BROKENHEARTED
Title: Brokenhearted
Written By: besame_bj
Timeline: Early Season Two
Rating:
Warnings: Spoilers for Season One & Two
“My grief lies all within, and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” Richard II, William Shakespeare
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” Kahlil Gibran
That night, in a moment of reckless abandon, he’d dared to love. He didn’t plan it and it wasn’t on his agenda. It just happened.
After they left the prom, they’d stood together next to his Jeep, laughing, happy, goofing like a couple of kids. That’s when he found himself suddenly unable to pull his gaze from the boy’s face. It had been that smile, that luminous Sunshine smile, beamed into the dank gloominess of the underground parking structure, that had forced a duplicate onto his face and into his heart. At that precise moment, he’d opened up, barely a crack, and for the fraction of a second it took to do so, considered the possibility of love, its fullness and beauty so wonderfully reflected in Justin’s beaming countenance he could do no less. It had been such a tiny thing, that thought, that smile, that fissure in his heart. So innocent. So sweet. Holding such promise.
Then, as he said his good-byes, as he climbed into his car, in an instant too brief to acknowledge, horror arrived in all its sickening, stupefying revulsion. The hellish floodgates opened and an all-too-familiar torment spewed back into his world bringing with it the torturous certainty that this was all he deserved, this was all he would ever have. He dared nothing then, barely breathing, barely able to make sense of the brutal reality that awaited him on that cold cement.
Retreat came naturally. He withdrew deep inside where no hurt could penetrate, where no one could get to him, touch him, make him feel anything ever again. Called Mikey. And sat in the hospital corridor, unmindful of the tears, the blood, the angry looks from Justin’s mother, the pitying ones from everyone else. Numb.
After three days of bitter coffee, no sleep, few words, and painful memories, he returned to his life. There was the semblance of that life, a husk that contained the things he used to do to occupy his time. Wake up, get dressed, drink coffee, go to work, sound brilliant, hit Babylon, fuck someone, go to the hospital, try to sleep. He did it by rote, hardly aware of his own goings on, not really caring about any of it … except for the hospital. But that numbness soon gave way to the new horror that rushed him, pushing and shoving itself into his face.
No matter how hard he tried to keep it at bay, it’d come upon him unexpectedly, anywhere, at anytime, that horror. The nameless fear, so intense it squeezed the air right out of his lungs, rearing up to devour him like some monster from the depths of his childhood. The images: blood pouring from the head wound; Justin’s crumpled form on the concrete; the white silk that mocked him as it turned a gruesome red. The sounds … dreadful sounds. The sickening thud of wood against bone, the bat hitting the ground, his own keening wail. The smell of blood, of exhaust fumes, of intense hatred mingled with gut-wrenching grief. All of it would rush him, mixed into a kaleidoscope of panicked sensations that overwhelmed, tormented, and terrorized him in a way nothing else ever had.
He didn’t tell anyone. Of course he didn’t. He sucked it up and hoped the neighbors thought he was fucking someone especially hot when he woke up at 3:00 am screaming ‘til his throat hurt. He drank and that helped, so he drank more. He smoked weed, did lines of coke, bought poppers in larger quantities. Then he upped the number of tricks he did until the already-nameless sex became mindless and unsatisfactory, a physical release that meant nothing. But none of it worked. Not completely. Not all the time.
Once, he nearly broke down during a presentation, pretending at the last possible moment to choke on a piece of bagel just to get out of the room. He pushed a guy off him at Babylon one night when he felt himself pitched down that slippery path, making it into the alley just in time to press himself, breathless and frightened, into a corner, hoping like hell no one saw. Driving back from a client dinner another evening, he barely had time to pull over and get out of the car before he puked up the filet mignon and stuffed mushrooms he’d consumed, shaking like a motherfuckin’ retard.
