It Was Only Time
Chapter 10 – Pittsburgh
No one knew that Brian went to New York for Justin's first show. He just had to support Justin, even if only from afar. The phone call was the hardest thing he had to do in years. He thought that a quick, clean, painless break was what both Justin and he needed. It turned out to be anything but painless and he thought of nothing else for days. As far as anyone knew, he was in Chicago soothing a client and when anyone in the office, namely Ted or Cynthia, tried to ask him about that trip, they got their head bitten off and were told to mind their own fucking business.
Personally, Brian wasn't doing so well either. He seemed OK the first few days after he found out that Justin moved to New York. But the night after he supervised the packing and shipping of Justin's things, he got blindingly drunk at Woody's and had to be practically carried home. After that he resorted to his usual method of pain management – fucking anything that moved. One evening, Brian brought a trick back to the loft, but he couldn't get the images of him and Justin together in every corner of the place playing in mocking kaleidoscope in his brain. He ended up screwing the trick against the front door and throwing him out. After that, he didn't bring anyone back to the loft for quite some time. Not long after that disastrous encounter, he realized that neither the booze, nor the sex, nor the drugs were helping him in the slightest, but sheer exhaustion somewhat did. So he sobered up and threw himself into work instead.
At first, Brian planned to sell the charred shell that was Babylon to developers, but Michael intervened and convinced him to repair and reopen the club as a giant symbolic "Fuck you!" to anyone who wanted to do Liberty Avenue harm. So for the next two months, Brian immersed himself in work both at Kinnetik and at the reconstruction of the nightclub. The original club manager that Brian hired when he first acquired Babylon got slightly injured in the bombing and decided to seek employment elsewhere after he recovered. Ted wanted to hire someone new, but Brian refused and decided to manage both the club and Kinnetik himself at least for the time being. He worked non-stop, taking every phone call, every meeting and every business trip he could, driving himself and his team into the ground. The only downtime he took was a few hours of sleep and the 30 minutes he spent with Gus every day until Mel and Lindsey moved to Toronto. After that, he called Gus on a daily basis and spent a few minutes talking to him, afraid that Gus would forget him otherwise.
The result of this frenetic work pace was that Babylon was ready to be reopened in 10 short weeks. As for Kinnetik, the company landed three major new accounts in March alone and "stole" two important clients from the now decimated Vangard in April. It was shaping up to be a banner year for Brian's firm – the team just about reached the point of having more work than they could handle, yet Brian seemed to be on a never-ending quest for more.
Disclaimer: All belongs to Showtime and CowLip.
A/N: If Brian seems a bit OOC, its my vision as to what the bombing and losing the love of your life would do to a person. My thought is that Brian is starting to change.