Fade to Black
Title: Fade to Black
Author: blasthisass
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3552
Summary: Luke has a nightmare. Will his doctor be there to see him through it? Occurring around September 17th, let's say
Spoilers: Endgame spoilers, though I'm sure everyone is aware of what's happening at this point.
Warnings: Angst, temporarily broken!Luke (there's a happy ending, I promise!)
Disclaimers: All characters and such property of ATWT, CBS and anyone else who can legally take credit for them. If they were mine, I would take infinitely better care of them.
A/N: This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine.
Comments much appreciated. Hopefully this will raise your spirits a little. Writing this was very cathartic for me. :)
Luke’s legs fell out from under him, no longer able to hold the weight of his body and his soul. They folded under him like the piece of napkin had bent into pseudo-origami under the force of his fingers when-no. Fuck. No. He had to stop this. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t healthy. Another comparison, think of another comparison. Any comparison. Folded like . . . that horrid burgundy shirt he always wore when-No. His heart when he had been hit with the emotion that was always-
“Fuck. C’mon, Luke, pull yourself together,” he moaned, knees curling into this chest. His hands went to his face and he curled up into as small a ball as possible until he disappeared from the face of this earth completely and didn’t have to suffer and didn’t have to lie there like a vase that had fallen and shattered into a million irreparable pieces. He blocked the world out until there was nothing but the black of his hands pressing his eyelids shut, that inescapable darkness that was eating away at his soul and his heart until there was nothing left. He inhaled, trying to draw in the air that was caught in between his knees and his chest but there was something caught in his throat and his lungs had collapsed and he couldn’t draw a full breath. His shoulders tremble with raking sobs, shuddered with the intensity of someone trying to shake awake a child who was having a nightmare. And yet no sound escaped his body along with the shuddering breath of air that breached the confines of his lips, no tears were able to flow past the dams that had been built by his grief.
And all he could see through the darkness was the last thing he could take. He couldn’t take seeing blue eyes and hair that refused to stay the same color and curls that would naturally wind themselves around Luke’s fingers and a smile that was so much more than any he’d ever seen because the man that gave it to him was so much more than he deserved. So much more than the fucking world deserved. He was a genius and an idiot and a man who ran from love and a man who had embraced it with all his heart, even when it had come against his will. Even though, when it came, it didn’t come for genius or beauty. It came for Luke, alcoholic, college drop-out, that messed up kid that was stuck in a relationship that had eaten away at him until there was nothing left and it was irrational and it was un-thought of and it was ridiculous and it was oh-so perfect. So, so perfect.
Luke squeezed his eyes shut until he could see stars before them but the tears that managed to leak out and carve riverbeds into his thin cheeks didn’t fix things. Didn’t fix his vision, didn’t fix the timeline that had been assigned to him by that sadist up in the sky that just loved to see him suffer. Didn’t fix the fact that he still saw Reid before his eyes, still saw his smile and that dark red shirt and the way his lips curved up to the crinkles that formed around his eyes whenever he looked at Luke. The way his long fingers had played gently with Luke’s as they’d moved steadily closer. The way his lips formed the words, those perfect words, the candle flickering in the dark room that had become life in Oakdale, life at the hospital, life for Katie, life for Chris, life . . . the way his eyes glowed when he’d looked into Luke’s and murmured, “I’ve fallen in love with you too,” and how the words were so true still. To unbelievably true that they cut into every nerve in Luke’s body even now.
That moment lay wrapped in fog until Luke could barely decipher it from the darkness. All he could distinguish was the gurney that was being wheeled in with body on it that should never be lifeless, covered in cuts and bruises that bled purple and black into skin that always managed to be that perfect shade of tan even when the sun had set on summer. And it was all so wrong, those memories that he wanted to rid himself off. The ones that clung to him as though their very lives depended on it. The ones that flaunted a broken Reid in his face, the Reid that couldn’t move to cup Luke’s right cheek in his strong yet delicate hands, the one who couldn’t attack him with logic, could only breath out the words “Chris . . . tests . . .” in a voice so broken that Luke had to resist the urge to whip out tape to physically put it back together. And it killed him that he couldn’t fix it and that Reid was . . . Reid was . . . Reid was haunting Luke’s dreams, but it wasn’t Luke’s Reid. It wasn’t the Reid that had danced to the front of Luke’s mind when he’d told Noah that he was in love, the one who always found an opportunity to run his hands tenderly along Luke’s skin-
“Don’t!” Luke yelled, leaping to his feet, as though the touch that had grazed his shoulder and the voice that had whispered his name had sent a bolt of electricity through his veins and had sent him flying into the air. He couldn’t take it, the physical contact, and he had to get as far away from its owner. “Don’t touch me!”
