"Who, like myself, your guide and stay will be. Through the storm and sunshine, I will abide with thee.” --Henry Francis Lyte Brian’s POV The goddamn world never stops for anything. Even when your own life seems to come to a screeching fucking halt, everything else just keeps going. One infamous night my world had frozen forever; a tableau carved from the ice that had enveloped my whole being. Permanent and un-melting. His blood flowing crimson across his pale skin, through my hands and over my fingers, streaking the ivory scarf with the tainted threat of death. I’d watched as the scarlet river had flooded in abandon over his beautiful face and into his glittering ash gold hair. A fallen angel. White Innocence and Red Hatred in a cruel, clashing contrast. But it wasn’t that prom night image that haunted my subconscious mind and prowled through my nightmares. It was that feeling. That all consuming, unrelenting, physically painful stab of horror and panic and helplessness. It had been like I was drowning, like I was the one dying; crying out for help into an empty, uncaring darkness. It was a feeling so powerful I thought there was no conceivable way that anything would ever make me feel it again. I had been wrong. ~~~ I actually ran into the airport foyer, the pounding of my feet on the shiny, hard floor echoing eerily in the habitual mid-morning lethargy. People looked up at me, curious at the sight of this unshaven, wild-eyed, tousle-haired stranger in his mismatched wrinkled attire, sprinting into through the revolving doors like a bat out of hell. I looked up and desperately scanned the walls for a computer monitor that displayed the flights as they arrived. Trying to make sense of Justin’s distorted message had been like trying to break the goddamn Di Vinci Code. This task was made no simpler by the fact that I had spiralled rapidly into mindless hysteria which I’d only been able to beat back with the knowledge that Justin needed me, and he needed me sane. The ‘6:30’ had thrown me for a fucking loop, because I’d received the message at 4:29am, when the buzzing of my cell phone had woken me. The caller ID had declared the sender was ‘long distance’ which meant that the S.O.S. call could actually have been sent by a Cuban marooned a rubber dingy in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. But I knew instinctively who it was from. ‘Help me’ I’d seemed to hear those two words rather than reading them, heard them screamed out in surround sound, filling all of my senses with molten terror. That feeling had come crashing over me…something had to be desperately, horribly wrong. At first, I’d thought ‘6:30’ meant he was getting a 6:30am flight…but surely ‘On a plane’ meant he’d actually physically been getting onto an aircraft. It took me a ridiculously long period of time to realize that, as California was on the other side of the fucking continent, there was a time difference. He must have left Los Angeles at around 1:30am, which probably meant that ‘6:30’ was the arrival time, but only in the Pacific time zone. A quick calculation in my head put the arrival time of his plane- if he was actually on a plane- at about 9:30 Pittsburgh time. I located an arrivals board and scanned all the entries, trying to pinpoint a flight that would fit all the criteria. I thought of asking one of the attendants at the flight desk, but realized I didn’t even know what airline Justin was flying, let alone the flight number or arrival time. Shit…what was I gonna do if he wasn’t on any of these? I told myself savagely to calm the fuck down, knowing that flying off the handle wouldn’t bring Justin any closer. I saw the earliest flight into Pittsburgh from L.A. was an American Airlines flight whose arrival time was 9:50am. The next one didn’t get in until 11:25…that was too late. It had to be the first one. Looking up at the enormous clock mounted on the wall behind the check-in desks, I thought I felt the bottom drop out of my heart when I saw it was already 10:10. Shit! Goddamn it! Thank fuck I flew pretty regularly and knew where the arrivals gates were. I took off at a run, nearly knocking over a woman carrying a yapping long-haired terrier in a carrying crate. She shouted something after me that sounded like “Watch where you’re going, Asshole!”, but I absolutely did not care. She could take her ankle-biting fur seal and shove it. I skidded to a halt outside the automatic doors on the arrivals level and looked around wildly for any sign of Justin. I didn’t see him anywhere. I shoved and pushed my way through the crowds of relatives, chauffeurs and tour guides with