No One Ever Wrote of the Brothers of Christ
Title: No One Ever Wrote of the Brothers of Christ.
Chapter: Prologue.
Pairing: Brian Haner/Matt Sanders, Brian Haner/Jimmy Sullivan, various.
Rating: PG-15 - NC-17.
Word Count: 503.
Summary: In the aftershocks of the hurried stripping frenzy people are staring at him with apprehension.
Disclaimer: I don't own it because it doesn't exist. Which is deep. No, really.
Author's Note: I've had wild block for a month now, but I just picked up my laptop and this idea unfolded. It's for the_staci, and if you don't know why, you obviously haven't read her work.



Brian's standing on the corner between 6th and Bond when he sees him. His coffee is cooling in his hands and even the scarf wrapped around his mouth isn't doing anything but strangling his iced flesh. His eyes water thick tears down the bridge of his nose and his very calves shiver beneath the soaked legs of his jeans. Clumps of slippery snow drop into the backs of his trainers (they weren't built for this, but neither was he) with every step. The snow is black with rush hour steps and the sky is grey even though it's morning, his breath smogging the atmosphere further, great plumes of it steaming as his lungs struggle against the confines of layers.

It's the bone crunching cold that freezes his eyeballs, and that's why he thinks it strange. Terribly strange that just a split second later he's so hot that his coffee is clattering to the floor and his hands are feverishly attempting to loosen his clothes from his burning body. Fire lights at his toes and speeds up his frame work as though he's just stepped atop a thousand air vents, his hair drying beneath his hat and his clothes fucking smoking. He panics. He grabs and pulls and he's breathless with it, licks of flame curling around his veins and heating his blood to boiling point. He thinks he's going to die, hysterically, anxiously, tearing at himself. He's going to die in a pile of ashes that flutter into the wind as hell itself rises.

His hat is on the floor with his scarf and his jacket and his t-shirt is just about to follow, yanked up and revealing a tight, pale stomach, only for the cold to return like a door's been opened, rushing in at once like a bucket of ice cubes dumped over his head; a brick wall of pure cold slamming into him; a freight train of it.

He thinks he's going insane. He pants as though he's just risen from water, stilling, his hands falling by his sides tentatively. In the aftershocks of the hurried stripping frenzy people are staring at him with apprehension. Fear. Surprise. The eyes that watch a mad man trapped behind the bars in the zoo. But it doesn't take him long to realise they're not staring at him at all.

No, not the man shivering in his t-shirt and pants with his teeth chattering and his skin flushed like sunburn breaking out in goose bumps, but the perfect circle of sidewalk around him. Where the snow has melted. About a yard in diameter and he's at the centre of it. This bone dry crop circle, still steaming from where even the water has evaporated. Proof.

His eyes are wide and the tears are freezing to his lashes all over again. He grabs at his clothing hastily, the fabric warm as fresh laundry in his hands. And as he turns, turns to escape to new burn of eyes, that's when he sees him. Just a fleck of him, black and sweeping around the corner, leaving nothing but an echo of his laughter and a memory of his own pale, trembling, furious reflection.

The man with the mirrored glasses.