Title: Rat Trap Hotel

Summary: As two London streetwalkers, Geoff and Alan find a moment of solace in their Murphy's Law abiding hotel room

Rating: PG-13 for mild swearing and insinuations of, well, a rather sordid lifestyle. It's just too fluffy for R

Spoilers/Timeline: None

Characters: Geoff, Alan

Note: The only truly completed chapter of the Trashy!Whore! AU that Jess and I started last year and never really finished. The Trashy!Whore! AU was birthed, I think, from The Decemberists' On the Bus Mall. I still don't know why Jess and I thought this was a good idea, lol. But I do love this chapter. Geoff + Alan= ♥

The room they live in is so ridiculously foul that when Geoff is in the right mindset (such as very, very high), its sheer awfulness strikes him as comical. The dripping ceiling, the single bare light bulb, the window so grubby that its lack of a curtain is irrelevant, the scum-coated bathroom, the carpet dark and sticky with stains, the hordes of cockroaches, the constant draftiness in winter—it is a parody of a bad hotel, Murphy’s Law in ‘cheap rented room’ form. Sober, though, it’s just depressing. Thanks to the thinness of the walls, they can’t escape the sounds of other people: pacing, watching TV, arguing, conducting torrid affairs. Night after night, they are unwillingly surrounded by the secrets of faceless strangers, as if the building was haunted. When Alan’s there, it’s okay.

Alan isn’t there right now. Geoff curls up in the room’s one rickety chair, trying to read instead of worry, but this is a losing battle. He hates getting back before Alan. They stay together as much as possible, working the same street corners when they can, but sometimes there are circumstances beyond their control. Or rather, most of the time, circumstances are beyond their control. Geoff feels his most helpless in times like these, when all he can do is wait for his friend, and struggle not to think up worst-case scenarios. Cursing the mix of pessimism and imagination that render this impossible, he leans forward to read the clock-radio lying on the floor. 5:30 a.m.—half an hour late. His skin has gone clammy, either from worry or drugs, he’s not sure which.

Lately, he’s been needing more and more pills to feel even decent. He took some Valium on his way to the hotel, but the old sense of euphoria was weak, and it dissipated almost immediately. Tomorrow, he’ll do whatever he has to for more. Without the pills, he’s just too damn aware of his surroundings.

A streak of grimy morning light filters through the window. In the wall behind him, Geoff can hear cockroaches scuttling back and forth. Where do they think they’re going? The clock’s bleary red digits flicker. It’s 5:31. Alan should’ve been home thirty-one minutes ago. Anything could’ve happened since then.

Shit.

At 5:37, there’s the scratch of a door unlocking, and Geoff fills with hope, knowing that only one person besides him has a room key.

“I’m home,” says Alan softly, and Geoff laughs, partly from relief and partly because of the words themselves. It’s such a clean-cut, domestic, 1950’s sort of greeting that Geoff can’t help but reply:

“Welcome home, honey. Did you have a long day at the office?” Alan just lets out a long, ragged sigh in response, and that’s when Geoff glances up and catches a good look at his friend’s face, sees the bruise purpling on his friend’s cheek. He jumps out of his chair. “Are you okay? D’you want some ice?”

“We don’t have ice.” Alan wearily shuts and locks the door behind him.

“Sit down,” orders Geoff, so Alan perches on the end of the bed as Geoff walks to the bathroom, runs the sink until the water’s at its coldest, and douses some paper towels.

Not until he’s handing them to Alan does Geoff realize they’re probably not cold enough. The redhead gratefully accepts them anyway, pressing them to his bruise.

“What happened?” asks Geoff, sitting next to him.

“You know those men that show up every Saturday with signs and tell us that we’re going to go to Hell?”

“The batshit insane religious wankers?”

“Yeah. D’you remember the one that kept trying to call us sodomites?”

“Yeah…” Geoff doesn’t like where this is going.

“Well, tonight I was standing near the corner of Ninth Street and King Street when he walked up, by himself and sort of—looked me over and said—said he wanted—” Alan hesitates, stares at the wall.

“The bloody hypocrite wanted to fuck you,” Geoff supplies so that Alan doesn’t have to say it. Nodding, Alan takes a deep breath and continues,

“So I told him, ‘No. I can’t do that with you. It’s a sin.’”

