Justin was livid. She had promised him. Fucking promised him that Brian wouldn't wake up during the night. But, Dr. McCarthy's assurances of sedation aside, Brian had wakened during the night. Or at least he had roused enough that the demons were able to torment him yet again.

He looked over at his partner, still unconscious from the effects of the second sedation last night, and Justin was struck by the innocence and boyishness - the peace - his face reflected in sleep. But that was just another lie. There was no fucking peace for this beautiful, tortured man. Not a single damned moment of escape for him. Even in sleep. Last night proved that.

Justin felt himself again wandering into that newly discovered territory inside his own psyche, that place where his rage burned with a homicidal heat he had never before known.

They fucking called themselves the Kings.

Yeah, he could easily kill Jack Kinney. Without a second fucking thought or a single backward glance. Christ... He thought about all the times Craig or his mom had sat with him at night, easing his fears and vanquishing the monsters he was convinced lurked under his bed or in his closet or outside his window. Formless, shapeless monsters of a frightened child's active imagination. And every day... every fucking moment of his childhood... Brian was trying to merely survive the very real, very incarnate monster that had given him life. God...

Fuck god.                                                                                    

No, Justin wouldn't have left the hospital if he thought Brian might wake up, especially after that traumatic session yesterday and the discussion with Dr. McCarthy in the waiting room. Her reassurance was really the only reason he had agreed to meet Emmett at the loft instead of insisting that they meet here.  

And now... Shit, Michael! If there was one fucking word... just one fucking mention of Brian in the press... He sighed and straightened the stack of magazines he had brought from the loft for Brian, picked up his sketchbook and charcoal, pulled one leg under him and settled in to wait for his lover to wake. His fingers poised above the empty page of his sketchbook, itching to take that first stroke... to draw some normalcy back into his life... but every image that ran through his mind had Brian broken and bleeding and suffering who knows what kind of torture...

With one audible sob, Justin pulled his hands up to cover his face as the book and charcoal slid with soft thuds to the floor. He drew both legs up, wrapping his arms tightly around them, and laid his face down on the tops of his knees. I can't do this here. I can't fucking fall apart here.  

"Hey." The soft voice floated through the room so quietly Justin could almost believe he had imagined the sound.

"Hey. You cryin'?" With the whispered question, Justin felt a single finger poke him in the shoulder. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked up into the worried round eyes of his partner. No, not his partner. Some alter.

"I'm okay," Justin spoke through the thick lump in his throat.

The alter sounded a soft growl-like noise, almost a warning sound. "Don't wake ‘im up. And don't piss on the rug." Without any other notice of Justin, the alter turned over and curled up completely beneath the thin, cotton blanket. And was again fast asleep.

The young man sat watching the curled up figure on the bed, his jaw a bit slack in surprise. Of all the encounters he'd had with the various parts of Brian's personality over the last several days - Christ! Had it only been a few days? - this seemingly innocuous one somehow seemed the most frightening.

*******

They parked the car in the nearly empty visitor's parking lot and walked toward the administrative offices of the non-descript red brick building. Even today, twenty years after the summer Brian spent here, Schuman Detention Center was not a particularly inviting structure. All sharp angles and function from the outside. Most certainly antiseptic and clinical on the inside.

"Certainly the kind of place that'd make a kid want to turn over a new leaf, don't you think, Carl?" 

"Yeah, but unfortunately it's a hell of a lot better than what most of ‘em came from."    

Kaz had to agree with that. He knew it was a fuck load better than what Brian Kinney had apparently come from. He had already filled Carl in on the tentative connection between the two notable arrests in Kinney's history, and the recent disappearance. And now they were here trying to decipher any insight available from the man's past. They didn't expected to get any actual information from the administrators of the facility, even if they had been prone to discussing past inmates. The records wouldn't even be accessible to them at this point. Those were tightly held in some moldering archive somewhere, certainly not important enough at that date and time to transfer to microfiche or other data storage. And, of course, incarceration records of a juvenile are sealed by the courts. Yeah, they knew he was here and when, but what they wanted were specifics of the actual experience Brian had during his stay. And some kind of information on exactly what happened to lead to that experience.

