The Fighters Journal (Chapter Eight)
Title: The Fighters Journal (Chapter Eight)
Author: TheAllTimeLow
Rating: PG (for now)
Pairing: Alex/Jack
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the creative thought process behind the writing.
Warnings: suicidal behaviour, death, cutting, disordered behaviour
Summary: Rose Hill is hope for the hopeless and I was the most hopeful of them all. That was until I met Alex. When I first saw him I couldn't believe someone so broken could still be living.
Author Notes: Yay, an update! And this time it didn't take me months to do it. Please keep leaving your comments because they literally make my days a billion times better and reading them always encourages me to write the next update sooner. Also a question: when I hit read more on my LJ cut it drops down the text instead of going to a different page. Is this happening with anyone else, and if so, someone mind telling me how to fix it? I followed the guide on the home page of the community but I dunno.
Either way, love you all and enjoy!
Master Post - Previous Chapter
“Well, of course you’ve got to talk to him about it,” I was sitting at a coffee shop at 3am in the nearest town, talking to the only night staff worker still hanging around. She had been cleaning off tables trying to kill time until her shift was over and was quite surprised when I walked in. But I needed somewhere off campus to think and I couldn’t bear the silence of my empty apartment this time, so I found myself sipping my fourth cup of coffee and spilling my proverbial Lebanese guts to a fifty-two year old café waitress called Joyce - of all names.
I groaned and ran my hands over my tired eyes and through my black hair that had been neat at one point but was now a disheveled mess on top of my head. “But how?” I whined, “He’s a patient and I’m his worker and it is all so wrong in so many ways. And furthermore, he’s at Rose Hill. Do you know what that is? It’s the place where people go to die, Joyce. No one talks about it - but people don’t come out of there as often as we make it seem. There are too many people who have been in there almost as long as I’ve worked there, and worse than that, the number of grave plots I’ve had to help dig… it keeps me up most nights.”
She reached across the table and patted my hand the way a grandmother might, her eyes crinkling at the corners as she smiled slightly. “And what does all that have to do with your friend, dear?”
“He’s at Rose Hill. He came there because he wanted to die and what if… what if I can’t save him? I couldn’t - I can’t handle the idea of having to dig a grave for him, too.” The panic and dread that accompanied that thought welled up inside me and for a moment as the room started to swim I thought I may throw up. I imagined walking into his room to meet him for breakfast and instead finding his body; cold and lifeless. I imagined never seeing him smile again, or hearing his voice, or that breathless feeling I’d gotten since the first day I saw his eyes. Those damn eyes. Of course, I have brown eyes and so do millions of other people on this planet, but I was positive no one’s could ever shine the way his did. It occurred to me then that perhaps they weren’t actually that spectacular. I mean, you never hear anyone say, “wow your dirt coloured irises sure are amazing”, so maybe they only seemed that way to me because I saw something there that no one else did.
I saw life when everyone else had accepted he’d died.
Joyce squeezed my hand, “Oh, honey, that’s not going to happen. “
“But how do you know it won’t? How do you protect the people you love the most from dying?” I knew I wasn’t talking about just Alex anymore when I asked that. I was thinking of my parents and my family and how much I missed them. I was thinking about how I wished I hadn’t been taking an exam that day so that I could have died with them.
“You can’t,” she said simply, bluntly. “The truth of it is that someday everyone you love is going to die. Everyone who ever made you smile, made you cry, made you laugh; everyone you ever shared a moment with will be gone. They will come and go and disappear until all you have left of them is a memory, and it will hurt. Of course it will! Love will always end in pain if we let it. But you see… we have a choice whether or not we let it end that way. You can cut everyone out of your life and never let that love in or you can decide that the love of today will be worth the pain of tomorrow and accept that even though, yes, they will die, the joy of what precious time you do get to spend with them will be worth the pain of losing them.” Joyce let go of my hand and looked down absently at the ring I hadn’t noticed on her left hand. She smiled down at it with a warmth that made me uncomfortable so I took a sip of coffee for the excuse to look away. “I’ve lived for over five decades, Jack. I’ve loved and been loved by the same man for only six of those years and have lost him now for almost thirty of them. Our time together was short but they were six of the greatest years of my entire life and if the devil himself showed up to try and take them he wouldn’t get far without a fight.”