“Luke.” The voice was so soft that Luke had almost though it was the one that had haunted his mind for the past two weeks. It filled him with rage because it was tender and hurt and it had no right to be. It had no fucking right. He lost it.
“Katie, whatever you have to say to me right now, just save it,” he yelled, turning on her almost involuntarily. His eyes narrowed when he saw Noah hovering in the background behind her, face pale.
“Luke, I’m so-”
“You’re kidding me, right?” he sputtered in disbelief. “I mean, really, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Don’t you dare apologize to me. Don’t you dare pretend you feel sorry for me!”
“Luke, I-”
“You won, okay!” Luke yelled, overpowering her quiet voice with his own, which was rising uncontrollably to hysterical levels. “You got your happy ending, you didn’t have to suffer through the death of the man you’re in love with for the second time. You won and because the universe fucking hates me, I lost! And don’t even pretend you’re sorry that it worked out that way! Don’t even pretend you’re not happy Chris is alive and that Reid is dead!"
“I’m not happy that Reid is dead!” Katie whispered, tears leaking slowly from her eyes, but it was nothing like the desperation that was flooding every orifice of Luke’s body.
“But you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”
“Luke, that’s not fair-” Noah started, moving forward, hand reaching out gently for Luke.
Luke’s eyes focused on the hand and all he could see was Reid, hair wet, burgundy patterned shirt unbuttoned, face gentle was he reached for Luke as though he was porcelain and would break if he wasn’t handled properly. Reached for Luke in that way because he’d realized that he was in love with Luke and to break him would kill Reid. And the gesture was so familiar and so wrong because it was Noah and the last words that Luke remembered hearing from him were “me” and “I.”
And instead of leaning into the touch he backed away as though the extended hand held a gun. “And you! God, I can’t believe you’re still here!”
Noah’s brow furrowed in hurt and confusion. “Luke . . .”
“I don’t need this, Noah! I don’t need you here, gloating in my face about how if I’d stayed with you I wouldn’t have had my heart broken! About how you were right about Reid breaking my heart! About how I need to get over it and conveniently get back together with you and how moving to L.A. will help me grieve and move on!”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
“No?” Luke scoffed, backing away until his back was pressed against the old brick wall of Old Town. “You’re not that nice, remember?”
Noah opened his mouth to retort, to tell Luke that he was wrong, that he was hurting for Luke’s sake, but it was as though the volume had suddenly cut out. All Luke could hear was silence and he was forced to clap his hands over from the deafening noise that the quiet produced. He heard a voice call his name but he shook his head and tears spilled from his eyes because the voice wasn’t real because Reid is dead Reid is dead Reid is dead.
“Love you . . . Reid . . . listening to me?”
Noah’s voice filtered in and out and he took at tentative step closer before stopping as though breaching a certain distance between them would cause Luke to completely snap. Luke could barely focus on what was going on around him and when the scene before him flickered to black and back and he groaned, doubling over, hands on ears, eyes squeezed as far shut as they would go. He was going crazy, losing his mind, falling so far with no one to catch him. He panicked when his body shook involuntarily and he slid to the floor and he heard his name like a voiceover in a movie and he couldn’t have because Reid is dead Reid is dead Reid is dead. He was falling, falling, the ground crumbling beneath him, the edge of the cliff that he’d been teetering on, crumbling into the darkness below him and he reached up for the arms that had always been there and God, why couldn’t he stop shaking? Why wouldn’t that voice stop saying his name like that, reminding him over and over that Reid is dead Read is dead Reid is dead-
“Luke!”
“Reid . . . no . . . stop . . . please . . .”
“Luke! Hey, Luke, wake up!”
The hands on his shoulders were firm and they weren’t Noah’s hands, the hands that had gripped him to keep him from falling, the hands whose fingers he’d slipped through. His eyes snapped open and Noah was gone and Katie was gone and Old Town was gone. Instead all he could see was blue, the lightest of blues despite the darkness of the room, like that of Lake Michigan when it was a perfect summer’s day and the cloud-free sky reflected perfectly off the waves. Luke melted into the blue, light surrounded by the dark blue of denim jeans before fading into white.