PTSD. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Janice, the nurse at the hospital, diagnosed it for him one night. She’d followed him into the men’s room where, sweating and shaking, he tried to make her leave. Talk to someone, she advised, but that would never happen. No. It had been dealt with like everything else: he had ignore it. It would go away if he could keep himself from giving into the weakness. And that’s what it was. He had no illusions. Weakness. He’d opened himself up to an emotion he was never meant to feel and this had been the result.
One night at Woody’s, though, it all came crashing down-the retreat, the illusions, the denials. When he returned to where he’d left Mikey and saw Justin standing there, the shock hit him full-force. His stomach dropped, his throat went dry, his knees shook. They stared at one another and that huge part of him that rejoiced at seeing the boy standing there, alive and well, quailed and did not dare celebrate. Later, back at the loft, they talked and he tried, God, how he tried to not care, to be his old self, that person who got in and out with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of bullshit. But it didn’t work and he did care and the whole tale spilled out of him without his consent in an agonized retelling while the eighteen-year-old comforted him and tried to absolve him of guilt.
Later that night, after he dropped Justin off, he went home, took the Beam, and drank it on the couch straight from the bottle, chain-smoking ‘til his throat hurt. Unable to admit that he feared sleep, but unnerved by the nightmares the day’s events might provoke, he sat there for hours. In a drunken stupor, fingering the stiffened fabric of the scarf around his neck, he tried desperately not to think, not to contemplate the boy’s blazing beauty, not to remember his promise that he would see him again. But unbidden, the images from the past assaulted him: Justin, rumpled and sweaty after sex; Justin, plastered to his side, staring up at him adoringly; Justin, decked out in a tux, breathtakingly handsome. The bitter taste of bile in his mouth reminded him, in a multi-media kind of way, how fucked up everything was, on all levels. If he’d had a coherent thought, he would’ve known the only way to end such anguish was to die.
Within the next few days, he kept the promise he’d made, and visited Justin, but even that proved to be a pointless gesture in a world filled with such absurdities. Jennifer Taylor told him to get the fuck away from her son. For good. He listened like someone hearing his sentence meted out by a particularly stern judge, not arguing, not saying anything, his stony expression not betraying the wild beating of his heart. He made it back to his Jeep and took off, clutching the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Half-way home, he pulled the car off the road and slid out of the driver’s seat onto the grass, but, no, he wasn’t sick this time. Instead, he crouched next to the Jeep, hand covering his eyes, and trembled violently, barely able to breathe.
A few days later, Justin, in all his innocence and trust, came to the loft to be brutally turned away. Fortunately, by then, he had gone numb again and nothing could penetrate the stony exterior he’d erected. He shut the door in the boy’s face and lay against it while Justin’s violent banging on the other side vibrated against his back, his vision clouding until he could barely see anything. But, no, he was dead, it meant nothing, he could survive this-he could survive anything.
Within a week, events took another fierce turn and he stood at his kitchen counter, pretending to make a sandwich he didn’t want, his fury barely contained as Jennifer asked him to take her son. What the fuck? He slapped peanut butter on bread and thought about smacking her when she gave him a speech about helplessly watching someone. His jaw muscles hurt and he nearly bent the knife in two, but he kept it together and waited for the opportunity to tell her to go to hell. He wouldn’t do it. Fuck, no. Why should he? Expose himself again? For what possible reason? Yet even as the words stomped around inside his head, demanding to be heard, a tiny beacon of hope tucked away inside his heart eventually prevailed. He dared once more, and agreed to her request.
Everything changed when Justin came to live with him. It had to change. The boy needed him and that meant he had to pull himself together and stop with the fuckin’ freak-outs. No other option existed. Justin came first so the freak-outs would obey him. End of discussion. Yet, despite all the bravado and steely-eyed determination, that’s not what happened. No amount of stern lectures in the mirror while he shaved could alter what he felt because he knew, when he stopped to look it dead in the eye, that he didn’t control it-it controlled him. Like a videotape set on a permanent loop, his brain had recorded something horrific and fixed it into the gray matter, something it refused to relinquish no matter how hard he tried to persuade it to do so.
