I am so sorry, It’s 5AM and I have no more brain but here’s a thing i wrote.
tw: drug use, hospitals | also me having no idea about, like, science and stuff
It’s been three months, two weeks and five days since he broke up with Owen, and Aaron is probably ODing.
At least, he’s pretty sure that’s what’s happening. It’s the only real thought he’s been able to hang on to for… oh, about a million years, now. Everything’s spinning. He’s seeing things and then forgetting them. He can’t try to focus, because he’s just been too distracted to think; he’s so hot and so thirsty and his heart is going to explode at any second, if his head doesn’t burst first—
…
Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Fuck these drugs.
The first thing he recognizes – really, truly focuses on, remembers and recognizes – is the low, droning hum of a hospital room. An age later, Aaron pries his eyelid creakily open.
There’s a silhouette in the doorway with dark, curling hair.
Aaron closes his eyes to the figure for a moment; His chest has been aching with loss since the last time he’s seen Owen, and though he has no idea how Owen knows, he’s also glad he’s there.
Aaron tries to get something out of his throat, but it’s so dry and cracked that what comes out is a rasp. He coughs.
From the doorway, he feels rather than hears a low and resonant baritone laugh.
It stops Aaron immediately, and he has to remind himself to breathe. Suddenly, he knows for certain that Owen is smaller than the man in the doorway, of course he is, and his laugh is more melodic, like singing. How could he not have noticed it right away? It must be because the room is still spinning, and the lines of the walls aren’t staying straight.
Owen isn’t visiting him at all.
The figure walks towards the bed and sits. Slowly, slowly, a sweet and slightly gap-toothed smile comes into soft focus.
“Hello, baby,” says Jack, and Aaron closes his eyes.
The next thing Aaron remembers is the feeling of Jack’s fingers running through his hair. His ex is sitting on the edge of the bed, right up by the pillow, strong shoulders leaning casually towards the wall. Despite the gentle touch, it bloody hurts.
Aaron tries to pull his tongue from the roof of his mouth, he really does, but his throat is the Sahara and his palate is sandpaper. He makes a wheezing sound instead, and seems to think more than speak.
“How did you know?” he asks. “How did you know I was here?”
Jack smiles softly at him, but his eyes are pained. “I heard,” is what he says. His voice is both familiar and strange. “Don’t try to talk, baby, you’re not out of the woods yet.”
Aaron exhales in a ragged sound, and has to look away, towards the high window. Dimly, some corner of his mind is surprised to notice that the hospital room looks remarkably like the one Eoin sent him to in Ohio an eon ago.
There’s a sixpack of beer and a pizza on the table.
He twitches again. Maybe he’s been sedated.
Painfully, Aaron tries to roll toward Jack – a pathetically bad decision. At some point, he’d sweat through his hair, and he’s now sticking to the sheets, so when he rolls his skin seems to shriek. The shift to one side makes his head pound like a countdown. For a moment, Aaron is so deeply aware of how pitiful he looks that he wheezes out a laugh into the pillow, but that just makes the pain in his throat worse, and he starts to cough instead.
He has to take far too long to collect himself before he can form words.
“Not my finest hour, I’ll admit,” Aaron rasps, still trying to be flippant despite himself. It’s exhausting.
Jack, never one to hide a feeling, looks like his heart is breaking. He kisses Aaron’s forehead, and Aaron’s skin just feels hotter for it, though Jack doesn’t seem to notice. “Aaron… I don’t understand. Why would you do this to yourself?” he asks, and it sounds almost like he’s pleading. “This isn’t you, baby. You’re supposed to be so full of life. You never used to put yourself in harm’s way at all.” Aaron watches Jack swallow in slow motion. “So why?”
Something fills Aaron’s stomach, cold and nauseating. Shame. He looks away.
“I changed,” he says, and it comes out in a thready little whisper. “I… think I broke. And—and I reckon when I put myself back together, I just wasn’t the same. Is all.” The therapist he had been seeing – seeing, but not really talking to – for Owen’s sake had mentioned something about personality disorders, the age of presentation, and Aaron being ‘textbook’, but he can’t really remember right now.
He hasn’t seen the therapist since the last time he saw Owen, actually. Sitting here with Jack, who looks so like him, that little reminder is like a punch to Aaron’s solar plexus. He shoves the thought violently aside and twitches.
Jack tries to shush him, to calm the shaking, and Aaron dimly recognizes his ex is brushing sweaty strands of ginger hair aside with surprisingly gentle fingers. “I am so, so sorry I hurt you, baby,” Jack murmurs, his voice warm and low. “You know I never meant to. You’re the one who kept me centered and sane throughout everything in high school, and I… really owed you a better ending. But you can’t keep holding on to old love like this – it’ll kill you. It almost did, for a second.”
It feels like Aaron would be crying, if his eyes weren’t so dry. Instead, he just shakes. “I missed you, Jack,” he says. “Every damned day. We didn’t get closure – we got nothin’. Just the end, all at once, and it—”
He chokes. His throat is so dry he can’t breathe. He cannot breathe.
Aaron’s heart rate spikes, and there’s suddenly activity around him – racing footsteps, then noise, then nothing.
When Aaron returns, the room is quiet. Jack is leaning against the doorframe. For several minutes, both men say nothing.
“You’re not here,” Aaron creaks. “You’re a dream.”
“Maybe,” says Jack.
“All right.”
Aaron closes his eyes.
The next time he’s conscious, Aaron’s vision is too blurry for him to really see. He can’t even lift his head from the pillow to look around. Around him there is only a wash of cool white light, a clean smell, and a voice.
“You’re right, baby,” says Jack. “I think you have changed, in one important way: you love Owen now. You really, really do, no matter what you think. And he loves you just as much. You can’t keep pushing that away – for your sake or mine or anyone else’s.
“You’ve got to let me go.”
Aaron says nothing. This time, the tears do come.
When he finally is able to ask how to do that – how to let Jack go – there is no more answer.
This is how you do it: you start somewhere.
It’s like cleaning out a messy house – when it comes to your start point, any place will do, no matter how small. Maybe you move a teacup, and that’s all you have in you to do that day. Maybe the next day you can clean off a chair, or fix a broken television. Maybe some days you’re able to get a whole room dusted – and maybe some days you find something you’d forgotten about, and you have to take the evening to mourn.
Be patient. Make sure you keep coming back. Just start.
I don’t know, man. To me, Owen seems like a pretty good place to begin. Maybe you should give that a shot.
The next time Aaron wakes up, his skin is cool. The hospital room looks different now – it seems less familiar, though the hum is the same. The IV is an alien weight in his arm. For the first time in a while, he feels a strange sort of clarity.
Slowly, bracingly, he sits up in bed, and unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth again.
Aaron doesn't remember the last few days very clearly, if he's honest. But he wants to call Owen, and that's a start.
do you ever read a tweet you made seconds ago and go “why am i so embarrassing”??????? #justme #okay
hongseok @hseok • 1min
wow. ella... is like really pretty... i mean if i saw her walking around... i wouldn’t do anything. well, i would. probably walk straight into a pole or something. trip over nothing. die a little on the inside from sheer embarrassment. #luxe #ellaluxe
hongseok @hseok • 2min
without u is my new LSS????? what a great song #luxe
