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Shoes are kicked off at the door, their jackets launched at the coat hanger and not quite meeting their mark. Wilbur already knows the layout, knows he’s got stairs to climb before he can rest his weary feet. George, who knows the floorplan like the back of his hand, is already leaps and bounds ahead of him. Wilbur tucks his glasses into the collar of his shirt before following, securing the rest of his valuables in whatever carrying space he has available on his body.
The living room lights flip on, flooding the room with a pale yellow light. It bleaches the room and the furniture inside of it, a few tints away from having the same fade effect as the fluorescent lights in a hospital. Before he can see the whole of it, however, George's voice blasts through the air.
“One second!” George runs by, arms full of...something. The most he could see was that it was colourful, with sprawling limbs that caught in the air. Wilbur takes a step back, almost missing a step behind him and plunging down to the entryway in an act he's sure would deal the final blow to the damage he's done over the years to his spinal cord. He has to grab the handrail to steady himself, the arm he's not using flailing around in the air as he tries to get his balance.
George returns a second later, panting. The room he was just in is blocked by his body and the door that's only a few centimetres away from closing. He holds a--now free--hand out for Wilbur to take. The palm is a ripe pink.
“Make yourself at home?” says George, more of a question than anything, as Wilbur is hefted to the top. His shoulders are hunched forward, arms dangling to where pockets would be if they were incorporated into the design of his sweatpants.
He tries to put him at ease with a smile. “Thanks, man.”
George cares so much about these things, which is why he’s trying to take his drink order. To make things easier for him, he asks for water. George doesn’t waste a second, scurrying away to the kitchen and opening the second-largest cupboard, which has a row of glasses outnumbered by the assortment of plastic fitness water bottles better suited for a streaming set-up because they’re less dangerous to have on a desk. George retrieves one of the former, about to run it under the tap before remembering he has something in the fridge. The glass is dumped, then taken to the appliance's interior where a large container forfeits clear liquid into it.
Wilbur tries not to watch too intently, moving his eyes away to look at how much the room’s changed. While the furniture is where he remembers it being, some of the decoration has made itself scarce. Gone are the few pieces of wall art that George tacked onto the wall, leaving the clock behind by itself. The hour hand points to eight.
“Here,” a glass of water is stuck in his face, almost sloshing over the edge. George stands behind it, looking slightly apologetic for the patches of dampened fabric on the hem of Wilbur’s shirt.
Wilbur accepts it, toasting with a short sip. “Thanks,” he says after swallowing. He pats the seat beside him, asking George to join.
There’s a moment of hesitation when he thinks he’s asked too much of him and pushed beyond the lines of comfort, before George agrees. The cushions beneath them dip under the weight, sliding them closer toward each other. Wilbur tries to move himself away, only to end up right back where started from.
Before the awkward tension becomes unmanageable, Wilbur says the first thing on his mind.
“So, I’m guessing you’re pretty excited about the travel ban lifting?” It’s the elephant in the room, something he would be happy to shut the door on if it wasn't blocking the way out.
To his dismay, George’s eyes light up brighter than they had looked the entire day.
“Yeah,” he says with a small laugh, “I’m, uh, already trying to work things out.”
Of course he wouldn’t wait. He has been waiting for so long now.
For George’s sake, Wilbur makes his eyes softer. “I hear it’s better than applying for a Visa.” He might not share his enthusiasm, but he can still sound like it.
“Oh god, so much.” He props his knee up, leaning the ball of his elbow on it. “The interviews were driving me crazy. We weren’t sure if a work visa would, well, work; so we had to keep thinking of ways to make it happen.”
“Are you still going to, once you get there?”
George’s face scrunches up, the loose skin of his cheek mashed by the fist holding his head up. “What do you mean?”
“Like, are you just visiting for the holidays or are you going to end up staying?”
“Oh. Well, I think Dream hopes that once I’m there in person they will take the request more seriously. He’s been coordinating the whole thing with his manager so I’m just doing what they tell me to.”
Wilbur swallows the hard lump in his throat. It travels down his esophagus, sticking like lard. “Are you ever going to come back?”
“Probably. I think I have to come back in January no matter what.”
“But like, are you serious about moving to America? Are your parents okay with it?”
George stiffens up at the mention. He lets go of his face, dropping both hands into his lap. “They’re...sad, of course. But they’re not going to stop me.”
He nods along, expecting as such. They have no reason to keep him around--not in a bad way, just, it’s part of growing up. They lived through years of having George be unable to contain his excitement at three in the morning, staying up just to make use of the few hours before his American friends had to go to bed.
He’s about to joke that maybe it would be a relief, before he comes to his senses. George looks upset already. It’s a decision that wouldn’t come easy. Leaving means abandoning his family, his friends, the identity he’s made in a city that’s been the background to his incredibly successful career.
