22. It's Only Everything (Drabble 21)
Title: It’s Only Everything
Author: arlad
Drabble: 21 by lastglances
Notes: Story takes place directly after 513.
Title from the drabble I chose to inspire me - a million thanks to the incredibly talented author.
It’s Only Everything
This is a moment to live in, to forget any past or future they had or might have had together. This is the time to lay himself bare, to grow and reach and strive for what he wants. They embrace, kiss, and fumble. They part and it seems to be the end. Brian sleeps, smokes, works. He tries to imagine a time before Justin when he might have been happy, when he might have been who he was meant to be. But such thoughts only bring more sadness. "It's only time," he said. He meant to say, "It's only everything."
+++
For a second, Brian lets himself think that one day of mourning will be enough. He pretends that if he lets himself feel this absence for one full day, he will wake up the next recovered, safe from Justin’s ghost, immune to the phantom touches and words.
He pretends, even though he knows he’s only pretending so he can take the next breath and walk the next step, because there is no escape, there is no immunity.
Justin is in New York, and Brian is here, and no fuck, no drink, no charming euphemism from Debbie or Mother Taylor can change that.
So Brian sleeps, smokes, works.
Goes through the motions, hopes that in doing that he’ll find a form of happiness, doesn’t even try to hope for real happiness.
It’s man’s curse, after all, to only realize how happy he was once the happiness is gone.
Brian’s mind betrays him, replays moment after moment - from No place special. I can change that. to even if it was ridiculously romantic; from I promise you won’t forget this one to Take a shower. You stink.. It’ll be a pleasure to work under you, sir. and He’s the guy I fuck more than once. He relives the ecstasy and the crumbling terror, remembers every moan and thrust, the exact way Justin’s toes curled before coming, the sound of a bat hitting bone, the feel of a cold gun in his hand. There are innuendos and jokes, bitter yelling, forgiving hands.
It’s only five years, five years of memories against twenty-eight, but how they haunt him. How they changed him.
But Justin is in New York, and Brian is here, and no wish, no ghost, no meaningful look from Mikey can change that.
And Brian sleeps, smokes, works.
+
“So I had to let Drewsie go, you know?” Emmett asks, practically falling into his Cosmo.
Brian can’t believe he’s spending his Saturday night listening to Emmett Honeycutt’s love woes.
He can’t believe he just thought the phrase love woes.
Jesus, he needs more Beam.
“Yeah, I let him go,” Emmett repeats, sighing wistfully. “Kinda like you did Justin.”
And just like that, Brian’s pleasant buzz is gone.
“I didn’t let Justin go. Justin left all on his own,” he says, hates that his voice is stark and too fucking revealing. Goddamned alcohol.
Emmett isn’t as drunk as he appears to be either, apparently, because he raises an arch eyebrow, and leans over the table. “Who are you trying to kid here, Brian? You know that if you’d said the word, if you’d made a different choice, Justin would still be here, and he’d be Justin Kinney. But you knew that neither of you were built or ready for that - you had the guts to set him free, the guts to hope that maybe, when he’s ready, he’ll come back to you.”
Brian wants to say no, he wants to say something cutting and sarcastic, something that will make those blazing blue eyes look away, but he can’t.
Emmett’s right.
But fuck if Brian’s going to be a martyr.
“Be that as it may, Honeycutt, Justin’s still gone,” Brian finally replies, after he’s cleared his throat. “And I have to go see a fuck about a blowjob,” he adds, pointing to a guy who’s been giving him the eye since they walked into Woody’s. He’s not extraordinary looking, but he’s new, and Brian will take what he can get right now. “So, if you’ll excuse me.”
He thinks he hears Emmett say, “He’ll come back, Brian,” and “Don’t call me Honeycutt,” but he can’t be sure.
He’d rather not be sure.
+
A few weeks after Justin leaves, Brian takes the day off from Kinnetik and drives to West Virginia, to the house.
He parks the ‘Vette in the driveway, gets out and stands in the shadow of the house for a few minutes, breathes in the cool, crisp air, laden with the scent of evergreen.
The house is a standing monument to one of the few times of his life when he laid himself bare, grew and reached and strived for what he wanted. It has a place among a picture of a baby, his tiny hand on Brian’s face, a bloody scarf, a napkin with the perfect name scrawled across it.
