A Different Corner

aka the southern belle fic

Kris knows he'll have to take odd jobs while he is in Los Angeles. He figures he'll have to wait tables sometimes, or maybe wash the dishes somewhere. It’s how you pay your dues and that’s the whole point of his being here in the first place. What he never expects is to get a job that actually involves music in some way. So when Neil tells him that he knows someone who is looking for a piano player, Kris doesn’t ask questions, he says yes please and just goes for it. He doesn’t even stop to ask what he’d be playing for—which he now thinks maybe he should have.

He's pretty sure he got the right address, but he's hoping maybe he got the time wrong. Because there's a man standing a couple of feet from him in a tiered yellow dress, wearing a ton of make-up and a large yellow hat. He has fake boobs and everything, very realistic in fact, but it's obvious that he's a guy from the width of his shoulders. Kris has been in LA for all of a month and he hasn’t yet met anyone so…colorful, so he is not sure what the etiquette to this is. Is he supposed to act like he doesn't know? He's not sure if he can pretend a guy is a girl when he knows very well the guy is not a girl.

"Umm. Excuse me?" he says to a passing Colonial General, but the man doesn't even stop. Everyone seems to be in a hurry here; people in costumes, people following the people in costumes, and one girl with uhm…not a lot of costume. Except for the guy in the yellow dress; he's not in a hurry. He is just standing there—and looking at him. Crap.

The guy tilts his head and says, "You lost?" in a completely normal male voice. Kris relaxes a little. At least he doesn't have to pretend the boobs are real.

He offers the guy a tentative little smile. "Yeah. I think so. Neil sent me. I'm the piano player."

"Oh, wonderful," the guy says, grabbing his hand and pulling him towards the side stage. "Derek has been looking for you everywhere."

~

Derek is the director, and he seems to be more than a little crazy. But since the whole cast and crew appear to share that quality, the man doesn't particularly stand out.

The man in the yellow dress stays while Derek talks to him, which Kris is very much surprised to say he is grateful for—who knew he'd prefer the man in drag to anyone, but there it is. And when Derek leaves, having explained his vision to Kris—which is basically a drug induced trip to the colonial era as far as Kris can tell—the yellow dress man extends a very masculine looking hand at him.

"I'm Adam," he says.

Kris decides to pretend this is a perfectly natural way of meeting new people and introduces himself. "Kris."

They look at each other for a second and Kris finds himself asking a question he doesn't know if he really wants to know the answer to.

"What's with the dress?"

Adam looks down like he forgot he was wearing something that resembles a birthday cake. "Oh. I'm Southern Belle 3," he says, curtsying.

Kris blinks at him. "And uhm. Why?"

Adam makes a face; it can be a good face or a bad face, Kris doesn’t know how to interpret it. "Jess is out sick today and I know all her lines,” Adam explains. "Plus," he says and twirls a little, "the dress fits."

Kris nods, because, of course, that makes perfect sense.

Then Adam gets called away to be Southern Belle 3 somewhere else, and Kris is left alone to learn the songs from the sheets Derek left him with. He sits down on the bench in front of the piano and squints down at the scribbled notes. It’s very possible Derek has tried to write music with Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Kris has no idea how that would go with his vision, but he has to give the guy points for originality.

Now he just has to figure out how to play them.

~

It gets stifling inside real quick with all the costumed people running around, and after a couple hours of rehearsal, Kris escapes to the alley behind the building, and drops gratefully on an overturned box. There’s an overflowing dumpster right next to him, and it stinks, but a part of Kris prefers that to the insanity inside; the commotion, and the raised voices, and the bad, bad singing. Derek’s songs are bad enough, but the singing is somehow even worse.

It doesn't even take two minutes before the door opens to reveal the voluminous skirt of the yellow dress. Adam steps out, holding his skirt up so it doesn't get wet with garbage juice, and walks over to Kris with a couple of skips over the puddles.

"Sing me something," he says, looking ridiculous yet sounding surprisingly serious.

Kris looks around in confusion. "Why?"

"I heard you inside,” Adam explains. “You're... Where the hell did Neil find you?”

Kris sang a little in there while Derek was busy yelling at the actors, but it was pretty noisy and no one was paying him any mind. At least that’s what Kris thought at the time. Why Adam felt the need to sneak around to listen and then come after him like this, he has no idea.

"I play at the cafe down the street from his place,” he says, but then thinks that sounds kind of dodgy, so he tries to explain. “Not that I've been to his place. That's what he said."

“You’re fucking amazing,” Adam says, his eyes large and surprised.

Kris offers him a smile. “It’s not that hard to be better than those guys in there.”

