Chapter Text
The bathroom door locks with a barely-audible click, and finally Joseph can exhale. It comes out in trembling waves, lined with soft whines that he tries but fails to hold back.
This is so fucking stupid. He's so fucking stupid. All he has to do is stand around and look pretty while a few hundred philanthropists mill about his house eating hors d'oeuvres and bragging about their own achievements. But people keep expecting him to crack jokes or show off some of his party tricks, and he feels like he's suffocating.
He couldn't have been clearer about this: he does not want to attend events in February. It's the shortest goddamn month there is, so it should be easy to keep his fucking calendar clear. But they keep making him go places, they keep filling his fucking house with every kind of insufferable millionaire and billionaire under the sun, and all Joseph wants to do is stay locked in this bathroom until March.
His head is throbbing. It pulses unevenly, and it crushes him with loneliness. He despises his own heartbeat; even after they got rid of that damn ring around his aorta, it never went back to normal. His whole body never went back to feeling like his own.
Caesar had a good heartbeat.
He needs to wrap his arms around him, press ear to his chest, and listen until their heartbeats fall in line. Caesar's pulse had rhythm and strength and warmth. When Joseph breathed in Caesar's scent, he felt safe. When he felt Caesar's hands rub circles into his back, he felt at home. Now, he feels like he’s falling, plummeting to the ocean from thirty kilometers, but he isn’t going to die, because fate is too cruel to let him see Caesar again. He wants to pull his hair out, he wants to scream, he wants to curl up in a ball and disappear forever.
A knock on the door jolts him back into reality. "Joseph?"
It's Suzi's voice. Joseph hates himself for it, but he doesn't want to let her in. Stomach churning, tears in his eyes, he tries to swallow a choked sob. "No, it's—someone else. Someone else is in here."
" Caro mio... Everybody is wondering where you are."
Joseph groans, whacking his head against the bathroom door. The pounding in brain gets louder, more violent, and he groans again. "It's none of their fucking business where I am!"
"Joseph-"
"They're in my fucking house! I don’t want them here--Just make them leave!"
"Don’t you dare speak to a woman like that, coglione!"
Joseph’s heart stops.
He doesn't say anything; he waits to hear that voice again, the silvery tone, the pleasant lilting cadence of a warm Italian accent. When no one else says anything either, Joseph punches the doorframe. "Who the fuck is that?”
“Are you going to apologize?” the voice says patiently.
Indignant, Joseph snaps, “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing in my bedroom?!” The whole reason Joseph chose this hideout is because his ensuite is only accessible through the master bedroom, so no guests would be able to find him. He waits for an answer, but is met only with silence.
Well, not silence. There's a hushed conversation on the other side of the door, but no matter how hard Joseph presses his ear against it, he can't understand what they're saying. Is he having a stroke? Is he going insane? Is he finally collapsing in on himself like a dying star, his faculties shutting down one by one as he hallucinates voices from his past? Joseph’s head isn’t throbbing anymore; he's not actually convinced that his heart has yet to start beating again. His vision is blurred, and he thinks he might be dead. He doesn't know how, but he died, he finally died, and he went to heaven, and-
He hears the word 'coglione' again, and he realizes they're just speaking Italian.
Fuck. Eventually, he really needs to learn to speak that language, or at least understand it.
Once he knows what he's listening to, it starts to calm him down. The smooth, dulcet sound of the conversation feels distinctly nostalgic. He checks his pulse. It’s definitely there, which means he’s definitely not dead, which means there’s no way that the voice belongs to the person Joseph wants the voice to belong to.
It really, really sounds like him though...Unless Joseph already forgot what he sounded like.
The thought rips a hole in Joseph’s chest, and he gasps, and the voices stop talking, so he punches the doorframe again. “Where’d you go?”
“We’re still here,” Suzi says softly. Her voice is an aural safe space, a warm blanket that wraps Joseph in a familiar sense of closeness and amenity. But it’s not enough. It’s not the same. It’s a blanket out of the dryer in the winter, and the warmth fades too quickly.
“Unlock the door, Jojo.”
This voice radiates its own heat. It’s the sun in the winter, a cloudless sky, a beam of light that kisses Joseph’s skin with promises of springtime.
Joseph can’t open the door. He isn’t strong enough to shatter the illusion he’s created for himself. He doesn’t know who this guy is or why he’s here, but he needs to keep pretending. Just for a little longer, he needs to believe that Caesar is here with him.