And he couldn’t breathe, because he couldn’t see what he was seeing because . . . because . . .
“Luke?” Reid murmured, both his hands on Luke’s sweaty shoulders, his gaze filled with so much concern that he barely held it together.
The name was a ghost of a whisper on Luke’s lips before he could gain enough air to utter it. “. . . Reid . . . ?”
“Yeah, of course it’s me. What-” Reid stuttered, the breath almost knocked out of him as Luke’s arms came up around him and almost squeezed the life out of him, his breath shaky and warm and tear-stained on Reid’s neck as he tried to wrap himself around every part of Reid in order to determine that this Reid was real and the one he’d seen dying was not.
“Oh God, Reid,” Luke broke down, sobbing urgently into Reid’s shoulder from relief, from fear, from desperation, from love. His open lips skimmed the fabric of Reid’s shirt, loose around his body. “God.”
“Umm . . . it wasn’t that bad, was it?” Reid joked feebly, unable to muster up his usual amount of snark because he’d never seen Luke like this, so utterly helpless and it scared him until every muscle and nerve of his body was shaking from the panic and his brain automatically jumped from seriousness to the need to make light of the situation. Because he was worried he wouldn’t be able to handle the emotion.
Luke sniffed, trying to compose himself and pulled away, his eyes scanning every bit of Reid’s face to determine that this wasn’t another level of his dream. His hand skimmed over Reid’s cheek, feeling the light stubble that prickled against his fingertips, the same way they had hours before when Luke’s hand had been scrambling over every inch of Reid as he tried to memorize every curve and every inch of skin.
“Reid . . .” he whispered, savoring the feeling that filled him like helium and allowed him to float toward the ceiling when the name didn’t have to be followed by the words is dead. “I . . .”
“I know,” Reid replied, cupping Luke’s entire face with his hand and running this thumb lightly over Luke’s cheek, erasing the nightmare from his skin along with the tears that he never wanted to see etched there again. “It was just a nightmare. It’s okay.”
“It felt so real,” Luke murmured, voice small like a child. They sat there for an eternity, savoring each other, before Luke turned his eyes to the fact that Reid was dressed (halfway, anyway) and Luke was not and his brow furrowed. This . . . this was so familiar. Where had he seen this before? “Why’re you dressed?”
“I got a call from Bob,” Reid answered, glancing down in momentary confusion as though the world he’d gotten lost in within Luke’s eyes hadn’t involved him being clothed in any way, shape or form. “They found a heart for Chris in Bay City.”
“No!” Luke cried out, bolting up and out of Reid’s embrace.
“Yes,” Reid muttered, glancing curiously at Luke’s reaction. “I have to get down to the hospital and am probably going to end up driving to get it-”
“No! No, no, no, no, no,” Luke muttered, his emphasis on the word growing each time he said it until it came with the pace of the steps he’d started taking around the room after he’d lept out of bed for lack of another way to rid himself of the terrible energy that filled him.
“Luke, what-”
“Don’t go!” Luke exclaimed, stopping dead in his tracks in front of Reid, who tried very hard not to concentrate on the fact that all Luke was wearing was a pair of black boxer briefs. “Reid, don’t go!”
His brow furrowed in confusion. “But I-”
“Don’t do this to me!”
“Do what?”
“This! Go! Put me through this again!” Luke’s eyes were brown and wide with his plea.
“Are we even having the same conversation?” Reid asked cautiously, raising his eyebrow and standing just in case, for Luke was looking like he was about to collapse. “I’m just going to go to Bay City. There and back. It’s six hours by car. You’ll barely even notice I’m gone-”
“Please, please don’t go,” Luke begged, his voice almost rising into a sob. “Don’t to this to me, please don’t put me through this again!”
“I don’t understand!” Reid groaned, standing up and walking over to an anguished Luke. “Put you through what?”
“I just . . . my dream, I-”
“Luke, it was just a dream,” Reid murmured, trying to restore the calm to his boyfriend’s face.
“Do you really want to put that to the test?”
