Chapter 11 - All The Things You Are.

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

Brian heard the alarm going off on his phone and reached out blindly towards the nightstand trying to locate it, with no luck. He really didn’t want to get up and go find it, though; right at that moment he was far too comfortable to leave the warmth of his bed. Which might’ve had something to do with the fact that his bed was also hosting a very snuggly warm blond boy. However, the incongruous noise was already having a negative effect on said blond boy.

“What? . . . What is that? . . . Brian, what is that noise? Where's it coming from?” Justin asked, sounding almost frantic as he desperately tried to climb his way out from under a pile of blankets and Brian’s limbs.

“Oh, fuck,” Brian grumbled, throwing off all the blankets and rolling out of bed.

He quickly took the five steps necessary to cross the room to where a pile of his clothes from the night before was waiting on the floor. After a quick search through the pockets, he pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, and effectively ended the noise. Only then did he stop and think about exactly how he was going to explain a cell phone alarm to his 1941 blond.

“Brian? What the heck is that thing?” The inquisitive boy asked again from his spot kneeling at the end of the bed.

“It’s nothing. Just my alarm going off,” he answered, hoping that would be enough to satisfy Justin.

“An alarm? Like an alarm clock? So, that . . . lightbox thing . . . It’s some kind of clock?” Justin pressed.

“Sort of,” Brian replied with a shrug as he set the incriminating item face down back on the top of the dresser and returned to bed.

Unfortunately, Justin wasn’t having it. “Explain, Brian. Now.”

“Uh . . .” Brian said, flopping down on the pillows and pulling the coverlet up over his naked lower half, trying all the while to think of something he could tell Justin that wouldn’t be a complete fabrication. So far, though, he was coming up blank. “That’s another of those things I probably can’t explain to you, Justin.”

“So, this lightbox clock thing . . . It has something to do with the job you can’t tell me about either?”

“In a way . . .” Well, Brian thought, he did use his phone when he was working, so yeah it sort of had to do with his job . . .

Justin looked at Brian for several long seconds, a deep frown on his normally cheerful face, his eyes boring into Brian’s skull as if he could divine the hidden thoughts there with merely the power of his stare. Brian tried not to flinch. He wasn’t sure he succeeded, but in the end Justin apparently hadn’t found the answers he was looking for. With a huge sigh, the blond boy plopped down on the bed next to Brian and rolled so that he was once again curled up along the length of Brian‘s body.

“I feel like I’m trapped in some horrible, torrid, romance novel, where I’ve fallen in love with a German spy who is going to milk me for information and then use it to kill all my friends,” Justin posited, only half kidding. “Please tell me that’s not the case, Brian. After last night, I don’t think I could take it if that's what’s really happening here.”

“Damn. You really are a silly, romantic, little twat, aren’t you?” Brian teased, trying to get a smile out of his companion. When it didn’t work, he resorted to sincerity. “I promise you, Justin, I’m not a German spy. I wouldn’t work for those fuckers even if they’d let me. Which they wouldn’t, because I’m gay. Right now, Hitler is already busy rounding up all the gays he can find, putting them in concentration camps and doing nasty experiments on them, when he isn’t just out-right killing them. So, no, I am not, and would not, work for the fucking Nazis.”

“He’s killing queers?” Justin asked, completely horrified by Brian‘s disclosure. “I hadn’t heard that before. Are you sure? Why isn’t anyone saying anything about it?”

“They will be,” Brian explained with a sinking feeling in his gut. “There’s a lot of shit going on over there that nobody’s talking about yet. But it’s all going to come out. Soon. I think by next summer sometime you’re going to be hearing a lot more rumors about what’s going on in those fucking concentration camps. And it’s definitely NOT good.”

“What about . . . What about prisoners of war? I’ve had a couple buddies shot down over there . . . We saw the parachutes open so we all assumed they would be fine when they landed even if they were captured, but . . .” Justin didn’t bother to complete his thought.

