HALF THE WORLD IS SLEEPING
Title: Half the World is Sleeping
Written By: etharei
Timeline: post-122 AU
Rating: R
Warnings: Work in Progress
What if: The “Forever Young” scene in 118 didn’t happen, and Justin chose to go to Dartmouth. The prom and the bashing, however, still took place.
Summary: Looks like Mysterious Marilyn got it right, after all. They’d just misinterpreted the timing
Author's Notes: Heartfelt thanks to mclachlan for her kind encouragements. Humbly dedicated, with love, to shadownyc and beathen. I apologize for it being unfinished, but the second part could not be completed to my satisfaction before the deadline.
You said you'd light a candle
And you'd say a prayer for me
I feel the light has dimmed and gone
Half the world is begging
While the other half steals
Why is everything so wrong?
“I Can’t Let Go” by The Goo Goo Dolls
As near as Justin can make it, waking up from a coma is a lot like being born. Not the clichéd corny shit about being re-born as a new human being, though later it will become clear that that is not far off the mark, either. No, he means the pain, of bright lights fucking stabbing him in the eyes, and the initial rush of terror at feeling helpless because his body’s not responding to him. Oh, and all the people hovering over him, talking over him, and prodding and jabbing him.
He quickly falls asleep again the first few times. When he’s truly awake and has regained control of his jaw and throat again, his mother slowly explains what had happened to him to put him in a hospital bed with a big-ass bandage around his head. He looks at her blankly after she finishes, feeling not unlike when she’d continued to tell him stories about Santa Claus after he’d figured out that the presents in the stockings had arrived not via reindeer, but MasterCard
The first question he asks is, “Where’s Brian?”
Debbie’s eyes tell him more than his mom’s stuttering, He left for New York, honey. He feebly bats away the hands advancing on his hair. Remember his job offer?
It will be over a year before he’ll feel anywhere as lucid again as he had that day.
#
He’s sure that his mother would have kept details about the prom from him if she could. But the world was on his side, or at least not on hers, and the story was all over the news after word got out that he’d woken up, and again when he was discharged. Somebody else’s story repeatedly rehashed, with his name stenciled in. But he reads each and every article, and watches anything that even vaguely refers to the story.
It takes him over three months to recover. ‘Recover’, in the purely clinical sense. His body apologizes throughout the entire prolonged process, because apparently cells operate rather autonomously and will go on with the repairs whether or not the big boss up in the brain wants them to.
After innumerable listless physical therapy sessions, Justin finally gets to the point where he can pick up paper clips and put them into a cup. The doctors tell his mother that that’s probably the most that can be expected of him, considering his brain injury and obvious lack of motivation. It’s a miracle that he’s alive and awake, they remind her. Mustn’t hope for more than the powers that be are willing to give.
They’re probably right. The first time somebody puts a pencil in Justin’s hand, he fucking breaks it in half. He’s not entirely sure it’s accidental.
Just as well that he’s going to Dartmouth.
#
Of course, his parents split up anyway. Justin has no idea how he could have thought that attending his father’s alma mater was going to make any difference. They ‘try’ for a while; apparently Craig Taylor is encouraged by Justin submitting to his wishes, which is indication enough of his priorities. But Justin knew, from the moment he heard the words ‘Couples’ Therapy’, that in a dusty room somewhere the ink on the divorce papers was already drying.
Saying goodbye to his mother and Debbie and the guys is actually a relief. He’ll miss them, but he hates the way they look at him now. Plus, Justin is sure that if he stays in the Pitts, acutely aware of a certain person’s absence in every conversation, every street corner, not to mention every club, the thin skin separating the cold numbness his exterior and the raging fire inside him will gradually be worn away by the hurt that blooms in Debbie’s eyes every single time he backs away from her arms. It will tear him apart.
He suspects it will happen eventually, anyway. That would explain why he feels like a ticking time bomb.
#
Because he’s paying for Justin’s education, Craig Taylor seems to think that he holds some power over his wayward son. (Wayward, hah! The asshole actually used that fucking word.) Justin goes along with it for a couple of weeks, mostly out of a non-personal kind of curiosity.
Everything about him these days is non-personal.
Besides, he knew his father’s game from the get-go. Justin is introduced to a bevy of intelligent, respectable kids sharing his birth year, all of them with Ivy Leaguer parents and all of them glaringly heterosexual. In the end it’s too pathetic to even get annoyed about.
He goes to class, memorizes notes and textbook pages, gets the top grades he’s always gotten even when he was being harassed at school and spent only half his nights in house he technically lived in. He even half-heartedly attends a dorm party, and spends the night smoking on the steps outside. Staring at the moon, a sacrificial burial ground of cigarettes smoldering away on the ground beside his feet.
#
Colors start playing tricks on him. Weird effects splash across his vision at random times; reds switching places with blue, whites tussling with blacks to make grey-babies, objects or whole people melting into monochrome. He interprets it as his brain having trouble accepting the fact that he’s not creating art anymore.
Justin doesn’t mention it to anyone.
But, clearly, he’s losing control of his body. It shakes him, and the internal movements uncap the fire in his blood. Ironically, his anger is the only thing now that can bridge the strange vacuum separating him from his body. Yet even when rage engulfs his muscles and his voice and his eyes, the ice around the rest of him remains untouched. The feeling of helplessness only ferments into fuel for his fury, closing a vicious circle.
