Disclaimer: I do not own the Breakfast Club. I do not own the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds. Nor do I own the title "All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers". That honor belongs to Larry McMurtry. (I'm horrible at coming up with titles, so I like to just steal other people's.)

Summary: Four years after detention, the BC reunites after years of separation to help one of their own. Together, they travel back to Shermer, where they find that some memories, and flames, never die.

A/N: Another story, yay! Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about my others. I've just been getting some major plot bunnies lately and decided to start developing them before they disappeared completely. So, here it is.

Chapter One: Slow Change

Saturday, March 26, 1988
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Brian Johnson stood on the corner of John F. Kennedy and Eliot, just outside of The Tasty Diner, and stared up at the sky. It was a crisp, sunny day, made even more perfect by the fact that it was also the first official day of Spring Break. It was the kind of weather that made him want to start a game of touch football in the Old Yard, if he was into that kind of thing… which, let's face it, he wasn't.

After a moment, Brian tore his eyes away from the cloudless sky and went into the diner. It was a small, crowded space, but it had been there forever and was one of the more popular grazing spots for students and locals alike. Brian was a big fan of their blueberry pancakes, which were so huge that they took up an entire dinner plate. He often came to the diner for lunch or supper, partially because it was really cheap and partially because his girlfriend Rebecca worked there.

Rebecca was a pretty girl with long dirty blonde hair and a shy smile that he'd met in his French Literature class the year before when they'd been paired up to give a presentation on Honorè de Balzac. He didn't remember much about the presentation other than the fact that they'd aced it, but he did remember their first real conversation outside of class. They were sitting in the library discussing their presentation when Brian went off on a tangent about the Realist Movement as a reaction to the Romantic Movement in post-revolutionary France. He must have gone on for two or three minutes straight without pausing even once, but she didn't say a word to try to stop him. In fact, she was even listening. Brian pretty much fell in love with her right on the spot.

Brian snagged a seat at a booth next to the window. Spring Break or not, he had some reading to do for some of his English classes and knew that he couldn't wait until the last minute to finish, especially since he was going to be spending the week at his roommate Jonathan's beach house with him and the rest of their housemates. The house was on the coast of Cape Cod not three hours away, and the boys had been looking forward to their trip for months.

After a couple of minutes, Rebecca walked over to his table, sales pad in hand. "Hey, big boy. Lookin' for some candy?" she said seductively, doing her best impression of Mae West. Brian felt his face flush and Rebecca, suddenly realizing what she'd just said, blushed, too, and let out a nervous chuckle. "Um, hi."

Brian bit his lip to keep from laughing. "Hi."

"Do you want something to eat?"

He paused. "Maybe."

Rebecca smiled knowingly. "I'll be right back."

Brian nodded and watched her disappear into the kitchen, then opened his backpack to find the worn-out copy of Pride and Prejudice he was reading for his British literature class. He'd always loved reading, even more than he loved math and science, and had surprised his parents by choosing English as his field of study. He wanted to teach when he graduated, high school or middle school perhaps, but his parents were still under the impression that he would go onto grad school or even law school. He didn't correct them, mainly because they were paying for most of his education, which was no small price, considering it was Harvard.

Rebecca returned a few minutes later with a tray in her hand. "Blueberry pancakes and…" She slid a plate of warm blueberry pancakes and a cup of coffee onto his table and smiled. "…coffee."

Brian smiled appreciatively. "Thanks."

Rebecca glanced behind her to check on her other tables. "I'll be back."

Brian nodded and reached for the syrup. He didn't know exactly how many blueberry pancakes he'd eaten in the entire time he'd lived in Cambridge, but the number was probably in the thousands. Not that it had hurt him any. In fact, Brian attributed his substantial gains in both weight and height to Tasty's cuisine. By the end of his freshman year, he'd gained forty pounds and had shot up about four inches, making him 6'2. He was still pretty lanky, but at least he didn't look like an awkward high school student anymore.

After he finished off his pancakes, Brian pulled out his book again and read about fifty pages in a little under two hours. Rebecca made frequent stops at his table to check on him and chat. At about 8:00 that night, she brought him his check and slid into the other side of the booth, checking to make sure her manager wasn't watching.

"He's in the kitchen."

