just_1_word | 36.8. Hunger
3.6. Hunger
Co-written with isabelowens
[Follows THIS, THIS and THIS]
There was only so much Izzy could do for Cameron right now. Her heart was breaking to watch him so distressed at his brother's condition. Isabel sat next to him for a little while, her hand resting loosely on the top of his. His eyes never left his brother when he came back from the MRI, and Izzy wasn't even sure if he realised she was there. She was starting to go stir crazy, and she couldn't even imagine how Cameron was coping with being stuck in hospital again. Even if he wasn't the patient.
Aiden looked terrible as well, Harri coming back to take the strain of him. Or at least try. Harri seemed to have a better way of managing Aiden, than Izzy did managing Cameron. Part of her was wondering if she would ever get knack. Lachlan and Riley just seemed to float between everyone and make sure they had what they needed, with Tara and RJ nearby. Isabel felt out of place, and she couldn't shake the feeling no matter how long she sat in the room.
Maybe she just wasn't letting herself be a part of it, and she knew it had to do with a part of her mind staying on James. She'd sent a discreet text message at one point to find out where he was, James' reply sending a ripple of nerves through her. He'd stayed in Princeton, and was still where Harri had left him at Pat and Aiden's. Isabel had spent so many weeks travelling between that house, and her apartment in New York, she had no trouble knowing where to go.
She hadn't even tried to make up an excuse, just murmured to Cameron that she'd be back and kissed his cheek. The nerves seemed to build, and without really knowing why, she found herself driving to Pat and Aiden's to see James. It was like if she saw him again, maybe she'd get the strength she needed to keep going. It wasn't fair. None of this was fair to any of them. Harri should have been the one gathering strength from James, but instead, Izzy was the one pressing the buzzer. She stood on the doorstep, arms wrapped around her middle.
When James opened the door, he was just in the wifebeater he wore under his suit for work and his work trousers. He hadn't planned on an overnight stay, so he hadn't brought any clothes to change into. Harri tried to coax him to change into something of Aiden's non-business wardrobe (yes, the guy actually had two separate wardrobes), but James hadn't felt right doing that. The phone call from Lachlan had inevitably set Harri into a panic. She didn't ask any questions; she just dropped everything and left. It's how it should be. That's what inseperable best friends did. And now Izzy was here standing in front of him in some strange mirror of Aiden and Harri, without the buffer of one being gay and one straight. They didn't have that buffer, they never had and never would. Had that been their downfall?
James only just got news of what happened with Pat, and he felt awful by default. He knew things between him and Aiden had been strained and tense in the early days. Aiden didn't trust him, and that hadn't been unfounded. It was going to take time for James to gain Aiden's trust and it was happening slowly. They were breaching the gap, and that's how it should be. Now everything just felt like it had been thrown into very deep waters again. He watched Izzy quietly for a moment, wetting his lips. "Hey," he finally said and then stepped forward to put his arms around her, embracing her securely and kissing her hair.
Izzy wrapped her arms around him, not saying anything at first as she buried her face against his chest. It was easy to forget that amongst everything, he was her best friend. He knew her better than anyone, and if someone was going to pick up her pieces, then it had to be James. She could feel a lump in her throat threaten to break, the fact that she was having twins on the verge of her lips, but she still couldn't bring herself to speak. She stayed clinging to him for a long moment before she shifted, and pulled him into a kiss.
James inevitably started to kiss her back. It was there, and he didn't have enough warning to fight it off right away. He had to force himself to tap into his self control and he pulled out of the kiss, his hands resting on her arms. "Izzy..." he said uncertainly, giving his head a small shake. This couldn't be right, he just didn't know why. He had absolutely no success trying to shake any of the confusion in the wake of his conversation with Harri. If anything, it just confused him even more. He had thought being with her would help him at least sort through some of the mess in his head, but then she had to go. Was that some sort of sign? It'snot like he was ever superstitious before, but he would take anything he could get to try and help him make some sense of all this.