I looked at this woman; wrinkles around her eyes and mouth told stories of every smile, her back slightly hunched forward in the booth as time and gravity slowly started to twist her spine, and her fingers had started to bend slightly from what I assumed was the early stages of arthritis. Age was slowly claiming her body but I could hear in her voice that her spirit was something that time could never touch.
Joyce looked up to see me staring at her and she smiled.
“Thank you,” I finally said. “I needed this more than I can even explain and I - I don’t mean to be weird, but can I have your number? In case I need to reach you or something.” I felt dumb saying it but she reminded me so much of my Mom and the idea of walking out of there felt like I was losing her all over again, so I had to ask. “I’m afraid I don’t own a phone, honey. I live just down the road from this café but if you need me you can usually find me right here,” she patted my hand again and pulled herself slowly out of the booth and onto her feet. Her face tensed only for a second as she worked to straighten out her stiff joints.
There was an audible pop from somewhere and she sighed.
“I think it’s time both of us went home.”
I nodded and stood.
“Thank you, again,” I said as I left.
“No need to thank me, dear,” she laughed. “Coffee shop waitresses are notorious for their life altering advice.”
~.~
I finally pulled into my reserved parking spot outside of the staff dorms around 7am. I’d slept through the majority of Wednesday, skipped dinner, and sat in my room like a coward avoiding Alex until I finally decided to take the drive to the coffee shop. I’d sent a memo to him through the office saying that if he absolutely needed me he could call and I would come and that I was sorry we hadn’t talked. I heard his friend Rian had come for visiting hours and I hoped that it had gone well, but Alex never sent a reply back to my memo. To be honest I didn’t blame him either. I knew I was being a coward but I hadn’t felt ready to face him.
It was 7:25am when I got out of the shower and got dressed. The nice thing about Rose Hill is that there were no strict uniforms. We basically got to wear anything we wanted as long as we got the name embroidered into whatever it was and wore our name tag everywhere. So that morning I decided to wear a simple, v-neck, grey short sleeved t-shirt and a pair of black jeans. It was an outfit that I knew I felt comfortable in and for some reason that seemed like it was important for today. I walked the short path to the main building and made my way to the dining hall. And then, I walked in, got my food, and took my seat at the staff table with everyone else.
I’m not sure if he had been watching the door to see when I’d come in or if it was because I was the only person standing in the room other than The Boss at her usual post, but I could tell when Alex became aware that I was there. He was sneaking peeks in my direction between bites and random replies in conversation he was having with the people he sat with and I was inconspicuously trying to do the same. It felt so ridiculously high school that I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Something funny, Jack?”
Another Rose Hill worker who I’d also gone to university with was staring at me, eyebrows raised slightly. He was one of the few people here who I could call a legitimate friend. “Nah, you know me, dude… always laughing at something stupid. “Jeff nodded, chuckling in a way that made his constantly disappearing and re-appearing (at this moment it was in a full on growth stage) beard shake. “Yeah, I know. Remember that shirt you used to have that only said ‘BONER’ on it in huge, red capital letters? That was awesome. You still have that thing?”
We went on talking for the next half an hour of breakfast about the shirt and other unfortunate teenage disasters we got ourselves into; including the time we did somersaults in a hotel lobby in nothing but our bath towels. We often joked that if we weren’t so good at diffusing people with our adorable laughs and charming personalities they never would have let us graduate. Eventually Alex stood up and dumped off his empty dishes and I excused myself from the slowly fading conversation of the staff table and followed him out the double doors. I waited for him outside his room while he used his bathroom time.
When he came back, hair wet and dirty clothes under one arm, he walked past me and threw his laundry in the hamper in the corner of his room before falling heavily on his bed. I stood in his doorway and watched him straighten out his hair with his fingers and then cover it with his beanie.
“I think that I really need a haircut,” he said, finally.
I exhaled loudly and took up the chair that was at his desk, turning it so I could lean against the back with my legs on either side while I watched him. I smiled and rested my chin on my folded arms. “Yeah, I think that’s an idea. Your hair is starting to do that flippy thing.”
Alex groaned and fell back against the wall. “I know, I know. I swear it has a mind of its own after a certain point. I used to cut it super short but kind of leave my bangs really long and everyone I knew used to make fun of me, so I’d let it grow out until it started like - eating my face again, and then I’d cut it - and shit, Jack, it was a vicious circle.”
