fic: hey, you've got to hide your love away
title: hey, you've got to hide your love away
author: girl_in_stripes
fandom: arthur (pbs kids)
pairing: binky barnes/allen “brain” powers
summary: of course, you don't call him brain anymore, not really; futurefic.
notes: I blame this happening on the fact that netflix instant streaming decided to suggest I watch arthur at near two in the morning.
You still remember Brain telling you that whenever you were going to fourth grade, you were going to go there together. You remember the feel of Brain’s hand on your shoulder, just over your backpack strap as you hurried down the street, past the Sugar Bowl, ready to study. You remember what it felt like to know that someone, even someone so much better than you like Brain, cared.
Of course, you don’t call him Brain anymore, not really. A couple people still hold onto the nickname, but the world’s pushed and bullied you into labels that don’t need to be clear-cut stereotypes. Not that You minds too much- hell, with a name like Binky, you’re lucky that people just adopted your last name as your first. You managed to get out of that one easy.
Brain just really goes by Powers, now. Most of the kids from their elementary school had even forgotten that Powers was his last name to begin with, but you remembered. You’d always liked the way it sounded, thought it suited Brain completely. With a mind like that and a name like Powers, he was definitely going somewhere.
Not like You. Maybe you’ll get out of Elmwood City with a basketball scholarship to one of the state schools around, but you know you’re not ever going to go as far as Brain. It used to bother you, bother you that Brain had it so easy, that he’d be able to do whatever he wanted to in life. It doesn’t bother you much now, but really only because you know it’s not actually easy, that Brain works hard for what he does, and that it’s really something to be admired.
It’s not cool to admire, though, you’ve learned. It’s not cool to spend warm summer nights with the windows open, thinking about all the times you’d played out on your front lawn when you were young. It’s not cool to invite him to parties that only the football team is attending, not cool to say that you’re friends when social boundaries obviously dictate that you don’t act like such in public.
So when you’re out with the team and you see him, you’re polite, because as much as a douche as you were when you were kids, you’ve got a little more common sense now. You say hello, maybe bump shoulders or shake hands before hurrying back to the team, distracting them so they won’t notice that maybe you held your grip for a little too long, or your shoulder bump seemed a little too familiar. You shrug off their questions about how you know Powers and whether he’s actually as scary-smart as everyone says he is.
The name Powers is still foreign on your tongue, mostly because you never call him that. It’s even grown strange to call him Brain. He’s just Allen to you, always Allen. He was Allen when you were thirteen and needed to get your life back on track. He was Allen when he spent the whole summer with you helping you practice for basketball tryouts in the fall. He was Allen when
He was Allen when you were fifteen and terrified of what you were feeling. He was Allen when you were sixteen and hated yourself for even existing. Then he was Allen with his lips against yours and his eyes wide and terrified like he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life and you felt like the biggest mistake of his life and how you were both just spiraling down somewhere that neither of you knew the way out of.
Now he’s Allen when you’re pissed off at the world and need something to yell at until you calm down. He’s Allen when he’s there before you even yell, with a hand on your shoulder and some sort of story on his tongue, anything to distract you from yourself. He’s Allen who holds on to you tight when you’re falling, who knows when to talk and when to stay quiet, who knows that he can only kiss you to make you feel better when there’s no one around, who knows that small towns like big news, and that neither of you would ever make it out of this secret alive.
It’s not fair, on either of you, but you know that it’s important. Allen takes it better than you do, tells you over and over again that yes, this sucks, but it’ll get better once you’re both out of Elmwood City and off in some proper city that’s not a mile wide with a big mouth. You don’t have the heart to point out that he’s being preciously naive, and that you’re going to be stuck here forever.
So for now you just enjoy the moments you have. You relish in the moments after basketball games where he catches you outside the gym, eyes alight with the adrenaline of the game, and clings to you like a cool compress, laughing into the side of your neck in the time before the team will be out behind you. You live for the moments where he shows up at your house and you spend the day wandering through the old park, by the tree house, just remembering what it felt like to be young and stupid. Your favorite days are where the two of you can just spend hours in your basement laughing and talking and then saying nothing much of anything at all.
You know it’s not going to last. You know that even if Allen doesn’t leave you to go work internship in a bioengineering plant somewhere north, or you aren’t stuck playing basketball until your knees go bad, that it’s never going to last anyway. Allen’s smart, smart enough to know that he’s so much better than a guy like you, deserves a guy with the balls to say who he’s with, small town or not. He’ll figure it out eventually, and then he’ll pack up and leave, and it’ll hurt like fuck, but you’ll be able to say you saw it coming anyway.
Right now, though, with Allen fast asleep in your arms and a weekend stretched out ahead of you with no basketball practice and no final exams to study for, you can pretend you have a little longer to just be together.