She reached up to brush her fingers against his cheek, touching James' face as her green eyes stared into his. They'd shared so much as partners, and best friends. They'd barely gotten a chance to know how it felt to love each other as more, and share their lives totally. A huge part of her was still angry that it had all been ripped away, regardless of James doing it for the SS. She wet her lips, tasting him there as she finally broke eye contact, but only so she could gaze at his lips. "I can't help it. I need you... I want you. I still love you. I was at the hospital with Cameron, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. I hate my brain right now. I feel like a drug addict who's fallen off the wagon again. I can't get enough, I don't know if I'll ever get enough, and I don't even know if I want to bother trying to get back on the wagon."
James put his hand up and grabbed a handful of his hair, tugging on it just a little to try and dilute the frustration. "Iz, you're having his kid! I tried to talk to Harri, and I don't even know how I'm supposed to feel anymore. I mean, you've just found out. It's early. There's been no time to really see or feel the connection with the kid. But Harri, she's... she's nearly seven months pregnant. It's all belly and there. There's a baby in there. My baby!" He dropped his head back a little and let out a heavy breath before he looked back at her. "Do you love him?"
"I know," Izzy said, stepping back as the lump broke and the tears started to roll down her cheeks. "Don't you think I hate myself enough for both of us? I'm not doing this on purpose! I didn't wake up choosing to destroy our relationships. I didn't wake up choosing to fuck over Harri, and Cameron. I'm having twins! Fucking identical twins. I think it's amazing, and scary, and I don't know what I'm doing." She bit her lips, and gave a small nod. "Just like you love Harri, but he has his own hole."
James shook his head and started to pace a little. "It doesn't work like that, Izzy. Don't you think if it did, marriage would be kind of defunct? This is all so fucked up, but it doesn't make it any easier to contemplate! Cameron's brother is seriously ill. His identical twin," he added for emphasis. "Harri's best friend is falling apart. Her best friend, just like you and I. How can any of this rationally work? I'm trying to get my head around all this, but it's just... just... I don't even know what I'm supposed to think anymore! It's like I don't even know what love is! How can I when I supposedly feel it for two women? No one else seems to be walking around wondering where their heart is supposed to be! I look at Lachlan and his wife, and hell, I look at Pat and Aiden and wonder why the fuck it doesn't make sense to me like it does to them!"
Isabel winced as she watched him pace. "Because it did make sense, and then you left. I know I keep bringing that up, but it's a pretty big sticking point. We had it all worked out. We had each other, and we didn't need anyone else. It was you and me. We didn't end because we fell out of love. It wasn't some break up because the relationship didn't work."
"Yeah, well, it's a pretty big sticking point and if I'm going to be punished for it for the rest of my life, what the hell are we even doing here?" James cried, and really wanted a smoke right then, if just to give him something to do with his hands other than attempting to tear his hear out by the roots. "If I wanted to live in the past, I would be sitting by my dead boyfriend's grave day in, day out! I've apologised over and fucking over yet you keep throwing it back in my face! I put myself into a coma to come back! I could have killed myself! But you know what? Maybe that's what you need to keep doing because it's definitely helping me want to back off right now!"
"We're trying to work out what we want!" Izzy told him, raising her own voice to match. "I just... I still want you, and I can't help it. I don't know if I want what we had. We'll never get it back, and maybe that isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we both needed fresh. I don't want you sitting by David's grave. I don't want me trying to keep running away from exes, or in fear of what might happen if I went down the aisle. I don't know! I don't know anything past what I've told you. And I'm sorry, okay? I fucked up, too. I know I did. I don't mean to be a bitch. I just wanted you back..."
