They Can’t Take That Away From Me

by Ian McDuff

This is for the Nick Slashficathon Challenge. Skipper sent me in to pinch-hit; these were the signs from the third base coach:

Name [of who I was writing for]: Katie. (kaethe here on LJ.)

Backstreet Pairing [that the recipient preferred]: Nick/Kevin. (What IS it with me and NiKe these days? Oh well … Just Do It, right?)

Two things [the recipient] wants: ‘all the Boys at least making a cameo; happy ending.’ (No problemo.)

One thing [the recipient] doesn’t want: PWP. (And a good thing, too. I’m like an old Comintern apparatchik: I live for plots.)

Okay, then. Step into the box, dig in, and wait for the first pitch….

Howie loved them both. Not just because it was his ‘job,’ his role, but because it was right and inevitable and he couldn’t help himself. He cared fiercely, he worried incessantly.

Brian loved them both. Not just because Kevin was Kevin, and his cousin, and Nick was Nick, his very own chaotic Frack, but because they had earned it and deserved it. He glowed a little extra when he was around them, and he would charge the gates of Hell to fetch either of them a bucket of coal, if asked.

AJ loved them both. Not just because they were his surrogate dysfunctional family, and not just because, deep down and behind all the façades, he desperately needed someone to love, but because they loved him even when none of them could stand one another. He’d take a bullet for either of them. He’d even face up to their mothers for them … if there was no other choice, no avenue of escape, no time to run like hell, and he was being held at gunpoint.

And of course, beneath the sniping and the prodding and the butting of heads, they loved each other dearly.

That was the problem.

That was why Howie was worried, Brian was making tactical dispositions for an assault on the said infernal regions, and AJ was wondering if there might not be some bullets in this life that no one could dodge no matter how hard one tried.

It was the week before Kris’s and Kev’s wedding, and Brian and Howie were both considering holing up with AJ and staying drunk, rather than having to face the music (‘fuckin’ Wagner,’ as AJ had put it, in a tone so aggrieved it had almost made them laugh).

Kevin and Nick were taking it best of all, to their bandmates’s astonishment. Their mood was a little elegiac, nostalgic, tinged with an easy melancholy, but not sad. They spent most of their time together, reminiscing.

The fact was, there had been so little time.

The window of opportunity had been brief.

Nick had spent the late, gosling stage of his adolescence lurching from hopeless crush to hopeless crush. On Brian, who, though Nick’s sweetest and closest friend of all, was so straight – and Nick, painfully, knew it and never managed to forget it – that Nick could have used him to rule off some staff paper. On Joey Fatone of That Other Band, who was about as T-square straight as Brian was, but whose presumed ability to enfold and anchor Nick however big he might get, made him the star of many of Nick’s fantasies. On Howie and AJ, who, unfortunately, dearly as they loved him, would have hyperventilated if their off-limits baby brother had suggested that they make their settled couplehood into a threesome.

And always, even when he most resented him, even after one of their legendary confrontations and ensuing silences and sulking, on Kevin. Kevin, who was everything Nick wanted and everything Nick so desperately wanted to be, graceful and imposing and mature and … oh, everything Nick wasn’t and had stopped hoping he would ever become. Everything that Jane hammered into him that he wasn’t but ought to have been.

And Kevin, in turn … well. He had spent his time and paid his dues as a performer, dance instructor, occasional small-time model. The idea of man to man sex wasn’t exactly new or shocking to him. In fact, the practice wasn’t altogether unfamiliar, although he persisted in seeing himself as fundamentally straight. And certainly, until Nick turned eighteen – ‘came of age,’ as Kevin had put it, ignoring a few sotto voce ‘coming’ cracks from AJ – Kevin had adamantly ignored Nick’s tentative advances, even while always being available to listen and advise.

And always, in the background, there had been the soon-to-be Mrs Richardson, on and off and back on again.

The window had been brief.

Nick was nineteen, and Kevin and Kris were in an ‘off’ period that was pretty much indistinguishable from an episode of the Cold War. Before détente. In absolute desperation, Nick had jettisoned his previous attempts at being cool and sexy and seductive and flirtatious and all the other tried, and failed, approaches, and had poured out everything to Kevin, including the desperation and the longing, and the poignant ache to have his first ‘real’ time mean something and be with someone he trusted and cared about.

It wasn’t in Kevin to walk away and wash his hands of that amount of raw need and raw honesty, least of all when he himself was vulnerable, and hurting, and more empathetic than usual. And his determination to prove that their encounter was anything but, and infinitely more than, a pity-fuck, had done more to bond the two together than anything Nick could have tried and planned for.

But the relationship had been fleeting, and destined, it seemed, to fade: no more than a brief, summer afternoon in Arcady, freighted with the Arcadian portent that inheres in blossoms and brief pastoral, ephemeral, quick to fade, bittersweet and doomed. Corydon’s lambs gambol but briefly, and the spit awaits them; Corydon, too, will not linger on the scene. Flowers blossom and die, all things evanesce. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, and, Golden lads and girls all must / Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Ashes to ashes. Et ego in Arcadia.

The interlude had been just that, an interlude, with barely time enough for AJ to come up with a few jokes, mostly along the lines of, ‘Well, at least now we know what, exactly, is up Kevin’s ass.’ Neither Kevin nor Nick wanted to be hurt, or to hurt the other. Both felt, always, that they were living on borrowed time in the relationship. Both tried, if with less than conspicuous success, to keep it light, or at least to maintain that polite fiction, even as each of them came to entertain more and more profound feelings: feelings that neither would admit to.