He barely avoids blowing up on a professor, and his roommate decides to room in with a couple of old friends for a week.
Still, in the face of fire the lethargy of self-pity is burned away.
Maybe he’ll do a better job of pretending to be alive than he has pretending to be dead.
#
Justin manages to sniff out the one truffle hiding in the heterosexual shit-heap: a round-faced kid (who’s actually a year older than Justin, but to Justin he’s a kid) with trusting eyes and anxious pink lips. Apparently Justin is thought of as a very serious, mysterious hidden genius, on account of him never smiling. One friendly girl, a fellow thwarted artist, tells Justin that Michelangelo’s marble masterpieces have more expression than he does. Virgin Kid clearly finds Justin coldness appealing.
Justin quietly considers the matter; then, feeling charitable and curious to see if he could, he uses his much-honed skills to introduce the unsuspecting innocent into the happy, happy world of horny homo sex.
That fuck, his first since the bashing, almost causes him to regurgitate his guts the second his dick penetrates the kid’s tight virginal channel. He immediately feels disgusted with himself, for once again letting Hobbes disrupt his life, for not being over the bashing, for still being so fucking damaged. Lucky, really, that the kid is a closet case with nothing to compare Justin’s sorry lack of technique to. Justin feels ashamed of himself, through the nausea. Brian would have-
He doesn’t know if word got out through ex-Virgin Kid or their more prying and preening peers, but he would’ve paid a lot of money to see his dad’s face when Ex-Virgin’s outraged father phoned Craig up and accused Justin of seducing his son. Karma kamikaze.
A few loud and boisterous phone calls later, Craig drops the ultimatum: Justin is to change his deviant ways, or Craig will stop paying for school.
Craig must have been very confused to hear Justin laughing and thanking him, right before hanging up and dumping his cell into the pile of soggy paper towels in the restroom trash.
#
The second time Justin runs away is a lot easier than the first. This time he’s not plagued with doubts about what he’s doing, he’s not wallowing in self-pity, he’s not actively hoping that somebody would come after him.
So this is liberty.
#
He doesn’t really know where he’s going, but after some thought, he decides to head for New York. There’s an appropriateness about going full circle on his real getaway.
Plus, he thinks that it maybekindofsorta won’t be too bad of a thing to run into him. Not look for him, of course. But, if by chance their paths do meet, then there are things he’d like to say. He’s curious to see if closure would fix whatever it is that’s wrong with him; he doesn’t hope for it, because that would imply aspiration, but he’s… interested, to see if it would work.
He has money from working at the diner, and an emergency stash from his mother, but he knows that he won’t last even a month in New York on those. Since art is now out of the question, he reverts back to his original plan. No four-star hotel with room service, this time, only a dingy little room in a building that looks like it’s ready to return to the earth from which it came at any moment. Justin may have lost his art, but he still has his good looks. He spends a few days checking out the club scene, making like he’s an old pro from another state, and ends up getting a job at a club in Chelsea. Five nights a week, free drinks, and there’s even security; a pretty good club, all things considering.
Looks like Mysterious Marilyn got it right, after all. They’d just misinterpreted the timing.
He stays away from the drugs and the heavy booze and keeps an eye on the regulars who seem to think that their patronage entitles them to putting more than their eyes on the dancers. It’s not that he’s particularly concerned about self-preservation- these days he doesn’t really care much about anything- but he would like to live long enough to have that little chat with We-Know-Who. So he’s careful, because he’s heard the stories, even back at Babylon. Doesn’t go beyond hasty blowjobs, and even then he needs a couple of drinks to loosen up. Definitely no one twice, and not his fellow dancers, which is fine because they’re all kind of intimidated by the deceptively short blond kid with eyes like steel, who never smiles.
It turns out he got extremely lucky with his choice of workplace; apart from habitually screaming at all his employees and taking perverse delight in scaring his dancers to death at the slightest mishap, the boss is a decent enough asshole.
Justin pretends that it doesn’t remind him of anybody.
#
Sometimes Justin talks to the Other One. The old Justin, whom he’s taken to calling Justin the First. He just turned up one night, while Justin was in the middle of fucking a pole, and refused to leave.
Psychologically, he reasons, Justin the First is probably a representation of all the memories and characteristics from his recollections that he can’t identify with his present persona.
But it’s easier to call him Justin the First.
He would show Justin the things they- he used to do. Justin envies him, for being so sure in who he was and what he wanted to do and, especially, who he was doing it for. Though Justin the First’s memory, if it can be called that, gets a bit blurry at the end. One rainy day- and he always knows when it’s raining, on account of the hole in the ceiling that would send water drip-dripping straight onto the dirty mattress- they passed the hours by arguing about whether Justin the First is, in fact, alive.
Nothing was decided, but it did occur to Justin (Jr.) that he needs some real friends.
#
Justin wants to walk down the street without his skin trying to crawl off him and jump through the nearest door.
He wants to have a conversation with someone without feeling like one wrong word in the wrong tone can set off the bomb inside him, its invisible timer ticking out steady beats beneath his ribs.
