(Author's Note: Sorry I made Brian's intro a bit short! Its hard to get
into his head, and I have to be up for work in about 4 hours but I REALLY
wanted this part posted. Sheesh. Ain't exposition a bitch!)
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. Period.
John Bender groaned as his alarm clock went off. His head was still fuzzy from the late night and for a couple minutes he had no idea why on earth he had set his alarm clock anyway. Normally he slept until at least ten, worked hard in the afternoon and again after dark and went to bed in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes because of a party, sometimes because of a woman, but mostly because he was a night person, plain and simple.
The Club, he thought and sat bolt upright. His head instantly complained. He hadn't had anything to drink the night before – had had nothing for well over a year, and had the white chips to prove it. His drinking had nearly cost him his career and his life. At least it hadn't threatened some phantom GPA. Unlike the other four, he had never even wanted to go to college. He worked best with his hands, not his head. Although to know cars inside and out, every make and model, certainly took some smarts.
He snorted as he added coffee to his cornflakes instead of milk. He didn't even know why he was going to the school today. The other four were going to show off their snotty college educations and their brand new fancy cars and, quite likely, some trophy spouses.
But then, they'd all come from better than he had. Even Brian and Allison, though far from rich and with parents who were sometimes abusive or neglectful, hadn't felt the sting of true poverty, or the deeper pain of a father's fists and curses. His father had been what made him stop drinking. Not literally, his father was dead, but one night, while drunk, he'd backhanded his girlfriend across the face. He looked at his hand while she crashed into a table. Looked at his hand... and saw his father's hand striking his mother. And the next morning, he saw Chrissy's cheek swollen and bruised, and he saw the cigar burn on his own arm, and he skipped work and went to his first AA meeting. The first of many. It sometimes seemed like he had spent half of his life afraid of his father and, as an adult, his greatest fear was that he was going to become his father.
And speaking of fathers . . . lately he'd been committing the ultimate sin and wondering what it would be like to have children himself. He didn't have a wife, or even a girlfriend at the moment, but for some reason he had been thinking more and more of children. He wouldn't be like his father. It seemed, somehow, that he could correct his father's mistakes by having rugrats of his own and treating them well. He had the money, would have even more if the partnership in the garage went through like he thought it would.
For a moment, he was tempted to stay in bed. He was finally starting to scrape together something resembling self-esteem, just starting to build himself a life. Did he want to ruin it by meeting up with people that were likely far better off?
Yes, he was tempted. John rolled over and closed his eyes. But the image that swam before them was of Claire. Cherry – how she'd looked on graduation day. Beautiful, her hair starting to grow a little longer, her dark eyes large and worried. She was still a girl then. He knew that was why she'd never associated with him in school. She was a girl, and she was scared.
He wondered what Claire the woman was like.
With that thought, he forced himself out of bed and into the shower.
* * *
Allison Reynolds was up long before everyone else in the Club. In art school she'd been exposed to many things that had never found their way into Shermer, Illinois. Most of those things, like yoga and meditation, had still been considered "hippie leftovers" but she couldn't deny that her isolation and depression had eased since she started uniting her mind and body. Kind of like Aristotle and all the Greek philosophers, she thought. Sound mind, sound body.
As was her custom, she was up at five in the morning. She didn't have her usual beachside jogging, so instead she substituted the hotel's fitness room downstairs. Finding it empty, she quickly ran her usual five miles and improvised on the weight machines. She couldn't wait to get back to California at this point – she felt absolutely lost without a seated leg press handy. In college, she had actually begun to understand Andrew's obsession with physical fitness.
Back in her room, she spread out a yoga mat and did another half an hour in downward dogs and standing tree poses. She would have done that in the fitness room, but some of the poses were vaguely obscene and she was still shy enough not to want to be observed. After a steaming hot shower – almost hot enough to burn – she settled down to a quick fifteen minute meditation.
