Chapter 100

                                    

                                          
"It's just going to be different this time, Brian, you've got to believe me," Roger finally addressed the professor's concern, "We're going someplace new, where no one knows us and all we'll have is each other—"
                          
"All you'll—" Brian began to repeat when he cut himself short, scoffing, "Roger, that...that sounds like an awful reason for you to go through with this 'fresh start'."
                          
"But he's different when it's just him and me!" the blonde shouted, his words bouncing off the walls of the confined space and losing their momentum as the two colleagues stared at one another. Roger's chest rose and fell with each strained breath he took in the space that seemed to grow smaller and smaller with each passing second. He stumbled back into the corner, trying to create some space between him and Brian, and shook his head. "I'm so sick of everyone thinking they know what our relationship is like, but...but you don't know anything, okay? You only know what you want to know."
                          
"Then tell me! Tell me what I don't know!" the professor insisted, taking another impatient step towards the blonde.
                          
The music instructor swallowed the lump that formed in his throat, averting his gaze to the opposite corner of the box and sighing. "We're moving to America, alright?" He dared to glance back at Brian, the professor's heartbreak evident in his hazel eyes. "Tim has a friend out there, and he's letting us stay with him until we find our own place. He says he's even got a job for me."
                          
"And if it falls through?"
                          
"It won't, Brian. I'll be fine."
                          
Roger's words of assurance did little to achieve the effect he hoped they would, giving the professor the answers he desired but not the relief he longed for. Brian didn't want to admit it, but he started to feel like all his efforts were going towards a lost cause. Time had run out and the blonde still believed he couldn't pursue his fresh start here, with him. The professor was more than willing to go out of his comfort zone to be with Roger, and it perplexed him that Roger—someone much more outgoing and independent than he—wasn't willing to do the same. He was still under Tim's charm and the pretense that he could change his ways, and for whatever reason Roger refused to share with Brian, he believed him. There was only so much Brian could say and do before he began repeating himself; repeating the same things Roger's heard and ignored for years.
                          
All there was left to do was help him move the piano, and so without another word, he returned to his side of the lift and restarted the elevator. Although the ride only stretched from one floor to the next—not even—it felt like an eternity, Roger staring at Brian's back as he tried to make sense of his surrender. 
                          
Yes, Roger had done and said everything he could to drive the wedge between them deeper, knowing it was for the best considering both their circumstances, but the moment felt incomplete without Brian's pushback. He wanted him to keep fighting; to "properly show him he cares," as Freddie so kindly put it. Yet he did none of that. He just kept his back to the blonde until they'd reach the ground floor, somehow managing to avoid his gaze altogether as they rolled the piano down hall and into the teachers' lounge where only a couple faculty members lingered—the bell having rung while the young pair was holed up in the lift. 
                          
"Where was it, again?" the professor awkwardly broke the silence that had been cast over them, rubbing the back of his neck while locking his eyes to his feet.
                          
"It...It was right over there," the former music instructor stammered, tossing a timid hand in the way of the wall that housed a small, ever-changing display of students' horrendous assignments, too horrible to grade. The teachers had to put something in the piano's place, and what better decoration than papers that would surely brighten their mornings by drawing a laugh out of them?