#fathwtf

[artificialqueens]

for all the honest world to feel (trixya) (6/9) - dare

“You fucker,” Adore crowed, drawing back with a face-splitting smile. Bianca grinned back, crooked, and tucked a little of her bangs behind her ear.

“Only one of us gets to affect a tone of outrage here, bitch,” Bianca said. “You’ve been keeping Trixie Mattel stashed away in your little grow-op for how long, exactly?”

(AN: more laughs, more sadness! i can’t believe it’s been two months. hopefully yesterday’s interlude served as a bit of a refresher; as usual, i use “she/her” for adore and “he/him” for pretty much everyone else (depending on the context.) no promises on when the next one will be up, but it is currently reading week so i’m gonna try to get as much done as i can. ALSO IVE UPPED THE CHAPTER COUNT. i’m sorry? i don’t know if i should be apologizing. 

this week on honest werld: bianca tries to cheer a couple of sad sacks up.)

| ch. 1 | ch. 2 | ch. 3 | ch. 4 | ch. 5 | 

TO: KATYA - 7:28 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

check in?

FROM: KATYA - 7:28 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

[A single emoji: index finger pinched to thumb, OK, the universal symbol of ‘all-good’.]

FROM: KATYA - 7:29 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

you?

TO: KATYA - 7:29 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

yeah. that’s about right

*

“So this is where you’ve been hiding out,” said Bianca, staring inquisitively, like Brian was a specimen under a microscope. “There was a pool on it. I guess we all lost – my money had you under a mattress in a drug den somewhere. You know, a classic.”

“You heard about that, huh,” Brian said, with a smile that landed somewhere between awkward and sheepish. He held Bianca’s gaze steadily as a nervous feeling turned over in his stomach – or maybe that was just the hangover.

He hadn’t seen Bianca in… god, ages. He couldn’t even say when.

“I hear everything,” said Bianca. He looked Brian up and down, brow raised; then his dimples flashed. “It’s just a matter of distinguishing the bullshit from the facts.”

Brian huffed a laugh – flavoured with relief – and stepped back. “Come on in,” he said. “I, uh. I wasn’t expecting to see you. It’s… kind of a mess.”

Bianca grabbed his bag again and followed him in the door, snorting audibly. “If you think I don’t know that…”

“Oh, no, this is fully on me,” Brian said. “Adore’s been away all week.”

“I know,” Bianca said. There was a thump – Brian turned to see that he’d dropped his bag in front of Adore’s room, and was leaning back against the wall beside the door, inspecting him. Bianca continued, “She’s been texting me pictures of the other lawyers’ asses that just say ‘P.E.G. THEM’. The same caption every time. All week. I’m about to call my telephone company and change my damn number.”

“Just buy another prepaid, girl,” said Brian, and grinned when Bianca laughed.

“But yeah,” Bianca said, shrugging. He tucked his hands into his pockets. “I thought I’d come down and, y’know, cheer a bitch up, and then I find you here.”

He gave Brian an expectant look.

Brian cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. He rubbed a hand at the corner of his eye, willing away the dry itch of too much liquor and not enough sleep. “I’ve, uh. Had a lot going on, I guess. Uh – I’m in the guest room, actually, sorry. That throws another wrench in your plans. I could take the couch, if you don’t mind my crap being all over the room –”

“Don’t be stupid, no one’s sleeping on the couch,” said Bianca, “except maybe you, right now, if you don’t collapse on the floor instead. You look like you’re about to pass out. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.” He brushed past Brian at what could only be called a clip – fast, determined, and altogether more than Brian’s hungover brain could fully process. Brian chose the path of least resistance and heaved his aching body – he was definitely getting too old to be sleeping without a real pillow, shit – over the arm of the couch, settling down with his cheek leaned against the back cushions as he watched Bianca set about tidying the kitchen. Bianca called over his shoulder, “Should I bother looking in the fridge, or should I spare you the indignity and just go get groceries?”

Brian thought about the wilting lettuce all sad and alone on the second shelf, and closed his eyes. “Uh,” he said. He’d never made that salad. “Might be best not to look.”

Cupboards banged open and shut, keeping time with the pounding in his head. “That’s what your dad told your mom when the nurse put you in her arms, huh,” said Bianca over the racket, who could very well be doing this to punish him.

“You think my dad stuck around that long?” said Brian, suffering quietly in the unmoving dark behind his eyelids. “You think I was born in a hospital?”

Bianca cackled. Brian’s head throbbed.

A long moment later, something cool and damp pressed against his temple, and he opened his eyes to see condensation drip down the side of a glass of water from very close-up. He lifted a hand to the glass, fingers brushing against warm skin, then looked up further to meet Bianca’s eyes, which were resting on him with a sober kindness.

“If you’re gonna die, do me the courtesy of moving to the balcony first so you don’t stink up the place,” Bianca said, mouth twitching up.

Brian pressed the glass against his cheek. “Anything to make this easier for you,” he said.

Bianca – nearly three years later and Brian was still a little too intimidated to even try for ‘Roy’ – huffed a laugh and returned to the kitchen. The cupboards started banging again, but a little quieter this time. Brian sipped his water and watched through half-lidded eyes as Bianca fussed and grumbled. “Always moving things around, I swear to God it’s like she tries to piss me off…”

“If there’s no food, what are you looking for?” Brian said.

“Frying pan. You’re vegetarian, right?”

Brian glanced up, surprised. “Yeah.”

“Get that look off your face. I remember things. I’m not that old.”

Brian smiled, hiding it away behind his cup.

Once Bianca was satisfied with the layout and contents of the kitchen, he leaned back against the counter and started tapping away at his phone rapidly. “Sesame oil, hoisin, star anise,” he muttered, “tofu, rice noodles – if I find anything instant in these cupboards, I swear…”

The sun was splintering through the clouds above the rooftops across the street; Brian shut his eyes and pressed the cup against his cheek, the cool glass soothing the ache behind his eyes. There was a pause in the low flow of words across the room and then Bianca said, “How’re you doing, miss Trixie?”, in the kind of crooning voice you might use on a sick pet.

That was fair, probably.

“Somehow both too close and too far from death at the same time,” Brian mumbled against the glass.

Footsteps sounded across the floor. He opened his eyes again.

“Don’t,” Bianca said, now over by Adore’s room, rustling through his duffel. “I’m just going for groceries. You can catch a few more winks while I’m gone.”

The fog in his head made Brian’s nose itch, his eyelids hang heavy. He nodded distractedly at Bianca as he rubbed at his face with one hand; when the door shut, he slumped against the arm of the couch, knees coming to rest against the back, glass of water cradled in his hands between his ribs and the cushions. Somewhere outside, a wind chime jingled quietly. His eyes drifted shut.

At some point, Bianca came back. Brian twitched into wakefulness at the sound of the door; shoes on hardwood (quickly silenced); the fridge opening and closing and the stove top beeping on. Bianca hummed tunelessly across the room.

Something in Brian twisted, turned in on itself like a dog gnawing at a mat in its stomach fur. Not quite restlessness, not quite nausea. He made a quiet, incoherent noise, then licked his lips and tried again: “Bianca?”

Bianca looked over at him. He saw it through mostly-closed eyes. “Yeah?”

Oil sizzled in the frying pan. The doors to the balcony were still open, and there was a faint smell of ginger beginning to fill the air, chasing away the staleness that clung to the corners of the room. Brian swallowed against the dry feeling in his mouth. “Tell me about your tour?” he said.

Bianca huffed a laugh. “Don’t get me started, girl,” he said, warning, but Brian cocked a sleepy eyebrow and he laughed again, louder. “Alright. The most recent show was in Florida, so, you can imagine, a bunch of swampy assholes – you didn’t need to fuck ‘em to smell ‘em. And the venue’s air conditioning was amazing everywhere except in the dressing room. You wouldn’t believe…”

Bianca rambled on. Brian closed his eyes again and drifted off to it, Bianca’s voice a soothing rhythm in the room, like one of those fountains where the water trickles slowly over tumbled stones. The pounding in his head faded. His eyes shut. He slept.

*

Hours later the door closed again, startling Brian into confused wakefulness and a late afternoon light. The sun had passed beyond the scope of the glass doors, casting the living room into shadow. Brian blinked hazily against the indistinct dark of the entryway, unable to make sense out of the lines and shapes that blurred before his eyes.

There was the thump of a bag being dropped. His gaze focused in on the sound – and up, to its source, where Adore stood listless, pale and brittle in the shadows. Her eyes slipped shut while he watched, and her lips thinned, pursed.

He opened his mouth.

“Adore.”

Adore’s eyes flew open to meet Brian’s gaze, but it wasn’t him who’d spoken. She looked to his right.

“B!”

In a flash, Adore’s face went from spent exhaustion to an almost hungry joy – not hungry, exactly. Sharp at the edges and a little too bright in the eyes. Brian didn’t know how to explain it, but it hit him like a punch all the same, familiar and close. Adore flung herself at Bianca, who caught her easily.

“Hey, baby,” Bianca said, knuckles going white at her spine.

“What the fuck, Yanx, what the fuck,” Adore kept repeating. Her elbows poked out like a spiny guard where her arms were wrapped around Bianca’s neck – like, god fucking help you if you try to get between this shit. She’ll fuck you up.

“What? I can’t take my weekend off to come visit my best girl?”

“You fucker,” Adore crowed, drawing back with a face-splitting smile. Bianca grinned back, crooked, and tucked a little of her bangs behind her ear.

“Only one of us gets to affect a tone of outrage here, bitch,” Bianca said. “You’ve been keeping Trixie Mattel stashed away in your little grow-op for how long, exactly?”

Adore paused, and looked back at Brian.

Brian dragged himself upright – well, more or less. Bianca had drawn a step back, watching him with an eyebrow cocked. Adore, holding one of Bianca’s hands in both of hers, was watching too, mouth set with trepidation, waiting for Brian’s move.

“About a month,” Brian said. “It’s, uh. It’s a long story.”

Bianca’s brow twitched higher. “I cleaned your puke out of the bath mat while you were passed out just now. I think you can fuckin’ humour me.”

Adore’s eyes widened.

“Oh my god,��� she said, “oh my god, dude, the thing –” she glanced quickly at Bianca and then back, “when I was in L.A. I saw – but the thing, last night, dude, how fucked were you?”

“Ask your bath mat,” Bianca said. “And what thing is it we’re referring to? I’m not a fucking codetalker – no offence to your people, Trixie.”

Brian laughed, hoarse but real. “That was the Navajo, you dumb bitch.” He sipped his water – which miraculously hadn’t spilled all over him during his nap – and aimed for a smirk. “Sorry that the only code you understand is hanky because you’re a fucking dinosaur.”

Bianca cackled, and the sound – bright and younger than such an old bitch deserved – bounced off the walls, pushing back the pall of the encroaching evening and the stale air in the corners left over from Brian’s week alone.

“Watch it, girl,” Bianca shot back. “I brought your dinner into this world and I can take it out just as easy.”

“Food,” Adore blurted, turning suddenly and shaking Bianca’s arm.

Bianca rolled his eyes. “Did your lawyers not feed you in L.A.? It’s on the stove. I’d say you know where your own plates are, but in this kitchen, I can’t be sure.”

Adore smacked a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks, B,” she said, then spun past him into the kitchen.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bianca said. He eyed Brian critically. “I’d ask what you’ve been eating but I’ve already met it. You look thin.”

“Who knew depression had such perks?” Brian said, but judging by the way Bianca’s lips thinned, it fell flat.

“Come on,” Bianca said, decisive. “You’re having seconds tonight, and if I have to clean them out of more of Adore’s furniture later, I’ll do it. Because I care, Trixie Mattel.” He came over to the couch and offered Brian a hand up; once Brian was standing, he took him by the elbow and lead him towards the kitchen. “But expect my invoice by Monday. My mother taught me two things: how to clean and how to bill for it. So don’t you take me for a fool.”

“Oh, I’d never,” Brian laughed. “Lot of drunk white women stay at the hotel she worked at, huh?”

“Don’t compare yourself to them, now. You couldn’t afford to stay there.”

Adore flitted around once they were sitting like she had springs instead of feet, spreading candles throughout the room so everything was glowing and soft at the edges. And Bianca could cook, apparently, because it wasn’t enough that the bitch was talented and funny and well-read and handsome. Brian scraped his plate clean and – at Bianca’s glare – got seconds.

At one point, Bianca stepped outside to make a call. Adore leaned over and said, “Trixie, when I was in L.A.,” and then paused, one hand curled around Brian’s wrist. “Yeah?” he said, prompting, grinning easily with the food and the hour and the company. Her gaze flicked across his face – then she smiled and said, “I was really fuckin’ worried about my plants, dude.”

“Wow,” he said. “They’re fine. Where is the faith? I thought we were friends.”

“You’ve said that to a lot of people in your life, haven’t you,” Bianca yelled from outside the doors.

It was good. Everything else might be fucked beyond belief, but this – it was good, and something in Brian’s chest felt like it had been opened, like the first sweet breeze breaking through a summer heat wave, fluttering the curtains and knocking screens against their frames.

*

Brian woke just after midnight to a dry mouth – this hangover was going on twenty-four hours now, which was some bullshit – and the quiet sound of rain and distant voices. The glass by his bed was empty so he pulled on a shirt and slipped out the door, only to stop, drawn up short at the sight before him.

Adore and Bianca were on the balcony. They were turned in towards each other, talking quietly; Adore had one arm braced up on the railing, and Bianca was holding her hand. The city beyond them hid behind a grey curtain of late August rain. The night haze closed them in together, away from the rest of the world – and Brian, standing at his door, holding his empty glass against his chest, was just as far away.

Bianca said something he couldn’t catch, a serious expression straining the corners of his eyes as he searched Adore’s face for… Brian didn’t know. Adore replied, then ducked her head, shoulders hunching up. She freed her hand to fumble at her pocket, coming up with a carton of cigarettes. She lit one in the candle on her right – and missed the look that crossed Bianca’s face, aching and tired.

As Brian watched, Adore aimed a crooked smile out from under shaggy bangs – saying something, cracking some joke – only for it to break at the edges, ragged and thin in the orange glow of her cigarette. She turned away, out into the rain. Her shoulders, square and black against the grey night, cut a lonely figure, like some doomed ingenue from an old hollywood movie.

Bianca stepped closer and wrapped an arm around her waist. Her shoulders shook.

Brian couldn’t watch anymore – shouldn’t have seen any of it. He slipped away into the bathroom to fill his glass, then back into his room, deliberately not looking out onto the balcony again – and it hurt not to, in some fucked up way, hurt worse not looking than looking had. Because seeing Bianca hold Adore’s hand, and seeing Adore lean into the warmth of Bianca’s body – that had fucking hurt, like a blunt force straight to the chest.

He went back to bed. Cheek pressed into his pillow, he looked again – for the fifth or sixth time that day – at the texts from that morning between him and Katya. Not even ten words and they were all he could think about.

He fell asleep and dreamed of seagulls in flight; white sheets rumpled like seafoam; warm skin and a warmer smile.

*

bianca is here and she thinks she’s my mom, he texted Katya the next morning, each word coming too slow and careful. Stupid. He was so stupid. how do i tell her it’s a new dad i need instead?

He considered the text for a solid minute before pressing send.

There was no reply, but no read receipt either. He stared at the phone for another minute or two, lost in thought, until a knock came at the door.

“Hey,” Adore called, “hey, get your guitar, I want to show Bianx what you’ve been teaching me.”

“Sure, just a minute,” he called back. He woke his phone up to check it one more time, then got up to grab his guitar from the corner, flipping his notebook shut where it lay on the bed along the way.

He’d gotten a little work done this morning. It still made his palms sweat to see it all laid out like that, all the little fears and hopes he tried not to look at from day to day, and to remember that video on his instagram. But there were too many words set down to let them all go to waste. And anyway, he didn’t have to share the finished product with anyone. Just Katya.

He owed Katya that much.

Out in the living room, Bianca was curled on the couch barefoot, like a large and particularly self-satisfied house cat, smiling over a mug of coffee at Adore on the other end, her guitar balanced precariously in her lap.

“Oh, cool,” Brian said, affecting as much irritation as possible when they looked up at him. “Everyone gets to sit except me. Very cool.”

“Someone called me a dinosaur last night and someone didn’t,” Bianca said. “Figure the rest out for yourself.”

“Oh,” Brian said, and discreetly shot Adore the finger around the body of his guitar. Adore raised a lazy peace sign in return. “I’ll take that, I guess,” he continued, contemplative, “I probably deserve it.”

“Grace in defeat,” Bianca said. “I like that about you, Trixie.”

Brian hummed, dumping his phone on the coffee table and then straightening to sling his strap over his shoulders. He tapped his foot on the floor idly. “What did you want to play?” he asked Adore, then, not looking down, plucked out the notes to the theme of Jurassic Park.

Adore fell back into the arm of the couch, laughing, and Bianca pointed a finger at Brian and said, “You’d better lock your door tonight, bitch.”

“Please,” said Brian. “I welcome death.”

“Could we maybe, like, play my fuckin’ songs? Before I pussy out over here?” said Adore.

Bianca made a skeptical face at her. She made a much worse face back.

“Alright, alright,” said Brian, adjusting his strap. “27 Club?”

Adore’s new material was all angry and loud, but she kept returning to these softer, acoustic versions, like there was something in there between the notes that she was trying to find, something that got lost when it was all grinding electric rhythms. Brian followed her on the melody, rounding the sound out with three notes for her every one. Her music didn’t sound angry to him. It just sounded honest.

That had always been Adore’s greatest strength, though – that revelatory honesty, that unquestionable realness. Even when she was plastering on a smile, it was there underneath, palpable. Brian didn’t know how she did it.

(Nothing is real, mama, Katya would say, but that was also just her way of saying that everything was.)

(Brian didn’t know about all that. Some stuff was realer than other stuff – it was just a question of whether that mattered.)

The last chorus faded into a settled quiet. Adore tapped her pic against the body of her guitar rapidly, like a wood-pecker, then looked up at Bianca through her lashes and said, “What do you think?”

Bianca opened his mouth, paused, and then huffed a quiet laugh. “I think you put the rest of us to shame,” he said, and Adore ducked her head over her guitar.

Brian looked at them a moment, then swallowed and said, “I just want to remind everyone in the room that I did the heartfelt acoustic thing first. Just. You know. In case anyone had forgotten.”

Adore laughed and kicked out at him, missing his knee with her turtle-print-socked foot by a mile.

“I hate you,” she said, beaming. “9 Yards?”

“It’s your gig, girl,” he said, clinching the capo into place.

Adore nodded. She tapped them into the intro, grinning up at Brian like they were a team, and they fell into the melody together, just like they’d been practicing all month.

Three songs later they took a break, while Adore stretched her fingers out and Bianca got them all drinks. The two of them traded jabs across the room, and Brian, cross-legged on the floor, tucked a smile into the body of his guitar as he listened to their banter. He fiddled away at the notes aimlessly. The words he’d been penning late at night ran through his mind, the internal rhyme, the dips and pauses.

“I have it on good authority you never reorganized a damn thing when you were living with your mother,” Bianca was saying, “so I can only assume you’ve picked it up now to spite me –”

“I reorganized plenty!” Adore protested. “Moving shit around is reorganizing, it just isn’t tidying.”

“Oh, and you think you can have one without the other? Like, oh, well, I put this condom on, guess you can fuck me in the ass now! That ain’t how it works!”

Adore dissolved into laughter.