No, what slowed down the PTSD wasn’t his determination. It was Justin. Being there with him, day-by-day. Seeing the boy’s aliveness. Watching him brush his teeth or put on his briefs. Noting the heavy swing of his balls, the way he nibbled on his thumbnail, the tiny pinch between his eyes when he got upset. Feeding him pizza and Thai food, watching the pepperoni or noodles disappear between those perfect pink lips. Holding him after a nightmare while his heartbeat returned to normal, wiping the tears from his face. Kissing him. Touching him. Looking across the room anytime, day or night, and finding him there.
It wasn’t easy, though. Justin was wounded, a kid whose spectacular grip on life had been loosened by a brutal act. They clashed. Once, not too far into the living arrangement, Justin threw a glass of water against the brick wall in the living room, screaming in frustration when his hand cramped and he couldn’t hold a pencil. He stood watching Justin in the aftermath, hands clenched at his sides, surprised that he wasn’t angry with the boy. Instead, he had an intense desire to do the same thing. The muscles in his arms tightened as he imagined heaving the beer bottle in his hand, knowing the shattering, splintering sound it would make when it hit, anticipating even the smell of hops that would fill the air. It all played out for a moment before him, but in the end, he went to Justin’s side, set down his beer, and, without a word, began to massage the boy’s hand.
After that, they battled together, the unspoken agreement between them that they’d care for one another and somehow win out over this thing Chris Hobbs had done. There were more wild mood swings, and not just from Justin either, mood swings that couldn’t be easily tamed by booze or weed or whatever, that required patience and tears and soothing words. There were reenactments that tore at his heart and brought on fresh nightmares that he somehow managed to keep from Justin … at least that’s what he told himself. He even made the unprecedented move of talking to a therapist, a friend of his who agreed to meet him at Woody’s one night.
And finally, on one warm September afternoon, Justin remembered the bashing.
Afterwards, he held the boy in a tight embrace, shielding him from the eyes of the birthday guests in Mel and Lindsay’s yard, listening as the happy party sounds blended with the boy’s quiet, terrified moans. They needed to leave and he knew that, but at first his feet wouldn’t move, his own demons rising up to meet Justin’s in that instant of discovery so intense he felt as if they’d both been skewered by the same deadly arrow. In the end, they made it out of there and went the short distance back to the loft where Justin shivered against him and cried until he fell asleep.
Trying to do something productive after that, he ended up walking around the loft, straightening things that didn’t need straightening, staring out the window with no thoughts in his head, pacing between his desk and the entertainment center until he had nearly driven himself crazy. He tried to convince himself that everything would be all right, but doubted that until the moment Justin awoke, the moment they talked, the moment the bloodied white silk scarf around his neck was finally discovered.
They stared at one another when that happened and something was communicated in that look, something he could not quite explain. But before he could think about it or decide what had happened or what it meant, Justin had moved closer and was speaking to him in a nearly-invisible voice. “I want you inside me,” he said, the boy who’d been so frightened of people, of their touching him, that he recoiled whenever anyone came near.
He nearly lost his power of speech in that moment, a moment that seemed suspended in some kind of transparent haze that just went on and on, a moment he knew was of vast importance for both of them. The air itself seemed quieted, waiting, as he opened his mouth, not sure what to say, what to do, how to answer such a gentle request. “Are you sure?” he finally managed to croak, the stud of Liberty Avenue seeking permission from someone who long ago had ceased to be a trick, who’d become so precious, so special, so wonderful he feared the damage he would do to him should they connect in such an intimate manner.
Then, though it took every ounce of courage he had, he dared once more and allowed the light from the boy’s love to breach that fissure in his heart once again. Taking Justin into his arms, he made love to him with a shaking tenderness he had no idea he possessed, the only sounds in the loft their quiet moans and murmured words, the white silk discarded at the foot of the bed.
They slept after that, their bodies entwined, and, although it would not always be so, that night their dreams were not interrupted by nightmares, that night they slept in tranquility and comfort, ensconced in one another’s arms.