Rebecca looked back at him and grinned. "When do you leave on Monday?"

"Uh, I don't know. In the morning sometime."

"You can come over tomorrow night if you want. Jessica's leaving to go home in the afternoon, so I'll have the place to myself."

Brian knew that he was probably blushing a little bit and he hated himself for it. He was twenty-one years old, for crying out loud. Wasn't he supposed to outgrow stuff like that? "Um, yeah. Yeah, that sounds, um… that sounds good."

"Okay." Rebecca tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear as one of the chefs walked out of the kitchen whistling 'Bridge Over the River Kwai'. Rebecca didn't seem to notice, but Brian looked over at him, startled. He hadn't heard that tune in years. Four years, in fact. It was the marching tune the Breakfast Club been whistling in detention when they'd first met.

"So, you can just call when you want to come over."

Brian looked back at Rebecca. "What? Oh, yeah. Of course. I'll call you."

"Okay…" She looked back over her shoulder, then stood from the seat. "I have to go, but I'll see you tomorrow."

Brian nodded. "Yeah, okay." She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek then walked over to another table to help a customer that had just come into the diner. Brian dug out his wallet and laid a few dollar bills on the table, then stood and gathered his things. He was just about to turn and leave when the map on the far wall caught his eye, and he walked over to get a better look. Tasty's was famous for the gigantic map of the world that was completely covered in pins that supposedly represented the origins of the diner's customers. Brian had always been skeptical about the map's accuracy, especially since there were more pins in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean than there were in Massachusetts, where the diner was located. There were dozens of pins stuck into the small area that Illinois occupied on the map and most of them were in arranged in a tight little circle over the heart of Chicago. There was one pin, a red one, that Brian himself had put on the map just after he arrived in Cambridge when he was lonely and homesick and missing his friends. He'd put it right where Shermer would be, even though it wasn't named on the map, and after almost three years, it still hadn't moved.

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Two months after their Saturday in detention, Andy, Allison and Claire graduated from Shermer High School while Bender and Brian sat in the bleachers together and cheered them on. Well, Brian cheered them on. Bender chain smoked an entire pack of cigarettes and threw the stubs into the open purse of a rich looking woman sitting a couple of rows below them. Unfortunately for her, he only missed twice.

That summer, the five of them hung out as much as they could, which wasn't a lot. Andy, who had been accepted to Ohio State University on a full wrestling scholarship, spent a lot of his free time working out with some of his teammates so that he would stay in shape. Claire, who had remained close to most of her friends, divided her time between the Prep Club and the Breakfast Club. Everyone seemed to be going their separate ways and, in the fall of 1984, they finally did.

Andy and Claire started college during the first week of September. Claire lost touch rather quickly, but Brian and Andy talked on the phone a few times, especially during the fall semester when Andy was having a hard time figuring out his place on the wrestling team and in his classes. By the time the spring semester rolled around, Andy had found a good group of friends and his conversations with Brian dwindled from once a week to once a month to nothing.

Allison moved to New York not long after the other two left, hoping to find her niche in the city of hopes and dreams. She sent Brian postcards with short, cryptic messages or detailed drawings that left Brian more confused than comforted. He wrote her letters telling her how school was progressing for him and Bender, but she never responded directly to any of his information or questions and he sometimes wondered if she even read those letters. In the last letter he ever sent her, Brian told Allison that he had gotten accepted to Harvard and would be graduating from high school in a matter of months. She never wrote back.

Brian and Bender started their final year of school, but only one of them finished. Bender dropped out a couple of months into the fall semester and got a job with an electrical repair company that operated on his end of town. Brian saw him a few times during that last year, but not very often. Bender was busy with work and Brian was busy with school and the two of them had never been very close to begin with. By the time he graduated, Brian hadn't spoken to any of the other members of the Breakfast Club in months.

