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Entry tags:	ai fic: other pairings

AI Fic: Love You Like an Apology (1/2, Danny/Adam, R)
TITLE: Love You Like An Apology
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: R
DISCLAIMER: None of this is real.
SUMMARY: “And she said, ‘I’d wait for you/Like a widow waits for sleep.’/To hold a lover that she grieves.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This one really has to go out to thethingiswhat, for without her enthusiasm it never would have happened.
AUTHOR’S NOTES PART DEUX: YEAH, I USED THE BIG “L” WORD, WHAT. IDEK, I can’t look about half of my flist in the eye with this one.



It’s easy to tell, early on, who is going to be here for a long time, and who had better not waste their time picking out a favorite spot by the pool. So easy, in fact, that Danny doesn’t even think about the little groups they’ve begun to form, or that there’s some part of it based upon the hierarchy everyone knows exists, until they’re all going back up the stairs of the mansion after Jasmine’s and Jorge’s farewell dinner with the producers.

“Well, that was kind of a douche move,” Adam says in a voice so low that for a few seconds Danny doesn’t think that he intended for himself to be overheard. He feels Adam’s eyes upon him, waiting for his answer, and then realizes that this is meant to be a conversation, not just a solitary rumination.

Danny looks up. Adam is standing with one hand upon the door to the room that he shares with Kris, which is right next to Danny’s and Matt’s in this house that could almost be a hotel (and has nearly as much staff and security as one). Adam blinks a little impatiently, making Danny think that maybe he was supposed to have come up with his answer before now. He throws his mind back, but it’s late--for them, given how early they have to be up tomorrow in order to begin choosing their songs for the upcoming week--and he’s not putting the pieces together as fast as he should.

“What?” he asks.

Adam’s leaning up against the wall, fiddling with his doorknob, clearly tired but not yet willing to go in for the night. “Jorge,” he says, and makes a face. “Okay, so we all knew it was going to happen--”

That’s a lie, Adam was practically hauling Allison around like a personal talisman and threatening to hide her in his suitcase all day, so worried was he about her, but Danny doesn’t think that’s quite what Adam means. Allison is one of the ones that they all, instinctively and independently of outside stimuli, just know is going to be there for a long time.

But Adam does seem to feel genuinely bad, so Danny hears himself saying, “It could have been anyone, you saw how close Dial Idol had anyone who wasn’t...” And he has to trail off there, because the next logical words to come out of his mouth can only be, “Anyone who wasn’t you, me, or Lil.” He’s pretty sure that nice people don’t say things like that. Or at the very least, they don’t say things like that without a pretty good blush and an awareness of the fact that they’re being kind of a jerk.

Adam still gives Danny a sly smile from one corner of his mouth, like he knows exactly what Danny’s up to but is going to let it slide. He has that way about him; Danny hangs out with Adam more than he does anyone else, even if he hasn’t managed that easy way of finding a best friend within the house and hanging onto them like others have. He does it because it’s easy and only a little bit because, well, they’re growing into cliques whether anyone likes it or not, but Adam sees things that make Danny uncomfortable, sometimes. Like now; Danny turns and coughs quickly into his hand.

“We could have been nicer,” Adam finishes. “He was all by himself.”

Danny casts his mind back, realizes that it’s true. After they had gone to commercial, before his fate had been sealed, Jorge had been sitting mostly by himself at the bottom seats without anyone particularly talking to him. Even Anoop, theoretically in the same position, had been able to wander back and forth. Danny thinks of himself as a good person--Danny has a so much invested in thinking of himself as a good person that it staggers him, sometimes--and it’s a little disconcerting to realize that Adam is the only one in their entire group who seemed to notice this.

Adam grins at him, quick-silver and heart-stopping, and leans across the carpet separating their doors so that he can pull Danny into a quick, one-armed hug. It’s so brief, it hardly lasts longer than their photo ops, and Danny is left with nothing more than the smell of whatever it is that Adam puts into his hair as the other man pulls away. He and Adam get along, okay, but they’re not close, so he’s left startled and blinking by the contact.

