#pfitp

and you're not the steadiest on your feet because you've had 4 of whatever brady's drinking, which is IPAs, which you hate. but brady always knows what the right and normal thing to order is. so you tell them you're gonna go piss, and as you're looking for the bathroom you hear matthew go, what? and brady goes, we're not telling people yet, fucker, it's too early. and you stand at the urinal reassuring yourself that you're doing SUCH a good job of hiding it and pretending that you have nooo hard feelings about what went down between you and brady. which was nothing!! nothing even really happened. nothing that mattered. obviously it didn't matter to him, and it was never going to be what you wanted it to be. and you knew it didn't matter to him so you have no one to blame but yourself for how much it mattered to you, and it's creepy and pathetic that it still matters to you even after you were in his wedding party. and [well. it's pov quinn so pretend you don't understand this reference. but your spirit knows the choreography perfectly] you have a little emma thompson both sides now love actually moment with one of those very luxurious paper towels that feels like cloth. and you come back to the table and say, very brightly, i'm gonna head up to bed, and brady goes, i'm still going first tomorrow, right, quinn? and you go, yeah. for sure.

Also pfitp Quinn

One thousand times yes, AND (rpfing in a huge way while also telling the story that is interesting to me) I would say that Quinn in Pink Flamingos in the Pool is slightly insulated from a layer of this trauma when he is with his beautiful socially adept queen bee brother who loves him, because he can trust that Jack would expeditiously and directly tell him to take off his yellow shirt or leave the bluetooth alone or turn off Summertime Sadness. And jump down the throat of anyone who laughed at him. Is this sometimes embarrassing and revealing? Yes. Does it spare Quinn the infinitely worse experience of realizing that people have been snickering about something behind his back for an hour? Also yes.

& then RPFing more because I am feeling silly and reflective and inspired by this and still processing my pontoon experience...I am suddenly feeling like this dynamic is maybe part of what is behind the lack of trust between Jack and Quinn. Imagining like a 13-year-old Jack (who has not had the epiphany that Quinn's experience of the world is not as linear or easy as Jack's) letting Quinn flail—or even actively putting him in his place—in a social situation because it's like not connecting to him that Quinn doesn't have his above-average ability to police his own behavior or laugh things off or clap back. I feel like there were probably times growing up when Jack joined in on the teasing or quietly let Quinn wear yellow on Thursday (as it were), because he expected that Quinn would figure it out. And then Jack has the devastating mid-teen years epiphany slash witnesses an awful traumatic social experience that shows him that if he doesn't intervene, sometimes people will laugh at his brother and, to mix my metaphors, let him like swing far, far away from the piñata over and over again because they think it's funny or they are too cowardly to gently steer him back. And that each time this happens, Quinn has been wide awake and swinging at air and internalizing the message that there is something about him that people don't like.

the insufferable answer is that i am planning for a sequel that answers this question so i am not going to fully get into the details!! but i do not think Quinn is ready to come out to Jack during summer '24—too much at stake between them, and Quinn also gets a huuuuge kick/cheap thrill out of sneaking around with Trevor, so coming out would kind of blow up his spot, lol.

i actually don't think it has occurred to Jack that Quinn could be gay. (to me) Jack is really perceptive of Quinn in many ways, but he's so fixated on Quinn's self-isolation and social stuff that he's convinced that's the hangup that leaves Quinn perpetually single, never pausing to be like maybe my brother doesn't like it when i shove girls at him. (he's like....it's girls?!?! who doesn't like girls?!?!?!)

(entirely reserving the right to change my mind here) i feel like the eventual coming out is Jack bluffing, like of COURSE i always suspected (he didn't)....and then spending the next 3-6 months continually having smaller revelations of like "oh THAT'S why he wasn't bent out of shape about Grace" "THAT'S why he was so scared about the JT thing" "THAT'S why he was obsessed with Willy when he billeted with us." i think after Quinn tells him, it's a real time of crow-eating for Jack; there's so much he assumed he knew and understood when it came to Quinn, stuff he thought he had to explain to Quinn about himself, and it turns out that Quinn is in fact the expert on Quinn, and Jack knows waaaay less than he thought he did. lmao.

“He was always the first to make friends when they moved; he’d start getting sleepover invites and group chat invitations from his teammates, like, two weeks into the school year. Quinn would usually make his first friend around Hanukkah

/

There were a couple of years before Jack really understood what words could do where he said shit that will probably be lodged in Quinn’s brain forever; a particularly tectonic That’s why you don’t have any friends and you have to hang out with mine when Quinn was fourteen still shifts on him sometimes, still opens up some chasm inside himself that he can get lost in, if he isn’t careful.”

Like OW! Absolutely perfectly painful. It stands out to me so much even among all the more adult and immediate things happening for the characters. It hits so hard! The childishness of sibling relationships. Things from the past/mean things said years ago can stick to us so vividly because that sibling relationship is so much more closely linked to childhood… lodged in his brain forever!

The feeling of loneliness comes across so perfectly here as well:

“Luke’s face goes blurry; he must be on another app. It’s kind of funny, the idea that Quinn could’ve come out to him and Luke would have been busy maintaining his Snap streaks.”

There’s something so lonely about this moment and Luke doesn’t even KNOW..

I really love this fic I’ve reread it several times!! Losing my mind about That’s why you don’t have any friends….youre such a good writer!

And if I told you the loneliness and friendlessness and sibling stuff and these three specific passages are also my favorite parts about pink flamingos??? The way something you hear when you're 14 will just stick in your ribs and inform how you think about yourself and what you think everyone else can see when they look at you…whew!! Thank you thank you, I’m so glad you enjoyed. Reading this back and I have written a novel in response but this ask is like exactly what I love about this fic so :-/ had to do it to em.

