Chapter Text
Michael was already eleven minutes behind schedule when you stopped him.
Well, it wasn't actually you. Not really.
You were probably nowhere near the Los Angeles sidewalk his team was hurrying him down, caught between a security guard at either shoulder and an assistant reminding him that the studio had been expecting him ten minutes ago. You were likely somewhere across town giving another interview, sitting through another fitting, or reading through one of the countless scripts that had begun arriving at your door.
Or perhaps you were doing none of those things. That was the strange cruelty of it all- once, Michael would have known. Now, all he could do was guess.
But your face, enlarged and lacquered beneath the late afternoon sun, possessed enough authority to bring him to a complete halt. His security detail stumbled around him. Someone nearly walked into his back before catching himself.
“Mr. Jackson?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
A magazine rack stood outside a newsstand, crowded with glossy faces and headlines promising scandals, fad diets, messy divorces, and political disasters. Yours had been placed front and center, directly at eye level- as though fate had tucked you amongst all that noise like a breadcrumb meant for Michael alone. But breadcrumbs were supposed to lead somewhere. Yours led nowhere he was permitted to follow.
There was nothing accidental about the photograph. Your shoulders were bare beneath a length of black silk, your head turned slightly away from the camera while your eyes- deepened by a smoky eyeliner- looked straight into it. You weren’t smiling. Not quite. One corner of your mouth held the suggestion of one, as if the photographer had captured you seconds before deciding whether the person behind the lens deserved it.
Michael knew that expression.
He knew the small line that appeared between your brows when you were concentrating. He knew your left eyebrow lifted higher than the right when you were amused and trying not to show it. He knew that what the magazine had presented as cool, untouchable confidence was really the look you wore whenever someone asked a question you intended to hesitantly answer.
Across the bottom of the cover, beneath your name in large white letters, was the declaration.
HOLLYWOOD’S NEW LEADING LADY - IN HER OWN WORDS
The phrase caught somewhere beneath his ribs.
'In her own words'.
At last, he thought to himself. Something about the tagline tugged a small, sentimental smile onto his lips. It never quite reached his eyes, but it was enough to invite the dangerous beginnings of reminiscence. He could already imagine your reaction to the cover. You would call the headline excessive. You would complain that they had made your name too large and insist the photograph hardly looked like you as you would blush profusely at the bold look you had tried for the editorial. Then, when you thought no one was watching, you would smooth your hand over the cover to keep it from bending.
There would have been a time when Michael could have teased you about it. There would have been a time when you might have brought the magazine to him yourself, feigning indifference while waiting for him to tell you what he thought.
“Michael,” his assistant tried again, gentler this time. “We need to go.”
“I know,” he answered absently, without looking over his shoulder.
He still did not move. Instead, he stepped closer to the rack- studying the image as though enough attention might make it change. Awards predictions crowded one corner of the cover. 'The performance of the year!', one critic had called it. Another declared that the film had introduced the world to a talent Hollywood had overlooked for far too long.
Michael felt an immediate, almost childish urge to correct them. They had not discovered you, you had been there this whole time.
You had been there when your name appeared somewhere near the bottom of a cast list, printed so small that you once held the paper comically close against your nose and pretended you needed a magnifying glass. You had been there when casting directors praised your audition but hired someone else instead. You had been there when reporters referred to you only as Michael Jackson’s girlfriend, even while you had a film of your own premiering three blocks away.
Michael remembered how you used to see him everywhere just as how he was seeing you as often now. The memory came back with such clarity that for one disorienting second, the sidewalk beneath him seemed to shift. You stood beside him in a drugstore late one evening, wearing one of his surgical masks and a baseball cap pulled low over your forehead. The disguise had been his idea, and so far it had worked in leaving Michael undetected- despite having two security personnel making rounds like military drones.
Personally, you had no need for the disguise- as you still considered yourself a no-name in the industry. But it was your reputation as the global susperstar's significant other that preceded you more than anything.
You had stopped at the checkout line and stared at the display in theatrical disbelief. There he was on the cover of one magazine. Then another. And another. A fourth photograph of him peered over your shoulder from a cardboard advertisement near the register.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” you muttered under your breath, eyes fighting back an eye roll.
Michael looked around, first to you and then towards the magazine rack. “What?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You’re…” You made a broad gesture toward the display. “Everywhere.” Then you plucked one of the magazines from the rack and held it beside his face, comparing the two. “I have counted five Michaels, and we haven’t even paid for the toothpaste yet!”
