Title: The Forgotten Ones
Author: Steph
Rating: PG
Pairing: None, really.
Summary: In honor some of the many matriarchs, pawns and friends in Queer as Folk who I don't think get their due.
Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me, but in fact are the property of Russell T. Davies, Channel Four, ect.
Notes: Un-betaed. I'm not sure why I felt I need to write this, but I sort of did. I think after this, barring some serious plot bunny, Queer as Folk will finally be out of my system. Also, I'm not sure this isn't crap, or at the very least intensely boring. It's only four pages though, so I'm sure you can make it through. Let me know what you think.

Hazel looked around the cafeteria before sighing in disgust. She couldn’t take it anymore, all these kids nattering on about their stupid problems as if they meant anything. They didn’t know the half of it, whinging about failing an English exam or going on about how some bloke they fancied didn’t ask them to the dance. It fucking made her sick. One table’s conversation ran into another, and Hazel had had enough.

Slipping out the back door, she walked confidently but swiftly down the steps of the building and onto the street below. Christ, at times like those she really wished she had a car.

Rooting around in her bag, she pulled out her pack of Benson’s and lit one, inhaling deeply. She hadn’t smoked for long, only a few months, but thus far it proved a balm for her nervous, twitchy energy, especially when she had to sit still for hours during classes. It’s not like she fucking needed school anyway. She certainly wasn’t going to university, and showing up everyday only served to aggravate her.

Hazel hated every single one of those kids—and they were kids, even the ones older than her. It’s like they couldn’t be bothered to each find separate personalities. They wore the same clothes, ate the same foods, listened to the same music, watched the same movies, and Hazel didn’t fit into that.

She’d leave school and then she could finally find someplace for her. She felt lonely, with her wild red hair and threadbare clothes, so different from everyone else. But who cared? She didn’t want to be like them anyway. Tossers, the lot of them. Thinking their lives were so bloody important. Not knowing anything about anything at all.

She rubbed her swollen stomach fondly. Hazel knew about the world, knew it in a way the others couldn’t even begin to understand. And in another few months, she’d forget them completely, because she’d have her baby to worry about, and that was more important than some stupid school dance.

She couldn’t wait. She hadn’t even seen it yet, but she already loved it more than any mother had loved her child in the whole history of the world, she was sure.

***

When Lisa was six years old, her neighbour, Hugh Smith, told her girls couldn’t play football. She took aim and kicked him so hard that he bled, and went crying and limping back to his house. Her mum had given her a right bollocking, asking her what she was thinking, doing something like that.

Lisa hadn’t meant to hurt Hugh. She quite liked him, actually. His long, shaggy hair intrigued her, and they always watched telly together after school until his mum got home from work.

She hadn’t meant to hurt him, but she liked football.

When she turned twenty-one, a classmate at uni said she shouldn’t bother trying to become a solicitor, because only men got hired at the good firms. Instead, he suggested she try a profession more suited to a woman, like perhaps a teacher or a secretary?

Five years later, when her boss asked her if she knew Colin Brawner, because according to his application that they went to the same university and graduated the same year, she said yes, she remembered him.

Later that day, she sat in the room when Colin was called and regretfully informed that Bailey and Cropter didn’t currently have a position suitable for him.

***

Sandra hated pushovers. Her last boyfriend was one. Everyone had a go at him, telling him to do this and that, and he did it all because he couldn’t say no. Even his mum directed what he wore and where he went. Can you imagine? A twenty-six year old man still listening to his mother.

“Yes dear” and “no dear” were novel only so long. Soon she started doing things to purposely get a rise out of him. Wearing her socks during sex though she knew he hated it. Driving his car and not filling up the petrol tank. Showing up twenty minutes late every time they met. And still, nothing. Gritted teeth, a strained smile and balled fists constituted the biggest reaction she got.

Every woman wants a man with some passion in him, not some sorry, nodding lapdog. She doesn’t want to always get her way, because then it stops being fun. She tried telling him, “Benny, stick up for yourself, you sorry soft touch! If you don’t want to have tea with your mother, then tell her!”

Nothing ever worked, though, and in the end she had to chuck him, when it went passed funny and sad into pathetic and painful to watch. Bit of a shame though, he was a magnificent shag. Very giving, which was only to be expected, she supposed.

Sandra quit her shite job at twenty-eight years old and began working for Stuart Jones, a man famous around the circuit for being ruthless and incredibly gay, two traits that apparently didn’t go together in most people’s minds.

The first day of work he asked her for a pot of coffee. When she informed him that coffee making was not part of her job description, he answered firmly that whatever he fucking told her to do was part of her job description. She told him that he should disabuse himself of that notion as quickly as possible. Then they’d shared a small grin, and Sandra thought, “This’ll do.”

