#and this time saying goodbye | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

oddsconvert · 1 year ago

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I am broken. Completely broken. I'm willing to bet there's not a dry eye in the house, my eyes are literally stinging with tears. How on earth are you able to take hurt, and suffering and misery and spin it into something so beautiful yet and so devastating?

About half way through I got that pain in my chest - that kind of pang of hurty sadness I get few and far between when reading heartbreaking whump. And then from therecit was game over.

Brian's fierce protection was just soul-soothing, and his pent-up anger for not only his son - but for him, and the grieving the life and love he lost and hasn't stopped mourning since 😭 a gorgeous touch, I'm in awe. I couldn't deal with Wills comatose body - so utterly wrecked beyond belief just lying there as the bridge between them 💔 and then stroking him and holding him. It fucking hurt, man. So goddamn hard.

And Casey? A character I probably never thought I'd meet, or rather even care to meet from what we've been told from Will. But you had me on a rollercoaster, swinging back and forth with her. One minute I hated her, the next I sympathised with her, then I wanted Brian to kick her ass out and then I would understand her again. A testament to your amazing writing, my friend. I really think you've outdone yourself here.

"I didn't know," for 5 sentence fics!

Um, so this is way more than five sentences, so we'll tag all the people for this one. Will's mama heads to the hospital...

part of the kennel. follows this five-sentence fic about will's mom. master list here.

content warnings for: hospitals, comatose whumpee, absentee parents

post-rescue, to see you through

“I didn’t know.”

The words are inadequate, and they both know it. There’s nothing that Casey can say that will bring her absolution; she isn’t sure that she wants it anyway. She didn’t want the life she had with Brian; she knew she wasn’t the mother Will deserved. At least, that was the explanation she gave herself. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be his mother, or anyone’s, in the first place.

And yet, Casey is his mother. It’s an incontrovertible fact. When she looks at Will’s face, sunken though it is, she can see bits and pieces of herself knit with Brian’s features. She’d love to say that it doesn’t matter to her. That it doesn’t matter that the boy in the hospital bed is part of her, that she was absolutely right to walk away, because if it doesn’t matter, why would she have stayed?

But it does matter.

“Of course you didn’t know,” Brian says, his voice low and, Casey thinks, dangerous. It’s different than before. If Brian had ever shown the slightest bit of fight, she might have stayed. But if Brian couldn’t fight for her, at least he is fighting for their son. It’s more than Casey has ever done. “I tried to call you when he went missing, and the number was disconnected.”

“I didn’t know,” she says again. She didn’t know Brian would call, she didn’t know Will would be in such trouble, she didn’t know that any of this would ever matter again.

“We don’t need you,” Brian says. He holds Will’s scarred and gnarled fingers between his hands like a talisman. The message is clear: they are connected; Casey is not.

“I didn’t think you did.”

“Good. Because we don’t.”

Casey sighs. She should move further into the room, but she can feel Brian’s rage from six feet away. If she moves any closer, she’ll get singed. “I know you don’t. I wouldn’t have left if–”

–if I thought he needed me.

“Fuck you,” Brian snaps. “Fuck you for leaving him.”

I left you too, Casey thinks. She doesn’t feel remorse. Not for that. But Will–

She takes a half-step closer. The boy in the bed doesn’t look anything like the one she left all those years ago. He is older and bigger, of course, but like this–she can’t imagine what he must have gone through to come out looking like this. A patchwork man of scar and bone. It should turn her stomach, and it does. But it’s the horror that gnaws at her belly; she doesn’t feel like the boy is hers at all.

For that, she is sorry. But she doesn’t know how to make it better. She can’t repair what wasn’t there to begin with.

“I deserve that,” she whispers.

Brian makes a noise low in his throat. “You don’t deserve shit.”

“Brian—“

Brian clasps Will’s limp hand to his chest. “Why are you here?”

“He’s my son.” It is technically true, but it’s been years since Casey’s said the words.

“No,” Brian snarls, “he’s my son.”

“I know that—“

“He needed you. He needed his mother. I needed…and you weren’t fucking there.”

