Work Text:
Manhattan on the Fourth of July is loud. There's parties, parades, police sirens – nobody here is getting a wink of sleep, so Scott and Kip don't try. They stand out on the balcony and watch the chaos, until their eyes are drawn upward together, as fireworks start to rain down from the sky.
“Happy Fuck Columbus Day, I guess,” Kip cheers, and offers his whisky glass for the clinking.
“Fuck Columbus,” Scott agrees, though it still feels a little sacrilegious. He taps his glass against Kip's and drinks down the urge to say something sappy. You are opening my eyes, you are making me a better person, today and every day. Instead, he says, “You know, it's my birthday today.”
Kip snorts. “Bullshit, it is not.”
“It is.” Scott nods. “It's on my driver's licence and everything.”
Kip tilts his head, examining Scott's expression for a sign that he's fucking with him. He's not – earnest as always – and it makes Kip smile.
“Do you now, or have you ever owned a Golden Retriever?” he teases.
“Tragically, never,” Scott laments, “although I did work with a few, for photo shoots. Especially my rookie year.”
“Photo shoots plural?”
“I was first in the draft! Everyone got really excited. It's never an American. Monty and the guys were psyched, really pushing the hometown hero angle, you know?”
“I thought you said the Admirals never get good draft picks?” Kip frowns.
“Because we're too good. Now.” Scott raises an eyebrow, a cocky glint in his eye, and Kip grins.
There's a distant boom and red, white, and blue explodes into the sky. The crowd beneath them roars, and that feels distant too, as Scott pulls Kip into his arms. They're still, ostensibly, watching, even if Kip is just more aware of Scott's body, his heartbeat pressed against his back, than he is of the celebration. Born in the USA is blaring from somewhere and everywhere, and it's a fucking hilariously ignorant song choice and they do it every year, but this time Kip has something else he'd rather be listening to anyway.
“Hometown hero, huh?”
Scott ducks his head down, and dots a kiss right by his ear.
“I'm from Rochester, technically,” he explains, “which, I mean, it's close enough, but after the accident, St Thomas moved me out here, so I grew up in Brooklyn. When I wasn't on the ice I was hanging out in arcades and comic book stores that aren't there anymore. Busting open fire hydrants in summer. Bodegas, Coney Island, the whole deal. I am New York. They love me, I love them - not just the Admirals, but this whole place, you know?”
Kip knows. He feels it in the way the crowd cheers for Scott, and in the way he wears the Empire State Building emblazoned on his chest with such pride. But it's also in the way he will take any opportunity to voice opinions about the Mets, he knows Central Park like the back of his hand, and he's the least scared of street food of any athlete Kip knows – and he knows a few, these days.
Kip also knows what it's like to love New York. His dad has worked for the City's sanitation department as long as he can remember, and it takes a lot of love for a place to spend your life cleaning it up when it's determined to perpetually out-mess you. It's given him a deep respect for unions and for hard work and for those comic book stores Scott misses so much, and the little barbershops and hole-in-the-wall eateries clinging to life in an ever-growing, climbing, consuming city. It's such a quintessential artists' life: all over the world, he knows, people would kill to work themselves to death here just to be able to do it amongst the brownstones and MOMA and the Met and street chalk and Pratt and Julliard and kitschy little cafes and Broadway and off-Broadway and art, art, art, everywhere he looks.
And.
“Have you ever been to Stonewall?”
Scott's hands tense around his waist. He buries his nose in Kip's hair, and eventually confesses -
“No. Never. They invited me to the anniversary last week, but... I chickened out.”
In his mind's eye, Kip can see the way Scott's cheeks burn with shame and pain and everything he'd hidden before. He remembers how petrified Scott had been of coming to the Kingfisher, as if a neon sign would appear above his head for even thinking about it: SCOTT HUNTER, HOMOSEXUAL. Of course he'd struggle with a visit to the most famous gay bar in the world. Then again, every headline about him basically starts with that these days, so what is there to lose?
Kip draws patterns with his fingers on Scott's forearms where they cross his waist.
“Why?” he asks, as gently as he can.
“I don't know,” Scott replies. Then he sighs and pulls away, pacing back up to the balustrade so he can bury his expression in the crowd and the glass and not watch Kip watching him. “I guess... maybe I feel like I'm going to learn some things I'm not ready to learn in front of everybody. I don't know shit about the police, or AIDS, or fucking, anything, really – anything real, anyway - and they wanted to give me an award. For bravery. For kissing my boyfriend. It's crazy, I feel so selfish. And it's like, I want to do better, I want to help, but every time I open my mouth I feel like I'm going to stick my foot in it. In front of the whole world. I can't do this, I don't even know where to start.”
“Start where you are.”
Kip says it like it's the easiest thing in the world, and it knocks Scott a little off his axis. He turns.
“Hm?”
Kip offers a small, reassuring smile.
“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can,” he recites. “It's one of my favourites.”
“Isn't that Arthur Ashe? The tennis player?”
“It's Arthur Ashe, the first and best Black tennis player in the country,” Kip corrects him. “And, AIDS victim, AIDS advocate, anti-apartheid activist. There's an ESPY award named after him.”
“I knew that. Shit, I need to pay more attention at those things. Didn't he get arrested?”
“Twice.”
“Damn.”
Scott shakes his head, and watches the last sip of whisky dance around the bottom of his glass. Kip sets his drink aside and steps up next to him, close enough to bump shoulders, and tries again.
“Scott,” he breathes. “You tortured yourself for twenty years keeping a secret you should have never had to keep. That's real. The damage it did to you is real. Please, give yourself some fucking credit, okay? Personally, I think you're entitled to be a little selfish. Which you're not, by the way. Not as much as you think. Don't you think Hollander and Rozanov felt better having you in their corner? Don't you think Carter gets taken more seriously because The Scott Hunter personally demands it?”
“That's just being a friend,” Scott protests.
“Okay. Then be a friend, start there. Be a leader. Be a captain. Hockey. That's where you are. That's what you have right now. And look, I- no offence, but I hope I never understand the level of scrutiny you're under. It's tough enough being five feet to the side of the laser beam. But there'll always be people who think you can never do enough, who think everything you do is wrong - those people are already out there. You can take it. And if you can't, I'll be here. Trust me. Start where you are. It's already helping.”
Scott turns, and Kip is looking up at him with such earnest eyes it takes his breath away for a second. It's daunting, yes, but for Kip to have so much faith in him... Maybe he can do this. Maybe, together, they can figure out what this even is.
“And I can teach you,” Kip offers. “The other stuff. AIDS history, and Stonewall, and all that. Maybe we can go on some random day that's not the biggest queer event in the Western world.”
Scott snorts. That hadn't even occurred to him, not since the invite at least. Fuck, he loves Kip – even more with every passing second, if that's possible, as Kip, eyes gleaming with inspiration, pulls out his phone and paces the balcony and taps furiously as he continues -
“We can have movie nights. How to Survive a Plague, that's going on there. Paris is Burning. You have to watch Moonlight. Please tell me you've seen Brokeback Mountain. Philadelphia. Before Stonewall. Ooh! I get to make you watch Rocky Horror! Okay. Okay. I'm texting Shawn. I'm so excited!”
He gravitates back inside, entranced with his new project, and Scott trails behind to pick up his glass and their dishes from dinner. As he loads them in the dishwasher, his eyes keep pulling back to Kip, beaming and laughing on the phone with his friend as they plot out how to share a whole new life with him. One that he couldn't have even imagined until recently. One that he knows too many people can't imagine for themselves either, and somewhere inside, he feels the resolve knot together, that he'll do what he can to change that.
This is the perfect place to start.