He wants to hear someone laugh without flinching. Even more ambitiously- and it’s all right to say this in his head because no one’s listening, except for Justin the First, and damn is that a fucked-up though or what?- he wants to laugh himself. He wants hear that sound in his own voice, make that explosion of air and emotion, and actually feel it.
Under the sun, he wants a lot of things.
#
Maybe somebody Up There has a plan for him, after all. Three or four months after his unassuming ingress into the big bad city, Justin spends a weekend day off trying out a new route between home and work. He rounds a corner and careens into a body going briskly in the opposite direction.
He automatically shoves the person off, his mouth opening to apologize for the uncontrollable aggression, but the cologne of sex and sweat stops him cold. His head whips upwards, mouth still open.
Brian looks equally shocked to see him. “Justin?”
Blink. Blink. “Brian.”
It’s kind of amusing how Brian’s face is more expressive than Justin’s is, now. He doesn’t need to glance at the display glass of the shop next to them to know that his features aren’t giving anything away. Which is fortunate, considering what his expression would have been at that moment.
He’s sure that he would have noticed Brian anywhere, whatever the man was wearing or doing, even if they hadn’t just collided on the sidewalk. There’s something about Brian that draws the eye; at least, something that’s always drawn Justin’s eye. But perhaps Justin’s brain doesn’t entirely trust him, or doesn’t want to take the chance that Brian would slip by.
It’s kind of hard to not notice somebody who is completely black-and-white.
Interesting grayscale effect, Justin the First comments.
“What the fuck are you doing in New York?” Brian is staring at him, his bewilderment reaching Justin through the expensive designer shades.
“Here with some friends,” Justin smoothly sort-of-lies, on top of Justin the First whispering, Brian doesn’t know! Which means that Debbie doesn’t know, because she’d have made sure that Brian found out about it. And his mom would definitely have told her. So his mom doesn’t know. To be fair, he’s hardly talked to her since you left Pittsburgh. Still. How many months has it been? Has Craig even noticed that he’d left the school?
Justin is really glad that his face doesn’t respond to his thoughts anymore. A restless, itchy feeling spreads over his skin.
“Oh.” Brian glances around, as if expecting Justin’s supposed friends to materialize at any moment. “Are you on a school break?”
He can pretend he’s here on some trip. But after months of being by himself… he wants to run away, keep on walking, but at the same time he knows that there are things he needs to do, to get out of his system, reasons he’d come to New York in the first place for. And now that’s within touching distance of Brian… he wonders if he’d be the way he is, now, if Brian had been there when he’d woken up. Stupid thing to think, really, moot, because he wasn’t. He had left.
Anger quells his uneasiness. “I won’t be here long,” Justin says, stepping towards Brian. Back at Pittsburgh, he had always been able to draw Brian’s eyes to his body, and that was before he had had to make a living out of the skill. “Let’s go somewhere quieter and… talk.”
He feels a little sorry for Brian; the man has never been able to resist him.
#
Talk, of course, means that precisely twenty minutes after their meeting, Brian’s cock is in Justin’s mouth. Brian is on his back, on his bed, groaning and cursing and messing up Justin’s hair with his hand. They’re in Brian’s apartment, not that Justin had the time to get anything but a cursory look around. Smaller than the loft, but still equipped with top-of-the-line appliances, sleek imported furniture, a minimalist theme that sends a pang of home through Justin.
Then Brian’s mouth was heading towards his. Justin had rushed forward, pushing his lips onto the skin of Brian’s neck, kissing a wet trail downwards. Brian gasped when Justin tongued his collarbone, his nipples, his navel. Justin was practically manhandled into the bedroom, and later he will wonder why he doesn’t react so strongly to Brian’s touch.
He doesn’t remember if Brian has always succumbed to his touch this easily. He has very determinedly not thought about Brian since learning that Brian had moved to New York. By all rights, he shouldn’t know Brian very well anymore.
Evidently, he still does.
Brian-musk invades his lungs and gut and head, and the sounds he’s teasing out of that beautiful mouth fill up every fold in his ear. Brian’s cock quickly becomes wet and slick with Justin’s spit, easing the hot glide of his lips up and down the swollen, throbbing length. Justin’s hands clutch at Brian’s legs, arms, the softer mounds of Brian’s ass. Pre-cum dribbles down the back of his throat; he swallows, taking Brian all the way in, throat constricting around the spongy head while his lips press down in a ring at the base. Brian nearly shreds his sheets.
It’s nice to know that he hasn’t lost his touch.
When Brian comes, the long sinuous line of his body arching beautifully off the bed, a stuttered throb issues from Justin’s chest, his lungs pausing in their mechanical inhale-exhale. He gazes up at Brian in the throes of orgasm, and for the first time desperately wishes, wishes, wishes that he can still draw.
Justin is not too surprised at feeling a wetness in his pants when he sits back, though he hadn’t felt himself come.
Brian, panting heavily, murmurs, “That was hot.”
For some reason this sends a strange trill through Justin. He elbows Brian in the leg, even as he feels the muscles in his face move and morph and mold into something that feels strange yet hinted of familiarity in a time past.
A smile.
Something at the back of his mind stirs and stretches. Opens. “Didn’t know if I’d ever get do that again.”