He remembers buying this, the realtor’s wide-eyes when he took it without any haggling. Not eighteen hours before that he’d been in a car, listening to a radio host say words that nearly stopped his heart, that turned his world around. He’d been covered in soot, choking on smoke, praying to a God he stopped believing long ago to please, please let him be okay. Fourteen hours and he’d been screaming out his fear and his anger, Take my blood, motherfucker!. Thirteen and he’d been saying the three words he’d never thought he’d mean, not like this, not to someone like him, but he’d almost lost him, and clinging to him amidst the smoke and the noise and the sirens, those three words were the only things that could be said.
He’d gone for broke, with this house, with the proposal. Half-mad with fear and grief and love, terrified and liberated all at once.
Brian sees it so clearly, Justin’s face, shinning with unexpected joy and disbelief. Hears the Yes, I’ll marry you!.
He would’ve gone through with it. He would’ve married Justin.
But, what people so often forget when offering their opinions on them, unasked for and unwelcome, is that Justin’s just a kid. Yeah, sure, Brian’s an immature asshole, and he’s a selfish shit, he’s never denied that, but when raging against him, people seem to loose sight of the fact that Justin’s only twenty-two years old.
Granted, a twenty-two year old that’s gone through more crap than most people ever do in a lifetime, but a twenty-two year old nonetheless.
And he needed time and space to fuck up and to stand up, to triumph and to fail, all on his own.
Walking into the empty house, breathing in the broken promises and the soft, barely there possibilities, Brian thinks that maybe they can have this, that he should keep the place, just in case.
If Justin comes back, decides he wants this. They can set their own rules, and do whatever they want, walk at their own pace, and fuck everyone else.
Maybe.
Yeah. Maybe they can have this.
Brian will lay himself bare, to grow and reach and strive for what he wants.
+
“Brian, I was wondering if you’d like to come over for lunch,” Jennifer asks over the phone, sounding hesitant but demanding all at once.
Brian pinches the bride of his nose, shuts his eyes for a second. He wants to say no.
“Don’t say no, Brian,” Jennifer continues, softly. “I - We. You’re family, okay? No matter what, you’re family.”
And, yeah, they probably are - a twisted, weird version of a family, but a family nonetheless, and it’s more than Brian thought he’d ever had.
“I’ll be there, Mother Taylor,” Brian replies, after a few seconds of silence. “I’ll be the one with the bottle of wine.”
“Better make it a couple.”
“Why, Jennifer, I didn’t know you had it in you,” Brian says, gasping loudly.
“Of course you fucking did,” she replies, drily. “Now get back to work.”
They haven’t said Justin’s name aloud to each other since he left.
+
Brian’s phone rings at different hours, but each time he knows it’s Justin, knows it’s Justin when it shouldn’t be.
They parted, and it should’ve been the end.
It would be all too easy, and so fucking hard, to pick up and exchange meaningless chatter. To pretend that they’re any good with words - they aren’t, they never have been.
Too easy to pretend that the phone sex will turn into more in just a little while, that they don’t miss each other, that Justin isn’t scared shitless somewhere in a roach-infested walk up in the seedy part of the Village and Brian isn’t sitting in the dark, smoking, feeling like a B-list actor in a shitty noir film.
So Brian doesn’t pick up, and he erases the messages in the machine without listening - a single Brian with a tired sigh almost had him calling Cynthia to cancel his appointments and book him on a plane to New York City, he’s not taking the risk again.
Brian lived twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine years without Justin, and he can live twenty-nine more. One way or another. Because Justin needs this, Justin wanted this, and it doesn’t matter how much it hurts either of them, how much it tears Brian. He just has to pace himself through it.
They parted. It had to end.
+
“He’s getting chewed out, Brian,” Lindsay tells him, completely ignoring his request to keep Justin out of the conversation. “And, well. I told him New York wouldn’t be easy, but he’s not even painting. He’s working three jobs just to breathe there. And art galleries won’t even let him walk in the door when they see he has a portfolio, not when he doesn’t have a degree.”
Brian could say so many things. What the hell did you think was going to happen, this isn’t a small-town boy does good in the big city Lifetime feature. He could remind her she’s the one who dangled that review in both their faces, the one who told Justin, and then Brian, that without going to New York City an artist would never make it.
“Jennifer offered to send him money, and I offered to send it through her, but he refused,” is what Brian finally settles on. “He’s a stubborn shit, Lindsay, you know he is.”
“Yeah. Wonder who he takes after.”
Brian ignores the minefield that is, stays silent.
Lindsay relents with a sigh. “I didn’t think it’d be like that,” she says, and there it is, the touch of guilt. “He had that great review, and a few people called me, and. I don’t know. I just thought it’d be different.”