Brian had wanted to get in touch with them, especially during that first semester at Harvard when he would hole up in his dorm room and watch television or read instead of going to parties. There were so many times when he almost picked up the phone to call Andy or even Bender, but he never let himself dial that final number. He imagined that they had probably moved on from high school and wouldn't understand why Brian would choose to call them out of all the other people he knew. Brian didn't really understand it either, but he knew that there wasn't anyone else that he wanted to talk to outside of those four. Maybe it was because they knew things about him that no one else in the entire world knew. Maybe it was because they were the only people who had seen him at his lowest point and he knew that they wouldn't be uncomfortable hearing the desperation in his voice or the tears clogging up the back of his throat. Either way, he didn't make the call. Eventually, he turned off the television and started going to parties. He started talking with other students in his classes and made plans to go out for coffee or lunch. After a while, he had people that he called friends, people who knew him by name, and that went a long way in helping him feel not quite so alone in the world. But he still thought about the Breakfast Club a lot. Every once in a while, Brian would remember a joke that Bender told or a book that he and Claire talked about and the memory would be so strong that he would open his mouth to tell the person sitting next to him. He always stopped himself just in time, realizing that no one else would understand why it was so funny or interesting or important.

Three years later, he still wondered if he would ever stop missing them.

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Brian lived in a small three bedroom apartment occupied by himself and four other college students that he called friends. He'd met Jonathan and Charlie in one of his English classes during the spring semester of his freshman year and they'd agreed to get an apartment together in the fall. Justin and Nathaniel joined them a semester later during the spring of 1986 and the five of them moved into a slightly larger apartment down the street. The arrangement worked out fairly well for everyone involved, though Brian knew better than anyone else on the planet that five very different people in one small space was bound to get a bit heated at times.

The first thing Brian heard when he opened the door on Saturday night was: "Franklin Roosevelt."

Brian rolled his eyes and locked the door behind him. Jonathan and Charlie were as different as any two people could possibly be. Jonathan was a reporter for the Harvard Crimson, the daily newspaper put out by the students, and he took his position on the paper very seriously. A bit too seriously at times, as Charlie loved to point out. Charlie was on staff with the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine that was engaged in a very intense rivalry with the Crimson that had been going on for decades. The two of them traded insults like they were baseball cards and were a constant source of irritation (or, in some cases, entertainment) for their fellow housemates. Their most common and enduring argument, which they had apparently picked up again on Saturday night, involved comparing how many famous people had come out of their respective publications.

"William Randolph Hearst."

"J.F.K."

"Fred Gwyne."

"David Halberstam."

Charlie looked over at Jonathan and frowned. "Who the hell is David Halberstam?"

Jonathan rolled his eyes. "He's a journalist. He used to report for the New York Times."

"Never heard of him."

"That's because you can't read."

"If I haven't heard of him, it doesn't count."

"What! Does, too!"

"Does not."

"He won the Pulitzer Prize!"

"Doesn't matter."

Jonathan looked over at Brian, who had just walked into the living room. "Do you know who David Halberstam is?"

Brian hesitated, then nodded. Jonathan looked over at Charlie triumphantly. "David Halberstam. Your turn."

Charlie sighed. "John Updike."

"Caroline Kennedy."

Brian continued into the kitchen, where Nathaniel was eating a banana as he read Sphere by Michael Crichton. "Hey."

Nathaniel looked up. "Hey. Your mom called."

"When?"

"About an hour ago."

Brian sighed. "Thanks."

Nathaniel nodded and went back to his book. Brian dumped his backpack into an empty chair and walked back to the bedroom he shared with Jonathan. He removed his jacket and gloves, then plopped down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. He knew that he should probably call his mother as soon as possible, if only just to get the conversation over with, but he didn't really have the energy just then. Maybe later, when he'd had time to prepare himself a little.

In the other room, the phone rang and Brian tensed, hoping it wasn't for him. After a moment, he heard someone knocking on his door. "Brian?"

Brian sat up and sighed. "Come in."

The door pushed open slowly and Nathaniel peeked his head into the room. "Phone's for you."

Brian stood up from the bed. "It is my mom?"

"No, some girl."

Brian furrowed his brow in confusion. "Rebecca?"

"No, I didn't know her."

Brian followed Nathaniel into the kitchen, where Jonathan and Charlie were reheating leftover pizza from the night before. Nathaniel picked up his book again and started reading, and Brian went over to the phone, which was resting on the kitchen counter.

"Hello?"

"Brian?"

"Yes?"

"It's Claire."

A/N: The Tasty Diner was a real diner in Harvard Square (it was actually turned into an Abercrombie and Fitch a few years back, corporate bastards) and it did have a map wall with pins, as described.

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