Brian’s eyes focus on Justin’s face, still glazed from the high. Brown and green and droplets of gold, vivid above the odd grayness that persists on the rest of Brian’s body. He reaches down, takes Justin’s arm and pulls him up. Moves to kiss him. Justin instinctively evades it by standing up, keeping the smile on his face. “I have to go. Maybe you can return the favor another time?”
Confusion clouds Brian’s features, before coherency returns and they settle into sober solidity. Everything slows, because Justin can tell what Brian is thinking, could have written the script for the thought process taking place in the man’s head. “Justin.”
Quite ironically, the tone he’s using is the same as Justin’s last memory of him, from Babylon, declining Justin’s invitation to prom. It feels like they’re picking up where that conversation left off.
“You should go back to your friends.”
Justin recalls a time when Brian’s denial only spurred him into trying harder, because Brian’s voice had always seemed to be in conflict with Brian’s body, at least where Justin had been concerned. But there’s a bat-shaped fissure where his single-minded determination used to flare, and it’s too easy to pretend that the flicker he’d felt earlier was a trick of the moment. And it’s the ease with which he returns to the familiar confines of indifference that makes Justin realize just how separate he has become from that Justin who, really, exists now only in mind and memory. His, and everybody else’s, but that doesn’t make him any more real.
This has to end. He thinks that might have come from him; his head feels hollow, empty. Maybe Justin the First has had his closure, and left the building with it.
His head nods. “Just tell me,” he says quite calmly. “Why did you leave? Without ever visiting me, even once?” The words are alien to his ears, his tongue, because they belong to a memory.
Brian doesn’t move to cover himself, just lies there, naked but for the crumpled shirt hanging off one arm. The trousers and coat that likely cost more than Justin’s monthly rent littering the floor. Brian avoids Justin’s eyes; it’s not nudity that makes Brian vulnerable.
“Because,” Brian finally speaks, addressing the glass-and-steel coffee table. “I had a new life waiting for me here.”
It seems Justin the First isn’t as far away as he’d thought, because he feels the incorporeal fist punch their lungs, crumpling soft spongy tissue.
Their ending really should be more dramatic than this, Justin thinks. And he realizes that it had been- Brian Kinney had come to his prom, Justin’s fucking prom, and danced with him in front of everybody.
This is… this is just a bad epilogue, by somebody wearing Justin’s skin and using Justin’s name and wanting what Justin used to have.
He clears his throat. “Well, as you can see, I’m alive and walking, no thanks to your concern. And I’m glad to see that your new life is suiting you very well.” That, at least, is God’s honest truth. If the figure he’d presented out in the sidewalk was any indication, Brian Kinney was definitely made for New York City. He belongs here, not in the dreary Pitts. So he did right by himself, at least.
It’s a comfort.
Brian seems to shrink into his own bed, and suddenly Justin doesn’t want Brian to keep punishing himself. The man doesn’t deserve it, and it’s not like it’ll change things for Justin. So Justin bends down, arranging his body and arms into a semblance of a hug. “Take care of yourself, Brian.”
Brian’s body tenses; whether in preparation to return the gesture or in response to the minute, breathy catch in Justin’s voice, Justin can’t stand to wait and find out. He pulls away, pauses, and later he’ll drunkenly imagine that a thin gold line shimmered through the air between his eyes and Brian’s. Then he turns, strides out of the bedroom, out of the apartment. Walks out and forward and away, away, away, eyes never diverting from the path in front of his feet.
Somehow he makes it inside his apartment, shaking and breathing as if he’d run the whole way. Maybe he had. He doesn’t think he’s felt so much since waking up. He thinks that he never will again, which is a bit of a relief, really. Further exposure would probably destroy him.
He’d owed it to the old Justin, though.
(TBC)
Preview of the second part
“Debbie,” Brian answers, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“Brian!” she exclaims, and the frayed edges of her voice send him sitting up, recalling the gas level in the Jeep and comparing it to the number of miles between New York and Pittsburgh.
“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Mikey?”
“No, Michael’s fine.” She sniffs. “I don’t know what that kid is…” A deep breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken to Sunshine lately?”
“Not recently,” he says, his exhale of relief tinting his voice with sarcasm.
“Oh. I didn’t think so.” She pauses, and in the momentary quiet you can hear her decimating her chewing gum. “Well, if you ever do hear from him, tell him his mothers are worried sick. All right?”
The obvious concern in her voice prompts Brian to say, “Debbie, he’s in college. The last thing he’ll be thinking of is calling home to check in with his mommy.”
“Well, if regular calls home were mandatory, this wouldn’t have happened.” she snaps. Takes a deep breath. “Brian, he’s dropped out of school.”
He frowns, the pen he’s been playing with freezing in his fingers. “What?”
“Apparently it’s been almost six fucking months since he’d been attending classes,” Debbie bursts, likely glad for the excuse to rant. “The last person he spoke to was his father, which answers why he took off - the word begins with ‘G’, and grades is something Sunshine has never had any trouble with. Of course, the asshole didn’t contact Justin after their last ‘conversation’, didn’t tell Jen that anything was wrong. If Jen hadn’t called the school-“
A glance at the calendar. Three months, since that day on the street.
And Brian finally understands.
Justin had been saying goodbye.
Debbie’s tirade washes over Brian, a chaotic counterpoint to the hushed whisper of rain, as he stares unseeing through the glass of his window.