“Jesus, I’m not saying that either one of us clubbed a kitten, calm down,” Adam says. He disappears into his room and shuts the door behind him, leaving Danny standing in the hallway with a tingling of warmth up and down his side and the smell of Adam in his nostrils.

*
Danny dreams of Her, this is his routine. He doesn’t care that the capitalization is probably blasphemous; he can’t halt it any more than he can stop himself from breathing. He dreams of Her, every night, the real Her who cursed guiltily and half-heartedly as she dug Cheerios from the cushions of their couch and who could never get her eyeliner right on the first try, so much more solid and real than the shadow that he used, first in grief and then because he just became too swept up in it to realize what was happening until he felt the backlash. He dreams of Her, until tonight when he doesn’t, and he can’t say what it is that he dreams of, instead, the images too hazy and teasing when he wakes up, except that it leaves him standing beneath his shower spray and the coldest water imaginable, his hand still finding his cock, forehead pressed against the tile and wanting to curse and cry at the same time.

*
He doesn’t remember much of the dream, in the morning, but he remembers enough to make him avoid Adam. Danny sees Adam’s brow furrowing in confusion and, possibly, the slightest touch of hurt before he shrugs it off and goes to eat his breakfast with Allison and Kris. Alexis has her eyebrow arched up very slightly when Danny goes to sit with her; it’s not a secret that he and Adam are in the clique that doesn’t have anything to worry about, and that they’ve started running in a pack.

“That?” she asks, cocking her fork at him. He very nearly winds up hit with a stray fleck of pancake before he tilts his head out of the way. “Was not okay, and you know it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Danny takes a drink of his orange juice and grimaces. Alexis is still looking at him hard. “It’s sour.”

Alexis shakes her head and goes back to digging at her pancakes. Danny is fairly certain that she’s the only girl in the competition still eating carbs, in stubborn defiance of the ten pound rule, though to be fair it’s probably helped by the fact that she only weighs eighty pounds to begin with. “You know damned well what I mean,” she says. “I thought that you were better than that, Danny, you were always at least nice to Nathan, even though none of us would have been sad if he had just quietly disappeared--”

It’s a good thing that Danny has already managed to swallow that gulp of orange juice. He thinks that there’s a fair chance that he would spray it across the table otherwise. “You think that I’m not sitting with Adam today because he’s gay?” There are certain circumstances in which a whisper might as well be a shout, it’s going to attract every bit as much attention, anyway, and Danny has the disconcerting feeling that this is going to be one of those times. He feels his face starting to color, but pushes onward. “Alexis, I am not homophobic.” He sounds betrayed, fitting because he certainly feels betrayed, that someone would make that kind of assumption about him. Okay, so the church says one thing, but “love the sinner, hate the sin” has always caused a fair amount of cognitive dissonance with him, and Adam has thus far been nothing other than one of the coolest and laid-back members of the group save for maybe Kris, and Danny sometimes wonders if Kris doesn’t manage to actually fall asleep with his eyes open and the rest of them just haven’t caught him yet.

“Well, you might want to go let Adam know that, because I know that look, and that is not a look that he deserves.” Alexis goes back to her plate, attacking her bacon and rendering it into shreds rather than actually putting it into her mouth, and Danny decides that maybe he doesn’t want to know the backstory on this one.

“What do you want me to do, apologize?” Alexis gives him a look suggesting that he’s not leaving her any other choice but to question his intelligence on this one. “It has nothing to do with Adam. I’m having a bad day, Alexis, that’s it.”

“That doesn’t mean that you have to get it all over everyone else,” Alexis sniffs before she rises from her seat and stomps off. Danny sighs and stares up at the ceiling.