I laughed. “Did you never consider just getting it trimmed instead of going from one extreme to the other?” Alex’s brows furrowed and he pulled a face that I could only describe as the expressional equivalent of a facepalm. I smiled, “I’m going to go ahead and say that’s a no.”
We sat there for a few minutes; me staring at his bed sheets and him staring at the empty wall opposite him. The silence of words that needed to be said but were being avoided had become a palpable tension in the room and we were both pretending that it didn’t exist. I realized that I didn’t exactly know what it was that I was planning on telling him or asking him even. What did I want to say? What could I say? And more important than that what did Alex want to say? I noticed for the first time since I’d seen him again and for the first time since I’d met him even that his arm was completely free of bandages. I glanced at the raised and scarred skin that seemed to wrap around the entire length of his forearm; scars on top of scars on top of scars. I wanted to hug him for every single one of them and especially for the invisible ones that I had no doubt were on his heart.
“Did you read my journal?” Alex finally asked. “I noticed it on my desk and I guessed you put it back while you were skipping breakfast on Wednesday, but I didn’t know if you’d read it or not.”
“Yeah, I read it.”
He nodded like that was the answer he’d been expecting.
“So you know that I didn’t mean it when I said I didn’t mean it?”
“About the whole nickname thing? Yeah, I know,” I said.
More silence.
“I’m sorry I avoided you for the past day or so,” I blurted. “I could make some bullshit up about how I had things to do, but I never lie to the people I’m assigned to and I definitely don’t want to lie to you.” I was about to go into this big speech about how much I cared about him and how my whole life seemed to have been turned upside down by him coming into it and how every day I wake up and look forward to seeing his smile when he interrupted me.
“What happened?” Alex asked.
“I - sorry, what? What do you mean?” I was confused.
“You told me that each staff member only is assigned to one person and they don’t get assigned to another until that person walks out of here, chooses another staff member, or dies. I’m here and, since I know you’ve been here for years, what happened to your last person?” his voice was measured and slow and it scared me for a reason I didn’t quite understand. Maybe it was because he was so calm and collected I knew he was putting on a mask to try and hide something.
“She walked out of here,” I said slowly.
“Really? So you saved her then?” Alex was so excited it made me flinch. I didn’t want to crush the hope in his voice but I had just said I didn’t want to lie to him and I meant it.
“No, not exactly,” I looked down at the seat of the chair. “I thought I did. She was the first person I was ever assigned to when I originally came here two years ago. Her name was Kara. She was… she was real broken, Alex. The first year she was here she spent all of her rec. time in her room. She only left for meals and to use the bathroom, she wasn’t allowed pens, and she spent more time in the padded room than I sometimes care to remember. It wasn’t until her sixteenth month here that she finally started talking to me.
“Just one day she came into my office and said she needed to talk, and then she told me everything. And god, Alex, the things she’d been through,” I let my eyes fall shut as I pictured her sitting in my office in the same chair Alex now sat in on Fridays. “Looking back on it now I realize that should have been a red flag. I mean, people don’t just have breakthroughs like that overnight when they’ve had years for that kind of trauma to build up - it just doesn’t happen. But she was my first assignment and I wanted so badly for her to walk out of here.”
I shook my head at the memory, ashamed of my own stupidity.
“It was her eighteenth month and she seemed completely healed. In every way I’d read in every book, been taught during all my years of school, and even other members on staff all agreed… but she put on a good act. We let her go and she killed herself on the drive home,” my voice shook. “I was put on tribunal for almost four months as they questioned my abilities and tossed around the idea of negligent homicide. In the end they ruled it as a car accident and the claims against me were dropped, but I always knew. A month after all the dust cleared, I got you.”
Every fiber of my being told me I didn’t want to look up at him but I could feel him staring at me, so I did. I expected him to be looking at me with a mixture of disgust and horror; instead all I saw was a compassion and understanding that damn near floored me. Alex pushed himself off the bed and knelt down on his knees in front of me.
He put both his hands on either side of my face, wrapping his fingers through my hair and around my neck.
“You didn’t kill her, Jack,” Alex said as he looked into my eyes. “You didn’t kill her.”