“Wow, I’ve been doing sex wrong this whole time,” Brian said, then almost dumped his guitar out of his lap as his phone buzzed on the table. The screen flashed with a new text: FROM: KATYA.

The guitar went on the floor; the drink Bianca tried to offer him went unnoticed.

“It’s from Katya,” he heard Adore stage-whisper as he snatched his phone up and unlocked it. “You can tell ‘cause she looks like she’s about to throw up her heart out of her mouth.”

“That’s visual,” said Bianca, and “Fuck the both of you,” said Brian, exiting the room, gaze glued to his phone.

Safely tucked away with a door between him and his hecklers, he read the text a second time, a third, and his own before it:

TO: KATYA - 12:07 PM - Saturday August 30th, 2017

bianca is here and she thinks she’s my mom

how do i tell her it’s a new dad i need instead?

FROM: KATYA - 1:34 PM - Saturday August 30th, 2017

what’s a step up from a check-in

He sank down onto his bed – and then a new text appeared, and another, and another.

if bianca’s ur dad and my uncle what does that make us? because i’m into it

i should have opened with that

I just. can’t tell when it’s a joke and when it’s a call for help with you right now

Brian swallowed.

me either, he typed.

Moving between the living room and the guest room was like moving into another house – another life entirely. The air prickled at his skin, slightly too cool with the encroaching fall. He’d left his window open the night before; gone back to his room, the image of Adore’s shoulders and Bianca’s hand at the turn of her hip burned into his mind. He’d cracked the window and lain on the sheets, thinking, thinking, completely un-fucking-able to stop thinking, staring out the window at the shadows cast by Seattle’s spindly bulk.

Katya’s texts from before had lit the dark of the room with an unfamiliar blue as Brian read them over a third time, a fourth. As his eyes had slipped shut, he’d heard it again, the way Katya’s voice had cracked: it’s not – you don’t just get to have things.

In the late afternoon, now, he hunched over his phone, shoulders up against the silence of the walls. He typed, i’m okay. And then, I don’t know what else to say.

There was a pause. Three inscrutable dots.

i don’t know how you did it, back then, Katya sent. trusted i’d make it through off one emoji and some incredibly unwarranted faith in – idk, fate? god?

You, sent Brian without pause.

He hurt. It was a physical thing, like all the ache inside of him had clawed its way out of the lock-safe of his chest and sunk long nails into his bones, his joints, all the spongy marrow, the nooks and crannies of his body. The way he missed Katya – it was a physical thing.

Dumb, sent Katya.

And, yeah.

i’m tired, he typed. The words came slow, because every letter felt like it cost him something. i feel sick all the time, more than i can blame on a day-old hangover. i miss you. I don’t know what to do.

He stared down at the words in the little text box, sitting idle, deceptively tranquil. His thumb hovered for a beat over the [x] to delete – then he shook his head and sent it off.

Delivered and then Read flickered instantly, followed by the ellipsis of Katya’s typing.

okay, came the answer. okay. thank you for telling me, tracy.

For some reason, the simple, sober seriousness of it made his eyes prickle. He huffed a laugh and rubbed at his nose.

we’re gonna work this out, was the next message, and then he really was tearing up, lashes sticking damply together as he blinked down at his phone.

we’re gonna work this out and it’s all gonna be okay, Katya sent.

thats a lot of optimism from a selfprofessed fatalist, he replied one-handed, wiping at his eyes with the other.

satanist, Katya answered quickly. theyre different things. sometimes.

Brian huffed a laugh, and then, mouth twitching despite himself, typed and sent: oh, you mean some people try to be bipartisatan?

There was a pause.

I, Katya sent.

I can’t even be mad

Im actually relieved

Brian really did laugh then, a sharp bark, and grinned down at his phone, like he could see Katya grinning back from the other side of the words.

The dots returned.

FROM: KATYA - 1:43 PM - Saturday August 30th, 2017

so bianca’s there now? how’s hell’s favourite senior citizen doing

That one Brian screencapped to show to Bianca post-haste.

good, he replied. sounds like she’s taken up throat-singing. seems to be sleeping in adore’s room.

Katya sent back a line of eyes-emojis.

mhm. it’s good though, Brian continued. like a continuous wave of benevolent judgement radiating directly at me. i think that’s healthy. Needed, even.

There was no reply for a minute; Brian kicked his heel gently against the back leg of the bed frame, waiting it out. His gaze drifted to his notebook, open at his side, and the corrections he’d scrawled out that morning. Assonance, meter, rhythm – just because it was honest didn’t mean it could be sloppy. He had his pride, here.

His phone buzzed again. Katya, forever on his wavelength, had sent: i liked your song

And then:

well, for values of liked. I mean – you know.

but it was good. is there more of it?

Lots more – black ink bleeding across faint blue lines, all the shit he’d been not-saying for a year or more condensed into four-four time. A whole fucking mess of a song more.

Yeah, he sent. And then, biting his lip: i’ll have to play it for you sometime.

He looked down at those words on his screen and the flicker of the Read notification, then amended -- i mean. i want to.

i’d like that, Katya replied, followed by a single heart.

Outside the guest room, a guitar picked up again, hesitant at first and then with more confidence. Brian glanced at the door, then out the window at the stretch of grey clouds hanging over the city. He turned and lay down on his side, phone in hand, and scrolled up to the top of the conversation – 1:34 PM, Saturday August 30th – to re-read it from the start.

*

Too late that night, tired but restless, Brian stepped out of the guest room to see faint light on the balcony and a thin haze of smoke. The apartment smelled vaguely sweet; mug in hand, he followed the scent out through the open glass doors, where Bianca was sitting alone, watching a small stick of incense burn. The orange glow at the tip simmered steadily, like a car light on a highway at midnight.

Bianca turned at Brian’s approach. “You’re up late,” he said, tipping his head back to observe Brian as he hovered in the doorway awkwardly.

“Yeah.” Brian jiggled the mug. “Getting some writing done.”

“Yeah? How’s that going?”

“Oh, you know. Slightly less painful than a country doctor pulling teeth. The usual.”

Bianca laughed softly. “C’mere,” he said. “Come sit. Enjoy the night. And this, uh, smelly shit Adore chose to inflict on us.”

“Really? I don’t see her out here,” Brian pointed out. “She bought it, but you lit it, girl.”

Bianca harrumphed, sinking deeper into his nest of blankets. “Well, she’s actually sleeping for once. Someone’s gotta keep the neighbours awake on her behalf.”

(When they’d walked into the magic shop that evening, Bianca’s first words were, “This feels like some white people bullshit.” He’d scanned the place, scowling, while Adore held her hands up to her face and snickered behind them. “No sense of self-preservation, messing with forces they don’t understand. It’s a miracle there’s enough of ‘em still around to plague the rest of us.”

Steph’s first words upon meeting Bianca were, “You look like you need more chamomile in your life.”

“I have some we can share,” Adore had offered; “if you can fuckin’ find it,” Bianca had interjected under his breath.

Adore had dug her elbow into his side. “Don’t be a grump,” she’d said. “I like these white people, man. They sell me crystals.”

Brian, behind them, waved at Steph with weary commiseration.)

Bianca tugged one blanket free from his pile as Brian settled down and passed it over; Brian took it with a nod, hunching his spine against the chill. Fall came faster in Seattle than L.A., like an impatient host ushering a guest out the door. Brian tried hard not to think of the implications of that particular metaphor.

“Let me,” Bianca said, nodding at Brian’s mug, then, when he passed it over, poured half of his own into it. A faint haze of steam rose out of the mug as Brian took it back.

“Thanks,” he said, then choked on his first sip – not because it was hot, but because it was beyond alcoholic. “The fuck is this?” he managed.

“The only cure for the common cold,” said Bianca. “I don’t know. Whatever was in the cupboards. Lemon, chamomile, and a shitload of gin, can you taste it?”

Brian stared at him. “No,” he said. “It’s just a delicate bouquet.”

“Ooh, someone thinks she’s fancy,” said Bianca reproachfully. “You don’t want it, give it back.”

“No, no.” Brian huddled the mug closer to his chest. Bianca’s mouth twitched crookedly.

They drank in silence for a minute. The skies lay heavy and low, weighted with rain; the street was quiet. On the coffee table, the incense was burning down to its stick, the sweet unfamiliar smell drifting on the breeze. Sips two, three, and four of Bianca’s hell brew went better, and a slow warmth began to fill Brian from the inside out. He slumped back into the chair, twisting his feet in the ends of the blanket as he stared out onto the street. The buildings were so obscured by the dark that he could only pick them out in edges and lines, like some monochromatic cubist painting.

“How long do you think you have left here?” said Bianca.

When Brian turned to look, Bianca was watching him – might have been watching him the whole time.

“I’m not asking ‘cause of Adore. Short of insulting her mother or voting for Trump, Adore would let you stay until the oceans rise to swallow this godforsaken hipster port-in-the-storm whole. I’m asking for you – ‘cause I don’t know how much longer you have it in you. Staying. And you’d better have a plan for when you can’t anymore, because otherwise this whole bullshit tangle will just get worse.”

Brian lifted his mug, rested it against his bottom lip. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”

Bianca let him sit a moment longer, then said, “So?”

“Yeah,” Brian said again. He took another sip to steady himself. “I don’t know. Everytime I think I have a handle on what I’m feeling, something else comes up, or something happens, and it’s like I’m back in that moment again – standing in my bedroom in L.A. and realizing I couldn’t do it for another second more.”

Bianca hummed, low and almost soundless in the dark. “And what’s it?”

“The whole – thing. All of it.”

“Narrow that down for me.”

Brian turned and scowled at him. “You know, Adore never gives me this kind of shit.”

“Adore has her own shit. That’s why you never asked her to actually help – you just asked her for a place to stay. You wouldn’t have sat in that chair, and you wouldn’t have said as much as you have, if you didn’t want me to give you shit.”

He held Brian’s gaze steadily until Brian looked away, back down into his mug.

“Yeah,” Brian said.

“Hey,” Bianca said. “You know I wouldn’t push if I didn’t care.” He nudged Brian’s knee with his own. “Don’t repeat that or I’ll deny it.”

Brian laughed, just quietly.

“So,” Bianca said again. “What’s it?”

A siren rang out, somewhere in the distance. Brian took another drink. The clouds overhead cast everything in deep blue shadows; his hands had gone ghostly white and veinless. He wrapped them tighter around the warmth of his mug.

“Everyone wanting something from me,” he said finally, then corrected, “expecting something from me, and feeling like I have to answer to it. All of it, because no two people expect the same thing. That’s not what I fucking signed up for,” he said, volume climbing, then he cut himself off, looking away.

“Isn’t it?” said Bianca impassively.

Brian – snapped.

“I signed up to compete on a dumb-ass game show. I signed up to show my art to the world – I signed up to share what I could do, not who I am. That’s mine. That’s mine and not any other fucking person’s in the world. I didn’t sign up to be grabbed at, told what to do, or told when and where to spill my guts for some strangers’ emotional boners. They can go jerk off to season seven if that’s what they really need. I owe them my work – my best work. I don’t owe them me.”

The mug was shaking in his hands. He breathed, then breathed again, fighting against the band around his chest.

“No,” Bianca said gently. “You don’t.”

Brian opened his mouth, then closed it. It felt like something had dislodged inside of him, something that had been stuck in crooked where it didn’t belong; he couldn’t meet Bianca’s eyes. He looked out at the skyline until his mouth felt less dry and he could speak evenly. “But that’s not how it works.”

Bianca made a questioning noise. “Isn’t it?”

And – for fuck’s sake. “I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask Adore.”

Silence. Brian pressed his lips together, then took another sip of his drink. That was a low blow and he knew it. When he looked back, it was Bianca staring out at the skyline, face unreadable.

“Sorry,” Brian said quietly. And then: “I don’t know how to go back. But this isn’t… this isn’t who I want to be. I didn’t know I could get to this point, not anymore.” He hunched his shoulders. “I’m such a fucking mess.”

“Well,” said Bianca. “Yeah.”

Brian’s mouth twitched. “Thanks, girl.”

They sat in silence for a moment – a new, companionable silence that Brian had never felt with Bianca before, always a little too impressed and in awe to actually relax. He drained the last of his mug and pulled his blanket further up around his shoulders and neck. Sitting with Bianca like this felt like sitting with Adore did, like – like sitting with Shea, or Kim, or Katya, and that made him feel both warm and lonely at the same time.

“You know,” he said abruptly, “Adore has to be one of the – the best fucking people I’ve ever met.”

“That’s not exactly breaking news to me,” said Bianca.

“I’m serious. I show up out of nowhere and she just… lets me stay in her house, tells me it can be for as long as I need – seriously, who does that? For some bitch off the street? Come on. I wouldn’t.”

Bianca rolled his eyes. “Don’t be melodramatic. You’re not some bitch off the street. She liked you before all this, she told me so.”

“But you know what I mean,” Brian insisted. He watched Bianca from heavy, half-lidded eyes – he was either tipsy or half-asleep, and for the fucking life of him he could not have said which.

“I do,” said Bianca. “But – you realize she got something out of it too. Having you here. It’s been good for her.”

“Well,” said Brian, “well, yeah.” He tipped his face over to look at Bianca fully, the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth and the way he held the edges of the blankets bundled in his lap, arms crossed to keep them place and hands tucked into his sides for warmth. “She’s lucky to have you. You balance her out – you’re like a rock. Or, I don’t know, some other, less-cliché shit.”

“I can see why you’re such a successful songwriter,” said Bianca.

“Fuck you, you’re the wind beneath her fucking wings.” Bianca laughed, and Brian grinned sleepily. “I mean it. You’re like – you’re so steady. Nothing touches you. That’s what she needs right now.”

(Earlier, he remembered, in the magic shop: the moment where Adore had retreated from the conversation, so smoothly Brian almost hadn’t noticed – eyes going distant and distracted, body closing in on itself. One moment she was there and the next she wasn’t.

And then: the way Bianca had stepped forward, touching a hand to the small of her back. The way Adore had leaned into it. The way Steph hadn’t noticed at all, because Bianca had taken over the conversation completely, buying Adore the moment she needed to get herself together.)

Bianca’s mouth pursed and he looked away.

“Who’s older, you or her?”

“I –” Brian paused. “I don’t know, actually.”

“She makes it easy to forget. And then sometimes I look at her and I feel like she has to be my age. No one that young should look so tired.”

Brian shifted in his seat, unsure of how to respond to the strange tone in Bianca’s voice. “Bitch has good skin.”

Bianca hummed quietly.

“You know,” he said, “you go through things in life and you think, this isn’t so bad. There’s no point in lingering on it because the more time you spend in place, the less time you spend getting yourself out of there. You know? You think, I can handle anything. And then you see someone else go through their own things – someone you care about, someone you love… “ Bianca trailed off. “That’s the real hardship. That’s the shit you can’t push away or push through. Where you learn you aren’t so tough after all.”

Brian swallowed, and thought about Katya.

“It’s not –” Bianca frowned and looked away. “It’s not her fault. But it’s hard.”

“She’s lucky to have you,” Brian said again, more forcefully. Bianca looked back,

surprised – then smiled all lopsided, and reached over and squeezed Brian’s forearm.

“Anyone ever told you you’re a sap when you drink, Miss Mattel?”

“Yeah.” Brian looked down at Bianca’s hand, then at his own around his mug. A dozen nights from the past month filled his head, the warm cocoon of a tipsy haze, Katya’s voice in his ear. He had developed this bad habit of repeating hey, I like you, like it was some big secret he was revealing every time. And then Katya would say, smile evident in the timbre of his voice: you’re a sap, Tracy. How many nights?

God, Brian missed him.

He swallowed against the tangle of feelings lodged tightly at the base of his throat. “Is it worth it?”

“Mm?”

“You’re the biggest name there is in our world. You know what I mean. Is it worth it?”

Bianca looked at him, equal parts thoughtful and watchful. Words clustered on Brian’s tongue but he couldn’t get them out: the stress, the loneliness, the bullshit, the distance –

“It can be,” said Bianca after a long moment. “You have to make it worth it, though. Make it yours. Do what you want to do, no more and no less, and make sure that at the end of the day, you have something to come back to.”

*

Brian dreamed of the pier; he woke too early, with gritty eyes and a tightness in his throat, and lay on his side looking out at the heavy grey skies which had persisted through the night. He remembered Steph, the day before:

“You look weathered,” she’d said, while Adore showed Bianca around the store.

“Yeah,” he’d said. “My pores are all oc-cloud-ed.”

She exhaled half a laugh, but looked at him with serious eyes. “So,” she’d said, “how’s that end of the world treating you?”

Seattle outside his window grew lighter but not brighter, the grey pall lying melancholy along its lines. All the colour leached out; that last pretense of summer giving up the fight. Brian shut his eyes against it and fell back asleep.

*

“My uber is downstairs,” Bianca said, chiding, as Adore refused to let go. “Dan.”

Adore sniffled. “Shut your face and let me hug you.”

“My wrinkles are getting deeper by the second, Delano.”

“‘Cause you can’t afford to get a lift done. Shut your face.”

Brian, leaning back against the island that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room, looked down at his hands so he wouldn’t have to see the way Bianca’s mouth twisted, abruptly less than firm.

“Now don’t you two do anything stupid once I’m not around to keep an eye out,” Bianca said a moment later, “and you, don’t you let that one forget to eat, okay?”

Brian glanced up again to find both of them looking at him, Adore with a fond smile halfway there and Bianca with a scowl.

“I eat!” he protested.

“Hmph,” said Bianca.

“Okay, exactly one of us looks like a short brown stick insect, so…”

“Shut up and c’mere,” Bianca said, finally loosening himself from Adore’s clutches, and when Brian hesitated, he came over himself, grasping Brian’s elbows, one then the other, and tugging gently until he folded forward into the waiting hug.

Bianca was warm and steady, and Brian shuddered, just a little. He didn’t know how Adore could let go.

When Bianca was at the door, bags in hand, he paused and looked back at both of them, even though his Uber was waiting (and beginning to honk intermittently.) His gaze flicked from Adore, to Brian, and then back to Adore. Adore made a rough noise. “Text me, dumbass,” she said. “I’ll miss you. Fuck. Get out of my house.”

Bianca laughed, eyes crinkling up at the corners, then waved a little at both of them – like a fucking dork – and disappeared out the door.

Adore slumped back against the couch. She looked both tired and older; but there was something more quiet about her energy than Brian had seen in the past month. He went over to settle beside her, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders gingerly.

She rested her head against his shoulder. He rubbed his thumb against the slope of her arm, absent, then said, “Want to get plastered?”

It was barely noon.

“Yeah,” said Adore. “Fuckin’ slaughtered.”

The rest of the day was… a bit of a blur.

*

Brian woke to a new day, sunlight, a pounding head, and a text from Katya.

LA is more of a sinkhole than i remember, it read. Anxious about fault lines & wishing u were here.

He pressed his face into his pillow and read it again, then again, half a smile creeping onto his face.

The night before was pretty much a shitshow, but he remembered parts here and there; vaguely, he could recall Adore digging her toes into his thigh – she’d been stretched out along the couch, while he’d been tucked into one end, mug of something ungodly held between his hands – and telling him, voice quieter than the night outside, that she’d watched the video. His video, the one he’d deleted from Instagram.

“That’s,” she’d said, slurring a little, “that’s some real shit, dude. Like some real ass shit. That’s not the shit you walk away from.”

But I have, he’d replied, barely even conscious of what he was saying. Lots of times. Katya and me… it’s always been ‘almost’ with us. Almost after almost after almost.

