The End, Done Right... by vamphile
Oh my darlings... have you read "The End Done Right," or as its fans lovingly call it, EDR? THIRTY NINE CHAPTERS, YO!!!!!!!
This work of heartburn-inducing-rending emotion was written to work out the author's issues with gently smooth over some of the rough spots in Season Five. It gives us a totally cracked-out canonical Brian living alone in the unfurnished house he bought for Justin, roaming moodily from room to room, drunk, like a gay modern-day Miss Havisham. Oh, the angst.
Brian was drunk, that wasn’t new, lately Brian was drunk a lot, it felt good, well, not good but better. It had been three months since he’d said goodbye to Lindsay, and to Gus, and to Justin.
He lay on the mattress, it had been delivered to the house a couple days after the wedding had been scheduled, but he’d never bothered to have them set up the bed, he’d simply gestured towards a room, he hadn’t even been paying attention to which room… so now, when he passed out in bed, he was in the room that he had planned to be Gus’s.
The house had too many rooms. “I used to live in one big room that had everything,” he thought now I live in a hundred rooms with nothing. And nothing was only a slight exaggeration. He had sold a lot of the furniture with the loft, modern Italian leather wasn’t really the style for a Tudor country manor, and so, when he left the loft, a few hours after Justin had, he’s taken his clothes, and little else.
The movers came and packed up what he hadn’t sold with the loft and delivered it…
It was all in boxes in the room closest to the front door, he hadn’t bothered to unpack a thing. Sometimes he felt like he was living in the castle in Citizen Kane, and sometimes, he was too drunk to think about it.
A couple of times a week Mikey stopped by and brought food from the diner, and lemon bars, which was convenient because then he could throw out the old food from the diner, and the stale lemon bars that were still sitting on the counter from the last time he’d visited.
Brian worked hard, and then worked out after work, and would sometimes stop by Mikey’s for dinner, but mostly he just did anything to avoid coming back to the house, the big empty house that he lived in…alone.
*wipes tears*
Okay, where was I? So, of course, Justin comes back. Because that's what Justin has to do in order for their to be a plot. Otherwise Brian would just roam around Britin among his boxes and slowly turn into dust and blow away.
Before he comes back, though, we see him in New York, Justin has one show with other artists, everything sells out, and the gallery owner comes and says he'll take anything Justin can give him and Justin is like OMG YAY I can go back to Pittsburgh, I don't have to stay in stinky old New York anymore!
Which should be our first clue that this is not actually Justin, but the Justin!bot. I hope you like him, because there's a lot of him in this fic.
Brian was exhausted, sleep only came lately when he was too drunk or stoned to think, and then it seemed all too soon after he lost consciousness that he was pulled back to reality by his alarm. It had been a long day, and it was well past 11 pm when he finally turned off the lights in his office and headed back to the house.
Justin had gotten to the house at around seven, since then he’d been wandering the empty rooms, he found the bed, not in the master suite, just lying on the floor, and he found a room full of boxes, dusty and unopened. There were clothes, fresh from the drycleaners hung meticulously in the closet, some things never changed. There were also piles of dirty laundry and discarded cigarette packs laying everywhere. Justin had imagined Brian still in Pittsburgh a thousand times, sometimes a thousand times in a single day, he had never pictured him pacing the rooms of an empty house like Mrs. Haversham, he didn’t know whether to be touched, worried, or aggravated.
His feelings varied depending on the debris he found, the several empty cases of scotch left him aggravated, as did the cigarettes, but the bed, looking so sparse, left him feeling touched, and well, worried was a bit of a constant.
He was worried about a lot of things; specifically what Brian was going to say when he found him here.
He pulled a sketchbook out of his backpack and started to draw the bed, the empty, crumpled sheets, the single pillow, the discarded cigarette boxes and overflowing ashtray, he was sketching intently when he heard the car pull into the driveway.
The minute Brian pulled in he sensed something was wrong…the lights were on, he knew he didn’t leave the fucking lights on, and was the door partially open? He got out of the car and carefully swung the door inwards, but the alarm had not gone off. For a moment, a thought flickered, and he pushed it away. Then he laughed, even if someone had broken in, what the fuck were they gonna steal, a couple of stale lemon bars and a half empty pack of cigarettes? He walked into the house and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Justin”
Justin smiled; he hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath ‘til he let it out
“Brian, I’m back”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Justin was somewhat prepared for this, he wasn’t silly enough to think that the sentimental Brian, who had been so open with him before the wedding would remain once his heart had been broken, but as prepared as he had been, it still saddened him to think about how much reinforcement Brian had probably put into the wall around his heart…shit, that fucker was probably steel rebar and poured concrete at this point.
Justin was wrong.
“Never mind, doesn’t matter” Brian said, “You’re here”
*Pets poor OOC Brian and Justin*
So then Justin gets an eating disorder, or that's not fair, the author says that is not an eating disorder, just anxiety and panic attacks so severe he can't eat. He moodily paints and throws up a lot and can't keep anything down, and Brian is protective and tries to get him to eat more and not vomit and stuff, and Justin just is all stubborn and OMG BRIAN I'M FINE! and hides in his studio and they have lots of hot sex, and then Brian tries to kidnap Justin and make him go to New York for some reason and it's all just TOO FUCKING AWESOME FOR WORDS!
And vamphile wrote this story but she knows I feel this way about it and said it was okay to post this, because actually she feels the same away about it and is the one who made up the Justin!bot thing. In fact, she thinks Brian is a bot also, although I like to think of him more as the gay Miss Havisham who then mysteriously turns into protective!Brian so he can take care of the Justin!bot, who is sort of a combination of "When My Boy Walks Down the Street" Justin and an extremely emo teenaged girl.
And that's all. If you haven't read it, you're missing a beautiful story of the love of a guy named Brian who bears virtually no relationship to the guy on Queer as Folk and a guy who looks like a very thin, malnourished version of Justin. And what's better than that?