The other three were torn, throughout the whole process, between rooting for them and wincing at the inevitable end that awaited them. Soon enough, though the other three were never quite sure how or why or when it had resumed, Kris and Kev were back ‘on’ again, and Nick and Kevin drifted apart, not with recriminations or scenes, but slowly, apparently amicably, and almost imperceptibly. Howie compared it to a fading bruise, and AJ was barely able to muster a jibe about its having ‘petered out,’ at which neither Howie nor Brian laughed and for which not even AJ could summon a patented AJ cackle.

And now it was the week of the wedding, and their only concern was whether or not both their friends and brothers would shatter irreparably.

The mood may have been bittersweet, but Kevin and Nick, resolutely ignoring the stricken looks of The Three, were keeping it more sweet than bitter. They spent a great deal of time together, reminiscing. They were sharing what was now only a series of memories, and doing all that was in their power to make them feel immediate, present, undimmed.

Kevin had laughed, a little wryly, and sung a few lines of a classic.

And Nick, whose surreptitious fondness for showtunes was perhaps the most stereotypical – and most carefully guarded – gay trait he possessed, had quirked a half-smile back, and countered with something from Gigi:

Howie, for one, felt like going off into his room and crying like a baby.

They were now within twenty-four hours of the wedding. The very traditional wedding. Among the traditions being observed – and in this case, not least because it gave Kevin and Nick a last few hours of burnishing the memories that Nick, at least, would have to subsist on for a lifetime – was that of the bride’s and groom’s not seeing one another in the day before the ceremony.

Which is why Kevin and Nick and AJ and Brian sat bolt upright in their chairs, heads snapping around to face the door, as they heard Howie’s pleading ‘Kris, no! It’s bad luck!’

As the door opened and Kris strode in, lithe and unconcerned, Howie dithering uncharacteristically behind her, AJ muttered to Brian, ‘No shit is it bad luck.’

Kris pointedly ignored Kevin. ‘Nick? I think you and I need to have a little talk, hon.’

Kevin was left gaping like a gaffed fish. Nick rose, slowly, and followed Kris out, like a man going to his own execution. The Three hesitated a moment, torn between calming Kevin, who was by now a whiter shade of pale than ever Procol Harum envisaged, and rescuing Nick. Nick’s danger being more acute, his interests won.

They clattered into the hallway and found themselves staring a line of closed doors. Listening carefully, they heard voices.

AJ started towards the door through which the faint sounds could be heard, obviously planning to eavesdrop.

‘It would be wrong,’ Howie warned.

‘Very wrong,’ Brian added.

‘Look,’ AJ snapped, exasperated, ‘if she’s gonna fuckin’ break him, I wanna know so we can fix him, and you know he won’t say a –.’ He broke off when he realized he was talking to thin air. ‘Well, you sons of bitches,’ he muttered, and walked over to where the two moralists already had their ears to the door.

‘– something I can’t give him,’ they heard her say, crisply and without any intention of pausing for comment, ‘and I am not talking about his prostate here. I take this damned seriously, Nick, and if he ever cheats on me with another woman, I’ll have his balls for paperweights. But. Look. Kevin is so confused it’s almost funny. He’s always been looking for something. Brian is Brian and has always been exactly like Brian. But Kevin…. He’s been an Air Force reservist and an environmental activist, he’s flirted with Pentecostalism and speaking in tongues and now he’s a nature-worshipper if he’s anything. And to top it all off, no matter how hard he tries to run from it, he can’t help being a Southerner, all tangled up in conventions and honor and – shit, you can’t eat magnolias, as they say. And even if he no longer worries that God Almighty will come and git him if he Does Wrong, he’s sure his daddy is watching him from Up Above. A little practical Midwestern sense would have done him no harm. But that’s just the way he is, and we both love him, not in spite of it, but because of it, it being part of him.’

Nick made a strangled sort of noise that Kris ignored.

‘I mean it, Nicky-boy. I’m serious about this commitment we’re making. But the rules don’t apply when it comes to you guys. You two. Kevin and Nick. What you guys have defies the categories, okay? There are no pigeonholes. So. You do right by him, and I’ll do right by him, and maybe he can finally do right by himself, okay? He’s off-limits to anyone else on this earth, hon, but … you and he have something that … well, something that transcends the limits, and I’m not going to stand against that. Just … just let’s promise each other, you and I, to share. Not just share him, but share the burden. If something goes on that the other one of us needs to know or can help with, we’ll call, right? Deal?’

‘Deal,’ Nick said, faintly, still in an evident state of shock. The Three looked at each other in wild surmise, and decided to make themselves scarce until Kris Had Left the Building and Nick and Kevin had shared and absorbed the news.

It was a beautiful wedding, all the old bluehairs said, loudly and repeatedly. And Howie, Brian, and AJ, at least, could see Nick’s lips moving just a little, silently, repeating the vows along with Kris and Kevin, and everyone saw the glow on Nick’s face and the wink Kevin sent him as the newlyweds recessed back down the aisle, though only six people in the whole nave knew the story behind the wink.

AJ, at least, had grace enough to wait until they were outside to nudge Nicky and whisper, slyly, ‘So, how does it feel to be married, Junior?’

Nicky looked down at him – the thing he most liked about his sometimes awkward height was finally being able, physically, to look down on AJ, who sometimes needed to be cut down to size – and grinned. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘But if anyone tries to get me in on the bouquet toss, I’m kneein’ him in the balls, man.’

Everyone looked around and smiled, though without knowing just why, as AJ cackled loudly: ‘Curses! Foiled again!’

END