“As far as I know, prisoners of war are still being treated alright. That doesn’t mean they’ll last till the end of the war, though. Even the POW camps aren’t very nice. But I don’t think they’re being out-right shot or put in the ovens . . .” Brian answered as completely as he could.

“Ovens?”

Brian didn’t bother to answer. He just wrapped his arm more tightly around Justin’s shoulders and hugged the smaller body closer to himself. There really was no way to explain the atrocities going on just a few hundred miles away. Not to someone that hadn’t already seen the evidence, seen the pictures, heard the stories. And he didn’t want to spend the morning talking about that kind of shit anyway. It really wasn’t the kind of stuff you wanted to talk about while lying in bed with your gay lover who happened to be an RAF pilot and who might one day find himself shot down over Nazi Germany. Instead, Brian went with one of his best, tried-and-true back up plans - distraction techniques.

Rolling over so that he had the worried little pilot pinned beneath his much larger body, Brian proceeded to pummel his blond with kisses across every square inch of his face, neck, and shoulders. At first, Justin was resistant. Gradually, though, the tension was kissed right out of him. By the time Brian had kissed his way down to below Justin‘s collarbone and was busy licking his way towards one rosy pink nipple, Justin seemed to have moved on from the disturbing conversation of a few minutes earlier.

Fate was not Brian‘s friend that morning, though. Just when things - including certain fun parts down below - were heating up, the alarm on Brian’s cell phone went off a second time.

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

*Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep*

“Fuck!” Brian yelled as he rolled off of Justin once again and stomped across the room to go get the annoying device.

This time, though, the alert that popped up on the screen gave him a real reason to grumble. He only had an hour and a half to get to yet another meeting with the Britcom marketing team. Fucking clients - didn’t they know he had a raging hard on to take care of and a worried blond to placate in the process?

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a rain check for this morning, Blue Eyes,” Brian explained as he turned back to face the boy waiting in his bed. “I have a meeting I have to get to. If there was any way to postpone it, I would . . .”

“It’s okay, Brian, I should probably get going myself. I didn’t actually tell anyone I was going to be gone all last night. Mrs. McCready has probably already notified the neighborhood wardens that I’m missing. And if I don’t check in with Daphne and the guys at the White Lion pretty soon they’ll be sending someone to find me,” the young pilot said, smiling as he thought of the wonderful reason why he hadn’t made it back to his room the night before.

“Then you definitely need to get to the pub and check in as soon as possible,” Brian reasoned. “Gears already gave me a talking to the other day, threatening my personal safety if I did anything to hurt you. I wouldn’t want them to think I was responsible for your disappearance.”

“Applesauce! He didn’t . . .” Brian’s amused nod reaffirming it was true made the boy blush yet again. “Great. Well, I’m going to kill him later today, so you’ll be fine from here on out, Brian.”

“Hey, give the guy a break. He’s just trying to look out for you. I respect that,” Brian offered with an understanding shrug. “But that won’t matter if I miss this meeting, because my boss will kill me first. So, let’s both go down the hall and get cleaned up and then I’ll walk you back to your room on my way to . . . To my meeting. How’s that sound?”

Justin said it sounded fine and within a half hour, they were both dressed, clean, shaved, and ready to head out the door. Brian shoved the bag of oranges into Justin‘s hand as they were leaving, telling him to share with his friends if he didn’t want to eat them all himself. Then they were strolling down the street together heading in the direction of Justin‘s boarding house, which was only a few minutes walk from the hotel.

“So, what’s your schedule for the week,” Brian asked, trying to sound casual about it.

“Why? You gonna need someone to help you eat another fancy, expensive hotel meal sometime soon?” Justin prodded, not letting him get away with the casual thing.

“Something like that, twat,” Brian replied, bumping shoulders with the teasing blond imp.

“Sorry, Brian. I don’t know what HQ has in store for us this week. But I doubt I’ll have much free time. There’s been a big push on lately and, with a lot of the guys from the First Squadron out sick the past week or so, we’re all busy picking up the slack. I don’t expect to have another night off for at least a week or maybe more. I was actually pretty surprised to get both last night AND tonight off together, to be honest. I’m not sure I’ll be able to see you again till sometime next week.”