James stopped pacing and stilled in front of her, his voice much calmer. "You forget that I know exactly what it is like to lose someone you love. Exactly. That I know how much your world falls apart and you don't know what your supposed to think or even if you can think. And before you turn around and tell me that I shouldn't have done it because I know, it also makes you do crazy things. It makes you want to do whatever you can to try and put things right again. To find something inside you that helps you process again and like the person you are without who you lost. That is why I joined the SS. That was my way to try and process what had been fucking ripped away from me with no warning. Because I didn't know if I could ever give you my whole self as long as I was still feeling like that. Every time you throw it in my face, it feels like I didn't succeed in finding closure. I failed. I didn't do anything to justify why his life was just taken for no reason. I made absolutely no difference. I just lost you in the process. I lost my life. I made a fucking mistake, Isabel. You as well as anyone know what it's like to make mistakes that you just can't understand no matter how hard you try."
Izzy dipped her head, hiding her face from James as she felt it crumple. "When you... when you were just there in Ali's apartment I couldn't understand. I thought I'd lost my mind finally. I couldn't even be in New York! Everything fucking reminded me of you, and I was drowning. I bailed on Ali because I wasn't strong enough. I tried to leave my entire life behind because everything was something you'd touched, or someone you'd spoken to, or somewhere you'd been. I didn't want to be in a country you'd breathed air in. How fucking insane is that? And then it was really you, and I just wanted to understand why you didn't love me enough to stay. It was the first thing I thought. I just assumed it was because I wasn't enough. I didn't... It took me ages to understand you did it because you loved me too much. We're both fucked in the head when it comes to this stuff. We both assume we're never going to be enough for someone, then because we love the other person so much we try and protect them by pushing them away. I can't love Cameron completely when I feel like I'm still in love with you. I don't know if it's just residual stuff and I'd still be feeling like this if you'd stayed dead. I probably would, but then people would understand because you were dead, and that's what widows do." She lifted her head. "But you're not dead, you're here, and I don't have an excuse other than you're the man I loved with all my heart for a long time, and I can't just shake that feeling."
James was quiet for a long few moments. He realised as he stood there watching her, wetting his lips slowly, that she felt exactly the same way about him as Mark did for Ali. James himself felt it too. How did their happy little fun universe become so fucked up? This is what love did and he still didn't understand. After David, he never could. Maybe he never would again, but it didn't mean he had to stop living like he tried to do. He tried to become a thing and not a person. Just a machine to seek some sort of relief over the pain he had felt from the loss. He felt like he should be crying, but no tears came. Maybe he had even shed enough of those. "What if it doesn't give us closure? What if it just takes us right back to square one?"
Iz wiped at her eyes, and gave another small shrug. "I'll find a Fraser patch, or check into rehab."
James shook his head. "If only it was that easy..." He was getting a funny niggle in his gut that he needed to talk to his brother. This whole conversation was making him realise that with things up in the air with him and Isabel and everyone around him seeming to be off balance from pregnancy or whatever else, he needed Mark. Mark was the one he could talk to without any of his mistakes reaching out and tearing his heart out. "I don't know what to do."
Izzy took a breath, and moved back in close to James. "Kiss me. Please."
James hesitated. Of course he did. He didn't know what was right or wrong anymore, and he didn't have the capacity to anticipate what the consequences would be. He wished he had more sleep to at least have some rational clarity, but there was none. None at all. He breached the gap between her and kissed her, hoping that strange feeling somewhere between his stomach and chest would disappear the more he ignored it.
Her hands came to rest on his arms, and she curled her fingers around them as she kept him close. Izzy wasn't sure anymore what was right, but it was impossible to think when her entire body screamed for James. It really was like an addiction, and she was too tired to fight. She kissed him back, slowly, so she could savour the way James tasted. When it eased off, Izzy rest her head against his shoulder. "How can you be right here, and I still miss you?"
"Maybe because I'm not really here anymore," James murmured, speaking the first words that came to his mind. "How do you even know I'm still what you want?"
"I don't," Isabel admitted as she lifted her head to look up at him again. "Isn't that part of the reason we need to try this? The what ifs are going to eat us up otherwise. I know they will."
James looked down at her, swallowing to wet his dry throat. "Once," he told her. "It can only happen once."
Iz nodded. "Hopefully it'll be all we need."