Written By: etharei
Timeline: post-122 AU
Rating: R
Warnings: Work in Progress
What if: The “Forever Young” scene in 118 didn’t happen, and Justin chose to go to Dartmouth. The prom and the bashing, however, still took place.
Summary: Looks like Mysterious Marilyn got it right, after all. They’d just misinterpreted the timing
Author's Notes: Heartfelt thanks to mclachlan for her kind encouragements. Humbly dedicated, with love, to shadownyc and beathen. I apologize for it being unfinished, but the second part could not be completed to my satisfaction before the deadline.
You said you'd light a candle
And you'd say a prayer for me
I feel the light has dimmed and gone
Half the world is begging
While the other half steals
Why is everything so wrong?
“I Can’t Let Go” by The Goo Goo Dolls
As near as Justin can make it, waking up from a coma is a lot like being born. Not the clichéd corny shit about being re-born as a new human being, though later it will become clear that that is not far off the mark, either. No, he means the pain, of bright lights fucking stabbing him in the eyes, and the initial rush of terror at feeling helpless because his body’s not responding to him. Oh, and all the people hovering over him, talking over him, and prodding and jabbing him.
He quickly falls asleep again the first few times. When he’s truly awake and has regained control of his jaw and throat again, his mother slowly explains what had happened to him to put him in a hospital bed with a big-ass bandage around his head. He looks at her blankly after she finishes, feeling not unlike when she’d continued to tell him stories about Santa Claus after he’d figured out that the presents in the stockings had arrived not via reindeer, but MasterCard
The first question he asks is, “Where’s Brian?”
Debbie’s eyes tell him more than his mom’s stuttering, He left for New York, honey. He feebly bats away the hands advancing on his hair. Remember his job offer?
It will be over a year before he’ll feel anywhere as lucid again as he had that day.
#
He’s sure that his mother would have kept details about the prom from him if she could. But the world was on his side, or at least not on hers, and the story was all over the news after word got out that he’d woken up, and again when he was discharged. Somebody else’s story repeatedly rehashed, with his name stenciled in. But he reads each and every article, and watches anything that even vaguely refers to the story.
It takes him over three months to recover. ‘Recover’, in the purely clinical sense. His body apologizes throughout the entire prolonged process, because apparently cells operate rather autonomously and will go on with the repairs whether or not the big boss up in the brain wants them to.
After innumerable listless physical therapy sessions, Justin finally gets to the point where he can pick up paper clips and put them into a cup. The doctors tell his mother that that’s probably the most that can be expected of him, considering his brain injury and obvious lack of motivation. It’s a miracle that he’s alive and awake, they remind her. Mustn’t hope for more than the powers that be are willing to give.
They’re probably right. The first time somebody puts a pencil in Justin’s hand, he fucking breaks it in half. He’s not entirely sure it’s accidental.
Just as well that he’s going to Dartmouth.
#
Of course, his parents split up anyway. Justin has no idea how he could have thought that attending his father’s alma mater was going to make any difference. They ‘try’ for a while; apparently Craig Taylor is encouraged by Justin submitting to his wishes, which is indication enough of his priorities. But Justin knew, from the moment he heard the words ‘Couples’ Therapy’, that in a dusty room somewhere the ink on the divorce papers was already drying.
Saying goodbye to his mother and Debbie and the guys is actually a relief. He’ll miss them, but he hates the way they look at him now. Plus, Justin is sure that if he stays in the Pitts, acutely aware of a certain person’s absence in every conversation, every street corner, not to mention every club, the thin skin separating the cold numbness his exterior and the raging fire inside him will gradually be worn away by the hurt that blooms in Debbie’s eyes every single time he backs away from her arms. It will tear him apart.
He suspects it will happen eventually, anyway. That would explain why he feels like a ticking time bomb.
#
Because he’s paying for Justin’s education, Craig Taylor seems to think that he holds some power over his wayward son. (Wayward, hah! The asshole actually used that fucking word.) Justin goes along with it for a couple of weeks, mostly out of a non-personal kind of curiosity.
Everything about him these days is non-personal.
Besides, he knew his father’s game from the get-go. Justin is introduced to a bevy of intelligent, respectable kids sharing his birth year, all of them with Ivy Leaguer parents and all of them glaringly heterosexual. In the end it’s too pathetic to even get annoyed about.
He goes to class, memorizes notes and textbook pages, gets the top grades he’s always gotten even when he was being harassed at school and spent only half his nights in house he technically lived in. He even half-heartedly attends a dorm party, and spends the night smoking on the steps outside. Staring at the moon, a sacrificial burial ground of cigarettes smoldering away on the ground beside his feet.
#
Colors start playing tricks on him. Weird effects splash across his vision at random times; reds switching places with blue, whites tussling with blacks to make grey-babies, objects or whole people melting into monochrome. He interprets it as his brain having trouble accepting the fact that he’s not creating art anymore.
Justin doesn’t mention it to anyone.
But, clearly, he’s losing control of his body. It shakes him, and the internal movements uncap the fire in his blood. Ironically, his anger is the only thing now that can bridge the strange vacuum separating him from his body. Yet even when rage engulfs his muscles and his voice and his eyes, the ice around the rest of him remains untouched. The feeling of helplessness only ferments into fuel for his fury, closing a vicious circle.