He doesn’t have to make a point to avoid Adam after the morning; Adam does the rest of the work for him without prodding. He, Allison, and Kirs remain a threesome during song selection, while Danny spends all of half an hour trying to make up with Alexis before discovering that she’s not in the mood. So maybe Adam was wrong, then, and the little cliques that they were creating aren’t made of stone.

Then again, Danny doesn’t see Alexis hanging out with anyone else, so maybe not.

It’s easy for Danny to pick the appropriate song, though, okay, he takes some crap for it. “Really?” Matt sounds almost too delighted for speech. He pulls the lyrics sheet from Danny’s hands over Danny’s protesting, “Hey!” The sound that comes out of Matt’s mouth is disturbingly like a giggle. “Oh, man, this chick has never driven on ice before in her life, has she?”

Danny snatches the lyrics back and feels himself frowning. That alone is enough to get Matt’s attention, as Danny does it so rarely, at least where others can see. “She liked it,” he mutters, and swears that if there are any of those behind the scenes yahoos lurking around with a camera that Danny cannot see, he might act completely out of character and actually hit someone.

He says it too low for Matt to actually hear the words, he thinks, and thanks God for small favors. Apparently, his expression is enough.

“Sorry, man.” Matt claps Danny on the back, pulls his hand back like he thinks that Danny might bite him; Danny wants to roll his eyes at the ridiculous idea that he might actually get violent and ignores the few seconds in which he actually felt like it. He takes a few deep breaths until he manages to center himself again, smiles as well as he’s able and is aware that it doesn’t look like much. “Didn’t mean to piss in your Cheerios.”

“It’s fine,” Danny says, still lying with eyes and voice and body until Matt relaxes and seems to take his word for it, believe that he really did just ruffle the odd nerve that proves Danny’s human. When Matt turns away to hum a few bars of his own chosen song--if Danny were in a better mood, he might point out that Matt’s singing a song by Carrie, too, and maybe that’s the pot calling the kettle insipid--Danny looks down and realizes that his palms are aching. He’s clenching his hands into fists so hard that he’s about to cut the flesh; even then, his knuckles creak when he forces them to let go. He’s supposed to be a different Danny now, he’s supposed to be in this to have fun, move on with his life, honor her memory but make more of his own.

He’s forbidden any of his family members or friends from bringing Her picture to the set again, ever, and it has nothing to do with damage control. He can’t hold onto the fiction if he has to look at her face.

“It’s not fine.” Honestly, after Danny was such a dick to him this morning, Danny really wishes that Adam was a worse person. He wishes that he would at least sulk, and maybe make Danny feel better about this free-floating anxiety that wants to be rage and can’t quite get there, but Adam is perching on the arm of one of their big squashy chairs in the red room like the world’s largest and most fashionable cat, and he’s doing things to Danny...he’s doing things. Danny shivers before he can stop himself; he’s exhausted, and yet sleep is not an appealing prospect. This time he has a good idea that he’ll remember his dreams.

“Wasn’t I an ass to you earlier?” Danny snaps, because he knows that Adam will be understanding, that’s kind of Adam’s thing. Danny swears that he’s only so mellow in the house because he’s storing it up in bottle-sized amounts of crazy that he can then spew enthusiastically all over the stage.

Adam’s eyes narrow a tiny bit; that’s all. Danny realizes how well he’s come to know this person in what’s, relatively speaking, an incredibly short amount of time and feels something in his chest constrict. He didn’t ask for this, he thinks, not quite knowing what this is even supposed to mean and fairly certain that Her and Jamar both would happily call him an idiot if they were available and he were to voice that thought aloud. They both knew and know him better than anyone.

Danny wonders if Adam has ever had someone who knew him like that, feels something that he refuses to acknowledge as jealousy blooming, and pushes it away before it grows into something large enough that he has no choice but to acknowledge it. “What are you singing?” Danny finally asks, when Adam seems content only to stare at him without taking the bait.

“‘Ring of Fire’,” Adam unfolds himself from the arm of the chair with a grace that, once again, puts Danny to mind of a cat and makes him want very hard to flush and clear his throat. He grins, quicksilver. “Johnny Cash.”