And almosts only count –

“But you want it,” she’d said. “And I know – I know she does too. Dude. I know.”

And what was he supposed to do with that? Did Adore think he hadn’t figured that much out for himself?

Fuck.

He turned over in bed, away from the sunlight, and groaned quietly. It felt like a small animal had fucking died in his mouth. He dragged himself upright on unsteady feet. There was a slight possibility he was still drunk.

Phone in hand, he stumbled out of bed, hitching his boxers up with one hand. The stretch to the door felt like an interminable distance. Water, he thought, get some water, and then back to bed for more sleep, and when I wake up I’ll feel like a person again –

He opened the door.

For one golden moment, everything was still. Then somewhere across the room, something jerked, and Adore gasped, “wait –”

Brian blinked.

Another jerk of movement; a thud; and then his vision cleared, the noonday sun slanting through the apartment easing in his eyes, and he saw Adore staring back at him from the couch, mouth slack, one hand pressing her phone face-down into the coffee table.

“I was –” she stuttered, “– fuck, I was –”

In his hand, Brian’s phone began to vibrate insistently.

“Fuck, Trixie,” Adore said weakly. “I was live.”

Brian stared at her.

People talk about the bottom falling out of your stomach. This wasn’t that. This was walls tumbling outwards, like a card structure when the table under it’s been knocked, the hollow inside of a house revealed to the open air in the shock of a second. This was the walls of his chest split open; fault lines doing what fault lines do.

He pressed a hand behind him at the door, like maybe he could step back into his room and all this would go away.

His phone was still buzzing, continuously now, the noise like a power drill. His mouth was dry as sawdust.

He wasn’t ready. The walls were coming down and he wasn’t fucking ready.

#dare #trixya #adore delano #katya zamolodchikova #trixie mattel #rpdr fanfiction #submission #fathwtf #canon compliant

[artificialqueens]

interlude: the whole world folding over (trixya) - dare

L.A. is always the eye of the storm. Adore, in a mess of a lawsuit, runs into Katya, in a mess of her own making. 

an honest world interlude: | ch. 1 | ch. 2 | ch. 3 | ch. 4 | ch. 5 |

of all the times i’ve settled in my life, Adore typed on her way out of the office, this? has to be the worst

The text flew out, New-York-bound. Adore threw the doors open with equivalent force, stepping out into afternoon L.A. heat with a swagger that was more hangover than bravado. Porque no los fuckin’ dos, though, right? She brushed her hair out of her eyes and squinted down at her phone, at the three little dots dancing with an impending response. 

She had time. She switched her water bottle to her phone-hand to free up the other, and dug around in her pocket for a joint and a lighter as she ducked into the alleyway beside the Producer Entertainment offices. The lighter was nowhere to be found; the joint she stuck in her mouth, just in time for her phone to buzz. 

FROM: BIANX - 1:43 PM - Tuesday August 26th, 2017

Who do i gotta beat up? 

Adore huffed a laugh through her nose. 

Chillaxxxx, she typed. Not worst. Just longest.

A breeze curled through the alley; she leaned back against a wall in the shadow of an overhanging fire escape, where the sun couldn’t reach her. She patted at her pockets for her lighter, but without much hope of finding it. She knew herself. If it wasn’t sunk at the bottom of the hotel pool after a unnoticed fall from her balcony, she’d eat her own dick. 

Her phone buzzed again. 

FROM: BIANX - 1:44 PM - Tuesday August 26th, 2017

How much longer are you in LA?

Twitching her water bottle between her ring and middle fingers, she typed back: friday if they don’t learn to compromise and u know they wont. fuckin kindergarten ass douche juicers.

“Oh,” someone said from the mouth of the alley. 

Adore looked up and her jaw dropped – only a rapid fumble saving her joint from the ground. “Holy shit,” she said, “holy shit, hey.”

Katya – in full drag, the sun gleaming on her blonde hair from behind like a halo – beamed. 

“Holy shit is right,” she said. “Come here, fuck, give me a fucking hug. My arms are empty. They knew not how empty they were.”

Adore tucked her joint behind her ear and her phone into her pocket as she came out of her hideout to wrap her arms around Katya’s frame, squeezing tight. Katya was all muscle and bone; she smelled like hairspray and she clung back just as tightly – tighter. 

“Oh honey,” she said when she pulled back. “Oh honey, oh honey – oh, hey, love the accessory. Very fash-ion,” she lisped in a french accent, poking at the joint behind Adore’s ear. 

“Be more than an accessory if I hadn’t lost my lighter to the depths, dude,” Adore said, which definitely made no sense, but Katya took it at face value. 

“Well that’s no good. Here,” she said, and handed Adore her own phone, water bottle, and a pair of sunglasses with brims made up of what looked like real actual teeth. “Oh, awesome,” Adore said; Katya hummed agreement, then pulled a lighter and a joint of her own out of one of the ten pockets on her dress with a loud a-ha!

“This is what life should be about,” she said, sticking her own joint in her mouth like a cigarette and talking around it as she flicked the lighter in front of her face, “Sisters helping sisters.” She inhaled, waited, then exhaled dramatically, smoke billowing from her mouth. “God, that’s good. Here.”

Adore stuck her joint back in her mouth and leaned close. 

“Fuck, yeah,” she said on her own first exhale. 

Katya hacked a laugh that went on, and on, and was more scream than noise by the end of it, face scrunched. Then, when she got her wits back around her, said, “Isn’t life great?” and set herself off again. 

Up close, it was obvious how thick her makeup was caked under her eyes, foundation and concealer and highlights all stacked up against what had to be some truly monstrous shadows. You didn’t go through life as an insomniac drag queen without learning the signs. Her cheeks were hollow and the skin around her nails, when she brought the joint back up to her mouth, was yellowed. 

She caught Adore looking and her mouth twitched crookedly up at the corners. “Sometimes you gotta indulge one bad habit to stave off another,” she said, then her eyes went wide. “Fuck. I told Fena I wouldn’t smoke up in her wigs again. Fuck.”

The joint was thrust at Adore; then Katya was tugging her wig carefully off, revealing nylon and a hint of bare skin at the temples. She sighed down at the wig, like it had disappointed her, then hung it carefully off a jutting bar on the fire escape overhead. 

Adore handed her joint back to her, then brought her own back to her lips. She looked Katya over – blonde hair creeping past the edge of the nylon; red lipstick creeping past the edge of her lip liner; the dress; the heels. 

“You filming?” Adore said. 

Katya met her eyes, then looked away. She twitched her shoulders. “Some very expensive and life-like suits wanted to meet before they asked me for a screen test.”

Adore hummed. Inhaled and waited for the burn; exhaled slowly. 

Katya looked down. “God. This fucking… sucks.”

“Yeah,” Adore agreed. 

Katya’s fingers twitched at her side, then she looked up and met Adore’s eyes. “This is fucking shitty. Me, being here – all of this, this whole fucking – just fucking everything. It sucks. I’m so sorry.”

Adore shook her head. “‘S not your fault.”

“Still.”

Adore’s phone buzzed – not a text from Bianca, she saw when she pulled it out, but from her lawyers. Five minute warning. 

“I gotta go,” she sighed. She looked back up at Katya to find her watching with wide, intent eyes, eerily still. 

“I – yeah,” Katya said. Then her mouth twisted and she burst out, “Have you – has Trixie texted you? I –” she bit off her words harshly, looking away and pressing her lips together. A long moment passed. When she lifted her joint to her mouth, her hand shook, just a little. 

“Yeah,” said Adore. Her whole chest ached, looking at Katya. “Yeah, man. I heard from her yesterday. She’s taking care of my plants.”

Katya exhaled smoke and something that was almost a laugh. Then she looked down at the red tips of her shoes peeking out from under the black of her dress, scuffing one foot against the dirty pavement. 

“How is she?” she said. 

Adore, watching her, weighed her words. Weighed what she should and shouldn’t say. People thought she did shit without thinking, but that had never been true. It was just that – sometimes there were corners you couldn’t think yourself out of. 

Which was, now she thought of it, probably the crux of a lot of the problems currently laying their guts bare in this dirty alleyway. 

Fuck it, she decided; in thirty seconds she’d have to go back to being careful and circumspect and compromising, and fuck that, and fuck everyone in that sterile boardroom, and fuck biting her tongue when people were hurting for stupid reasons and keeping silent about it. 

“Trixie’s a mess,” she said. “She’s a mess and she misses you and –” Katya looked up – “she’s so fucking gone on you, man. You have to know.”

Katya’s chest hitched; she looked away again. 

Adore sighed and dropped her joint, stubbing it out under her docs. “I’ve gotta go. Listen…” She waited, but Katya didn’t look back. “I’d say we should get coffee, but all I ever wanna do is go home and sleep when I’m done here. But text me, okay, if you need anything? Anything, Katya. For real.”

Katya’s mouth twitched and she glanced at Adore sideways, her eyes too green under heavy black lids. She lowered her joint and exhaled, then said, “I feel like I should be the one saying that to you.”

“You can owe me one,” said Adore. She checked the time on her phone again, then swore. “Okay, for real,” she said, making her way towards the mouth of the alley; she squeezed Katya’s arm as she passed by. “Don’t forget your wig on your way out,” she called over her shoulder. 

“Give ‘em hell, mama,” Katya replied. 

Adore looked back for just a second at Katya, tucked away in the depths of the alley, joint in hand, watching her go. She looked too small amidst all the grey and grunge. When she noticed Adore’s gaze, she waved a little, just her fingertips, and swayed to make her skirt swish around her ankles, the beads catching the light like fireflies darting through the sky, lost in the black. 

Adore smiled, because she knew Katya wanted her to, and waved back as she left. Her heart hurt. 

Back through the doors, back into the foyer, the elevator, the endless stretch of the halls. Adore lifted her chin and refused to be swallowed up by it, or by the niggling fear at the back of her mind, a waving flag that whispered: what if you just made it worse?

Fuck it. That might not have been the right thing to do, but: fuck it. At least she’d done something. 

#...why do you hate happiness :( #adore delano #katya zamolodchikova #trixya #dare #rpdr fanfiction #submission #fathwtf #canon compliant

[artificialqueens]

for all the honest world to feel (trixya) (5/8) - dare

Brian stared down at his screen, trying to understand what he was seeing – the mild frown on Katya’s face, and the other queen, hands raised, standing just out of frame beyond the gap in the bus bunk curtain.

(AN: so this is… long and sad. finally-throwing-in-an-angst-tag-at-the-bottom levels of sad. warnings for unsafe alcohol use and overdrinking; as usual, “she/her” for adore and “he/him” for trixie (brian) and katya. also, this might read a little weird, but i made the executive decision not to name the weho queen who’s been giving trixie shit because (contrary to, uh, all other signs, i guess) i don’t actually want to speculate on who’s a douche and who isn’t in the ru girl community. so that’s also a thing. 

(OH, and, there’s more lyrics in this one, please don’t judge me, it’s very hard to try to measure up to trixie’s irl songwriting chops lmao)

this week on honest world: shit’s sad. shit’s real sad.)

| ch. 1 | ch. 2 | ch. 3 | ch. 4 |

FROM: SHEA - 9:57 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

[Attachment: IMG_3782.MOV]

Girl.

If you dont wife her up I will.

FROM: KIM - 10:03 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

holy shit

i don’t think i’ve ever seen her mad. like for real

FROM: SHEA - 10:04 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

This was some WWF shit girl. That bitch will be feeling it for a while.

FROM: KIM - 10:05 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

katya’s from boston. she’s 90% salt, 5% feelings, 5% inner saboteur and 100% ready to fight

FROM: SHEA - 10:05 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

Thats a lot of math, Kimberley

FROM: KIM - 10:05 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

are you being racist? don’t be racist shea. omg.

someone had to count trixie’s tips for her when she was passed out drunk in my bed

FROM: SHEA - 10:07 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

*Steal trixie’s tips from her.

FROM: SHEA - 10:15 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

Trisha baby if you’re out there we love you girl okay? call us any time xxxx

*

Brian stared down at his screen, trying to understand what he was seeing – the mild frown on Katya’s face, and the other queen, hands raised, standing just out of frame beyond the gap in the bus bunk curtain.

“You know,” Katya was saying, perfectly conversational, “I found it kind of cute at first? Like a puppy trying to fight itself in the mirror – or one that can’t, you know. Stop pissing itself. You know what I mean? Funny but sad. But I don’t think I find it funny anymore.”

The other queen laughed nervously. “Come on, Katya –”

“I’m not laughing. Why are you laughing?” said Katya, raising his eyebrows. “I’m not laughing.”

The laughter stuttered into silence. Over the mic, Brian heard Shea expel a slow, cautious breath.

Katya tilted his head, and the expression on his face darkened like a spring storm. “I want to make it really clear to you how far you’ve managed to over-reach yourself, that you’ve actually crossed my limits. ‘Cause I don’t care how you run things in your club, how you treat your friends, whatever – that’s none of my business, since I don’t work in your club and I’m not your friend. Oh, in case you hadn’t noticed – I’m not your friend. FYI. Because you’ve been acting like I am, and I think it’s time for that to stop.”

The raised hands dropped out of sight. “Jesus. Why don’t you tell me how you really feel.”

And that – Brian winced despite himself. That was a mistake.

Katya grinned, showing too many teeth. “Can I? I’d like that, thanks.” He tapped his fingers rapidly against the side of his thigh. “I feel like you’ve gotten a little too comfortable as top dog in your scene, and when Trixie showed up and didn’t line up to eat you out like everyone else does, your ego plummeted out of your ass. And what we’ve been seeing for the past half a year – can I repeat that? It’s been half a year, which is beyond pathetic – what we’ve been seeing is some kind of hemorrhoidal psychosis, as you take obsessive potshots at someone who couldn’t give less of a fuck about you. It’s not just pathetic – it’s harassment. You’re showing your whole ass right now but guess what, girl? We’ve seen it.”

“You said yourself you’re not in my scene, so don’t talk like you know shit,” the queen snapped back. Her voice tightened like a screw being ground into drywall. “The bitch could have tried to be friendly, for fuck’s sake –”

“You aren’t being very smart right now,” Katya interrupted, with all the force of a tire iron punching through a sheet of glass. “This might be a good time to consider your word choice, if there ever was one. That would be the smart thing here.” Teeth again, manic. “You want friendly? I can do friendly. We have another week on tour – you want me to do friendly. Because the alternative is that I freeze you out, publicly and professionally, and I make your life and your career outside of that fucked up, incestuous bubble of a scene you’ve pissed all over very difficult. Am I – am I being clear? I want to be very clear. You’ve messed up enough shit in my life, and I want this over with.”

There was a pause and a shift in the shadows beyond the curtain – nodding.

“Good. So here’s how this is going to go.” A wooden sound, rap, Katya’s knuckles against the bunk frame. Brian could make out the rise and fall of Katya’s chest, shallow and too fast, in the gap between the curtains. “You don’t post about Trixie. You don’t talk about her. If, God forbid, the opportunity arises, you don’t talk to her. That last one is for you – I’m a lover, not a fighter, but it is my strong suspicion that if you pull this to her face one more time, she will beat the ever-loving shit out of you. Just a – a pro-tip, let’s call it. An insight.”

There was a weak laugh. “She can try it. Jesus, Katya, come the fuck on –”

Slam – an open-handed palm against the wood. “Do you think I’m fucking around here? I’m not. Don’t fucking push me on this.”

Brian had heard Katya angry a handful of times in his life. He’d never heard him like this. This wasn’t Katya out of control; this was Katya very near the end of his rope, and aware of every inch he had left, making them count.

The sick feeling in Brian’s stomach crept higher. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth.

“You stop coming for Trixie,” Katya was saying. “No more posts on facebook, no more whispers at shows. No more shit-talking to promoters – yeah, I asked around, I heard about that. Not that it did you much good. It has to hurt, I think – does it? Knowing that Trixie’s booking is worth more than your word? That’s gotta sting. But I’m not sure how much of a hold your word even has anymore, you bitter fucking cunt.”

Shea, behind the camera, drew in a shocked breath at the pure vitriol in Katya’s voice.

There was a stillness to the air for a long moment, like the silence after a hurricane has swept the earth bare and ragged. Then the other queen laughed again; louder this time, acidic, but with a definite note of finality – of defeat.

“If everyone could see you now,” she said.

Katya barked a laugh of his own. “Girl, they wouldn’t care. I’m America’s fucking sweetheart.” He stepped back and waved a hand in the space visible between the curtains; it was shaking finely, Brian could see it. “Get the fuck out of here. I’m not dealing with you today. Call back tomorrow – I’ll be friendly again.”

The curtains fluttered as hurried footsteps passed by and receded out of the room, the door to the common lounge sliding open and then shut.

Katya’s shadow shifted. Back and forth, like he was caught up on a decision; then he said, quiet, muffled: “fuck.” Footsteps rang in the opposite direction – towards, Brian assumed, his own bunk, as there was the fumbling sound of feet on rungs and then the rattle of metal rings as the curtains were pulled shut.

The camera reversed. Shea stared up at it, her eyes filling most of the screen, hilariously wide and scandalized. Then the video went black – and flicked back to that first still, frozen, the anger on Katya’s face deepening the hollows of his cheeks, his eyes throwing sparks through the screen.

Brian stared down at the rictus of his face, then pressed the phone down screen-first beside him into his mattress. The hard lines of its body bit into the insides of his fingers.

Fuck. What the fuck.

He could stop the video, but he couldn’t make his brain put away the tired lines that had cut into Katya’s face, or the ragged edge of his voice, or how the sound of his palm hitting solid wood had rung through Shea’s bunk, bouncing thickly off the walls.

The room was too small. Brian dragged himself up and went out into the living room, phone in his fist tucked into his pocket, but out there it was too big, and his skin felt all wrong, and he wanted to call Katya but he couldn’t make himself do it.

Katya hadn’t called or texted since the night of the pageant, when Brian had waited and waited all night but the internet – and that fan in the bar who’d clocked him – had stayed miraculously silent. Katya hadn’t called, or texted, or tweeted, or even updated his fucking instagram.

God.

Brian’s phone buzzed suddenly in his pocket and he almost threw it at the balcony doors in his haste to get it out. He fumbled it awake – and then he saw the name on the screen, and his shoulders slumped again.

FROM: ADORE - 10:28 AM - Sunday August 24th, 2017

I forgot to ask but can u water my plants??? this is the longest ive gone without killing any of them :(

LA sucks.

it’s like *jaws theme* all the time. and i forgot my sunglasses

He swiped his phone unlocked and read through the texts, mouth twitching feebly towards an almost-smile. It buzzed in his palm again and a picture appeared – Adore, nose scrunched, squinting into the sky.

Brian typed back, i promise, you can definitely afford another pair of sunglasses. and yes, your plants are safe in my hands.

The answer came quickly, every letter infused with the kind of wry snark that Adore was so good at: dont make promises my lawyers can’t keep

Brian huffed a quiet laugh. The sound was swallowed up in the space of the apartment, a small rock dropped in a large lake, not even reaching far enough to touch the walls.

*

Adore had come out the morning after that night to find him on the couch, his guitar abandoned on the coffee table, staring out into the thin morning light. It wasn’t even 7 AM. He’d gotten four or so hours of restless sleep before giving up on it; the room was lit such a soft grey that he might as well have wrapped in a dream anyway. He’d been staring out at the clouds and the inkstain crows flecked along the telephone wires for so long that they’d blurred, like an impressionistic painting – barely real.

