Alpha Written for fanfic100. FANDOM: Queer as Folk CHARACTERS: Brian Kinney, Lindsay Peterson PROMPT: She WORD COUNT: 2,147 RATING: PG-13 SUMMARY: Before everything else, there was always them. Author’s Note: You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to write this for. Back when his skin wasn’t always so cold, he thought that she could save him. Could make him something that his mother used to take away. It was only a week, but it wasn’t his fault. She was just so… so pale, and blonde. Her laugh made him smile, even if not a word she was saying was funny. Her hands were thin and she would wear a skirt in the dead of winter because she liked the color, even if it made her knees turn blue. She would have been – could have been – perfect for him; perfect in the engagement, marriage and a baby kind of way. He could have fallen in love with her. It was only a week... It wasn’t his fault.  … 7 - Friday, the 25th. He scores them a bag of weed that night, weed that’s stronger than the stuff she’d smoked back in eleventh grade, back before her parents caught her, found the pipe tucked inside of her closet. “I’m not a fag, though.” He says, his eyebrows knotting in the middle of his forehead, and to her, he looks like some kind of comic book character, all confused and unsure of how he will save the universe now. That thought makes her laugh, and she lays back to sprawl over his messy bed, curling her arms up into the blankets. It’s silent and then she pulls one hand back to tuck a piece of hair behind an ear, an ear that’s pierced with a diamond stud, and she whispers, “You know what?” He raises his eyebrows and leans a little bit closer, obviously intrigued. She covers her mouth with her pale hand and whispers, her cheeks suddenly flushing a bright red, a color that is not made from the pot in her system, “I think I might be, too. Gay.” Falling back into the thin mattress, he laughs.  … 6 - Thursday, the 24th. She finds him outside of his dorm room that day, dick deep in her best friend’s brother’s ex-friend – who, coincidentally, she had no idea was attending the same school as she was. What are the chances, she will later wonder. “Brian?” She asks, voice quiet, and she’s gaping, can’t help the way that her mouth drops open and her arched eyebrows raise halfway up her forehead. He inhales sharp and quick and tries to pull out. “Fuck.” He whispers, forehead against the back of the guy’s neck as he tries to reach down and pull his pants up. “Uh. You, uh, you caught me.” She notices the way the other guy tries to hide his face from her and duck away. And she isn’t mad. She isn’t even disappointed. She really isn’t that surprised, either. She wants to be, but she can’t – she just can’t do it – can’t yell or snap, or even get that angry. “What are you doing?” She asks instead, and he covers both of his eyes with one hand.  … 5 - Wednesday, the 23rd. ‘The Call’, as she will later name it, makes him a little jumpy. A little weird. A little more distant. Something in him changes, but she doesn’t really know what it is. Not yet, at least. He shows up at her dorm room that night, leaning against the door frame with a case of beer in one tight hand and an already perfected, classically placed, ‘I’m sorry’ smile on his lips. “I was just busy today.” He shrugs, stepping inside the small room before he kicks the door shut behind him with one foot. She pushes a piece of hair, fallen from her elastic band, back behind one ear. She can shrug, too. “It’s no big deal.” She promises, stepping over the painted canvases, lazy stripes of bright colors spread across the tight fabric of them. “I’ve been working on this project all day, anyway.” He nods and falls into her bed, on top of piles of newspaper clippings and shredded glossy magazines that she’s been using as inspiration. “Oh.” He says, and cracks a beer open one-handed. “Okay.”  … 4 – Tuesday, the 22nd. He’s sprawled over her desk chair, clunky cell phone attached to his left ear as she chews her bottom lip thoughtfully, and tries to draw a proper line, one that looks as though it’s actually sketched and not just gouged into the paper she’s been debating on all day. Her whole life, and all that she’s ever wanted to be is an artist. “I don’t know. No. Jesus Christ, no, I’ve only been gone a month and a half.” He’s saying, the chair spinning back and forth as he moves his legs, rocking his body. She slicks her tongue over her front teeth, white from practice, and really tries not to listen. “Shut up, Mikey. At Lindsay’s. A girl. Yes, a girl.” She crawls on all fours over to the desk that he’s got his arm thrown across, and starts to dig around for an eraser, finally finds one buried under a pile of papers that it’s already attacked and ate through. Before she moves back to her paper, he leans down and wraps his fingers around the back of her head, knuckles disappearing into the blonde hair she’s worked so hard to keep shiny, and presses their lips together. A smile and she pulls away, reaching blindly behind her for the assignment. She wishes they didn’t have to draw the hired models in class, and could sketch whatever – whoever – they wanted to, instead.  … 3 – Monday, the 21st. She’s laying under his blankets that night, watching him sleep. Breathing already evened out, it starts to slow more and more, every time he inhales and then exhales again. It relaxes her, gives her something to concentrate on. Tucking her hands under her head palm to palm, she looks over his face, all long eyelashes and lips that she’s found out aren’t really swollen, just always like that – debauched, the bottom one especially. A long leg and she curls her own around his, and his body almost immediately rolls back into hers, an arm thrown over her thin waist. She looks at that too, the color of his skin versus hers, and she finds herself thinking of all the ways she could introduce him to her parents. He doesn’t exactly seem to be the parents fearing type, anyways. “Daddy, this is Brian. We met a few months ago.” She rolls that around in her head for a while, and then makes a face. Something about the words just don’t seem right.  … 2 – Sunday, the 20th. Her head feels as though it’s stuffed full of fabric – and it’s some kind of material that’s rough to the touch that rubs against itself whenever she moves. Causes a friction burn inside of her head that makes her eyeballs ache. She rolls over and groans when the sun suddenly sneaks up behind her and slides up both of her nostrils, shining through the backs of her eyes and reflecting all over again – making everything twice as bright as it never before seemed to be. She groans again, and thinks that she’s going to puke. Knows she’s going to puke. The bed disappears from under her body as she feels something hauling her off of the mattress, two arms that seem familiar wrapping around her middle and dragging her across the cold morning floor. “Hey, let me go.” She whines, half-heartedly trying to slap the offending hands away from her. Whatever’s pulling her laughs, and says something that sounds an awful lot like, ‘the hell I will.’ She’s propped over a toilet seat then, and yeah, she knew she had to puke, because now everything from the night before is rushing back up her throat, seemingly at a ten fold, and pouring into the water. For some reason or another she thinks it sounds like the Niagara Falls do, but then she starts wondering how that’s even possible, because how would the entire natural phenomenon fit inside this toilet bowl? “I’m never drinking again.” She vows, throwing one arm up to further her point, but that just sparks her stomach and then it’s cramping again and she’s throwing up some more, only there’s nothing left to puke up, so it turns to acid and then stomach bile. That’s around the point where she realizes she’s sprawled across someone’s bathroom tile naked, and, yeah, here come some more things rushing back to her from the night before. Brian pushes himself away from the doorframe, stops watching the spectacle in front of him and saunters back into the other room, scratching the back of his head and blinking the interrupted sleep from his eyes. She shakes her head and groans, reaching up with a shaky hand to flush the toilet.  … 1 – Saturday, the 19th. He ends up stumbling into a party held at her friend’s house already half-high and laughing, too-tight jeans with too-long legs, practiced fingers wrapped around a beer bottle, lips swollen and red from things that he will inevitably never remember. And she sees him, as soon as he enters the crowded room. Smiles at the way that he’s laughing, his teeth kind of funny looking and definitely crooked in a few places. She’s leaning against a wall with one hip out, heart thumping inside her chest with her own beer in hand when he pushes his way through the floor and throws himself into the couch opposite to where she’s standing. She smiles and blushes each time he catches her eyes with his own, brown and wicked, wicked and brown, much like the ones that she finds herself watching every morning, studying her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s when she leans over and reaches to get another beer – she finished the first way too quickly, she thinks – that he sneaks up behind her and leans against the wall, startles her and makes her body jerk despite itself when she stands upright again, bottle cold with condensation on the pads of her fingers. “You scared me.” She whispers, and those are the first words, one corner of her pink lips turned up as she looks into the smirk above her, twisted up at the corners with a practiced ease. Then he smiles. “Oh yeah?” He asks, and that’s where it starts.  … “I don’t want to be a dyke, though.” She whispers, voice hoarse with a joint in her fingers as they look up at the popcorn ceiling above them, her head tucked into the inside of his elbow, his fingers touching her shoulder. He tilts his head a little and mouths the top of her head, and her hair is soft and just like a girl’s should be, and he loves her – he does. He loves her hands and her collarbones, and how she always touches his shoulders or his elbow, even if there’s no real reason to. “You won’t be a dyke.” He murmurs, eyes bleary and red-rimmed, suddenly widening as the ceiling tiles jump out at him and then fall back into place just as quickly, before his head can even register what his eyes seem to be seeing. The joint is taken out of her fingers and he takes a hard deep drag, letting it twist against the walls on the inside of his body before he exhales, and even if they both get suspended for doing this, it might still be worth it. “Brian? Did you always know you were gay?” She asks him, tilting her head back until she can see his face, even if it’s from a funny angle. All she can really make out is the line of his jaw, and one closed eyelid. He considers this for a second, and then hands the joint back. Thinks of Mikey and magazines. “I guess.” He says, and shrugs his shoulders. Her head bounces up and down a little. She nods, then, and watches the paper burn. “I think I did too.”  … When she introduces him to her father, it’s only because he’s passed out on her bed on Visitor’s Day, and he’s too heavy with dead weight to try and move. “That’s just Brian.” She smiles, and leans against the door. Her mother raises both eyebrows before wandering off into the adjoined bathroom that they specifically requested, all sucked in cheek bones and clothes styled to an eventually dated perfection. Her father lingers behind, pretends to survey the room for just long enough before he motions to the body, strewn through her sheets and blankets, one hand clutching her pillow. “Lindsay.” He whispers, thinking that the body can hear them. “He’s not…” Lindsay smiles – she really smiles – and shakes her head. “No.” She says, throwing her neck to the side so she can move the hair from her forehead without lifting either hand. Her father looks relieved before she even says, “He’s not.”