Chapter Text
“What the fuck is going on?”
Adam Faulkner-Stanheight stood in the middle of his favorite downtown record store, his hands shoved deep in his flimsy windbreaker pockets to avoid the shaking, right by the D section of the vinyls (Deftones, Depeche Mode, Duster…) as his breaths hitched sporadically.
“I’m sorry, I just saw you, and I thought…”
Dr. Lawrence Gordon was standing in front of Adam, one hand hanging limply by his side and the other white-knuckling his cane, and he looked so beat-down and worn out that Adam almost felt sorry for him. There was a small bit of resentment, harsh bitter resentment, deep in the pit of his stomach. But he also felt pity, chest-strangling pity, and he swallowed roughly.
“You thought what, man? That we’d be on familiar terms? I haven’t seen you since–”
Lawrence’s eyes widened slightly, and Adam cleared his throat. He didn’t finish his sentence. They both knew what he meant.
The bathroom trap was always in the back of Adam’s mind. The stench of mold, the coppery sickly scent of rotting blood, Lawrence’s awful screams, and then the blinding pain in his shoulder. It killed him to remember.
“I know, but I just needed a familiar face,” Lawrence explained, desperately trying to force the words out of his throat, and Adam almost laughed at the absurdity.
“Me? Familiar? You don’t even know anything about me!”
Lawrence flinched slightly, barely noticeably, and Adam immediately felt bad. But it was true, what he’d said. He knew more about Lawrence than the doctor knew about him. He still remembered his wife and daughter’s names, Alison and Diana, and he sometimes sat and thought about what could’ve happened to them. That just depressed him, so he usually just lit a cigarette and put on some even more depressing music and laid on his couch and thought about everything but Lawrence and his family.
“...Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just thought I’d – God, what do I even say?” he muttered, fidgeting with the buttons on his jacket, then with the soft-looking plaid scarf wrapped around his neck. “My wife left me, Adam.”
Adam’s eyes widened. Why did Lawrence come to him of all people? Why did Lawrence say that to him? Lawrence backed up a bit to the F section (Fleetwood Mac, Fall Out Boy, Foo Fighters), subconsciously, and his eyes were flicking to the ground back up to Adam, almost as if he couldn’t decide where to look. Maybe he felt guilty looking at Adam. Maybe he felt guilty, because he didn’t come back. Or maybe he felt guilty because he’d dumped all of that information on Adam at once, and he’d barely even said hello.
“Jesus, Larry, I-” Adam started, not even sure what to say or where to start, but he quickly realized that probably wasn’t the best name to use as he saw Lawrence cringe. His wife had probably called him that. “Lawrence. Lawrence, I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” said Lawrence, in the defeated tone of voice that a man uses when it is very obviously not alright. He looked tired. He looked sad.
Adam had no idea what to do now. He’d talked to Lawrence a bit, heard the big news, said he was sorry, and he wasn’t very good with what came after. Was he supposed to console him some more? Walk forward in this random fucking record shop and hug him like they were old friends? Or was he supposed to yell at him for coming up to him in such a way? Tell him to fuck off and never come back?
God, just Adam’s stupid shitty luck that on this disgustingly brisk December day, the very guy he half-hoped he’d never meet again just happened to see him and came up to him and told him his fucking wife and kid had left him.
Wait.
Where had Lawrence seen him?
Lawrence was standing awkwardly in front of him, looking at the records next to the two of them halfheartedly, just rustling them around as if he actually wanted to purchase one. He had his eyes on a particularly old-looking Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra vinyl, his fingers ghosting over the plastic covering. He looked even sadder now, somehow. If that was even possible.
Adam hated to ask the question, to disturb him in whatever the hell he was doing, but the question was now weighing heavy on him. It felt like a pit in his stomach.
“Lawrence, how long have you been following me?”
The doctor froze, his grip tightening on his cane once more, his gaze stuck to the floor. How ironic it was that Adam, once the follower, was now being followed. Lawrence was at a loss for words, and he tripped over his tongue for a second before finally speaking.
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking up at Adam slowly, as if it pained him to do so.
“You know what I mean,” Adam muttered, his voice and body shaking as one, the jitters finally catching up to him. His hands were balled up into fists in his pockets still. Lawrence’s muffled screams rang out in his head.