Adore had gone and sat beside him. Then she’d leaned over, carefully, and rested her head on his shoulder. He’d shuddered – one long wave through his whole body. She was warm. When she breathed her chest expanded against his arm, slow and steady like waves coming into the shore. He’d only been able to bear it for a few minutes before he’d had to get up, fingers twitching at his side; he’d given her an apologetic smile, and she’d watched him walk back to his room with her chin on her wrist, her forearm braced against the back of the couch.

He’d checked twitter one more time, and then fallen into deep, exhausting sleep.

*

“That’ll be thirty-two dollars and forty cents, please,” said the bored young woman behind the till, eyeing his – genuinely embarrassing – collection of groceries: ramen noodles, tomato sauce from a jar, the kind of shitty white wine he’d drunk in senior year of college, and stuff to make a salad, out of the idealistic hope that he might actually make a salad.

“I’ll just put that on my credit card,” Brian said. He watched her surreptitiously as she entered the amount onto the card reader. Adore had brought him here a few times, but he didn’t recognize her.

“This your first day?” he said, then winced.

“Huh?”

“I mean. Are you new?”

Now she was eyeing him, even less impressed than she’d been by his groceries. “No…”

“Oh.” He ran a hand over his head awkwardly. He’d forgotten his cap at home. “I just, I haven’t seen you here before. I thought…”

Her mouth twitched, and she popped her gum, a sharp snap in the air. The sound was somehow scornful. “Listen, mister – I’m working, you know, and even if I weren’t, I don’t go out with the kind of guy that bothers –”

“Oh my god, no,” Brian said, flushing, “Oh my god, no, I’m gay. What? No.”

“Oh,” she said. She started turning red too. “Oh. Shit – uh, I mean –”

He laughed awkwardly. “Don’t worry about it. Sorry for being, uh, super weird and stuff.”

The lights overhead were the sickly fluorescent yellow of small-time grocery stores everywhere. He could have been anywhere – east coast or west, north or south, any timezone, any city, any tour. His shoes squeaked on the floor when he shifted from heel to heel.

How was it less than a week ago that he’d felt so at home in this city he didn’t know at all?

“Your receipt,” the cashier said. She held it out towards him, then hesitated visibly. “Listen, uh… are you okay, man?”

He shrugged, stilted, and took the receipt, then grabbed the bags by their handles. “Oh, you know. More of the same,” he said.

It was awful to realize he meant it.

*

Touring was a little bit like being a ghost in your own body. You were breathing and eating and sleeping, but you might as well have been walking through walls, the way you drifted from place to place, squinting at google maps on your phone, talking to people whose names you’d either forget within five minutes or never knew in the first place. You could be anywhere at all; you might as well be nowhere.

Brian drank shitty wine and played into the night, the notes echoing hollowly across the big empty space of Adore’s living room. Music usually anchored him into his body on the road. Every chord brought him a little closer, the muscles, tendons, bones of his hands all tuned in to the melody with the ease of years. He could close his eyes and wherever he was, he was home.

But each time he opened his eyes again he was someplace new.

Seattle wasn’t a tour stop, but its grey skies, the neighbours he ran into on the staircase, the people he saw in the grocery store – none of them were home. But, fuck it, neither was LA, where he spent a few days every month or two and sometimes found himself waking up wondering whose walls he was looking at. And where the fuck did that leave him?

He played a sour note, paused, and corrected himself. Breathed. Tried to bring Emmylou’s lilting refrain back under his fingers.

Without Adore’s voice in the next room livestreaming her way out of boredom, the apartment grew stale and shadowed; without Katya’s calls every night, the days seemed endless, a pale stretch of hours where he did nothing and saw no one. And as each hour ticked past on the clock it became more and more obvious that the veneer of sunshine he’d pasted over Seattle with Adore’s friendly warmth and the sound of Katya’s smile was just that – a veneer.

Another sour note. He stopped and lay his guitar flat in his lap, then picked up his glass on the coffee table and drained it.

His phone lay still and silent beside the wet ring his glass had left on the wood.

He flicked a bit of lint from the couch off his boxers and took up his guitar again, tracing out the melody that he’d been chasing these past weeks on automatic. The sky outside was ripening, edging into evening. It was almost fall. He’d been in Seattle for three weeks, and it seemed he really hadn’t moved an inch.

He could call Katya. He could suck it the fuck up and call Katya, because maybe Katya was waiting for him to call. Maybe this whole ‘respecting Katya’s space’ thing he was doing was totally misguided, and Katya was waiting beside the phone every minute that he wasn’t out there defending Brian’s honour or whatever that was.

I fucked you up, he could say. I was so busy pretending that everything was fine now and my problems were gone because they weren’t yelling in my face every two seconds that I didn’t realize I was setting us both up to get hurt. I was so fucking stupid, Katya, and I’m so – I’m so sorry.

And Katya would say…

What?

I just want you to be okay, if he was feeling self-sacrificial; it’s your irrepressible Virgo energy, if he was feeling avoidant. Maybe, maybe, I thought you said you didn’t lie to me, and you weren’t going to start, if he was feeling particularly honest.

Katya was always honest, more or less. It was just that the truth was flexible, more conversation than monologue, and irony always had to have the last word. Brian, meanwhile, was just a bit of a liar.

Not with Katya, though. Not before. And he hadn’t meant to – he really hadn’t meant to, not even for a second; it was just –

Fuck.

It’s worse than I was letting myself feel, Brian could say. There’s things I don’t know how to tell you. Because it is about you.

His throat tightened; he let go of the frets. He grabbed for his drink blindly and for his notebook with his other hand. Resting it against the body of his guitar, he opened to a blank page and scrawled,

You fought yourself to bring all your feelings down to heel,

and if you stopped yourself from looking, was it ever really real

but everyone’s been looking

and you –

Something inside of him was drifting dangerously, thin tethers tied to his ribs all that held it in place, like a threadbare sail on fraying ropes. The words on the page blurred in front of his eyes. He raised his glass to his mouth but the rim bumped against his teeth and nothing came out. Empty.

He frowned down at his cup. Like, fuck that nonsense. He’d put good money down on those teeth.

The wine sloshing into the glass when he poured himself another sounded like the ocean creeping onto the shore on a windless day. Like Provincetown – another place he’d gone to hide; another town full of strangers. He set the bottle back on the table, cap off, and picked up his guitar again.

*

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday he went running in the morning like nothing had changed. Before, Adore would be waking up when he got back; one of them would make breakfast, then they’d jam for a while, and then Adore would smoke up and Brian would text Katya, if he hadn’t already done so.

Now Brian just jogged. Further and further each day, until Thursday found him running along the seaside, pounding the pavement with salt stinging the inside of his mouth on every inhale. The sky was a soft feather blue, the ocean a deep silk bedsheet wavering in his peripheral vision – and then the mass of Pike Place rose up in front of him. Before he could think about it, his feet were carrying him inside; past the florists, past the bursting orange and red arrays of fresh fruit, and down the stairs to the magic shop’s door.

He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the collar of his tank top, grimaced, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It was just-opened quiet on the floor. No customers, no music; just a vague shuffling from behind the counter. “Just a minute,” the shuffler called. “If this accursed speaker breaks on me one more time…”

There was a crackling sound from the speakers set high in the walls, like a cheap firework skidding along cement, and then a whole storm of swearing below the counter.

“Uh,” Brian said. He approached cautiously. “Can I take a look? I might be able to help.”

“No, it’s really fine –” A frazzled head popped up from behind the register. “Oh! It’s you! I know you. You think you can fix it? The damn thing goes off all the time, the wiring’s too old –”

Brian shrugged. “I work in clubs and theatres and stuff, so I’ve picked up a thing or two. Let me see.”

Steph – that was her name, he remembered – was as curly-haired and strangely-dressed as when they’d met, with a sprig of rosemary tucked behind the large crow-shaped brooch pinned to her blouse and dust all over her knees. He crouched down beside her and squinted at the mess of wires and cords, poking a hesitant finger around and hoping he wouldn’t get fried. That sound had not been good.

“I think,” he said after a minute, “I think it’s this. Hang on. I’m gonna – if I die, tell my momma I loved her, and tell my dad –” he ducked further under the desk. “Well, whatever you like, if you can find him.”

She barked a laugh behind him.

He didn’t die, although he did burn his fingers a little bit, and when the music started playing (some kind of witchy Swedish wailing, possibly Bjork, Katya – Katya would know –) he let out a “Hah!” of triumph. Eat that, three years on the road and four years of theatre school and thousands of dollars funnelled directly into the University of Wisconsin’s incredibly deep pockets. Eat the shit out of that.

Steph helped him out with two hands around his forearm, shaking him delightedly once he was more or less standing. “You’re a miracle worker,” she said with a bright smile. “I should hire you on the spot, because clearly you’re the real magic here.”

He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his free arm and grinned down at her. Clear bright light was streaming through the high windows in the walls, glinting off her brooch, her earrings, the silver in her hair. Her smile and easy warmth was the same as it had been before, and, god, that was nice. “I’ve got greasepaint coming out of ears,” he said, shrugging modestly. “You can’t really call yourself a theatre kid until you’ve nearly died a dozen different ways trying to string up the speakers on the janitor’s old ladder. ”

“Different ways?”

He waved a hand. “You know, falling, electrocution – so boring. A good old-fashioned garrotte is where it’s at.”

Her eyes scrunched at the corners when she laughed. “I like you,” she said, grinning, “you’re strange,” and he grinned back, feeling lighter than he had all week.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. Then: “Oh, hey, the book you sold me is great. Who knew reading about the end of the world could make you feel better about life?”

“That’s right, the apocalypse poems, you…” Steph said, then paused. “God, I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name. But you’re Danny’s friend, right?”

Brian blinked. Swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said; it came out forced, like he was overcompensating for something. “Yeah, sorry, it’s Brian. Yeah. I took some time off work and I’ve been staying with Danny.”

“Oh, do you work together?” she said, brightly and obliviously twisting the knife. “I know he does something or other with clubs and theatres and whatnot too. He’s very private about those things, but such a sweetheart. I haven’t seen him around in a while, though, how he is?”

“Away on business,” Brian said, “and, you know, we’ve been keeping busy otherwise. I’ll tell him you asked.” He wiped his palms against the sides of his shorts. “Listen, I actually – I should probably be going, actually. I’m supposed to be skyping him in about half an hour.”

An absolute lie, but Steph swallowed it without a flicker of suspicion. She smiled and pressed a hand to his arm. “Tell him I send my love. And thanks again for your help, Brian. I don’t know how many more shocks my old heart could take.”

“Oh stop,” he said, chuckling, and gave a little wave. “See you around, I guess?”

The polite small talk of strangers. Preferable to a slow death, but not by, like, a lot.

Brian took the stairs back up to the ground level slowly, although his heart rate was well back to normal by this point. He wandered out of the arcade, and turned, and walked, and turned, and then he was on a raised dock, leaning against a wooden rail next to a locked gate, which guarded the ramp down to the boats. The wood pressed into the front of his ribs. He curled his palms around the rail, ignoring the bite of splinters.

A light breeze ruffled his shirt and cooled his pink cheeks. The ocean stretched out before him, golden sunshine catching in the crests and troughs of the waves.

He closed his eyes.

*

At home, he typed, i hope you’re doing okay. i love you.

Deleted it.

Typed, today someone didnt recognize me and THAT made me sad. i think i need an intervention.

Deleted it.

Typed, went to the beach to sea what all the commocean was about but idk im still not shore

Deleted it.

Sighed, stared out the window, looked down at his feet.

Typed, i’m sorry. katya, i’m so sorry.

Deleted it.

*

“You’re so white from these shadowed winter months,” Katya crowed, shielding his eyes dramatically. “I don’t know if I can be seen with you.”

“You’re real white from being born, you know, caucasian and unfortunate, but I’ve suffered your company for years,” said Brian. He frowned and wiped at his nose where something wet was dripping – sweat or sunscreen, he didn’t know. “If you really can’t bear it, I’m sure I can find one of these tanned, strapping, oiled-up hunks of meat who’d be willing to walk with me –”

Katya grabbed his arm mid-gesture. “No no no, don’t you dare!”

“I’m just saying,” Brian continued, “you invited me, bitch –”

The shine of Katya’s grin, open-mouthed and laughing, was enough to blow his whole awful night out of the water.

They walked. The sun drew rippling air waves out of the too-hot cement; the ocean crashed beautifully green into the white shore. But it somehow wasn’t too crowded, for all that it was the dead of summer, the very peak of beach days. They moved in blissful anonymity. At one point, Katya bought him an ice cream. Brian ate it one-handed, making panicked noises and laughing as it dripped closer and closer to his hand. His other hand was – well. He’d taken Katya’s as they stood waiting for the cone, and he hadn’t let go yet. His stomach flipped giddily every time their steps fell out of sync – their palms would drag against each other, just for a moment, each time making him newly aware again of the calluses on Katya’s palm.

He traced his index finger along the big tendon on the back of Katya’s hand, and Katya glanced at him sideways, quick, lips parting on a short intake of breath. Brian licked at his ice cream and said nothing, warm and smug all over.

Sea breeze and the sting of salt. They leaned over the wooden rail, right into it, shoulders and hips pressed together. The blue stretched endless.

Katya started to turn red in the cheeks around four so they ducked for shade. Brian slouched back against the blush pink wall of some souvenir shop, under the awning, and Katya stood in front of him to block the sun from his eyes. One moment Brian was looking over Katya’s shoulder at the white gulls darting and dipping over the sea; the next, he was blinking up, and Katya was closer, leaning in, one hand on the wall beside his head, his gaze flickering over Brian’s face with the same combination of lazy ease and breathless flight as the birds in the air.

Brian blinked, processing, then licked his lips to wet them. “Feeling tall?” he said.

“Feeling lots of things,” said Katya, smiling faintly. “Tall may or may not be one of them. No one’s ever accused me of a Napoleon complex, Tracy – and my psychological rap sheet is longer than the Mariana Trench. You always take me to new and exciting places, did you know that? That’s why we’re friends.”

“I thought it was for the free therapy and life coaching.”

“Don’t undersell yourself, mama. What’s newer or more exciting than uncertified therapy and dubious life coaching?”

Brian laughed. “I don’t know that ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ are words that many people have applied to me – out of drag, at least.” His mouth twitched. “You might be du-biased.”

He expected Katya to throw back his head, lean away and laugh, but instead – Katya leaned closer, his eyes glinting with mirth. “I’m gonna kill you,” he said, “I’m gonna kill you right here and dump your body into the ocean in front of the tourists, God, and everybody, and no one will punish me when they hear about the years of pun-spewing bullshit you’ve put me through.”

He was so close. Brian’s stomach flipped again; he could feel Katya’s warmth all along him, make out the freckles on his nose. “Kill me?” he said, mouth dry.

Katya blinked. Something about the set of his jaw, the small lines around his eyes, seemed suddenly vulnerable, intense and somehow opened wide.

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Or, I dunno. Maybe that other thing.”

Brian held his breath. All he could hear was the crashing of the waves, loud and close – or maybe that was the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. He reached up and brushed the tips of his fingers along the sharp line of Katya’s cheek.

Katya’s chest hitched.

The breeze chased the sunlight through the empty pier, stirring the sand across the wood, and Katya leaned in, slow enough that Brian could stop him if he wanted. Brian didn’t. He lifted his face, eyes slipping shut; and Katya’s mouth fell on the corner of his, once, soft, then warm against his right cheekbone, and again on his left. Brian exhaled shakily.

“What,” he said, unsteady. “Can’t kiss me when the cameras aren’t on?”

Katya huffed a laugh, the breath warm on Brian’s face. He curled a hand below Brian’s ribs; his fingers dipped into the hollow in his tank top to brush against bare skin. Brian shivered. Voice barely louder than the wind in the distance, Katya said, “My life would be so much simpler if that were true.”

Brian opened his eyes. He looked up and met Katya’s gaze, and his mouth twitched, almost a smile. Katya’s stubble scratched at his fingertips as he settled his palm more firmly along the curve of his jaw. “Well, you’re not really a simple woman,” Brian said, and Katya was laughing when he leaned down and kissed him properly.

When he opened his eyes, the sun’s lowest rays had dipped below the edge of the awning, lighting Katya up in gold, and he tipped his head back to rest against the wall, wrapped his free arm around Katya’s waist, and said, “Come home with me.”

Except that’s not what happened at all.

When he opened his eyes, the sun was shining, and Katya was lit with gold, and he tipped his head back against the wall and thought about saying it –

– then smiled crookedly, and said instead, “You kiss like you have heat stroke.” And Katya threw back his head and laughed, wheezed, “no, just heat rash,” while the sun caught in his hair and lashes.

It’s not what happened, but it could have been. He could have taken Katya home, and pressed him up against the hallway inside his door, all that sun-warm skin under his hands. He could have kissed him the way he wanted to. He could have blown him right there with his knees sore against the hardwood, or taken his hand again and drawn him back into the bedroom, kissing him all the way. And after – Brian could have asked him to stay.

That wasn’t how it happened, but, crashed out on the couch in Seattle after his run, Brian dreamed every moment of it. Every inch of hot skin and the rasp of sheets and falling asleep together and waking up together. And when he woke up – alone – he pressed his hands flat against his stomach, feeling like something had been taken out of him. Feeling ill, feeling exhausted, feeling like his head was buzzing and his mind was five feet outside of his body.

Eventually he dragged himself up and fumbled for his phone. He wiped at the inner corners of his eyes with his knuckle as he thumbed it awake; then he pressed his palm over his face, exhaling shakily.

No new messages. Of course.

His whole body hummed feverishly, the twinned effect of the sun on his morning run and the one in his dream. Maybe that was what fucked over his self-control, that sick feeling like he was out of his head, or maybe he was just giving in to the inevitable – but, whatever it was, he opened his messages and, despite all his better judgement, typed out: check in?

Hating himself a little, he hit send.

When there was no response thirty minutes later, despite the read receipt that had popped up almost immediately, he left to go find something to drink.

*

“Oh hey, it’s you,” said the girl behind the counter. She eyed his purchases. “Wow. I didn’t think it could get sadder than last time…”

Brian huffed a short laugh. “Still gay, don’t worry.”

“Uh huh,” she said. She ran the first wine bottle – yes, first, thanks so much – under the scanner and hit a few buttons. “So is the whole sad and gay deal an aesthetic thing? How much Lana have you listened to in the past three days? I’m trying to decide if I should be staging an intervention that I’m – full disclosure – not really qualified for.”

“Do sad gays get a discount at this establishment?”

“Nope,” she said, popping it like bubblegum. “Sorry.”

She finished ringing him, his three bottles of wine, his pack of sour key candies, and his thoroughly depleted dignity through the machine.

“Credit,” he said, offering it over.

He was threading his hands through the bag handles, waiting for his card back, when she said, “Hey. What’s your name, man?”

He blinked. “It says on the card.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she said, handing it over wrapped in his receipt with an eye-roll. “So what is it?”

“Brian,” he said, and looked at the sallow lights on her face, wondering where she was going with this.

“Brian,” she repeated. “Hi, Brian, I’m Mariam.”

Her tone was conversational but somehow serious, weighted, and Brian – Brian swallowed against the sudden and unexpected feeling of his throat going tight.

“Now who’s hitting on who?” he managed, and she chuckled, but didn’t lose that look in her eyes.

“Brian. Take care of yourself, hey?” she said.

