An off-key birthday wish for Brynn!
Dudes, it's brynnmck's birthday! I think that bears repeating:
It's BRYNN'S BIRTHDAY!
Brynn is, as you know, a solidly wonderful and amazing human being. She organized that little get-together for 60 of her closest friends (aka bitchinparty), she writes amazing fic, she provides endless amounts of squee and enthusiasm, and she masterminds the best road trip sock puppet adventures ever!*
*Okay, so troyswann helped a little with that one. But still. How often do you get the chance to use the phrase "road trip sock puppet adventures"? That's right. Not nearly enough.
Anyway, Brynn's awesomeness is a well-established fact, and to celebrate her amazingness and her deep and abiding love for Monsieurs Hugh Dillon and Callum Keith Rennie, Esq., I wroted a short RPS story about their angsty, angsty love...
Title: Let Your Fingers Do The Talking
Pairing: Hugh/Callum
Fandom: C6D RPS
Rating: R
Length: 1084 words
Author's Note: Beta'd by the lovely llassah, who reminded me that there's always a solution to every problem. For brynnmck, for being awesome.
The irony is, they never fucked.
Wait, scratch that. That’s the punchline.
The irony is, they spent nearly fourteen years wanting each other, and yet they never managed to get together. They made excuses. They ignored the heat that sizzled between them. They threw other people in one another’s path like props on a movie set. Wives. Lovers. Girlfriends. They used drugs and booze as a roadblock. Even if Callum had been okay with the gay thing from day one, sobriety was always big hurdle for Hugh to clear. In some ways it was more of a barrier than the wife and the girlfriends.
Hugh’d always been comfortable about being queer (or bi, or straight with some exceptions, or whatever). He said he figured it out when he was about fourteen. Different people turned his crank. Guys, girls, it didn’t make a difference. For Hugh, it’s always been about that white-hot connection. Up on stage he has that bond with the mike, with the rest of his band, with the audience. When he’s one-on-one, or up in front of an amphitheatre of 30,000, Hugh Dillon is always looking for that spark. And when he finds it, he goes for it just like he goes for everything. Full throttle.
Callum’s never been like that. He’s never been that lucky, or that dedicated, or maybe that deluded, about anything in his life, except for a few brief seconds when the cameras are rolling and the dialogue pours out of him and he knows--he knows--that everything’s clicking. In that one second he’s perfect, it’s perfect, the world is perfect. And his stab at perfection is all on film, captured and frozen there for all time. Later, when he sits alone in the dark and stares at that flickering screen, it’s easier to pretend he’s not alone. Not if other people can share this with him, somewhere, somehow. That's his moment of connection.
But that’s all he’s got, now. Precious seconds of celluloid perfection, and hours and hours of shitty roles and bad scripts and worse editing to drown out the good stuff. Maybe if he’d been as brave or as willing to take some fucking risks in his life as he’d been in his work, he’d have more to show for the last ten years. Hugh’s certainly doing well. Hugh’s happy. Hugh’s clean. And Callum...
Callum’s fucked. He’s lonely, and lately he's been spending too much time thinking about irony and past mistakes.
The thing is, he walked away from Hugh once. Way back in ’95 they had a--a moment, or something. He’s not entirely sure what you’d call it. He was on tour with Hugh’s band at the time, learning the punk game, and a late-night conversation about the script and what a total douche Noel was turning out to be grew into an unexpected kiss. Fourteen years later, Callum can still feel Hugh’s hand high on his thigh, his thumb rubbing in little circles, his fingers brushing closer and closer to Callum’s dick while Hugh kissed him so softly and so sweetly that Callum had to squeeze his eyes shut tight. Hugh’s mouth was like a drug, like aged whiskey, like something he wasn’t supposed to have. And Callum kept kissing and kissing him, trying to push past the slow and the sweet and into the rough. Into the punishing kiss he deserved for wanting something like this so badly.
But Hugh just kept easing back, slowing down, taking his time. It was like he wanted to taste Callum. And his hand was so gentle on Callum’s thigh. It was almost like--almost like Hugh loved him, which was all kinds of fucked-up.
Callum was just a guy up there on the screen. Everything in his life, good and bad, happened in the empty seconds between the frames of the film. He wasn’t brave enough for this, for Hugh, for being someone so totally different. Not in real life. He couldn’t bear it.
So Callum shoved him away, both of them panting hard, and said, “I can’t. I can’t.” He kept on saying it, shaking his head at Hugh’s surprised denials, folding his hands up over his chest as some kind of pathetic defense against Hugh’s anger.
