Author: Damienne Ross
Rating: PG (for now)
Spoilers: None so far
Summary: Years ago, Greg received some bad news. Now he's living with a harsh reality. What happens when he no longer wants to be alone?
Greg Sanders knew the world.
He'd been a part of it for so long, an avid member, that it would have been impossible for him not to know every inch, every dark nook and cranny, of what went on. Some of it, he enjoyed, some of it he despised, some of it he didn't understand. But mostly, it was just what he'd known since he was fifteen. And being a San Francisco youth didn't help.
By the time he was fifteen, the early nineties were upon him, and it was simply a thoroughly different time. Because things had happened before he was old enough to understand, because a kind of liberation, then a kind of panic, then a kind of odd acceptance had settled into the town in the previous decade, he saw history as just that. History. The past. What you read about in textbooks and watch programs about on PBS. What you hear about from other people like the kind of ghost stories told around campfires during the summertime with flashlights dramatically held to your face.
When he was four, it was a silent concern, a hidden secret barely discussed behind closed doors by renowned physicians. At five, it continued to spread slowly, silently, an unrecognized ghost. At six, the media got hold of it. By seven, panic was beginning to spread, and though he was oblivious, it all seemed to be radiating from his little California corner. But by eight or nine, it had a reputation pinned to it that induced both terror and disgust, concern and bigotry. At eleven, he began to question his own sexuality, but not before he had a good hold on the implications.
Still, being a San Francisco youth lended him a kind of admitted cavalierness that he later suspected had been a major player to the root early eighties chaos to begin with. And that cavalierness garnered him attention. The wrong kind of attention.
But when it touched him in a way he never would have considered, things changed.
Greg Sanders changed.