“We’re all going to miss you,” he settles on saying. Still not the right thing, but it’s close enough to the truth that he can start moving some of the weight off of his chest while still having relevance to the conversation.
George’s phone erupts with noise, dedicated enough to be a call. Their knees knock together as he scooches forward, pulling at fabric to find it. When the home screen brightens, iOS is telling him it’s an oncoming Discord call. His thumb is blocking the sender from Wilbur’s line of sight, though he’s sure he could fire off a few guesses and get it right.
George powers it off, about to tuck it into his hoodie pocket when Wilbur nudges him hard enough for the impact to bring their eyes back together.
“Answer it, it’s probably important.”
“It really probably isn’t,” George says, tongue getting lost on the jumble of words.
Wilbur pats his shoulder, reminding himself to take his hand away. “I can wait. There’s probably something I’m forgetting to do.”
His tongue swipes over his bottom lip. “You sure?”
“I promise I’m not going to run away in the ten minutes it will take for you to clear this up.” He forces a laugh to fill the empty space. He’s been doing a lot of that lately, unable to dwell in the silences where George could be thinking ill of him for acting weird.
George doesn’t need much more encouragement than that, giving him a smile framed by the folds of his cheeks. He makes a quick escape to what Wilbur assumes is one of the storage rooms, as the leaning wall of boxes, suitcases, and wooden pallets would leave him to believe. A small flash of light is the last thing he sees before the door politely closes, followed by George greeting the voice on the other end with intelligible happiness, even from behind a wall that should blur the rest out into muffles.
Wiping his sweaty palms on both knees, Wilbur gives himself a moment to breathe without being hyper-focused on the company he keeps. His lungs thank him, expanding into his chest as they gulp down their heaping. He lets them do their job, taking intermittent sips of water to help his mouth stop feeling so dry.
The empty room doesn’t give him much to do, not that he would be comfortable poking around without his host’s permission. There are no bookshelves or ornamentation that isn’t absolutely necessary. No dishes are in the rack or beside the sink, the surface of the oven immaculately clean. If he didn’t know any better, he would say it’s a newly renovated kitchen, with only a few stains on the backsplash to prove him wrong.
George's voice carries from the other room, a familiar laugh stretching out from under the door. Wilbur walks closer to it, before deciding it’s none of his business. A crack in the furthest door of the hall shows him a bedroom he hasn’t been invited to enter, which means it’s off-limits. A few articles of unfolded clothing hang from the edge of the bed in surrender. The rest are dumped in unceremonious piles on the floor, one egregious example being right in front of the door. Eyeing a few of the colours, he recognizes them from when George removed a bundle of clothes from the living room as they walked in. It seems they’ve only been moved to make a better impression.
His tour complete, he returns to the couch where he can comfortably recline. He wasn’t lying when he said he has messages that needed his attention: the onslaught of preparations for the new Lovejoy release has turned his manager cannibalistic, doing everything he can to spur Wilbur into responding to him consistently. Already, the red notification circle has staked its claim, pulsing.
He doesn’t get far into the first wave of unread messages when he starts looking for something else to make the centre of attention, which unfortunately is the mess of clutter on the table in front of him. A lot of it is bowls with crumbs at the bottom and papers ranging from utility bills to scrap, but he knows the Union Jack when he sees it.
He shakes some of the mess away from it, holding it up. If he didn’t know any better, he would say it was a book. The laminated paper texture would certainly make him think that’s the case, until he opens it to see what it contains.
It’s a passport holder, inside the offending document with its navy blue cover and seal emblazoned on the front.
Wilbur snorts. It’s so horribly gimmicky but makes sense; the Americans are probably going to tout him around. George is going to turn heads in stores he visits the second he opens his mouth to talk to a cashier. It’s a novelty to be British there, may as well play into it with the accessories. He wouldn’t be surprised if it was a gag gift from someone else in the British circle that never managed to get thrown into a bin, eventually becoming useful.
It’s probably against some law to look at such a private document, but his curiosity gets the better of him. He opens the binding to see a staunch picture of George looking back at him, hair cropped just a bit above his forehead and face boyishly round. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen when it was taken and that factoid is almost enough to make him lose it, his mouth pulled into a grin as he looks at the details that bear enough resemblance to be George but also feel like they should belong to a completely different person, someone ten years younger that he could never have known. He imagines a squeaky voice to go with it and his gut swirls with laughter.