“Things rarely turn out to be how we think they’ll be,” Brian tells her. “That’s just life.”
But, god. Brian is suddenly overpowered by the fierce, mad wish that he could make it all better, that he could fix it - that he could make things be exactly what Justin deserves them to be.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Lindsay replies, and she’s not really talking about Justin anymore.
+
Almost seven months after the bomb and the proposal and the almost wedding, Justin comes back in the middle of the night, as silently as he left.
Brian is lounging in the bed, trying to decide whether it’s too late and too much of a bother to get dressed and go check up on things in Babylon, maybe grab a guy, get a blowjob in the backroom, when he hears the loft door slide open, raises himself up on his elbows and stares.
Justin.
Looking a bit thinner, a lot tired. Hair on the long side, like it was before the suicidal Pink Possums, or whatever the hell that shit Cody called their vigilante debacle. His eyes are ringed with shadows, bruised and weary, his mouth tense with the slow-burning unhappiness that builds with day upon miserable day.
Brian allows himself only a moment to feel the hurt - just one moment to absorb the pain of all those lonely nights and shitty days Justin went through, just a single second to feel how they ache much more than his own tale of empty days.
One moment, and then he sits up, lips turned up at the corners.
“Hey,” he says.
And every weight Justin is carrying falls away along with his clothes as he walks towards Brian, falls away until there’s only them, meeting on the bed with a deep, deep kiss, bodies melting against each other and eating up the distance, the absence, the loneliness. Brian leans back, takes Justin’s body with him, feels skin against skin and feels alive again, alive after seven months of numbness and placebos.
This is a moment to live in, to forget any past or future they had or might have had together. What they have is now, and maybe tomorrow, and every day after, but now is what matters.
“Hey,” Justin replies, once they part, his forehead resting against Brian’s.
Brian leans up for another kiss, clutches at the messy ends of Justin’s hair, feels Justin running a hand across the same spot in his collarbone - the spot he always buried his face in to sleep. They’re retracing each other, remembering all the small things.
Not much has changed, it was only time, after all.
But this? Justin against him, his skin and his knowing eyes, his smile and his messy hair, his smelly socks, his talent and bravery, his drunken giggle, and them, the all-consuming, fucked up and fucking right thing they are, this is only everything.
It's only everything.
the end.
Author: arlad
Drabble: 21 by lastglances
Notes: Story takes place directly after 513.
Title from the drabble I chose to inspire me - a million thanks to the incredibly talented author.
It’s Only Everything
This is a moment to live in, to forget any past or future they had or might have had together. This is the time to lay himself bare, to grow and reach and strive for what he wants. They embrace, kiss, and fumble. They part and it seems to be the end. Brian sleeps, smokes, works. He tries to imagine a time before Justin when he might have been happy, when he might have been who he was meant to be. But such thoughts only bring more sadness. "It's only time," he said. He meant to say, "It's only everything."
+++
For a second, Brian lets himself think that one day of mourning will be enough. He pretends that if he lets himself feel this absence for one full day, he will wake up the next recovered, safe from Justin’s ghost, immune to the phantom touches and words.
He pretends, even though he knows he’s only pretending so he can take the next breath and walk the next step, because there is no escape, there is no immunity.
Justin is in New York, and Brian is here, and no fuck, no drink, no charming euphemism from Debbie or Mother Taylor can change that.
So Brian sleeps, smokes, works.
Goes through the motions, hopes that in doing that he’ll find a form of happiness, doesn’t even try to hope for real happiness.
It’s man’s curse, after all, to only realize how happy he was once the happiness is gone.
Brian’s mind betrays him, replays moment after moment - from No place special. I can change that. to even if it was ridiculously romantic; from I promise you won’t forget this one to Take a shower. You stink.. It’ll be a pleasure to work under you, sir. and He’s the guy I fuck more than once. He relives the ecstasy and the crumbling terror, remembers every moan and thrust, the exact way Justin’s toes curled before coming, the sound of a bat hitting bone, the feel of a cold gun in his hand. There are innuendos and jokes, bitter yelling, forgiving hands.
It’s only five years, five years of memories against twenty-eight, but how they haunt him. How they changed him.
But Justin is in New York, and Brian is here, and no wish, no ghost, no meaningful look from Mikey can change that.
And Brian sleeps, smokes, works.
+
“So I had to let Drewsie go, you know?” Emmett asks, practically falling into his Cosmo.
Brian can’t believe he’s spending his Saturday night listening to Emmett Honeycutt’s love woes.
