Work Text:
You are a forty-five year old woman. You have a daughter. You are Dean of Medicine at a teaching hospital. Responsibility is your middle name.
Wait, he says. I need you in there. I trust you.
Add idiot to the list of things you are because you went to scrub in immediately. It was the words he said, the tone he said them in. You told yourself weeks ago that you were done with him. Done playing games, done being the adult in your relationship. Done dealing with his crap of which there has always been more than you could cover.
But with his request, he overwhelmed you once again. He is overwhelming in all he does, you suspect overwhelming himself as well. Overwhelmingly annoying, a constant pain in your ass. Overwhelmingly intense when he kisses you feverishly and slides his hands under your clothes to feel skin.
Calm and cold, that is his facade.
But then he is nothing like that when he allows himself to just be. Like he did with you. Dropping all pretense and aloofness and arrogant indifference, swapping all this out easily for a burning need to be held. He never once spoke about it but anyone can see how the loneliness ate its way through him. Anyone who bothers to look closely enough anyway. (Most don’t. That’s his fault of course.)
You did.
And once you do, once you see the raging abyss within him, once you’re caught in its gravitational pull, you are lost. Drawn in ever closer, you must burn in his heat, blinded by it.
Then fall.
When he drops you. When he comes to his senses.
Insults. Yells. Twists your words until you’re not even sure what you said yourself, until you realise that in that moment, he forgets to care about you. That in that moment, he is the wounded animal that retreats, lashes out if you try to follow. It is a cold place to be in, when your lover turns feral.
You try to reason it all away. He is hurt. He is damaged. Be understanding. Be there for him.
It makes you feel so tired.
You take Rachel to bed, sing for her and shake your head with a weak smile when she asks why your hands are so cold. You phone your assistant and reschedule tomorrow’s first meeting. You try not to think about the fact that going to bed without a glass of Chardonnay has become unusual.
With the buzz of wine, you sit there among your lifeless pillows, and recall what it was to have his nails scrape over your skull. He’d always tried to be gentle but then eventually, the madness would take over and leave marks on your body. Sometimes you wonder then, why it was you that he held onto so desperately.
On occasion you had meant to ask him. Until he looked up, with shining blue eyes, spilling over with raw emotion. Overwhelming, still. Him and you both.
You would dive back down and kiss him to soothe away the despair you saw in his eyes. Knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind, that there is only so much you can do. You would shut your eyes against those thoughts. He pulls you in so close you fear you might lose yourself in him.
In the morning, you would wake to him watching you, reverence in his eyes. Undeserved, you think, and blush. There is some friendly banter. It lasts until the door closes on him. In the hospital, everything is wiped away somehow. Neither of you are sure why that is exactly. He snaps at you, calls you an idiot. You sentence him to an extra week of clinic duty.
His patient dies. This sends you both reeling. His patients don’t die.
Confident and in control, that is your facade.
You hold it up on that day. Tell yourself it was bound to happen. No doctor saves every patient. You know he is devastated, terrified because he failed. You know he expects and needs you to be steadfast, to withstand his attacks.
But you are so tired.
Both of you retreat behind your walls and you have built them up high. He sleeps at his place that night. You shush Rachel when she asks about him.
He’ll come around tomorrow, sweetheart. And it’s bedtime for you.
Things go downhill from there on out, with both of you enthusiastically taking the next step in the opposite direction, spitting in the other’s face. You remember how he held you and whispered in your ear. You are not sure how he went from there to venomous.
Seeing him in his bathtub, bloody and laid bare, well it seems to be a sight straight out of a nightmare. Though it turns out you are still good at dragging him around, heaving him into your car.
You wish you had left Rachel at home. The sight of him turns your stomach, god knows what it does to the child. Oddly enough she doesn’t seem bothered. They joke about that stupid cartoon. He keeps sending careful glances your way, checking if maybe this time he’d get a reaction out of you.
In moments like that, you are thankful to have your facade. You hunker down in its shadow. That is until you force him out of hiding and realise that will shatter your walls, too.
You wanna know what I feel like? I feel hurt.
Your heart breaks for him then. You wonder why you ever turned away.
It’s not your fault , he says and pulls away, and then you remember.
He will always pull away. Step off. Leave you behind, knowing the problem, not knowing the fix. You don’t know either.
But for a split second, his face had softened. For a split second, he was once more the man who clung to you, who would have carried you. He never seemed able to hold on to that side of himself for long. You watch him limp down the corridor, leaning heavily on his cane.
He delivers the hairbrush later that day. Leaves you in shock. Leaves you knowing that that is it. There is no going back to the way things were. To either state of before. To being colleagues, friends. To being lovers. He shattered those hopes along with your living room.
But you keep up your facade. You know he does, too.
Little else survived through it all.