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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.

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