cardboard nameplates that populated the steel railings just outside the arrivals gate. I heard my heart start to pound loudly in my ears as a sweeping glace around the entire floor yielded no Justin. Fuck…what if something had happened to him? Fuck! I’d been looking out for his ash blond hair and pale complexion- his two most distinguishable features from afar. It hadn’t occurred to me that the west coast sun and surf would have tanned his skin and darkened his hair to a pale straw colour. Amidst a gaggle of toned and sun-kissed Californians emerging from the gate, he was camouflaged so well that I missed him entirely. Which was why he saw me first. “Brian!” It wasn’t just my name. That single word carried with it all the grief and fear and pain of hours and hours of gut-wrenching suspense. I whipped around so fast I almost dislocated my shoulder, the soles of my shoes squeaking on the polished floor. He was there suddenly, looking scared and anxious and panicked. He was moving towards me, almost at a run, and did not check his pace at all as he drew level with me. I wanted to move, but my feet had suddenly become rooted to the floor. He threw himself at me with enough force to send me stumbling backwards, seizing him around the waist to avoid sending up both crashing to the floor. He instantly had both arms and a leg wrapped tightly around me, putting all of his weight onto my chest and shoulders. And I was crushing his body against mine, holding him to me so fiercely I doubted he could breathe, let alone move. Dear God…the relief was almost too much to bear. I don’t know how long we stayed like that…I was vaguely aware of being stared at by what seemed like ever set of eyes in the whole goddamn building. But I didn’t give a shit. I do remember thinking that I should defiantly loosen my grip on him before he passed out from asphyxiation. But then I realized something tremendously disturbing. He wasn’t crying. Suddenly alarmed, I grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked his head back, much harder than I’d intended because I heard him give a gasp of pain. I looked down urgently into his face, hoping desperately that I was mistaken. But I wasn’t. His eyes were dry and there weren’t even any traces of tears. It sacred the shit out of me. Justin didn’t cry very often, but he was certainly ‘a weeper’. His feelings and emotions had always found an outlet through his tears; it was his way of both displaying and purging them. But their absence meant that whatever he was feeling now was impossibly deep; out of my reach, unfathomable and bottomless. What the fuck could have happened to do this to him? With my hand still gripping the hair at the back of his head, I stared down into his eyes, trying to seek out the answer there. The edges of his irises had gone strangely dark, rimming the azure depths with indigo. It was like a tunnel into his soul. And at the end of it, I saw the answer. I understood. When he stared straight back into my eyes and told me in a choked, frozen voice…I found I already knew. ~~~ An Hour and a Half Later When I finally allowed them to fall, I’d thought the tears would be silent, but they weren’t. No matter how hard I tried to blame my own sentimental weakness, I knew deep down that it had nothing to do with self-control. The grief and agonizing regret and all-consuming helplessness had been bottled up too tightly and for too long. A streak of lightning can’t suppress the ensuing thunder forever. On the journey back to the loft, my immediate and only thoughts had been for Justin. He’d been absolutely silent for the entirely of the trip which I’d found immensely disquieting. His unvoiced emotions continued to alarm me and I thought desperately that if I couldn’t reach him with words, I’d make him respond to my touch. I’d taken a hand from the steering wheel and had reached out to grip the back of his hand in mine, squeezing it tightly, trying to elicit some kind of a response. To my utter relief, he’d turned his hand over almost at once and wrapped his fingers around mine in a hard, vice-like grip. As if he were clinging to a lifeline, he’d refused to let go of my hand after that. Even when we’d reached the sanctuary of home and were climbing out of the ‘Vette, I’d had to pull him through the driver’s side because he wouldn’t relinquish his hold on me. I would have let him hold onto me forever if he’d wanted. Upstairs in the loft, I’d sat him on the edge of the bed and told him to take his shoes off, leaving him there while I called Cynthia to tell her not to expect me in the office that day. There must have been a note of desperation or anxiety in my voice, because she’d accepted this without demanding an explanation, which was supremely unlike her. When I’d gone back to Justin less than five minutes later, I found him curled up, asleep, on top of the comforter. ‘Sleep that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye.’ Shakespeare may have been an incomprehensible twat, but he had gotten some things right. As a child, I’d used sleep as a way of escape, a method of coping. It didn’t make the situation any better, but it seemed to make things more bearable. I thought vaguely that the clothes he was wearing- jeans and a maroon long-sleeved t-shirt- were likely the only decent garments he had, having left everything else in L.A. This meant he probably shouldn’t have been sleeping in them, but I didn’t want to wake him up by attempting to remove them. He’d have to wear something of mine until I’d managed to pull together an ensemble from the odd assortment of clothes he’d left behind in the loft. I crawled onto the bed beside Justin, facing him, and gently pulled his body against mine. Slowly, so as not to wake him, I slipped one arm under his body so I could cradle him against me. I buried my hand in the silken softness of his hair and I put my face up against his neck and inhaled, drawing in his unique scent. I wanting to be exhalent at having him back with me, but I loathed the reason why he was. That’s when the tears had come, and I could do nothing to stop them. The worst thing I could imagine was Justin waking up to find me crying; I was supposed to be his protector, his guide, the one who would help him through the storm. I couldn’t show him this kind of weakness. I gently pulled my arm out from under him and rolled him carefully onto his stomach before getting off the bed and going into the washroom. I gripped the edges of the vanity and screwed my eyes shut, feeling the hot tears stream down my face to fall and dash themselves on the white porcelain of the sink. My breath came in short, hissing sobs, which I drew through my teeth to muffle the sound. I fucking HATED this! It was so impossibly cruel and malicious and so goddamn unfair! Why couldn’t this shit have happened to me instead? I was the one who deserved it. I was the one who was hard and unthoughtful, sinful and spiteful and crude. And yet the fates had chosen Justin, who was pure and beautiful and young and flawless. Or may be the fates knew that the greatest punishment they could deal out to me was watching him suffer… Christ…I had to stop thinking like this. It didn’t fucking matter where the blame lay, because blame brought no relief, no answers…just more confusion and spite. What mattered now was Justin. Justin, who had left everything- his life, his passion, his fucking future- to find hope and sanctuary with me. He needed me. And needed me to be strong. Justin was strong, and he would survive. He had always survived. I raised my head and stared at my reflection. The green-gold eyes, now red and swollen with tears, had taken on a look of determination. A steady gaze that was preparing itself for the battle; girding its loins and hardening its heart. I felt a surge of challenge and strength and knew then that this would not defeat me. I was so much stronger than that. I turned the tap over the sink on and watched as it washed the salty traces of my tears down and away. I splashed the cold water on my face repeatedly, feeling its cold string revitalize and fortify. I turned the water off and dried my face on the towel hanging by the shower. I tip-toed back into the bedroom and lay down on the bed next to Justin’s sleeping form. Gently, I lifted the shirt from his body and carefully pushed the material up to his shoulders. I wanted- no, I needed- to touch him. I laid the palm of my hand softly against the small of his back, feeling the heat of his body radiating into my fingertips. The Californian sun had darkened his skin and now, instead of being almost translucent, it was the colour of clover honey. But it still felt the same; soft and smooth and ever so slightly downy. I wanted to stroke my hand along it, but I was afraid it might wake Justin up. Instead, I curled my index finger along the dip of his spine, loving the tiny bumps and ridges his vertebra made. He shifted in his sleep and whimpered softly, but didn’t wake up. I smiled at the thought that I might have indivertibly been tickling him. Keeping my hand on his back, I laid my head gently on Justin’s shoulder and kissed his ear softly before whispering my words of comfort. “Be strong, Sunshine. This storm will pass. I’ll find you your rainbow.”