to burst into the operating room and assault the doctors.
Brian wonders if it’s wrong that he doesn’t feel the same way.
Ben says to him suddenly in a voice that sounds completely and totally unlike himself, “Go on, Brian.”
Brian looks at him tiredly. “The fuck are you talking about?” he asks, rubbing his sooty hand over his closed eyes to protect them from the ash and dust.
“We won’t know anything for hours. You know that.”
The way he says that makes Brian clench his jaw and release a hard breath, because Ben’s just connecting more dots, drawing more similarities between four years ago and now. Ben wasn’t even fucking there and he gets to push it that much harder into Brian’s head. Brian really doesn’t subscribe to the theory of ‘unfair’, but Ben getting to remind him of shit that he would rather forget about - that everyone except Justin would rather forget about -- is pretty fucking unfair, in his opinion.
“You can come back. Michael’ll still be here.” Ben pauses, licks his lips, and Brian can tell that he’s worried about overstepping his bounds. He raises an eyebrow in admission, telling Ben to cross them with as much fervor as Brian always had. “Find him.”
“Why, Professor,” Brian says, a little too loudly for the maudlin crowd in the waiting room, many of whom shoot him dark glares at his interruption of their skulking. “I never knew you were the romantic type.” He turns his mouth into his shoulder to cough out more smoke and smog and death and death and death and -
“Of course you did,” Ben counters quietly, leaning back in his seat for the first time in an hour. He lets out a sigh of relief when his shoulders hit the back of the chair, and then he meets Brian’s eyes for the longest time, a completely serious expression on his face.
Brian stands up, brushes splinters of glass and dust off of the knees of his slacks, and walks out of the brightness of the hospital and into the black mess back at Babylon, a mess of crying and shouting and headache-inducing whirling red and blue lights with too many people for him to try and differentiate the one he came for.
Justin does it for him. He seems to sense that Brian’s approaching in the way that he had when he was seventeen; just the hint of Brian’s cologne would send that blond head whipping up and a smile spreading across his face as he leaped to attention, practically wagging his fucking tail. Brian hasn’t seen him do that since the night at his office, nights and nights and weeks and months and years ago, hasn’t seen the boundless enthusiasm of his childhood since it crashed into the strong don’t-fuck-with-me attitude of his adulthood, but the way Justin disentangles himself from his mother and strides over to him with his head up high and his shoulders back reminds Brian of the fearless kid that had attracted him in the first place, right in this exact spot.
He grabs Justin because that’s the first thing he thinks to do. Brian always relied on physicality, shutting his emotions up behind steel doors, and even if Justin had started to break him of that habit before he left, it doesn’t change the fact that Brian feels by fucking, emotes by kissing, reacts by pushing away. He grabs Justin because that’s what he always has done, and even if Justin isn’t what he always has done, it’s full-circle night for Brian Kinney and the past and present are just going to have to collide for once.
Justin asks about Michael, but Brian doesn’t want to talk about Michael. He doesn’t want to talk about Babylon or what’s going on with any of the people he left behind to race Debbie over to Allegheny General or their fucking non-defined, non-conventional relationship. He doesn’t want to talk about the closeness he came to being over an ocean instead of where he belongs, doesn’t want to talk about the hair’s breadth of distance between Justin and death again.
He just wants to talk about what Justin always wanted to, because if he can stop being himself for long enough to verbally express what, physically, he probably always has, then Mikey in surgery and Babylon in ruins and people dead inside a place he considered more of a home than his childhood house won't matter, and it’ll resolve itself.
Everything will resolve itself.
“I want to take a shower,” Justin says to him, his voice muffled by Brian’s leather jacket, after they’ve been standing in the middle of chaos for several minutes in a purely quiet and uninterrupted place, arms tight around each other, a guilty admission hanging in the air that isn’t so guilty after being so long in coming. “I need…I -“ Justin can’t seem to get the words out. Brian steps back the slightest bit so that he can turn Justin’s chin up with his thumb, angle his face to one side and then the other. Justin lets out a shaky breath and a couple of stray tears make clear paths through the soot and ash and dust on his face. He rubs them self-consciously away on the paramedic’s jacket he’s wearing, embarrassed about showing his emotions to Brian the way he always has been.