All muses referenced with permission and are from the princeton2nyc universe
Word Count | 2,804
Co-written with isabelowens
[Follows THIS, THIS and THIS]
There was only so much Izzy could do for Cameron right now. Her heart was breaking to watch him so distressed at his brother's condition. Isabel sat next to him for a little while, her hand resting loosely on the top of his. His eyes never left his brother when he came back from the MRI, and Izzy wasn't even sure if he realised she was there. She was starting to go stir crazy, and she couldn't even imagine how Cameron was coping with being stuck in hospital again. Even if he wasn't the patient.
Aiden looked terrible as well, Harri coming back to take the strain of him. Or at least try. Harri seemed to have a better way of managing Aiden, than Izzy did managing Cameron. Part of her was wondering if she would ever get knack. Lachlan and Riley just seemed to float between everyone and make sure they had what they needed, with Tara and RJ nearby. Isabel felt out of place, and she couldn't shake the feeling no matter how long she sat in the room.
Maybe she just wasn't letting herself be a part of it, and she knew it had to do with a part of her mind staying on James. She'd sent a discreet text message at one point to find out where he was, James' reply sending a ripple of nerves through her. He'd stayed in Princeton, and was still where Harri had left him at Pat and Aiden's. Isabel had spent so many weeks travelling between that house, and her apartment in New York, she had no trouble knowing where to go.
She hadn't even tried to make up an excuse, just murmured to Cameron that she'd be back and kissed his cheek. The nerves seemed to build, and without really knowing why, she found herself driving to Pat and Aiden's to see James. It was like if she saw him again, maybe she'd get the strength she needed to keep going. It wasn't fair. None of this was fair to any of them. Harri should have been the one gathering strength from James, but instead, Izzy was the one pressing the buzzer. She stood on the doorstep, arms wrapped around her middle.
When James opened the door, he was just in the wifebeater he wore under his suit for work and his work trousers. He hadn't planned on an overnight stay, so he hadn't brought any clothes to change into. Harri tried to coax him to change into something of Aiden's non-business wardrobe (yes, the guy actually had two separate wardrobes), but James hadn't felt right doing that. The phone call from Lachlan had inevitably set Harri into a panic. She didn't ask any questions; she just dropped everything and left. It's how it should be. That's what inseperable best friends did. And now Izzy was here standing in front of him in some strange mirror of Aiden and Harri, without the buffer of one being gay and one straight. They didn't have that buffer, they never had and never would. Had that been their downfall?
James only just got news of what happened with Pat, and he felt awful by default. He knew things between him and Aiden had been strained and tense in the early days. Aiden didn't trust him, and that hadn't been unfounded. It was going to take time for James to gain Aiden's trust and it was happening slowly. They were breaching the gap, and that's how it should be. Now everything just felt like it had been thrown into very deep waters again. He watched Izzy quietly for a moment, wetting his lips. "Hey," he finally said and then stepped forward to put his arms around her, embracing her securely and kissing her hair.
Izzy wrapped her arms around him, not saying anything at first as she buried her face against his chest. It was easy to forget that amongst everything, he was her best friend. He knew her better than anyone, and if someone was going to pick up her pieces, then it had to be James. She could feel a lump in her throat threaten to break, the fact that she was having twins on the verge of her lips, but she still couldn't bring herself to speak. She stayed clinging to him for a long moment before she shifted, and pulled him into a kiss.
James inevitably started to kiss her back. It was there, and he didn't have enough warning to fight it off right away. He had to force himself to tap into his self control and he pulled out of the kiss, his hands resting on her arms. "Izzy..." he said uncertainly, giving his head a small shake. This couldn't be right, he just didn't know why. He had absolutely no success trying to shake any of the confusion in the wake of his conversation with Harri. If anything, it just confused him even more. He had thought being with her would help him at least sort through some of the mess in his head, but then she had to go. Was that some sort of sign? It'snot like he was ever superstitious before, but he would take anything he could get to try and help him make some sense of all this.