And then he kissed me.
Author: TheAllTimeLow
Rating: PG (for now)
Pairing: Alex/Jack
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the creative thought process behind the writing.
Warnings: suicidal behaviour, death, cutting, disordered behaviour
Summary: Rose Hill is hope for the hopeless and I was the most hopeful of them all. That was until I met Alex. When I first saw him I couldn't believe someone so broken could still be living.
Author Notes: Yay, an update! And this time it didn't take me months to do it. Please keep leaving your comments because they literally make my days a billion times better and reading them always encourages me to write the next update sooner. Also a question: when I hit read more on my LJ cut it drops down the text instead of going to a different page. Is this happening with anyone else, and if so, someone mind telling me how to fix it? I followed the guide on the home page of the community but I dunno.
Either way, love you all and enjoy!
Master Post - Previous Chapter
“Well, of course you’ve got to talk to him about it,” I was sitting at a coffee shop at 3am in the nearest town, talking to the only night staff worker still hanging around. She had been cleaning off tables trying to kill time until her shift was over and was quite surprised when I walked in. But I needed somewhere off campus to think and I couldn’t bear the silence of my empty apartment this time, so I found myself sipping my fourth cup of coffee and spilling my proverbial Lebanese guts to a fifty-two year old café waitress called Joyce - of all names.
I groaned and ran my hands over my tired eyes and through my black hair that had been neat at one point but was now a disheveled mess on top of my head. “But how?” I whined, “He’s a patient and I’m his worker and it is all so wrong in so many ways. And furthermore, he’s at Rose Hill. Do you know what that is? It’s the place where people go to die, Joyce. No one talks about it - but people don’t come out of there as often as we make it seem. There are too many people who have been in there almost as long as I’ve worked there, and worse than that, the number of grave plots I’ve had to help dig… it keeps me up most nights.”
She reached across the table and patted my hand the way a grandmother might, her eyes crinkling at the corners as she smiled slightly. “And what does all that have to do with your friend, dear?”
“He’s at Rose Hill. He came there because he wanted to die and what if… what if I can’t save him? I couldn’t - I can’t handle the idea of having to dig a grave for him, too.” The panic and dread that accompanied that thought welled up inside me and for a moment as the room started to swim I thought I may throw up. I imagined walking into his room to meet him for breakfast and instead finding his body; cold and lifeless. I imagined never seeing him smile again, or hearing his voice, or that breathless feeling I’d gotten since the first day I saw his eyes. Those damn eyes. Of course, I have brown eyes and so do millions of other people on this planet, but I was positive no one’s could ever shine the way his did. It occurred to me then that perhaps they weren’t actually that spectacular. I mean, you never hear anyone say, “wow your dirt coloured irises sure are amazing”, so maybe they only seemed that way to me because I saw something there that no one else did.
I saw life when everyone else had accepted he’d died.
Joyce squeezed my hand, “Oh, honey, that’s not going to happen. “
“But how do you know it won’t? How do you protect the people you love the most from dying?” I knew I wasn’t talking about just Alex anymore when I asked that. I was thinking of my parents and my family and how much I missed them. I was thinking about how I wished I hadn’t been taking an exam that day so that I could have died with them.
“You can’t,” she said simply, bluntly. “The truth of it is that someday everyone you love is going to die. Everyone who ever made you smile, made you cry, made you laugh; everyone you ever shared a moment with will be gone. They will come and go and disappear until all you have left of them is a memory, and it will hurt. Of course it will! Love will always end in pain if we let it. But you see… we have a choice whether or not we let it end that way. You can cut everyone out of your life and never let that love in or you can decide that the love of today will be worth the pain of tomorrow and accept that even though, yes, they will die, the joy of what precious time you do get to spend with them will be worth the pain of losing them.” Joyce let go of my hand and looked down absently at the ring I hadn’t noticed on her left hand. She smiled down at it with a warmth that made me uncomfortable so I took a sip of coffee for the excuse to look away. “I’ve lived for over five decades, Jack. I’ve loved and been loved by the same man for only six of those years and have lost him now for almost thirty of them. Our time together was short but they were six of the greatest years of my entire life and if the devil himself showed up to try and take them he wouldn’t get far without a fight.”