***

Donna supposed she loved Nathan a bit. It was inevitable, all things considered. Few people could deny his innate sexuality. He’d nabbed Stuart Alan Jones the first time out, didn’t he? When he came out to her that day during lunch, she hadn’t been surprised, not really. What did surprise her was that her heart only gave a weak little lurch, then kept on beating, right as rain. She thought she loved him more than that, but she guessed it was good she didn’t.

Donna’d gone with him since year eight when she moved in across the street. She knew well her part in his life. She fulfilled the role of support and caretaker; almost maternal, only because he refused to talk to his mother. Their friendship was never meant to be about her. Nathan’s mind remained constantly cluttered with too many things to include Donna. She understood that from the beginning, and honestly most of the time it was ok. She didn’t mind tagging along for the ride.

Canal Street’s not bad, once you get over the initial shock of it. Clubs are quite nice, and always chock-a-block, so she doesn’t worry about sticking out. Look at that Hazel, no one even questioned that she belonged; she fit right in.

Anyway though, Donna thought most anything would be better than staying in her house all day. Her mum she didn’t mind, but that new boyfriend disgusted her. He was big and hairy and smelled terrible. He had lived with them three months and Donna only remembered seeing him shower once. He terrified her, with the way he walked around naked and how he liked to touch her hair and back.

One night, he stood outside her room for hours, not saying anything, just breathing. She wrapped herself in her duvet and curled into a ball, nervously watching the shadow that slithered under her door from the light in the hallway. He never came in the room, but she stayed up all night, in case.

Donna felt nearly as happy as Nathan’s mum when he decided to move back home. She waved a flag to harken his arrival, as a joke. For the first time in a long time, Nathan and Mrs. Maloney were both happy, and Donna thought that occasion alone deserved a flag or two waved in its honor. The voice hollering from behind her made that miserable, sick feeling return to her stomach. She turned futility to look back in the direction of Nathan’s house, but of course he wasn’t there, as she expected.

It was all right, being Nathan’s friend. Though sometimes she wished he could be hers in return.

Her mind wasn’t on that at the moment, though. With that gorilla in front of her, the only thing she could think was that she really didn’t want to sleep in her house ever again.

***

Romey was an only child. When she turned seventeen, her mother told her that being a lesbian was ok. Romey hadn’t come out or anything, her mother just knew, the way mother’s sometimes did. She smiled and said it didn’t matter who she loved, so long as she did love.

Romey tried to deny it, went beet red and asked agitatedly what she meant. At seventeen, the last thing anyone wants to do is talk about sex with her mother. How humiliating.

She said that nothing Romey did would turn her away. If Romey admitted to killing ten people in cold blood, her mother would stand at her side in the courtroom, and then sleep outside her prison cell the next forty years, telling her stories and keeping her company.

Romey was beautiful and lovely, and whomever she found to make her happy was ok by her mum, man or woman. Just so long as she thought the person deserved Romey, of course. They went to their first P-FLAG meeting two weeks later, and Romey buried her ten months after that.

She wondered if she would ever stop thinking about her mother in those simple, quiet moments—Lisa’s arms around her waist and both of them gazing at Alfie, sound asleep in his cradle. When the love surged so strongly between them that it made her heart clench and her breath catch from the intensity of it.

She certainly hoped not.

***

Rosalie wasn’t very lucky when it came to men. Usually they already had girlfriends, or they were prigs, cheats or con artists. The string of malicious ex-boyfriends in her past could attest to that. And yet, she defied logic and remained optimistic. Surely they couldn’t all be mongs, right?

Vince seemed so perfect. He was good looking, almost too nice, shy and clever. Really, all around, the kind of guy Rosalie had searched so long for. They’d really hit it off at the bar that night, and she felt confident that if his friend’s mum hadn’t gone to hospital he would have taken her home.

So of course, because it was going well, he started seeing someone a few weeks after that night. Marcie called it strange because Vince never had a girlfriend, but Rosalie knew what it was, really. Her terrible luck with men.

She kept that in mind when Vince’s friend, Stuart, asked her to go to Vince’s birthday party as his personal guest.

“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”

The sincere smile that spread across his face nearly convinced her before he even spoke. “I promise you he doesn’t.”

She agreed, and he’d told her to arrive at nine, and not to mention it to Vince because, “It’s a surprise.”

That Stuart was a good sort, she thought, Vince deserved someone like that. As she pondered what to buy him, the thought flittered through her mind that perhaps her crap lucky was finally changing.


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