“I know—“

Brian finally lets Will’s hand go, and he stands. Casey had forgotten how tall he is, how imposing he could have been if he hadn’t been so insular and lost.

He is imposing now. He looks like he might tear her limb from limb, and part of Casey wants to let him.

“You don’t know.” He takes a step closer; Casey holds her ground. “You don’t know that he cried himself to sleep every night for a year. You don’t know that he used to write you letters, and I took them to the post office, but I didn’t know where to fucking send them. You don’t know that he put the ornaments he made you on the tree every year—“

Stop, Casey wants to say, but she knows that she has no right to ask for mercy. The guilt she feels is abstract anyway. It’s sad for a kid to grow up without a mom, sad when a marriage doesn’t work out, but what the hell was she supposed to do? She digs her nails into the hip seam of her jeans.

“You don’t know what he did on his tenth birthday. You don’t know his favorite food. You don’t know what makes him laugh, or how he’s kind even though he’s afraid of everyone he meets. Because of you. You don’t know that he’s spent years wondering what’s wrong with himself because of you. Because you made him believe that there is something wrong.”

“Isn’t there?” Casey asks, gesturing at Will’s bed.

“Shut up. You know that isn’t what I–”

“I do. I know what you meant. And I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t,” Brian snaps. He takes another step and jabs his finger into the air between them. “Don’t fucking pretend you’re sorry.”

Casey holds up her hands in contrition. “I am sorry. About this. I mean, when I saw, on the news–”

“God, how terrible that must have been for you,” Brian spits, every word souring as it hits the air.

“It was. I love–”

“You don’t. You don’t love him.”

But Casey does. Not in a way that either Brian or Will might understand, but she loves them both. She loved them enough to spare them. She can’t explain it, but she knows that it’s true. She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t love them.

“You don’t get to say what I do or don’t feel,” she says softly.

“You don’t get to show up after years and pretend like it’s fine,” Brian counters back.

“It isn’t fine. There’s no way this could possibly be fine.” She takes a careful step forward, and she and Brian are suddenly close enough to touch. Brian’s chest beats with uneasy breaths; Casey waits.

And then Brian crumbles. He sags backward against the foot of their son’s hospital bed, and he hides his face in his hands. Casey’s eyes are dry.

Her eyes are clear when she looks at Will, the bony lines of his body tucked in beneath a blue waffle pattern blanket. He is smaller than he should be, smaller than the photo she saw on the news, and he is so quiet, so absolutely still. It breaks her heart, but she can’t cry. It doesn’t feel like she’s allowed to.

“Brian?”

“They’ve mostly kept him under since they brought him home.” Brian’s voice is small and faraway, and, somehow, Casey knows he isn’t really talking to her at all. “He’s had a few surgeries. And they say his body is exhausted after–well, after everything. I haven’t–I haven’t seen his eyes. Not once. I don’t know if he can hear me. I’m afraid that–I’m afraid–”

Casey moves so that she’s beside him, her rear end resting on the footboard of the bed next to Brian’s. She doesn’t touch him. “What are you afraid of, Bri?”

He flinches. Bri. It must have been too much. She called him that too long ago; taking hold of the memory is like tearing roots from deep soil.

Brian shakes his head, but he keeps his eyes on the foggy hospital linoleum. “You wouldn’t understand. You gave him up.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Casey says. She grips the footboard with careful hands, and her little finger is a hairsbreadth from Brian’s. It reminds her of when they were kids, fumbling over the movie theater armrest. “What are you afraid of?” she asks again.

“You don’t know what they did to him.”

She knows some. The news reports made some pretty convincing speculations based on what happened to Will’s little friend, Tommy. Not so little now. Not so innocent. But Casey doesn’t say anything. She looks at Brian, even if he doesn’t look back.

“He–what he went through–I’m afraid that he won’t–what if he isn’t happy to–what if he doesn’t–if he doesn’t want to wake up? What if he’s afraid of me?”

“He was never afraid of you,” Casey says immediately.

No, Will was afraid of her. Because Casey has always been prickles and thorns, sharp corners and edges. It’s like she’s missing some essential element of her DNA; she’s never known how to be a mother, at least not the kind a boy like Will needed. She still doesn’t know how.

