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Title: Take Five Hundred and Eleven
-*- You watch him in the half-light seeping through the curtains, leaving a lavender fizz across his face. It seems almost wasteful to be asleep when you can be watching him instead. He is quiet in his dreams, his face picture-perfect, and he seems so very different from the man you know when he is awake; the person he shares with the rest of the world. There are so many facets to him that he reminds you of cut glass, all crystalline hardness and clean lines that reflect and retract when you turn him this way and that. He is almost child-like in his enthusiasm, as if every day he awakes to a new world. He breathes in as if he can inhale experience through his lungs, soaking it up through osmosis. His intelligence surpasses yours, you know that, but it never stops you from trying to keep up. He is most lucid when he is stoned; spinning his theories on politics or literature as if to stop would cause him pain. He is passionate, more than you ever thought he would be that first time you met him in a cold office, the artificial brightness doing little to hide the raw beauty of him that lay beneath his unshaven chin and sleep-deprived eyes. He was a diamond, rough and uncut, and you knew instinctively that his edges had the potential to be sharp. He was life-battered yet not beaten, almost like the haunting cliffs of Dover you remembered from your childhood when your parents took you to England. But watching him now, he was none of those things, his over-active brain still underneath blanket-layers of sleep. You felt incredibly honoured to know him like this; awake, a fiercely opinionated man who walked through his life as if he was a jungle cat being stalked, his eyes constantly wide and wary as if he let his guard down for one second then he would be devoured; asleep, he was reduced to an infant, a stark innocence possessing the faint traces of lines on his face.You remembered wanting so badly to play Justin to his Brian. He was a man who would be able to possess you over and over again, each meeting with him, each word reducing you to little more than a spectator, a member of the audience in his life’s stage. You knew it would seep over to your characters, and you barely remembered a time where you felt reluctant about being able to play someone so innocent, so naïve as Justin. Gale made you feel like that. You were in awe, although you managed to hide it well. You recalled meeting Peter after the casting call, excitedly telling him that you had met the only man who could ever be Brian Kinney. Peter knew it then, that you would develop a crush. It had always been so easy for you to feel more for people you admired than you were strictly supposed to. But it went far beyond a crush, and you found yourself falling harder as the months progressed, your fascination with him, your knowledge of how he worked deepening right alongside Justin’s for Brian. It was almost a cliché, and you felt like a beginner; a little boy who wanted to play at dress-up, trying on the idea of being an actor, wearing your sexuality anew. Before him you thought you were secure with who you were. You thought you knew what you liked and what you needed to avoid. Then he came along and stirred everything up with his enthusiastic monologues that he delivered to you in your trailer after hours, leaving you wondering where on earth he got the energy after twelve hours of shooting to muster up any sort of passion for anything. You watched him unguarded, realizing how utterly useless it would be to try and pretend that you were anything less than falling for him. And fall you did, harder than you ever thought you could. And it hurt too. The little looks Justin gave Brian; his adoration, his worship, they were so easy to perform because you knew just how he felt. You thought you were the biggest fraud. He had no clue, and why should he? He was oblivious to your internal dialogue, swinging between the poles of ‘tell him’ and ‘this has to stop’. And then one day it happened and you dared to let yourself dream, just a tiny bit, just a few seconds between sleep and waking up, that one day, somewhere, somehow, you could maybe stand a chance. It was during the filming of the final season and you had both already been clued in on the entirety of the scripts. You knew that Justin would be leaving at the end and you had spent hours locked in your room telling yourself that it was only pretend, that you didn’t have to leave too. That you could tell him how you really felt, what you wanted, who you really were. You had a miserable day, spending most of it standing around in the freezing cold and covered in soot. It was in the aftershocks of the bombing at Babylon, a plot device you both adored and abhorred. You stood shivering in the too-large jacket ‘borrowed’ from a fire fighter, your hair a mess, wondering how you would get through re-take after re-take of hearing him whispering ‘I love you’ in your ear as the director insisted you both do it again, the angle or the lighting or something else not quite right. But then there he was, striding towards you, his own face dirty, and he had a desperate look in his eye that was part-Brian, part-Gale. His gaze was firmly locked onto yours, as was required, and as he drew closer you swore you could smell the longing rising off him like a heat-wave. He pulled you into his arms, and you sank against his chest, trying to commit the shifting of his muscles to your memory, squeezing your eyes shut and imagining that you weren’t making a television show, that it was real, that finally, after years of waiting, he managed to clue himself in and was about to tell you his truths: "I was so worried…" His voice went up a pitch. It was perfect. The fans were going to go wild. He pulled back and looked down into your face and you were helpless to do anything but stare back, watching the storm clouds chasing each other across his eyes as he battled with himself, with Brian, with trying to figure out what to do. He pulled you close again, burying his face against your neck, and you swore that you felt him inhale sharply, taking in your scent. "I love you," he mumbled, and your heart stopped. It was there in his voice, in his touch, in the way his heart beat a rampage against your chest. You made a vague sort of noise, disbelief mingled with shock. It belonged to both Justin and yourself. He relaxed, reading your body language like Braille, knowing instantly from the way you stood, the way your fingers tightened a notch in his shirt, the way you blinked slowly - once, twice- your expression so instantaneous it could never be considered an act. He looked down at you again, studying you more intently than you had ever seen him looking at anything. He was all at once trying to work you out to reassure himself, but knowing there was nothing left to discover: that he knew everything; that you had thrown yourself to him, naked, years ago, waiting for him to notice, to comment, to refuse you. "I love you," he said again, and this time it was completely for you. No Brian, no Justin, no cameras, no whirring lights that threw you off your lines. Just you and him, facing each other in the topsy-turvy world you now inhabited. Where everything had been flipped, turned around, messed up and mangled, and put back together in the space of a single heartbeat, over the course of three little words that shouldn’t have meant anything but meant everything just because of that look in his eyes when he had said them. "Cut!" the director yelled and you reluctantly stepped away from him to find out whether another take was needed. It was the scene that was filmed the fastest in the entire show. One take and you had it down. That’s all it took. Perhaps that was all that was ever needed. But neither of you stopped there. You smile when he stirs in the bed and reaches out one arm from under his mountain of covers, holding his hand out to you. You link your fingers with his, allowing him to pull you back down inside his private cave, watching with barely-concealed amusement in the almost-darkness as he cranks open one eye and looks at you. "Love you," he mutters, and you fall hard. All over again. |
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