His eyes crinkled above his mask. “Maybe you’re just lookin’ for me.”
“I don’t have to look for you. That’s the problem.” You returned the magazine back to its original place on the rack. “How am I supposed to miss my boyfriend when his face follows me into the grocery store?”
Michael didn’t miss the implication. “Aww,” he crooned immediately. “You miss me?”
The hopeful note in his voice made you commit to the eye roll you had been fighting.
“That was your conclusion?”
"Hey," he lifted one shoulder in an infuriatingly casual shrug, unable to disguise the pride in his voice at having successfully flustered you. “You said it, mama, not me.”
“I meant it as a hypothetical," you defended yourself.
“Sounded pretty real to me.”
“You hear what you wanna hear.”
“And I heard you say you miss me.”
“I said I couldn’t miss you.”
“So you tried?”
You stared at him from the side. "…Just pay for that toothpaste already."
And although you couldn't see his smug smile because of the surgical mask, Michael’s shoulders began to shake with muffled laughter. You nudged him with your shoulder, attempting to steer him toward the register before he could tease you any further. Michael caught your hand instead. Hidden between your bodies and the narrow display of chewing gum, his fingers slipped through yours.
“You can miss the part of me they don’t get,” he whispered, leaning close enough that his breath warmed your ear through the mask.
Your amusement softened. You looked at him- not at the man on the magazines, not at the performer suspended above arenas or projected on television screens, but at him.
Michael… your Michael.
The person beneath everything the world believed it owned. To be entrusted with that version of him had always felt like the greatest gift he could give you as someone who had only bared his heart for you. You alone were allowed to witness how quiet he became once there was no audience left to please. You knew the authentic rumble of his laughter as it carried across a room and the uncertain pauses that interrupted his sentences whenever he had thought he was beginning to overshare too much information.
You thought of nights spent wandering the fairgrounds at Neverland Ranch after every ride had gone still, when the pathways belonged only to the two of you and your conversations drifted from dreams and childhood to whether elephants understood jokes.
You thought of the evenings he spent at your cramped apartment, where he would leave his shoes beside the door and pretend the domestic life had always been yours to share. Your kitchen was so small that opening the refrigerator trapped him against the counter, and Michael somehow managed to use every dish you owned while attempting to prepare breakfast. He would stand at the sink with his sleeves pushed up, washing plates while you dried them, the two of you bumping elbows and arguing over whose turn it was to choose the movie for movie night.
In those moments, he was not the man whose image covered the world. He was simply the man standing barefoot in your kitchen, being an agent of provocateur and arguing why Star Wars was better than your beloved Star Trek. You thought of industry events where the two of you could be pulled to opposite ends of a room and still locate one another instinctively. Michael knew the exact moment your practiced smile began to hurt your cheeks. You knew when the noise around him became overstimulating, when a slight tilt of his head meant he needed you to find an excuse for the two of you to leave.
There had been comfort in knowing that no matter how much of him the world consumed, there was still a part of Michael it could never reach. A part that came home to you.
“…I think that’s the only part I ever do miss," you quietly mused.
Michael hated the idea that the entire world was saturated with his image but he soon realized all of that was out-triumphed when something of him would always and intimately belong to you. But he had never considered what it might feel like when the world learned of your face, too.
Worse, he had never imagined that by the time it did, the private part of you would no longer belong to him. He no longer knew what you looked like first thing in the morning or whether you still read scripts curled into the same corner of your sofa. He did not know which roles frightened you, which interviews left you drained, or whom you called when the pressure became too much. He no longer knew the things the magazines could not print. He had been reduced to yet another admirer in the crowd.
“Would you like me to buy it?” His assistant asked, pulling him back to the present once more.
The Los Angeles sidewalk settled around him again. Cars crawled through traffic with less-than neckbreak speed the city had always suffered from. Someone across the street called his name, having finally recognized the cluster of security surrounding him. Michael lowered his gaze from your photograph.
“No,” he had answered a bit too quickly.
Then, before his assistant could turn away, he reached for the magazine himself. The paper was warm from the sun. His thumb passed over the glossy curve of your shoulder before he caught himself, the gesture resembling a touch closely enough to make his chest ache. Here you were: permanent enough to preserve in ink, public enough for anyone with a few bucks in their pocket to take home, and small enough for Michael to tuck beneath his arm.
But you would never be quite his again.
“Actually…” He drew the magazine from the rack. “I’ll take this one.”