Work Text:
Into the silence, Jonny casually drops, “So, my mother’s in town,” like this is a totally normal, everyday occurrence.
“You have a mother?” Raphaella asks it clinically, like she’s about to take notes. While it’s probably not the most delicate way of approaching the subject, she least saves the rest of them from having to react immediately.
“Well I didn’t smash my way out of Bill Vangelis’s head, may he rest in pieces, fully formed,” Jonny says like this should be obvious.
It isn’t. Even Nastya, who did, actually, know Jonny had a mother who was still at least nominally in the picture, is surprised when he continues, “Anyway, I’m having dinner with her next week.”
As far as Nastya knows, Jonny was fifteen when he last saw his mother — she’d been in town for a weekend, and, again, had taken him out to dinner. The next year, she’d called on his birthday, but after that, Nastya had pretty much forgotten that she existed. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t present, it was that even her absence didn’t really feel like a presence in Jonny’s life, not the way Bill Vangelis’s did.
“What night?” Tim asks, and there’s some intensity there in his usually pretty uninflected voice.
Jonny must hear it, too — and, more than that, must not have been expecting it — because he sounds a little thrown as he answers. “Um, Friday?”
Tim nods. “I’ll get Julie to cover for me,” he says, and Nastya knows that he usually closes at the café on Fridays, but apparently this week he’s decided he’ll be crashing Jonny’s date with his semi-estranged mother instead. And yeah, now that Nastya has thought of it in those terms, she wonders if she shouldn’t do the same.
“Sure,” Jonny says, and Nastya doesn’t quite know what that tone means, but she mostly tries not to get too involved in Jonny and Tim’s relationship, so she tries not to read too much into it anyway. “Come along if you want — it’s her treat, and she always wants to go somewhere ritzy enough that they look like they kind of want to kick me out.”
That’s good, probably, Nastya thinks — whatever this woman’s deal is, it’s good that he’ll have some kind of backup there, and while Tim has mellowed a bit over the last few years, Nastya thinks he hasn’t fully outgrown his murderously protective side. But then Raphaella says, “That’s the night Brian and Ivy are in town to visit,” and everything shifts again.
“Right!” Jonny agrees, wild grin stretching across his face. “That’s right it is,” and he’d clearly forgotten this fact until right at this exact moment. “Think they want to spend their weekend in the city meeting a celebrity?”
“And what makes her a celebrity, exactly?” Ashes asks. There’s something a little dangerous in their tone, and Nastya doesn’t think it’s directed at Jonny. “Just because she’s related to you?”
“Well, yeah, of course, fame by association,” Jonny says, but Nastya can tell his heart’s not in it.
She says, “Brian and Ivy will visit again, if you want to take some time to spend with your mom.”
Jonny laughs, and Nastya knows in an instant that she’s miscalculated. “Oh no,” he says, “I think it’s very important that she gets to meet the people who are an important part of my life,” which is a sentence Nastya isn’t sure she’s ever heard deployed with such viciousness. “How about it? Tim’s in, Nastya are you free?” she nods a little cautiously. “Grand. TS, you’re welcome to bring Wonder or the new one—”
“Samuel Nutcracker!” The Toy Soldier volunteers cheerfully. “On account of his many teeth.”
“RIght, fine, Samuel’s welcome, but no Megan and definitely no Teddy. Brian and Ivy aren’t here to defend themselves so they’re in by default, Raph likes a social experiment,” Raphaella nods, “Marius likes when social experiments are also parties,” Marius beams, “And Ashes?”
Ashes stares him down, eyebrows raised. “Yeah? What’s my Senior Superlative?”
Jonny grins like blood in the water. “Want to eat a nice steak and piss somebody off at the same time?”
The answer is written all over Ashes’s face, Jonny doesn’t even wait for a verbal response.
“Excellent,” Jonny says, “Table for ten it is. I’ll let her know.
