Thought I'd post this before I hit the sack! *blows kisses and collapses*

Rating: NC-17
Pairing: MR/TW
Summary: AU. Trapped somewhere between angst and humour.
A/N: Never happened. Except the tiny bits that did, and those have been completely turned to my own purposes. Also, thanks to black_siren for finding Tom's plush doppelganger. Feedback is like a pumpkin scone.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13



He hardly sleeps all night, alternately surging out of bed to call Tom, to explain, and then flopping back onto the mattress, paralyzed with indecision. Tom might not believe Michael, and why should he? From the outside, it looks exactly as though Michael played on Tom’s attraction to him just to get his script read. But if that were the case, then Tom wouldn’t expect Michael’s call now that his objective had been met -- but then, Michael isn’t sure he’s ready to face Tom’s anger because there’ll be a lot of explaining and that means --

Michael will have to say some things out loud, things that he’s kept buried under miles of concrete.

The next day at work is clumsy and horrible. Michael feels like he’s wearing mitts and his female co-workers roll their eyes when he says he can’t lift the crate of milk jugs for them. His speech starts to slur around noon and that’s when he realizes that he hasn’t taken his meds since yesterday morning.

“I’ve gotta run home for a minute,” he tells his shift supervisor.

She laughs and then catches his eye, sees his seriousness. “What? Why?”

Michael waits for his heart to start tripping but it doesn’t. The words just emerge as if Michael’s said them a hundred times before. “I’m on anti-seizure drugs,” he tells her. “I forgot to take them yesterday.”

Her eyes go wide. “God, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Michael reassures her.

“But you’re talking kind of --”

“It happens when I’m tired,” he says. “It’s from a head injury a few years back.” He takes a deep breath. “That’s why I can’t lift the milk today, my right side gets weak.” He said it. He said the word ‘weak’, that word he’s hated ever since the neurologist first used it.

“I -- didn’t know.” She is almost reproaching him, but her concern is too overwhelming for her anger to be clear.

“Yeah, sorry,” says Michael, palming the back of his neck and jamming the other hand in his pants pocket. “So -- I have to go. Can you cover me for like twenty minutes?”

She is clearly torn -- he’s not supposed to leave during a shift, but it’s also a serious matter. “Yeah, yeah. Go. Hurry!”

Even though he feels like shit, Michael can’t keep from grinning as he heads down the street towards his apartment. One person down, hundreds to go.

***

It’s nearly three o’clock and Michael’s just about done for the day. The shift supervisor put him on bar because there’s less talking to customers and he can pull the shots left-handed if he needs to. He’s already a little tired of the gentle treatment he’s receiving at her hands but he figures that it’ll only last another few hours anyway, so he shuts up and deals with it.

“Oh, someone called,” she says over her shoulder as Michael pours his last latte of the day. “Asked if you were working today, and for how long. I told ‘em to come before three if they wanted to catch you.”

He’d admitted to Beeman that he’s been working at Starbucks, and Beeman had grinned and threatened to come by and buy a drink from him, but it’s far too early in the day for Beeman to have a spare moment. And if Beeman’s busy, so is Tom. Michael frowns as he sleeves the latte, wondering who the hell else would want to catch him here.

Whoever it is seems to have missed his or her chance, Michael thinks, watching the final 4 seconds of his shift tick away before heading to the back room. Untying his apron is much easier than untying skates, thankfully, and he’s just emerged back onto the floor when he hears it:

“Venti dark roast to go.”

He looks up, startled, and finds Tom looking back at him from the other side of the counter.

“Sorry I’m late,” Tom says, nodding at the clock. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Michael asks, winding his apron around his right arm as though Tom could see its uselessness.

“There’s a night shoot today so Beeman gave me a free afternoon.” Michael notices a small triangle of orange make-up under Tom’s earlobe, a place he missed in his hurry to get here by three.

“Good,” says Michael, subconsciously limiting himself to simple words. “Cool.”

“So, do you have a minute? I thought we should talk.” While Tom’s posture isn’t exactly open, it’s not drawn up with anger like it was yesterday either. It seems like they’ve both had time to think things through.