She always thought Brian knew what she didn’t. It made her hate him, just a little. She was supposed to know. She was supposed to be able to do it. And she couldn’t.

And then, she just didn’t.

She knows now that she won’t, either. This is not the start of some new beginning. This, Casey suddenly realizes, is the goodbye she never said.

“No,” Brian half-laughs, “I guess he wasn’t.”

It’s silent for a long moment. Well, almost silent; the monitors that track their son’s heart, his breathing, the pain medication that is almost certainly coursing through his battered body click and beep in arrhythmic succession.

“I never meant to hurt you. Either of you,” Casey says finally.

Brian forces all the air from his lungs. “Well, you did.”

“I know that. But it wasn’t–I wasn’t trying to–”

“Yeah.”

“I wasn’t very good at it,” she says.

“Me neither,” Brian says softly. He looks over his shoulder at Will, his eyes still bright with tears.

Casey nudges her finger alongside his. “That isn’t true.”

Brian was the one who did the late night feedings when Casey couldn’t get Will to latch. Brian held the baby against his bare chest, murmuring to him in a language that Casey couldn’t understand. I heard skin to skin is good for them, Case. Maybe that was when the distance began.

It was Brian who potty trained Will, because Casey was impatient with the wet pants and the tears. It was Brian who airplaned food into Will’s mouth, who soothed Will’s scrapes and bruises, who checked on Will when there were monsters in the closet. Casey should have been jealous, should have felt inadequate; she felt nothing at all.

But looking at Brian now, at the lines that crease his forehead, at the pain in his drawn expression, Casey wonders if there is new distance, this time between father and son. Not that Will isn’t distant from everyone and everything just now.

But Brian blames himself for whatever it was that put Will in this hospital bed. That much Casey knows. Brian has always blamed himself.

Brian pulls away and pushes himself from the footboard. “It’s unfair that he got stuck with us.”

“He isn’t stuck with you, Bri. He’s lucky to have you. I’m sorry I wasn’t up for it.”

“You weren’t up for it?” Brian parrots. He nods at their son’s motionless body. “It wasn’t a chore or something, Casey: it was our marriage. Our child. You don’t just get to leave those things the way you did.”

Casey doesn’t have any defense, and even if she did, it would be pointless to try. “I know.”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t have done it.”

It isn’t entirely true, but she cannot make Brian understand. When she left, she didn’t know just how much she wouldn’t feel, and she’s sure that’s not what Brian wants to hear. That she did them a favor. Even now, she is certain she did the right thing. Right for her; right for them.

“I should go.”

“I don’t even know why you came.”

“I don’t either,” Casey says softly. “You don’t–maybe don’t tell him I came.” It wouldn’t do any good, would it? It isn’t like she’s going to come back.

Brian laughs cheerlessly. “So, that’s it, then?”

“Brian–”

“You’re a real piece of work, Casey.”

“I know that.”

He shakes his head. “So long as you know.”

Casey closes her eyes. “I’m never going to ask you to understand.”

“That’s real fucking big of you.”

“I couldn’t do it, Bri. I don’t know how to be the person I would have had to be if I’d stayed.”

“Poor, poor Casey–”

She sighs and lets her eyes flutter open again. Brian’s face is red, and his hand is curled around the plastic headboard of Will’s bed. It’s ridiculous, but she almost wants to shush Brian so that he doesn’t wake Will. It was always Casey who did the shushing. But, of course, nothing is going to wake Will. He isn’t really asleep. For just a second, Casey wonders if he can hear them.

“I don’t want sympathy.”

“Good,” Brian spits, “because you won’t get any from me.”

“I know. I know I’m a bitch, Brian, okay? I knew you’d be better off without me. That’s why–”

“You didn’t even say goodbye.”

“I didn’t know how.”

Brian looks at the crown of Will’s head. Anywhere but at Casey. “You should have tried.”

“I’m trying now.”

Brian waits. He leans down and kisses the crown of their son’s head, and he waits for her to try.