“Luke-”
"Do you love me?” Luke exclaimed suddenly, his eyes dashing across Reid’s face as though the answer was written there as clearly as on the pages of a book.
“What?"
“Do you love me?”
Reid’s entire composition softened and he approached Luke until they were almost touching. He reached out a hand to run it gently up and down Luke’s arm softly. The motion seemed to calm him down, but the tears didn’t vanish from his eyes. “I told you I do. I’ve fallen so hard for you and I want you in the worst possible way. Where is this coming from?”
Luke bit his lip and collapsed against Reid, his hands running under Reid’s arms and clutching frantically at his back, lips pressed hard against the soft skin of Reid’s shoulder. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t go. I can’t lose you.”
Reid didn’t answer, his mind flashing from contemplating what on Earth Luke could mean by that to telling himself that telling Luke that seeing him begging on his knees wasn’t a terrible picture was wildly inappropriate to the words that he finally whispered: “You’re not going to lose me. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Stay.”
Reid stopped questioning Luke’s vagueness and pulled away from the tight embrace, holding Luke carefully as he reached into his pocked, pressed a couple of numbers and held the phone to his ear, his eyes never leaving Luke’s.
“Hey, Bob. . . . No. No, I’m still at my apartment. . . . No, listen, I can’t come. Find somebody else. . . . No, something came up. . . . Listen, Bob,” Reid’s voice exclaimed, suddenly switching into its usual, curt tone, “I’m a neurosurgeon, not a cardiologist. It’s not my responsibility to take care of this. I took care of Chris when I had to, but I called in a specialist whose job it is to make sure his patient lives and to find the appropriate people to make it happen. Now, I’m sorry, something more important came up, so you’ll have to sort through this entire ridiculous mess yourselves.” With that, he pressed the end button with much more force than was necessary and threw the phone onto the dresser behind Luke, as though flinging it as far away from himself as possible would prevent it from ever ringing again.
“Thank you,” Luke whispered, his fingers playing with the ends of Reid’s shirt, the tension going out of his shoulders.
“Care to explain to me what that hysteria was about? Because I might have to reconsider this whole thing if you plan on repeating it. I can’t deal with that on a regular basis,” Reid reprimanded, glancing carefully at Luke. Luke smiled for the first time since he’d woken up and Reid took that as a success. “Oh, hey, dimples. Thought you’d gone and left me with sad, angry Luke.”
“Well, they like you too much to leave permanently.” Luke’s weak smile kept improving, as though the knowledge that his dream world had been kept at bay was infusing the edges of his mouth to rise toward his eyes.
Reid waited for an explanation as the distance between them closed slightly until they were standing with Luke’s back against the wall. One of Luke’s hands fingered the hair on the nape of Reid’s neck as Reid’s hand stroked his waist tenderly. Their free hands were intertwined by their sides.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” Reid murmured, trying not to get lost in Luke’s eyes. “You go and take a shower and I’ll go and make us some food because you’re looking pale and that’s not boding well for my state of mind and while we eat you’ll tell me what got you so freaked. Deal?”
Luke cocked an eyebrow as Reid’s long fingers reached up to play with the dimples on his cheeks. “I don’t know . . .”
“What, it’s a good plan! It’s got food and showers.”
Luke smiled, feeling himself coming back and his dream-self fading into the background. His curl-entwined fingers tightened and he held Reid’s head in place as he leaned in a placed a soft kiss on Reid’s lips, like the brush of a rose-petal on his cheek. Reid smiled into the kiss and murmured against Luke’s lips, “It seems you have a better plan.”
“Well, it involves many aspects of your plan. But in mine, we have sex, then take a nice long shower and make those disgusting sandwiches you love. And we’ll talk,” Luke replied, marveling at the way the air tasted when he breathed it in so close to Reid, as though particles of Reid were hovering in it.
“Yes, infinitely better,” Reid smiled, pulling Luke closer and deepening the kiss. Their mouths were open and they went slow, even slower than the first time, taking the time to explore. Luke kept it that way, feeling that if he’d gotten a second chance he wanted to remember everything so that, some day far down the road, everything about Reid wouldn’t be engulfed in fog. He walked them back to the bed, turning them around as though dancing to a slow song.
Luke reached the bed first, and fell back onto the bed, staring at Reid, completely enraptured, and this time, when the world tried to fade to black, it was filled with a burst of stars and a Reid that was very, very much alive.