“Unlock it yourself!”
"It's a bathroom, Jojo. It only locks from the inside."
"You would know!"
“What does that even mean?” There’s a smile in the voice, now, and Joseph feels himself smile, too.
“It means blow it out your ass! I’m not coming out of the bathroom.”
“Fine. Let’s go, Suzi; the other guests will start to wonder where you are.”
All at once, panic grips Joseph’s heart and his throat, arresting his vitals and plunging him into icy Mediterranean waters. He chokes on something stuck in his windpipe--a sob, a scream, a wedding ring--he doesn’t care what it is, he just knows there’s only one person who can fix it. “Wait,” he chokes. He shuts his eyes so tight that he starts to see colors (yellow, purple, baby blue, and pink, like a Venetian sunrise, but then grey and black and red, red, red ), and he presses his hands against the door desperately. “Stay here.”
The muffled Italian between Suzi and the stranger starts up again, and Joseph focuses on his breathing while he listens.
“Suzi is going to return to the party,” the voice eventually says. “But I’ll stay here. Is that okay?”
“Yes,” Joseph answers, before he can even feel guilty about sending his wife away to talk to a stranger. He doesn’t care; he can’t care right now. He just needs this to keep going. He’s grabbing this moment and digging in his fingernails, clutching it and refusing to let it go. Nothing else matters. If Joseph makes it through this moment, he’ll deal with everything else later. But he won’t make it through without whoever’s on the other side of the door.
Before leaving, Suzi gently says, “Ti amo, caro mio.”
“I love you,” Joseph answers. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to. He tastes blood, so he spits into his hand, but it’s clear.
There’s a beat of silence, then the stranger asks, “Did you just spit?”
Joseph doesn’t know why, but he blushes. “Why do you care?”
“Just making conversation.”
“Well, make a different one.”
He sighs, and Joseph hears him sitting down on the other side of the door. “You didn’t spit on the floor, did you?”
“No.”
“Then wash your hands.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can see your shoes through this crack.” He sticks his fingers under the door and wiggles them to illustrate. “You didn’t walk to the sink or the toilet, which means you spat into your hand, which means you need to go wash your hands.”
“What the fuck, dude?”
“Just wash them. I know you’re about to wipe them on your pants, and I literally don’t have words for how disgusting that is.”
Joseph opens his mouth to say something, but he’s drawing a blank. That fact alone makes him feel uneasy, but he chalks it up to the panic attack (which is going, but not yet gone). He steps over to the sink and runs the water for a few seconds, then turns it off.
“Are you seriously standing there with spit in your hand just to see if I can tell whether you actually washed it?”
Okay, this guy is starting to freak Joseph out. “How did you know that?” he demands.
The stranger chuckles, and Joseph’s stomach flutters. “Are you upset because I copied your party trick?”
“No,” Joseph snaps. “I’m pissed because you stole my gimmick.”
“Sei un deficiente, Jojo,” he muses. He sounds more fond than angry.
“No one’s called me Jojo in years. Where did you hear that nickname from?”
There’s a long pause. Joseph stands perfectly still, holding his breath, afraid that he might miss what the voice says next. with a mournful sadness that digs into the hole in Joseph’s chest, making it writhe and ache. “You really don’t know who I am?”
“I know who you’re not.”
There’s another pause. Joseph waits expectantly. “Open the door,” the voice says simply. “After you wash your hands,” it adds.
He goes to clench his jaw, but realizes it’s been clenched this whole time, so he relaxes it and pumps some hand soap into his palm. “I won’t open the door.”
“You’ll have to open it eventually.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“We’ll have to find out sometime.”
“Not for a long, long, long time, we don’t.”
The voice hums. “I can wait.”
When Joseph finishes washing his hands, he sits down by the door and rests his forehead against it, feebly asking the stranger to keep talking while they wait.
They talk for what feels like hours. Joseph, for the first time in pretty much his whole life, has very little that he wants to say; he keeps his mouth shut and just listens to the familiar voice prattle on about music, about nature, about food, about everything and nothing at the same time. At some point, he slips one hand part way under the door, and the stranger starts to gently stroke Joseph’s fingers with his own. His fingertips are calloused but warm, and Joseph closes his eyes and focuses on the sensation.
He doesn’t realize he fell asleep until he wakes up.