QaF Ficlet: Untitled
by bloodyrose82 (Rachael)
Rating:  PG-13 (for mentions of spunk)
Author's note:  Alrighty. So I wrote this in fifteen minutes while I was waiting for Shan to get her ass back online. Which means it's a stream of thoughts just running out of my head. It isn't edited and it barely has a purpose, but it's Brian and Justin so I thought maybe someone would like to read it. PG-13 for mentions of spunk. Muwaaahhaa.

Oh yeah...Brian's PoV, and it has not been yank-picked. Nevermind.

There was a road I couldn’t walk down, no matter how many times I tried. I came near many times, walking up to the road sign that spelled out ‘love’ in neon colours, flashing on and off as if they were deliberately trying to cause me a migraine, and I would stand there, my hands buried deep into my pockets, and just stare. Then I would take a step back, and another, and finally turn and walk back the way I came.

I just couldn’t do it. I was a fucking coward, through and through, and worse than that, I was a hypocrite.

The words would come up my throat and sit there on the tip of my tongue, making my whole mouth tingle. I would wet my lips and open my mouth, the air gushing out, and hope that somehow the words would sit upon the exhale, almost as an after-thought, so I wouldn’t have to make the conscious decision to tell him.

But then I would swallow, trying to clear the dryness in my mouth, and the words would slip back down my throat and be digested.

It was no way to live.

To him the words came easy, tripping off his tongue without an after-thought. It was his natural response to seeing me. In the morning I would lay there in the bed, my head buried under my pillow, trying to prolong the moment until I would have to heave myself up and start the day, and he would turn over, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and brush his thumb over my forehead: “I love you.”

Or after work, I would slip into the loft, throwing my briefcase down on the counter, shrugging my coat off my shoulders, and when I turned around he would be there, pausing in whatever piece of art he was currently working on, and it would just float from his lips and across the space between us, hovering in front of my face like a fucking butterfly, as if I was expected to capture it in my palm.

Sometimes he didn’t even say it, but it would be loud anyway, in the way he turned his gaze towards me, or the way he captured my hand and squeezed just a little bit. It was in everything he did, and everything he was, in the line of his back as he arched underneath me, his fingers pressing so hard into my biceps that I thought he was trying to sink them through my skin so he could caress my bones.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was his intention.

It was there in the way he cried my name as he jerked and shot his load over my stomach. It was in the way he would duck his head and lope up to me after an argument, sorry written across his face.

And I felt like the biggest fucking idiot for not being able to say it back, for not being able to just take that final leap and open my mouth, letting the words fall out like a carefully dropped bomb. I wanted to be able to say them. I wanted to be able to see the reaction on his face. But the walls were just too high, too solid. There were only so many bricks I was capable of moving by myself.

But then a bomb of a different kind was dropped, and I wasn’t there to protect him. I wasn’t there to shield him with my own body. The news came over the radio as I was being driven to the airport, and I knew with a sudden clarity how I felt.

He was everything I had been focusing on for as long as I can remember. He had crawled under the trip-wire and made his way across the field of landmines I had surrounding myself with, willing to take the risk of losing a limb, or possibly a vital organ just to have that chance to get close to me.

My entire being pulsated, drawn in his direction like a fucking magnet. I ran through the crowd huddling outside the club, searching for the familiar sight of blonde hair that had always shone like a fucking beacon.

I found his mother, and she told me he was still inside. I didn’t even think as I ran towards the front door, pushing past the fire-fighters who stood around, assessing the damage and the stability of the building. I just knew I had to be in there, with him. I had to get there and tell him before it was too fucking late.

And there he was. A little bloodied, a little bruised, soot covering his face: the most fucking beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life. I was ready then, ready to say it to him, those three little words that I told everyone meant nothing but apparently I couldn’t bring myself to say.

And they were shoved back again, swallowed down with a glass of horror as Emmett told me about Mikey.

It was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do, leaving Justin there like that, trusting that his mother and the paramedics would keep him safe when I was so sure that I had to be the one in control.

But it was all a farce, as had most things been in my life. A fucking façade that I could maintain some sort of air that everything was down to me, that I had the power to set things right.

But I didn’t, and it was confirmed in the hospital when I was unable to give Mikey my blood.

An hour later, when I had found out all I could, I made my way back to the club, stalking across the street with more purpose than I could ever remember having.

He turned around as I came near, his face a mixture of fear and that fucking determination only Justin possessed. It was overwhelming, the way I felt, a heady cocktail of confusion, of worry that I had almost lost him, of a desire to hang on and never let go.

I rushed over, my jaw set, and pulled him into the biggest hug, for once not giving a shit about how I looked or how much soot he got on my clothes. I just needed to touch him, to smell him, to breathe him in, to know he was still there, still mine.

Words came, stumbling over themselves as I told him how scared I was. That was new. Brian Kinney wasn’t scared of anything, was he? But I was, so desperately scared that it was almost pouring out of me. I’d almost lost him once, right back at the start, and I couldn’t do it again. I wasn’t going to allow it to happen.

“I love you.”

It came out suddenly, just like that. As if the accumulation of the past five years had been battering at my walls for so fucking long that something had to give in the end, and that thing was me. The emotions crashed through the barriers like waves, spilling out across from my body to his, and he clung to me, almost falling over from the force of it, the surprise.

He made a little noise, half-way between a wounded animal and the sound a person makes when they have been hovering near death and suddenly have a chance to breath again.

And I knew then how fucking true it was, how much he really did mean to me, how I wasn’t me without him there.

“I love you.”

I repeated it, with far more conviction. This time it was my choice. I was the one in control. But it was a different kind of control, not one of false pretences that I had created to keep myself safe. It was one in which I had aligned the itching in my gut with my behaviour, finally admitting that he was the only person I had ever let in and ever would.

And that’s where my story ends. What comes after isn’t of consequence. Love, it’s the most evasive thing I can think of. I can sit here trying to describe what it feels like to love him, and I don’t have the words. I can highlight times where I have felt it pulsing through me more than others, like when he directs his smile at me and I think I’m about to burst, but that doesn’t give the complete picture.

If I’m honest then I would tell you it’s so much bigger than me that some days I don’t think I can contain it. I’m in awe of how much I can feel for one person now I have let myself, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

I don’t want to turn this into something cheesy, something suitable for the big screen, because it isn’t like that. It isn’t always about roses and hearts and fluffy pink things that would look completely unsuitable in the loft. It’s about this ache that just sits with me, everywhere I go, sometimes lulling me to sleep when he isn’t here on one of his visits from New York. It can grow in magnitude until its so painful that I’m scared I’m going to die if it doesn’t go away, but then all he has to do is pick up the phone and call me, or send me an email just saying hello, or walk across the airport terminal, his eyes fixed so intently on me that I feel that I’m the only thing that matters in his world, and it all just slips back until I’m not even aware of the love I feel for him.

Until it’s just Justin, a little blonde twink with a fucking awesome ass.

And I know he’s all mine.