Author: blasthisass
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3552
Summary: Luke has a nightmare. Will his doctor be there to see him through it? Occurring around September 17th, let's say
Spoilers: Endgame spoilers, though I'm sure everyone is aware of what's happening at this point.
Warnings: Angst, temporarily broken!Luke (there's a happy ending, I promise!)
Disclaimers: All characters and such property of ATWT, CBS and anyone else who can legally take credit for them. If they were mine, I would take infinitely better care of them.
A/N: This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine.
Comments much appreciated. Hopefully this will raise your spirits a little. Writing this was very cathartic for me. :)
Luke’s legs fell out from under him, no longer able to hold the weight of his body and his soul. They folded under him like the piece of napkin had bent into pseudo-origami under the force of his fingers when-no. Fuck. No. He had to stop this. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t healthy. Another comparison, think of another comparison. Any comparison. Folded like . . . that horrid burgundy shirt he always wore when-No. His heart when he had been hit with the emotion that was always-
“Fuck. C’mon, Luke, pull yourself together,” he moaned, knees curling into this chest. His hands went to his face and he curled up into as small a ball as possible until he disappeared from the face of this earth completely and didn’t have to suffer and didn’t have to lie there like a vase that had fallen and shattered into a million irreparable pieces. He blocked the world out until there was nothing but the black of his hands pressing his eyelids shut, that inescapable darkness that was eating away at his soul and his heart until there was nothing left. He inhaled, trying to draw in the air that was caught in between his knees and his chest but there was something caught in his throat and his lungs had collapsed and he couldn’t draw a full breath. His shoulders tremble with raking sobs, shuddered with the intensity of someone trying to shake awake a child who was having a nightmare. And yet no sound escaped his body along with the shuddering breath of air that breached the confines of his lips, no tears were able to flow past the dams that had been built by his grief.
And all he could see through the darkness was the last thing he could take. He couldn’t take seeing blue eyes and hair that refused to stay the same color and curls that would naturally wind themselves around Luke’s fingers and a smile that was so much more than any he’d ever seen because the man that gave it to him was so much more than he deserved. So much more than the fucking world deserved. He was a genius and an idiot and a man who ran from love and a man who had embraced it with all his heart, even when it had come against his will. Even though, when it came, it didn’t come for genius or beauty. It came for Luke, alcoholic, college drop-out, that messed up kid that was stuck in a relationship that had eaten away at him until there was nothing left and it was irrational and it was un-thought of and it was ridiculous and it was oh-so perfect. So, so perfect.
Luke squeezed his eyes shut until he could see stars before them but the tears that managed to leak out and carve riverbeds into his thin cheeks didn’t fix things. Didn’t fix his vision, didn’t fix the timeline that had been assigned to him by that sadist up in the sky that just loved to see him suffer. Didn’t fix the fact that he still saw Reid before his eyes, still saw his smile and that dark red shirt and the way his lips curved up to the crinkles that formed around his eyes whenever he looked at Luke. The way his long fingers had played gently with Luke’s as they’d moved steadily closer. The way his lips formed the words, those perfect words, the candle flickering in the dark room that had become life in Oakdale, life at the hospital, life for Katie, life for Chris, life . . . the way his eyes glowed when he’d looked into Luke’s and murmured, “I’ve fallen in love with you too,” and how the words were so true still. To unbelievably true that they cut into every nerve in Luke’s body even now.
That moment lay wrapped in fog until Luke could barely decipher it from the darkness. All he could distinguish was the gurney that was being wheeled in with body on it that should never be lifeless, covered in cuts and bruises that bled purple and black into skin that always managed to be that perfect shade of tan even when the sun had set on summer. And it was all so wrong, those memories that he wanted to rid himself off. The ones that clung to him as though their very lives depended on it. The ones that flaunted a broken Reid in his face, the Reid that couldn’t move to cup Luke’s right cheek in his strong yet delicate hands, the one who couldn’t attack him with logic, could only breath out the words “Chris . . . tests . . .” in a voice so broken that Luke had to resist the urge to whip out tape to physically put it back together. And it killed him that he couldn’t fix it and that Reid was . . . Reid was . . . Reid was haunting Luke’s dreams, but it wasn’t Luke’s Reid. It wasn’t the Reid that had danced to the front of Luke’s mind when he’d told Noah that he was in love, the one who always found an opportunity to run his hands tenderly along Luke’s skin-
“Don’t!” Luke yelled, leaping to his feet, as though the touch that had grazed his shoulder and the voice that had whispered his name had sent a bolt of electricity through his veins and had sent him flying into the air. He couldn’t take it, the physical contact, and he had to get as far away from its owner. “Don’t touch me!”