They laugh briefly together. It’s the most sarcastic thing Geoff has ever heard from him.

“What’d he say?”

“Well, that’s when he punched me in the face. I was kind of stunned—I mean, it came out of nowhere—so he had time to hit me in the stomach, too. Then he wound back to do it again, but I ducked so he hit the fence behind me instead, and got his hand stuck on it.”

“How’d he get his hand stuck on a fence?”

“Barbed wire,” says Alan simply.

“Serves him right, the stupid bastard. So then what happened?”

“I ran as fast as I could to the nearest gay bar, because I figured even if he was trying to chase me, he wouldn’t go in. I stayed there until I knew he wasn’t following me, and then I walked home.”

“Are you alright?”

“I feel a bit—shaken. The pain’s fine; my uncle’s hit me harder before. But if the ‘Christian’ had attacked me somewhere else, I might not’ve gotten away, so that’s—I feel shaken.” Alan looks shaken, so Geoff reaches over and they hold hands.

“What’ll you do tomorrow?”

“Put some makeup on my cheek, I guess.”

“You mean you’re going back out after what just happened?”

“It’s what you would do,” Alan points out. Not only is it what Geoff would do, it’s what he has done once or twice. It’s why there’s a bottle of foundation sitting next to his eyeliner on the bathroom counter.

“Alan, as role models go, I’m not exactly—”

“Look,” Alan interrupts, quiet but intense. “We need the money. Whether I work or not, that’s my decision, and we need the money.” He’s right of course, but Geoff still wishes there was a way to stop his friend, protect him. There isn’t.

“I’ll show you how to do foundation the right way tomorrow,” Geoff finally says.

“How was your day?” asks Alan. Geoff shrugs.

“Alright. You know. The usual. I am going to kill the hypocrite who did that to you, I’ll—”

"I don’t think the police’d take too well to fighting in the streets, Geoff.”

“It won’t be a fight, he won’t have time to fight back because he’ll be too busy getting killed. By me.” He may or may not be joking.

“Please, no murders.” Alan gives an exhausted half-smile. “I’ve had enough violence for one day.” And that’s when it starts: from across the hallway, they hear something crash, and then a woman’s voice screaming,

“What were you doing with her, huh? You liar! You stupid, cheating liar! I hate you—” More crashes. A thump. Glass shatters. “I hate you!”

Alan hunches down, his body tense. The expression on his face breaks a piece of Geoff’s heart. He can’t stand this, not now.

“Hey Alan? D’you want to listen to the radio?” Anything to drown out this noise.

“Okay.” His voice is small and flat. Geoff gets up, retrieves the clock-radio from the floor, and sits back down on their bed, cranking up the volume and searching for a decent station. The first song to emerge from the static is a rap, something about “bitches and ho’s”. The irony of this is sick and bitter, and nothing Geoff wants to contemplate at the moment, so he quickly re-tunes, first to an obnoxious beer commercial, then to a spooky religious call-in show. He’d rather have the static.

“The Gods of Radio have forsaken us,” Geoff mutters. “One more try and then I chuck this thing out the window.” He turns the tuning dial yet again, and suddenly, like a tiny miracle, their rat-trap hotel fills with Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’.

“See? Gods of Radio love us after all,” murmurs Alan. Geoff wasn’t aware that he’d been listening.

“I suppose they do.”

“’S a good song,” Alan adds. Geoff wraps his lanky arms around his friend’s shoulders, rests his head next to Alan’s. The redhead nestles closer, like a newborn puppy, as Geoff softly sings along, turning it into a sort of lullaby.

“And after all, you’re my wonderwall…”

When the music’s over, Alan says sleepily, “Y’know what?”

“What?”

“That was a sign.”

“Yes, from the Radio Gods, we’ve been over this,” reminds Geoff, smiling at his half-asleep friend.

“No, no—from something else, something real. Don’t know what, ‘xactly.”

“Well then, what’s this ‘something real’ trying to tell us?”

“That we’re going to be alright. It’s—we—we’re going to be alright.”

And for that moment, huddled together, they both believe him.