britin1729 (britin1729) wrote in _love_qaf_fic, @ 2010-04-10 19:34:00 |
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The very next day, I sat down at my computer with a purpose in mind. My fingers hesitated over the keyboard, knowing what to type, but unwilling to do it. Finally, I remembered that there was no one here to realize what I was doing, and typed in my search keywords.
There were thousands of results, from horror movies to spiritual advisors to ghost stories. There were quotes from The Sixth Sense, old myths and legends, and about a thousand other utterly useless things. Of course, I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for, but there had to be something useful on the entire fucking web, right?
I was just debating with myself whether or not to add in the keyword 'schizophrenia' to my search, when suddenly, the figure entirely responsible for this search in the first place appeared on the edge of my desk.
“Christ!” I said, nearly falling off my chair in shock. I gripped the desk, my knuckles turning white while my heart rate slowly returned to normal. “Quit fucking doing that!”
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding very apologetic at all. “What are you doing?”
I glared at him, and once I was positively sure that I was not going to piss in my pants, got to my feet, striding off across the loft just so that I didn't have to look at him. A 'him' who technically shouldn't even be here. No, not even shouldn't— he fucking couldn't be here.
“Trying to find out why the hell you keep showing up every time I turn around,” I said bitingly. As if to prove to me that I didn't even have to turn around, he suddenly materialized right in fucking front of me. I glared at him. Why did I have to have such a fucking annoying hallucination?
“I told you. It's lonely,” he said, with a trace of that vulnerability he'd displayed the night before, when I'd evidently been fucked up enough to entertain my mind's little fantasy. But I wasn't on drugs now, and I wasn't drunk either, to the best of my knowledge. Evidently, I'd been more fucked up than I'd realized last night. “You're the only one who can see me.”
“That's because apparently I've gone insane.” Lucky me.
“You're not insane,” he said softly. “This happens, Brian.”
I laughed, a dark sound, devoid of any humor. I grabbed for the nearest bottle of beam, only to discover that there was hardly enough left for a mouthful. Right. I'd finished most of it off last night in my latest attempt to ward off the images on the inside of my eyelids. Though, admittedly, what had followed probably couldn't be called 'sleep.' I'd passed out way before I'd gotten to that point.
“Where? Where the hell does this happen, Justin? In mental hospitals? Horror movies?”
“Actually, yeah,” he said. “In hospitals, I mean. Do you know how many 'mentally ill' are really just people who are stuck with spirits hanging around them...whether they know it or not? This is more common than you think.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, that's great, I'm showing symptoms of deranged mental illness now. Just what I always wanted.”
“I'm serious,” he said, his eyes wide with that fervor I knew so well on him. “You have no idea how many people live like this. And then there are the ones who are smart enough to realize what's going on, and don't broadcasting it to the world, so they don't end up in mental hospitals.”
“Well, that's comforting,” I said sarcastically. “Self-aware insanity. Really, thanks for that. So, when did you say you're leaving?”
His brow furrowed in a familiar expression of hurt frustration. “Why are you so eager to get rid of me?”
I gave him a look of pure disbelief. “Listen to me, Justin. Are you listening? You. Are. Dead. You cannot be here. You cannot be talking to me. You are dead, buried in the fucking ground under six feet of dirt. You never fucking made it out of that parking garage alive. Why the hell is this so hard for you to comprehend?”
It all but fucking killed me to say those words, to hit him with the harsh, bitter reality. But I'd been dealing with it for fucking weeks, and he just did not get to come waltzing in here whenever the fuck he felt like it and torturing me with the illusion of his presence. It was like someone was dangling something I wanted, more than I'd ever wanted anything in my life, right in front of my face, only there was a catch— if I tried to reach out and grab it, it would disappear. It was the cruelest trick my mind could have played on me, imagining Justin's presence when I needed to just forget him. Though how this was possible in the first place, I wasn't sure. I didn't think I'd ever be able to live a day without some reminder of him in my life.
I was certain, though, that having him pop up whenever the hell he felt like it, fucking with my TV and throwing shit off my dressers, was not going to help.
“You're not crazy,” he said, ignoring my question completely, “if that's what this is about. You're really not, I promise. I'll prove it to you, even.”
“Right. How?” I challenged.
He bit his lip in consideration as his eyes swept the loft for a potential resolution. Seeming to come to a decision, he smiled triumphantly. “I'll be right back.”
And then, right before my eyes, he disappeared. Again. I stood staring at the spot for a full twenty seconds, then suddenly, just as quickly as he'd vanished, he reappeared at exactly the same point.
“Call Michael,” he said. “He's on David's computer, looking for Captain Astro Issue #145 on eBay.”