He barely avoids blowing up on a professor, and his roommate decides to room in with a couple of old friends for a week.
Still, in the face of fire the lethargy of self-pity is burned away.
Maybe he’ll do a better job of pretending to be alive than he has pretending to be dead.
#
Justin manages to sniff out the one truffle hiding in the heterosexual shit-heap: a round-faced kid (who’s actually a year older than Justin, but to Justin he’s a kid) with trusting eyes and anxious pink lips. Apparently Justin is thought of as a very serious, mysterious hidden genius, on account of him never smiling. One friendly girl, a fellow thwarted artist, tells Justin that Michelangelo’s marble masterpieces have more expression than he does. Virgin Kid clearly finds Justin coldness appealing.
Justin quietly considers the matter; then, feeling charitable and curious to see if he could, he uses his much-honed skills to introduce the unsuspecting innocent into the happy, happy world of horny homo sex.
That fuck, his first since the bashing, almost causes him to regurgitate his guts the second his dick penetrates the kid’s tight virginal channel. He immediately feels disgusted with himself, for once again letting Hobbes disrupt his life, for not being over the bashing, for still being so fucking damaged. Lucky, really, that the kid is a closet case with nothing to compare Justin’s sorry lack of technique to. Justin feels ashamed of himself, through the nausea. Brian would have-
He doesn’t know if word got out through ex-Virgin Kid or their more prying and preening peers, but he would’ve paid a lot of money to see his dad’s face when Ex-Virgin’s outraged father phoned Craig up and accused Justin of seducing his son. Karma kamikaze.
A few loud and boisterous phone calls later, Craig drops the ultimatum: Justin is to change his deviant ways, or Craig will stop paying for school.
Craig must have been very confused to hear Justin laughing and thanking him, right before hanging up and dumping his cell into the pile of soggy paper towels in the restroom trash.
#
The second time Justin runs away is a lot easier than the first. This time he’s not plagued with doubts about what he’s doing, he’s not wallowing in self-pity, he’s not actively hoping that somebody would come after him.
So this is liberty.
#
He doesn’t really know where he’s going, but after some thought, he decides to head for New York. There’s an appropriateness about going full circle on his real getaway.
Plus, he thinks that it maybekindofsorta won’t be too bad of a thing to run into him. Not look for him, of course. But, if by chance their paths do meet, then there are things he’d like to say. He’s curious to see if closure would fix whatever it is that’s wrong with him; he doesn’t hope for it, because that would imply aspiration, but he’s… interested, to see if it would work.
He has money from working at the diner, and an emergency stash from his mother, but he knows that he won’t last even a month in New York on those. Since art is now out of the question, he reverts back to his original plan. No four-star hotel with room service, this time, only a dingy little room in a building that looks like it’s ready to return to the earth from which it came at any moment. Justin may have lost his art, but he still has his good looks. He spends a few days checking out the club scene, making like he’s an old pro from another state, and ends up getting a job at a club in Chelsea. Five nights a week, free drinks, and there’s even security; a pretty good club, all things considering.
Looks like Mysterious Marilyn got it right, after all. They’d just misinterpreted the timing.
He stays away from the drugs and the heavy booze and keeps an eye on the regulars who seem to think that their patronage entitles them to putting more than their eyes on the dancers. It’s not that he’s particularly concerned about self-preservation- these days he doesn’t really care much about anything- but he would like to live long enough to have that little chat with We-Know-Who. So he’s careful, because he’s heard the stories, even back at Babylon. Doesn’t go beyond hasty blowjobs, and even then he needs a couple of drinks to loosen up. Definitely no one twice, and not his fellow dancers, which is fine because they’re all kind of intimidated by the deceptively short blond kid with eyes like steel, who never smiles.
It turns out he got extremely lucky with his choice of workplace; apart from habitually screaming at all his employees and taking perverse delight in scaring his dancers to death at the slightest mishap, the boss is a decent enough asshole.
Justin pretends that it doesn’t remind him of anybody.
#
Sometimes Justin talks to the Other One. The old Justin, whom he’s taken to calling Justin the First. He just turned up one night, while Justin was in the middle of fucking a pole, and refused to leave.
Psychologically, he reasons, Justin the First is probably a representation of all the memories and characteristics from his recollections that he can’t identify with his present persona.
But it’s easier to call him Justin the First.
He would show Justin the things they- he used to do. Justin envies him, for being so sure in who he was and what he wanted to do and, especially, who he was doing it for. Though Justin the First’s memory, if it can be called that, gets a bit blurry at the end. One rainy day- and he always knows when it’s raining, on account of the hole in the ceiling that would send water drip-dripping straight onto the dirty mattress- they passed the hours by arguing about whether Justin the First is, in fact, alive.
Nothing was decided, but it did occur to Justin (Jr.) that he needs some real friends.
#
Justin wants to walk down the street without his skin trying to crawl off him and jump through the nearest door.
He wants to have a conversation with someone without feeling like one wrong word in the wrong tone can set off the bomb inside him, its invisible timer ticking out steady beats beneath his ribs.
