Disclaimer: Don't own it.
Warnings: Um, bad language (blame the movie, that's where this dialogue is from), mentions of heroin, and suggestions of a three-way relationship including m/m. Just all around not-kid-friendly stuff.
A/N: This was supposed to be a little drabble based on a scene from a little-known movie, Gridlock'd... but it got a bit long. Doubt anyone will read it anyway, since it's so obscure, and since Spoon was played by Tupac Shakur and Stretch by Tim Roth, and I don't know a lot of people who would appreciate me insinuating anything having to do with Tupac being even remotely gay. Even though I thought they were adorable together, as friends or otherwise. ;D Watch the movie, people, they're highly slashable!
Please, no flames.
Positive
by
Norikio Na No Da
Spoon kept his head down, eyes leveled at the floor as he slipped through the crowded lobby, towards the bathroom. The cops didn't seem to have noticed him - which was a small miracle, considering his distinctive good looks and the fact that his facial composite sketch was being broadcast on the news, alongside Stretch's. This truly had been one hell of a day so far.
Cookie's OD had woken Spoon up to the dangers of the drug, seemingly for the first time in his life, and he was scared. Scared she might never wake up. Scared that their little trio would never be whole again - that the Three Musketeers had become Two, just him and Stretch, who - let's face it, he thought - could barely survive on their own for one day without Cookie's exasperated shepherding. And now, now that they had finally decided, finally made the commitment to kick the drug, they were being told over and over again, "We can't help you", "Come back tomorrow", "We'll notify you in a month".
Well, they didn't have a month. The system that was supposed to help them had been doing nothing but screwing them over, and over, and over again.
Spoon glanced once more over his shoulder at the blue boys, who were milling around the lobby distractedly. Then he pushed the bathroom door open. A nervous glance inside reassured him - none but the familiar scuffed shoes of his friend under one of the stall doors. "Yo, Stretch!" he hissed impatiently. Stretch was just supposed to flush the dope and be done with it, but he appeared to have other business to attend to as well.
"Yeah, how'd it go?" Stretch called back.
Spoon let the door fall shut behind him and made for the stall next to Stretch's. "Fucking 5-0 just came in, man, we gotta get the fuck outta here!" He closed the stall door and leaned against the partition separating them. A vague memory of the three of them - Spoon, Stretch and Cookie - crammed in the same stall just after a performance, no shame, no secrets, flickered through his mind, but he shook his head. The pain of hauling Cookie's prone form to the ER that very morning was too raw, and he didn't want to deal with it just yet.
Stretch made a sound that could have been a groan or a snort of bitter laughter, then said, "Gimme a minute."
But Spoon was too hopped up on adrenaline - the same adrenaline that had been keeping him aware and alive all day long - to relax for even a minute. Not only that, but he was angry. Indignant, afraid. All that trouble, all that cop-dodging and dealer-dodging, only to be told, by some goofy white guy at a desk, 'Come back tomorrow'? How were they going to get into detox now? How were they going to get off the junk, and off the streets? Everywhere they went, there was someone just around the corner looking to kill them or arrest them, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where was the justice?
"You know all that bullshit people been telling us 'bout getting on Medicaid the same day?" he snapped, referring to the misinformation they'd been fed since the beginning of the horrible, horrible day, and the bad news he'd just been told while Stretch was in the bathroom. "It's all drama! You gotta be HIV-positive to get on. Ain't that some shit?"
A brief pause, and then,
"I'm HIV-positive."
Then silence. Spoon stared at the red partition, shocked. He slowly sank down on the closed lid of the toilet in his stall, still staring, unable to process the information.
"Spoon, y'alright?" Stretch asked, concerned.
He still couldn't respond.
"I'da mentioned it before," Stretch went on, sounding chagrined, "but I didn't know how you'd take it." He paused, and then added, "I mean, I always used my own works and everything..."
But Spoon, bowled over, didn't take any particular notice of this last part. He shook his head. "Does Cookie know?" he asked, voice soft.
"Nah. Never really got far enough for me to hafta tell her. You're the first person I ever told…" The last part sounded musing, almost cheerful, as though the words had removed a great weight from his shoulders and unwittingly placed it on Spoon's.
Spoon shifted a little, hands clasped on his knees. His world was falling apart. Admittedly, it had never been a very stable world in the first place; most of the time he saw it through a drug-induced haze. But heroin or no heroin, he loved Stretch and Cookie, and he suddenly felt terribly alone. What was becoming of the only family he had left in the world? His lady - their lady - was in the hospital, and Stretch - who was sort of like his other lady (because the three of them, they shared everything) - was telling him he had HIV. Spoon was almost afraid for himself, considering how he and Stretch, on certain nights, would get a little physical, but then he realized that they had never gone far enough for the virus to be transferred.
Another memory entered his mind. The apartment, after he and Cookie had been fooling around. Stretch watching TV, smoking a cigarette, looking annoyed. Cookie purring, "What's the matter, daddy? You coulda come and joined us," and then kissing him. Stretch shrugging it off with a joke, craning around her body to see the television screen.
Spoon always wondered why Stretch never wanted to go farther, with him or Cookie (or both), and now he knew. It was shattering.
He suddenly got to his feet, angry. At the world, at himself, and at Stretch for not coming clean - for keeping the miserable truth to himself and stewing away unhappily, in the corner, while Spoon and Cookie had always carelessly, carefree-ly shared their love. He put one foot on the toilet seat, braced one against the wall, and peered over the partition. "Man, what the fuck you doing?" he shouted.
Stretch grinned up at him dopily, needle in his arm.
"I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE YOU, MAN! I TELL YOU TO GET RID OF THE DOPE AND WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU DO?!"
"What am I supposed to do?" the white man replied, indignantly. "Flush the dope down the toilet without doing any? Fuck that!"
But Spoon didn't hear him, because all of a sudden the bathroom door opened and in stepped two uniformed officers. They looked directly at his head, which was still poking over the top of the partition, a guilty expression spreading quickly across his face.