She reached up to brush her fingers against his cheek, touching James' face as her green eyes stared into his. They'd shared so much as partners, and best friends. They'd barely gotten a chance to know how it felt to love each other as more, and share their lives totally. A huge part of her was still angry that it had all been ripped away, regardless of James doing it for the SS. She wet her lips, tasting him there as she finally broke eye contact, but only so she could gaze at his lips. "I can't help it. I need you... I want you. I still love you. I was at the hospital with Cameron, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. I hate my brain right now. I feel like a drug addict who's fallen off the wagon again. I can't get enough, I don't know if I'll ever get enough, and I don't even know if I want to bother trying to get back on the wagon."
James put his hand up and grabbed a handful of his hair, tugging on it just a little to try and dilute the frustration. "Iz, you're having his kid! I tried to talk to Harri, and I don't even know how I'm supposed to feel anymore. I mean, you've just found out. It's early. There's been no time to really see or feel the connection with the kid. But Harri, she's... she's nearly seven months pregnant. It's all belly and there. There's a baby in there. My baby!" He dropped his head back a little and let out a heavy breath before he looked back at her. "Do you love him?"
"I know," Izzy said, stepping back as the lump broke and the tears started to roll down her cheeks. "Don't you think I hate myself enough for both of us? I'm not doing this on purpose! I didn't wake up choosing to destroy our relationships. I didn't wake up choosing to fuck over Harri, and Cameron. I'm having twins! Fucking identical twins. I think it's amazing, and scary, and I don't know what I'm doing." She bit her lips, and gave a small nod. "Just like you love Harri, but he has his own hole."
James shook his head and started to pace a little. "It doesn't work like that, Izzy. Don't you think if it did, marriage would be kind of defunct? This is all so fucked up, but it doesn't make it any easier to contemplate! Cameron's brother is seriously ill. His identical twin," he added for emphasis. "Harri's best friend is falling apart. Her best friend, just like you and I. How can any of this rationally work? I'm trying to get my head around all this, but it's just... just... I don't even know what I'm supposed to think anymore! It's like I don't even know what love is! How can I when I supposedly feel it for two women? No one else seems to be walking around wondering where their heart is supposed to be! I look at Lachlan and his wife, and hell, I look at Pat and Aiden and wonder why the fuck it doesn't make sense to me like it does to them!"
Isabel winced as she watched him pace. "Because it did make sense, and then you left. I know I keep bringing that up, but it's a pretty big sticking point. We had it all worked out. We had each other, and we didn't need anyone else. It was you and me. We didn't end because we fell out of love. It wasn't some break up because the relationship didn't work."
"Yeah, well, it's a pretty big sticking point and if I'm going to be punished for it for the rest of my life, what the hell are we even doing here?" James cried, and really wanted a smoke right then, if just to give him something to do with his hands other than attempting to tear his hear out by the roots. "If I wanted to live in the past, I would be sitting by my dead boyfriend's grave day in, day out! I've apologised over and fucking over yet you keep throwing it back in my face! I put myself into a coma to come back! I could have killed myself! But you know what? Maybe that's what you need to keep doing because it's definitely helping me want to back off right now!"
"We're trying to work out what we want!" Izzy told him, raising her own voice to match. "I just... I still want you, and I can't help it. I don't know if I want what we had. We'll never get it back, and maybe that isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we both needed fresh. I don't want you sitting by David's grave. I don't want me trying to keep running away from exes, or in fear of what might happen if I went down the aisle. I don't know! I don't know anything past what I've told you. And I'm sorry, okay? I fucked up, too. I know I did. I don't mean to be a bitch. I just wanted you back..."