Danny has no problem whatsoever imagining Adam dressed entirely in black and once again playing a role, but Cash’s deep and aggressively masculine notes put into Adam’s mouth make him blink. “Ah.” He’s fairly certain that it’s not the cover that he thinks it is. He’s absolutely certain when Adam flashes him that grin again, slow and a little sly, making it clear that he’s not holding Danny’s earlier temper against him and also making Danny wonder what, exactly, it is that Adam thinks they’re talking about. That’s not a smile that one gives when discussing music.

“You have to quit making assumptions, Danny,” Adam says to him, suddenly way too close and throwing off heat. “You know what happens when you assume.”

It’s not until several minutes after Adam has gone that Danny realizes Adam kind of managed to call him an ass before leaving, and secondly that he’s smiling a little when he figures it out.

*
The good thing is that they stay so busy filming commercials and segments and preparing for shows that what little sleep they do manage to get is the best that Danny has experienced before in his life. The bad news is that he’s not entirely sure that he wants to sleep, but he’s being taken under before he can even think of protesting, then there’s Her.

She’s like she was the day that they met and he’s older, he’s himself with the weight of ten years and one powerful fuck-up in her name that he’s only now realizing how much he regrets, and he knows what is going to happen. He knows and tries to tell Her, but She only presses her finger against his lip, much stronger than She ever had in life. She’s, as he looks her over and drinks in every detail, the same way that he does every time that he dreams of Her just in case this time is the last, is fulfilling that goddess-power that is probably more than a little blasphemous for him to be projecting upon Her in the first place.

“Don’t worry, Danny,” She tells him, pressing her finger harder against his lips when he insists upon trying to speak, because She has to know, maybe if She knows they can-- “You worry too much.”

And She never worried enough, but Danny doesn’t feel vindicated in being right in the end. He doesn’t want to argue, though, and takes her hand away from his lips so that he can lean in to kiss her before he wakes--

Touches someone else’s lips instead, feels a jawline that’s firmer and more broad, riddled with the first suggestion of post-morning stubble. Adam chews at his lower lip when he’s nervous; it’s the one tic that all of his acting experience cannot overcome. So Danny knows who he’s kissing immediately even with his eyes closed and startles, but he doesn’t pull back and he doesn’t open them again to look Adam in the face. It’s much easier, that way, to tell himself that this is all taking him by surprise like falling off of a cliff, rather than a slow, creeping tide that’s been building his way for weeks.

“See?” Adam is the first one to break away. Danny wishes that he hadn’t, and finally has to open his eyes. Adam’s are very blue. He’s staring at Danny with an intensity that Danny has to this point only seen him exhibit on stage. He wonders, before he can push the thought away, if this is what Adam is like in bed, too. “See what happens when you put people into categories?” He leans in and kisses Danny again, hand on the back of his neck. Danny wants to tell Adam that if he’s thinking that Danny is going to pull away, then as the owner of this dream Danny himself can let him on a little secret, until Adam’s fingers flex and Danny realizes that it’s a pure gesture of possession and nothing more. And he draws a ragged breath, puts his hands on Adam’s waist and urges him closer in the first overtly encouraging move that he’s made so far, while Adam’s fingers slide beneath the elastic waistband of his boxers--

Danny wakes up in a cold sweat and with an erection so hard that it nearly hurts. He lies on his back with the sheets in a tangle around his body while the sweat cools, panting hard, mortifyingly convinced that he was pushing his hips up and into the empty air only a few seconds before. Danny leaps from the bed so quickly that Matt wakes a sleepy noise and turns over, just almost wakes.

The coldest water that the shower has to offer does absolutely nothing to cool him; it’s under a minute before Danny cracks, and his hand finds his cock while his forehead rests against the tile, eyes squeezed shut tight. He shudders hard and makes a sound from low in his chest, down deep where it hurts, as he comes. The water sluicing down his back is pulling up hard prickles of gooseflesh.

