Title: Red Jacket. Fandom: Whose Line is it Anyway? (US) General Characters: Colin and Ryan. Prompt: 011. Red. Word Count: 1,292. Rating: PG. Author's Notes: AU fic. My Intro to Acting class was full of amazing people. Some were amazing in more than one way. You had your typical, “I’m in this class to make it on the silver screen or Broadway, so I weigh twenty-five pounds less than I should, and I’m better than everyone here, because I’m a star,” people, and then there were the, “I’m taking this because it’s part of my English major, and I really don’t know what I’m doing here,” people, but my favorite were the people like me. The people who thought, “I want to be here.” My love for acting started at a later age than most. It wasn’t until grade ten that acting even came up on my radar as a hobby, or, even, heaven forbid, a lifestyle. Acting class in high school became my life. I was always at that theatre. I spent weekends doing tech work for upcoming shows, even though I had nothing to do with the tech department. I painted flats, I wrote signs, I helped hang backdrops, I helped clean the stage…that was when I wasn’t acting. I was in almost every show, due to the immense lack of male actors at my school. I think there were ten of us. Of course, my best friend in school was met through these plays. Mark was an exceptional actor. It was normally between the two of us on who would get the leads. Occasionally, Roger or Adam would get it, but Mark and I knew…we were the premiere actors. But, like most friendships, once we left high school, we hardly saw each other, and the last time we did…we had a falling out, let’s say. I really don’t like to talk about it. He’s off in California, doing his acting thing, and last time I heard, he’d gotten a commercial for Cheerios. So, you can imagine my surprise when, on the first day of Intro to Acting, in walks Mark. Okay, it wasn’t Mark, just some guy who looked a heck of a lot like Mark. He was tall, with curly, dirty blond hair, and a demeanor about him that I couldn’t – and still can’t – explain. It was like he had a secret, some sort of immense secret that could possibly help us understand our minds, and delve into the minds of others to finally get what was going on up there. He understood something about the world that we mere mortals never could. The one thing that struck me the most was his red jacket. It was a normal-looking thing, a bright red color, silver zipper, hood in the back, two strings in the front, two pockets. He always wore it. I never saw him without it on until one night two years after we met. Mark always wore a similar jacket, in the same color of red…he had those same piercing green eyes, that same curly blond hair, but he didn’t have that special something that drew me to this stranger. That secret buried beneath the surface of him…and I was dying to find out what it was. It came as a shock to me when, with about fifty open seats, seeing as how there were only six of us there at the moment, he chose to sit down two seats away from me. I glanced at him as he settled into the chair. I didn’t see any notebooks, papers, pencils, anything to indicate that this man was going to school. He just sat there, hands in the pockets of the red jacket, listening to his Walkman. He caught sight of me looking at him, and I immediately focused my attention on the brand new – red – notebook in front of me. I opened the cover and began to doodle on the sides of the paper. I felt him move over one seat, so he was sitting right next to me. I dared to look up, and met his bright, powerful green eyes with my dull brown ones. Suddenly, I hated the color of my eyes. Without taking off his headphones, he smiled at me and asked, “What’s that for?” “What?” “The notebook.” I looked down at the paper, and around at the rest of the class, who all had notebooks in front of them. I met his gaze again and chuckled. “For the class.” “Hmm. I thought, acting class, why do we need notes? It’s not about what we learn on paper, is it…?” I could tell he was looking for my name now. “Colin.” “Colin. You’re an actor. I can tell. You’ve been acting for about four years now, right?” “How…how did you--?” “You of all people should know that acting is about learning yourself. You learn who you are, who other people are, who God is, who the world is…you learn people in acting, not words and definitions.” “I…wow. I’ve never heard it that way before…” “Ryan. Name’s Ryan.” “You know, you look a lot like my friend Mark.” “I look like a lot of people. I am an actor, after all.” At that moment, the professor made her way into the classroom. During our talk, about thirty more people had joined us. I hadn’t even noticed. “Notebooks away, people. This is Intro to Acting, not Chem 101.” Stunned, I put away all the materials on my desk and glanced over at Ryan. He was grinning at me, and mouthed, “See?” After class, he left without saying a word to me. I had been involved in the last improv exercise of the class, and felt stage fright for the first time in my life. I always got nervous before I went on, not while I was on. I don’t know what made me so nervous about this stranger, but his mere presence made me feel like I had to be perfection in a little Canadian package for him. As I made my way back to my seat, I stopped in my tracks. His red jacket was still hanging over his chair, his Walkman still in one of the pockets. How could he have forgotten this? I picked up the jacket and a piece of paper fell out of the other pocket. I picked it up and read it. ‘Next week, class comes again. Next week, I’ll sit next to you again. Next week, we’ll be strangers no more. Next week, you’ll know nothing about me. Next week, I’ll know everything about you. Next week, we’ll have met many times more. This week, No Anchovies at 6pm. Any day you want.’ No Anchovies? The little pizza place I loved? How could he have known I loved pizza…somehow, the fact that this man already knew so much about me didn’t scare me, it made me more willing to go meet him. Tonight, I decided. Tonight I’d meet him. It was next week. We’d met that evening at the pizza place, and talked for three hours about ourselves. It was mainly him telling me about myself, and me filling in the gaps, but it was the most interesting night I’d had in a long time. We were sitting in class, watching two inept students completely butcher a round of Film Noir. How the teacher could allow this to continue, I don’t know. Finally, when their scene had ended, Ryan and I were called to do the game. Something happened while we were up there. It kind of…clicked. Something in my head turned on, and I was suddenly more open and more outgoing than I had ever been in improv before. I found myself saying things that seemed absolutely crazy, but Ryan enjoyed it. We were one person in that moment, one person in the scene. Somehow, I left the class wearing his red jacket.