Brian quickly calculated the dates in his head and in the process remembered the other thing that would be happening during the upcoming week.

“Um, Justin, there’s something I need to tell you . . .” Brian started out, unsure of how to approach his news. “It’s important.”

“What?” Justin asked with his usual forthrightness.

“It’s . . . confidential,” Brian stated, looking around them at the street full of people.

Justin paused in his steps, looking sideways at Brian with a calculating frown. “Why don’t you come inside then,” he pointed to the stairs leading up to the porch of the rooming house they’d just arrived at. “Mrs. McCready won’t mind me inviting you in, as long as we stay in the sitting room. She’s adamant about us not having guests in our rooms, though. She’s always blowing a fuse at the other guys when they try to sneak in their girlfriends. Of course, that’s never been a problem for me . . . before.”

Brian smiled through his worry, amused by the boy’s simple joy in actually having someone to invite up for a change, and followed Justin into the frowsty red brick townhome. It was everything he would have expected in a boarding house run by an older British widow - very victorian, far too many little knick-knacks adorning almost every surface, but meticulously clean. However they were in luck, since it seemed the lady of the house wasn’t in at the time, so they were free to take their private conversation into the front room in peace. Once inside, Justin closed the door firmly behind him and then turned back to Brian.

“So, about that something . . . confidential?” he said with a resigned look.

“Yeah, um . . . Please don’t ask me how I know this, because I can’t explain, but . . . I just need to warn you . . .” Brian felt like a bumbling fool, stuttering through a half-assed disclosure, and decided to just spit it out and let the cards fall where they may. “Fuck it. There’s going to be a really big air raid this week, Justin - the night of the seventeenth. It’s going to be huge. The biggest since the start of the war. And it’s going to hit this area of the West End hard. There’s going to be lots of civilian casualties. So, please, just make sure you and all your friends are safely in a shelter early that night. Okay?”

Justin stood there frowning, his arms crossed, not saying anything at first. Then he sighed and rubbed worriedly at his forehead, before looking back towards Brian. You could almost feel the struggle going on in his head as disbelief, worry, and curiosity raged inside the young man’s head.

“You’re sure about this?” Justin asked when he finally spoke.

Brian nodded.

“But you can’t tell me HOW you know?”

Brian shook his head in the negative.

“I believe you, Brian.” The RAF officer sighed again. “But I’m going to have to report this to my CO.” Brian started to object, but Justin held out a hand to silence him. “I won’t tell him who told me, but I can’t just sit on this information and not say anything. Not if it could mean lives are lost. I swore an oath as an officer in the Royal Air Force, Brian, and I won’t violate that oath for you or anyone else.”

“I understand, Justin. I wouldn’t ask you to,” Brian asserted, moving closer to his Blue Eyes, needing the reassurance that only touch could provide. “I’d love to do something to help prevent it and hopefully save those lives myself. I just don’t think anyone would believe me even if I tried. If I had some way to prove what I’m saying, I would . . . Unfortunately, I doubt anyone’s going to believe you either.”

“Probably not, but at least my conscience will be clear.” Justin stepped into Brian’s arms, laying his head on the broad chest before continuing. “Hopefully they’ll at least believe me enough to be flying some extra patrols that night. If we have enough fighters in the air, we might be able to head them off . . .”

That statement worried Brian even more. If Justin was out flying extra patrols because Brian had tipped him off about an air raid that he only knew about because he had knowledge from the future, did that mean that Brian had somehow changed the past? And if he’d somehow changed the timeline merely by trying to warn Justin to stay safe, did that mean the other things he thought he knew about the future might be altered? The history he’d read said that Justin was safe until at least July, when his plane went missing, but if the younger man was out flying dangerous missions to stop German raids that he might not have been flying without Brian’s interference, might Justin’s fate have been altered too? What if he was hurt or killed on THIS mission rather than later? Brian felt a tight ball of panic starting to form in his gut, and he clasped the plucky pilot to him even more strongly.