The lights glared brightly across the empty floor, the rows upon rows of no-name brands and the scuff marks on the shitty linoleum. She was watching Brian like maybe he needed watching. He swallowed again, and nodded, and left without another word.

*

Dust motes floated in the slowly draining sunlight when he returned to the apartment. The whole space of it echoed with the closing of the door. He kicked off his shoes, cracked open the first bottle, and went to get his guitar, glass in hand.

Hours passed. He drank more. He scribbled in his notebook, crossed things out, scrawled corrections in the margins. There was too much in his head. Words tumbled out like a hole had been torn somewhere, all the loose change and lint of his brain escaping despite his best efforts to plug the gap. His writing got sloppier, slanted; he wiped wine from his mouth with the back of his hand and turned the page.

The beach, the dream, the night before. The months of build-up, the moment of release. Wanting, wanting, he wanted so much and he had told himself, when he was a kid, that someday he would be able to have all the things he wanted. If he was smart enough and good enough, quick enough on his feet, he could make anything happen. But here he was: trapped into stillness as the path under his feet cut off abruptly. Because how could he have all the things he wanted when they existed at such cross-purposes?

Or was it just him? Not the fame, not the fans, not the industry, and certainly not Katya – maybe it was Brian at cross-purposes with all of it, putting himself in his own way, selfish and stubborn and cowardly, refusing to accept with good grace what the universe was offering him.

The sun dipped below the blocky Seattle skyline, the buildings across the road cast in radiant red, as he stumbled into the kitchen to open the third bottle. His hands slipped on the cap; he blinked wearily down at it, then out the window at the purples and pinks of the sky, dappled and streaked like watercolours. The sun was just a winking and burnished glare over the lip of the buildings. He inhaled deeply and it almost seemed like he could still taste salt in the air.

The skyline blurred before his eyes, replaced by the memory of the things his dream had omitted. Walking the long way back down the pier, Katya with one arm hooked around his elbow and the other hand clutching at his bicep like an ingenue, twitching with laughter every minute or so because apparently this was the most heterosexual he’d ever felt. Which, Katya had definitely licked at least one pussy in his day, so. What he meant was probably that it was dumb, and romantic, and brought them so much closer together than held hands as they made their way between the shadows of the tall lights that lined the boardwalk. The sun set in brilliant gold in the distance. Brian remembered the warmth of Katya’s chest against his arm; he remembered looking at Katya’s lips, then away, and wash, rinse, repeat; he remembered the sign they passed, jutting up out of the middle of the boardwalk: END OF THE TRAIL.

He remembered going home alone, flushed and giddy with the heat of the day, and turning on his phone to see a new notification from his facebook messages. date night tracy?, it said, captioning a photo of him and Katya on the boardwalk, arm in arm, the soft look on his face all too bare in the deep amber light of the sun setting over the ocean.

Brian shook his head, and poured himself another drink.

The night after that was all in flashes. His fingers sliding along the strings of his guitar. Losing his pen under the couch; hunting through Adore’s drawers for another one. Sweet sad notes filling the room, lingering in the air like sea salt. Fumbling with his phone; his guitar; his own hands.

Love’s the kind of feeling that’s not easy to derail, that was good, that was fine, but I find that I’ve been tryin’ ‘cause, ‘cause what, ‘cause what –

He lost another pen. After that… he didn’t remember much after that.

*

Brian woke to a splitting headache and a buzzing phone.

The phone was on his stomach; his head was on the arm of the couch. He blinked into the bright morning light and groaned, covering his eyes.

His phone buzzed again.

Whatever it was, it could fucking wait. He let it fall to the side as he rolled over, taking in the mess of paper and pens – what the fuck, where did he get so many pens – on the coffee table, the empty wine bottles, his guitar abandoned carelessly on the floor. The glass doors to the balcony were open, though he didn’t remember opening them, and the harsh cawing of the crows outside made his eyes water.

Jesus fucking Christ.

He stood unsteadily and made his way to the kitchen, where a bag of sour key candies lay splayed open and empty on the counter and a plate with the mysterious remnants of what might be a drunken midnight snack lay beside the sink. He stared at one, then the other, then turned decisively to get a glass out of the cupboards and fill it from the tap. He downed it in one go and poured himself another.

Back by the couch, his phone was buzzing again.

Katya, he realized through the groggy fullness in his head. That could be Katya.

He returned to the couch and lowered himself gingerly, full glass clutched in one hand. He fumbled the phone trying to grab it, which probably said bad things about the balance of alcohol to water in his system at that moment; then he thumbed it awake and scanned it as quickly as he could through the low-burning nausea of his hangover.

There was, in fact, a notification from Katya. A missed call at 2:23 AM. Brian’s heart leapt and his mouth went dry; but then he looked past that, at the avalanche of notifications from twitter and instagram, and his whole body turned cold, shoved into full wakefulness and unholy sobriety.

What the fuck had happened last night?

He unlocked his phone and opened instagram to see notifications in the thousands. Thumbing over to his profile, he found a post he didn’t remember making, dated 1:57 AM. That was – he looked at the little clock at the top of his screen: 7:13 AM – barely five hours before. The little thumbnail showed his shoulders over his guitar; when he opened it, he saw it was a video.

Brian stared at the post in horror for a long moment. Then – because there was literally no other choice – he flexed his fingers, which had gone numb, and he hit play.

The screen cut to his face, frowning blearily and too close, as he tried to prop his phone up. He looked – exhausted. Shit. Dark circles under his eyes, a tight, stressed set to his mouth, which twisted down as he failed to make the phone stand steady a third time. Finally he – the Brian on screen – muttered a sharp fuck, and just leaned the phone back against something or other, putting his glass of wine in front of it to hold it upright, so the rim blurred out the bottom of the frame.

He stepped back, sat down, and pulled his guitar into his lap.

Brian, the Brian watching, took shallow breaths against a rising nausea. His pulse thrummed loudly under the thin skin of his neck.

The camera captured the body of his guitar, the slouch of his shoulders, and part of his mouth, which he wiped at with the back of his hand, pick balanced easily between his fingers. Then he sat up straighter, squaring his shoulders and sliding his other hand up the neck of the guitar into place – Brian remembered that, cool smooth wood under his palm, he remembered glancing at the camera and thinking fuck it, fuck this –

The Brian on screen played an open chord and then set into the melody that made up the verses, the tumbling notes, middle finger – pinky finger – ring finger, and, watching, his brain cut through the fog to focus on that, ring finger, ring finger, the song he’d been working on all this past month coming together despite the drunken way he slid between the metal frets.

And then he started to sing, and Brian went from feeling slightly nauseous to being absolutely certain he was about to throw up.

It wasn’t the verses, thank god. Not the harried scribbles that filled pages upon pages in his notebook, most of them awful, all of them never to be fucking revealed to the world at large because they were his, ugly and sincere and too personal. All the moments that made him want to try; all the things that made him afraid. But this –

“Love’s the kind of feeling that’s not easy to derail

But I find that I’ve been trying ‘cause

I can’t see the when and where –”

A chorus is a vague thesis; but, watching, he still felt stripped wholly bare.

“I hear waves in my dreams at night,

Feel the sunlight and your stare,

So maybe it’s to no avail –

And maybe ‘stay’ won’t turn out stale –”

Brian swallowed, fumbled for his glass of water, tried to hear anything but the roaring in his ears, see anything but his face dipping into frame as he bent lower over the guitar, eyes closed, face pained as he sang stay. And he was sliding through the notes like a drunk stumbling through a door, graceless but functional and – worst of all – far too honest.

“But I still don’t know if I can go

Off-road at the end of the trail.”

Fuck.

The video didn’t end abruptly – apparently, when drunk, he couldn’t make the crop function work for him – but with an agonizing slowness, the last, aching note from his guitar hanging hollowly in the air. His shoulders on-screen rose, then fell; then finally he reached forward for his phone. A flash of his mouth, his cheek, his eyes squinting – and then it went dark, and looped back to the beginning.

He jabbed at the screen to stop it, and stared down at his phone in mute horror, jaw slack and mouth dry.

First things first, he deleted the video. It wouldn’t shut people up, but he couldn’t just let it sit there, all of him laid out in the bare daylight. The raw sound of his voice, scratchy with exhaustion, on his shitty phone mic; that one glimpse of his face, like opening a door you’re not supposed to by accident, the kind of door you can’t close again or back away from. All a room’s quiet secrets, the small ones that cut deepest, framed starkly by the open doorframe.

He wasn’t going to load twitter, or look at the texts that had come in from his friends who’d seen, but then a new one appeared at the top of his screen as his phone buzzed in his hand. It was Shea – a youtube link. His phone buzzed again with a second message, a third, more, all from Shea. He thumbed messenger open, still numb all the way through, and scanned the group chat dispassionately. Then he stopped, and read it again.

FROM: SHEA - 7:17 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

youtube.com/watch?v=Jf1L34kn0

Please watch this, get your collective shit together, and stop making me feel sad for both of you

Ive got better shit to do with my time

And PLEASE reach out to us, jesus, brian, we care so much and i know youre doing your own thing but we’re really, really worried.

Well. I cant speak for kim. Im worried; that bitch is probably just hungry

He huffed a laugh, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt like something was cracking open inside of him.

His phone buzzed again.

FROM: KIM - 7:18 AM - Friday August 29th, 2017

i can be hungry and worried at the same time cunt

but sheas not wrong, bri.

please.

Brian swallowed, then swallowed again, throat tight and eyes stinging. He took another gulp of his water, then, after a moment’s hesitation, typed, i’m here. i’ll watch it in a minute. i love you guys and im sorry

He wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. There was a whole laundry list of reasons he should be; he might as well cover his bases.

It wasn’t – it wasn’t that he’d been wrong to leave. It wasn’t that he’d been wrong to want out or to go silent. It was just that it could be right for him and wrong for them, and he could be sorry for that, even if he wasn’t sure yet that he regretted it.

He hit send all the same.

His phone buzzed almost instantly with their replies, but he didn’t look, pulling up the youtube link instead. Then: for the second time that morning, his heart stopped and his body went cold.

“help me i’m not dying fast enough”, said the title under the loading video. “Katya Zamolodchikova Periscope (August 29, 2017 @ 2:40 AM)”.

He didn’t want to click – he knew he didn’t want to, and also that he shouldn’t – but he did anyway, because sometimes he was a masochist like that. Lately, especially.

Katya, on-screen, stubbed out a cigarette and lit another one, inhaling deeply.

“I’m not going to tell you how many of these I’ve had tonight,” he said to the camera. “Because it’s none of your business what hell cycle of ideating and ovulating I may or may not be going through right now. That’s first of all.”

He looked… gaunt. Unkempt. Worse than in the video Shea had taken a week earlier.

“It’s a funny thing, to have – kind of – resolved myself to wanting something, and always having it sort-of in reach, and then to realise maybe I can’t have it at all. I could have, but maybe I missed my moment, maybe I didn’t lay out my thesis convincingly enough – maybe maybe maybe. Maybe what I wanted isn’t on the proverbial table anymore. That’s harder, I think, than knowing all along you can’t ever have it. It’s a different kind of wanting. I don’t know.”

He flicked his fingers in the air by his ear, ash falling grey and soft like snow from a rooftop.

“I’ve never been good at wanting things. That’s funny, right? From an addict, I mean. It’s funny. You can laugh – I’m laughing. Maybe you are, I don’t know, I can’t see you. I don’t care.

I’ve never been good at wanting things – I’ve had them, or not had them. It all seemed kind of –” he paused, then laughed, a hoarse bark. “You know, insignificant in the face of the rapid decay of the environment, our bodies, society as a whole, and ultimately the universe itself. The universe is dying, by the way, in case you hadn’t heard. I took a first year physics class, girl, so I know what I’m talking about.”

You read Neil Degrasse Tyson’s book once, you fucking idiot, Brian thought; it rung hollow, as if it came from someplace a good distance from his own body.

“So I’ve never been good at wanting stuff. Drugs isn’t want, drugs is need. And that’s not – I know I look like a mess right now, but a) not on drugs, and b) still not about need. I’m not in some kind of I’ll-die-without-you pseudo-love psycho-abusive Nicholas Sparks kinda bullshit. I’m just – I’m just sad. I’m just really fucking sad. And I’ll delete this tomorrow, and anyway –” Katya looked sharply into the camera, and for a moment, Brian felt seen – “I figure it’s only fair.”

“So anyway,” Katya continued. He turned away, towards the road; his eyes lit up with amber streetlight, glass-green and shadowed. “We’re all dying. I know, Brenda, I’m a broken record over here about it, but we’re all dying, and that’s kind of a big deal. And I love it! In some strange, existential way, it’s liberating, it’s electrifying, it brings you closer to your own body and soul and maybe even God, if, I don’t know, that’s your thing sometimes – ‘your’ being mine – but then –”

He stopped himself. Brian watched as his fingers tapped frenetically against the side of his cigarette for a moment, then he raised it, pursed his mouth, inhaled. Exhaled. He lifted his face to watch the smoke rise and disappear.

When he looked back down, he was smiling, crooked at the edges, like it hurt. “But then something comes into your life, and suddenly, it’s like, wait. Hang on. I want to see more of that – let’s stop the death train, maybe. Let’s put a hold on this dying shit. Because whatever it is I’m feeling, I want that, and – and – and why the fuck am I wasting time killing myself when this has been here, maybe all along. Self-indulgent fatalism suddenly starts to feel – selfish.”

“I mean,” he interrupted himself, suddenly and obviously changing tacks as a thought struck him, “please still come to my show. It’ll be so good. All these questions and more will be addressed – not answered, because who cares about answers, but asked? Yes. More questions than you ever wanted. Please come.”

He flashed a smile, plastic-white, but it melted away too quickly into the same tired pallor.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if anything I’m saying is true. I want all sorts of things all the time, but it’s always a little bit – intellectual. Like, wow, I wonder what having that would be like? Feel like? I’ve never experienced this kind of wanting that doesn’t have an endpoint – it won’t just stop once I get it. It goes forward. It has a future. What the fuck is up with that, you know?

But it’s not – you don’t just get to have things.”

His voice cracked.

“No. Okay. One second,” he said, and then he disappeared around the camera. Brian could still hear him breathing, though, quiet in the night air, an eerie echo of so many phone calls over the past month.

When Katya returned, he lit himself another cigarette, and this one didn’t shake between his fingers. “I’m going to delete this the minute it ends, for the record. I don’t know why I’m even doing it. I guess I’m just lonely. I know, I’ve been on tour, and that’s great, but – I dunno. It’s lonely. Work is lonely. Dying is lonely. And there’s one thing I want and I thought I could have it but – turns out – I probably can’t, and that’s – that’s lonely too.”

His mouth twisted, an almost-smile.

“I always thought that was such a cliché: to feel alone in the middle of a crowded room. And I love a cliché when it’s not played straight, but. Maybe, sometimes, the crowd doesn’t matter when one person’s not in it.

Anyway. I’m doing a lot of whining for someone with not a lot of problems, comparatively. And this problem isn’t even really mine. Not at its core. Selfish, right? But hey – no one’s making you tune in, Elizabeth.”

He took a final, decisive drag on his cigarette.

“Okay. I’m gonna go listen to some ambient noise and try to sleep.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Ocean sounds, track four: a classic. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Bye.”

The streetlight blanketing his face in fragile white, he looked into the screen again, directly, as if he could see Brian there looking back at him, heart sore in his throat. Then the video went dark.

Brian sat and stared down at the phone in his hands. Between the low buzzing nausea of his hangover and the Seattle morning greyness, the world around him felt – distant. Not quite real. Not as real or as close as that twitch of Katya’s mouth, or the wry, exhausted humour in his voice. The frustration and sadness and longing in every line of his body. 

They were both so stupid. And so fucked.

He tapped out of Safari and into his messages, where he typed again, check in?

Knees tucked into his chest, he waited, and a minute later the reply came in – the little OK emoji, thumb pinched to index finger.

He exhaled loudly and pressed his hand over his eyes.

The phone buzzed against his thigh a moment later and he looked down again. It wasn’t from Shea or Kim like he thought it might be – it was, unexpectedly, another text from Katya. All it said was: you?

He bit his lip, thinking about it. He wasn’t going to let himself lie, to himself, to Katya, not again. He wasn’t going to do that to them. But the honest answer was – yes. He wasn’t good. He wasn’t better. But he was okay, for all the values of okay that the check-in had meant since the first time Katya had needed it: I’m alive, I’m safe, I’m here.

Yeah, he typed and sent, that’s about right.

He looked up from his phone at a sudden noise beyond the front door – a thump, like something heavy had been dropped.

It could have been one of Adore’s neighbours, so he dragged himself up and started to walk over, ready to offer assistance if needed. The woman upstairs was older, and generally bought more groceries than she could carry. But as he was approaching the door he heard the scrape of a key in the lock, and then the handle began to turn.

Adore wasn’t supposed to be back until that evening.

“Hello?” he started to ask, but then the door swung open, and he was staring into a pair of very tired, very startled eyes that definitely weren’t Adore’s.

“What the fuck,” said Bianca del Rio.

To his own surprise, a burst of laughter punched out of Brian’s stomach. “Yeah,” he said, staring back at Bianca, at the douchey sneakers on his feet, the Shangela shirt he was wearing, and the small duffel he’d dropped behind him. Brian found himself smiling, just a little. “Same.”

#I've said this to u already but… why #trixya #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #dare #angst #submission #fathwtf #canon compliant

[artificialqueens]

for all the honest world to feel (trixya) (1/8) - dare

The speed with which Brian’s priorities could flip was enough to give him whiplash. That was part of the problem. One moment he was freaking out about his life, his career, this ever-increasing feeling that the walls were closing in on him, and the next that was all secondary to how careful Katya sounded over the phone and how he must be feeling. 

(AN: who’s ready for 4k of unmitigated sadness broken up by a few bad jokes? i have the whole thing outlined though and i promise a happy ending. no warnings apply and none of this is real. this fic is canon set sometime this upcoming august; i use “katya” and “brian” for clarity and he/him pronouns out of drag for both. once again, not established relationship, but established something. (and belated thanks to everyone who liked or responded to “here comes the breath before”! i appreciate you all.))

There was an email drafted on the laptop in front of him. It had been staring him in the face for the past half hour, unsent; for the past five minutes, he’d had his phone out, his thumb hovering over the call button.

“Fuck,” Brian said, quietly. Then louder: “Fuck this.”

He hit call.

The call rang through; he lifted a hand behind his head to adjust the brim of his cap, the band slipping on his forehead. It was bright outside the windows, the light slipping through the blinds and landing golden on the desk. A California-typical day, just like the day before, on the pier, with seagulls white against the stretching blue sky, sand crunching on the dock under his sandals, and Katya –

There was that not-sound, like a change in the air pressure on a plane, and then Katya’s voice was bright in his ear.

“Tracy!” That was how Katya always answered the phone – announcing the caller’s name, like they might have forgotten what it was. He’d told Brian once that he thought it said that not only did he know exactly who they were, but that he was abso-fucking-lutely delighted to hear from them.

Brian, on the other hand, liked to start a phone conversation with a stone-faced ‘you have five minutes.’ Really set the mood right off the bat.

“I was just about to call you,” Katya continued, characteristically exuberant. “I don’t know if you’re free but if you are, I have feet that were made for walkin’, boots that were made for knockin’, and a hike that leads to a view that I’m pretty sure you’re gonna fall in love with. Which I can say, because I am a psychic.”