That night, Brian was at peace.
Written By: besame_bj
Timeline: Early Season Two
Rating:
Warnings: Spoilers for Season One & Two
“My grief lies all within, and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” Richard II, William Shakespeare
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” Kahlil Gibran
That night, in a moment of reckless abandon, he’d dared to love. He didn’t plan it and it wasn’t on his agenda. It just happened.
After they left the prom, they’d stood together next to his Jeep, laughing, happy, goofing like a couple of kids. That’s when he found himself suddenly unable to pull his gaze from the boy’s face. It had been that smile, that luminous Sunshine smile, beamed into the dank gloominess of the underground parking structure, that had forced a duplicate onto his face and into his heart. At that precise moment, he’d opened up, barely a crack, and for the fraction of a second it took to do so, considered the possibility of love, its fullness and beauty so wonderfully reflected in Justin’s beaming countenance he could do no less. It had been such a tiny thing, that thought, that smile, that fissure in his heart. So innocent. So sweet. Holding such promise.
Then, as he said his good-byes, as he climbed into his car, in an instant too brief to acknowledge, horror arrived in all its sickening, stupefying revulsion. The hellish floodgates opened and an all-too-familiar torment spewed back into his world bringing with it the torturous certainty that this was all he deserved, this was all he would ever have. He dared nothing then, barely breathing, barely able to make sense of the brutal reality that awaited him on that cold cement.
Retreat came naturally. He withdrew deep inside where no hurt could penetrate, where no one could get to him, touch him, make him feel anything ever again. Called Mikey. And sat in the hospital corridor, unmindful of the tears, the blood, the angry looks from Justin’s mother, the pitying ones from everyone else. Numb.
After three days of bitter coffee, no sleep, few words, and painful memories, he returned to his life. There was the semblance of that life, a husk that contained the things he used to do to occupy his time. Wake up, get dressed, drink coffee, go to work, sound brilliant, hit Babylon, fuck someone, go to the hospital, try to sleep. He did it by rote, hardly aware of his own goings on, not really caring about any of it … except for the hospital. But that numbness soon gave way to the new horror that rushed him, pushing and shoving itself into his face.
No matter how hard he tried to keep it at bay, it’d come upon him unexpectedly, anywhere, at anytime, that horror. The nameless fear, so intense it squeezed the air right out of his lungs, rearing up to devour him like some monster from the depths of his childhood. The images: blood pouring from the head wound; Justin’s crumpled form on the concrete; the white silk that mocked him as it turned a gruesome red. The sounds … dreadful sounds. The sickening thud of wood against bone, the bat hitting the ground, his own keening wail. The smell of blood, of exhaust fumes, of intense hatred mingled with gut-wrenching grief. All of it would rush him, mixed into a kaleidoscope of panicked sensations that overwhelmed, tormented, and terrorized him in a way nothing else ever had.
He didn’t tell anyone. Of course he didn’t. He sucked it up and hoped the neighbors thought he was fucking someone especially hot when he woke up at 3:00 am screaming ‘til his throat hurt. He drank and that helped, so he drank more. He smoked weed, did lines of coke, bought poppers in larger quantities. Then he upped the number of tricks he did until the already-nameless sex became mindless and unsatisfactory, a physical release that meant nothing. But none of it worked. Not completely. Not all the time.
Once, he nearly broke down during a presentation, pretending at the last possible moment to choke on a piece of bagel just to get out of the room. He pushed a guy off him at Babylon one night when he felt himself pitched down that slippery path, making it into the alley just in time to press himself, breathless and frightened, into a corner, hoping like hell no one saw. Driving back from a client dinner another evening, he barely had time to pull over and get out of the car before he puked up the filet mignon and stuffed mushrooms he’d consumed, shaking like a motherfuckin’ retard.