…
Jonny’s just sort of drifting, not even thinking about the conversation earlier in the evening or the consequences of it later this week, just slow and easy with post-orgasm lassitude. He guesses it must be like this for Tim every time, with the way he drops off after, but Jonny has never been able to use sex as a shortcut for sleep. He doesn’t get to this time, either, though, since Tim, who seems to have picked up some wakefulness where Jonny left it, speaks.
“You could have told me, you know.”
Jonny turns his head on the pillow to direct a blank look in Tim’s direction. “I did. Right out there in the living room, I could have sworn you were there.”
“Jonny—” there’s this almost-pained look on Tim’s face, exquisitely uncomfortable for no very good reason that Jonny can see. He looks like he thinks Jonny knows what he’s thinking and is just making him say it out loud to be a dick, but Jonny doesn’t actually know this time, so Tim can suck it up, maybe.
“Fancy dinner, changing your work schedule to crash the party — ringing any bells?”
“I don’t — I don’t have to,” Tim offers, and that isn’t what Jonny means, either.
“No, no, if nouveau cuisine with the glitterati dilettante who contributed half of my DNA sounds like your idea of a good time, by all means!” It comes out wrong, though. “That makes it sound a lot cooler than it’s actually going to be.” It also makes it sound like he doesn’t want Tim there, or like he’s trying to brush Tim off, which doesn’t feel like what he wants, either.
“Before now,” Tim says, and Jonny still doesn’t know what he’s looking for with this. “You could have told me before now, how things were with your mom. Or now, even, because I still don’t know anything about it, really.”
“That’s because things aren’t anything with her,” Jonny says, and this, this is why he doesn’t mention her, because people always expect him to have something to say when there just isn’t anything. “There’s nothing to know. She wasn’t here to say anything about, so I didn’t, and now she’s going to be here, so I told you she was coming. I wasn’t, like, hiding anything.” Not that it would be Tim’s business if he did, but he didn’t, so he might as well get that on the record, too.
“No, I know,” there’s something strained in his tone, like he still isn’t getting at what he actually wants to say and knows it. Jonny wouldn’t mind filling in the blanks for him if he knew, but he doesn’t, so he just waits for the next bit of the sentence. “I know you weren’t, and I’m not saying you, like, have to tell me things, that’s not — I just want—”
“Yeah?”
“It’s stupid.”
Jonny props himself up on one elbow, too awake now to feel comfortable lying prone for a conversation like this, whatever this is. “Yeah, probably,” he agrees. “Tell me anyway.”
Tim rolls over, too, facing Jonny, those big dark eyes looking like holes in the universe staring out of his face in the dark. “I want to be the one who knows things about you. One of the ones. You’re so — not everything has to be a good story before you tell it, it could just be true, and you could say it, and I could know it.” I could know you, Jonny hears running under the words.
“Right, yeah, because we do so much talking about our feelings.” Jonny seems to remember Tim deciding they were going to live together without so much as a phone call between high school graduation and his arrival on Jonny and TS’s doorstep.
Tim sighs. “I said it was stupid.”
Yeah, he did say that. Jonny isn’t sure he’s ready to agree yet, though. Instead, he reaches out — sometimes his body is so much better at knowing what to say to Tim than the rest of him.
…
The restaurant is, as Jonny promised, pretty ritzy, and the woman standing outside to meet them is the kind of well-put-together — skin and face and hair and clothes like she just stepped out of a magazine — where it’s impossible to tell if she’s pretty or not, there’s too much perfect spread across the top to be able to tell. She also looks an awful lot like Jonny, which doesn’t feel quite right to Ashes. People who ditch shouldn’t get to leave their DNA written all over your face, it’s not fair.
“You must be Jonny’s…” And she trails off, clearly waiting for one of them to fill in the blank.
“I’m Jonny’s therapist,” Marius, bless him, volunteers. Ashes wonders if they can come up with something equally horrifying to say.
