Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dean holds up the CD, with its swirling illustration and blue border. "You seriously own this?"

Chris responds by breaking into song, spinning and waving his arms in no discernible pattern. "Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick—"

Dean whacks him in the calf, and Chris comes to sit on the floor next to him. Dean eyes Chris's clothes, which are pretty much his standard day-to-day wardrobe: grey Armani pants, crisp cotton dress shirt, sleeves rolled up. Barefoot, because he insists that everyone take off their shoes at the door. "Did I miss the part where you're secretly a Goth?" Dean asks.

"Came home from my first semester of college with black hair, eyeliner, and a lip ring."

Dean stares.

"It's true. The pictures are in the attic somewhere."

Dean laughs and nudges Chris's knee with his. "Your parents must have hated that."

"People in Atlanta probably heard my mother shrieking."

"Did she let you keep it?"

"Are you kidding? She paid her hairstylist five hundred dollars to come to the house and re-dye my hair, and I wasn't allowed to leave the house—which would have included going back to college for the next semester—until I took the piercing out. And there was at least an hour of lecture about disgracing the family name and making everyone think I was one of those gays. I decided to leave that conversation for another day."

"Your parents are kind of assholes sometimes," Dean says after a moment.

Chris shrugs, too lightly. "Julia and I turned out OK."

Dean doesn't bring up Julia's multiple ex-husbands or trips to rehab. Instead, he says, "You should show me those pictures."