“Luke.” The voice was so soft that Luke had almost though it was the one that had haunted his mind for the past two weeks. It filled him with rage because it was tender and hurt and it had no right to be. It had no fucking right. He lost it.
“Katie, whatever you have to say to me right now, just save it,” he yelled, turning on her almost involuntarily. His eyes narrowed when he saw Noah hovering in the background behind her, face pale.
“Luke, I’m so-”
“You’re kidding me, right?” he sputtered in disbelief. “I mean, really, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Don’t you dare apologize to me. Don’t you dare pretend you feel sorry for me!”
“Luke, I-”
“You won, okay!” Luke yelled, overpowering her quiet voice with his own, which was rising uncontrollably to hysterical levels. “You got your happy ending, you didn’t have to suffer through the death of the man you’re in love with for the second time. You won and because the universe fucking hates me, I lost! And don’t even pretend you’re sorry that it worked out that way! Don’t even pretend you’re not happy Chris is alive and that Reid is dead!"
“I’m not happy that Reid is dead!” Katie whispered, tears leaking slowly from her eyes, but it was nothing like the desperation that was flooding every orifice of Luke’s body.
“But you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”
“Luke, that’s not fair-” Noah started, moving forward, hand reaching out gently for Luke.
Luke’s eyes focused on the hand and all he could see was Reid, hair wet, burgundy patterned shirt unbuttoned, face gentle was he reached for Luke as though he was porcelain and would break if he wasn’t handled properly. Reached for Luke in that way because he’d realized that he was in love with Luke and to break him would kill Reid. And the gesture was so familiar and so wrong because it was Noah and the last words that Luke remembered hearing from him were “me” and “I.”
And instead of leaning into the touch he backed away as though the extended hand held a gun. “And you! God, I can’t believe you’re still here!”
Noah’s brow furrowed in hurt and confusion. “Luke . . .”
“I don’t need this, Noah! I don’t need you here, gloating in my face about how if I’d stayed with you I wouldn’t have had my heart broken! About how you were right about Reid breaking my heart! About how I need to get over it and conveniently get back together with you and how moving to L.A. will help me grieve and move on!”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
“No?” Luke scoffed, backing away until his back was pressed against the old brick wall of Old Town. “You’re not that nice, remember?”
Noah opened his mouth to retort, to tell Luke that he was wrong, that he was hurting for Luke’s sake, but it was as though the volume had suddenly cut out. All Luke could hear was silence and he was forced to clap his hands over from the deafening noise that the quiet produced. He heard a voice call his name but he shook his head and tears spilled from his eyes because the voice wasn’t real because Reid is dead Reid is dead Reid is dead.
“Love you . . . Reid . . . listening to me?”
Noah’s voice filtered in and out and he took at tentative step closer before stopping as though breaching a certain distance between them would cause Luke to completely snap. Luke could barely focus on what was going on around him and when the scene before him flickered to black and back and he groaned, doubling over, hands on ears, eyes squeezed as far shut as they would go. He was going crazy, losing his mind, falling so far with no one to catch him. He panicked when his body shook involuntarily and he slid to the floor and he heard his name like a voiceover in a movie and he couldn’t have because Reid is dead Reid is dead Reid is dead. He was falling, falling, the ground crumbling beneath him, the edge of the cliff that he’d been teetering on, crumbling into the darkness below him and he reached up for the arms that had always been there and God, why couldn’t he stop shaking? Why wouldn’t that voice stop saying his name like that, reminding him over and over that Reid is dead Read is dead Reid is dead-
“Luke!”
“Reid . . . no . . . stop . . . please . . .”
“Luke! Hey, Luke, wake up!”
The hands on his shoulders were firm and they weren’t Noah’s hands, the hands that had gripped him to keep him from falling, the hands whose fingers he’d slipped through. His eyes snapped open and Noah was gone and Katie was gone and Old Town was gone. Instead all he could see was blue, the lightest of blues despite the darkness of the room, like that of Lake Michigan when it was a perfect summer’s day and the cloud-free sky reflected perfectly off the waves. Luke melted into the blue, light surrounded by the dark blue of denim jeans before fading into white.