Adam doesn’t smile back. He leans down to look at Kris’ face, closer and closer until they are almost nose-to-nose. Kris sits tight and doesn’t make any sudden moves. He thinks maybe Adam is trying to see his voice or something, but who can guarantee that he won’t bite Kris’ nose if he moves? He seems to be a harmless kind of crazy, but Kris doesn’t have a lot of experience with crazy people, so he decides not to push his luck.

"You're like a cute, tiny, plaid-wearing wonder," Adam says.

Craaaazyyy, Kris' mind sings in Britney Spears' voice.

"I like plaid," he says inanely.

Adam shrugs. "Of course you do."

"Adam, we need you in here," someone yells, opening the door a crack.

"Be there in a sec!" Adam yells back at them, very unladylike.

The door closes with a loud slam. Adam turns back to Kris and leans down to place his mouth over Kris’. Just like that. Like it's something they do every day. It's a soft kiss, their lips locking together perfectly for just one moment and then gently breaking apart. Adam doesn't push his tongue in or anything; Kris would say it's a surprisingly respectful kiss—although there's hardly anything to call respectful in a situation in which he is being kissed by a man dressed as a Southern Belle next to a dumpster in an alley.

Adam stands back up, looking slightly dazed, and Kris finds himself staring up at Adam’s face, really looking through the make-up and the dress for the first time, and wow...he has beautiful blue eyes...and rather perfect lips. Adam blinks down at him and Kris reaches up to pull him into another kiss.

"Adam!" the voice from before screams, interrupting the kiss and making Adam pull back sooner than Kris would have liked.

Adam doesn’t look away from Kris. He puts a hand on his own lips, his make-up somehow still perfect, and yells, “Coming!”

He straightens up and points a finger at Kris. "After the rehearsal. Don't run away."

~

The day is long and tiring and completely beyond deranged. Kris manages to figure out how to read Derek’s writing and learns to tune out the most dreadful parts of the singing, but he also gets hit in the head with a shoe—ducks out of the way for the second, so maybe he should count that as a win—and finds someone's corset inside the piano. When it's finally time to pack up and leave, he is seriously reconsidering the dishwashing thing.

Neil catches him at the door. "Hey! How was your first day?" he asks, cheerful and oblivious.

"Wonderful," Kris replies.

Neil nods enthusiastically, completely missing the sarcasm. "Have you seen my brother?"

Kris sighs. "And your brother would be?" It's not like they exchanged family histories. All he knows about Neil is that he comes to the same café everyday and helps strangers find jobs in bizarre places.

"Oh, there he is," Neil says, pointing at a black haired man walking towards them purposefully. The man stops to stand next to Neil and Kris' eyes widen in recognition. "Adam, you met Kris?" he hears Neil say, but it comes from a very faraway place.

Adam is...not a Southern Belle, that's for sure. He's wearing jeans and an old faded black t-shirt, with a leather jacket and combat boots; he is tall and solid and has thighs that…Kris will very pointedly not focus on right now. He is as different as one can get from the yellow dress guy from earlier—not that that version was bad exactly, in fact Kris was growing inexplicably fond of the dress, but...this is something else.

Kris takes in Adam’s freckles, they are all over his face, and his hair, which is mussed from the wig he wore all day—Kris’ fingers itch to find their way into the mess and maybe get lost there. Adam’s eyes seem more blue somehow, maybe because of the hair, and they are staring right back at Kris, deep and intense and not even blinking. Adam looks so different, from anyone and everyone Kris has ever known, and Kris’ mind can’t make sense of the fact that this guy is interested in him. It just doesn’t seem possible. Kris can’t stop staring at him, which is probably freaking Neil out right now, but since he was the one to send Kris into this loony bin without so much as a warning, Kris refuses to feel bad for him.

Kris isn’t completely naïve or anything. He knows he is into guys sometimes and he's okay with it. He even kissed a guy once; granted, it’s been a couple of years, and he was drunk at the time, but whatever. If he's attracted to a guy, he's attracted to a guy, it’s not a big deal. He just didn’t know that he could find a man so beautiful and sexy and—what’s up with Adam’s eyebrows? Kris doesn’t think he has ever found anyone’s eyebrows attractive before, or noticed them even.

Afterward, Kris is pretty sure it was Adam that moved first, but he wouldn’t bet on it. They meet halfway, Kris’ fingers immediately situating themselves in the mess of Adam’s hair, and Adam kisses him without the lipstick this time. It’s a deep kiss; if the one before was hello, how are you, this is more like let’s find somewhere more private. But they don’t have anywhere private handy, and Neil is standing right there, possibly snickering at them, so Kris tries to pull back before things get out of hand, but Adam has a firm grip on his neck and he tilts Kris' face up for another and another and another kiss, and by the time they stop kissing, Kris doesn’t even know what year it is anymore.

"So I take it you guys met?" Neil says, deadpan.

Adam grins at Kris, his face brilliant and shining. "Yeah," he says. "We met."

The End

September 23rd, 2009