3am again. Christ, this is becoming a bit of a recurring theme. Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, I was thrilled with the great reaction to bi!Erik. A serve of teenage confusion, underage drinking, and swearing coming right up. Bring on the bromance!

Disclaimer: Glorious Nadir belongs to the fabulous Susan Kay. Erik is a whore and everyone owns a bit of him and I can't be bothered listing them. If you're here shouldn't you know?

So tell me baby pretty baby that this house is not a graveyard

Tell me how to stay strong and carry you home

Over corpses of her long-lost fathers and her unborn daughters

Cause goddamnit I can't do it alone

I Can't Do It Alone, 3OH!3

Covering All The Bases

Erik had liked Christine Daae almost as long as he'd been at high school.

It had been eighth grade, when he'd been weedy and short and convinced high school was the worst thing to happen to him. His parents had been gentle but adamant he had to progress forwards to high school, and a future of patriotic wedgies and being thrown into dumpsters and shut in lockers swam before him like an ocean of terror. He was utterly alone and utterly terrified, and when a quartet of angry ugly upperclassmen came towards him with their fists clenched, he knew his paranoia about high school had been justified.

The first day they threw him into a dumpster.

The second day they gave him a patriotic wedgie.

The third day they shut him in a locker.

He had been let out after nearly half the school day had elapsed by a grim, pale maths teacher who looked like he hadn't seen the light of day since 1978. Trying to find his English classroom, he was in the corridor attempting to remain unnoticed by a group of jocks when the sound from another classroom hit him. An angelic, pure soprano, as far as he could tell. He was only a teenager, after all. But it was without a doubt the prettiest voice he had ever heard, and the sound of it was enough to take his breath away.

He peered into the classroom, only to see an angel. Shoulders back, head held high, she sang like a professional and it filled him with a warm, almost scorching glow in his chest. His mother had been a singer. Once.

When she stopped he expected her to curtsey, as old fashioned as it was, or perhaps wave regally to her stunned audience of the rest of the class. But, she had instead shoved her gum back into her mouth and said, "Yeah, never doing that again," and sat down.

It turned out Chris Daae's dad was a singing tutor and a vocal coach. Little Chris had been having lessons ever since she could talk and as a result the girl loathed singing. Loathed it. She'd put her foot down about the lessons the summer prior, displaying a streak of teenage stubborness that left her father at his wits end, baffled by this strange young woman who had replaced his angelic-voiced child. Christine refused on principle to join choirs and vocal groups, giving everyone who asked a cold stare that just screamed, "Bitch, please."

And Erik never heard Christine Daae sing ever again. But her voice remained crystal clear in his memory, and when the time came for him to start having feelings for girls, her beautiful face and exquisite voice was the first in his mind, surpassing Emma Thwaites' utterly-out-of-proportion-to-the-rest-of-her breasts or Meg Giry's rumoured promiscuity.

Well, he did spare a thought for Meg, but she had made her disdain for him very clear. No, Christine Daae was the woman for him.

He would love her forever. Or at least until the end of high school.

As it turned out, there was no more bullying either. On the fourth day he met Nadir, tall and with muscles so impressive they sometimes seemed to have their own field of gravity, and then no one was game enough to touch him. Nadir had been locked in a stall in the boy's toilets freaking out over a spider blocking his path. It turned out spiders were Nadir's kryptonite and once the spider was slain they fell to talking. Nadir liked the other boy's quick wit and sarcastic commentary on the other students so much he decided to keep Erik around that day, and then for the week, and so on. It had been years since they'd met and he had still not tired of Erik and his mask and his mystery and his wicked temper.

So Christine and Nadir were the constants in his life. His love for Christine and his friendship with Nadir, and never the twain should meet. Or whatever. The point was, the lines had blurred. Raoul de Chagny had entered the playing field and turned it all upside down. That one little... encounter, and Raoul's confession, had changed everything.

Erik didn't want to be with Raoul... most of the time. He wanted Christine, beautiful Christine with her silky blonde hair and her quick flashing grin and her delicate wrists.

He wasn't sure why he found her wrists so cute. Maybe that was a bit weird.

The thing was, he couldn't look at her now without thinking, I made out with your boyfriend, I played tonsil hockey with your boyfriend.

Etc.

It was stupid and immature and he knew it. If Nadir knew what was running through his head as he stared as Christine hazily in the cafeteria, he'd laugh himself stupid and then maybe throw up again.

Christ.

He shared everything with Nadir. Nadir had been his confidant and his rock through so much hardship, his first real friend. He had shared everything with Nadir, all the details of his life, including the half a dozen foster homes he'd lived in, where everything from his sarcasm to his grades to his appalling face had been the eventual reason for him to move on.

He was settled in now of course, with a couple and their two daughters, the son and older brother to the girls they'd always wanted. He'd been with them since he was twelve, his mum and dad and little sisters. He hardly remembered the parents who had died in a car crash when he was barely old enough to be out of a carseat. They'd loved him, he knew; he had a thousand pictures of a smiling woman with his eyes and a man with his dark hair snuggling a freakish baby, holding it, playing with it.

Christmas and birthdays and holidays and just days, all strung together in glorious frozen colour, proof through the hard years his parents had loved him, and accepted him.

In every picture he had been mask-less.

He couldn't remember where he'd got his first mask, when someone had snapped and fashioned a garment to protect their eyes from his monstrous features.

