#i gave Jian asthma and he clapped right back at me😔 no mercy

[whumpsical]

Jay

contents: flashback to a minor whumpee, homelessness, discussed homophobia, bio family blues

Some sweet comfort from one the rockiest eras of Jian's past <3 the gays stick together <33

sometime in 2014

taglist!!! @yet-another-heathen @much-ado-about-whumping @minerscanary

🌲🌲🌲🌲

“Come here, Jay.”

Jian bristled.

He was only sixteen at the time. He didn’t like nicknames. He’d never liked nicknames. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; no one had beaten or bullied him out of a taste for them, and he had no past relationships to any particular nicknames to turn him off to the concept. He just didn’t like them.

But at Casanova, one of the many gay bars in Jian’s early rotations, the owner liked to call him Jay. And Jian found that it didn’t grate on his nerves the way it usually would, not coming from Cal.

Cal first caught Jian sneaking into Casanova on a chilly, rainy night. It wasn’t the first time Jian had gotten in. He’d just had a harder time blending with the partygoers that night: waterlogged and shivering, too exhausted to even talk, sitting by himself on a leather couch near the bathrooms. His clothes were damp, leeching all the warmth from his small body, but even shedding his wet jacket didn’t feel like an option. He was convinced that the moment he slipped his scrawny, narrow shoulders free, his age would be made even more pathetically obvious than it already was. It was better to keep still and try to pretend that he wasn’t there at all.

Cal was on the floor that night, covering for a sick bartender. He’d wondered how he’d missed the obviously underaged kid’s entrance into his bar. It was a Tuesday night. Not very busy at all. Maybe it was the rain. The patio sat empty, everyone instead gathering inside and cluttering up Cal’s view of the front door.

Jian flinched when Cal approached him. He was a tall, hefty man, comfortably in his fifties. Though with age his ratio of muscle to fat had shifted, he still had an intensely intimidating power in his stature, especially from where Jian was sitting.

“Hey,” Cal said, with just a hint of the stern edge to his voice which he only fully put on for the handsy creeps and mean drunks.

Jian looked up at the man, numb in the face. He had nothing to say, and was too shocked with cold and fear to even try to squeak out a word.

Cal stood tall, unyielding. “You wanna show me some ID?”

Jian looked at his shoes, a lump growing in his throat. His head was too misty to comprehend much, but he understood enough to recognize he’d been caught, which meant that he had to find somewhere else to hide from the rain. He already couldn’t remember how many times this had happened that night. All he knew was that he didn’t want to go back to the shelter, but he was quickly running out of options. With stiff, freezing hands and a weak, trembling effort, he pushed himself off the sticky seat and started on his staggering trek to the exit.

Cal’s large hands stopped him, butting against his shoulders. Not grabbing. Jian couldn’t even muster any awareness of the act, just pushing his empty body against Cal’s hands like they were an invisible wall in a video game. Cal pushed back a little more firmly, and Jian’s feet tripped to a halt. He stood in place, blinking through confused sparks in his eyes, feeling lightheaded.

“Hold on, hold on. Hey,” Cal said, stooping down to meet Jian’s eyes, and, as twenty-something year old Jian suddenly realized with fondness, to shield him from the activity of the bar around them. “Do you need… Would you like something hot to drink? A warm meal, maybe? Someplace dry?”

Jian had no clue what his face was doing. He remembered his body as a hollow wooden vessel. Still, something must have come across in his silence, because Cal softened even more.

“Look, I don’t know your situation,” he said, squeezing Jian’s shoulder. “But I can tell enough that you need help. I have the means. Come on, honey.”

Cal started to usher Jian towards the bar, and a volatile switch flipped in Jian’s gut, instantly rubbing every inch of his skin raw and sucking the air from his lungs.

“No,” Jian managed in a desperate whisper, shrugging his way out of Cal’s hands and stumbling backwards a few feet before blinking the blind terror from his eyes and halfway remembering where he was. Cal’s hands hovered in a deliberately non-threatening airspace, allowing Jian to retreat as far as he needed.

“Okay,” Cal said quickly, in a peaceful, hushed tone. Jian’s focus still whipped around the bar, but Cal let that manic vigilance die down in its own time, keeping his own body still and distant. “Okay. You don’t have to. But I really don’t want to send you back out there, to who knows what, without at least getting you dried off. You can stay here, honey. You don’t have to go.”

The vividness of Jian’s memory drained to an uninviting mist. He knew that at some point he’d started to cry, and that Cal had led him with an open hand -- so broad it nearly spanned Jian’s entire waistline, at least in those days -- to a more secluded area behind the bar, where both Cal and the small kitchen crew could keep an eye on him while he ravenously devoured a warm plate of various bar staples and a few Casanova specialties. Jian remembered being offered an offensively sugary Shirley Temple in that same spot, but that may have been on another night.

Sometime later, a shift change freed Cal up to drag a second black painted chair over to Jian’s, where he’d been working on drying himself off with an only slightly ratty towel, having adamantly refused a change of clothes from Cal’s apartment above the bar.

“Hey there, kiddo. You feeling any better?”

Jian nodded sheepishly, embarrassed at all the drama he’d become the center of tonight, now that the terror had mostly passed. The heat from the crowd and the food had long since stilled his shivering, and an almost contented sleepiness was taking over instead, a feeling so unfamiliar that he was struggling to guard against it, finding himself nodding off every now and then. He’d been focusing his energy on staying upright in the chair, and was glad for Cal’s interruption.

