An Abundance of Foreshadowing
by Trianne
Pairing: Ian McKellen/Patrick Stewart
Disclaimer: No profit is made nor offence intended.
Rating: PG15
AN: Wistful, fictional fluff. In July 1977, Ian and Patrick acted in Tom Stoppard's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" at the Royal Festival Hall. The music was by Andre Previn. It was Jubilee Year and Virginia Wade – finally – won Wimbledon. This story can be seen as a companion piece to Every Good Boy.
"Do you think you'll come out one day?" Patrick blew on his tea – PG Tips in a cracked Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee mug – and waited.
His companion was trimming his toenails using a pair of clippers purchased that lunchtime from Boots The Chemists. He stuck his tongue out as he clipped, oblivious – or perhaps not – to the fact that he was wearing a taupe and teal chenille dressing gown, belted at the waist, and nothing else. Patrick had a grand view of the thesperly meat and two veg as it lolled out on Ian's firm thigh, foot rested on the arm of the chair in which Ian sat.
Ian paused in his grooming and turned pale eyes upon his friend and colleague. "Come out? Where? Where do you suggest? Where is there to come out to?" he asked, a little acerbically.
Patrick sighed and then drank his tea back in two healthy gulps. He crossed his legs and then his arms, then sat forward and peered at Ian, gimlet-eyed and determined.
"Out, out!" he snapped, indicating the Sunday paper with its salacious headline – "TV Newsreader Confesses To Being Homo". Ian, who had been reading the paper avidly before Patrick came into his dressing room, rolled his eyes.
"The time will never be right, Pat, as well you know," he replied, evenly. He lowered his smooth, groomed foot to the floor and flexed his toes. "What about you?"
Patrick snorted. "I'm not gay, am I?" he retorted, though there was a playfulness now in those black-brown eyes.
"Oh spare me!" Ian snapped, standing up and unbelting his dressing gown; he let it fall to a puddle about his feet, standing before the mirror, naked, admiring. He was in his prime – thirty-eight years old, not conventionally handsome but with a lean and hungry look; like Cassius, one lover had quipped, thinking himself clever whereas Ian had merely thought him fairly well-read…
He was vain but he had good reason to be. The world was his, well, London at any rate. He'd had a good time with the Beatle-mopped Andre Previn this production, had bandied words with the Hungarian author of their little enterprise, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, had spotted the divinely dishy Prince Andrew watching him in the dark of one of the boxes… Why spoil it all by making some arbitrary announcement about his sexuality? Why? What was the gain? Everyone who mattered knew already. Really, it was no one's business but his own. Let someone else lead the charge, man the barricades. This was 1977 and there were pretty boys with spiked, pink hair and tartan trews, gobbing and cursing and sticking two fingers up at the Establishment – as if they even knew what or where it was. He'd like to take them in hand and teach them a thing or two.
"So you swing both ways, hurrah for you," he said, wearily. "Doctor, take my pulse, there's a love," he added, holding out his naked wrist to Ian.
The man from Mirfield dutifully took hold of his friend and laid two fingers approximately in the right place. Ian stood very close, very naked and very male, with his bits and pieces now nicely taut and beginning to twitch. "Do we have time?" he asked, quietly, beginning to stroke his friend's forearm.
"I'm not really a doctor, you know," Patrick said, ignoring him.
"You can cure what ails me right now, and you know it," Ian replied. Patrick looked up finally and smiled.
"I told you, I'm not-"
"Gay - yes, I know," Ian sniped, moving even closer. "But you are awfully… cheerful for a straight man."
Later, they would stroll along Waterloo Bridge and people-watch. Ian would pump Patrick for gossip about this man or that. If the weather stayed fine for an English summer's evening, they would sit on a bench and talk.
"Seriously," Ian would try again. "Do you think you'll ever come out as a gay man?"
Ian would sigh and gesture casually at their surroundings.
"I've as much chance of doing that as, as turning into that stone wall," he would declare. Then he'd reach across for Patrick and, oblivious to the trickle of tourists at close to midnight, he would kiss him.
The End