i’ll be right beside you, dear.
freddiewhy:
There was a part of Freddie - a part that lay deep in shadows and fog - that had expected this. It wasn’t something that he was proud of, but then it wasn’t something that he wouldn’t be prepared to defend should the need arise either. Brandon was reckless on a good day but lately something had shifted in him and now that the wheels were turning Freddie felt hopeless to stop them. There was only so much that he could do to intervene when his friend was on a warpath and so he had resigned himself to following behind and picking up the pieces as they fell. Eventually, Brandon would tire of this. Eventually, he would pause - if only to catch his breath - and then Freddie would be there, gently pressing the bits of himself back into place as if whatever had gone wrong could be fixed with a steady hand and a bit of glue.
Patience. Patience would fix this. Freddie had weathered his fair share of storms and he knew that if he waited long enough the clouds would eventually part and he would be free to tend to the wreckage. It had become something of a routine by that point; the destruction and the desperate, gentle attempts at salvaging whatever was left by two boys that nineteen had not been kind to.
If Freddie was the moon - calm and cool and dependably absent - then Brandon was surely the sun. He held a certain unattainable attraction that was dangerous to linger in. There was no pursuing him ( not safely ) and it was slowly becoming more clear that Freddie, too, had fallen prey to something bright that tended to leave burns. He had forgotten that even the moon made its slow orbit around something it seemed able to converge with for brief pockets of brilliant colour only twice a day. And, worse yet, Freddie was thoroughly unprepared for what was coming: a day when the sun would disappear from the sky altogether.
Ben’s voice cut through the haze, a quiet reminder that there were galaxies with other stars and orbits that were, perhaps, kinder. It took a moment before Freddie fully processed what he had said, and even then his delayed reply was lacking in a way that made it clear he still hadn’t quite gotten the message. This was, unfortunately, not an uncommon development. “Yeah.” His vision was as foggy as his mind and as Freddie leaned back in his chair he plucked his glasses from his nose and set to work wiping at the lenses with a small handful of his shirt. It was a distraction - something to concentrate his energy on that wasn’t exclusive to the hospital and the ugly situation that he and his friends found themselves in. It would have been simpler if he could have said that he had no idea how they had gotten there; if he could have sat in bewilderment and passed the slow hours trying to suss out who would take the blame. But it was there, tucked in that dark, shadowy place: a truth that he was unprepared to acknowledge.
And so, sat in a row of unforgiving chairs in an unfamiliar hospital where Brandon lay a few doors down battered and quite literally broken, Ben’s lesson was welcome. Freddie’s posture shifted and he turned slightly in his seat and it was likely that if his new friend had been an old friend he might recognise, in that moment, glimpses of a boy from over a decade ago that was eager to learn and sat in his school desk upright and attentive. Too soon, the flow of information stopped and Freddie could see it in Ben’s eyes and desperately wished that they knew each other better - that he could communicate with merely a look that he wanted nothing less than for the conversation to circle back around to the very reason they were under the hospital’s harsh lights instead of settled in the warm glow of the hotel lounge’s. “Bone’s not really - y’know - accessible though, is it?“ Freddie brushed past Ben’s last comment as if it had never tumbled from his tongue at all, his own voice still dragging far more than the urgency to which he felt the subject need be diverted required. Throat cleared. A minor improvement. Hardly an improvement at all. “No one would want to live in a building made of bone, anyway. Sure, it’d keep the wolves away - y’know, the Three Little Pigs and that - but it’d keep everyone else away too.”
Freddie’s diversion was as subtle as roadworks, a large illuminated sign on a highway saying reduce speed, construction ahead. His voice came out like gravel, the sound cemented with worry, and tiredness, and everything else Freddie carried with him. His words were weighted, and they sat in the pit of Ben’s stomach next to Caution. Ben had been raised in a cautious home, his mother stressing the urgency of ‘the green man’ and road sensibility on every venture outside their screen-door temple. When a fine strand of silver appeared in her hair, she had laughed and pulled Ben beside her in front of the vanity table, pressing a kiss into the tip and saying she would name it Love. Worry was a subtraction of love, the price of it, but love looked different in Kings County Hospital. It looked different sitting in the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room, different in the light. It looked different on Freddie.
Somehow, it looked older.
‘I’d take walls of bone over these ones, any day’ was Ben’s initial response to Freddie’s swerve, but whilst his mother had raised him with caution, his father had taught him how to handle a gearshift and reverse. Expression shifting from solace to searching, Ben adjusted to the conversation’s new course of direction. “The Three Little Pigs?” he repeated, weary amusement seeping into the space between his words and what he meant to say. Freddie was something of marvel, skin wide open like a map soaked in ink. He was a corner Ben kept tripping over, the bruises on his knees blooming into blue hydrangeas. A light without a switch. He didn’t make sense. "I dunno’, it’s not as if you’d see it or anything.” Ben continued, humoring Freddie in this. “You’d cover it in plaster, wouldn’t you? Make it look nice for the retailers or, erm, three little pigs.”
Ben offered Freddie a teasing smile after that, even though his heart thumped worriedly, unsure of where his friend was headed. Surgeons say a wound gives off its own light, and if that were true, Ben supposed Freddie would be a sky mottled with purple, yellows and greens, the remnants of a bad memory. Looking away, he reached down for a bottle of water that sat forgotten beside him, his ankle a pillar. He turned the plastic over as he settled back into the hard edge of the chair, and for a terrible, insufficient second, Ben thought he saw thick, black lines spelling Oliver on the cap. It was a trick of the light, sleep finding a way to tap his shoulder in consciousness like an old friend. He wavered, a mirage of a person, before offering the bottle to Freddie.
To him, the plastic was only plastic. Still, Ben’s hands felt as though they were touching a crime scene, his fingerprints coated in blame. He had learned how to read the barometer of Oliver’s unhappiness, every familiarity a handful of clay, building a full person out of him. He had seen him in all his entirety, and that had been dangerous. It was a dangerous to know someone too well, to get used to them, to learn where to touch them, where to stab them, how to love them. Dangerous because it was easy to mistake that familiarity for responsibility. No one ever blamed the forecast for a storm, but the body Ben had built still followed him with accusatory eyes. He was almost grateful for the unkind hour, or at least the promise that came after 2 am. Patients were sleeping. They were hidden inside their curtained rooms, drained in hospital grey, and if any of them had Oliver’s face, at least he didn’t have to see them.
Brandon was a patient now and he’d put Freddie in a position that Ben had often feared. It was a scenario that had played out enough times in his mind to keep him awake at night, heart beating like a bruise, and made him wonder if fear was just another subtraction of love that his mother had forgotten. It wasn’t, he didn’t think, looking at Freddie now. All he thought was gracious, and how that was a word he’d have a lot to say about, someday. “You sound like death,” Ben prodded, the bottle already feeling lighter in his hands, less like a mistake. “Here.”