I gave him a look of incredulity. “What?”
“Just call him,” Justin insisted. “Ask him what he's doing. See if I'm right.”
I blinked at him. “I fucking must be crazy.” Not because I was seeing the spirit of my dead not-boyfriend. Well, not only that. It was also because of the fact that I actually fucking picked up the phone and dialed Michael's number.
“Brian?” my best friend's voice filtered through the phone. “What's up?”
I felt a little guilty for the surprise in his voice at hearing from me. I hadn't exactly been the most sociable creature as of late.
“What are you doing?” I asked, deciding not to answer his question.
“Not much,” he said. If he was at all taken aback by the brusqueness in my voice, he didn't let on. “Just surfing the net. What about you? How are you?”
“Anything in particular?” I asked, ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that told me I was most definitely losing my fucking mind. “On the internet, I mean? Any hot porn?” I added, thinking it might sound a bit less...weird...and maybe a bit more 'me.'
“Sorry, no porn. Just this Captain Astro comic I've been looking for,” he said dismissively, and I felt my stomach clench. Okay, well...that could have been a coincidence, right? The odds that Michael was doing something Captain Ass-Wipe related were pretty high, weren't they? That didn't mean a damn thing. “It's issue 145. I'm looking for it on eBay.”
I nearly dropped the phone. Now that crossed the line of coincidence, right into the territory of What the Fucking Hell. What the fuck was happening to me? How was this even possible?
“Listen, Mikey...I'll call you back later,” I said, closing my eyes just so that I didn't have to look at Justin, at the expression I knew I'd see on his face at my realization that he'd been right.
“Don't you have a minute?” he asked. “We haven't talked in forever.”
“I'll call you,” I promised. “Tomorrow.” And this time, I vowed to myself that I'd be keeping my word.
“Okay,” he sighed, with a resigned tone that told me he didn't believe me. And why should he? I'd regularly ignored him for nearly a month— had, in fact, ignored everyone who wasn't named Jack Daniels or didn't have a somewhat fuckable ass for a while now. Being around them, my friends...it made me fucking feel too much. Like I could sense that they were feeling it, and it made me feel it, too. It made me have to think, have to remember. Alone, the silence screamed at me. With them, it was too hard to pretend that my life wasn't falling apart. There was no relief, no reprieve, no matter what I did.
I hung up the phone, letting out a long, deep breath. “I just called— long distance— to fucking Portland. To ask my best friend if he was looking for a comic on eBay. Because the dead blond boy standing in the middle of my loft told me to,” I said out loud, as if by hearing the words with my own ears they might sound just a little less crazy.
“Well, you believe me now, don't you?” he asked pointedly. “There's no way you would have known that on your own. You have to realize that I'm real now, right?”
Did I?
“I don't...this is just...fucked,” I burst out. “This...it's impossible.” That was it. It was just impossible, and impossible things just did not fucking happen.
Justin merely shrugged. “You used to think you falling in love was impossible, too,” he pointed out, sounding exactly like the dreamy little twink I'd known him to be in life. I glared at him.
“Why are you here?” I barked. “Why aren't you in...in heaven, or whatever the fuck?”
He shrugged, looking a little helpless. A little hopeless. “I don't know,” he admitted. “I guess some of us move on. But that didn't happen for me.”
He had that look in his eyes, again, too...lost and broken. Alone. Everything I tried not to acknowledge in the mirror lately. I took a deep breath and let it out. “What did happen?” I asked. Maybe figuring out whatever the hell had happened to him after he'd died might help me make sense of what was happening to me now. Or something.
A dark shadow seemed to pass over his face, and his eyes were suddenly in another place entirely. He sighed, materializing right next to me in the space of a heartbeat.
“I don't really know.” He sounded younger right then than I'd ever heard him sound, and for a second, he wasn't the determined young man I'd once known him to be, but the scared, fragile child we all carried around inside us, the one he'd been forced to bury at the age of seventeen. “One minute, we were kissing out by your jeep...you were telling me you'd see me later, and I started walking away.”
The moment flashed through my head like a video. I'd tried so fucking hard to just get rid of the memory, just cut it out of my mind. But it only ever grew, attached itself to the inside of my head until it took over everything and became my life. It was like some toxic disease for which I couldn't find the cure.
“The next minute,” he continued, his eyes—as blue as they'd ever been—carrying the weight of so much sadness, “I was standing there looking down at us on the ground.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Us?” Us, on the ground. Me, holding his lifeless body against my chest, crying and pleading with him to wake up and be okay. Begging him not to die.