Stumbling out of the shower with nothing like the easy afterglow that should have followed an orgasm, Danny barely pauses to pull some sweatpants back on before he’s fumbling for his cellular phone with one hand and shaking Matt’s shoulder with the other.

“The fuck?” Matt mumbles as he turns over and blinks at Danny in the mostly-darkness. Danny lets go of Matt’s shoulder and flicks on the bedside lamp; the expression becomes a squinting glare.

“You need to get out,” Danny says more calmly than he actually feels at the moment, and a hell of a lot more calmly than he’s going to be able to manage if Matt makes a fuss.

“Uh, no?” Matt sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and seems to notice for the first time that Danny is just barely holding it together as it is. His expression becomes concerned, because he’s a nice guy. Danny does not particularly care if he’s being a nice guy at the moment, and if Matt doesn’t get his ass up and get moving Danny might bodily throw him from the room. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Go away.” Danny barely remembers that this is not exactly how one gets someone to do something for someone else. “Please.” Matt continues to stare at him, sleepy, confused, and stubborn. Danny swears, and sees Matt’s eyes widen. He grabs for Matt’s arm again. “Come on.”

“All right, all right.” Matt goes, still clad only in his sleeping pants and with his hair sticking out in all directions, muttering about how he doesn’t understand why Danny is the one with the problem but Matt is still the one being thrown out of the room.

It’s the second speed dial down, immediately after his parents. Danny throws himself face down across the bed, holding the phone against his ear so tightly that he makes the plastic creak, and begs the person on the other end of the line to pick up, no matter how late it is.

The thing about best friends is that sometimes a certain kind of telepathy emerges. “‘Lo?” Jamar sounds as if he has been woken from a dead sleep; Danny sneaks a glance at the bedside clock and doesn’t doubt it. He might not even have recognized the number before he fumbled the phone open, in which case he’s the best friend that Danny has ever had in his life or can ever hope to have again. Rather than explaining that, though, he pushes his face into the sheets and makes a muffled sound.

Jamar sounds a little more awake as he says, “Listen, jackass--” That still doesn’t answer the question of whether or not he realizes that it’s Danny. “You had better have a good reason--”

“I had a sex dream,” Danny finally raises his head enough to confess.

There’s a long pause from the other end, and then, “Danny?” A longer pause. “Why do you think that I need to know this?”

“It wasn’t about--” Danny can only get halfway into the sentence before he shuts his mouth so hard that his teeth make a clicking sound as they come together.

Jamar knows Danny. He knows about Danny’s reticence to speak Her name; he called Danny the night that her picture was held up to the camera and yelled at him for the full length of Danny’s voicemail, let it hang up on him, and then did it two more times. “Okay,” he says slowly. Danny can hear him moving on his end of the receiver, presumably sitting up as he realizes that this conversation is about to get serious. “That’s...um, do you really think that I need to know this?”

“I’m about to lose my mind here!” Danny hisses back through gritted teeth, and apparently there’s enough of a high-pitched whine in his voice that Jamar can tell he’s not joking. The chances that the two of them will ever, ever discuss this conversation again as soon as they manage to hang up the phone probably rival the chances that Danny will someday be able to hit some of Adam’s throat-tearing high notes, but as long as it makes it even remotely easier for Danny to sleep at night he’ll pay the price.

He should not have thought about Adam’s voice. It makes Danny wonder what other sounds he makes, if he can be made to whine soft and low and needy, wordless lover’s gasps telling Danny where to put his hands and his mouth next. He shifts miserably and wants to bury his head in the bed sheets again, so that he nearly misses Jamar’s next words.

“That’s...that was going to happen, man.” Jamar is speaking softly, gently, like he thinks that Danny on the other end of the line has become an animal that might bite and tear at even a familiar hand if he doesn’t choose his words with care. “That’s supposed to happen. You can’t mourn her forever.”

