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Sonny Boy had that drink - or three. In the early morning he was still having them. A celebration of the ignited rage in his soul and the burning of Jack in effigy, the symbolic destruction of the evil one. Never again. Never. Mac had been so tired, so afraid. Struggling so hard to just remember. Sonny wasn't going to allow that. Had to prevent that. Had to protect them. Protect them all. His brothers all. He would let them sleep and he would remember. He would burn Jack as many times as necessary. And then he would forget.

And his forgetfulness lay in the taste at the bottom of a bottle. In the smell of cheap perfume and cologne. In the tightening feel of warm thighs around his waist. In the sound of his own racing heart. In the smell of sex and booze.

The laughter of the woman on his lap brought him back from those thoughts. Be here now, he reminded himself. Nothing exists but here. Now. This. She wasn't exactly pretty. Or young. But she was here and now and she was offering forgetfulness. And Sonny was taking her up on her offer. Protection demanded it.

She ground herself down upon Sonny's lap. He was too far into drink to respond fully, but he soaked in her attention - his hands tangled in the short, dark hair, his mouth devouring her painted red one. He almost didn't feel the slight touch on his shoulder or hear the broken almost-whisper.

"Brian?"

He threw off the hand with a shrug, clutched the dark hair tighter in his own hands and laughingly buried his face in the cleavage exposed by an unbuttoned blouse. Another broken word. Louder.

"Brian?"

Sonny sighed and clenched his jaw. Cocking his head slightly he stared into the blue eyes of the young blond man at his side.

"I think you may be mistakin' me for another," came the soft brogue and a smile up at the man. "I'm not this Brian you are looking for."

Justin stood frozen, looking down into the now glassy hazel eyes of Brian Kinney. He took in the cheap plaid shirt and the grimy jeans, the gelled hair slicked back from that beautiful face.

"You are Brian Kinney."

"Did you not hear me the first time? I'm not this Brian, ‘tho it is a good Irish name." Sonny laughed. Turning his attention back to the woman on his lap, he dismissed the young man.

Confusion written on his face, Justin turned to Carl and Kaz. "What the..."

"Like I said, not the Brian Kinney you thought you knew," Kaz offered. He had been watching Brian for over two hours and nothing about his actions or speech reflected the legendary stud. Kaz had begun to wonder if this actually was Brian, if he had perhaps made a mistake. But...if his own partner thought this was Brian?

The three men didn't move. They simply stood and watched while the man they knew as Brian Kinney behaved and sounded like anyone but.

Sonny could feel the eyes on him. Could smell the confusion, even fear rolling off the men. A chill ran down his spine. A too familiar feeling began to build in his gut.

"Never again," he whispered to himself as he moved the woman from his lap and rose from the chair. There was no laughing demeanor about him now. Nothing casual about his stance. Shoulders back, he brought himself to his full height, feet slightly apart, hands fisted by his side. He was prepared for their attack.

"Gentlemen, I am not your Brian Kinney. I'll not say it again. Now you have no business with me."

Justin knew those eyes, the flecks of green flashing. The eyes of an angry Brian. Why Brian was behaving like this, he didn't know. Disappearing, denying who he was, making out with a woman, for fuck sake?

Justin started to move toward Brian as Carl put his restraining hand on his arm. But he had to try once more.

"What's going on, Bri? What happened?"

Sonny's arm came up across Justin's throat as he pushed and pinned the young man to the back wall of the bar, knocking over the chair as he moved. Even in his shock at Brian's actions, Justin saw it - one flicker of fear and pain, one hint of his Brian crossed hazel eyes. For the briefest of moments. In the seconds it took Kaz and Carl to reach Brian and pull him from Justin, it was gone. Just the anger there now.

"I'm not him," Sonny claimed again, almost in a whisper. And again, "I'm not him."

Then a collapse into total blackness.

*******

He sat and waited. It seemed an eternity that he'd been here, although that ugly institutional wall clock told him it had only been a couple of hours. Sitting in the hard, blue plastic chair, one of many in a line of bolted-together hard, blue plastic chairs, made the time pass much more slowly. He had too much time to think and he would rather not do a lot of that right now. ER waiting rooms didn't have a lot in the way of distractions, which he thought odd. Where better to place distractions than in a room full of people worried about someone injured or ill? And shitfuck, he was worried. Everything was a damned mess.  

Justin and Carl hadn't contacted the family yet. Knowing what a madhouse the waiting room would become when that crowd descended, they decided to wait until they at least knew somethingAnything. Carl had gone to the station, Justin having promised to call him as soon as he had anything to relate. Kaz had accompanied Justin to the hospital, but had since gone home. Now that Brian had been found, his part of the drama was essentially over. Justin had the stray thought that he needed to properly thank the man for his quick work. But right now he had other things to worry about. Brian. God, what the fuck was happening? The inactivity pulled heavily on Justin's eyelids and he gave up the struggle and closed them.

He was dreaming, he knew that on some cognitive level. He felt trapped, locked inside some complicated Chinese tangram, trying desperately to fit all the pieces together to make the image appear again. But the fit was off. Some small pieces were broken and, no matter how they were forced together, the resulting image seemed cracked - fractured.