“He is lucky to have you,” Casey says. “I’ve always known that, but–Jesus, Brian, now? Neither of you deserved this. No one deserves this, but he’s so lucky. You’re going to be there when he wakes up, and you’re going to see him through whatever comes next. You’ve done that his whole life.”

Brian smooths Will’s hair, and his voice is waterlogged when he speaks again. “It wasn’t just him.”

“What?”

He manages to look at her, and his tears are finally slipping down his cheeks. “I can see him through. I have to. You taught me that. But you left me too. There’s no one to see me through.”

“I couldn’t. I wish it was different, but–”

Brian sniffs. “I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he says again.

Casey crosses the room, and she is surprised when Brian lets her duck under his arm. His body is warm and a little clammy, but his smell is familiar; he still wears the same aftershave he did when they were in high school, still uses the same laundry detergent she used to buy from Costco, back in another life. She leans her head against his chest, and Brian’s breath catches. Then, his arm slips awkwardly around her waist; he doesn't relax, and she can’t blame him.

“It wasn’t you,” she says. “It was never you. Or Will. It was me.”

“Okay,” Brian whispers.

Casey reaches to touch her son’s face, and for the first time, she feels something needling at the back of her own eyes. Her fingertips glide over Will’s cheek, the skin there still baby soft.

“Give him the chance to see you through,” she says softly.

“He can’t–”

Casey shakes her head. “Everyone’s going to think they know what he needs; people are really good at that. But no one is going to know. But he needs you, and I think if you let yourself need him–well, you’ll give him a reason to keep going.”

It’s an imperfect plan–who knows what will happen when Will wakes–but they’ve always needed each other, her boys.

“I loved you,” Brian said. He watches her fingers slip over the bridge of Will’s nose, his eyebrows, behind his ear, places she hasn’t touched since he was an infant.

“I know. I love you too.” She hopes he doesn’t notice the present tense; he wouldn’t understand.

Brian’s lips ghost against her hair, and then they are gone.

“You have to go.”

It isn’t a question, but it isn’t a command either. Casey peels herself away from Brian’s side.

“Yeah.”

“He’ll be alright,” Brian whispers.

“I know. You’ll take good care of him. You always have.”

He doesn’t watch her as she turns to the door, but Casey is almost certain that he knows what she does: this is it.

“Brian?”

He drops his body into the chair next to Will’s bed, and he takes up Will’s hand again, running his thumb over his son’s knuckles. “Yeah?”

“Goodbye.”

Brian doesn't answer.

taglist: @darkthingshappen, @oddsconvert, @sparrowsage, @whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump, @mylifeisonthebookshelf, @highwaywhump, @squishablesunbeam, @hold-him-down, @whumpsday, @sowhumpful, @termsnconditions-apply, @irishwhiskeygrl, @deltaxxk, @d-cs, @whumpinggrounds, @canislycaon24, @considerablecolors, @starlit-darkness, @scp-1296, @flowersarefreetherapy, @morning-star-whump, @whumpwhittler, @susiequaz12, @whump-world, @hiding-in-the-shadows, @tasteywhumpee, @whumplr-reader, @sad-boys-anonymous, @whumpzone

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always-a-king-or-queen · 4 months ago

Text

The ache will go away, eventually.

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent.

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea.

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night.

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered.

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face.

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be.

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure.

They seemed so lost.

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.”

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust.

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning.

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were.

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult.

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods.

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day.

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room.

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word.

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan.

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces.

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall.

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing.

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

#oh also I want to clarify just in case - the 'offerings' left by the pevensies aren't meant to be anything weird #they're just little mementos that were special to them that they left there in case the wardrobe ever opened again #so whoever was on the other side could find them and maybe it would be somebody they'd known and loved during their time in narnia #i do have someone in mind who found the items but I'll leave whoever it is up to you :)#i just thought it would be nice for them to have a way of saying goodbye to the narnia they knew/creatures they loved during the golden age #sort of a way to let go of it and also leave something behind as a memory #narnia #tcon #the chronicles of narnia #lucy pevensie #peter pevensie #susan pevensie #edmund pevensie #mrs macready #digory kirke #the lion the witch and the wardrobe #cs lewis #ramblings from the void

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