If Justin’s embarrassed because of a few tears, Brian doesn’t know what he is.
“Use my place,” Brian tells him, putting a hand in his hair. The cut that bled all over Justin’s hair and ear is superficial, but it’s only maybe three inches up from that scar, the rigid, raised one that he’s traced a thousand times over, and that freaks him out. Full-fucking-circle.
Suddenly he’s embracing Justin again, unwilling to let him go, to return him to real civilian life when he can keep him here forever with this unacknowledged admittance.
“There’s a shower at mine,” Justin whispers, his hands trying to grasp the leather of Brian’s jacket. The coat’s too tight, though, and there’s no slack for Justin to pick up.
“If the rumors are any indication, it’s not much of one,” he tries to rebuff, but he thinks it sounds more desperate than nonchalant. Justin turns so that his cheek’s resting against Brian’s shoulder and he can breathe and talk without sounding like he has a pillow over his face, or under his face, like when he said stop stop I can’t I’m sorry don’t don’t don’t --
“Brian…”
“Use my fucking shower. For once, don’t give me shit about something.” It comes out sounding harsh -- too many harsh words -- but it’s just to keep from sounding absolutely pathetic, which is half of the way he really feels. The other half is exulted, emancipated. Justin hasn’t said anything about it, but Brian knows that’s what he’s thinking about. True words. True, perfect words, waiting for the opportune moment. They wouldn’t have meant anything if they were said in a context that belittled them. Here, they’re fitting. Here, they’re believable. Here, they work.
“I won’t,” Justin says, laughing, although there’s no humor in it. He’s laughing to keep from crying. Brian knows, because he’s done it before. “I’m not.”
“I have to go back to the hospital,” Brian tells him, his words going into Justin’s darkened hair. “I have to find Theodore, too.”
“I’ll be there.” Justin pulls back from him, but his hands are grasping Brian’s forearms. Contact is necessary at all times. “I just want to change. There’s blood, not m -“
Brian kisses him hard before he can say ‘mine’, right in front of his mother and her boyfriend, the way he had a few minutes ago. He kisses him hard to try and make him believe that what Brian said was for real, even if Justin’s already talking his way out of it. Post traumatic stress. Admission by freak out. Psychological shock manifested in verbal form. Justin has fancy names and words for everything, neat little labels he likes to tie things up in. Romantic. Marriage. Relationship. Over.
Then he lets him go, and he watches as Justin walks away, his arms crossed tightly around himself, cocooned in the paramedic’s jacket, his back slightly bent but his head still up. Brian watches him walk away, and that is the difference between another night that anyone else would rather not think about and this one.
Rating: R
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: Why is this night unlike all others?
Warnings: Major 510 spoilers.
Notes: For mclachlan, as a return for the amazing gift!fic she wrote me called "Set the Fire to the Third Bar". Her exact request was "QAF, angst, and a happy ending", which was just so specific. I hope you like it, darling. You're a mind-blowing author and I couldn't possibly hope to equal your gift, but I hope it conveys my thanks and love.
Brian thinks that the bombing of Babylon brings everything full-circle.
When he’s screaming Justin’s name in the burned-out ruin of his investment with smoke tunneling down his throat and scraping it up like sandpaper, he expects the chilliness of spring to be around him and not the stifling heat of fires still desperately trying to be put out. As he pulls away from the tight, tight, tight embrace he had Justin in and sees the blood in his hair, he wonders why Justin’s talking to him, why he’s able to speak and why he’s not on the ground, unconscious.
He wants to find Mikey - dammit, harsh words at the wrong time and it’s just too fucking late now but there’s never any regrets -- but even when he does, he wonders why it’s not Justin strapped to the stretcher, why it’s not him climbing into the ambulance. He’s done this before; he knows the moves. So why can’t he complete them?