James stopped pacing and stilled in front of her, his voice much calmer. "You forget that I know exactly what it is like to lose someone you love. Exactly. That I know how much your world falls apart and you don't know what your supposed to think or even if you can think. And before you turn around and tell me that I shouldn't have done it because I know, it also makes you do crazy things. It makes you want to do whatever you can to try and put things right again. To find something inside you that helps you process again and like the person you are without who you lost. That is why I joined the SS. That was my way to try and process what had been fucking ripped away from me with no warning. Because I didn't know if I could ever give you my whole self as long as I was still feeling like that. Every time you throw it in my face, it feels like I didn't succeed in finding closure. I failed. I didn't do anything to justify why his life was just taken for no reason. I made absolutely no difference. I just lost you in the process. I lost my life. I made a fucking mistake, Isabel. You as well as anyone know what it's like to make mistakes that you just can't understand no matter how hard you try."
Izzy dipped her head, hiding her face from James as she felt it crumple. "When you... when you were just there in Ali's apartment I couldn't understand. I thought I'd lost my mind finally. I couldn't even be in New York! Everything fucking reminded me of you, and I was drowning. I bailed on Ali because I wasn't strong enough. I tried to leave my entire life behind because everything was something you'd touched, or someone you'd spoken to, or somewhere you'd been. I didn't want to be in a country you'd breathed air in. How fucking insane is that? And then it was really you, and I just wanted to understand why you didn't love me enough to stay. It was the first thing I thought. I just assumed it was because I wasn't enough. I didn't... It took me ages to understand you did it because you loved me too much. We're both fucked in the head when it comes to this stuff. We both assume we're never going to be enough for someone, then because we love the other person so much we try and protect them by pushing them away. I can't love Cameron completely when I feel like I'm still in love with you. I don't know if it's just residual stuff and I'd still be feeling like this if you'd stayed dead. I probably would, but then people would understand because you were dead, and that's what widows do." She lifted her head. "But you're not dead, you're here, and I don't have an excuse other than you're the man I loved with all my heart for a long time, and I can't just shake that feeling."
James was quiet for a long few moments. He realised as he stood there watching her, wetting his lips slowly, that she felt exactly the same way about him as Mark did for Ali. James himself felt it too. How did their happy little fun universe become so fucked up? This is what love did and he still didn't understand. After David, he never could. Maybe he never would again, but it didn't mean he had to stop living like he tried to do. He tried to become a thing and not a person. Just a machine to seek some sort of relief over the pain he had felt from the loss. He felt like he should be crying, but no tears came. Maybe he had even shed enough of those. "What if it doesn't give us closure? What if it just takes us right back to square one?"
Iz wiped at her eyes, and gave another small shrug. "I'll find a Fraser patch, or check into rehab."
James shook his head. "If only it was that easy..." He was getting a funny niggle in his gut that he needed to talk to his brother. This whole conversation was making him realise that with things up in the air with him and Isabel and everyone around him seeming to be off balance from pregnancy or whatever else, he needed Mark. Mark was the one he could talk to without any of his mistakes reaching out and tearing his heart out. "I don't know what to do."
Izzy took a breath, and moved back in close to James. "Kiss me. Please."
James hesitated. Of course he did. He didn't know what was right or wrong anymore, and he didn't have the capacity to anticipate what the consequences would be. He wished he had more sleep to at least have some rational clarity, but there was none. None at all. He breached the gap between her and kissed her, hoping that strange feeling somewhere between his stomach and chest would disappear the more he ignored it.
Her hands came to rest on his arms, and she curled her fingers around them as she kept him close. Izzy wasn't sure anymore what was right, but it was impossible to think when her entire body screamed for James. It really was like an addiction, and she was too tired to fight. She kissed him back, slowly, so she could savour the way James tasted. When it eased off, Izzy rest her head against his shoulder. "How can you be right here, and I still miss you?"
"Maybe because I'm not really here anymore," James murmured, speaking the first words that came to his mind. "How do you even know I'm still what you want?"
"I don't," Isabel admitted as she lifted her head to look up at him again. "Isn't that part of the reason we need to try this? The what ifs are going to eat us up otherwise. I know they will."
James looked down at her, swallowing to wet his dry throat. "Once," he told her. "It can only happen once."
Iz nodded. "Hopefully it'll be all we need."
All muses referenced with permission and are from the princeton2nyc universe
Word Count | 2,804