Thursday Night

[billboyd]

The evening of the Open Call, the Bill/Johnny Convo, and the Bill/Orlando Convo.

Bill pulls the Mini half onto Johnny's drive and half on the grass. There's plenty of room at the moment, but once he's ready to go, he's not interested in getting blocked in. In his experience, when he's ready to get away from the DBY crew, he's ready now.

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[billboyd]

Bill doesn't bother to qualify his grab for the bottle with excuses; he just wants to take the burn off, wants to soften the sharp edges and biting teeth of the last five minutes. If Johnny's pinners had still been sitting on the coffee table, he might have reached for those instead.

At this point, it doesn't even matter.

Something is happening behind his eyes that he doesn't want to pay attention to, doesn't want to acknowledge. A shifting, painful and inevitable, unavoidable.

It doesn't matter what Johnny had done, of course, because the truth of Johnny is that he's a good man, a good friend, a good boss, and he'd been only a kid himself when faced with a situation that a grown man would have been unlikely to handle any better. But Bill knows better than to think that means less, somehow, that Johnny might have less guilt or less regret because of that.

The things that change you in childhood stay with you forever, they mark you, Bill knowsAnd Bill is still essentially as he had ever been, and some part of him wants to grab

[_johnny]

Johnny nods and then shakes his head and says "'M sorry," again, and Bill makes a sort of shushing noise, not entirely a comforting noise but more of a 'shut up and cry like a man' noise. Johnny snuffs loudly, clings tighter, tries to resist pushing his face into Bill's neck like a little kid.

Gotta get your shit together, gotta breathe, gotta stand up and smile and do what you have to. You made your bed, man. You made it.

"Okay," he says, pushing Bill back to arms length, and Bill looks faintly insulted. Johnny shakes his head, wipes his nose on the side of his hand. "Right. I." He looks up at Keira and smiles a smile chock full of bullshit. "I'm fine. I'm fine. I. Am... going to go get some more coffee." He scrabbles to his feet, nearly knocking Bill over in the process.

[keira_nightly]

Before she realises she'd stepped into the livingroom, she's got a hand at Bill's elbow, steadying him -- and herself. Their eyes meet on the way back from staring at Johnny's retreating back. Bill's face is flushed, eyes shining and the lingering shock of a smile still on the corner of his mouth. The look on his face is nothing she's seen on him before, somewhere between amused and dead serious.

He's righted himself without problem but her fingers still curl into the fabric of his shirt, grounding.

"Is he all right?"

There's a loud bang in the kitchen and she starts, flinching at the sound -- and the idea of Johnny being the source of it.