She used the quiet time to sort through her feelings about this meeting of the Club. To her surprise, she was actually excited. She let both emotions float over her. She honestly wanted to see how everyone else was doing now. The only person she had been in contact with after college was Brian – she had attended his wedding, and then barely seen him again. She heard vague snippets of information about them all from time to time. She lived not too far from Andrew, actually, just a few hours, but all temptation to see him had passed when she saw his wedding announcement in the newspaper.
I'm probably the only one of them that isn't married! she thought suddenly. Well, that's not true. Bender didn't strike me as a one-woman man.
Her general isolation had definitely extended to dating. She had almost gotten married in college, but had then found the age-old cliché – coming home early after a class was cancelled to find her fiancé in bed – HER bed, no less – with a fellow artist. Not her best friend, she didn't have one, but bad enough. She'd been set up on a few blind dates since then, and occasionally tried long-distance relationships with men she met at the fantasy art conventions – but men more steeped in fantasy and escapism than she used to be wasn't really her style. She was finally, FINALLY, grounded in reality. It took a lot of meditation, a lot of Buddhist studies, and a hell of a lot of therapy, but she was fully awake and mindful most of the time.
Allison carefully blow-dried her hair and placed the long strands in a gentle French braid, letting tendrils drift around her face. She donned yet another all-black outfit, one of her quirks that had never changed, although her clothes now were much different; often chic, often hippie, but most often jeans and smocks for painting. Today, though, she wanted to look good, so she put on a pair of tight black jeans, black high-heeled boots, and a fitted black t-shirt with a whispy periwinkle fairy on the front. No makeup. She painted canvasses now, not her face.
* * *
Claire Standish-Pembrooke stepped off the airplane with just enough time to rent her car and head to the school. She had wanted to arrive the night before and stay in a hotel, but the situations kept changing. First, her louse of an ex-husband called to say that, no, he simply couldn't take the children now. It interfered with too many conference calls to Japan. Then, while she was arranging with her Theresa, her best friend, to stay with the kids, part of her workroom had caught fire. Quickly put out, but it scrambled the nerves.
And, finally, her kids just hadn't wanted her to go. Samantha, only three, cried and cried about the monsters under the bed and Brad, always teasing his sister, kept jumping out of the closet to make her scream every time Sam started calming down. She finally had to lay in her daughter's tiny bed with the girl, nightlight on, until Sam was deeply asleep. Then Claire was able to extract herself, thank Theresa profusely, and just barely catch a red-eye from LaGuardia.
Claire sat in her rental, a sleek Mercedes, and carefully brushed her long hair. Her hair was still shockingly copper-red, but it was now far longer, almost to her waist. She pulled it back carefully with a series of sparkling barrettes in the shapes of butterflies. The Swarovski clear crystals were wonderfully accented by colored wires and gems that matched the blue trim of her outfit. Claire considered the barrettes to be some of her best handiwork.
She had surprised herself in college by thinking of John one day as she signed up for a new semester's worth of classes. Having exhausted most of her "core requirements," she decided to take a jewelry-making workshop. The idea of creating jewelry with her own hands appealed to her on a basic level. To her shock, she was good at it. Her teacher loved her designs, ranking them up there with the top models in Tiffany's and other Manhattan sources. She found her hands, previously manicured and moisturized and beautifully white, were becoming scarred. It became pointless to paint her nails when they were chipped hours later. She developed faint scars from cutting herself on jewelry wire and tools, tiny burn marks from soldering irons.
And she loved every minute of it.
She took every jewelry-making workshop the campus offered. She set up her apartment as studio space, barely keeping enough room for her wardrobe and bed. She began wearing her creations and other girls immediately offered to pay for one just like it, or a custom job. More than once she came home without the jewelry she left with, but several hundred dollars richer. It finally made her feel independent of her parents.
Having no idea what to pursue in school anyway, she'd left. Just up and left. Sent her parents a quick letter, took her savings, and got a studio apartment in Manhattan. She didn't want to be the Princess anymore. She built her business slowly, working craft faires in New York, Long Island, Connecticut, Jersey, and so on. Some local jewelry shops got some pieces on consignment. Eventually she became a "name" in known circles, and more than one socialite was sporting an original "Claire" made just for her.