Michael’s instinct is to make an excuse, avoid letting Tom see him when he’s this exhausted -- but Tom already knows. And it’s so easy to just admit the truth again. “Yeah, sure,” he says, and steps out from behind the counter. “But just so you know, I’m kind of messed up today. I get like this when I don’t get enough sleep.”

Tom takes his cardboard cup and they leave the store together. Tom’s Echo is parked outside around the corner but with a tacit understanding they continue past it, heading aimlessly down the side street into the quiet Vancouver neighborhood. For two blocks, neither of them speaks, and then they both speak at once.

“I’m sorry --” “I should have --”

They laugh awkwardly and then Michael waves them both down to sit on a patch of grass outside someone’s fenced yard. “From the beginning?” he asks, and Tom nods. “Okay. I used to be an actor.”

“I looked you up yesterday,” Tom answers, nodding. “You were in a Keanu Reeves movie.”

“A bad Keanu Reeves movie,” Michael clarifies, and they both laugh again. “Anyway, yeah. I got cast as Lex Luthor back when Al and Miles were putting together the pilot. I was up here in Vancouver for some screen tests and we even rehearsed a few scenes. And then one night I was out at a club on Davie --” He pauses, because here’s another ocean-deep element of the story. “I was high and drunk and I shouldn’t have been there alone, but I was. Truth is, I don’t even remember what happened. I don’t remember the attack, I don’t remember what happened next. I just remember waking up in the hospital the next day.”

“You don’t remember me?” Tom asks, leaning forward. “But you were awake, I talked to you!”

“Head injury,” shrugs Michael. “It usually involves memory loss of the incident itself. All I knew was that I went to a club, got trashed, and woke up with broken ribs and a big hole in my brain.”

“It was two guys,” says Tom, flatly, avoiding Michael’s gaze. “They were calling you names and kicking you. I chased them off and came back to you, called an ambulance, waited for the paramedics. I took off because I didn’t want my name in the papers about it.”

“Most celebrities would,” Michael tells him, echoing the words of the interviewer from the article. “It’s great PR to save someone’s life.”

Tom looks at Michael now, all seriousness and intense focus. “You were hurt really really bad,” he says in a rough tone. “I was scared and sick and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I was not some kind of fucking hero.” The last spoken through clenched teeth, an effort to express and Michael has to close the space between them enough to get his hand in Tom’s hair, angle his head, and kiss him quickly and deeply.

“You fucking saved my life,” says Michael. “I had a skull fracture and my brain was bleeding. If you hadn’t called the ambulance, I would have died on the street.”

They breathe each other’s air for a second and Michael remembers the weird flashback he had the first night he and Tom fucked -- the strange sense of being cradled against Tom’s chest, being sheltered and hearing Tom’s racing heart against his ear. He might, after all, remember a little of that night.

They part slowly and Michael keeps talking. “I knew I couldn’t shoot the pilot, I knew I was out of the project. But I didn’t want anyone to know that I was hurt.” No, not quite true. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I had been gay-bashed and I was brain damaged,” he clarifies painfully.

Tom takes the words in without the slightest ripple of judgment. He’s still and silent and just watches Michael, listens.

“I couldn’t really handle the thought of anyone knowing. I figured I could just lay low until I was better and find more work somewhere else. So -- I called my agent and told him that I had just been outed in a really spectacular way, that I was pretty certain the producers on Smallville wouldn’t want a fag playing Lex Luthor, and I asked him to call them and give them my pre-emptive resignation. He didn’t argue, he just did it. And that was it.” Michael remembers the sick fury that had possessed him in those weeks following the attack, the way he’d alternately raged at his physical therapists and his broken body, the way he’d fought against every restriction they tried to place on him. He was discharged while he was still unable to dress himself and that was when Michael realized he wasn’t going back to Hollywood any time soon.

“When you said you knew me from somewhere, I thought you meant you recognized me from TV,” Michael concludes heavily. “I never guessed it was you that night. They never found the guys who did it and I never would have pressed charges anyway.”

“Why not?” asks Tom, bewildered.

“Because,” Michael says wryly, “that would be the same as admitting that they hurt me.”