“Adam…” Lawrence breathed, almost as if it was a plea for forgiveness, and Adam laughed in disbelief.
“You’re kidding me,” he laughed, giving Lawrence a look that he knew Lawrence understood; a look of surprise, at the sheer irony of the situation, but also of disappointment. God, Adam hated disappointment. It felt awful. He’d had more than enough of that his entire life, from his grades all throughout school to his photography career that just wasn’t growing fast enough for the rising apartment rates, and then finally when Lawrence didn’t come back from him. It was Amanda that had saved his life. He owed his somewhat of a return to normalcy to her. And here the doctor himself was, standing sorrily in front of him, his head hung and his stupidly deep and emotional eyes fixed downward. What did he owe Lawrence?
Nothing.
“Adam, I…” he started, but cut himself off. They both knew he couldn’t say anything that would mend the tension, and Adam backed up a little bit.
“I don’t know what you want from me, but dude, I am sick and tired of reminders of that stupid fucking trap.”
“As if I’m not?” Lawrence snapped, the aggression in his tone not unfamiliar to Adam, but it still caught him off guard, as it had every time in the trap. Adam couldn’t imagine what Lawrence was going through right now, what with having his entire perfect suburban life ripped away from him. God dammit, Adam thought, what about his daughter that he had pictures of in his wallet? How would he cope with having to split his time with her? His wife? Adam shook his head, as if to shake off feeling sorry for Lawrence.
“You know what, man? I’d be ten times happier if you left me the fuck alone.”
He could practically feel Lawrence’s bloody hand gently resting on his cheek as the doctor swallowed with some effort and nodded curtly.
“I’ll leave.”
Adam, still shaking, watched as Lawrence turned and walked out the door, his hand not loosening its white-knuckled grip on his cane.
What did I do to deserve this today?
As he watched Lawrence walk away, still shaking, he saw a woman in the B aisle (Ben Folds Five, Blink-182, Bowie) gawk at him like she’d never seen someone with a cane before. Adam snorted under his breath, thinking God how could someone be so ignorant, and then it hit him. She’d probably recognized him from the news, story after story after the latest survivor of a Jigsaw trap, who’d had to saw his foot clean off with nothing but a rusty hacksaw.
Adam had flown mostly under the radar after escaping the trap, his media presence severely underwhelming. Part of him was grateful, that he wasn’t a sob story, that he wasn’t a warning for others to live their lives better. He’d lived, and thank God for that, and he and Amanda had made a silent pact to never speak of the trap to anyone else. But the other part of him, childish and bitter, was jealous of Lawrence, who’d done interview after interview, looking significantly more ruffled and tired in each one.
Adam had watched every single one when they aired.
He still remembered when he’d first seen one. Adam always had the news on in the background, just to keep him from going insane (the floor in his apartment creaked, the walls were paper-thin, and his neighbors loved to raw-dog every single night), and this night wasn’t any different from the rest. But when he’d heard Lawrence’s voice on the television, he’d dropped his freshly lit cigarette onto his foot. The sharp burning pain didn’t even register past the throbbing in his equally as freshly scarred-over shoulder, and he had stumbled into the living room to see Dr. Lawrence Gordon on the television , looking far more put-together than he had in the trap. Oh shit, he doesn’t look happy at all, Adam had thought to himself, he looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
God damn, now that he was thinking about it, he wasn’t jealous of Lawrence in the slightest. His relationship with his wife had seemed strained from what Adam had heard from him while in the trap, which was next to nothing. Lawrence didn’t have many pictures of Alison in his wallet, if any at all, and he’d given Adam a strange sort of smile when he’d asked where she was in the pictures. And the nauseating blinding pain in his shoulder hadn’t been nearly as bad as Lawrence sawing his whole fucking foot off. Jesus Christ.
Adam felt shame, burning shame, for even considering being jealous of Lawrence. He knew it was painfully adolescent, the urge for attention, and he’d resigned himself to standing in the shadows that the sun cast for the rest of his life anyways. Nobody can stare at you, nobody can look for faults, when you’re the one with the camera. When you’re the one capturing them at their lowest moments.
He suddenly realized that he was standing in the middle of the aisle, shaking a bit too noticeably, his bitten fingernails scratching at the worn denim of his jeans.
Fuck, maybe I should go home.