Her marriage had happened almost by accident. She married a man who she thought would give her the world. He did, in the way of two glorious children that she adored. But the man himself was a sore disappointment after the ideal of "Prince Charming" she had sheltered in her heart all through school.
"Hell with it," she muttered as she applied the last of her lipstick into the car's visor mirror. "Who needs a prince? Maybe it's time I took on a wolf."
* * *
Brian Johnson woke up several minutes before his alarm clock went off. It was a habit he developed in high school in order to squeeze in some extra studying before breakfast. This time, though, he wasn't in the tiny bedroom in his parents house. Nor was he in his own home in Boston, waking up to the sounds of his wife making breakfast for the family. Instead, he was in a hotel room because of some half-baked idealistic pact the five of them had made.
His logical engineering mind tried to think of it as such, but the part of him still connected to the athlete, the princess, the criminal, and the basketcase, was utterly thrilled.
He kind of needed a vacation anyway. He was relatively conted with his life – no more or less than most people, he imagined. He loved his wife in a steady kind of way, but his first thought was always work. It always had been, and he doubted he could change that now. He worked twelve hours a day, most days, and saw his wife for an hour or so a night after he came home, and most of that time was spent in catching up on what the children had done. The weekends were spent entirely with the children. He missed them five days a week, he wanted to spend what time he could with them.
His wife, Julia, ran the house, and he had no problem with that. He brought home the paychecks, and she figured out where to appropriate the money. Brian knew he was far from the perfect husband, but he also knew his wife well enough to know that she was practical above all else. She didn't want a husband who called home all the time for small talk. She was a perfectly independent person and loved him, but her love for him didn't consume who she was. He liked that. He liked the idea of their marriage being more of a partnership of love than an all-consuming affair.
Brian got dressed quickly in his usual khakis and a button-down shirt. Thankfully, today, he could avoid the lab coat. He split his time between teaching at MIT and doing actual research in the MIT labs. He often felt kind of trapped in a "Real Genius-esque" world, wondering what the things he worked on would one day be used for.
Today, though, it didn't matter. Today, his wife was fifteen hundred miles away, getting breakfast for the kids. Today, he would meet up with the friends he hadn't seen in so long....
Today.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. Period.
John Bender groaned as his alarm clock went off. His head was still fuzzy from the late night and for a couple minutes he had no idea why on earth he had set his alarm clock anyway. Normally he slept until at least ten, worked hard in the afternoon and again after dark and went to bed in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes because of a party, sometimes because of a woman, but mostly because he was a night person, plain and simple.
The Club, he thought and sat bolt upright. His head instantly complained. He hadn't had anything to drink the night before – had had nothing for well over a year, and had the white chips to prove it. His drinking had nearly cost him his career and his life. At least it hadn't threatened some phantom GPA. Unlike the other four, he had never even wanted to go to college. He worked best with his hands, not his head. Although to know cars inside and out, every make and model, certainly took some smarts.
He snorted as he added coffee to his cornflakes instead of milk. He didn't even know why he was going to the school today. The other four were going to show off their snotty college educations and their brand new fancy cars and, quite likely, some trophy spouses.
But then, they'd all come from better than he had. Even Brian and Allison, though far from rich and with parents who were sometimes abusive or neglectful, hadn't felt the sting of true poverty, or the deeper pain of a father's fists and curses. His father had been what made him stop drinking. Not literally, his father was dead, but one night, while drunk, he'd backhanded his girlfriend across the face. He looked at his hand while she crashed into a table. Looked at his hand... and saw his father's hand striking his mother. And the next morning, he saw Chrissy's cheek swollen and bruised, and he saw the cigar burn on his own arm, and he skipped work and went to his first AA meeting. The first of many. It sometimes seemed like he had spent half of his life afraid of his father and, as an adult, his greatest fear was that he was going to become his father.
And speaking of fathers . . . lately he'd been committing the ultimate sin and wondering what it would be like to have children himself. He didn't have a wife, or even a girlfriend at the moment, but for some reason he had been thinking more and more of children. He wouldn't be like his father. It seemed, somehow, that he could correct his father's mistakes by having rugrats of his own and treating them well. He had the money, would have even more if the partnership in the garage went through like he thought it would.