A little silly backstory is that Quinn and Jack in this fic are completely inspired by my mom and her sister, and the “that’s why you don’t have any friends” line is a direct rip from their lives (don’t tell them!!) They are super super close but had this insane monthlong fight during covid because my mom (via zoom naturally) was like “why would you say [thing Jack said] to me when we were kids? it completely fucked me up.” and my aunt was like “I’m sorry but straight up I do not remember saying that.” And I believe her. I really do think she would have owned it if she remembered. So my mom had, in the 40+ years since this happened, constructed this idea of herself as a friendless loser and made numerous real adult choices based on that understanding of herself, and the foundation was just something stupid a 12-year-old said to her and never thought about again. Which of course is so fucking understandable and real and painful and human.

Like Jack has literally no memory of saying this to Quinn. And I think he would be defensive at first, but then mortified and deeply apologetic in the long arc of time, if Quinn were to bring it up and explain how much it fucked him up. Did not realize as a smartmouthed 12-year-old that he was traumatizing his brother, there just weren’t enough Wii remotes for all his friends to play MarioKart at his bday party and later he bought Quinn a thing of his favorite candy and assumed they were cool and never thought about it again. I also think the “when you give Jack a card he plays it” thing is Quinn’s outdated understanding of Jack, and probably in reference to something that happened, at the very latest, in 2015. Like Quinn has this idea that Jack and Jim are allies, probably left over from their teenage years, and Adult Jack is like, I do not know how to make this clearer to you: YOU are my ally. Our dad is kind of a controlling psycho and I have your back.

I wanted to write Quinn and Jack with all these ancient hurts that bleed into their present relationship. Like Jack genuinely wants, more than anything in the world in the night timeline, for his brother to hang out with what he rightfully believes are their shared friends and let his hair down and stop talking like Jordan Peterson and get laid! And somewhere in there, let Jack in on what has so obviously been eating away at him all summer.

And I think Quinn being closeted also has a lot to do with his loneliness. IMO you can't ever be truly at ease with someone when you are hiding a huge secret about the core of yourself from them. And I think both Jack and Luke have learned not to push, not to get too deep with Quinn, not to ask questions he doesn't want to answer, because he’ll withdraw or he’ll lash out. Luke is better at this, generally uses distance as a survival strategy to decompress from his deep intense family and their deep intense feelings. Like imo there are people Luke would push during the Snapchat conversation, but Quinn isn’t one of them, because Luke has learned (the hard way) that there are things Quinn doesn’t want to talk about, and sex and dating is one of those things. Okay, great. Luke will keep the peace and won’t pry. You do not have to tell him twice.

rated E, 20.9k, quinn hughes/trevor zegras

“Z,” Quinn hisses. “Why are you in my bed?”  Trevor squeezes his eyes shut tight, scrunching up his whole face.  Quinn watches, in horror, as the blanket falls away to reveal a gray “Property of Canucks Hockey” t-shirt. “Is that my shirt?” “Oh,” Trevor looks down. “Yeah.”  The pieces are starting to fall into the shape of a serious fucking problem. “Why do you have it?” Quinn asks. An incredulous grin spreads slowly across Trevor’s face. “You don’t remember?” Quinn pulls his blanket tighter around himself and shakes his head no with as much dignity as he can muster.

Weeeeelllll, you are in luck!!! Just last night after answering that ask I took the most stunning summer evening walk and relistened to my pink flamingos playlist and started a new one and thought a lot about our swagless + tortured + somewhere-on-the-spectrum Libra princess.

obviously no idea if this reference hits, but all of your fic makes me think of the harper/mormon wife animatronic “just mangled guts pretending/that’s how people change” exchange in angels in america (iykyk & if not im so sorry). idk why pfitp cuts to that feeling the hardest for me, possibly because no one can see your mangled guts the way a perceptive sibling can. and yet! perception does not always help… sometimes makes things worse….

truly the all time dynamic for me i cannot wait to watch quinn watch jack watch quinn again

Well…me too!! I assume it’s the new quinntrevor IG content but it has been really surprising and nice to randomly hear more about how it sat with ppl a couple months after the fact. I really really loved working on it—after the heaviness of idtfy it was nice to get to make fun of the manosphere and have some snappy dialogue. And there is also like real genuine emotion at the core, but it was nice to cut my angst with some levity!

Admittedly this ref wasn’t familiar to me on impact and that’s my bad. I have been meaning to read and watch Angels in America, and this was the final kick I needed. Library holds placed. I did do some searching for the quote & context and found myself misty-eyed on the train this morning just reading that tiny snippet of text.

Like !!! okay 100-word summary of the human condition. I am squeezing my fist Mr. Darcy-style thinking about it and so beyond excited to get my hands on that library book. (“And the pain—we can’t even talk about that.” Like to write this stunning metaphor that as humans reading it we all wince at, but to not focus on the pain, purely on the logistics of dealing with the organs, except for that little restrained aside that oh and btw it’ll hurt beyond what you can fathom…You’re kidding, Tony Kushner. You’re kidding!!!)

But anyways. I see what you’re saying in the context of fic and Quinn specifically—like his pain isn’t necessarily greater (or lesser) than anyone else’s because that’s not how pain works, but he’s so alone in it and nobody even knows he experienced anything. Like he has this gut-rearranging open wound Brady gave him, and he can’t/won’t even tell anyone about it. Just slapped two bandaids on and put a new shirt on, and now he’s trying to will it closed with his mind and avoiding seed oils and The 48 Laws of Power. And Jack is like heyyy kind of seems like there’s a giant open wound under your shirt. Just. If you ever want to talk.