I looked at this woman; wrinkles around her eyes and mouth told stories of every smile, her back slightly hunched forward in the booth as time and gravity slowly started to twist her spine, and her fingers had started to bend slightly from what I assumed was the early stages of arthritis. Age was slowly claiming her body but I could hear in her voice that her spirit was something that time could never touch.
Joyce looked up to see me staring at her and she smiled.
“Thank you,” I finally said. “I needed this more than I can even explain and I - I don’t mean to be weird, but can I have your number? In case I need to reach you or something.” I felt dumb saying it but she reminded me so much of my Mom and the idea of walking out of there felt like I was losing her all over again, so I had to ask. “I’m afraid I don’t own a phone, honey. I live just down the road from this café but if you need me you can usually find me right here,” she patted my hand again and pulled herself slowly out of the booth and onto her feet. Her face tensed only for a second as she worked to straighten out her stiff joints.
There was an audible pop from somewhere and she sighed.
“I think it’s time both of us went home.”
I nodded and stood.
“Thank you, again,” I said as I left.
“No need to thank me, dear,” she laughed. “Coffee shop waitresses are notorious for their life altering advice.”
~.~
I finally pulled into my reserved parking spot outside of the staff dorms around 7am. I’d slept through the majority of Wednesday, skipped dinner, and sat in my room like a coward avoiding Alex until I finally decided to take the drive to the coffee shop. I’d sent a memo to him through the office saying that if he absolutely needed me he could call and I would come and that I was sorry we hadn’t talked. I heard his friend Rian had come for visiting hours and I hoped that it had gone well, but Alex never sent a reply back to my memo. To be honest I didn’t blame him either. I knew I was being a coward but I hadn’t felt ready to face him.
It was 7:25am when I got out of the shower and got dressed. The nice thing about Rose Hill is that there were no strict uniforms. We basically got to wear anything we wanted as long as we got the name embroidered into whatever it was and wore our name tag everywhere. So that morning I decided to wear a simple, v-neck, grey short sleeved t-shirt and a pair of black jeans. It was an outfit that I knew I felt comfortable in and for some reason that seemed like it was important for today. I walked the short path to the main building and made my way to the dining hall. And then, I walked in, got my food, and took my seat at the staff table with everyone else.
I’m not sure if he had been watching the door to see when I’d come in or if it was because I was the only person standing in the room other than The Boss at her usual post, but I could tell when Alex became aware that I was there. He was sneaking peeks in my direction between bites and random replies in conversation he was having with the people he sat with and I was inconspicuously trying to do the same. It felt so ridiculously high school that I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Something funny, Jack?”
Another Rose Hill worker who I’d also gone to university with was staring at me, eyebrows raised slightly. He was one of the few people here who I could call a legitimate friend. “Nah, you know me, dude… always laughing at something stupid. “Jeff nodded, chuckling in a way that made his constantly disappearing and re-appearing (at this moment it was in a full on growth stage) beard shake. “Yeah, I know. Remember that shirt you used to have that only said ‘BONER’ on it in huge, red capital letters? That was awesome. You still have that thing?”
We went on talking for the next half an hour of breakfast about the shirt and other unfortunate teenage disasters we got ourselves into; including the time we did somersaults in a hotel lobby in nothing but our bath towels. We often joked that if we weren’t so good at diffusing people with our adorable laughs and charming personalities they never would have let us graduate. Eventually Alex stood up and dumped off his empty dishes and I excused myself from the slowly fading conversation of the staff table and followed him out the double doors. I waited for him outside his room while he used his bathroom time.
When he came back, hair wet and dirty clothes under one arm, he walked past me and threw his laundry in the hamper in the corner of his room before falling heavily on his bed. I stood in his doorway and watched him straighten out his hair with his fingers and then cover it with his beanie.
“I think that I really need a haircut,” he said, finally.
I exhaled loudly and took up the chair that was at his desk, turning it so I could lean against the back with my legs on either side while I watched him. I smiled and rested my chin on my folded arms. “Yeah, I think that’s an idea. Your hair is starting to do that flippy thing.”
Alex groaned and fell back against the wall. “I know, I know. I swear it has a mind of its own after a certain point. I used to cut it super short but kind of leave my bangs really long and everyone I knew used to make fun of me, so I’d let it grow out until it started like - eating my face again, and then I’d cut it - and shit, Jack, it was a vicious circle.”