The two men stood in front of the high counter separating the visitor's area from the secretary and waited. Kaz rolled his eyes at the generic motivational posters on the walls, with idealized images of hang gliders and piton wielding mountain climbers and over-challenged athletes - posters which were interspersed with copies of meal plans and duty rosters, with class schedules and lists of visiting hours. The room had the hybrid feel of a high school counselor's office and an employment agency. And just about as much warmth. Just along the far wall he noticed an older man, a bit stooped with age, pushing a utility cart laden with cleaning supplies. Kaz nudged the detective's shoulder and nodded his head once in the direction of the janitor. With Carl's return nod, the investigator headed off to play a hunch.

"Careful there, son. Floor's wet and I don't need no accidents today," the older man cautioned.

"Yeah, thanks, sir. I don't mean to be tracking up your floor." Kaz surveyed the man, assessing him to be around sixty but fairly fit.

"Nah, that'd just be job security," the janitor said with a sly laugh.

"Guess you're right there. You been here at Shuman a long time?"

"Round about twenty five years or so. You got a reason for asking?" The older man's eyes drew into suspicious slits as he rested his arm atop the handle of his mop.

Bingo, Kaz thought to himself. His hunch hand been right - the man was here at the time of Brian's incarceration. Government jobs, regardless of the skill level, seemed to inure longevity with their pay scales and benefits. He knew a lot of messed up kids had passed through these halls since 1984, but Brian... well, he seemed to have a way of being memorable. Here's hoping...

"Actually, yeah, I do," he replied, pulling out his identification. "Kaz Krawczynski. I'm an investigator looking into the disappearance of a man here in Pittsburgh. The man's been found, but he's not... able to tell us much about what happened. We're checking out everything we can think of, and know he did six months here when he was thirteen, fourteen. 1984."

"George Whitney," the janitor introduced himself, holding out his hand to the investigator. "That's seems a long time ago when you're dealing with someone going missing now. And I sure don't know if I'd remember a boy from over twenty years ago."

"I understand, Mr. Whitney. I'll be honest. We have some reason to believe there is a connection. And I know it's asking a lot of anyone's memory, but if you could just take a minute to think back, it would be appreciated. The boy's name was Brian Kinney. Tall for his age, a rather handsome kid. Probably a loner. Would have been here from March '84 through September that year."

"Kinney, you say? Shit. If it's the boy I'm thinking of, that was a sorry case."

Kaz's ears perked up. "Sorry case?"

"Sorry case. Boy didn't need to be here, he needed a hospital. Sumbitches did that boy wrong."

Kaz said nothing. He just let the man talk at will. And he felt he had a gut feeling he had hit a home run on his first time at bat. Shit.

"I even told them, but they damn sure don't listen to the janitor." George shook his head, sadly. "He was such a... well... pretty boy is the only way to describe him. Not a fancy boy, like, just beautiful. But sad. Damn, that boy was messed up - didn't even know who he was half the time. Scared as shit one minute, and cocky as the devil himself the next. I had a sister who had some mental problems and I could see it plain as day. That's why he stayed with me all this time. He reminded me of Sarah. I kept an eye on him as much as I could. But he took his share of shit from the older boys. ‘Specially when he was out of it." George paused, sighing in regret at what the boy had endured.  

"What do you mean by ‘out of it', Mr. Whitney?"

"Oh, like I said, he didn't even know who he was half the time, making up names for himself, pretending to be somebody else. And he would get so damned scared! Tormented. The boy was plain tormented by something."

"Did you ever know why he was at Shuman?"

"Not really. They don't let us know stuff like that and he didn't say much about it. Just that he tried to hurt somebody. Hard to believe, though. That boy never struck out at anybody unless they struck out first."

Kaz reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, handing it to the older man. "Mr. Whitney, you've been very helpful and you have my thanks. If you remember anything - anything else at all - give me a call at the number on that card." He put an easy hand on George's shoulder, as he turned to walk away.

"Oh, one other thing," the man called as Kaz began walking away to meet Carl. He turned back as the janitor continued. "One afternoon I was doing some work cleaning up a mess some of the boys made in the community room. That was the only time I knew of the boy having a visitor in the whole time he was here. Some man, don't know who it was, but the boy was terrified of him. Think they actually did put him in the infirmary that night. The boy just kept screaming ‘no no no'."

"Can you remember anything else about the visitor? Name? What he looked like?"

"No. Didn't take much notice of him. Just the boy." The janitor again shook his head regretfully.

"Thanks. Again. If you remember anything else, just give me a call."

Kaz walked away, realizing he now had more questions than ever. And a sadness that engulfed every inch of him.

*******

Emmett sat uneasily on the sofa in Debbie's living room, a newspaper twisted and crushed in his hands, his cold face a contradiction to the hot fury running through his body. He listened quietly to the various snippets of conversation going on around him.