For a moment, he was tempted to stay in bed. He was finally starting to scrape together something resembling self-esteem, just starting to build himself a life. Did he want to ruin it by meeting up with people that were likely far better off?
Yes, he was tempted. John rolled over and closed his eyes. But the image that swam before them was of Claire. Cherry – how she'd looked on graduation day. Beautiful, her hair starting to grow a little longer, her dark eyes large and worried. She was still a girl then. He knew that was why she'd never associated with him in school. She was a girl, and she was scared.
He wondered what Claire the woman was like.
With that thought, he forced himself out of bed and into the shower.
* * *
Allison Reynolds was up long before everyone else in the Club. In art school she'd been exposed to many things that had never found their way into Shermer, Illinois. Most of those things, like yoga and meditation, had still been considered "hippie leftovers" but she couldn't deny that her isolation and depression had eased since she started uniting her mind and body. Kind of like Aristotle and all the Greek philosophers, she thought. Sound mind, sound body.
As was her custom, she was up at five in the morning. She didn't have her usual beachside jogging, so instead she substituted the hotel's fitness room downstairs. Finding it empty, she quickly ran her usual five miles and improvised on the weight machines. She couldn't wait to get back to California at this point – she felt absolutely lost without a seated leg press handy. In college, she had actually begun to understand Andrew's obsession with physical fitness.
Back in her room, she spread out a yoga mat and did another half an hour in downward dogs and standing tree poses. She would have done that in the fitness room, but some of the poses were vaguely obscene and she was still shy enough not to want to be observed. After a steaming hot shower – almost hot enough to burn – she settled down to a quick fifteen minute meditation.
She used the quiet time to sort through her feelings about this meeting of the Club. To her surprise, she was actually excited. She let both emotions float over her. She honestly wanted to see how everyone else was doing now. The only person she had been in contact with after college was Brian – she had attended his wedding, and then barely seen him again. She heard vague snippets of information about them all from time to time. She lived not too far from Andrew, actually, just a few hours, but all temptation to see him had passed when she saw his wedding announcement in the newspaper.
I'm probably the only one of them that isn't married! she thought suddenly. Well, that's not true. Bender didn't strike me as a one-woman man.
Her general isolation had definitely extended to dating. She had almost gotten married in college, but had then found the age-old cliché – coming home early after a class was cancelled to find her fiancé in bed – HER bed, no less – with a fellow artist. Not her best friend, she didn't have one, but bad enough. She'd been set up on a few blind dates since then, and occasionally tried long-distance relationships with men she met at the fantasy art conventions – but men more steeped in fantasy and escapism than she used to be wasn't really her style. She was finally, FINALLY, grounded in reality. It took a lot of meditation, a lot of Buddhist studies, and a hell of a lot of therapy, but she was fully awake and mindful most of the time.
Allison carefully blow-dried her hair and placed the long strands in a gentle French braid, letting tendrils drift around her face. She donned yet another all-black outfit, one of her quirks that had never changed, although her clothes now were much different; often chic, often hippie, but most often jeans and smocks for painting. Today, though, she wanted to look good, so she put on a pair of tight black jeans, black high-heeled boots, and a fitted black t-shirt with a whispy periwinkle fairy on the front. No makeup. She painted canvasses now, not her face.
* * *
Claire Standish-Pembrooke stepped off the airplane with just enough time to rent her car and head to the school. She had wanted to arrive the night before and stay in a hotel, but the situations kept changing. First, her louse of an ex-husband called to say that, no, he simply couldn't take the children now. It interfered with too many conference calls to Japan. Then, while she was arranging with her Theresa, her best friend, to stay with the kids, part of her workroom had caught fire. Quickly put out, but it scrambled the nerves.
And, finally, her kids just hadn't wanted her to go. Samantha, only three, cried and cried about the monsters under the bed and Brad, always teasing his sister, kept jumping out of the closet to make her scream every time Sam started calming down. She finally had to lay in her daughter's tiny bed with the girl, nightlight on, until Sam was deeply asleep. Then Claire was able to extract herself, thank Theresa profusely, and just barely catch a red-eye from LaGuardia.