More than anything he may or may not regret saying to Mikey, he may or may not regret even more not staying with Justin in the mess of police and ambulances and fire trucks and fucking freaked out people. He volunteers to take Debbie to the hospital, but even as he’s guiding her with his arms around her shoulders to the town car he rented to take him to the airport, he doesn’t want to leave Justin here. He knows it’s impossible and ridiculous to think he’ll come back in an hour or two and Justin won’t be able to draw; knows him winding up in a coma for two weeks is laughable, not when he was talking to him and holding him not ten minutes before.
He goes anyway, because Mikey is his oldest and dearest friend and no manner of words, harsh or not, will ever erase that.
But whenever he’s not screaming at doctors to take his blood, motherfuckers or holding Debbie’s hand in the shitty little hospital chapel, he’s thinking of where Justin might be now, what he’s doing, what he’s saying. He’s thinking of the car he hired to take him to the airport and how, if he’d told the driver to shut the damn radio off when he climbed in like he almost had, he wouldn’t have known. He would be on a fucking plane, cellphone off as per airline regulations, with not a clue in the world. He’s thinking of the shitty past several weeks when he passes Justin on the street and they smile and they wave hello and they chat it up, pretending something’s alright when it clearly isn’t.
He’s thinking of time wasted and growing older and all the regrets he never let himself have, even though he knows he shouldn’t be.
He’s sitting in the waiting room maybe two and a half hours after they brought Michael in with his hand on his forehead and his foot tapping out a tattoo on the linoleum floor while they wait for news they know isn’t going to come in more than dribbles. Ben is sitting across from him and he doesn’t remember where Debbie is, just that Ben told her to go somewhere to fight off the urge to burst into the operating room and assault the doctors.
Brian wonders if it’s wrong that he doesn’t feel the same way.
Ben says to him suddenly in a voice that sounds completely and totally unlike himself, “Go on, Brian.”
Brian looks at him tiredly. “The fuck are you talking about?” he asks, rubbing his sooty hand over his closed eyes to protect them from the ash and dust.
“We won’t know anything for hours. You know that.”
The way he says that makes Brian clench his jaw and release a hard breath, because Ben’s just connecting more dots, drawing more similarities between four years ago and now. Ben wasn’t even fucking there and he gets to push it that much harder into Brian’s head. Brian really doesn’t subscribe to the theory of ‘unfair’, but Ben getting to remind him of shit that he would rather forget about - that everyone except Justin would rather forget about -- is pretty fucking unfair, in his opinion.
“You can come back. Michael’ll still be here.” Ben pauses, licks his lips, and Brian can tell that he’s worried about overstepping his bounds. He raises an eyebrow in admission, telling Ben to cross them with as much fervor as Brian always had. “Find him.”
“Why, Professor,” Brian says, a little too loudly for the maudlin crowd in the waiting room, many of whom shoot him dark glares at his interruption of their skulking. “I never knew you were the romantic type.” He turns his mouth into his shoulder to cough out more smoke and smog and death and death and death and -
“Of course you did,” Ben counters quietly, leaning back in his seat for the first time in an hour. He lets out a sigh of relief when his shoulders hit the back of the chair, and then he meets Brian’s eyes for the longest time, a completely serious expression on his face.
Brian stands up, brushes splinters of glass and dust off of the knees of his slacks, and walks out of the brightness of the hospital and into the black mess back at Babylon, a mess of crying and shouting and headache-inducing whirling red and blue lights with too many people for him to try and differentiate the one he came for.
Justin does it for him. He seems to sense that Brian’s approaching in the way that he had when he was seventeen; just the hint of Brian’s cologne would send that blond head whipping up and a smile spreading across his face as he leaped to attention, practically wagging his fucking tail. Brian hasn’t seen him do that since the night at his office, nights and nights and weeks and months and years ago, hasn’t seen the boundless enthusiasm of his childhood since it crashed into the strong don’t-fuck-with-me attitude of his adulthood, but the way Justin disentangles himself from his mother and strides over to him with his head up high and his shoulders back reminds Brian of the fearless kid that had attracted him in the first place, right in this exact spot.
He grabs Justin because that’s the first thing he thinks to do. Brian always relied on physicality, shutting his emotions up behind steel doors, and even if Justin had started to break him of that habit before he left, it doesn’t change the fact that Brian feels by fucking, emotes by kissing, reacts by pushing away. He grabs Justin because that’s what he always has done, and even if Justin isn’t what he always has done, it’s full-circle night for Brian Kinney and the past and present are just going to have to collide for once.