“That’s an interesting take on a timeless classic, sure,” Brian said, then shook his head and swallowed. “Listen. I’m actually – I have an email open in front of me to my manager. I’m telling her not to book me for the next month, because I’ve hit inspiration and I need to write a new show.”

“What?! Your plan, you said – not for another six months, bitch! Tracy, that’s incredible –”

“It’s a lie. I’m lying to her.”

The line went silent, the kind of silence that follows a mental stumble; Brian swallowed again, shifting in his seat. He pressed a knuckle to his jaw, then reached for the keyboard and highlighted the text in question: feeling really good, really excited about this, I want to get it down and out before I second-guess –

“I didn’t want to lie to you too,” he said. “I don’t do that and I’m not gonna start. But I need to get – out. Away. I don’t know.”

He sighed and rubbed at his forehead.

There was a strange sound from the other end of the line, like something – maybe the phone itself – was being fumbled by a body in motion. “Trixie, are you okay?” Katya said, and then, in the same breath, “Can I come over? I want to come over. I think maybe I should come over.”

The concern in Katya’s voice felt like blunt fingernails being shoved into the cartilage up and down his sternum, where it held his ribs in place over his heart and the other soft, important bits. He forced the words out anyway. “I absolutely don’t mean this how it sounds, but I’d prefer you didn’t.”

Another silence.

When Katya finally spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Did I, uh. Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” Brian said, as forcefully as he could. “No. Yesterday was amazing. I had – I had the best time.”

To his extreme horror and embarrassment, his eyes started to prickle, just a bit.

“I did too,” Katya said. “I did too, so why – I don’t understand.”

“Okay,” Brian said, “okay, give me a – give me a second.”

He thumbed the phone onto speaker and set it down. He stood up and walked the circumference of his room, the quiet sound of Katya’s breathing following him. His gaze drifted restlessly: over the art on the walls; the open mouth of his closet; the deep blue of his bedsheets, the empty suitcase splayed open on top of them; and, half-hidden by his open door, the crumpled pile of his drag from two nights before. That last held his attention for a moment – then he walked back and picked up his phone again.

“You know how the industry is unsustainable and in eight years tops we’ll all be fucked and poor again?”

“Yeah,” Katya said immediately, like he’d been waiting.

“I think –” Brian said, a low grade nausea burning in his throat, “I mean. I don’t feel like I’m gonna make it eight years. If I don’t get out of this fucking city right now, I don’t think I’m gonna make it another ten minutes.”

He sounded like some dumb-ass kid again by the end, the words tumbling out high, fast, and just shy of hysterical.

“Okay, okay,” Katya said, voice determinedly calm. “So we get you out of here. Email to your manager, and I can get in touch with anyone else who matters, take care of the rest, whatever. You get out. And then –”

His voice caught and he went silent. Brian didn’t want to picture it, but he could, down to every detail. Katya’s knuckles pressed to his mouth, one arm around his waist, shoulders hunched; the way his brows would be drawn together, eyes distant or closed, while he tried not to lose his complete and utter shit. But pushing that image away only conjured up its opposite – sunlight reflecting off blonde hair, and a wide laughing smile, face tipped back to absorb every bit of warmth he could while Brian had stared, heart in his throat.

“Can I call you?” Katya said. The words came out small again, like he was anticipating and preparing himself to accept a no.

The speed with which Brian’s priorities could flip was enough to give him whiplash. That was part of the problem. One moment he was freaking out about his life, his career, this ever-increasing feeling that the walls were closing in on him, and the next that was all secondary to how cautious Katya sounded and how he must be feeling. Brian tried so hard to keep his shit together and locked down but he couldn’t be casual about Katya.

“Please call me,” he said, and his voice wasn’t casual at all. “I want you to. Or, like, text – whatever, whenever you can. This isn’t a –” this isn’t a break-up, he didn’t say, because they weren’t dating. Heart in his throat, he amended, “This is about you, us, but not – I’m just trying to figure things out. I don’t want to rush in blind and fuck everything up in the process.”

Katya huffed a laugh. “This is what I don’t like about you, Tracy,” he said. “You’re so sensible.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “Me too.”

They were quiet for another moment. The weight of his decision was settling down on him – the reality that he was really, actually doing this; throwing the brakes, pulling his chute. Or, more accurately, flinging the door open and catapulting himself out of the car at sixty miles-per-hour with a thought and a prayer. His empty suitcase was staring at him from its place of honour in the centre of the room. You’ve already decided to throw your five year plan for a loop, it seemed to say. What’s next?

“I’ll call you so much you’ll get sick of me,” Katya said from the other side of the line. “I will have absolutely zero chill about it, as the youth say. The opposite of chill.”

“No part of this conversation has been chill,” Brian said. He was laughing a little, but like, existentially.

“Performative disinvestment is overrated,” said Katya. He said it in that way he did sometimes – joking, but not for the satisfaction of a punchline. Just to lighten the air, and because it might make Brian smile.

Brian swallowed. “Could you stay on the line?” he said. “While I finish packing?”

There was a breath of weak laughter from the other end. “If you don’t mind listening to me do my dishes, sure.”

For some reason, that set the stinging in Brian’s eyes off again. He thumbed on speaker, then set his phone down, turning to his suitcase. “You actually do your dishes?” he says over his shoulder – it was easier, somehow, facing away. Like Katya could really be in the room, so long as Brian wasn’t looking. “I sort of thought you just… opened a window and aimed for the dumpster after every meal.”

“Bitch, you know I’m opening the bin lid and aiming for the window. Come on.”

Brian packed on automatic – socks, underwear, pants, shirts. No drag. He could hear running water and the faint clinking of metal and porcelain through the line. Katya was quiet, at first, but then he fell into the old habits of years spent on speakerphone from opposite sides of the world, humming tunelessly, occasionally dropping a derisive comment about the poor performance of his meat knives. Brian had been telling him for ages to get those fuckers sharpened. But Katya insisted that his knives would be sharpened by a knife-sharpening truck in the suburbs under a dead and heatless sun, or not at all.

Brian’s life packed up neatly. Without the wigs and the dresses and the makeup and the shoes, it was just one small grey suitcase with a University of Wisconsin sticker peeling on the side. It didn’t take long at all.

He stood staring down at it, and contemplated dumping it out on the bed, packing all his crap up again. That’d buy him another five minutes at least.

There was a sudden silence as the water shut off on the other end of the line. Brian couldn’t help but picture it, the small details: sudsy hands on the taps, a spray of water dampening the front of Katya’s T-shirt, his hair sticking up from when he touched it thoughtlessly. Katya fumbling for a dishcloth to wipe his hands dry and to rub uselessly against his shirt. His kitchen was a narrow thing; two adult men, standing with their backs pressed to opposing counters, would find their knees bumping together as they talked. Not that Brian had ever minded.

At one end of Katya’s kitchen there was a long window, and the light that cut through the space was clean and bright, and it always lit Katya’s eyes up like clear seaglass underwater.

“Trixie?” Katya said.

Brian turned his back on the bed, looking down at the phone. “What if this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done?”

“That’s a pretty high bar.”

“Well,” Brian said. “You’d know something about highs and bars.”

Katya huffed a short laugh. There was the sound of more movement on the other end – maybe he was boosting himself up to sit on the counter, the way he did sometimes. The silence lasted a few seconds, and then Katya said, “Do you know where you’re gonna go?”

“Not yet,” Brian said, slumping down into his desk chair and picking up the phone again. “I’ve gotta make some calls.”

“You could go stay with my mom,” Katya said, the sound of his smile warm in his voice.

“Oh my god, bye.”

There was another silence, this one heavier, final.

“Well, you know how I love a good segue,” said Katya.

Trixie’s mouth did something funny. “Yeah.”

“I should let you go.”

“Yeah.” This time it came out shaky.

“Okay,” Katya said. “Okay – yeah.” More movement; a quiet breath. “Well, Tracy, we’ll always have the Santa Monica Pier. And Palm Springs. And the WOW basement. And your house. And my house. And –”

“You’re the worst person I know,” Brian said, startled into laughter, then, “We’ll talk soon. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Katya said. There was a final pause, and then the zero-gravity silence of a dead phone line.

Or, Brian thought with masochistic fervour, an empty home.

He looked down at the phone in his hand, then to the blinds over his window, and finally at the suitcase on the bed, closed but not zipped shut.

He was doing this. He was really doing this. There was an unmoored feeling in his chest, like some anchor had been cut away with the disconnecting click of the phone; like his feet weren’t quite touching the floor, every part of him suspended in anticipation, like Wile E. Coyote half a step off the cliff. The breath and then the fall.

Fuck.

Before he could second-guess anymore, he reached over to his laptop and hit send on the email.

And that, fuck, that was it – a done deal, completely out of his hands. He pressed his fingers to his jaw, then picked up his phone again, thoughts running a mile a minute. His mom used to say he didn’t get a bee in his bonnet; he had the whole damn hive up there, buzzing restlessly, ready to burst out any second.

Oh, honey.

He could go back to Wisconsin, spend a week with his family. Or to Chicago, to sleep on Trannika’s couch, mooching out of his fridge and letting him tease him about his hairline. God, he missed Chicago, but that felt – it felt like going backwards. Running away. It was too much like that first, awful flight back from LA to Milwaukee, when he didn’t know what had gone wrong and the roar of the engine during descent sounded like a thousand voices from every stage of his life reminding him he wasn’t good enough.

Jokes on them, Brian took that shit and made it his brand. Hashtag team too much? Team not enough, bitch. Drag is what I do, pathetic is what I am.

(Was that sad? Sure. But the saddest things are also the funniest. Eventually.)

He shook his head, flicked open his contacts. Bob was the first to catch his eye – New York was far enough, and it wasn’t running away like the Midwest would be. But as much as he’d love to see Bob, New York’s drag scene was almost as big as LA’s, and no matter how irrational he knew he was being, the thought of it made his stomach turn.

Another name jumped out of the list to him. A weirder choice, but – it made some kind of sense to him. He bit the inside of his cheek, tapping the side of the phone with his thumb.

Hey, he typed finally. Some stuff going on. Might be in ur area for a bit. Any chance i could crash for a few days?

He wasn’t expecting a quick response, but it came in almost immediately.

sure! mi casa es su casa dude.

With that… well. Anything but zipping up his bag and walking out the door would be stalling. Brian didn’t believe in stalling. So he shut his laptop and shoved it into a backpack along with his wallet, sunglasses, and notebook; zipped his suitcase shut, and made for the door.

He paused, though, with one foot in the hall. There was a slip of pink fabric caught under the wheels of his bag. He lifted the bag gingerly and set it down against the wall outside, then went back in.

The dress was rumpled but not creased when he picked it up and shook it out; the fabric was soft under his fingers, the kind of soft that meant expensive rather than worn. There were multiple pairs of tights on the floor underneath it, tangled all together and smelling of old sweat, and his pink pumps were tumbled haphazardly beside them.

He couldn’t look at the mess without remembering the phone call, two nights before. Kicking off his shoes as he pressed call, throwing his tights and then his dress into the corner where he could pretend they didn’t exist as he waited through the ringing on the other end of the line. Not even bothering to turn on the lights, so his room was lit by just the glow of the streetlight through his blinds. His heart had still been pounding from the sheer overwhelming frustration of the night he’d had, of the show and after; and then Katya had picked up, and he’d said –

Brian shook his head. He hung the dress on a hanger from the doorknob; he threw the tights in the trash beside the desk.

Fifteen minutes later, he was loading his suitcase, his guitar, and his own sorry self into a cab. An hour later, he was at the train station.

“Round trip?” asked the woman behind the till, clicking her long nails together.

He shook his head. The handle on his guitar case slipped in his sweaty grip. “One way.”

When he was seated, guitar under his feet and suitcase in the overhead rack, the sweating turned into shaking. He pressed his hands together in his lap to still them and stared out the window.

It was pushing five when the train finally pulled out of the station. The seat beside him was empty, as was most of the compartment; apparently Tuesday wasn’t a popular day to run away from everyone you know and everything you love. The sky was just beginning to darken outside, the light blues deepening like bruises into purples and indigos with just a flare of orange above the horizon, and it took with it the familiar LA skyline – faster, maybe, than he was ready to see it go. He wrapped his arms around his chest.

The thought of dinner held no real appeal. He ate a granola bar from his bag and watched the city outside become thinner and thinner and finally disappear into California greens. The sky got darker.

He wrote a few lines in his notebook. His heart rate wouldn’t settle; the steady thud of the train along the tracks wasn’t enough to reel it in, like a water wheel trying to restrain a river. And then, all of a sudden, something changed, and he was abruptly and wholly exhausted, eyelids slipping, hand slackening around the wire spiral of his notebook. His head buzzed at some low frequency. He sort of couldn’t feel his fingertips, although he knew they were, like, still there. Obviously.

His notebook went back into his backpack, which he shoved under his seat. The train thundered on. He put his earbuds in and opened his phone, and there, on the screen, was the text convo that had set the wheels on the tracks, as it were. He bit his lip, then screenshotted it, and sent it to Katya with an appropriately apprehensive face emoji and a heart. The screen said it was just after nine.

That done, he switched over to iTunes and thumbed down to the Ls. The soft strains of Linda Ronstadt’s guitar filled his ears, and he bunched up his coat against the window under his head and shut his eyes. Love will abide, take things in stride – he knew this song backwards. Sounds like good advice but there’s no one at my side.

When he woke up, the greens had all changed, and the shoreline in the distance was grey.

He got a shitty breakfast from the dining compartment then went back to his seat and booted up his laptop, thumbing his phone awake. The first thing he saw was a flurry of notifications from sometime the previous night which had eaten up his screen; the second was that Katya hadn’t replied to his text.

He knew he shouldn’t look at Twitter, but he was weak, okay, and he had like eight more hours on this train and he’d have gone crazy if he didn’t. So he opened the notifications – fewer than if he had tweeted, more than normal if he hadn’t – and scanned through them for the gist. It was, to be fair, pretty obvious.

@trixiemattel did you watch

@katya_zamo is @trixiemattel ur dead dad on a beach again mother

@trixiemattel get on periscope!!!!!!!!

Etc. Etc. Trepidation fluttering in his stomach, he opened periscope – but whatever Katya might have done, it had since been deleted. Sometimes, though, these things wound up on youtube anyway – and sure enough, a quick search pulled up a new video, uploaded just a few hours ago. In the tiny still, Katya was staring off into the distance, the black night sky behind him, a cigarette between his fingers.

Despite his better judgement, Brian opened it.

The camera shook for a few seconds, and through his earbuds, he heard Katya swear softly, and then go, “Okay okay okay. There. Okay.”

The view went still. The camera was propped up somehow, and Katya was on his balcony; he stepped away and leaned back against the stuccoed wall. The light from inside was warm against one side of his face. He took a drag from his cigarette and blew it out towards the dark.

“So,” he said. “So I know that I’m not ever really funny on these things. I’m going to be especially unfunny tonight, probably. You should probably all leave now – or don’t, I don’t care. Whatever.”

His voice was tight, worked up, and Brian’s chest clenched.

“And I’m not gonna – I don’t have a lot to say. I’m just, I’m awake, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I can’t stop thinking, and sometimes this helps. Arranges the thoughts into a way that makes sense to even me. Because – and here’s where you’re not going to understand, and that’s okay – I’m on a beach, and I’m still there, right now. I’m frozen in that one second. And I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Katya took another drag, then laughed, mouth crooked.

“The comments are off, but no, that’s not a Contact reference. Or maybe it is. What’s it to you, Brenda?

Anyway. The only dead one here is me. Or, dying – time is a flat circle, mama, and we’re all just living in it. Or not living in it. Or waiting on a beach. I keep thinking, what if I go back, what if I go back and sit down in the sand and refuse to leave until –

God.”

Brian had a hand pressed over his mouth. He wasn’t crying, but it felt a little like he should be.

“You know what,” Katya said. “No. This was not my best idea. Okay. Bye.”

He reached forward to his phone, his bright eyes taking up most of the frame for just one second, and then it went black.

Brian put his phone down.

The next eight hours were a blur. The sunny west drove deeper into the pacific north, the skies clouding over, the greens finding new, more saturated hues, bloated with their own verdant life. It didn’t rain. Brian stared blankly at his notebook for most of it. He’d written one line and then stalled out, circling it over and over again with his pen. The tide and the tracks, he’d scrawled, each with their own pull, and I can’t hide, and I can’t go back; but you –

But what, he kept asking himself.

When the train settled into the station, the sun was half-sunk, thin rays creeping between white clouds in the west. He gathered his things and exited the train in an anonymous mass – all the people that had been picked up between home and here. There were cabs waiting outside; he stood in line, turning his phone on and off restlessly, then loaded his things into the car, read out the address with the kind of care you use when you don’t really know where you’re going. He’d only been there once, after all.

The city that passed by the windows was different than anywhere he’d ever lived in some undefinable way – and as he stared out at the quiet streets and the late-night coffee shop lights, something in his ribs loosened and expanded.

He breathed in deeply and – it was stupid, but he would swear even the air tasted different.

Look. He never said he wasn’t a cliché.

The cab slowed on a quiet street in front of a walk-up apartment block, the kind that was taller than it was wide, with one door set in the street between a coffee shop and a small secondhand bookstore. Brian paid and thanked the cabbie, taking his guitar and backpack out with him and retrieving his suitcase from the trunk. The cab peeled away from the curb as he stared up at the building in front of him, the white-railed balconies on the second and third floors. It was the second floor he was looking at; from the street, he could make out tealights on the wide rail, a lawn chair, a few empties around its feet.

His mouth crooked up in a bit of a smile.

There was a buzzer pad beside the door with three buttons, none of them labeled. Making an educated guess, he pressed the second one, and from inside he heard a distant bell, and then, a moment later, the clatter of feet.

Then the door swung open.

“Shit, dude – hi!” Adore said. “Sorry, I wasn’t, like, one hundred percent sure when you’d be getting here. I’m a little stoned.”

“I’m friends with Katya,” said Brian automatically, taking in the boxers, the Indigo Girls tanktop, and the long brown hair. “I think I’ll survive.”

Adore grinned, and Brian realized he was grinning back, just a little.

“Come on in,” Adore said. “Let me take your bag. And be careful on the stairs. Swear to god, I nearly die every time.”

Brian hefted his guitar case and followed her in, and up. Neither of them died, but the slow sound of the door swinging shut behind him as he ascended felt – like the strong downbeat at the end of a song. A little too close; a little too final.

Enough with the bullshit melodrama, he told himself. It’s just a fucking door.

He held his phone tightly in his pocket the whole way up, but it didn’t vibrate and it didn’t ring.

#trixya #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #dare #rpdr fanfiction #fathwtf #canon compliant

[artificialqueens]

for all the honest world to feel (trixya) (2/8) - dare

When your skill set is limited to being a real person around your friends and family and a fake person around random strangers, you’re kind of fucked for being a real person around a basically-stranger.

He texted Katya: ’can’t remember how to interact with ppl when they’re not paying and lining up to meet me. do u know a good therapist.’

(AN: part two! i meant to get this up on monday so it would be one week squarely, but, on the flipside, this is legit twice as long as part one at 8.3k words. whoops? this is for M, who is to blame, because she said “where’s my 100k trixya slowburn fic with bonus adore friendship” and sunk me down this rabbit hole. i don’t quite love u 100k worth, but like, somewhere between 30-40% of that probably. thank u to dandee for reassuring me that this isn’t garbage!)