Why not, Danny wants to ask, since he’s already made such a great mess out of it that any kind of just universe would let him back up and take a do-over, like rehearsing one note over and over again until he can make it ring. He had wanted to do it right. He had wanted to make her matter. Somehow, he doesn’t think that it’s turning out quite the way that she would have wanted, even if cutting it all off now seems even worse.

He sighs instead, and says, “I know.” It still sounds like giving up. He hates it; he wants to put his fist into the wall.

Jamar yawns, and then says apologetically, “You still need to talk?”

“No.” Danny doesn’t guess that there’s anything to talk about, really. “Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“You’re giving me free tickets when you’re on tour later,” Jamar says before he has to give way to another jaw-cracking yawn. “And buying me a plasma screen TV.”

Danny snorts out a laugh and hopes that Jamar believes it, even though he still feels less like laughing than anything in the world. He hangs up the phone, lets Matt back in and ignores his glare, and stares up at the ceiling for a long time before he manages to go to sleep.

*
Danny dreams of a mouth touching him, lightly, at the skin just above his navel, making Danny jump hard. He jumps harder when the mouth travels downward, when it takes him between its lips, and then it’s--

*
If there is one thing that Danny can be glad of, he decides as he once again finds himself huddled beneath a shower with the spray turned so cold that it’s making his teeth chatter, it’s that he can’t be costing the mansion anything in turns of hot water at this point. And it’s still a bitter kind of gallows humor, and so unlike him that Danny cannot stop himself before he’s punching the tile in front of him once, twice, three times, only stopping because a voice in the back of his head warns him that he’s about to break something. His hand is throbbing by the time that he shuts the water off and leaves the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, only to find that Matt is sitting up in the bed with the bedside lamp on, watching him with concern.

“Are you sure that you’re all right?” Matt asks Danny, tilting his head to one side. “That’s the second night in a row that you’ve done that.”

So much for thinking that Matt had been asleep. “Fine,” Danny says shortly as he goes to his dresser and rummages through it for a pair of pants. He hesitates to let the towel drop until the very last minute; after the past two nights, any male gaze lingering upon his form makes him feel jumpy and uncertain in his own skin. “I’m great.”

“You’re not kicking me out again,” Matt says quickly.

“I wasn’t planning on it!” Danny snaps a little too quickly for someone who did that very thing all of a night before, and he swears again. Matt’s eyes go even wider than before.

“Are you sure sure the pressure’s not getting to you?” Matt asks, and then holds up his hands when Danny glares at him. He doesn’t bother with insisting that he’s fine again when it’s going to be even more painfully obvious before that it isn’t true, throws himself into the bed and rolls over so that he doesn’t have to look at Matt any longer until Matt turns off the bedside lamp.

It was unfortunate that Matt mentioned pressure. When Danny finally and against his will falls into sleep shortly before the dawn, he dreams of Adam leaning over him with that wicked smile that he only has when he’s performing--he wears a softer, gentler one in the everyday, and Danny wonders what that one would look like in bed, too, and Danny wishes that his libido was a physical thing that he could find and cut out until it learned to behave itself again--and Adam putting his weight down on both of Danny’s wrists to keep them pinned down by his sides. The pressure is light, Danny could buck him off if he wanted to, but he’s going to pretend that he can’t. It makes it easier when he’s the one to lift his head from the pillow and find Adam’s mouth, when his are the first hips to shift and bring their cocks together in slow, searing friction.

“Mmmm,” Adam says from the back of his throat before he leans down and places a series of biting, suckling kisses from just beneath Danny’s ear and all the way down into the subtle hollow where his collarbones meet. Danny arches harder. “Didn’t figure you for the type that needed to be seduced.” Feeling rather than seeing the smile does nothing to diminish its power. “You were always kind of...forward.”

Danny thinks about grabbing Adam by the shoulders and flipping them both over so that he’s the one on top, but instead he whispers, “I’m only doing this because it’s not real.”

Continue to Part Two