Time Passages (Queen or Freddie Mercury Fanfic)

35. The Nightmares Before Christmas

Julia

Sleepily I rubbed my eyes, then gently ran my hand over Fry's warm, long body next to me, which set his tail to wag for a moment.  I had to smile.  I liked him best asleep; he wasn't quite such a nuisance then.

With a tired sigh, I opened The Great Gatsby back up again.  I'd pushed myself through about half the book, starting from the first page; I usually sailed through books much faster than this, certainly books I'd read as much as that one, but I'd been reading only at short intervals.  I had had other outside  things to take care of- such as finding a nice, well-obscured home for Jim Hutton's memoirs, someplace where even the sneaky Danny Phantom would not think to pry.

Marvelous, Stuart; something else to stress about, I said to myself, still feeling a tad bitter about his, shall we say, ill-timed gift. Thank you, dear.  Let me just add Freddie's current lover's book to the million things I have to f---ing hide from both Freddie AND his child.

Before I could get myself riled up again (and it would not have taken much), I settled back into the classic piece of American literature- and found the following passage alarmingly familiar:

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from [James Gatz's] Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end...

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

Sounds like Freddie, I noted.  Sounds just like him. 

"What doesn't," I said aloud.  It was true; it didn't take much at all to remind me of Freddie.  Just about everything conjured up some little thing he would say, do, or be; not even the Great Gatsby was immune.

I repeated the last line talking about a fairy's wing, and found myself reminded of yet another song.  "Mother Mercury," I mouthed to myself, "look what they've done to me..."

But I didn't stay sidetracked long.  I stretched, tapped my phone's screen to look at the time- and groaned aloud. It was twenty-two minutes after one in the morning. I should be in bed; I've got work. Freddie, dear, hurry back.

As much as I wanted to curl up under the covers and get cozy, I had promised myself I would be awake to greet him. Not that he would have really cared in the long run, I knew; but I wanted him to, on one hand, understand that it really was not my intent to avoid him this way. But mostly, if we were being perfectly truthful, I just wanted Freddie all to myself for at least five minutes.

Of course, our moments alone were no less dangerous than they had ever been.  In fact, thanks to my missed happy pill this morning, my once-steely armor didn't stand a chance against his power- and my own suppressed, but still very real, emotions.  But tonight, I didn't care.  I knew our time together was limited- and every impossible moment mattered.  Every second I spent near him, the clearer that seemed.