“Justin . . . I’d feel better if I knew you were safe in a shelter that night, not flying around trying to head off another raid,” Brian started, unsure how he could explain without giving everything away.

“I’m not going to just huddle in a shelter like a coward, Brian,” Justin insisted, pulling away from Brian far enough to look him in the face. “Not if I can take a few of the bastards down before they have a chance to drop their damned bombs.”

Brian knew Justin was serious since this was the first time he’d heard the young man curse.

“I’m not saying to hide, just asking you to be careful, Blue Eyes,” Brian tried to placate him.

“Brian . . .” Justin had a spark of stubbornness in his eyes that Brian knew meant trouble. “You know I can’t do that. I’m an RAF pilot. My whole job is to fight the Gerries. And I’m not going to ‘be careful’ or take it easy - not that I even could if I wanted to, because that would only make it more likely that I’d get killed. But that’s not me, Brian. I would never shirk my duty like that. I WANT to fight the Germans. I believe in what the British are doing in this war. And after the other things you told me just this morning - about how they’re killing queers and others - well, that just makes me want to fight them even more. So, no, I’m not going to play it safe or hide, even when I know it’s dangerous. That’s exactly the time when I’m going to fight back even harder.”

“I know, Justin. That’s what fucking worries me so much,” Brian replied, frowning back at the frowning pilot.

“If you’re looking for the kind of guy who’d back down from a fight like this, then you’re not looking for me, Brian,” Justin stated adamantly, trying to push away from the long arms that refused to let him go.

“I’m not, Justin,” Brian insisted, holding on even tighter to the struggling youth and feeling his impotence turning quickly to anger. “I don’t want you to be anyone except who you are. But I can’t help worrying. I looked up the statistics on the Eagle Squadron’s pilots and they’re not good, Justin. I’m just worried you won’t make it till the Americans finally get here. Hell, at this rate you won’t even make it till JULY . . .”

Brian froze as soon as the words had escaped his lips, realizing immediately what he’d let slip, but unable to take it back. Justin stilled as well, the words, as well as Brian’s unusual reaction, giving him pause. When he looked up at Brian’s face, the guilty, worried, almost pained expression the big guy was wearing told him that there was likely a lot more that Brian wasn’t saying. It was clear, however, that something significant was going to happen in July.

“It doesn’t matter,” Justin finally broke the silence after several long seconds. “I can’t NOT try to stop this, Brian. If you’re right about this raid, then I HAVE to do everything in my power to, if not prevent it outright, at least ameliorate the damage. It’s what I’m trained to do. It’s who I am. It doesn’t matter that it’s dangerous. Every single mission I fly is dangerous, Brian. I’m not going to back down now just because YOU want me to be careful.” Justin’s expression finally softened and he smiled up at Brian again. “Although, I kinda like the way you’re acting all worried about me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re already sweet on me, Mr. Kinney.”

That actually got a laugh out of Brian. “Me? No fucking way. I’m never ‘sweet’ on anything. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of the people who know me think I’m a Grade A Asshole who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘sweet’,” Brian assured him.

“Then they obviously don’t know you very well, do they? Because I’ve only known you a week and I don’t think I’ve ever met another man with such a big . . . heart,” the puckish little pilot teased, giving Brian a squeeze and then playfully tilting his hips up to make contact with Brian’s other ‘big’ parts. “And I love that you’re trying to protect me, Brian, but I can take care of myself.”  

“. . . Fucking hero complex,” Brian muttered with another big sigh as he hugged the bold boy back.

That comment caused Justin to giggle and he raised up on his tiptoes, just about to reach up and pull Brian down for an appreciative kiss, when the door to the sitting room was unceremoniously shoved open and Chris Hobbs barrelled into the room. Justin immediately stepped away from Brian, but that tell-tale blush of his gave away the fact that they’d been interrupted doing something that they probably shouldn’t have been. Hobbs seemed just as surprised as they were at first. Then, after he’d scanned the scene and realized that something wasn’t right, he almost immediately shifted into a more judgmental stance, his fists balled on his hips and a gloating sneer on his face.