Justin asks about Michael, but Brian doesn’t want to talk about Michael. He doesn’t want to talk about Babylon or what’s going on with any of the people he left behind to race Debbie over to Allegheny General or their fucking non-defined, non-conventional relationship. He doesn’t want to talk about the closeness he came to being over an ocean instead of where he belongs, doesn’t want to talk about the hair’s breadth of distance between Justin and death again.
He just wants to talk about what Justin always wanted to, because if he can stop being himself for long enough to verbally express what, physically, he probably always has, then Mikey in surgery and Babylon in ruins and people dead inside a place he considered more of a home than his childhood house won't matter, and it’ll resolve itself.
Everything will resolve itself.
“I want to take a shower,” Justin says to him, his voice muffled by Brian’s leather jacket, after they’ve been standing in the middle of chaos for several minutes in a purely quiet and uninterrupted place, arms tight around each other, a guilty admission hanging in the air that isn’t so guilty after being so long in coming. “I need…I -“ Justin can’t seem to get the words out. Brian steps back the slightest bit so that he can turn Justin’s chin up with his thumb, angle his face to one side and then the other. Justin lets out a shaky breath and a couple of stray tears make clear paths through the soot and ash and dust on his face. He rubs them self-consciously away on the paramedic’s jacket he’s wearing, embarrassed about showing his emotions to Brian the way he always has been.
If Justin’s embarrassed because of a few tears, Brian doesn’t know what he is.
“Use my place,” Brian tells him, putting a hand in his hair. The cut that bled all over Justin’s hair and ear is superficial, but it’s only maybe three inches up from that scar, the rigid, raised one that he’s traced a thousand times over, and that freaks him out. Full-fucking-circle.
Suddenly he’s embracing Justin again, unwilling to let him go, to return him to real civilian life when he can keep him here forever with this unacknowledged admittance.
“There’s a shower at mine,” Justin whispers, his hands trying to grasp the leather of Brian’s jacket. The coat’s too tight, though, and there’s no slack for Justin to pick up.
“If the rumors are any indication, it’s not much of one,” he tries to rebuff, but he thinks it sounds more desperate than nonchalant. Justin turns so that his cheek’s resting against Brian’s shoulder and he can breathe and talk without sounding like he has a pillow over his face, or under his face, like when he said stop stop I can’t I’m sorry don’t don’t don’t --
“Brian…”
“Use my fucking shower. For once, don’t give me shit about something.” It comes out sounding harsh -- too many harsh words -- but it’s just to keep from sounding absolutely pathetic, which is half of the way he really feels. The other half is exulted, emancipated. Justin hasn’t said anything about it, but Brian knows that’s what he’s thinking about. True words. True, perfect words, waiting for the opportune moment. They wouldn’t have meant anything if they were said in a context that belittled them. Here, they’re fitting. Here, they’re believable. Here, they work.
“I won’t,” Justin says, laughing, although there’s no humor in it. He’s laughing to keep from crying. Brian knows, because he’s done it before. “I’m not.”
“I have to go back to the hospital,” Brian tells him, his words going into Justin’s darkened hair. “I have to find Theodore, too.”
“I’ll be there.” Justin pulls back from him, but his hands are grasping Brian’s forearms. Contact is necessary at all times. “I just want to change. There’s blood, not m -“
Brian kisses him hard before he can say ‘mine’, right in front of his mother and her boyfriend, the way he had a few minutes ago. He kisses him hard to try and make him believe that what Brian said was for real, even if Justin’s already talking his way out of it. Post traumatic stress. Admission by freak out. Psychological shock manifested in verbal form. Justin has fancy names and words for everything, neat little labels he likes to tie things up in. Romantic. Marriage. Relationship. Over.
Then he lets him go, and he watches as Justin walks away, his arms crossed tightly around himself, cocooned in the paramedic’s jacket, his back slightly bent but his head still up. Brian watches him walk away, and that is the difference between another night that anyone else would rather not think about and this one.