Dan looked around the colourful little house that had been his home for the last six years, as he thought back to that first day, that first meeting - the day he'd moved in to the House of Jones. He'd encouraged the kid to go nuts with his decorating and make the place his own so that he could live there without the ghosts of his mother's indiscretions plaguing him. It had sort of worked but even when Jones was jumping around to music or painting mad portraits, filled to his eyebrows with caffeine and sugar, there was always a shadow. He'd even tried to kiss the fear away, which had worked quite well, and if Jones wasn't keen on people knowing he was in a relationship, well, Dan wasn't that good at public displays of affection anyway, and was willing to do just about anything to see Jones' smile. It had become his mission. He'd never wanted anything so much in his life as to make Jones happy. And what Jones wanted in life was to be a DJ.
He'd started writing features for SugarApe to get enough money together to buy Jones a basic DJ set up, which had then been altered and 'improved' by Jones until he had a unique set of decks and a unique sound to match. They'd found out quite quickly that no one was that keen on hiring an unknown eighteen-year-old boy with no references, but also discovered that a twenty-two year old with a glowing review from Dan Ashcroft, well that man could find himself a resident DJ at a hot underground club and a day job at one of the coolest styling salons in Shoreditch. So that was what they had done, and it'd been easy.
And the smile that Dan had been working toward was there. And it was intoxicating and addictive and Dan had realised that he wouldn't be able to live without Jones. He'd fallen in love.
And life had been good. For years. The House of Jones was Dan's haven from a life he wasn't entirely satisfied with and Jones' safe place when being a grown-up got too hard. But they'd made things work. They'd laughed and lived a messy, fun, exciting life together in a house decorated by a teenage boy with brain made from colour and noise. They'd tried, and failed, to learn to cook together. They'd had messy, funny, noisy sex - a lot of sex - and learned what they liked and didn't like, and what they really, really liked. They'd argued over whether getting a cat was a genius or bloody stupid thing to do and they'd become a couple inside those brightly decorated walls.
But then, things had gotten... complicated.
Dan's shit job had gotten... more shit.
The Black Dog had reared its ugly head again.
As he always knew it would.
Every time it happened it was like a switch was flicked in his head - no matter how well he thought he was doing - it would happen, and in a matter of weeks he'd be a mess and barely able to function. Washing, eating, communicating, all seemed unimportant and everything seemed to go wrong, no matter what he was trying to achieve. Cat's died, his self-worth died, the debt collectors found him, the idiots won. Nothing turned out right when It struck.
Jones had tried to talk, tried to make things better, but he was still just a kid and Dan had pushed him away because it seemed like the only thing to do at the time. Jones hadn't stopped trying to find ways to cheer Dan up but this time it was Jones searching for a smile and Dan who couldn't seem to make it come.
He'd thought that humiliating himself in front of his sister and Nathan Barley, on film, had been rock bottom. Then he'd jumped out of a window and actually hit rock (well, concrete) and he'd thought that was as bad as it could get.
He'd thought that Jones didn't want to visit him in the hospital and had actually contemplated ending things then, but when everyone else finally left Jones had been there and had sat with him while the doctor talked about physiotherapy and non-addictive pain killers and chronic depression and the dangers of self-medicating with alcohol and anti-depressant medication and all the other things that made Dan want to run and hide and never show his face in public again. And that had been bad, but the way Jones had smiled at him when he'd agreed to try the anti-depressants, sad and wavering, just like the day they'd met, had made Dan think that maybe things were going to get better.
He should have known better than to think the universe would let him catch a break. He didn't deserve one. The one decent thing he'd done in his life, helping a kid whose real problems had made even his dormant heart bleed a bit, had turned out to be selfish, and he was being exposed as the idiot he was. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd gone through it without Jones being exposed to ridicule as well, but it was just like him to drag the person he loved most down with him.
And now, when he really didn't deserve it, Jones was sitting with him, so close that his shoulder blade dug into Dan's rib, like always, massaging Dan's injured leg the way the physio had taught him to, when he should have been kicking Dan - and Claire - out of his house and out of his life.
"Well what are we going to do?" Claire blurted into the silence, and Dan blinked up at her, wondering why she was still here.
She'd sunk down against the wall, sitting like a kid with her legs tucked up to her chest and her chin on her knee but Dan couldn't stand to look at her.
"You should be packing your stuff for a start," he mumbled, his frown deepening when she had the gall to look hurt.
"You can't kick me out, it's not your house!"
"No, it's not," Dan countered, his voice rising. "It's Jones's house. And do you really think he's going to want you here after what you've done? Do you?"
Claire looked so venomous he thought for a second she was going to poke her tongue out at him like she'd done when they were kids and she was losing another argument, but she sneered at him instead and when she spoke again it was with infuriating snideness.
"Why don't you let Jones speak for himself, Dan? I'll start believing what they've written about you being controlling and manipulative if you're not careful." She paused for breath but Dan couldn't think of anything to say in response so she kept on, leaning forward onto her knees and squaring her shoulders and ready for a fight. "I've been here three months and I didn't even know Jones' real name 'til I read this, and even if the pictures were from my phone - copied without my permission by the way - I didn't make up anything about Jones being under age! They found that out all on their own! What do you say to that?"