Claire sat in her rental, a sleek Mercedes, and carefully brushed her long hair. Her hair was still shockingly copper-red, but it was now far longer, almost to her waist. She pulled it back carefully with a series of sparkling barrettes in the shapes of butterflies. The Swarovski clear crystals were wonderfully accented by colored wires and gems that matched the blue trim of her outfit. Claire considered the barrettes to be some of her best handiwork.
She had surprised herself in college by thinking of John one day as she signed up for a new semester's worth of classes. Having exhausted most of her "core requirements," she decided to take a jewelry-making workshop. The idea of creating jewelry with her own hands appealed to her on a basic level. To her shock, she was good at it. Her teacher loved her designs, ranking them up there with the top models in Tiffany's and other Manhattan sources. She found her hands, previously manicured and moisturized and beautifully white, were becoming scarred. It became pointless to paint her nails when they were chipped hours later. She developed faint scars from cutting herself on jewelry wire and tools, tiny burn marks from soldering irons.
And she loved every minute of it.
She took every jewelry-making workshop the campus offered. She set up her apartment as studio space, barely keeping enough room for her wardrobe and bed. She began wearing her creations and other girls immediately offered to pay for one just like it, or a custom job. More than once she came home without the jewelry she left with, but several hundred dollars richer. It finally made her feel independent of her parents.
Having no idea what to pursue in school anyway, she'd left. Just up and left. Sent her parents a quick letter, took her savings, and got a studio apartment in Manhattan. She didn't want to be the Princess anymore. She built her business slowly, working craft faires in New York, Long Island, Connecticut, Jersey, and so on. Some local jewelry shops got some pieces on consignment. Eventually she became a "name" in known circles, and more than one socialite was sporting an original "Claire" made just for her.
Her marriage had happened almost by accident. She married a man who she thought would give her the world. He did, in the way of two glorious children that she adored. But the man himself was a sore disappointment after the ideal of "Prince Charming" she had sheltered in her heart all through school.
"Hell with it," she muttered as she applied the last of her lipstick into the car's visor mirror. "Who needs a prince? Maybe it's time I took on a wolf."
* * *
Brian Johnson woke up several minutes before his alarm clock went off. It was a habit he developed in high school in order to squeeze in some extra studying before breakfast. This time, though, he wasn't in the tiny bedroom in his parents house. Nor was he in his own home in Boston, waking up to the sounds of his wife making breakfast for the family. Instead, he was in a hotel room because of some half-baked idealistic pact the five of them had made.
His logical engineering mind tried to think of it as such, but the part of him still connected to the athlete, the princess, the criminal, and the basketcase, was utterly thrilled.
He kind of needed a vacation anyway. He was relatively conted with his life – no more or less than most people, he imagined. He loved his wife in a steady kind of way, but his first thought was always work. It always had been, and he doubted he could change that now. He worked twelve hours a day, most days, and saw his wife for an hour or so a night after he came home, and most of that time was spent in catching up on what the children had done. The weekends were spent entirely with the children. He missed them five days a week, he wanted to spend what time he could with them.
His wife, Julia, ran the house, and he had no problem with that. He brought home the paychecks, and she figured out where to appropriate the money. Brian knew he was far from the perfect husband, but he also knew his wife well enough to know that she was practical above all else. She didn't want a husband who called home all the time for small talk. She was a perfectly independent person and loved him, but her love for him didn't consume who she was. He liked that. He liked the idea of their marriage being more of a partnership of love than an all-consuming affair.
Brian got dressed quickly in his usual khakis and a button-down shirt. Thankfully, today, he could avoid the lab coat. He split his time between teaching at MIT and doing actual research in the MIT labs. He often felt kind of trapped in a "Real Genius-esque" world, wondering what the things he worked on would one day be used for.
Today, though, it didn't matter. Today, his wife was fifteen hundred miles away, getting breakfast for the kids. Today, he would meet up with the friends he hadn't seen in so long....
Today.