FROM: BOB - 11:03 AM - Thursday August 3rd, 2017

Your bf is talking crazy online again, u should prob check in w her

The one who looks like the baby eater from pan’s labyrinth

Girl

Txt me when u have a sec ok, it’s been a while

“So I cleared out my drag and opened a window last night – if it still stinks a little, I’ve got these candles that smell really fucking good, I can hook you up.”

“This is great, thanks,” Brian said, looking around. “Really, thank you so much for this. It’ll just be a few days while I figure out what’s next.”

“It’s no problem, girl. Whatever you need.” Adore swung her arms at her side. “Listen –”

Somewhere in the living room, a phone started blasting Britney’s Lucky.

Adore twitched in its direction, like a startled dog; “Shit,” she said, “I’ve gotta take that. Eat whatever’s in the fridge, I’ll do groceries later, and if you can find booze it’s yours but I’m pretty sure I’ve cleaned this place out, man. I’m coming, I’m coming!” she called in the direction of the phone as she disappeared through the door.

Brian dropped his guitar on the bed. Then he sat down beside it, at a bit of a loss.

Adore poked her head back around the frame.

“Hey, do you prefer, uh –”

The phone was still going off. “Uh,” Brian said, glancing over Adore’s shoulder.

Adore flapped a hand. “I know who it is, I can call them back. Just, like, we’ve only really hung out at shows. Do you prefer I call you one way or the other?”

“Trixie, I guess,” Brian said after a moment. He shrugged. “Trixie’s fine.”

“Cool,” said Adore with a smile. She was out the door before Brian could ask her the same.

Brian looked at the door, falling shut, then at the walls, and then down at the bedspread underneath him.

When he finally went out to the kitchen, Adore was on the couch, phone at her ear and knees pulled up to her chest. She didn’t seem to notice Brian; to be fair, she barely seemed to be listening to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Brian got himself some water, made a sandwich out of the scraps left over in the fridge, and slipped back into the guest room as quietly as he could. He ate sitting on the floor – there was no desk or chair in the room, and he wasn’t going to eat on somebody else’s bed; his mother had raised him, well, not right, but pretty okay – with his laptop balanced on his knees, watching some British baking show that Kim was obsessed with to calm his nerves before he checked his email or twitter.

He could hear Adore from outside, just a little, talking in a more serious tone than he’d ever heard from her. And that was weird, but there was no part of this that wasn’t weird. He was sitting on Adore Delano’s floor in Seattle; the nice, antique hardwood was biting into his ass. Like. Weird didn’t begin to cover it.

“What the fuck am I doing,” he said under his breath, then he pulled his phone out of his pocket like he’d been dying to since he arrived and woke it up.

There was nothing new from Katya under the column of message bubbles from Bob, which he’d received but not answered that morning. He tapped in his password and opened iMessage, scrolled past Bob with a mild guilty itch, and opened his and Katya’s chat. He thought for a moment, then started typing.

TO: Katya - 7:22 PM

some white girl’s been talking about me on the internet again

💖

The white ellipsis appeared almost immediately, flickering in and out of view, but no reply came.

After a minute, he typed and sent,

TO: Katya

Check in girl

The ellipsis flickered one more time and then a response appeared within seconds.

FROM: Katya

👌

His shoulders, which had been rising with the ringing of early alarm bells in his head, dropped and loosened. The uncommunicative but will survive signal they’d agreed on during one of the more hellish stretches of touring in 2015 was doing its job. He sent back another heart, then a picture he’d taken of his room – guitar on the bed, bags on the floor, and the hooks sticking out of the walls where, he assumed, clothing lines had hung to hold up Adore’s drag. His knees and his dinner balanced on top of them (the laptop having been abandoned to the floor before he could break it, juggling all his things like Icarus flying into the sun) were in the foreground, slightly out of focus.

He sent it over and added,

I love art

Katya responded with a heart wrapped up in a bow.

Around eleven, Brian heard the door outside open and close, and then, very faintly, footsteps on the stairs. When he poked his nose out of the guest room, the living room was empty, Adore’s phone lying abandoned on the coffee table. An unsettling, absolute quiet blanketed the apartment.

He slipped through the living room, then stood under the shower for a good twenty minutes regretting every choice he’d ever made.

Adore was back when he came out, sitting at the table that stood against the island separating the living room from the kitchen. Takeout containers covered the table and the smell of Chinese food filled the air.

“Hey!” she said when she saw Brian, brightening. “Grab a fork, I got a shitton of everything. You’re veggie, right?”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “But I’m, like, Wisconsin-veggie, not LA-veggie. If there’s nothing else I’ll eat it.”

“I got you, bae,” said Adore, sliding a carton down to the end of the table.

Brian laughed as he sat. “I’ve got you, bae,” he sang, not fully expecting Adore to get it, but her eyes lit up and she poked her fork fervently in his direction.

“I fucking love Johnny Cash,” she said. “Hang on, where’s my laptop – you mind if I put on some music?”

Brian waved his carton, like, please, go ahead, but Adore was already bouncing out of her seat and rushing off before he’d even finished the gesture. A few moments later the Folsom Prison Blues rumbled out across the apartment – and the space suddenly felt less hollow, the corners seemed less angular, and something about this airy Seattle rental with its expensive antique furniture and discordant hippie love beads was suddenly akin to the small warmth of his grandparents’ old home.

He tipped his head back on his neck, stretching out the aches, and hummed along, fingers marking out chords on the side of his carton.

“Have you listened to any of the stuff June did by herself?” he called across the room. “Wildwood Flower will change your fucking life.”

There was no answer. A moment later, Adore came back out of her room, frowning slightly as she typed away on her phone.

Brian watched for a second, then ducked his head and returned to his food.

He was halfway through his carton before Adore looked up again, setting her phone down on the table. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. “My mom would murder me for having my phone at dinner with a guest here.”

Brian waved her off. “It’s your house, girl.”

“Still –” Her phone buzzed insistently, rattling against the table. “For fuck’s sake,” she muttered, grabbing at it.

There was some more rapid-verging-on-furious typing. Brian glanced over every few seconds, a thought slowly occurring to him. He chewed methodically through the bite he’d just taken but barely tasted it at all; when Adore kept typing, hitting the top of the screen intermittently and scrolling like she was moving between multiple conversations, his stomach turned over and he blurted, “Have you told anyone I’m staying here with you?”

Adore looked up. Her eyes darted across his face for a moment, then she frowned, like what she saw wasn’t adding up. “No,” she said.

“Okay.” Brian tapped his fingers against the side of his carton. “Listen, could we, like… keep it between us? Me being here?”

“Here as in my place or here as in Seattle?”

“Seattle.”

Adore was still looking at him like that, brows pinched together, and he waited for the question he knew was coming – are you okay? Or, worse, do you want to talk about it?

Instead, Adore nodded slowly. “Yeah, for sure.”

The moment stood, suspended; the thudding guitar-beat filled the room in their stead. If they freed me from this prison, if that railroad train were mine, the walls echoed. I bet I’d move it farther, a little farther down the line –

Adore’s mouth moved, like she was biting at the inside of her lip, but then she relaxed and turned back to her food. “My brothers used to blast Johnny Cash in the backyard,” she said, like an offering. “You know, holding Grandma’s antique lamp like a guitar in front of their chests and yelling about prison.”

“Oh my god, same,” Brian said, laughing out of sheer surprise. “Well, my brother with Grandma’s lamp. It was my Granddad who’d put the tape on in the first place, so really, who’s to blame here?”

Adore grinned. “You and me, we knew better than to fuck with Grandma’s porcelain.”

“Bitch, completely,” Brian said, then barked a laugh. “You know how it is – the only family antiquity I ever got in trouble for handling was my great-uncle’s c–”

Adore’s phone buzzed again.

“Trixie Mattel, you are fucked,” said Adore through her laughter, grabbing haphazardly at her phone. “Like, in the head. No wonder Bianca likes you.”

Brian gasped and pretended to swoon.

“Fucked,” Adore repeated. Then she glanced down at her screen and sighed. “Sorry, I’ve gotta make another call.”

The moment she was back in her room, that same pall fell across the floor again; the feeling that Brian was so unthinkably out of place that the whole room was being distorted around him, like water slopping out of a previously-peaceful tub. He looked at the table. From the other room, the music stopped. He could hear Adore talking, staccato, rapid words piling up like a highway crash and then dropping into silence. If he tried, he could probably make out what she was saying.

She still wasn’t back by the time he’d finished his food. She’d taken one carton with her; he cleared away the rest into the kitchen, where he searched briefly for containers before becoming uncomfortable with the idea of digging through somebody else’s cupboards. There was a roll of saranwrap, no box, on the marble-finish countertop, so he used that to wrap the remaining food up as airtight as possible. He stacked them in the fridge (which was, for the record, an absolute graveyard) and grabbed one of the beers in the door for himself. He was just cracking the cap with the opener in the sink – he wasn’t the kind of gay who carried a swiss army knife, although he suspected that would be his final evolution – when Adore came back in, still on the phone.

He tipped his beer at her, offering. She shook her head. She’d taken off her wig; there was a bobby pin still sticking out from her bangs. The phone was pressed to her ear again and she looked like she was considering whether to make her warranty worth it. A new, unlit joint was clutched between the fingers of her other hand.

Whoever was on the other end must have said something particularly stupid, because she rolled her eyes and started off towards the balcony. She made an apologetic face at him across the room but he waved her off, mouthing good luck as he made his way to the guest room.

With the door shut behind him, the bare space felt like it was staring into his soul. Off-white walls, red sheets and duvet. No pictures.

To be totally fair, his own bedroom was pretty minimalist too. But it was like this little room was wholly separate from the rest of the apartment, which – while obviously an expensive pre-furnished rental – was littered with the detritus of life: pictures of Adore’s family stuck up all over the fridge, an oversized sweater slung over the back of the couch, half-burnt prayer candles on the mantle, and sheet music scattered over the coffee table.

It’s the guest room, he reminded himself. It’s the drag room. He hadn’t left home expecting to find home.

He was being stupid.

Halfway through his beer, his phone buzzed. He was stretched out on the bed in his boxers with a book; when he heard it go off across the room, he nearly spilled all over himself in his haste to get to it. He tugged it out of his jeans’ pocket and woke the screen up, already telling himself he was being an idiot for hoping so hard, but there it was – a new message notification from Katya.

I’m sorry about the periscope, it read.

He flew through his password and opened his messages. Settling himself cross-legged on the end of the mattress, he hunched over his phone and typed,

Girl no you dont have to be sorry for that. Did you say antyhign about me? No.

Yes, Katya replied.

He rolled his eyes, even though the message – the simple honesty of it – made something in his chest squeeze tight. Okay, but not so anyone else could tell for sure, he typed.

Should have asked tho. Or not done it at all. You dont like having your shit out there & here i am laying my corpse out for public autopsy with ur name in sharpie on my spleen

Brian laughed under his breath.

Your spleen? Wtf even is a spleen

All other organs completely atrophied :( mass necrosis :( spleen’s the only thing left but it’s urs, Katya sent.

Brian navigated out of his messages and flicked open Safari to google “spleen,” then he burst out laughing, half-yelling, before he remembered where he was. He screenshotted the page and sent it over.

U CAN KEEP UR ATROPHIED CORPSE BLOOD BITCH

And then, because he couldn’t resist: lucy, u got some ‘spleenin to do.

AHHHHHHHHHH, Katya replied.

Brian grinned down at his phone while the little ellipses kept on flickering. He had five more puns off the top of his head and two of them were actually good – but then the next message came through, and the smile slid off his face.

I am sorry though.

And then,

I dont know all of why you left but i can guess part of it. And i shouldnt have done that, knowing it.

I feel like i chased u away & then made it worse.

Brian swallowed. He looked away from his phone, up and out the window at the stretch of Seattle visible over the low roof of the building across the street – grey buildings, yellow lights, deep blue sky. Leafy green unfurled between the rows of buildings, trees demarcating where the gap of the street escaped the naked and distant eye. At the farthest edge of his vision, the navy-black of the sky melted into the ocean on the horizon. And then there was him – lost somewhere in the middle of it.

Was this running away? Sort of. Was it worse?

He turned back to his phone and thumbed it awake again. He typed, you didn’t. Don’t be stupid.

The beginnings of a response flickered on the left side of the screen; he raced to finish – i don’t want you to not be you. i LIKE you.

The ellipsis disappeared.

Brian yawned into his palm, dropped back onto the bed and scooted up until his head was on the pillow. Pushing up onto his elbow, he stretched to turn off the bedside lamp; the clock at the top of his phone’s screen said it was pushing 12:30 and he was completely wiped. Fuck, he was old.

Speaking of old, Katya was typing again.

I like u too. Shocking i know. I still feel bad but i wont have a breakdown or anything over it, promise

Brian grinned tiredly.

I’m not worth a breakdown? I thought i was on ur spleen

Go to bed you wretched cunt, Katya replied.

Brian sent another heart emoji, then switched his phone to sleep mode, shut his eyes and relaxed back. The wall on his left glowed dimly with light from the window, which had no curtains, but it wasn’t enough to keep him awake. His eyelids grew heavy. He kept thinking hazily, like it was coming from somewhere outside his own body, about how Katya would smile around the words if he’d spoken that last text aloud.

When you were on the road as much as he was, it was the little things that mattered the most, the little things you carried with you. He moved too much to carry a lot. But the way Katya’s voice sounded when he smiled – Brian had carried that close, these last three years.

He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep, the low murmur of Adore on the phone whispering through the walls and Seattle grey and restful outside.

*

The next two days were weird.

It wasn’t that Brian didn’t know how to relax. It was just that he didn’t know how to be still. He hid out in his room but his mind ran off without him, thoughts spinning from Seattle to LA and back again. The frantic energy would build up inside him until he had to go outside, fuss around in the fridge without picking anything, step onto the balcony for just a minute before going back inside – struck by the deeply paranoid conviction that someone was watching him.

Fucking crazy.

So he’d go back in his room, chip away at the book he’d brought – Gillian Flynn’s depiction of the Midwest was unflattering but one hundred percent accurate, right down to the murder rate – firmly not-thinking about his laptop, waiting, and the whole wide internet out there and all the speculating that may or may not be happening.

It had been one day, he told himself. One and a half now. There was no speculating.

Fucking, fucking crazy. He was breaking away from dire realist in the direction of paranoid schizophrenic. But he’d sit there, or lie there, as the case may be, and he’d flip pages until he realized he wasn’t reading at all, and then he’d put the book down and just think, about all the shit he was doing wrong, the massive and ominous precedent of shit he’d done wrong in the past, all the responsibilities he was letting slide, the momentum he was losing by the minute, and, worst of all, Katya.

And eventually he’d reach some dumb-ass breaking point and repeat the whole pattern. It’s not like the fridge had gotten more full. It’s not like he was actually hungry.

(What he wanted more than anything  more than anything was to pick up his guitar, but the thought of interrupting the afternoon quiet like that made his stomach turn.)

To make it worse, Adore kept catching him on these ridiculous trips. Apparently she was as generous as she was talented because instead of looking at him like he was a lunatic or kicking him out of her house, she’d smile, like seeing him in her living room was completely normal –  and Brian would echo it, his whole body suffused with awkwardness.

The fifth time it happened, Adore was just getting off a call. She reached out to grab his arm as he was passing by to say, “Hey, tacos tonight?”

And Brian said yes, and then, remembering the previous night, “I never really got around to asking. Do you have a preference? Like, Adore, or –?”

“Adore’s good,” she said. She blew her bangs – short again today – out of her eyes. “I feel like I’m always a little bit in drag, you know? And anyway, only my family calls me Danny all the time.”

“Same,” Brian said, huffing a laugh. “The family thing, I mean.”

And then, at a loss for the next conversational turn, he pretended the plate of microwaved leftovers he was carrying – this trip being the first and only time he actually had a reason to leave the room – had suddenly become very hot, and juggled it awkwardly as he retreated with a sheepish smile.

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

‘Tacos tonight’ was actually a bag of veggie tacos Adore pressed into his hands on her way out to the balcony, phone pressed to her ear. Brian didn’t mind. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the realization that it wasn’t just Adore’s guest room he was crashing in on. It was her life.

When your skill set is limited to being a real person around your friends and family and a fake person around random strangers, you’re kind of fucked for being a real person around a basically-stranger.

He texted Katya:

can’t remember how to interact with ppl when they’re not paying and lining up to meet me. do u know a good therapist.

Katya sent him a skull emoji and a phone number. He laughed at the first; the second he stared at for a long time, then resolved to pretend it never happened.

Thursday started with Adore knocking on his door around ten to let him know she’d be livestreaming in the living room, and Brian smiling painfully to try to hide the fact that his palms had gone all sweaty. He ducked back in his room and stayed there for two hours, long past when Adore went quiet outside and the live vid must have ended. His heart rate kept picking up at random moments, which his high school level biology told him wasn’t really supposed to happen.

A little while later, Adore knocked again.

“What’s up,” Brian said, swinging the door open. A guitar was thrust immediately in his direction, so fast he had to throw his hands out to stop it before the neck could hit the doorframe.

“Oh, shit,” said Adore, and then, “Hey. Wanna teach me to play?”

Brian stared, and then he felt one side of his mouth tick up. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

They sat on the couch, turned towards each other, Adore with her piece of shit Yamaha (he wasn’t being mean for the sake of it, it really was a piece of shit) and him with his Gibson. She showed him the few chords she knew, fingers wobbly against the frets, glancing up at him under her bangs to check if she was doing it right. He remembered, suddenly and intensely, holding his Granddad’s guitar for the first time. How the strings pinched his fingers. He could almost smell the sage his Grandma hung in the windows, which filled the kitchen with a faint perfume on breezy summer days.

“Don’t press too close to the metal, it can mess with your pitch,” he said. “When you’re just learning you’ve gotta really nail the placement before you can fuck around with it. Like scales and runs, right?” He played a few chords of his own, clean as windchimes. “You do it right, and then you fuck it up. Intentionally.”

“It huuurts,” Adore whined. She laughed as she stretched her pinky for the third fret and slipped. “Oh my god, fuck this!”

“Suck it up, buttercup,” said Brian, grinning. “Here. The trick is to not think about how much it hurts or how bad you sound. What’s a song you really like?”

“Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

Adore had a shit-eating grin on her face, but if she thought Brian doesn’t know every word, she’d pegged him as the wrong bitch. “Okay, that’s – hang on – four chords, you know three of them. This is D minor,” he said, and demonstrated. “But don’t worry about getting it perfect. This is more about your fingers learning where they’re supposed to be. So four chords, and the rhythm is something like…”

He played the first line – four-four time, with a folk bent to the rhythm.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Adore, staring at him wide-eyed and laughing in disbelief.

“Don’t shut up, copy me,” Brian said. He was laughing too, playing the chords over and over. “Guitar is about rhythm as much as melody. The song is four-four, but you don’t strum four times to four beats precisely. Come on, do the upstroke, don’t be scared of it.”

“Don’t be scared of the upstroke,” Adore wheezed, and Brian gave a high-pitched scream of laughter.

“Um, this is serious,” he said, “why don’t you respect my art?”

Adore played an astonishingly sour chord and swore. “I don’t believe in, like, putting restrictions on what art is and stuff, but girl, I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.”

“Have a little faith in me,” said Brian. He played the chords through one more time then came in, quiet overtop, loading country into the vowels. “Oh baby baby how was I supposed to know…”

Adore burst out laughing, then broke in, “Not to be scared of upstrokes.”