And he couldn’t breathe, because he couldn’t see what he was seeing because . . . because . . .
“Luke?” Reid murmured, both his hands on Luke’s sweaty shoulders, his gaze filled with so much concern that he barely held it together.
The name was a ghost of a whisper on Luke’s lips before he could gain enough air to utter it. “. . . Reid . . . ?”
“Yeah, of course it’s me. What-” Reid stuttered, the breath almost knocked out of him as Luke’s arms came up around him and almost squeezed the life out of him, his breath shaky and warm and tear-stained on Reid’s neck as he tried to wrap himself around every part of Reid in order to determine that this Reid was real and the one he’d seen dying was not.
“Oh God, Reid,” Luke broke down, sobbing urgently into Reid’s shoulder from relief, from fear, from desperation, from love. His open lips skimmed the fabric of Reid’s shirt, loose around his body. “God.”
“Umm . . . it wasn’t that bad, was it?” Reid joked feebly, unable to muster up his usual amount of snark because he’d never seen Luke like this, so utterly helpless and it scared him until every muscle and nerve of his body was shaking from the panic and his brain automatically jumped from seriousness to the need to make light of the situation. Because he was worried he wouldn’t be able to handle the emotion.
Luke sniffed, trying to compose himself and pulled away, his eyes scanning every bit of Reid’s face to determine that this wasn’t another level of his dream. His hand skimmed over Reid’s cheek, feeling the light stubble that prickled against his fingertips, the same way they had hours before when Luke’s hand had been scrambling over every inch of Reid as he tried to memorize every curve and every inch of skin.
“Reid . . .” he whispered, savoring the feeling that filled him like helium and allowed him to float toward the ceiling when the name didn’t have to be followed by the words is dead. “I . . .”
“I know,” Reid replied, cupping Luke’s entire face with his hand and running this thumb lightly over Luke’s cheek, erasing the nightmare from his skin along with the tears that he never wanted to see etched there again. “It was just a nightmare. It’s okay.”
“It felt so real,” Luke murmured, voice small like a child. They sat there for an eternity, savoring each other, before Luke turned his eyes to the fact that Reid was dressed (halfway, anyway) and Luke was not and his brow furrowed. This . . . this was so familiar. Where had he seen this before? “Why’re you dressed?”
“I got a call from Bob,” Reid answered, glancing down in momentary confusion as though the world he’d gotten lost in within Luke’s eyes hadn’t involved him being clothed in any way, shape or form. “They found a heart for Chris in Bay City.”
“No!” Luke cried out, bolting up and out of Reid’s embrace.
“Yes,” Reid muttered, glancing curiously at Luke’s reaction. “I have to get down to the hospital and am probably going to end up driving to get it-”
“No! No, no, no, no, no,” Luke muttered, his emphasis on the word growing each time he said it until it came with the pace of the steps he’d started taking around the room after he’d lept out of bed for lack of another way to rid himself of the terrible energy that filled him.
“Luke, what-”
“Don’t go!” Luke exclaimed, stopping dead in his tracks in front of Reid, who tried very hard not to concentrate on the fact that all Luke was wearing was a pair of black boxer briefs. “Reid, don’t go!”
His brow furrowed in confusion. “But I-”
“Don’t do this to me!”
“Do what?”
“This! Go! Put me through this again!” Luke’s eyes were brown and wide with his plea.
“Are we even having the same conversation?” Reid asked cautiously, raising his eyebrow and standing just in case, for Luke was looking like he was about to collapse. “I’m just going to go to Bay City. There and back. It’s six hours by car. You’ll barely even notice I’m gone-”
“Please, please don’t go,” Luke begged, his voice almost rising into a sob. “Don’t to this to me, please don’t put me through this again!”
“I don’t understand!” Reid groaned, standing up and walking over to an anguished Luke. “Put you through what?”
“I just . . . my dream, I-”
“Luke, it was just a dream,” Reid murmured, trying to restore the calm to his boyfriend’s face.
“Do you really want to put that to the test?”
“Luke-”
"Do you love me?” Luke exclaimed suddenly, his eyes dashing across Reid’s face as though the answer was written there as clearly as on the pages of a book.