PTSD. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Janice, the nurse at the hospital, diagnosed it for him one night. She’d followed him into the men’s room where, sweating and shaking, he tried to make her leave. Talk to someone, she advised, but that would never happen. No. It had been dealt with like everything else: he had ignore it. It would go away if he could keep himself from giving into the weakness. And that’s what it was. He had no illusions. Weakness. He’d opened himself up to an emotion he was never meant to feel and this had been the result.
One night at Woody’s, though, it all came crashing down-the retreat, the illusions, the denials. When he returned to where he’d left Mikey and saw Justin standing there, the shock hit him full-force. His stomach dropped, his throat went dry, his knees shook. They stared at one another and that huge part of him that rejoiced at seeing the boy standing there, alive and well, quailed and did not dare celebrate. Later, back at the loft, they talked and he tried, God, how he tried to not care, to be his old self, that person who got in and out with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of bullshit. But it didn’t work and he did care and the whole tale spilled out of him without his consent in an agonized retelling while the eighteen-year-old comforted him and tried to absolve him of guilt.
Later that night, after he dropped Justin off, he went home, took the Beam, and drank it on the couch straight from the bottle, chain-smoking ‘til his throat hurt. Unable to admit that he feared sleep, but unnerved by the nightmares the day’s events might provoke, he sat there for hours. In a drunken stupor, fingering the stiffened fabric of the scarf around his neck, he tried desperately not to think, not to contemplate the boy’s blazing beauty, not to remember his promise that he would see him again. But unbidden, the images from the past assaulted him: Justin, rumpled and sweaty after sex; Justin, plastered to his side, staring up at him adoringly; Justin, decked out in a tux, breathtakingly handsome. The bitter taste of bile in his mouth reminded him, in a multi-media kind of way, how fucked up everything was, on all levels. If he’d had a coherent thought, he would’ve known the only way to end such anguish was to die.
Within the next few days, he kept the promise he’d made, and visited Justin, but even that proved to be a pointless gesture in a world filled with such absurdities. Jennifer Taylor told him to get the fuck away from her son. For good. He listened like someone hearing his sentence meted out by a particularly stern judge, not arguing, not saying anything, his stony expression not betraying the wild beating of his heart. He made it back to his Jeep and took off, clutching the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Half-way home, he pulled the car off the road and slid out of the driver’s seat onto the grass, but, no, he wasn’t sick this time. Instead, he crouched next to the Jeep, hand covering his eyes, and trembled violently, barely able to breathe.
A few days later, Justin, in all his innocence and trust, came to the loft to be brutally turned away. Fortunately, by then, he had gone numb again and nothing could penetrate the stony exterior he’d erected. He shut the door in the boy’s face and lay against it while Justin’s violent banging on the other side vibrated against his back, his vision clouding until he could barely see anything. But, no, he was dead, it meant nothing, he could survive this-he could survive anything.
Within a week, events took another fierce turn and he stood at his kitchen counter, pretending to make a sandwich he didn’t want, his fury barely contained as Jennifer asked him to take her son. What the fuck? He slapped peanut butter on bread and thought about smacking her when she gave him a speech about helplessly watching someone. His jaw muscles hurt and he nearly bent the knife in two, but he kept it together and waited for the opportunity to tell her to go to hell. He wouldn’t do it. Fuck, no. Why should he? Expose himself again? For what possible reason? Yet even as the words stomped around inside his head, demanding to be heard, a tiny beacon of hope tucked away inside his heart eventually prevailed. He dared once more, and agreed to her request.
Everything changed when Justin came to live with him. It had to change. The boy needed him and that meant he had to pull himself together and stop with the fuckin’ freak-outs. No other option existed. Justin came first so the freak-outs would obey him. End of discussion. Yet, despite all the bravado and steely-eyed determination, that’s not what happened. No amount of stern lectures in the mirror while he shaved could alter what he felt because he knew, when he stopped to look it dead in the eye, that he didn’t control it-it controlled him. Like a videotape set on a permanent loop, his brain had recorded something horrific and fixed it into the gray matter, something it refused to relinquish no matter how hard he tried to persuade it to do so.