“Yeah,” he nodded, still not looking at me, as if the memory was too horrible to share through eye contact. “It was really weird...scary. It wasn't so weird that I could see you, but then I realized I was looking at me, and I was all bloody and you were crying and telling me you loved me and begging me to open my eyes.”
God. Fuck me, he was trying to kill me here. I turned away just so that he couldn't see how wet my own eyes had become. I couldn't help it. I turned into some kind of pathetic emotional wreck at the mere memory of that night. I felt my face burn at the thought that he had witnessed all I'd said to him in my desperation, but for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to mind what he'd heard as much as I might have before now. I knew firsthand that there were far worse things than giving him those words; I'd been living in my worst nightmare for a month now, after all.
“Did you mean it?” he asked, and though I had no trouble at all in determining what he was talking about, I feigned ignorance.
“Mean what?”
“What you said,” he clarified. I couldn't feel the rush of air when he moved, couldn't hear his footsteps at all, and yet...I could sense his movement, feel him behind me, getting closer. “That you...you know....”
“Does it matter now?” I couldn't answer him. I couldn't say it, not again, not when there was any chance he'd fucking take the words and run off with them. Not when the last time I'd said them, he'd left me for what I'd believed to be for good.
“It matters to me.” I could feel him behind me, his presence, just...there. Undeniable, like I could just fucking feel the energy he radiated.
I swallowed again, hard. “Maybe,” I said, my jaw clenched in discomfort with this entire conversation. “Fuck, it doesn't fucking matter anymore what I said. It didn't help. You died.” I strode away from that fucking energy I felt near him, just needing to move. To run. To flee.
Only he was having none of it. He did it again, that materializing right in front of me thing.
“You didn't have to say it,” he said quietly. I avoided his gaze, but could feel the fathomless blue eyes boring into me, as if trying to penetrate me just by staring. “You said it just by showing up. Just by dancing with me. It was still the best night of my life, Brian—”
“Fucking stop it!” I said, surprising even myself with my vehemence. “Just fucking stop it, Justin!”
And with that, I spun around and headed in the direction of my bedroom, eager just to put some space between us, hoping he'd get the hint and leave me alone, though why I was so angry with him, I couldn't say. I just knew that nothing made sense and he was talking about that night and everything inside me just wanted to seize him and kiss him and tell him how much I'd missed him lately.
Of course, picking up on hints, even the not-so-subtle ones, had never really been Justin's thing; he was beside me in literally a split-second, perching himself on the edge of the bed, watching me arrange myself in the center of it on my stomach, my head buried in a pillow. “I see you fixed up the room again.”
And why was I not even surprised that he'd watched me destroy it? “It needed a new decorating scheme anyway,” I muttered.
“Right.”
After a full minute of feeling his gaze burning into my back, I rolled over, fixing him with a look. “What?”
He looked surprised. “What?”
“Why are you staring at me? What do you want?” More importantly, what the hell did I have to do to get rid of him? It wasn't enough that I'd had to put up with his stalking in life, but I now had a personal potential-hallucination to do it for him after his death? Granted, after a while, I'd sort of given up on pretending his affections were purely one-sided. Or at least, I had in some ways. Verbally, I'd still made it a point to announce my displeasure with his constant presence every once in a while. God forbid either of us get too comfortable with the other.
It had been the prom that had changed everything. That night...that gesture...it had meant something for me, too. It had been my version of a declaration, an offering— a promise to maybe not push quite so hard, because just maybe I sort of wouldn't have minded getting closer to him. Maybe I sort of even wanted it. And maybe I even sort of felt “that word” for him, even if I couldn't ever tell him that out loud.
And then Chris Hobbes had swung that bat and ruined any chance we'd ever had of having something. Then, it didn't matter what I'd done or what he'd said or what we could have been, because it was over and we were too late and nothing mattered at all anymore. Life had shattered.
“Nothing,” he said simply, stretching out beside me. I looked at him, took everything in, every part of him that I knew so fucking well. How was it that his body could be buried under feet of dirt and grass and fuck knew what else, and yet here beside me, he looked as beautiful and flawless as ever?
“Don't you have to be somewhere?”
“Not really. One of the perks of being dead is a pretty open schedule. Lots of free time,” he said matter of factly.
I nodded, pressing my lips together, as if this all made perfect sense, when in fact, I didn't think anything had ever made less sense in my entire life. Ever since the prom, it was like nothing had been real. Life wasn't...it wasn't right. Nothing was, not without him.
“How long can you stay, then?” I asked, the words spilling from between my lips before I could stop them. I decided that this meant nothing...it wasn't as though I was suddenly accepting his ghostly so-called presence here or anything. The fact remained that this could not possibly be real, no matter how much I wanted it to be.
He gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “As long as I want,” he said, then added quietly, “As long as you want.”