I laughed. “Did you never consider just getting it trimmed instead of going from one extreme to the other?” Alex’s brows furrowed and he pulled a face that I could only describe as the expressional equivalent of a facepalm. I smiled, “I’m going to go ahead and say that’s a no.”
We sat there for a few minutes; me staring at his bed sheets and him staring at the empty wall opposite him. The silence of words that needed to be said but were being avoided had become a palpable tension in the room and we were both pretending that it didn’t exist. I realized that I didn’t exactly know what it was that I was planning on telling him or asking him even. What did I want to say? What could I say? And more important than that what did Alex want to say? I noticed for the first time since I’d seen him again and for the first time since I’d met him even that his arm was completely free of bandages. I glanced at the raised and scarred skin that seemed to wrap around the entire length of his forearm; scars on top of scars on top of scars. I wanted to hug him for every single one of them and especially for the invisible ones that I had no doubt were on his heart.
“Did you read my journal?” Alex finally asked. “I noticed it on my desk and I guessed you put it back while you were skipping breakfast on Wednesday, but I didn’t know if you’d read it or not.”
“Yeah, I read it.”
He nodded like that was the answer he’d been expecting.
“So you know that I didn’t mean it when I said I didn’t mean it?”
“About the whole nickname thing? Yeah, I know,” I said.
More silence.
“I’m sorry I avoided you for the past day or so,” I blurted. “I could make some bullshit up about how I had things to do, but I never lie to the people I’m assigned to and I definitely don’t want to lie to you.” I was about to go into this big speech about how much I cared about him and how my whole life seemed to have been turned upside down by him coming into it and how every day I wake up and look forward to seeing his smile when he interrupted me.
“What happened?” Alex asked.
“I - sorry, what? What do you mean?” I was confused.
“You told me that each staff member only is assigned to one person and they don’t get assigned to another until that person walks out of here, chooses another staff member, or dies. I’m here and, since I know you’ve been here for years, what happened to your last person?” his voice was measured and slow and it scared me for a reason I didn’t quite understand. Maybe it was because he was so calm and collected I knew he was putting on a mask to try and hide something.
“She walked out of here,” I said slowly.
“Really? So you saved her then?” Alex was so excited it made me flinch. I didn’t want to crush the hope in his voice but I had just said I didn’t want to lie to him and I meant it.
“No, not exactly,” I looked down at the seat of the chair. “I thought I did. She was the first person I was ever assigned to when I originally came here two years ago. Her name was Kara. She was… she was real broken, Alex. The first year she was here she spent all of her rec. time in her room. She only left for meals and to use the bathroom, she wasn’t allowed pens, and she spent more time in the padded room than I sometimes care to remember. It wasn’t until her sixteenth month here that she finally started talking to me.
“Just one day she came into my office and said she needed to talk, and then she told me everything. And god, Alex, the things she’d been through,” I let my eyes fall shut as I pictured her sitting in my office in the same chair Alex now sat in on Fridays. “Looking back on it now I realize that should have been a red flag. I mean, people don’t just have breakthroughs like that overnight when they’ve had years for that kind of trauma to build up - it just doesn’t happen. But she was my first assignment and I wanted so badly for her to walk out of here.”
I shook my head at the memory, ashamed of my own stupidity.
“It was her eighteenth month and she seemed completely healed. In every way I’d read in every book, been taught during all my years of school, and even other members on staff all agreed… but she put on a good act. We let her go and she killed herself on the drive home,” my voice shook. “I was put on tribunal for almost four months as they questioned my abilities and tossed around the idea of negligent homicide. In the end they ruled it as a car accident and the claims against me were dropped, but I always knew. A month after all the dust cleared, I got you.”
Every fiber of my being told me I didn’t want to look up at him but I could feel him staring at me, so I did. I expected him to be looking at me with a mixture of disgust and horror; instead all I saw was a compassion and understanding that damn near floored me. Alex pushed himself off the bed and knelt down on his knees in front of me.
He put both his hands on either side of my face, wrapping his fingers through my hair and around my neck.
“You didn’t kill her, Jack,” Alex said as he looked into my eyes. “You didn’t kill her.”
And then he kissed me.