"Who is here for Brian Kinney?"

Justin had been lost in his dreams of Chinese puzzles and broken pieces when the voice broke through the near silence of the room. Startled from his sleep, he jerked his head up quickly to see a fortyish man in green scrubs standing in the double doorway separating the waiting room from the ER proper. Quickly getting to his feet, his heart racing with thoughts of Brian's condition, he answered breathlessly, "I'm his partner, Justin Taylor. I also have his medical POA."

"Mr. Taylor, I'm Dr. Patterson, attending in ER. I just wanted to bring you up to date on what little we know at this point. Mr. Kinney is still unconscious and that concerns me somewhat, although I suspect the alcohol in his system is one of the culprits there. We've run blood tests and are waiting for results on those." The doctor looked down, leafing through paperwork he held in his hand. "Based upon information provided to us by the first responders regarding some disorientation and confusion on Mr. Kinney's part prior to his loss of consciousness, we also performed a CT scan and, as well, we are waiting for the result from neurology on that front to rule out head trauma or other pathology. Of course, he will be admitted based upon his continued lack of consciousness."

"Dr. Patterson, this is more than ‘some disorientation and confusion', as you stated! My partner went missing over a week ago, abandoning his car, his home and his business. When the investigator found him, he was in a bar making out with a woman, for Christ's sake, adamantly claiming he wasn't Brian Kinney! He was speaking with a freaking Irish accent!" Justin was beginning to melt down. Anger at everything that was happening to Brian, as well as the stress of the past couple of days exploded inside him and he was just too raw to keep it from leaching out. No, shouting at the doctor wasn't productive, but it sure as hell felt cathartic right now.  "Right before he lost consciousness, he got physically violent with me and had to be restrained. He was a total stranger..."

Tears wet Justin's face and he collapsed back into the hard, blue plastic chair, exhausted. The doctor eased himself down into an adjoined chair and placed his hand on Justin's shoulder. He just let the young man cry.

"Mr. Taylor, I know this is stressful - has been stressful. At this point - without more information - there simply is no way of knowing what is going on with your partner. It would be unprofessional of me to even hazard a guess at this juncture. I do promise that we will do everything we can."   

Justin wiped his face and took one, two deep breaths to calm himself. God. He knew this wasn't about his own fucking issues or his own fucking stress or how fucking tired he was. Right now was about BrianOnly about Brian.

"Can I be with him?"

"Of course. I'll take you back."

*******

Cynthia Moore placed the investigator's report back on her desk, walked over to the credenza and poured herself a Kettle 1. A little early, she thought to herself, but what the hell. What's a little vodka before noon, eh? Some of the most concrete facts of life as she had come to know it had been shredded lately, so who was she to worry about some socially constructed drinking rule?

Although Carl wanted to keep the information Kaz had discovered between himself and Justin, Justin felt it only fair Cynthia be included in the knowledge. After all, she was essentially running Brian's businesses at the moment and the information in the reports could have some potentially wide-sweeping effects financially, and he knew she would keep it to herself. It wasn't the financial information on the report that had Cynthia downing alcohol this morning, however. Even if finding out that Brian was apparently secretly squirreling his money away all over the State of Pennsylvania was a bit of a shock, the arrest record in Illinois from 1994 was the gut wrencher.

How could she forget that year and all its drama? The year Brian made ad exec at Ryder. The year she became his secretary. The year she kind of fell in love with him. Well, not kind of - and she did recover quickly. But the strong personal and professional bonds between them began to forge that year as they worked on the Simpson Steel account. Everything was going along great on the account, research had been done, the most creative presentation in Ryder history was ready to go. Brian flew to Chicago, clinched the deal - and disappeared. Not a word from him for four days. Then she got the call that he had been injured and would be coming back to work in a week. Marty nearly canned him for that little hiatus, but of course, Kinney charm won out and the rest is history.

Cynthia had strongly suspected then that there was no ‘injury'. Of course, she suspected he was off tricking, not that he was in jail.

That Brian was damaged was obvious to Cynthia when she began working closely with him. Something in the roll of his shoulders. In his eyes. In the way his behavior and attention would shift almost imperceptibly at times. Flirtatious and focused one moment and then suddenly gruff and... lost? One minute diligently sketching out his latest brainstorm and the next gripping his hair with one hand and staring, almost painfully, into nothing.

Simpson Steel was the first large solo account he worked on and the stress was intense. She knew Brian was a genius at advertising and she had always chalked his eccentricities of behavior up to that. Weren't geniuses always a little on the odd side? And he always recovered magnificently. That almost instantaneous ability to recover that was to become the linchpin of the Brian Kinney mystique. Never let them see you without your mask. But the mask apparently slipped on that trip to Chicago.

She sat back at her desk and again looked over the report. February, 1994. Arrested in Illinois for vagrancy and panhandling. Fuck. Juvenile detention at the age of fourteen, March, 1984. Ten years apart.

What the fuck happened to you, Brian Kinney?

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