WHO:Jeremiah Hugh & Heart. WHEN: Morning. WHERE: His Lakeside mansion. SUMMARY: He's hungover and tired of a name that he hates. WARNINGS: Theater kid cannot take his dog out without being dramatic. The dog is the most emotionally stable person in the room.
It was a wet nose that finally tugged him awake by insistently pressing at his hand. He pulled his eyes open and immediately closed them again with a groan of protest. His head was pounding while his whole body was aching, and the position he'd passed out in the night before was doing nothing for that, nor was the morning light streaming in through the windows. The nose came back.
"I know, Heart," he muttered. "I know, I'm awake."
He didn't want to be.
He tried the light again, eyes protested again, and as he pushed himself up into a seated position eyes still mostly closed, and his whole body protested, his head throwing an out and out tantrum. He tried the light again.
Heart was standing in front of him, they were not quite eye-to-eye, but pretty damn close because he was on the floor and she was standing up.
She needed to be taken out. He had no idea what time it was, but he knew this was true, and at least it was something to think about that had nothing to do with why the headache, or why sleeping on the floor, or why any of it.
"I've gotcha girl," he offered, his voice catching with emotion as he spoke. For an instant he stared at the baseboards, not moving at all. Heart's nose bumped his shoulder, which prompted a nod, and an attempt at standing up. For a moment the world seemed to spin, hangover, or lack of sleep, he wasn't certain which, nor did it really matter.
He found his shoes in the middle of the kitchen in front of the sink, without any recollection of why he'd discarded them there. He slid his feet into them, and reached for the leash, and connected it to Heart's harness. He walked through the back door, and down steps, towards the lake's edge.
Heart got most of the lead, and he focused on nothing except the way she pulled the leash, her general distance from him, where he was stepping so it wasn't in mud or puddles. His head was still pounding. She needed him at least.
Every time before when he'd lost something he'd had something else to focus on- the next project, or a career-changing film, or even just fucking staying out of prison. Right now, there was nothing. The possibility of this being what his life looked like, day in and day out for the next twenty years didn't so much increase his headache, as increase the numb sense of not knowing what to do next. He'd messed up. He couldn't deny that under the circumstances. But the recognition that he couldn't figure out exactly what he should have done differently outside of the obvious 'tell her as soon as I found out’ pushed anxiety up in an already uneasy stomach.
He hadn't been ready to tell her in the kitchen while Jamie and Si had been outside. He'd barely had a chance to think about it himself at that point. Maybe that's when he should have, and maybe if he hadn't already been spinning from everything else he could have found that ability,but there had been everything else. He was no stranger to having messed up, but usually when he looked back he could figure out how, and why, and what he should have done differently. Right now he couldn't, or maybe the one moment he could settle on, would have required a forthrightness he was incapable of, a forthrightness that seemed to just be expected and if he couldn't do it, then obviously he was the problem.
After things had broken apart with Em, he'd believed it was because he hadn't told her how he felt, he hadn't respected what she wanted, and hadn't valued the relationship. With Hannah, he'd tried to learn from that mistake. And he had told her things that had been hard, that he knew things he shouldn't have known, and he'd told her before he'd said he loved her, because he'd known that he had to. It had required more bravery than he'd thought he had, but he'd believed she was worth it and he'd intended to put the work in and to keep putting that work in. It still felt like he'd just told her that he wanted them to talk, and he'd meant it, even as he'd still been turning things over in his head. He was the son of an illicit affair his mother had, perhaps secrets were so woven into his DNA he couldn't figure out honesty even when he was intentionally pledging to do it. He'd failed, spectacularly, and it was making him wonder if love was just fairy tales, and feel good romcoms. The idea of it sold Broadway musicals and catapulted songs to the top of the charts, but it couldn't work in real life and maybe in what felt like a lifetime ago, he had been right to just have fun, no strings.
But even under that half nostalgia he recognized that he couldn't go back to it. He didn't want that any more. He wanted something with substance: Something he now doubted he was capable of sustaining himself, which left him alone, really alone.
Heart came bounding back, and he rubbed her ears gently, and they turned back towards the house, away from the lake, up the stone steps, and to the large glass windows.
Hope was so fragile. So often he felt like someone stuck inside a life that wasn't his and she had made it feel like his again. And while that would be too much to pin to any one person, especially one as uncertain of herself as Hannah was, it had felt like something they could figure out together, because she had those same uncertainties. He had liked how they were together. It had always felt like something that could be real despite all the logical strikes against it.
As he shut the door behind him and the dog, he leaned down to undo the leash, fingers operating mostly by memory as his vision blurred. "I think it's Heart & Hugh from here on out," he told her, sinking down again to the floor, but this time with a dog in his face, and in his lap. He leaned his head back against the cool pane of the glass and he closed his eyes again, letting the cool work against his headache.The silence was filled only with the sounds of Heart licking herself, the refrigerator kicking on in the kitchen, and Hugh's own heartbeat. The words, when they finally came, were whispered: "I always hated Jeremiah."
Heart's ears twitched, her nose nudging his hand and she didn't ask whether he meant the name or the man.