Something bursts like a dam inside Michael as he says this sentence, and all semblance of ironic manly control is destroyed. He looks down and sees his hands shaking, feels his breath catching and his vision wavering with tears, and it’s like the instant before a long fall -- he knows he’s going to fly apart before it happens.

Tom catches him, steadies him, and Michael spends long seconds trying to regulate his too-fast breathing against the fabric of Tom’s grey hoodie before Tom’s fingers stroke down his back. “I’ve got you,” Tom says, and Michael -- lets Tom get him.

***

They wind up at Michael’s apartment where Tom tucks himself around Michael while they both sleep for a few hours. Michael wakes up to Tom berating the contents of his refrigerator. “I didn’t know that salad dressing went bad,” he says irritably.

“Pizza delivery menus are on the microwave,” Michael tells him, stretching and testing his right side. It’s better. Everything’s better, clearer, inside Michael’s head. Why did it matter to him that Tom might see his apartment in its natural disgusting state? He can’t quite remember what it felt like to worry about that.

After Tom orders pizza, they sit on Michael’s futon couch and Michael finishes the story. “I couldn’t go home until I was better and I couldn’t stay in Vancouver without a job, so I got work. At first I did a few retail things, and then I got into Starbucks and I’ve been there ever since.”

“You never went home?” Tom asks, surprised.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve gone a few times,” Michael assures him. “But I can’t go for very long because if I have one sleepless night -- well. You saw what it’s like then.”

“And you never went back to work? Seems like acting would be better money than slinging lattes,” Tom presses. His bare feet are tangled up with Michael’s in the space between them.

Michael lifts one shoulder. “Same thing. I might have to explain what happened. So I just stayed here.”

Tom’s toes wriggle against Michael’s. “Until you met me.”

“I started writing,” Michael admits. “I’ve always liked screenwriting, but I never took it very seriously. Anyway, when I figured you’d realized I used to be an actor, I thought there was no harm in giving the script to you to read, get your opinion.”

Tom’s mouth makes an O shape of realization, which makes Michael laugh. “God, I thought --” begins Tom, and then blushes. “I shouldn’t have thought that.”
“I should have told you,” Michael admits. “I’m sorry.”

Tom accepts this with a nod and focuses his gaze on the place where their fingers are twining together now. “It’s so weird to think that we were almost co-stars.”

“Think we still would have ended up fucking?” Michael asks with a smile.

“Hey, I wasn’t hanging around Davie Street for the hell of it,” Tom answers, grinning back. He lunges forward and pins Michael down along the length of the couch while he kisses the breath out of him. “I still have an hour before I’ve got to go back to the set,” he leers, and kisses his way across Michael’s neck.

Michael thrusts up into Tom’s warmth, firmly resolving that he’s going to have to stop playing bottom when it comes to the two of them -- right after this. “Just between you and me,” he says, scrabbling at Tom’s hoodie zipper, “what’s *really* going on with Clark and Lex?”

Tom makes a face and wrestles Michael’s wrists into his possession, holding them together about Michael’s head. “Nothing at all. If it had been you and *me*, on the other hand…” He dives down and licks his way inside Michael’s mouth.

The buzzer interrupts them, announcing the arrival of the pizza.

“Pizza’s supposed to take thirty minutes,” Tom grumbles while Michael searches for change.

“The pizza place is downstairs and two doors over,” Michael answers. “Why do you think I order from there?”

They eat in amiable silence, but a call from Beeman summons Tom back to work earlier than expected. Tom leaves Michael only on the condition that they meet up again whenever Tom gets finished shooting.

“When’s that?” asks Michael, distracted by the way Tom’s fingers are crawling up the back of his shirt.

“Late-ish,” says Tom ambiguously.

“So, eleven? Midnight?”

Tom’s other hand goes down the back of Michael’s pants. “Two? Three?”

“You’re a fucking tease,” says Michael, because Tom’s hand is *inside* his boxers.

“No teasing,” Tom vows, and bends down to kiss Michael. “You’ll see.”

Michael’s definitely going to show Tom he’s not a bottom. Right after tonight.


***