No, what slowed down the PTSD wasn’t his determination. It was Justin. Being there with him, day-by-day. Seeing the boy’s aliveness. Watching him brush his teeth or put on his briefs. Noting the heavy swing of his balls, the way he nibbled on his thumbnail, the tiny pinch between his eyes when he got upset. Feeding him pizza and Thai food, watching the pepperoni or noodles disappear between those perfect pink lips. Holding him after a nightmare while his heartbeat returned to normal, wiping the tears from his face. Kissing him. Touching him. Looking across the room anytime, day or night, and finding him there.
It wasn’t easy, though. Justin was wounded, a kid whose spectacular grip on life had been loosened by a brutal act. They clashed. Once, not too far into the living arrangement, Justin threw a glass of water against the brick wall in the living room, screaming in frustration when his hand cramped and he couldn’t hold a pencil. He stood watching Justin in the aftermath, hands clenched at his sides, surprised that he wasn’t angry with the boy. Instead, he had an intense desire to do the same thing. The muscles in his arms tightened as he imagined heaving the beer bottle in his hand, knowing the shattering, splintering sound it would make when it hit, anticipating even the smell of hops that would fill the air. It all played out for a moment before him, but in the end, he went to Justin’s side, set down his beer, and, without a word, began to massage the boy’s hand.
After that, they battled together, the unspoken agreement between them that they’d care for one another and somehow win out over this thing Chris Hobbs had done. There were more wild mood swings, and not just from Justin either, mood swings that couldn’t be easily tamed by booze or weed or whatever, that required patience and tears and soothing words. There were reenactments that tore at his heart and brought on fresh nightmares that he somehow managed to keep from Justin … at least that’s what he told himself. He even made the unprecedented move of talking to a therapist, a friend of his who agreed to meet him at Woody’s one night.
And finally, on one warm September afternoon, Justin remembered the bashing.
Afterwards, he held the boy in a tight embrace, shielding him from the eyes of the birthday guests in Mel and Lindsay’s yard, listening as the happy party sounds blended with the boy’s quiet, terrified moans. They needed to leave and he knew that, but at first his feet wouldn’t move, his own demons rising up to meet Justin’s in that instant of discovery so intense he felt as if they’d both been skewered by the same deadly arrow. In the end, they made it out of there and went the short distance back to the loft where Justin shivered against him and cried until he fell asleep.
Trying to do something productive after that, he ended up walking around the loft, straightening things that didn’t need straightening, staring out the window with no thoughts in his head, pacing between his desk and the entertainment center until he had nearly driven himself crazy. He tried to convince himself that everything would be all right, but doubted that until the moment Justin awoke, the moment they talked, the moment the bloodied white silk scarf around his neck was finally discovered.
They stared at one another when that happened and something was communicated in that look, something he could not quite explain. But before he could think about it or decide what had happened or what it meant, Justin had moved closer and was speaking to him in a nearly-invisible voice. “I want you inside me,” he said, the boy who’d been so frightened of people, of their touching him, that he recoiled whenever anyone came near.
He nearly lost his power of speech in that moment, a moment that seemed suspended in some kind of transparent haze that just went on and on, a moment he knew was of vast importance for both of them. The air itself seemed quieted, waiting, as he opened his mouth, not sure what to say, what to do, how to answer such a gentle request. “Are you sure?” he finally managed to croak, the stud of Liberty Avenue seeking permission from someone who long ago had ceased to be a trick, who’d become so precious, so special, so wonderful he feared the damage he would do to him should they connect in such an intimate manner.
Then, though it took every ounce of courage he had, he dared once more and allowed the light from the boy’s love to breach that fissure in his heart once again. Taking Justin into his arms, he made love to him with a shaking tenderness he had no idea he possessed, the only sounds in the loft their quiet moans and murmured words, the white silk discarded at the foot of the bed.
They slept after that, their bodies entwined, and, although it would not always be so, that night their dreams were not interrupted by nightmares, that night they slept in tranquility and comfort, ensconced in one another’s arms.
That night, Brian was at peace.