“I’d like to have a little chat with you, if that’s okay,” Cal said, leaning forward in his seat to match Jian’s height. Jian visibly tensed, swallowing nervously and breaking eye contact. Cal’s voice only softened more. “Sweetheart, you’re not in any trouble with me. What’s your name, honey?”

When Jian only gulped again with considerably more effort, his eyebrows starting to knit with growing anxiety, Cal nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”

A rush of cool air flowed through Jian’s chest, relief unclenching his jaw before he’d even realized how tight he’d been squeezing it shut.

“I would like to know how old you are, though,” Cal continued lightly. “But don’t tell me that either. I want to guess. Flex my skills. Is that something the kids are saying today?”

One corner of Jian’s mouth lifted a bit.

“See, I’m out of the loop. This��ll be fun,” Cal said. “Hmm,” he hummed, one hand rubbing his chin as he made a show of scrutinizing Jian’s scrappy appearance. “I’ve got nieces in the eighth grade, but they’re all shorter than you. They definitely eat better, though.” Jian couldn’t help but chuckle silently under the heat of the spotlight, feeling himself becoming invested in the game, despite everything. “Fourteen, maybe? No, fifteen.” When Jian shook his head to both, Cal leaned back, worry overtaking his expression. “Oh, sweetheart, please don’t tell me I started too high. I don’t think I could handle it.”

Jian shook his head again, an easy smile finding its way onto his face. “Sixteen,” he said, his delicate voice all but confirming his answer.

Cal nodded, solemnity gently wafting away the air of humor that had eased them to this point. He leaned forward again, hands clasped in front of him, and looked into Jian’s eyes as he spoke. “It was a long time ago, but it was tough for me when I was that age, too. I can’t speak for your experience, honey, but I know what it’s like to feel alone in the world.”

His defenses down, Jian felt the words hit him square in his chest. Fear and apprehension prickled at the edges of the impact, but the crater was deep enough that genuine empathy was what struck Jian the most. He felt breathless and fragile as he listened, but he didn’t look away.

“I’ve seen some very good friends go down dark paths because of that feeling. And it’s hard to find your way back out. It’s hard out there, baby, I know. But no matter how lost you feel, you will never be unworthy of love, and safety, and peace. Do you understand me?”

Jian wasn’t sure that he did, but Cal spoke with such an urgency that Jian felt he should at least nod, though unease was building in his stomach again. Cal watched him with earnest conviction as he waited for Jian to answer, but Jian shied away from the intensity of it, breaking off eye contact and betraying the gnawing guilt he suddenly felt. Cal sighed, too softly to hear beneath the noise of the bar.

“I know that look, sweetheart. Your family?”

Jian hadn’t realized how obvious it could be. His stomach dropped and a flash of heat pushed tears behind his eyes as fresh wounds burst through their haphazard stitches. He could feel the metaphorical slam of the door all over again, the pain of his father’s violent and consummate rejection only compounded by the past year he’d spent trying to stitch himself back together without him. Failing miserably. He bit his cheek to keep the rest from spilling, and locked eyes with Cal to silently implore him to continue.

Cal didn’t falter. He wrapped Jian’s restlessly clenching fists between his warm hands and leaned in.

“There’s not a lot I can do to change the truly fucking awful things that happen in this world,” Cal said. “But what I can do is help lift some of the burdens that fall on us. You are welcome here, honey.” He accented this with a squeeze of Jian’s hands, then paused, blinked a few times, and made an undecided gesture with a tilt of his head. “Not in the bar, mind you.”

At the gentle chiding, Jian found himself laughing with him, vaguely relieved to be acknowledged as something other than a novelty or a criminal. Cal looked at him without hunger. Being the object of someone’s worry instead of their hatred or desire had faded to a memory from another world, and Jian didn’t know what to do with or even how to identify the bubbly feeling which sat high in his chest. The release of pressure set free a cold crop of tears that he had been clinging to. With grace, Cal let them fall without address.

“But any time it’s getting too heavy,” Cal continued, holding Jian’s hands tight, “if you’re ever hungry, tired, need someone to talk to, anything, you come to Casanova and you ask for Cal, okay? I mean it. We make our own families here.”

Jian nodded, with emphatic gratitude this time. His head felt too fuzzy and exhausted to really comprehend the mess of emotions that writhed and tangled inside him, like a rat’s nest of colorful yarn choking his heart, but the mess itself was colorful and soft, and that had to be enough for now. He took a steadying breath.

“My name’s Jian,” he said, feeling shy under the usually anonymizing glow of the blacklights. But Cal beamed.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Jian,” he said. “Now, the big questions: Do you have a place to stay tonight? Is there someone I can help you call, to let them know where you are?”

“No,” Jian said simply, and the scalding, mortified blush that would’ve normally flooded Jian’s entire face and neck just wasn’t there. Instead, Cal’s hands landed on his shoulders, blanketing him in steadiness and warmth without suffocating.

“Now you do, Jay. Now you do.’

From somewhere in the comfortable fog of Jian’s distant memory, Dickass Lee’s voice wormed back into his ears.

“Come here, Jay.”

Jian bristled.

“Ugh, yeah, no. No. I get it,” Dickass Lee said with a comically exaggerated shudder, mimicking the tension in his captive’s shoulders. “I’ll stick to ‘Jian.’”