I looked at him. Bit my tongue against the declarations and sentimentalism that threatened to fall from my lips. I couldn't want him here. I couldn't want his ghost or his illusion or whatever the fuck he was here with me. I couldn't. But I did. A month without him, and I fucking ached for it. If it wasn't possible, and it wasn't real, and it was just about the most fucked up, insane thing that had ever happened to me...it just didn't matter, because he was fucking here. And just maybe I was empty enough, or broken enough, that the rest of it didn't mean anything.
“You're real?” It was half a question, half a hesitant statement. Pictures falling off dressers, doors opening and closing on their own, weird phone calls and malfunctioning electronic appliances...alone, as isolated incidents, his presence and the strange recent occurrences around the loft might have been justifiable. Maybe. Combined though, and taking into account my somewhat chilling conversation with Michael, it was getting more and more difficult to convince myself that this was all in my head, impossibilities aside.
He nodded, his eyes meeting mine fearlessly, never backing down from the challenge. Just like in life. “I'm real.”
“How?” I couldn't help but ask. And wasn't it natural? Wasn't it human to deny what your mind knew was impossible, even when everything else inside and around you was telling you it was right? “What...I don't....”
“You don't have to,” he said, anticipating my words, my admission that I didn't understand, that I could not wrap my mind around this no matter how hard I tried, even while some part of me seemed so ready to just accept. Maybe it was the self-preservation part...the part that was responsible for easing my pain. Maybe it would have grasped onto anything to fill up some of this emptiness inside. All I knew was, for the first time in weeks, looking at him, I didn't feel like shattering. He fucking made me feel real, like I wasn't just a mess of empty anguish held together by my own skin, but a person. A functioning human being.
“Can I...am I allowed to touch you?” It wasn't that I didn't want to. And it wasn't that I thought he'd decline any advances I made, even after the less than warm welcome I'd subjected him to. It was that I wasn't sure of the rules anymore. I didn't know if I could, or should, or what would happen if I tried.
His brow crinkled as he considered me. “Well...it's not like there's a manual or anything,” he said. “With everyone else though, they just go right through me. I think I make them cold...I'm just this spot of freezing air.”
“You don't feel cold from here.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it's different with you.”
I let my lips curl up into a smirk. “Isn't everything?”
“So...you want to try?”
I nodded, taking a deep breath and leaning in. He looked so solid, so substantial, and for the first time since the last time I'd kissed him, doing this carried some sense of intimacy, of temptation, rather than the mechanical motion it was with tricks. I could feel his breath against my face, marveled over that fact, and he was so close, after so long....
And then we kissed.
Soft and tentative. Mouths closed, a simple brushing of lips. He was soft and even kind of warm, like a body, and I could still feel that pulsing energy around him. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, or something more, but he still tasted exactly the way I remembered.
“Not cold at all,” I said, letting my lips linger just above his. He smiled, looking relieved.
“You have no idea how good it is to be able to talk to someone,” he said quietly. “It's so fucking lonely here, Brian. Half the time I can't get anyone's attention, and even when I do, it's only tossing stuff off counters, or turning on the radio or something. It's driving me crazy...I haven't had one person— well, besides you— actually look at me in weeks. Do you know what that's like? To feel like everyone's just looking through you?”
I shook my head, completely caught up in his words, detailing misery and despair, but so beautiful, just because I never thought I'd hear the voice they belonged to again.
“Will you just hold me for a little while, please? It feels so good to be touching someone...like I'm actually here,” he said, looking so dejected that I couldn't say no. Couldn't turn him away, not this time.
I let him crawl into my arms, marveling at the solidity of his body against mine. So real, not at all like I'd expected. Not cold or vaporous in the least, he was just...there. Just the way he'd always been.
His chest rose and fell against mine as I lowered us to the pillows, his little huffs of breath warming my skin. Slowly, in awe at the sensation, I slid my hands beneath his T-shirt so that my palms rested against the skin of his back. The shirt, too, was solid, like fabric. Totally real to the touch...at least to mine.
I turned ever so slightly to press a kiss to his hair, wondering if it was as soft as it always had been, but before I could find out, the weight of his body against mine was gone. He had disappeared, again, without warning. My lips were left mere inches away from where his hair had been seconds before, but what was now only empty air.
I sighed, closing my eyes and rolling over to press my face into the pillow that had once been his. I still wasn't a hundred percent certain that I wasn't absolutely fucking insane. But I was certain beyond a doubt that if this was, indeed, real— and if I knew Justin Taylor at all— then this would not be the last time I saw him.
I clenched my fist in his pillow and— letting my perpetual state of exhaustion overcome me at last— I slept.