...can't believe this shit! ...gonna kill that little shit. He should have told us! ...none of our business! ...shit can't be true ...too strong for this ...Gus can't find out this! ...what's the asshole up to now?

"I don't know, Mel. What do you think the asshole could possibly be up to with this?" Emmett's icy voice cut through the cacophony, shocking them all into an uneasy silence. His soft heart had simply been crushed when he pulled the mid-morning town crier rag from the box on the corner and saw the headline.

‘Kinney Suffers Mental Breakdown'

The story that followed was devastating. How much of it, if any of it, was true was anyone's guess at this point. But of course Emmett wasn't naïve. He knew that when it came to Brian Kinney's reputation, truth and privacy and fucking loyalty would seldom matter. To the public or the majority of his friends, apparently.

Fuck Michael! Fuck them all!

"Emmett, you know Brian. You think this shit is for real? He's never done a damned thing in his life that didn't benefit him....

"Melanie..." Lindsay tried to quiet her wife. She, herself, was livid with Justin for his veil of silence during this whole thing - keeping the family at such a distance - and she couldn't believe that Brian would have agreed to such secrecy. But she knew that Melanie stirring it up, antagonizing an obviously distraught Emmett, wasn't going to help them figure this all out. 

"Yes, Melanie. Listen to your wife. Or would you rather listen to Brian's best friend?" The vitriol in Emmett's words weren't lost on the group as his eyes fell on Michael.

"The fuck, Emmett! I didn't write the damned article!"Michael was painfully aware of his own part in the article that had come out today, but he knew it wasn't his fault! He had just been frustrated and angry and...

"Emmett! What's gotten into you? Michael had nothing to do..." Debbie automatically stepped in between her son and his friend.

"You have no idea, Deb, just how much your son had to do with this." Debbie looked at him, a bit stunned at his interruption and the pain in his voice. Emmett turned back to his friend. "Doesshe, Michael?"

"Jesus! It was a mistake, Emmett! A fucking little mistake!" Michael looked toward his husband for support. Ben wrapped an arm around him, but Michael could feel a certain stiffness in the gesture. "Ben?"

"Michael, I..."

"Fuck! If that little shit had been fucking honest with us... We're Brian's family, for Christ's sake!"

Emmett quietly stepped closer to Michael, an amazingly intimidating sight to everyone in the room. They were all suddenly aware of how much raw power the tall queen actually commanded. The naturally sweet understanding and buoyant light of his personality was now gone. In its place was a dark resolve - a harsh fortitude. He didn't raise his voice. There was no flamboyant hysteria or guilded lily in his demeanor. He was deadly serious when he spoke.

"You have no idea, Michael, what family or friendship is really about." With a single raised hand, he stopped Michael's budding protest. "Absolutely no idea." Looking quickly around the room, his eyes landing on each and every one individually for a mere moment, he continued. "I don't think any of you have an idea."

Emmett was actually surprised at the abashed looks on the faces around him. "Or maybe you all do have an idea... So?...What? Did you just collectively decide that Brian didn't deserve the benefits of that knowledge? Hmm? That he, for whatever reason, fell somewhere outside the true label of friend or family? WHAT?

"Michael, you sat last night, in a room full of sixty, seventy queers and shouted - yelled out where Brian was, including all of the dirty details you were aware of! That was a little fucking mistake?" He laughed in frustration and anger. "I tried to shut you up. I tried to get you to leave. Did you even think of listening to me? No. NO! You had your feeling hurt over something that wasn't even any of your business! And...Surprise! It's all in the paper this morning!" He rubbed his eyes, suddenly tired of the ridiculous drama that was his family.

"You, Michael," he continued, sounding just a little broken. "This is all on you. And I, for one, am entirely done with you. If you could do that to your ‘best friend' - betray him that publicly because your feelings were hurt - then what the hell do you have in store for the rest of us?"

He collected his coat and the crumpled newspaper from the sofa without even a glance toward anyone else in the room. He walked a bit slowly to the door and stepped out onto the familiar front porch. This was a place that had cradled him, harbored him only mere months ago after the bombing. This place and those inside had been his world, his home since he arrived in the city from Mississippi, and here he had grown into the man he now was. For that he would always be grateful - he would always remember. But as he closed the door and heard the solid click of the latch behind him, he unknowingly shared an unexpressed sentiment that a certain blond artist had felt in this same spot mere days before.

He felt a sense of finality.