Tommy Hagan Bingo - prompt 2
I Saw The End (It Looks Just Like The Middle)
Bingo tag: @tommyhagan-bingo
tw/cw: Mentions of canon character death.
Canon adjacent - Introspective - study
Summary: Tommy Hagan was voted most likely to be haunt someone. Maybe he was more likely to be haunted by his own ghosts. Maybe that someone was him.
Tommy Hagan is, for lack of better wording, fucking lonely. Never in his life did he think that he would be sitting here on the dock of lover’s lake while he shivered his way through the night without anyone to share it with. It’s freezing out, the water just beginning to ice over on the other side of the lake. Tommy sits on the edge of the dock with his feet in the water as he thinks about the way that things have gone for him since high school and he breaks.
Most likely to haunt someone. He feels like he’s the one being haunted.
Sobs rips their way up his throat as he lets himself think about all the things he let himself mess up over stupid high school hierarchies and meaningless popularity. It stings and sours as the emotional bile comes back up. It marks the inside of his throat with the notion that he might never have the life he imagined. That he broke the glass case surrounding his hopes and his dreams and he swallowed the crystals, hoping they’d taste sweet — like sugar — as they made their way down after the rotten realization that he has become the kind of person he feared being. The idea that he will never get to meet some hypothetical kid of his friend’s and tell them embarrassing stories. The memory of shoving people in lockers and making them dig their classwork out of the lunchroom trash can. The memory of Keanan Johnson choking on water as Tommy watched his friends hold the boy’s head in the toilet for a second at a time over and over. Tommy’s sobs are starting to sound just like the pleas he had heard then.
His throat constricts as he swallows around nothing. That one burns as it goes down. It sticks to the insides of his stomach and seeps into his blood. Tommy heaves in a choking, gasping breath as he whimpers out another sob. His hands clutch at anything they can so he can find something to hold onto as he feels his world shattering into a million tiny pieces.
“You’re a dick, Tommy.” Carol said as she had stormed out of his room and he hadn’t heard from her since. Last he picked up, she’s all the way in Boston.
“I can’t deal with you, man.” Andy McCormick.
“Stop clinging to me like a child, dickhead.” Billy. Tommy didn’t attend his memorial service. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have made it all the way through without having something to clutch at. His world would have unraveled even faster.
“You’re both assholes, that’s my problem.” After Steve, it took a while for Tommy to feel okay again. It didn’t feel like anyone else that had ever stopped having anything to do with Tommy. Maybe it’s because he loved Steve in a way that ran far deeper than the brotherly relationship you formed on a team of 20 hormone riddled Varsity high school boys. He loved Steve in a way that was far more visceral. Tommy wasn’t Tommy without him. He thinks that might be why he got worse after Steve left.
But far before that, Tommy had loved someone else before. The same person that he had once spent time with talking about knights and kingdoms and dragons and comic books was now an unfamiliar face in the hallways as he kept his head down to keep from being tormented by Tommy’s posse. Tommy hates himself for the way that he left things between them. It wasn't Eddie’s fault that he didn't know how Tommy felt. Eddie hadn’t known that Tommy would grow to resent him for making him feel the way Tommy did. Still does, if he’s being completely honest with himself. It tears him up to think about the way that Eddie had been hunted during spring break. He couldn’t see him doing that to the Cunningham girl. Not Munson. Not the Eddie he knew, who was terrified of ducks and hated when people lied to him, and loved peppermint. He always had some in his pocket that Tommy would beg him for and he would act like he was annoyed but Tommy knew Eddie carried extra just for him. The Eddie that had grown his hair out in middle school because Tommy said that it would look cool, and then his father buzzed it all off at the end of 8th grade. Tommy saw less and less of Eddie after that. Eventually, Eddie became another person for him to pick on and degrade, and it hurt him to speak down to him like that. It isn’t Eddie’s fault that Tommy doesn’t know what to do and how to convey the love he feels for him. It isn’t Eddie’s fault that Tommy is a violent dog with no recollection of why he bites. There’s a chemical leak in his brain somewhere. There has to be. And maybe in some other universe, Tommy and Eddie are still friends, and they could have been friends with Steve and Carol and it would have been okay.
But it’s not. And it won’t be again. Tommy stares down at the handout for Eddie’s memorial service. He was supposed to turn 20 in two weeks. Tommy was supposed to show up at the trailer with an apology. A start to starting over. He was supposed to tell Eddie everything.
Maybe he’s just not meant to belong to someone. Love seems to be contagious for everyone but him, and the one person he wants is no longer available to call in the middle of the night with choked out apologies.
Maybe he’s immune to the concept of love. God knows that the only times he ever felt anything of the sort, it was a cruel joke and was always geared towards someone he wasn't allowed to have. When he was a sophomore, being alone meant a break from all of the social responsibilities. Now, being alone means everyone has left him, and he is utterly alone by himself on the edge of this dock.
Tommy slips the memorial service handout into his shoe and stands, wiping his eyes harshly. He strips himself of all his clothes in an admittedly clinical fashion. Like he hopes this will be some kind of miracle treatment that will fix all his problems and sew him back together with the right thread this time.
Tommy backs up to the start of the long wooden dock and breathes out all the nerves. This is stupid. He could get seriously hurt, but it’s the only thing he can think of to shock his body and his brain back into working. Back onto being a functional human being. Back into being able to swallow the rest of the shards stuck to the roof of his mouth and rinse it all out with peroxide.
It’s such a stupid idea, skinny dipping when it’s only 40 degrees. The water looks cold. Tommy runs. The end of the dock is rapidly approaching and it’s hard to see anything but the water as his vision tunnels.
The cold pierces his skin with a thousand tiny needles and he accidentally releases the breath he was holding. He gasps as he pushes up out of the water, soaking wet and miserably cold. But it kills the pain. Just for a little bit.
Tommy Hagan will attend Eddie Munson’s funeral service tomorrow afternoon. His lips will be slightly blue and he will sit at the side of the closed casket for far longer than he should.
And he will skinny dip in the freezing waters of lover’s lake once a week until the pain becomes bearable without it.