He can’t believe he just thought the phrase love woes.
Jesus, he needs more Beam.
“Yeah, I let him go,” Emmett repeats, sighing wistfully. “Kinda like you did Justin.”
And just like that, Brian’s pleasant buzz is gone.
“I didn’t let Justin go. Justin left all on his own,” he says, hates that his voice is stark and too fucking revealing. Goddamned alcohol.
Emmett isn’t as drunk as he appears to be either, apparently, because he raises an arch eyebrow, and leans over the table. “Who are you trying to kid here, Brian? You know that if you’d said the word, if you’d made a different choice, Justin would still be here, and he’d be Justin Kinney. But you knew that neither of you were built or ready for that - you had the guts to set him free, the guts to hope that maybe, when he’s ready, he’ll come back to you.”
Brian wants to say no, he wants to say something cutting and sarcastic, something that will make those blazing blue eyes look away, but he can’t.
Emmett’s right.
But fuck if Brian’s going to be a martyr.
“Be that as it may, Honeycutt, Justin’s still gone,” Brian finally replies, after he’s cleared his throat. “And I have to go see a fuck about a blowjob,” he adds, pointing to a guy who’s been giving him the eye since they walked into Woody’s. He’s not extraordinary looking, but he’s new, and Brian will take what he can get right now. “So, if you’ll excuse me.”
He thinks he hears Emmett say, “He’ll come back, Brian,” and “Don’t call me Honeycutt,” but he can’t be sure.
He’d rather not be sure.
+
A few weeks after Justin leaves, Brian takes the day off from Kinnetik and drives to West Virginia, to the house.
He parks the ‘Vette in the driveway, gets out and stands in the shadow of the house for a few minutes, breathes in the cool, crisp air, laden with the scent of evergreen.
The house is a standing monument to one of the few times of his life when he laid himself bare, grew and reached and strived for what he wanted. It has a place among a picture of a baby, his tiny hand on Brian’s face, a bloody scarf, a napkin with the perfect name scrawled across it.
He remembers buying this, the realtor’s wide-eyes when he took it without any haggling. Not eighteen hours before that he’d been in a car, listening to a radio host say words that nearly stopped his heart, that turned his world around. He’d been covered in soot, choking on smoke, praying to a God he stopped believing long ago to please, please let him be okay. Fourteen hours and he’d been screaming out his fear and his anger, Take my blood, motherfucker!. Thirteen and he’d been saying the three words he’d never thought he’d mean, not like this, not to someone like him, but he’d almost lost him, and clinging to him amidst the smoke and the noise and the sirens, those three words were the only things that could be said.
He’d gone for broke, with this house, with the proposal. Half-mad with fear and grief and love, terrified and liberated all at once.
Brian sees it so clearly, Justin’s face, shinning with unexpected joy and disbelief. Hears the Yes, I’ll marry you!.
He would’ve gone through with it. He would’ve married Justin.
But, what people so often forget when offering their opinions on them, unasked for and unwelcome, is that Justin’s just a kid. Yeah, sure, Brian’s an immature asshole, and he’s a selfish shit, he’s never denied that, but when raging against him, people seem to loose sight of the fact that Justin’s only twenty-two years old.
Granted, a twenty-two year old that’s gone through more crap than most people ever do in a lifetime, but a twenty-two year old nonetheless.
And he needed time and space to fuck up and to stand up, to triumph and to fail, all on his own.
Walking into the empty house, breathing in the broken promises and the soft, barely there possibilities, Brian thinks that maybe they can have this, that he should keep the place, just in case.
If Justin comes back, decides he wants this. They can set their own rules, and do whatever they want, walk at their own pace, and fuck everyone else.
Maybe.
Yeah. Maybe they can have this.
Brian will lay himself bare, to grow and reach and strive for what he wants.
+
“Brian, I was wondering if you’d like to come over for lunch,” Jennifer asks over the phone, sounding hesitant but demanding all at once.
Brian pinches the bride of his nose, shuts his eyes for a second. He wants to say no.
“Don’t say no, Brian,” Jennifer continues, softly. “I - We. You’re family, okay? No matter what, you’re family.”
And, yeah, they probably are - a twisted, weird version of a family, but a family nonetheless, and it’s more than Brian thought he’d ever had.
“I’ll be there, Mother Taylor,” Brian replies, after a few seconds of silence. “I’ll be the one with the bottle of wine.”
“Better make it a couple.”
“Why, Jennifer, I didn’t know you had it in you,” Brian says, gasping loudly.