Before they get the chance, Jonny, Tim and TS come jogging up. “Late,” Raphaella notes.
“The bus was on drugs, fucking bite me,” Jonny tells her. Then he turns to the fashion plate shifting uncomfortably on the sidewalk in front of them. “Mum.”
“Jonathan, I’m so pleased our schedules aligned for this,” she says, drawing a wide, carefully-pretty smile across her face. “I was just meeting your …friends?”
“Oh, is that what they told you,” Jonny says, looking the group of them over with what Ashes is pretty sure is pride. It’s true, they make quite a sight — Raph is wearing a pair of fairy wings, Ivy’s hair is four different colors, Brian heard that the place was “fancy” and dug out his top hat from high school, and that’s just the beginning.
“I told her I was your therapist,” Marius volunteers.
“Yeah, don’t listen to him, he’s a pathological liar,” Jonny tells his mother. “No, these are my partners. Like, romantically. We’re in love.”
“What,” Jonny’s mother, whose name they have not heard yet, says, “All of them?”
“Yes,” Jonny says, staring them down with you’d better hold the line on this written all across his face. “All of them. And you wanted to meet my someone special, right? They’re all ordering steak. Or lobster, or…” and here he falters, glancing over at Tim, “Or whatever the vegetarian equivalent is.”
To her credit, Jonny’s mother doesn’t blink at this, just gestures and says, “We’d better get started then, shouldn’t we?”
There’s definitely an energy about the way the maître d’ greets Jonny’s mom that has Marius asking if she’s some kind of celebrity.
“Oh, no, nothing like that, but I’m a fashion journalist, didn’t Jonny tell you?” she asks, and Ashes can see the way she’s scanning each of them, trying to locate someone in their group who looks likely to be impressed by this.
“Nah, Jonny’s not big on telling people things,” Ashes says, and it’s a power play, a little, a jab at the way this woman clearly doesn’t know her kid at all, but it seems to go right over her head.
“I suppose children never think their parents’ jobs are very interesting,” and Ashes thinks that Jonny would normally be livid to be condescended to like that, but he actually looks pretty amused by the whole situation.
“Yes, you’re very boring, mother,” he tells her, and she dimples back at him.
“And you are playing games, child,” she says, “But I’ll know which one of your friends you’re actually dating by the end of the night.” Her smile goes a little cutthroat, and there she goes again, looking much too much like Jonny for comfort. “My money’s on the vegetarian.”
…
After, they go to a bar.
It’s deserved, it’s earned, and it’s really only fair to Ivy and Brian, who don’t get off their respective campuses nearly often enough to want to waste a night not doing any of the things they wanted to. It’s good, too, and they don’t even get kicked out at the end, but after a couple of hours, Jonny just feels — tired.
He makes some vague excuse about an early day and ignores the sympathy on Nastya’s face, and is only faintly surprised when Tim follows him out. The walk home isn’t far, and normally at this time of night, Jonny would have something interesting to say, some fun topic of conversation to introduce, but tonight, everything that runs through his mind has sharper edges than he’d like, so he stays quiet and stays quiet, and stays quiet, right up until he doesn’t anymore.
“She wrote a whole column about gender-non-conforming fashion, after I came out to dad,” Jonny says. It’s a slip, calling Bill “dad” like that, all casual, like he still means something to Jonny. Jonny sighs. It’s a weird night, he figures he’s allowed a slip or two.
Tim looks confused. “But that’s not—”
Jonny knows what it’s not — not useful, not kind, not at all the point of what Jonny was saying to her. “It’s not anything. Yeah. I think maybe—” Jonny winds and unwinds his fingers around the hem of his t-shirt and thinks about how much he doesn’t want to finish this sentence, a secret thought that’s been building in the back of his mind, never articulated, for the better part of a decade now. It spills out anyway.
