Jonah stilled, listening to Harry, her injured hand resting, palm up, in his. How could she believe it was her fault? He didn’t understand, couldn’t make sense of it. Because without him, that whole night wouldn’t have happened. Without him, Harry would be safe, insulated from whatever hell was sure to rain down on them when the detectives started looking, really looking, into who had vandalized Orson’s house. All the more reason why they shouldn’t be here, never mind the ghosts that lived in these walls. Never mind that Jonah half hoped, half dreamed, in his drunken delirium, that Orson would come bursting through the door and lecture him and Harry for getting blood on his most expensive carpet.
“It’s not your fault,” he insisted, emphatic, holding her hand in his like something small, delicate, a bird with clipped wings. He was caught in an unsolvable paradox: here he was, filled to the brim with the overwhelming urge to explain to Harry how wrong she was, how much he needed her, how none of this was her fault because it was all his. But the second he told her that, the second he forced her to reconcile how much of this had gone wrong because of him, the second he gave her a real, palpable reason to leave him and never look back. Jonah couldn’t afford to lose any of the people he’d allowed to get close to him and his tiny, fluttering, terrified heart, but Harry… she would be the worst of them all. Something he would never recover from.
He focused his attention to her wounded hand, to cleaning the cut and bandaging it up. That was something he could do, something he’d been rather good at, back on William’s farm, tending to the injured animals. Maybe, if he kept his hands busy, he wouldn’t fucking cry again. “I regret letting Orson mean so much to me. I regret letting him get inside my head and change my reality to fit his purposes. I regret putting so much stock in his praise, and I regret every stupid, miserable, fucked up thing I did to try and get him to love me, the way he loved Mathias, the way he loved Chandler.” That one slipped through his lips, and even he paused, caught off guard, puzzled (to say the least) by what that meant, but he pressed on. “I regret everything I did up until the curtain fell on Troilus and Cressida, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing I can do to change any of it. If I’d known it would land us here, I’d change it all in a heartbeat. But I didn’t know. And we’re still here.”
He took a deep breath, winding gauze around her hand, applying pressure to the wound. He felt surprisingly sober, even though his hands were shaking as he tended to Harry, even though his cheeks were blotchy, and his eyes were red. “What I’m trying to say is… you can’t blame yourself for what happened that night because you’re not the one that got us there. I got did that all on my own, and you, you were just doing the best you could with what you had. With the mess I dumped in your lap and begged you to fix. And you did, Harry, you fixed it. For that one night, everything made sense. It was me and you, imploding together. And that’s what I needed,” he said, glancing up at her.
That’s what was so horrible about it. Harry thought it was her fault for pushing them to that place, but that was exactly what Jonah had needed, that freedom, that release, that frustration expelling from him like toxins leavinIg his body. If all that had happened that night had been petty vandalism and Orson had lived, Jonah would have woken up the next morning feeling more rested than he had in months, despite the hangover, and that was the worst part. “It’s not your fault because you gave me what I needed, and I’m– I’m wrong for even needing it in the first place.” He thought of how angry he’d been that night. He told everyone, even Harry, that he barely remembered what happened, but he did. Every detail, the texture of his rage, the weight of it in his chest, he remembered.
Jonah swallowed thickly, looking away from Harry because he couldn’t cry, he refused to cry, and thankfully, he had the excuse of putting all the medical supplies away, leaving them exactly where they’d found them. He’d wrapped her hand, to the best of his ability. They could deal with anything more back at the Castle. “C’mon, Haz,” he said, taking her uninjured hand in his and squeezing hard. “Let’s get out of here.”
She could see the gears turning in Jonah’s mind, the urge to argue with her and bear the whole weight of this himself being fought back. Because he was so used to assuming the position of the bad guy that he couldn’t accept that things weren’t always his fault. What happened that night hadn’t been all his fault; if Harry couldn’t take the whole blame, even the most objective of observers had to admit she was responsible for much of it. What Orson had done to Jonah certainly hadn’t been his fault, and the fact that a part of Orson’s hold on him remained, even in death, made Harry hate the man even more.
Jonah’s regrets spilled out and Harry listened with an even stare, keeping her eyes fixed on his hands as they tended to her injury. It made her ache to be reminded of all the ways Jonah had been hurt by this, but she stayed silent, let him pour all of it out into this dark, empty bathroom where the man they both knew was truly responsible had once lived and breathed. Harry breathed an inhale of surprise at Jonah’s admission of wanting Orson to love him the way he’d loved Chandler... not because she was surprised Jonah felt that way (she had more than picked up on his repressed sexuality confusion by now), but because she wouldn’t have expected him to say it out loud. From the way he paused, Harry figured he hadn’t expected to say it either.
Once it was all out, she rose carefully and nodded in agreement, a strange veil seeming to have lifted over their evening. She kept her hand in Jonah’s, but was silent through their procession toward the exit of the house and back outside into the waiting woods. Only once they were beyond the reaches of the house, the castle looming once again in the distance through the edge of the trees, did Harry speak up again, having finally processed everything that just happened in her drunk brain.
“You should know,” she started without introduction, “that you’re not wrong for anything you feel or need, ever. Even when you do the wrong thing, you’re not... there’s nothing wrong about you, about who you are. So. That’s that.” There were a million more unsaid things Harry wanted to make him understand, but they’d both said more than their fair share already tonight, and she wasn’t certain she could make all the words make sense, anyway. Harry had never been the best at putting them together in ways that properly expressed the magnitude of all she felt. That was why she preferred Shakespeare’s words, putting what she couldn’t say into sentences that had already been spoken for hundreds of years.
Instead of saying more, she turned in toward Jonah and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close and burying her face in his shoulder. She just held him there for a minute, hoping that in the same way she’d sensed what he needed on the night Orson died, this was what he needed now. It was certainly what Harry needed, anyway. She felt as though something incredibly cathartic had passed between them that night, and that even if they were still both broken, messed up people, each of them had the other to sit with in that brokenness. Harry had never been known like that before, and for once, it didn’t terrify her. For once, here was someone she knew she could fully trust to take care of her.
A light flickered on in one of the castle windows, and Harry’s attention perked, her body drawing back from Jonah’s but one hand linking once again in his. The two of them continued back toward their beds, exhaustion cresting over them like a wave as the drunken high wore off. Harry still didn’t say more. For tonight, there was nothing more to say.