“You’re a fucking coward,” Hugh snapped, and Callum dropped his head and nodded.
“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted. Hugh grabbed a bottle of Jack and went back to his own bunk. Callum left the tour early.
Hugh never talked that night, and he never called Callum a coward again. He forgave easily, and they’ve been best friends for a long, long time. They were friends living in different cities, that was all, friends who saw each other when shooting schedules and tour dates coincided. Just friends. And whenever Callum wonders if Hugh ever thinks about that near-miss, he reminds himself that Hugh’s happy. Hugh's clean. Hugh’s never been one for regrets.
But sometimes, sometimes, there’s a heavy silence on Hugh’s end of the phone. Maybe, Callum thinks, maybe he's been wrong about everything from day one. Maybe Hugh Dillon has one or two regrets about the way it all went down, too.
Late at night, after he's been talking to Hugh, or when he’s been thinking about the past, Callum wishes it hadn’t been so easy to put an end to the whole thing before it’d even started. Sometimes he thinks that, if things had been different, if Hugh had kicked the habit sooner, if Callum had come to terms with who he was and what he wanted a little sooner, they would have had something good.
Sometimes Callum wonders if anything would be different now.
And that’s where the punchline comes in. Everyone thinks they fucked. People in the industry, people in Hugh’s various bands, directors and other actors and even Hugh’s fucking wife thinks that they were more than friends out there on the road. Noel’s book had a lot to do with it, of course. Callum almost wishes he and Hugh had fucked, just so there’d be some point to the whole pathetic mess.
Maybe, instead of seeing each other once every few months, and calling each other all the time, and missing each other, they could have just--done it. People talk about it all the time anyway. At least Callum would know if Hugh’s hands were as gentle as they looked.
He’s been staring at the phone a lot, lately, and thinking about hearing Hugh’s voice on the other end. Fifty is on the horizon, after all. Neither of them are young anymore.
Reach out and touch someone, the ads on the cover of the phone book used to say.
That’s starting to sound like one hell of a good suggestion.
.the end.
I hope you have a very, very happy birthday, Brynn. You exude more love and joy and warmth than anyone I know, and the world is a better place because you're in it. You deserve every good thing. Enjoy your special day!
♥ ♥ ♥ BRYNN ♥ ♥ ♥
It's BRYNN'S BIRTHDAY!
Brynn is, as you know, a solidly wonderful and amazing human being. She organized that little get-together for 60 of her closest friends (aka bitchinparty), she writes amazing fic, she provides endless amounts of squee and enthusiasm, and she masterminds the best road trip sock puppet adventures ever!*
*Okay, so troyswann helped a little with that one. But still. How often do you get the chance to use the phrase "road trip sock puppet adventures"? That's right. Not nearly enough.
Anyway, Brynn's awesomeness is a well-established fact, and to celebrate her amazingness and her deep and abiding love for Monsieurs Hugh Dillon and Callum Keith Rennie, Esq., I wroted a short RPS story about their angsty, angsty love...
Title: Let Your Fingers Do The Talking
Pairing: Hugh/Callum
Fandom: C6D RPS
Rating: R
Length: 1084 words
Author's Note: Beta'd by the lovely llassah, who reminded me that there's always a solution to every problem. For brynnmck, for being awesome.
The irony is, they never fucked.
Wait, scratch that. That’s the punchline.
The irony is, they spent nearly fourteen years wanting each other, and yet they never managed to get together. They made excuses. They ignored the heat that sizzled between them. They threw other people in one another’s path like props on a movie set. Wives. Lovers. Girlfriends. They used drugs and booze as a roadblock. Even if Callum had been okay with the gay thing from day one, sobriety was always big hurdle for Hugh to clear. In some ways it was more of a barrier than the wife and the girlfriends.
Hugh’d always been comfortable about being queer (or bi, or straight with some exceptions, or whatever). He said he figured it out when he was about fourteen. Different people turned his crank. Guys, girls, it didn’t make a difference. For Hugh, it’s always been about that white-hot connection. Up on stage he has that bond with the mike, with the rest of his band, with the audience. When he’s one-on-one, or up in front of an amphitheatre of 30,000, Hugh Dillon is always looking for that spark. And when he finds it, he goes for it just like he goes for everything. Full throttle.