“Of course you fucking did,” she replies, drily. “Now get back to work.”
They haven’t said Justin’s name aloud to each other since he left.
+
Brian’s phone rings at different hours, but each time he knows it’s Justin, knows it’s Justin when it shouldn’t be.
They parted, and it should’ve been the end.
It would be all too easy, and so fucking hard, to pick up and exchange meaningless chatter. To pretend that they’re any good with words - they aren’t, they never have been.
Too easy to pretend that the phone sex will turn into more in just a little while, that they don’t miss each other, that Justin isn’t scared shitless somewhere in a roach-infested walk up in the seedy part of the Village and Brian isn’t sitting in the dark, smoking, feeling like a B-list actor in a shitty noir film.
So Brian doesn’t pick up, and he erases the messages in the machine without listening - a single Brian with a tired sigh almost had him calling Cynthia to cancel his appointments and book him on a plane to New York City, he’s not taking the risk again.
Brian lived twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine years without Justin, and he can live twenty-nine more. One way or another. Because Justin needs this, Justin wanted this, and it doesn’t matter how much it hurts either of them, how much it tears Brian. He just has to pace himself through it.
They parted. It had to end.
+
“He’s getting chewed out, Brian,” Lindsay tells him, completely ignoring his request to keep Justin out of the conversation. “And, well. I told him New York wouldn’t be easy, but he’s not even painting. He’s working three jobs just to breathe there. And art galleries won’t even let him walk in the door when they see he has a portfolio, not when he doesn’t have a degree.”
Brian could say so many things. What the hell did you think was going to happen, this isn’t a small-town boy does good in the big city Lifetime feature. He could remind her she’s the one who dangled that review in both their faces, the one who told Justin, and then Brian, that without going to New York City an artist would never make it.
“Jennifer offered to send him money, and I offered to send it through her, but he refused,” is what Brian finally settles on. “He’s a stubborn shit, Lindsay, you know he is.”
“Yeah. Wonder who he takes after.”
Brian ignores the minefield that is, stays silent.
Lindsay relents with a sigh. “I didn’t think it’d be like that,” she says, and there it is, the touch of guilt. “He had that great review, and a few people called me, and. I don’t know. I just thought it’d be different.”
“Things rarely turn out to be how we think they’ll be,” Brian tells her. “That’s just life.”
But, god. Brian is suddenly overpowered by the fierce, mad wish that he could make it all better, that he could fix it - that he could make things be exactly what Justin deserves them to be.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Lindsay replies, and she’s not really talking about Justin anymore.
+
Almost seven months after the bomb and the proposal and the almost wedding, Justin comes back in the middle of the night, as silently as he left.
Brian is lounging in the bed, trying to decide whether it’s too late and too much of a bother to get dressed and go check up on things in Babylon, maybe grab a guy, get a blowjob in the backroom, when he hears the loft door slide open, raises himself up on his elbows and stares.
Justin.
Looking a bit thinner, a lot tired. Hair on the long side, like it was before the suicidal Pink Possums, or whatever the hell that shit Cody called their vigilante debacle. His eyes are ringed with shadows, bruised and weary, his mouth tense with the slow-burning unhappiness that builds with day upon miserable day.
Brian allows himself only a moment to feel the hurt - just one moment to absorb the pain of all those lonely nights and shitty days Justin went through, just a single second to feel how they ache much more than his own tale of empty days.
One moment, and then he sits up, lips turned up at the corners.
“Hey,” he says.
And every weight Justin is carrying falls away along with his clothes as he walks towards Brian, falls away until there’s only them, meeting on the bed with a deep, deep kiss, bodies melting against each other and eating up the distance, the absence, the loneliness. Brian leans back, takes Justin’s body with him, feels skin against skin and feels alive again, alive after seven months of numbness and placebos.
This is a moment to live in, to forget any past or future they had or might have had together. What they have is now, and maybe tomorrow, and every day after, but now is what matters.
“Hey,” Justin replies, once they part, his forehead resting against Brian’s.
Brian leans up for another kiss, clutches at the messy ends of Justin’s hair, feels Justin running a hand across the same spot in his collarbone - the spot he always buried his face in to sleep. They’re retracing each other, remembering all the small things.
Not much has changed, it was only time, after all.
But this? Justin against him, his skin and his knowing eyes, his smile and his messy hair, his smelly socks, his talent and bravery, his drunken giggle, and them, the all-consuming, fucked up and fucking right thing they are, this is only everything.
It's only everything.
the end.