He wants to hear someone laugh without flinching. Even more ambitiously- and it’s all right to say this in his head because no one’s listening, except for Justin the First, and damn is that a fucked-up though or what?- he wants to laugh himself. He wants hear that sound in his own voice, make that explosion of air and emotion, and actually feel it.
Under the sun, he wants a lot of things.
#
Maybe somebody Up There has a plan for him, after all. Three or four months after his unassuming ingress into the big bad city, Justin spends a weekend day off trying out a new route between home and work. He rounds a corner and careens into a body going briskly in the opposite direction.
He automatically shoves the person off, his mouth opening to apologize for the uncontrollable aggression, but the cologne of sex and sweat stops him cold. His head whips upwards, mouth still open.
Brian looks equally shocked to see him. “Justin?”
Blink. Blink. “Brian.”
It’s kind of amusing how Brian’s face is more expressive than Justin’s is, now. He doesn’t need to glance at the display glass of the shop next to them to know that his features aren’t giving anything away. Which is fortunate, considering what his expression would have been at that moment.
He’s sure that he would have noticed Brian anywhere, whatever the man was wearing or doing, even if they hadn’t just collided on the sidewalk. There’s something about Brian that draws the eye; at least, something that’s always drawn Justin’s eye. But perhaps Justin’s brain doesn’t entirely trust him, or doesn’t want to take the chance that Brian would slip by.
It’s kind of hard to not notice somebody who is completely black-and-white.
Interesting grayscale effect, Justin the First comments.
“What the fuck are you doing in New York?” Brian is staring at him, his bewilderment reaching Justin through the expensive designer shades.
“Here with some friends,” Justin smoothly sort-of-lies, on top of Justin the First whispering, Brian doesn’t know! Which means that Debbie doesn’t know, because she’d have made sure that Brian found out about it. And his mom would definitely have told her. So his mom doesn’t know. To be fair, he’s hardly talked to her since you left Pittsburgh. Still. How many months has it been? Has Craig even noticed that he’d left the school?
Justin is really glad that his face doesn’t respond to his thoughts anymore. A restless, itchy feeling spreads over his skin.
“Oh.” Brian glances around, as if expecting Justin’s supposed friends to materialize at any moment. “Are you on a school break?”
He can pretend he’s here on some trip. But after months of being by himself… he wants to run away, keep on walking, but at the same time he knows that there are things he needs to do, to get out of his system, reasons he’d come to New York in the first place for. And now that’s within touching distance of Brian… he wonders if he’d be the way he is, now, if Brian had been there when he’d woken up. Stupid thing to think, really, moot, because he wasn’t. He had left.
Anger quells his uneasiness. “I won’t be here long,” Justin says, stepping towards Brian. Back at Pittsburgh, he had always been able to draw Brian’s eyes to his body, and that was before he had had to make a living out of the skill. “Let’s go somewhere quieter and… talk.”
He feels a little sorry for Brian; the man has never been able to resist him.
#
Talk, of course, means that precisely twenty minutes after their meeting, Brian’s cock is in Justin’s mouth. Brian is on his back, on his bed, groaning and cursing and messing up Justin’s hair with his hand. They’re in Brian’s apartment, not that Justin had the time to get anything but a cursory look around. Smaller than the loft, but still equipped with top-of-the-line appliances, sleek imported furniture, a minimalist theme that sends a pang of home through Justin.
Then Brian’s mouth was heading towards his. Justin had rushed forward, pushing his lips onto the skin of Brian’s neck, kissing a wet trail downwards. Brian gasped when Justin tongued his collarbone, his nipples, his navel. Justin was practically manhandled into the bedroom, and later he will wonder why he doesn’t react so strongly to Brian’s touch.
He doesn’t remember if Brian has always succumbed to his touch this easily. He has very determinedly not thought about Brian since learning that Brian had moved to New York. By all rights, he shouldn’t know Brian very well anymore.
Evidently, he still does.
Brian-musk invades his lungs and gut and head, and the sounds he’s teasing out of that beautiful mouth fill up every fold in his ear. Brian’s cock quickly becomes wet and slick with Justin’s spit, easing the hot glide of his lips up and down the swollen, throbbing length. Justin’s hands clutch at Brian’s legs, arms, the softer mounds of Brian’s ass. Pre-cum dribbles down the back of his throat; he swallows, taking Brian all the way in, throat constricting around the spongy head while his lips press down in a ring at the base. Brian nearly shreds his sheets.
It’s nice to know that he hasn’t lost his touch.
When Brian comes, the long sinuous line of his body arching beautifully off the bed, a stuttered throb issues from Justin’s chest, his lungs pausing in their mechanical inhale-exhale. He gazes up at Brian in the throes of orgasm, and for the first time desperately wishes, wishes, wishes that he can still draw.
Justin is not too surprised at feeling a wetness in his pants when he sits back, though he hadn’t felt himself come.
Brian, panting heavily, murmurs, “That was hot.”
For some reason this sends a strange trill through Justin. He elbows Brian in the leg, even as he feels the muscles in his face move and morph and mold into something that feels strange yet hinted of familiarity in a time past.
A smile.
Something at the back of his mind stirs and stretches. Opens. “Didn’t know if I’d ever get do that again.”