Dan was about to yell at her to shut up about what she didn't understand but Jones let out a strange, strangled little noise, halfway between a laugh and a sob and Dan cursed himself silently for being a dick and pulled the younger man more firmly against him instead.
"I ain't underage, Claire," Jones whispered, sounding tired and defeated. "They're shit mongers, you know they are. Do I look underage to you? Dan and I been living together for more than six years. You think I was twelve when he moved in?"
"Well, no, but," Claire stumbled, her anger deflating a little in the face of Jones' stillness. Jones was so rarely still, being a natural born fidget, that it was unnerving when he went like this, even for Dan who knew what it meant. "The article says your press age is twenty-seven but that you're really twenty-three."
Dan felt Jones shrug and gave Claire a warning look. She was doing a rubbish job at subtlety and he wanted to tell her to tread carefully but she was ignoring him in favour of Jones, who was hiding his eyes behind his jagged fringe.
" 'S four years," he said, in the same whispered tone. " 'S nothing. People do it all the time."
"Yeah, but usually they're trying to make themselves seem younger, not older. And it means that when Dan moved in here you were only, what? seventeen? Jones?"
"Still not illegal," Jones murmured and Dan felt his heart begin to claw its way out of his chest and up his throat because Claire didn't need to know this but he didn't know how to make her stop without just yelling.
And Jones hated yelling when there was no music beneath to balance it out. He said it stained the world a murky gray-brown and felt too hot, and Jones was uncomfortable enough right now without that.
"Not illegal, maybe," Claire barged on, oblivious of the distress she was causing, "but what were you even doing, living here on your own at that age? Are you a squatter? Should I even be paying rent to you or are you and Dan just running some sort of shady operation? Is it for drugs? Because mum warned me when I moved here-"
"Claire!" Dan yelled, hating that Jones jumped and shrank in on himself even more at the harsh tone.
"What?" she yelled back, but Dan couldn't be arsed with telling her what she'd done wrong.
Jones was too still, completely unmoving when he should have been all restless legs and drumming fingers and when he began to talk, it was barely audible and sounded dead, even to Dan's ears, which never picked up the subtleties that Jones' did. He wanted to cry but wasn't sure he even knew how to, and didn't want to distress Jones any more anyway. God knew the kid didn't deserve that.
"I don't do drugs. I do coffee, but that's not the same. And I do sleeping pills but the doctor gave me those, so that's not the same neither. I don't do drugs... An' this is my house. My mum died when I was seventeen and I inherited it. Dan helped me clean it up and he needed a place to stay so I said he could. He wasn't trying it on or nothing, he was really decent. We didn't get together until after I turned eighteen and that was 'cos I kissed him."
He stopped to take a shuddering breath in through his nose and Dan looked up at Claire, wanting to see if she understood what all this meant. She just looked curious and it made Dan unspeakably angry.
"He don't deserve to have his name smeared," Jones went on, his voice gaining a little strength now that he wasn't talking about himself. "Dan's been good to me. I love 'im. And you helped Jonatton Yeah? smear 'im. And you ain't said sorry yet."
He waited for Claire to apologise but Dan knew there was no sorry coming. His sister hated being told she was wrong, the same as him, and the more they showed her that she was wrong, the more she'd fight it, and then hate herself for it later. Niggling Claire was fun when he was in the mood, and Claire gave as good as she got, but sometimes Dan realised that he had to be the mature, older brother. It was a game he hated to play with Claire, because she despised it, but right now he knew they needed to get her out of the house before things got any further out of hand. And not just for Claire's sake - she would be hating herself for this for days, if not weeks - but because, in the last few days he'd actually felt able to love Jones properly again, and right now that needed to be his priority.
"Thanks for telling us about the magazine, Claire," he said, clearing his throat. "No, seriously. Otherwise we would have had to find out from one of those idiots out there and that would have been..."
"Pretty shit," Jones provided, and Dan nodded, seeing Claire's lips twitch upwards as he did.
"Pretty shit, yeah," he agreed. "But you do need to go now. Call Pingu or something. His thumbs are still messed up and he could probably use the help. Please?"
He tried to smile at her, to let her know that he didn't really hate her, but it came out as more of a grimace and she responded in kind. But she climbed to her feet and began straightening her shirt self-consciously and Dan finally felt his breathing relax knowing that she would soon be gone.
"I know I screwed up, Dan," she said, a little sullenly. "That's why I came to tell you myself, cos I knew I had to be the one to explain. And I didn't mean to give those photos to Jonatton. He played me and... well he's made me look like an idiot as well, that's all."
"Yeah," Dan replied, which he knew was probably not that helpful but was all he could manage.
Jones looked at his feet as Claire gathered a few things to take with her and didn't look up when she left and Dan didn't blame him. After she'd left, Dan hauled Jones firmly back into his lap, broken bones be damned, and held him and hoped that Jones understood what he was trying to tell him in the silence.