Nadir had seen it, when Erik had been scrounging through his bag one day and had tripped, only a few weeks into their friendship. The mask had come off, and Erik had lunged for it, hands over his face, desperate to conceal the horror he was sure would be the end of his friendship with Nadir. But he had seen it anyway.

Nadir had turned a delicate shade of green under his tanned skin, his lips quivering, but had managed a shaky grin and an arm around Erik's shoulders and an invitation to come round for Playstation. Erik had managed not to burst into tears with gratitude and had agreed, and the subject was never touched upon again. Nadir had his back and Erik in return did their calculus homework and if it was a parasitic relationship somewhere it became symbiotic because they genuinely liked one another.

And now everything had changed.

Erik had made out with a dude. And OK, that was so not a statement he could imagine saying to his best friend. But Raoul had been there and so earnest and cute and Erik couldn't resist blue eyes, he never could. Christine had blue eyes. And it had been a mind numbingly awesome experience to kiss Raoul, to run his hands along the boy's shoulders and feel the muscles there. But why? Was he genuinely attracted to guys, or just desperate? He didn't know.

But. Oh, but.

The feel of Raoul against him, chest to chest in the darkness, hands fisted in his hair, was one he was having a hard time shaking off. Erik didn't know why. He felt sorry for the boy, sure, but anyone with clothes that nice clearly didn't suffer too much. Erik knew that was unfair, but somehow it didn't really matter when Raoul slung a casual arm around Christine and she leaned into him.

He couldn't work out to be jealous of.

School that week elapsed blissfully quickly and Erik soon found himself slumped on Nadir's bed in friend's attic bedroom, contraband vodka fizzling pleasantly in his veins and colouring the world brighter. They had been on the X-box but when Nadir's parents and four sisters left to go to the movies Nadir had fished out a couple of bottles from under his bed and they had set to work drinking themselves happy.

Except Erik wasn't happy. Casting a glance at Nadir, sprawled in his computer chair staring dreamily at the poster of Megan Fox on his wall, he decided to bite the bullet.

"Nadir?" Erik asked, staring up at the cracks in Nadir's ceiling. There were forty-two. He sat up with a groan.

"Yeah?" replied his best friend hazily.

"Have you ever..." He trailed off. What if Nadir hated him? Thought he was a freak?

"What, dude? You're killing my buzz," Nadir said.

"Ever thought about, you know, guys?"

"What about guys?"

"You know. Making out with guys."

Nadir went very still, only his head moving until his narrowed eyes regarded Erik beadily. "What are you trying to say, Erik?"

Erik decided just to spit it out. The look on Nadir's face was indecipherable and could just be confusion. Or disgust. But come on, Nadir was his friend. His mate. They could work this out, surely?

"I... I think I'm bi, Nadir," he said, watching the other boy for a reaction. "At least bi. I'm... attracted to guys."

This was it. This was the moment Nadir was going to call him a freak and shout at him to get out of his house. Nadir was going to stride over and punch Erik for being even more of a freak than what his face already made him and Erik would be utterly friendless. Nadir's lips pursed, and then turned down, and then opened, and Erik braced himself for the onslaught, the words that would destroy his friendship forever -

"OK," Nadir said, taking a long swig from his bottle.

OK? OK? OK?

"WHAT?" Erik exploded. "How is it OK? I made out with Raoul! De Fucking Chagny!"

Nadir shuddered. "Ew," he said expressively. "De Chagny? Are you that desperate?"

Erik saw red.

"Oh, yes, actually, I am that desperate. It's so easy for you. You're Mr Ladies Man 2010. All the girls want you. You're the fucking school Casanova, for Christ's sake! How would you know what it's like to be desperate?"

Silence followed Erik's tirade, before Nadir sat up straight and regarded his friend through eyes only a little fogged with alcohol. "Are you mad because I don't have a problem with you being bi, or because you want me to have a problem with you being bi?" he asked shrewdly.

Sometimes Erik's best friend was really too perceptive for his own good. Erik thought this, and also that perhaps he was the luckiest bastard on the planet.

"You... you don't have a problem with this?"

Nadir shrugged. "Why would I?" he asked sensibly. "My folks are Muslim, man. I know what it feels like to be discriminated against, why would I want to do that to anyone else? Well," he amended, "maybe like paedophiles or something. That shit is fucked up. But dude, you're my boy. Why would I care which way you swung?"

Erik wanted to hug the shit out of his friend but, he thought, in view of his confession that might not have been a wise move. Instead once again he considered his extraordinary luck. Nadir didn't care. Nadir didn't think it was a big deal. And the question was, why did Erik think it was? Where did it come from, this ingrained social dogma that one had to be completely straight or be an outcast from society? Erik was reasonably open-minded, certainly he had taken Raoul's homosexuality in his stride, but why couldn't he apply that to himself?

"It's wrong," he said, but the words felt hollow.

"Nah," said Nadir, waving a hand in dismissal. "'S natural. Guy meets girl, they have sex. Girl meets girl, they have sex. Guy meets guy..."

Erik's head was spinning. It was doing a lot of that lately. Life was throwing him curve balls one after the other lately, and it didn't look like it was about to let up. "Does that mean you're...?"

"Nope," Nadir said cheerfully. "Straight as an arrow. But what other guys do with their dicks isn't my business."

And Erik guessed that was that.

The next day when he watched Christine Daae across the cafeteria, he didn't think of Raoul at all even though he was sitting next to her, and Erik could feel the solid presence of his best friend at his side, at his back. Sometimes, Erik figured, you don't have to cover all the bases yourself. Sometimes there's someone there to help you cover them.

And all was well.