“Bitch! Oh my god.” Brian thought quickly. “Oh baby baby I shouldn’t have let you go… dick like a mighty oak, yeah.”

Adore got up and started doing the iconic knee-socks-and-pigtails hallway choreo, shoulders shimmying, and Brian nearly dropped his guitar out of his lap he was laughing so hard.

But then they did some Fleetwood Mac, and some Lauryn Hill, and even a little Johnny Cash, although neither of them could sing low enough. And it was – kind of great. Just jamming, not on stage or in a club but in a home, where the acoustics weren’t great but the company was.

On Friday, Adore went out in the morning before Brian woke up, and didn’t come back until the sun was starting to set beyond the balcony, an orange glow covering the living room floor. She stopped in the front hall, shadowed; Brian, sitting on the couch with his guitar in his lap, couldn’t make out her face, but he could see the slump of her shoulders and her hands fisted at her sides.

“Adore?” he said, quietly.

She looked up, and then stepped further into the apartment so the tangerine light fell on her face. Her mouth was pinched tight. For the first time, Brian noticed faint stress lines around the corners of her eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. “Long day. What’s up?”

“The usual,” said Brian, shrugging a little. He reached up to fuss with back of his cap where it rested against his forehead. “I think a pigeon shat on the balcony. You should get a cat or something.”

Adore sighed, long and heavy. Then she dropped her bag and jacket to the ground and walked past him to the sliding doors, ragged converse scuffing against the floor. She didn’t even look at the site of the unfortunate incident; she just circled it on her way to the railing, where she propped her elbows up and leaned out, looking across the street at the city beyond.

After a minute, she put her head in her hands.

Brian fidgeted with his guitar, tension creeping up his spine like a pernicious weed. That feeling that had been so successfully foiled the previous afternoon – that he was intruding – was back. He curled his fingers tightly around the frets so the metal bit into his skin; then he picked up his guitar and retreated into the guest room, as quietly as he could.

At some point he dozed off; it was pitch dark outside his window when he woke, and he could hear Adore moving around the apartment restlessly. Not on her phone, like she often was. Just moving around.

He slept in fits and starts, and each time he drifted to consciousness he could hear her out there, still awake, wandering the contours of her home through the night like some anxious ghost.

*

Adore was still out there the next morning when he woke up, blearily stumbling out of his room at seven AM – one leg thrown over the back of the couch, painted toes catching the early light, fully crashed out. Even asleep, she was clutching her phone to her stomach, white-knuckled. He looked at her for a long moment. There was some kind of conclusion percolating in his brain, just out of reach; he felt, weirdly, like he was making a decision, although he wasn’t sure what it was yet.

She started awake with a grunt fifteen minutes later as veggie bacon sizzled on the stove.

“I’ll be running that off for a week, you fucking asshole,” she mumbled, draping one arm dramatically over her eyes.

Brian chuckled. “It’s veggie, girl,” he said. “No running required.”

“I love you,” she said plaintively, the words muffled against her skin. “Please stay forever.”

He pushed some bread into the toaster and scraped at the pan a few more times. Eyes glued to what he was doing, and with as much nonchalance as possible, he asked, “You get much sleep at all?”

She didn’t answer. She was staring up at the ceiling when he looked over his shoulder, her gaze distant, like the day before was coming back to her in one fell swoop. Brian was familiar with that particular feeling.

The decision – the one he’d been percolating on – reached him all at once.

“Adore?” he said. When she didn’t say anything, he tried, “Danny?”

She blinked and looked at him. “Yeah?”

“Do you, uh,” he said, then told himself suck it up and pushed the rest out – “Do you have anything going on today? ‘Cause I was kinda thinking it would be nice to like. Go out. Do something.”

Adore sat up fully, crossing her arms over the armrest and looking at him inquisitively. Which was fair. He hadn’t left the house in the three days he’d been there so far. “You want to go out?”

No. “Yeah. I mean, if you want.”

Her face lit up, like he’d thought it might. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, fuck yes. I’ll give you the fucking tour, man. Seattle is literally so fucking stunning, you’re gonna – shit, Pike Place Market, you’re gonna go crazy. It’s like Chicago on speed, if it was way more white and smelled like fish.”

“I think the important question here is,” Brian said, sidetracked from his own anxiety, “when will we have a queen who’ll roll around on the docks for an hour before a show and go out on stage serving fish? Like giving you realness, honey. When will we have that queen?”

“Katya,” Adore pointed out. When he started laughing, she said, “No, I’m so serious. She’s gonna be living in a sea shack collecting beer caps and colourful glass from the shore to cast spells on people. I give it ten years but I’m telling you, it’s gonna happen.”

“Oh bitch, completely,” Brian said, grinning, then, “Shit, hang on,” as the bacon started to blacken and smoke. Once it was safely off the stove and onto a plate, he turned back. “So, Pike Market?”

“Pike Place Market,” said Adore. “Yes, fully yes. I don’t think stuff opens until, like, ten, so let’s eat, and then, I dunno, nap, and head out in like two hours. Seriously, Trixie, this is gonna be the best. Like you’re not even ready.”

Two hours, a plateful of bacon each, and some napping later, they left the house on foot, and twenty minutes later a flare of neon red appeared between two curtaining buildings. They emerged onto the street directly in face of the great fluorescent sign: PUBLIC MARKET CENTER, it read, on three levels of rails above a single-level shopping arcade, with a great clock-face suspended on the right side of the rails. It was only going on ten-thirty, but the entryway was bursting with flowers, the street outside awash with pedestrians going in, going out, or gawking as they passed by.

“Holy shit,” Brian said, and Adore turned to him and grinned.

“Get ready to lose your fucking mind,” she agreed.

He was so busy staring in every direction around him as they entered that he barely even registered the crowd; and it didn’t matter, because every other person was craning their neck doing the same. They entered into a farmer’s market, where stalls of brightly coloured fruits and vegetables were stacked one on top of another. Neon signs and banners overhead directed visitors and advertised wares; when it wasn’t food it was flowers, roses, sunflowers, carnations in gorgeous arrangements, eye-catchingly vibrant.

With a fiver Brian bought himself a pear while Adore went for a banana – “this is definitely not local,” she said, laughing, then proceeded to mime deep-throating it in the middle of a crowd of tourists while Brian giggled.

Past the farmer’s market there were cheeses, fresh meats, and, as promised, so much fish and salt he had to cover his nose for a second, although he was pretty sure that was rude.

“I’m from the country, bitch!” he said when Adore laughed at him. “I thought the ocean was something my brother made up to screw with me until I was, like, thirteen!”

“Shut up, you did not,” said Adore, shoving at his shoulder. Her grin was bright in the thin rays of sunshine that slipped through the slats overhead; she looked like she’d forgotten the previous day entirely. Which was exactly the point, and which made the way Brian twitched any time a stranger looked at him a second too long almost worth it.

There were bakeries and cafés further down the walkway, which seemed to go on forever, but Adore pulled him away and down some stairs. He followed the bobbing of her tiny ponytail – held up by one of those stupid two-loop elastics with the little plastic balls, which, yes – down to a second, lower level, where there were fewer people and he could actually see the wooden floors under their feet. The stores were more artisanal here – leatherworks, glass and jewelry, some vintage clothes stores they were going to have to demolish later, and –

“There,” he said, tugging at her arm, “There, there, tell me we’re going there –”

“Duh.”

A magic shop, the facade papered with old circus posters in red and black; inside, it was somehow two floors (“How?” he demanded, to which Adore replied, “Magic, bitch!”), the walls lined with books, magic kits stacked on tables, with a long counter on the left filled with pendulums, crystal balls, earrings, bangles, and rings. There was everything from whoopie cushions and itching powder to tarot sets stuffed in every inch of square space; and in the dead center of this colourful chaos stood a big glass box, like an old-school cinema popcorn maker or one of those stuffed animal claw games. It said FORTUNE TELLER in purple neon on the top. Inside there was a bust of a withered old woman; she had one hand up in some witchy gesture while the other was held out flat, cards splayed out in it face-down. She frowned out at the observer from under disturbed eyebrows, like she didn’t quite approve.

“This… is the best thing I’ve ever seen,” Brian said, eyes wide.

Adore had already peeled off to talk tarot spreads with the woman behind the counter, with whom she seemed to be on a first name basis. Brian huffed a laugh, then turned back to the glass case, which was calling to him something fierce. He walked over, pulling out his phone as he went.

Katya would love this, he thought, and took a quick picture and sent it to her.

I can’t believe u followed me to seattle, he typed, and then, the humidity is really bad for ur skin, huh?

Katya replied with a string of exclamation marks followed shortly by a BITCH. YES.

Smh, he sent, then tucked his phone away again.

“Hey!” Adore called from behind him. “You want Steph to read your palm? Swear to god, it’s some real shit, man.”

“Stop it,” Brian called back, startling the woman behind the counter into laughter.

A larger group of tourists burst in then, college-aged, filling the center of the space and pointing everywhere excitedly. Brian made a face at Adore over their heads as he shifted back towards the wall to avoid them.

These kids weren’t really that much younger than him, but they looked like – god. Babies. A few noticed him looking and looked back; he turned away to inspect the books on the shelf behind him, tapping his knuckles frenetically against his thigh.

When no one approached him after a minute or so, he went from fake-looking at the titles to actually looking, and then browsing, and then he found himself flipping open a small book titled Witches’ Wisdom On Surviving The Apocalypse, which turned out to be full of free verse poems. One of them began:

We were burning long before you put your pyre under us

That’s where the power is

Start there.

He didn’t know a lot about poetry, so he couldn’t say if it was good or not. Probably there would be more than one copy stocked if it was. Still, when the crowd moved on to the second floor, he kept hold of it as he approached the counter – where Adore, he realized, frowning, had disappeared.

“You want me to ring that up for you, doll?” said the woman – Steph? – behind the counter. She was probably in her late forties, fuzzy curly mom hair, black cardigan, anatomically-correct heart necklace with tiny inscriptions he couldn’t read running along the big ventricular arteries. She was probably crazy; he liked her more or less immediately.

“Did you see which way, uh, Danny went? I think I’ve lost him.”

“Skipped up to the staff roof for a bit, I’ll show you where.” She looked down at the book in his hands and nodded. “You want me to ring that up for you?”

Brian looked down too, to where he’d been running his thumb across the two ravens on the cover unconsciously. “Yeah,” he said. “I have a friend who’ll go nuts for this.”

“You should read it too,” Steph said, accepting his card. “You look like you’ve seen a bit of apocalypse yourself. Door behind me, up the stairs. It’s supposed to be just staff, but Danny’s a sweetheart and he’s by all the time so we let him up.”

He nodded his thanks and waved off the offer of a little bag, ducking around the counter with the book still in hand. Through the door and up too many stairs led him to a beige landing and another door; through this one, he emerged into the sunlight, gulls overhead, and for a moment, staring up at the sky, he forgot where he was entirely.

“Trixie!”

He jerked back to himself, and went over to join Adore at the edge of the roof, leaning against a thick metal railing, staring out at the grey-green stretch of the ocean and the breaking waves.

“Sorry,” said Adore. “I meant to be back down before you noticed, but I guess I just – lost track of time.”

She had a lit joint in one hand, gaze distant.

“You okay, girl?” Brian said, hooking his elbows over the rail.

Adore looked at him sideways, like, really?

And – okay, that was fair. It’s not like Brian was one to talk.

Adore brought the joint to her mouth and inhaled deeply; she held her breath, then exhaled, a thin white plume drifting up into the robin’s egg blue of the sky.

“Crowds give me the shakes sometimes,” she said. “You know?”

Brian looked down at the toes of his sneakers poking out past the lip of the roof, then across at the water. The wind off the ocean ruffled the pages of his book as he held it up to shade his eyes.

“I don’t know if ‘shakes’ is the right word, but. Yeah.” He forced a smile. “That’s just where I live now.”

It was such a deeply insufficient answer, but when he tried to force anything else out, his mouth felt like it was stuffed full of cotton; his throat closed up and he had to swallow, grit his teeth, look back out at the water.

“Trixie.”

He looked over. Adore was watching him, gaze steady.

“You can stay as long as you need,” she said. “I mean that.”

He swallowed again and nodded.

She turned back to look out too. The August sun beat down, but with the breeze at their faces, it wasn’t overwhelming. It was like the warmth of two bodies under a duvet; despite the conversation, Brian felt himself relaxing, eyes slipping shut and face tipping up towards the light.

He remembered walking down the Santa Monica Pier with Katya; he remembered taking Katya’s hand, and Katya’s brilliant smile when he did. And that same feeling – like all his stressors, all the shit in his life that he couldn’t seem to outpace or outwit, were melting away.

Adore nudged him in the side a few minutes later. “Listen,” she said, “some friends invited me out tonight for drinks at this cute little bar on Capitol Hill. You wanna come? It’s super chill. I have a show there later this month, actually.”

Brian shrugged his shoulders up awkwardly, then dropped them. “Not this time, I think,” he said. “Thank you, though.”

“No probs, girl.” Adore nudged him again. “Wanna get some sketchy food and go try on vintage clothes while the sales people stare at us?”

Brian laughed. “That’s a yes. Hard yes.”

*

Adore’s apartment was eerily quiet when he got back, her keys cutting into his palm with unfamiliar ridges and jingling an unfamiliar tune. He paused in the threshold, setting down his and Adore’s bags, and looked out at the low sun in the west, the rays cutting golden across the otherwise-dim living room.

He walked in and stood for a moment where the rays just began to touch his face. He hovered his hands over the back of the couch, a bare breath away, then shook his head and went around it, dropping his new book onto the coffee table and sinking down into the cushions.

He meant to do something – read, get his guitar, get his notebook – but instead, he nodded off into the deepest sleep he’d had in weeks.

It was dark when he jostled awake, with just a thin sliver of light glowing from under Adore’s bedroom door. Something near him – on him – was buzzing. Drugged up with the last seconds of his dreams, for a second he wasconvinced it was bugs – and then it buzzed again, in the front left pocket of his jeans, and he remembered his phone.

When he pulled it out, Katya’s name was shining above the green call symbol.

He nearly dropped the phone in his haste to press accept. “Hey,” he said, “hey, hi. Hi stranger.”

“Hey yourself,” Katya said, and Brian could hear the smile in his voice like warm sunlight. “Have you seen my friend Tracy? She vanished into the night and no matter how many Christmas bulbs I tape to my wall I can’t seem to find her.”

“Is that what you’re calling interior decorating now? Bitch, I’ll take the demi-gorgon,” Brian said, and grinned into the dark as Katya cackled delightedly. When he’d settled again, Brian added, “Hey. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“You too. I’ve missed you,” said Katya. He made a dismissive sound, then, and said, “I mean, I know that’s stupid, we’ve gone longer than a week without talking on the phone and much longer without seeing each other, but. I missed you anyway. And all the festering guilt probably made it worse.”

Brian pushed himself up to sitting, pulling his knees in towards his chest and resting his cheek against the back of the couch. “I wouldn’t be telling you anything you don’t already know if I said you don’t need to feel guilty, right?“

“Yeah.”

“You process better out loud. That’s not, like, news to me. And I didn’t…” he trailed off, trying to get his thoughts in order. “I don’t want to take away something that’s good for you, something you use to cope, because it’s not something I like or want for myself. Like how selfish would I have to be – that’s not what I want.” He rubbed at his eyes. “I get the radical honesty thing, you know? It’s just…”

“It’s not how you operate, I know,” Katya said. “And I knew you wouldn’t be mad, although I still think maybe you should be.” He laughed. “So I’ll quit apologizing for periscoping about my, uh, emotional duress. But I will still say sorry for putting that day out there. That was meant to be just ours. So – sorry.”

They were dancing around it, and Brian knew it was for his sake, but he wondered if maybe it was for Katya’s too, a little. “Apology accepted,” he said quietly. He rubbed his thumb along the knuckles of his index finger, feeling out the juts of bone and the softness of skin on skin. “And how goes the emotional duress?”

Katya huffed a laugh. “Oh, you know. Enduring.” Brian rolled his eyes in the dark. Katya seemed to know it because he laughed again, just quiet, intimate beside Brian’s ear. “I’m doing better now,” he said. “It took a few days. It was like I knew consciously that all of this couldn’t be just my doing, that there were all kinds of factors that I may or may not know about, but try telling my crazy brain that.”

“I know,” Brian said, pressing the phone closer to his ear, like that would accomplish literally anything. “I”m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Katya said. “Just promise me you’ll talk to me when you’re ready.”

“I will, of course I will.”

It felt to Brian like he needed to offer something up, something to bridge the gap of hurt he’d left behind – in both of them – when he left LA at the end of the tracks. But unlike that moment in the bright afternoon sunlight with Adore, here, now, it felt almost easy to find a little piece of himself and hand it over. Because the room was dark, and this was Katya.

“We went to Pike Place today,” he said. “Adore and I. It was amazing, you would love it, but – it was the first time I left the house since I got here. Basically the first time I left the guest room.”

Katya made a soft noise.

“My shoulders go up when I’m around a crowd of people. Just thinking about going out for drinks with Adore’s friends tonight made my pulse race. It’s not – I’m not anxious. I’m pissed. And… concerned about the consequences of being pissed, because I’m so frustrated and done and so much shit could go wrong – I could lose everything.” He scrubbed a hand roughly over his head. “I can’t stop thinking about it. So maybe anxious isn’t so far off.”

“I wish I were there,” Katya said, his voice a quiet rumble, like morning waves at low tide.

Brian closed his eyes. “I wish you were too.”

They sat in silence for a long moment. Brian’s eyes were starting to slip shut, each blink lasting a little longer, but he could feel the tension in his shoulders still, and he could see the stress dreams coming at him from a mile away. He forced his eyes open and said, “Let’s talk about something else. Just before I go to sleep.”

“Tell me about Pike Place,” Katya said immediately. “Was it amazing?”

“So amazing,” said Brian. “There’s this fucking – girl. There’s a fucking magicshop. The woman behind the counter is on first name basis with Adore and she offered to read my palm.”

Katya screamed very quietly on the other end of the line. “See my future with them hands, bitch,” he crowed, and Brian was laughing, saying, “Bitch, yes.”

“Okay, okay, that’s amazing,” Katya said. “Is that where that hag you sent me was?”

“You’d better believe it. Oh! I got you a present.”

“What?” A smile curled through Katya’s voice. “What is it what is it what is it?”

“I found this little book of poems,” Brian said; “Witches’ Wisdom On Surviving The Apocalypse.”

“Oh my god, I need it.” There was a pause, and then Katya said, “Read some of it to me?”

“Hang on.” Brian used the dim light of his phone screen to find the book on the coffee table, then to skim through the pages for the lines that had caught his eye before. He lifted his phone back to his ear, angling it awkwardly so the light was enough to read by if he squinted. “Okay. So this one is called, uh, Battle Plans. It starts:

We were burning long before you put your pyre under us

That’s where the power is

Start there.

But this isn’t work for one –

So start there

And start with you, and start with me;

This is work to be done with love.”

The sound of Katya’s breathing over the line as he read was like a warm blanket; his eyes dipped, shut, blinked open again and again. His words faltered. He picked up the thread once, then again.

His head nodded forward. His phone fell into his lap. At some point, on the other end of the line, Katya ended the call – Brian woke up the next morning to find his screen read “Call Ended - 24m13s” (on what had been, at most, a fifteen minute conversation.)

He looked down at his phone, and he smiled.

#trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #trixya #adore delano #dare #rpdr fanfiction #fathwtf #canon compliant