“What?"
“Do you love me?”
Reid’s entire composition softened and he approached Luke until they were almost touching. He reached out a hand to run it gently up and down Luke’s arm softly. The motion seemed to calm him down, but the tears didn’t vanish from his eyes. “I told you I do. I’ve fallen so hard for you and I want you in the worst possible way. Where is this coming from?”
Luke bit his lip and collapsed against Reid, his hands running under Reid’s arms and clutching frantically at his back, lips pressed hard against the soft skin of Reid’s shoulder. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t go. I can’t lose you.”
Reid didn’t answer, his mind flashing from contemplating what on Earth Luke could mean by that to telling himself that telling Luke that seeing him begging on his knees wasn’t a terrible picture was wildly inappropriate to the words that he finally whispered: “You’re not going to lose me. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Stay.”
Reid stopped questioning Luke’s vagueness and pulled away from the tight embrace, holding Luke carefully as he reached into his pocked, pressed a couple of numbers and held the phone to his ear, his eyes never leaving Luke’s.
“Hey, Bob. . . . No. No, I’m still at my apartment. . . . No, listen, I can’t come. Find somebody else. . . . No, something came up. . . . Listen, Bob,” Reid’s voice exclaimed, suddenly switching into its usual, curt tone, “I’m a neurosurgeon, not a cardiologist. It’s not my responsibility to take care of this. I took care of Chris when I had to, but I called in a specialist whose job it is to make sure his patient lives and to find the appropriate people to make it happen. Now, I’m sorry, something more important came up, so you’ll have to sort through this entire ridiculous mess yourselves.” With that, he pressed the end button with much more force than was necessary and threw the phone onto the dresser behind Luke, as though flinging it as far away from himself as possible would prevent it from ever ringing again.
“Thank you,” Luke whispered, his fingers playing with the ends of Reid’s shirt, the tension going out of his shoulders.
“Care to explain to me what that hysteria was about? Because I might have to reconsider this whole thing if you plan on repeating it. I can’t deal with that on a regular basis,” Reid reprimanded, glancing carefully at Luke. Luke smiled for the first time since he’d woken up and Reid took that as a success. “Oh, hey, dimples. Thought you’d gone and left me with sad, angry Luke.”
“Well, they like you too much to leave permanently.” Luke’s weak smile kept improving, as though the knowledge that his dream world had been kept at bay was infusing the edges of his mouth to rise toward his eyes.
Reid waited for an explanation as the distance between them closed slightly until they were standing with Luke’s back against the wall. One of Luke’s hands fingered the hair on the nape of Reid’s neck as Reid’s hand stroked his waist tenderly. Their free hands were intertwined by their sides.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” Reid murmured, trying not to get lost in Luke’s eyes. “You go and take a shower and I’ll go and make us some food because you’re looking pale and that’s not boding well for my state of mind and while we eat you’ll tell me what got you so freaked. Deal?”
Luke cocked an eyebrow as Reid’s long fingers reached up to play with the dimples on his cheeks. “I don’t know . . .”
“What, it’s a good plan! It’s got food and showers.”
Luke smiled, feeling himself coming back and his dream-self fading into the background. His curl-entwined fingers tightened and he held Reid’s head in place as he leaned in a placed a soft kiss on Reid’s lips, like the brush of a rose-petal on his cheek. Reid smiled into the kiss and murmured against Luke’s lips, “It seems you have a better plan.”
“Well, it involves many aspects of your plan. But in mine, we have sex, then take a nice long shower and make those disgusting sandwiches you love. And we’ll talk,” Luke replied, marveling at the way the air tasted when he breathed it in so close to Reid, as though particles of Reid were hovering in it.
“Yes, infinitely better,” Reid smiled, pulling Luke closer and deepening the kiss. Their mouths were open and they went slow, even slower than the first time, taking the time to explore. Luke kept it that way, feeling that if he’d gotten a second chance he wanted to remember everything so that, some day far down the road, everything about Reid wouldn’t be engulfed in fog. He walked them back to the bed, turning them around as though dancing to a slow song.
Luke reached the bed first, and fell back onto the bed, staring at Reid, completely enraptured, and this time, when the world tried to fade to black, it was filled with a burst of stars and a Reid that was very, very much alive.