Fandom: Backstreet Boys
Pairing: AJ McLean/Howie Dorough
Prompt: #16 Purple
Word Count: 379
Rating: PG (AJ-ish language)
Author's Notes: Title Taken from a Duran Duran song
I watched him, as he picked up the bowling ball... steadied it, and sent it flying at the pins. The girls giggled and cheered, and he adjusted his slightly wrinkled purple DLF vest as he turned around, flashing a smile. Three pins tumbled down behind him... and his smile never wavered.
Bowling. For DLF. The Dorough Lupus Foundation, in honor of his beloved, hell, WORSHIPPED sister Caroline. She died years before. Everyone thought Howie was a trooper, and stoic, but I'd held him as he cried. I'd let him sniffle and sob and snot on me for two weeks, and I'd swallowed his pain. I sent a dozen purple flowers to her funeral, and a dozen more to Mama D the next week. I'd picked out one purple iris for my dearest Howie, and brought it to him. He held it in his hand as he'd cried that night. But no amount of holding healed him, and not even the most perfect purple flower could keep my Howie the same. That Howie died. When I couldn't get back the same Howie after weeks of snot and tears... our relationship died too.
It was years later that my grandmother joined Caroline in the clouds. There was no holding, no tears, no snot. There was a knock on my door, and a perfect purple iris. A pair of hollow chocolate eyes. A whispered "sorry" and a retreating back. A moment, a hanging-in-the-balance-life-altering moment, and he fucked it up. I held the flower that night as I popped two painkillers and smoked some bad crack. I slipped away, and he kept that smile plastered on his face and watched me go.
The crash of bowling pins startles me back to the present. There he is, smiling away as he fucks up and only knocks down two pins. I wonder how the hell he can bear it, wearing a gay purple vest and smiling through all of his fuck-ups.
I hold up a hand and offer a high five, and for a brief moment, we are linked. A brief moment is all it takes for the hairs on my arms to stand on end. For regret and sorrow and rejection to settle into the pit of my stomach. I'm alive, but my dear Howie is still gone away.
I let the moment go, but not before smoothing a purple wrinkle on his shoulder.