“What the heck’s going on in here, Taylor?” the stocky blond demanded.

“What business is it of yours, Hobbs?” Justin shot back, not giving in despite the fact that the other man had a good fifty pounds and half a foot in height on him.

“I think I have the right to know who it is I’m rooming with, Taylor,’” the brutish thug persisted. “I wouldn’t want to find out I’m bunking with a damned Nancy-boy or something. I don’t stand for any of that funny stuff, you know.”

“Trust me, Hobbs, you’re safe,” Justin responded glibly with a dismissive shake of his head. Then he turned back to Brian and blithely gestured towards the door. “Thank you for the information, Brian. I’ll pass it on to the right people and let you know what comes of it.”

“Right,” Brian knew he was being dismissed but he hated to leave like that, before anything had been resolved and with the new wrinkle of Hobbs thrown into the mix. “Just . . . be safe, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Justin assured him, adding a surreptitious wink. “Now, don’t you have a meeting you said you had to make?”

“Shit,” Brian looked at his watch and realized how late it had become. “I do. Sorry, I have to run, but, well, if you need anything, leave me a note at my hotel, okay?”

“Will do, Brian. And thank you . . . for everything,” Justin said with a bright, honest smile that easily said more than the words themselves.

After that Justin showed Brian out, closing the door firmly behind him. Part of Brian wanted to go back in there and make sure that Hobbs guy wasn’t going to be a problem, and the other part worried that would only make things worse. And he really did have to get a move on if he was going to make the meeting with Britcom. But, in the end, he decided that Justin was probably more than able to take care of himself and he would likely only muck it up worse, so he turned heel and rushed back towards Duckett’s Passage.

Ten seconds after he’d made it through the time portal, Brian’s phone started ringing. A glance at the screen told him it was Cynthia calling. It also told him that there was no way he was going to be on time for the Britcom guys.

“I’m on my way, Cynthia, but I’m probably going to be late. I still need to stop in at my hotel and pick up the Britcom file. Can you call and tell them I’m running about thirty minutes behind?” he barked into the phone as soon as he’d accepted the call.

“Well, you’re in luck, Brian, because I got a call from the CFO a little while ago saying they wanted to reschedule for this afternoon at three,” Cynthia responded, eliciting a whistle of relief from her boss as he immediately slowed his pace.  “I’ve been trying to call you for about an hour now, by the way. Where the hell have you been? I kept getting the strangest message too - something about, ‘the person you are trying to reach is currently unavailable’ and an error message saying that incoming calls weren’t properly connecting to your UA . . . I’ve never seen anything like that before. If your service isn’t working correctly, I’ll call the damned carrier and bitch them out personally. We’re paying exorbitant fees for you to have overseas cell phone service and I’m not letting them get away with shoddy coverage.”

“It’s not the phone service, Cynthia. I was . . . out all weekend. But otherwise, the phone service has been fine, so don’t get your panties all in a twist over it,” Brian tried to calm his assistant. “I’m really glad that the meeting is being pushed back, though. I’m desperate to get a real shower and get changed beforehand. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Hmmm. So, you haven’t showered yet and it’s already after nine. Where HAVE you been, Mr. Kinney, and what naughty things have you been up to all weekend?” Cynthia teased.

“Trust me, Cyn, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Brian explained with a laugh.

“Well, I’m glad you’re having fun, Boss. But, now, while I’ve got you, I need to ask you about . . .”

The rest of Brian’s walk back to the hotel was spent going over the crop of problems that had sprouted up over the weekend while Brian was MIA and rescheduling the remainder of his day. It looked like it was going to be busy. But even so, Brian made it clear that he was going to be unavailable again that night from about six on - he was determined to get back to the White Lion that evening so he could meet up with Justin again and make the most of the young man’s last night off before . . . well, before whatever else was going to happen.