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Title: Five Things that Never Happened to [Professor] Billy Boyd
Author: kiltsandlollies
Rating: PG, if that
Summary: I'm AUing an AU. That's as close to religion as I get these days.


The bite hurts more than Billy could have imagined, more than any one before, but he says nothing while his mother cleans it, nothing while Margaret stands next to him and stares, nothing until he’s alone and can rip the bandage off in one go and cry like it’s the end of the world.

“Another spider?” his father asks later, and his voice carries none of Mum’s exasperation. “Rate you’re going, Billy, you won’t live to study them properly. Here.”

Spiders and Their Kin, the 1979 edition, is full of illustrations and explanations, and Billy’s wanted the book desperately for five months and thirteen days. His fingerprints have stained its pages repeatedly during trips downtown to the shops, but he’s never said a word about it, not even to Dad.

“Now be more careful,” his father smiles gently, tapping the page Billy’s already reading with the terrified fascination of a twelve–year–old boy. “I’d as soon not have to bury you in the backyard.”

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Lena’s pretty, Billy supposes, but he’s never been a good judge of these things.

She’s also very smart, and she’s been to America, and she smokes thin cigarettes. She does everything quickly and well, to the sound of approving murmurs from all, and Billy sometimes feels as though he’s one of her accessories—curled around her like a scarf when he best complements whatever she’s wearing or saying or feeling.

They’ve not done more than the most cursory lovemaking in two months and six days, but that means nothing when they’re on their backs in the middle of the night, when Billy is the only one who sees her with no shocking, dark lipstick, and Lena is the only one who sees him with no bland, bemused smile.

“Marry me,” he whispers just before they sleep, and Lena only nods, twining their fingers together in the darkness, in the silence.

This is love, Billy supposes, but he’s never been a good judge of these things.

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Billy’s running out of chances. Portfolio after portfolio has been rejected, or worse, accepted with a smile that makes it clear that Billy’s work is appreciated, but will never be seen in print. Where once there was adrenaline and joy in his work, there is now only grinding failure—an erosion of possibility, of opportunity.

He stands now before his shelf of cameras—some antique, some modern, and all terribly complicated with their settings and lenses and levers—and knows that in two weeks and three days, there will be at least one fewer, sold to make the rent on what was a simple studio, and is now his home as well.

The young model enters the room cautiously, waiting for direction that does not come.

“What would you like me to do?” he asks finally, grey eyes trained on Billy’s tensed back and shoulders, on the man he’s come to love. “Billy?”

“Your job, Dominic,” Billy murmurs. “’s all any of us can do.”

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“Come on, out of your pit.”

Even surfacing from sleep, Billy has to smile at the sound of his lover’s voice. Matthias is older, considerably so, but his energy is boundless. Billy strains to keep up with him as they walk city streets, as they finish bottle after bottle of sweet Muscat wine, as they tangle themselves in Matthias’ rumpled blue sheets.

It’s the most perfect feeling in the world to be loved. Billy wishes for nothing now but time, and decades more of it—not for himself, but for Matthias, who in vain tries to hide from Billy the pain he feels daily.

Billy dreams one night that he has only seven months and nine days before Matthias is taken from him. Matthias smiles indulgently at this news, just before he pulls Billy to him and nearly kisses the dream from Billy’s memory.

Later, Billy sits at Matthias’ desk and works it out on cream–coloured stationery. He was only off by one week.

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He wonders sometimes what it would be like to go home again. To see Scotland. But Paris is home now, as much as home can be to one who forgot the definition of the word at fifteen. It is difficult now to hear English spoken around him, harder still to hear it in his own accent as he helps tourists negotiate the city.

Once upon a time, Billy believed he would find in Paris the answers to every question. But while he still loves the city, there are fewer things to keep him here now that Dominic has left him for another.

Left him. Left him with a flat that Billy wanders like a ghost, left him with the debris of fifteen years, nine months and four days together, left him alone. He is older now than he ever expected to see or feel, and he is ready to go home.

He does not have long now to wait, but still that wait seems endless.


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