“Maybe if she hadn’t, you know, taken a side—” Jonny’s side, ostensibly, but also not her business, going around taking a side like she matters when by then she’d been gone as long as she’d ever been present. “Maybe he would have— or wouldn’t have—” it’s hard to say, what possibilities there might have been. It doesn’t matter now, Jonny’s father is dead and buried, but sometimes he wonders—
Tim’s still not saying anything. That’s not unusual, but Jonny hates a waiting silence, it makes him want to fill it, and he’s not sure there’s anything he wants to say right now. He looks up and Tim is looking at him, gaze all steady, and when their eyes meet, he reaches out and takes Jonny’s hand, perfunctory, like they’re children crossing the street. Jonny looks down.
“It’s stupid shit, anyway,” he mutters, because it is, it is. “None of it matters, okay, that’s why you don’t know about it.” He squeezes their clasped hands lightly, instinctively, barely noticing that he’s doing it until Tim squeezes back.
“Okay,” he says carefully, not like he’s humoring Jonny so much as like he’s thinking it through — which is better, though what there is to think through about that relatively simple concept, Jonny doesn’t know. “And things that do matter are—?”
“Like, you know.” Jonny tries not to flail for an answer, because Tim must know, he must, it’s obvious. “You know. This.” Jonny looks down at their joined hands. “The many faces of TS, Ashes’s inevitable world-domination. Fucking up and scaring off Nastya’s girlfriends. Brian the wholesome necromancer. The fact that Ivy probably killed a man. Beating Marius and Raphaella at trivia night. Your little nightmare-cats. My someday Laundry Poems best seller. Just, like. Stuff.”
“Right.” Tim is smiling now, which is good because if Jonny’s fucking mother of all people had made him sad somehow, Jonny would have been pissed. “Important things.”
“Yeah.” And they are. Jonny thinks a lot of most people’s problems come down to not being able to tell what are important things to get upset about, and which are not-important things to chuck into a dumpster under cover of darkness. “I just — when you said — I don’t want you to think that just because I don’t go around, like, spilling my guts about, you know. This kind of thing. I don’t want you to think that means you don’t know me.” Sometimes Jonny thinks Tim knows him too well, terrifyingly so.
“Oh,” Tim looks a little startled at that. “Oh, I know that. Of course I know you,” and that’s — Jonny’s not going to protest because he was just explaining that Tim does, but that easy certainty makes him squirm a bit, too. “I just didn’t want you to think that you couldn’t. Tell me things. I know we don’t always, like. Talk about shit. But you could.”
But, “That’s not all. You said. The thing about knowing things about me,” Jonny remembers this, it’s been running through his mind over and over again for days, Tim doesn’t get to just wiggle out of that by acting like he never said it.
Tim draws back, a bit, the tension between their joined hands going taught. Jonny yanks him back. It’s not bad, what Tim said, Jonny just isn’t quite sure he gets it, still.
“Right. I did. I just thought — it means something, doesn’t it?”
Most things mean something, but in this case, Jonny’s still not sure he’s following. Luckily, Tim seems to have noticed that he hasn’t actually cleared anything up with this, because he stumbles on. “If a, a relationship is going to mean something,” he says, not meeting Jonny’s eyes, “Or, like, last. It’s usually people who have figured out how to say some of this shit,” and there, there, of all places, is where he looks up.
Jonny feels caught. He slows on the sidewalk, he stares back, he says, “Well — we’re talking about it now, aren’t we?” and he kind of means it to come out confrontationally, but he’s also kind of glad when it doesn’t, because Tim looks as nervy as Jonny feels, and Jonny has this feeling that if he let his tone get too defensive, Tim might bolt.
It comes out kind of tentative, instead, which is its own kind of mortifying, but seems to work, because then Jonny sees a flash of white teeth shining out from the way Tim, all dark hair and dark beard, sort of fades into the night, and Tim is smiling like Jonny said something useful, something that means anything, and he says, “Yeah, I guess we are.”