Work Text:
Justin helped me back into bed without saying a word. He bustled around with the same air of impersonal, professional concern he’d had for days, arranging the blankets and setting a bottle of water beside the bed. It was starting to make me feel more nauseous than the radiation itself. I wanted to call him out on it, but the exhaustion was already pulling me down into unconsciousness, so I let it go.
I didn’t ask him to lay down with me, even though I wanted to.
When I woke, the loft was dark and silent except for the distant hum of traffic in the street below. Justin was stretched out on his side of the bed and when I lifted my head, I saw his eyes were still open.
“Feel any better?’ he asked, turning to me. He didn’t touch me or move closer.
“Like I’ve been run over by a car, not a truck,” I said. My voice rasped and I reached for the water, sipping it carefully.
Justin said nothing more, just closed his eyes. I laid there quietly, staring into the gloom. My lips folded in. I couldn’t stop myself asking the question, even though it felt fucking pathetic. “How long are you going to stay pissed at me?”
I heard Justin exhale, but I didn’t look at him. “I’m not pissed at you.” he said evenly.
“Right, Sunshine. And the irony is you hate it when I lie to you.”
That needled him out of his fucking zen bullshit. He went up on his elbow and glared down at me. I raised my eyebrows in challenge. “Fuck you, Brian. I’m not angry.”
I laughed, and it wasn’t a nice sound. “I think you doth protest too much.”
He threw once last irate look at me, then flung off the blanket and stomped out of the bedroom. He left me with his holier-than-thou parting shot, “I’m not fucking doing this Brian. Get some sleep.”
I laid there for a while, hearing him rattle around, slamming cupboards in the kitchen. After a few minutes, the loft was quiet again except the hum of the TV, too soft for me to tell what he was watching.
I thought about the way he touched me now, since he’d bulldozed his way back into the loft five days ago and I wondered why he was here. Why he was staying. He said he’d made a commitment, but the silence felt like something else altogether.
I swallowed, thinking about all the things that I couldn’t ask him for.
He was sat on the sofa, drinking Beam straight from the bottle and flicking through channels aimlessly when I padded over to him a few minutes later. My feet were bare and I shivered a little at the chill from the floor.
I nudged at his foot with my own, and he cut his gaze towards me.
“Hey,” I said.
Justin didn’t reply for a moment, then he looked up and bit his lip. “Hey.”
I stood there thinking what to say. “You’re too fucking quiet. It’s making me nervous.”
He held my gaze a moment, then looked away, breathing deeply as though he were mentally counting to ten. I clenched my jaw. Then he turned back to me and patted the sofa cushion beside him. “Sit,” he said.
I did and for the first time in a while, he shuffled closer to me. I wanted to rest my head on his shoulder, but I didn’t. He put his hand on my thigh though and looked at me seriously. “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “Really.”
I took the Beam from him and took a drink myself. It burned all the way down to my stomach and I gritted my teeth. “But…?” I rasped, handing him back the bottle.
He shook his head and shifted away from me again, his brow furrowing. “I just-.” He sighed. “I just hate that you went through all that on your own I guess.” He didn’t look at me.
I shrugged. “Well, it was my decision. We’ve already established it was a bad one.”
“Yeah,” Justin replied quietly. “It was.”
Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and I found myself half watching the old movie playing on the TV. I felt his hand creeping back over to mine and he twined our fingers together. “I wasn’t-.” He cut off what he was about to say.
I turned to him. “Wasn’t what, Justin?”
He held my gaze, but when he spoke his voice sounded hesitant. “I wasn’t someone you could tell?”
I didn’t know how to answer that and after a while he tugged his hand gently out of my grip and started to stand up to go back to bed.
I jerked at his wrist. “Don’t go,” I said and he looked at me for a beat too long, then sank back down on to the sofa. I shifted into a sprawl, and he let me rest my head in his lap. His fingers found their way to my hair, stroking it idly, pushing it back from my forehead.
We watched the movie in silence. I must have drifted off because the next thing I knew the credits were rolling across the screen.
“Hey,” Justin sort of smiled down at me and twisted his finger in my hair. It was closer to a smile then I’d seen in a while, so I smirked up at him.
“I’m not angry at you, you know.” Justin said, almost a whisper, as he watched my hair curl and then untwist around his finger. “Mostly at myself.” He laughed and it sounded brittle.
I shifted and frowned up at him. “And why the fuck would you be pissed at yourself?”
Justin’s mood seemed to flip again then, and he dropped his hand away from my hair and shoved at me lightly, indicating he wanted to get up. “It doesn’t matter, Brian. Don’t worry about it.”
I heaved myself up into a sitting position. “Thought you liked talking, Sunshine. Don’t disappoint me now.”
He turned and looked me square in the eyes. He took a deep breath and I felt myself tense. “Fine. I’m always like, railroading you into things like if I just believe them enough it’ll make them true. It’s getting fucking pathetic.”
I tilted my head, my expression somewhere between confused and incredulous. “And what the fuck does that mean?”
“What it means is you… really don’t have to tell me anything.” Justin laughed again, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “I’m not really your partner Brian, let’s not pretend. Whatever I am, it’s not that.”
I had no comeback to that and Justin just looked me, a sheen in his eyes, and a little hitch in his breathing. It reminded me of before, when we didn’t understand each other. When he was just so fucking tired of me and what I couldn’t give him. I swallowed hard and looked away. When I looked back, his unshed tears were gone, willed away, and his eyes just looked fucking weary.
“Brian, just forget it, okay,” he said. “Let’s not do this.”
I pressed my lips together. Justin gave me an apologetic look, like he was somehow out of line for choosing to bring this shit up at all. It grated and when he stood and tugged on my wrist to pull me along with him to the bedroom, I resisted.
“Wait,” I said. I pulled him close to me and placed my hands either side of his face, leaning my forehead against his. There were things I wanted to tell him, but as always, I didn’t know how. I ran my hands through his hair restlessly, hating myself a little. More than a little.
Justin leaned in and touched his lips to my throat gently, his arms coming up to wrap around my back. I felt a shudder run through me, as I searched for the right words. I could feel the tears on my cheeks, and I knew from the way Justin was holding me that he knew I was crying. We stood like that a long time and he didn’t pull away, even when he stopped expecting me to say anything at all.
When I finally spoke, I surprised us both. “When you said you loved me and you’d be here when I got back,” I said, my voice coming out raw and quiet and making Justin instinctively tighten his arms around me. “That was when I decided.”
And at first Justin didn’t get it, clearly couldn’t comprehend what I meant, despite all my angsty tirades about the indignity of being old and sick and fucking lingering. I could almost hear ‘decided what?’ on the tip of his tongue, but before he could say it, it hit him. I could tell by the way he inhaled so sharply, the way his fingernails dug into my shoulder, hard enough to hurt.
“Fuck,” Justin said eventually, and he must have been crying too because his voice sounded thick and strange. “Fuck. You’re such a fucking mess.”
I breathed out and Justin tilted his face up to mine. I pressed my lips against his forehead and said almost too quietly for him to hear, “I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes and dropped his forehead back to the curve of my neck. “I know you are.” I felt more than heard the words. He held me tighter for a moment and then pulled out of the embrace, hand on my wrist, pulling me in his wake. “Let’s just go back to bed,” he said, and this time we did.