Callum’s never been like that. He’s never been that lucky, or that dedicated, or maybe that deluded, about anything in his life, except for a few brief seconds when the cameras are rolling and the dialogue pours out of him and he knows--he knows--that everything’s clicking. In that one second he’s perfect, it’s perfect, the world is perfect. And his stab at perfection is all on film, captured and frozen there for all time. Later, when he sits alone in the dark and stares at that flickering screen, it’s easier to pretend he’s not alone. Not if other people can share this with him, somewhere, somehow. That's his moment of connection.
But that’s all he’s got, now. Precious seconds of celluloid perfection, and hours and hours of shitty roles and bad scripts and worse editing to drown out the good stuff. Maybe if he’d been as brave or as willing to take some fucking risks in his life as he’d been in his work, he’d have more to show for the last ten years. Hugh’s certainly doing well. Hugh’s happy. Hugh’s clean. And Callum...
Callum’s fucked. He’s lonely, and lately he's been spending too much time thinking about irony and past mistakes.
The thing is, he walked away from Hugh once. Way back in ’95 they had a--a moment, or something. He’s not entirely sure what you’d call it. He was on tour with Hugh’s band at the time, learning the punk game, and a late-night conversation about the script and what a total douche Noel was turning out to be grew into an unexpected kiss. Fourteen years later, Callum can still feel Hugh’s hand high on his thigh, his thumb rubbing in little circles, his fingers brushing closer and closer to Callum’s dick while Hugh kissed him so softly and so sweetly that Callum had to squeeze his eyes shut tight. Hugh’s mouth was like a drug, like aged whiskey, like something he wasn’t supposed to have. And Callum kept kissing and kissing him, trying to push past the slow and the sweet and into the rough. Into the punishing kiss he deserved for wanting something like this so badly.
But Hugh just kept easing back, slowing down, taking his time. It was like he wanted to taste Callum. And his hand was so gentle on Callum’s thigh. It was almost like--almost like Hugh loved him, which was all kinds of fucked-up.
Callum was just a guy up there on the screen. Everything in his life, good and bad, happened in the empty seconds between the frames of the film. He wasn’t brave enough for this, for Hugh, for being someone so totally different. Not in real life. He couldn’t bear it.
So Callum shoved him away, both of them panting hard, and said, “I can’t. I can’t.” He kept on saying it, shaking his head at Hugh’s surprised denials, folding his hands up over his chest as some kind of pathetic defense against Hugh’s anger.
“You’re a fucking coward,” Hugh snapped, and Callum dropped his head and nodded.
“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted. Hugh grabbed a bottle of Jack and went back to his own bunk. Callum left the tour early.
Hugh never talked that night, and he never called Callum a coward again. He forgave easily, and they’ve been best friends for a long, long time. They were friends living in different cities, that was all, friends who saw each other when shooting schedules and tour dates coincided. Just friends. And whenever Callum wonders if Hugh ever thinks about that near-miss, he reminds himself that Hugh’s happy. Hugh's clean. Hugh’s never been one for regrets.
But sometimes, sometimes, there’s a heavy silence on Hugh’s end of the phone. Maybe, Callum thinks, maybe he's been wrong about everything from day one. Maybe Hugh Dillon has one or two regrets about the way it all went down, too.
Late at night, after he's been talking to Hugh, or when he’s been thinking about the past, Callum wishes it hadn’t been so easy to put an end to the whole thing before it’d even started. Sometimes he thinks that, if things had been different, if Hugh had kicked the habit sooner, if Callum had come to terms with who he was and what he wanted a little sooner, they would have had something good.
Sometimes Callum wonders if anything would be different now.
And that’s where the punchline comes in. Everyone thinks they fucked. People in the industry, people in Hugh’s various bands, directors and other actors and even Hugh’s fucking wife thinks that they were more than friends out there on the road. Noel’s book had a lot to do with it, of course. Callum almost wishes he and Hugh had fucked, just so there’d be some point to the whole pathetic mess.
Maybe, instead of seeing each other once every few months, and calling each other all the time, and missing each other, they could have just--done it. People talk about it all the time anyway. At least Callum would know if Hugh’s hands were as gentle as they looked.
He’s been staring at the phone a lot, lately, and thinking about hearing Hugh’s voice on the other end. Fifty is on the horizon, after all. Neither of them are young anymore.
Reach out and touch someone, the ads on the cover of the phone book used to say.
That’s starting to sound like one hell of a good suggestion.
.the end.
I hope you have a very, very happy birthday, Brynn. You exude more love and joy and warmth than anyone I know, and the world is a better place because you're in it. You deserve every good thing. Enjoy your special day!
♥ ♥ ♥ BRYNN ♥ ♥ ♥