George probably wouldn’t appreciate him doing that but he can’t help it. It’s something the world was not meant to see, stripped away until it becomes unremarkable. Wilbur would see a face like this on the subway, a chance encounter he would forget once his stop was announced. So much of their lives have become vision boards: collages of images and places that become their brands. He’s one of the rare few that has been allowed to see behind that show curtain George has hooked onto the rod, only to discover there are more layers wedged under like tectonic plates. Some things he’s not meant to know; it comes with the line of work.
So in a way, he’s grateful to have this spyhole to look through. It’s temporary, because this passport is going to travel with this man across the ocean and grant him access to the gates that were for so long forbidding trespassers to enter. Had things gone according to plan from the beginning, Wilbur might not have even met George in person. Their friendship was a coincidence, a wrong turn. George wasn’t supposed to stay in Britain for another two years. They made the most of it with dinners and outings, spending a night curled up in the other’s company when it ran too late to catch the bus.
Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt thinking he was something to distract from the pain, that he wasn’t enough to make George stay. For one selfish moment, he looks at his messenger bag he dropped nonchalantly beside the couch. It could easily conceal the passport; no one would know it’s gone until they went looking. He’d be out the door and out of the city before that happened. George couldn’t leave the country until the search yields something, which it won’t.
A bit more time and Wilbur could work up the courage to say something. He could free his conscience of the confession he’s sure would make it hard for George to look him in the eye ever again and pray for an outcome that would keep his heart in one piece. In a world where George never went to Florida, maybe he would be an option. They could rent a standard apartment downtown and take turns footing the grocery bill, reuniting under the cover of the night when their sleep schedules are messed up enough that they’ll order in anyway. It’s reminiscent of a time before Jubilee Line, when the repercussions of his working schedule on his sleep and diet were so bad that he was a walking stick figure. He’d go through that time again, horribly romanticize it, if it meant he could do it with George.
It’s something he thinks about to pass out at two in the morning on his lumpy mattress. It’s not real.
But taking it wouldn’t do a damn thing. George would file for a replacement; it would be a mild inconvenience. People would yell at him for being irresponsible with his belongings and George would have to take it, not knowing it was someone else’s fault. It would be the worst possible thing to do to someone he loved. That small voice inside of his head couldn’t lie, not even if he came over to join the search and grant George peace of mind.
It takes a disheartening amount of time to fight the impulse, clinging onto what he knows are the last days before George is gone forever. His time with George was always going to be temporary, even in a world where he stayed. There’s no way he could compete with the likes of the Dream Team, who have made themselves more than blood.
“Are you laughing at me?”
Wilbur looks up, his neck popping with how fast he commands the joints to move. George is just closing the door to the supply room, his phone clasped in his left hand.
It would look that way, with the open passport in the palm of Wilbur’s hand. What other use would he have for it? Certainly not to steal it, because what friend would do that?
“Hm? No,” he laughs, “I just don’t think I’ve seen you look this young before.”
George walks closer, flushed a rosy colour that dips under his shirt. “Yeah.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know, young? I can’t renew it for another couple years, but at least I think I need to take another picture for travel to the U.S.”
Wilbur closes the passport, the British coat of arms staring back at him as the only witness to the crime. “Probably. You better send that one to me too, as a souvenir.”
It’s a bit of a weird thing to say, which accurately reflects on George’s face. “Why would I give that to you?” He’s probably thinking it’s ammunition for a joke, which isn’t a stretch. Had it been anyone else, he would have just cause for it. There are already enough weird angle shots floating around on the Internet as is.
“So I have something to remember you by,” Wilbur answers honestly. It’s a lot sadder to say out loud, but he’s past the point of caring.
Sitting beside him once more, George leans into him. He won’t make eye contact, but he doesn’t need to. The gesture says all.
“I’ll see you when you come on tour in the U.S. I expect backstage passes,” he says, only somewhat facetious.
Wilbur sees the inch and walks the mile: tossing an arm over George’s back. “Of course.”
“Just because I’m gone doesn’t mean we’re going to stop talking. You better not.” George finally looks at him, determination darkening his eyes until they’re nearly black. He’s got a much sharper look to him now that his hair is cut.
Laughing, Wilbur pulls him closer, into a side-hug. “I promise. We’ll keep in touch.”
“Good.” While he doesn’t fully relax, he also doesn’t try to get up. Wilbur is allowed to hold him. George runs a lot colder, acting as a heat sink for the warmth that Wilbur is putting off, only some of it because of his heart beating twice as fast.
It’s a rare opportunity, one he might not get for a while. Everything else is blocked out: the clock on the wall that reads twenty minutes into the hour, the phone that George hastily dropped onto the table, even the passport holder. He’s disgusted with the person he was a minute ago, someone who would sabotage all of this just to add a few more days to the calendar. George will always be around, even in the ways he can’t touch.
He’s...satisfied with that.