Brian’s eyes focus on Justin’s face, still glazed from the high. Brown and green and droplets of gold, vivid above the odd grayness that persists on the rest of Brian’s body. He reaches down, takes Justin’s arm and pulls him up. Moves to kiss him. Justin instinctively evades it by standing up, keeping the smile on his face. “I have to go. Maybe you can return the favor another time?”
Confusion clouds Brian’s features, before coherency returns and they settle into sober solidity. Everything slows, because Justin can tell what Brian is thinking, could have written the script for the thought process taking place in the man’s head. “Justin.”
Quite ironically, the tone he’s using is the same as Justin’s last memory of him, from Babylon, declining Justin’s invitation to prom. It feels like they’re picking up where that conversation left off.
“You should go back to your friends.”
Justin recalls a time when Brian’s denial only spurred him into trying harder, because Brian’s voice had always seemed to be in conflict with Brian’s body, at least where Justin had been concerned. But there’s a bat-shaped fissure where his single-minded determination used to flare, and it’s too easy to pretend that the flicker he’d felt earlier was a trick of the moment. And it’s the ease with which he returns to the familiar confines of indifference that makes Justin realize just how separate he has become from that Justin who, really, exists now only in mind and memory. His, and everybody else’s, but that doesn’t make him any more real.
This has to end. He thinks that might have come from him; his head feels hollow, empty. Maybe Justin the First has had his closure, and left the building with it.
His head nods. “Just tell me,” he says quite calmly. “Why did you leave? Without ever visiting me, even once?” The words are alien to his ears, his tongue, because they belong to a memory.
Brian doesn’t move to cover himself, just lies there, naked but for the crumpled shirt hanging off one arm. The trousers and coat that likely cost more than Justin’s monthly rent littering the floor. Brian avoids Justin’s eyes; it’s not nudity that makes Brian vulnerable.
“Because,” Brian finally speaks, addressing the glass-and-steel coffee table. “I had a new life waiting for me here.”
It seems Justin the First isn’t as far away as he’d thought, because he feels the incorporeal fist punch their lungs, crumpling soft spongy tissue.
Their ending really should be more dramatic than this, Justin thinks. And he realizes that it had been- Brian Kinney had come to his prom, Justin’s fucking prom, and danced with him in front of everybody.
This is… this is just a bad epilogue, by somebody wearing Justin’s skin and using Justin’s name and wanting what Justin used to have.
He clears his throat. “Well, as you can see, I’m alive and walking, no thanks to your concern. And I’m glad to see that your new life is suiting you very well.” That, at least, is God’s honest truth. If the figure he’d presented out in the sidewalk was any indication, Brian Kinney was definitely made for New York City. He belongs here, not in the dreary Pitts. So he did right by himself, at least.
It’s a comfort.
Brian seems to shrink into his own bed, and suddenly Justin doesn’t want Brian to keep punishing himself. The man doesn’t deserve it, and it’s not like it’ll change things for Justin. So Justin bends down, arranging his body and arms into a semblance of a hug. “Take care of yourself, Brian.”
Brian’s body tenses; whether in preparation to return the gesture or in response to the minute, breathy catch in Justin’s voice, Justin can’t stand to wait and find out. He pulls away, pauses, and later he’ll drunkenly imagine that a thin gold line shimmered through the air between his eyes and Brian’s. Then he turns, strides out of the bedroom, out of the apartment. Walks out and forward and away, away, away, eyes never diverting from the path in front of his feet.
Somehow he makes it inside his apartment, shaking and breathing as if he’d run the whole way. Maybe he had. He doesn’t think he’s felt so much since waking up. He thinks that he never will again, which is a bit of a relief, really. Further exposure would probably destroy him.
He’d owed it to the old Justin, though.
(TBC)
Preview of the second part
“Debbie,” Brian answers, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“Brian!” she exclaims, and the frayed edges of her voice send him sitting up, recalling the gas level in the Jeep and comparing it to the number of miles between New York and Pittsburgh.
“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Mikey?”
“No, Michael’s fine.” She sniffs. “I don’t know what that kid is…” A deep breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken to Sunshine lately?”
“Not recently,” he says, his exhale of relief tinting his voice with sarcasm.
“Oh. I didn’t think so.” She pauses, and in the momentary quiet you can hear her decimating her chewing gum. “Well, if you ever do hear from him, tell him his mothers are worried sick. All right?”
The obvious concern in her voice prompts Brian to say, “Debbie, he’s in college. The last thing he’ll be thinking of is calling home to check in with his mommy.”
“Well, if regular calls home were mandatory, this wouldn’t have happened.” she snaps. Takes a deep breath. “Brian, he’s dropped out of school.”
He frowns, the pen he’s been playing with freezing in his fingers. “What?”
“Apparently it’s been almost six fucking months since he’d been attending classes,” Debbie bursts, likely glad for the excuse to rant. “The last person he spoke to was his father, which answers why he took off - the word begins with ‘G’, and grades is something Sunshine has never had any trouble with. Of course, the asshole didn’t contact Justin after their last ‘conversation’, didn’t tell Jen that anything was wrong. If Jen hadn’t called the school-“
A glance at the calendar. Three months, since that day on the street.
And Brian finally understands.
Justin had been saying goodbye.
Debbie’s tirade washes over Brian, a chaotic counterpoint to the hushed whisper of rain, as he stares unseeing through the glass of his window.