In the Year of the Cat (Queen or Freddie Mercury Fanfic)

42. Monty Python and the Holy Passport

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It wasn't a nonstop flight we were taking. Just like before, we were stopping at JFK to rush onto the next British Airways jet that would take us straight to Heathrow. Right now, we were back in the air, first class passengers aboard a Trans World Airlines 747. This isn't the Starship, but it sure beats riding coach.

I had my nose stuck in a January issue of Time magazine, laughing silently to myself at the cover story. "Global cooling" was the environmental worry of the decade, and the author of the article was sounding the horns of judgment upon we humans for hearkening forth the second Ice Age, which was due to arrive in the next two or three decades. Little did he know that in that same amount of time the message would flip, and become "global warming." Still our fault, though.

"Always something," I said aloud.

Freddie glanced up. "Hm?"

"Oh, nothing, just reading this story," I explained. "We're apparently all going to freeze to death before long."

"Bloody ozone," he said absently, turning back to his pencil and paper.

We hadn't said much to each other since getting out of K's truck. Freddie saved his conversation for Mary, whom he called to let her know he was on his way back (and to say a quick hello to the cats).

"Two more seconds, dear, I need to make another call," he had said.

"Call whom?"

"Just want to page Straker and Paul, they must have landed by now."

Freddie timed this perfectly; they had apparently just come in off the tarmac, about to board their plane back home. The phone call didn't take much time, Freddie just wanted to make sure his two friends were all right. As he hung up, I saw him roll his eyes.

"Now you've got Peter doing it," he muttered to me.

"Doing what?"

"He asked how Harley Quinn had liked her fiance," he chuckled.

"That's his name for me."

"It's harlequin, not Harley Quinn."

"Just go with it, Mr. J," I sang.

"Bad habits do spread so quickly," he sighed.

I bore his abrupt distance as well as I could, but I was finding it harder and harder to shift alongside him. Freddie was a chameleon, with a face for every hour of every day. I had only one face, and only one protective mask, which was wearing ever thinner with unbroken use.

For the past half hour Freddie had been hard at work sketching something, and I didn't want to distract him. I would have updated the NFOs and activities by now, but he was using my hardback journal as a desk; it seemed the tray table just wasn't doing the trick. I kept my eyes moving from the magazine pages to his steady pencil traces, making sure he didn't pry the journal open and see whatever potentially unkind things I had noted as recently as yesterday. Once I let myself stare too long at his handsome face, long enough to make him feel the pressure of my gaze. He looked up, and I turned away, my cheeks burning.

I understood it this way: Freddie wanted my body, and I wanted his. That much had been crystal clear since we had worked on "My Melancholy Blues" in the wee hours of the sixth morning- and that seemed to be about it from what I could tell (or admit, at this time). The brief spells of intimacy we had shared, wherein something always seemed to get in the way, were invariably followed by a drastic cool-down on Freddie's part. And he and I had not kept up one single conversation that lasted longer than five minutes.