22. GREY
22
GREY
Blair stared at the two disassembled pistols in front of him. He had stripped them on autopilot, and now they were just an array of metal, pins and springs laid out on his coffee table. Every time he tried to concentrate on something else his mind just swiveled back to the same thing that had kept him up most of the night save for a couple disjointed hours of restless, nightmare-plagued sleep. Maybe that’s why he was unsteady. Maybe it was just his emotions getting the better of him. He didn’t know anymore. He ran his hands up his face, feeling the faint tremors in them on either side of his nose. His hair slipped through his fingers and back on to his forehead. I need a haircut. He almost laughed, if he’d had the energy, at the thought of having time for something so mundane and normal.
No matter how many hours he’d spent awake trying to find a way around it, he’d realize there was no way the day could end with Wren and him still together without Wren being in danger. He could just ask Wren if he planted the wire (not that Blair believed for a single fucking second that he did, regardless of who his father was) but it wasn’t like the boss would take Blair’s word for it. Blair could tell Wren exactly what Felix had told him, and that they were going to have to take a break until things with Phantom were over and Felix calmed down, but he had a feeling as soon as Wren knew he had been threatened, he would probably go confront Felix himself and get a bullet between the eyes for it.
What Blair wouldn’t give for needing a haircut to be his biggest problem, instead of the fact he had to abandon the person he wanted more than anything, just to save him.
One Month Earlier
It was the stage of exhaustion in which all sound put a terrible pressure on Wren’s ears. It was too much like pain to be mental and too intangible to be a physical issue. It was nothing he would give such thought to except when he was so exhausted, with his thoughts floating aimlessly through his mind without ever connecting to each other. He drifted with them from place to place. His rounds were almost over.
Wren looked at the chart on his way into the room. He remembered this one, who he’d given stitches to. Gunshot wound. He grimaced as he pulled the curtain aside to enter. The hospital was too unremarkable to dislike on most days, but at times like this he wanted to rip the fluorescent bars out of the fucking ceiling. He rubbed his eyes under his glasses.
“You here to cut me loose?” the patient asked.
Wren clicked his tongue. He had hoped the patient would be asleep so he didn’t have to speak. “You’re not going anywhere just yet.”
He soldiered through conversation, forced to find responses to his stupid questions until the patient said, “Man, your bedside manner needs some work.”
Wren blinked. He was entirely aware of that, and didn’t care. He just wasn’t used to people commenting on it. “I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t.
Wren told him Reymond would take care of his discharge, or Dr. Garrett as far as this guy was concerned, and kept working his way down the list. He knew the font size on these damn things didn’t shrink according to how tired he was but it seemed that way. He was filling it out mostly from memory. The words were little more than faintly letter-shaped black dots that might have been legible to someone going on more than four hours of sleep in the last two days.
A chuckle drew his eyes up, and then, “You are my sunshine.” The patient again. He was so loud, for absolutely no reason.
Wren concentrated on taking the man’s pulse. Maybe if he ignored him he would go away. That approach hadn’t worked on the rest of Wren’s problems yet, but it usually worked on people just fine.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine? You know, from the song? Cause sun is bright, and you’re kinda, you know, gloomy...it’s a joke...no? Okay.”
Usually worked on people. On rare occasions such as these, he found a spectacularly dumb specimen with all the social awareness of the window next to them. “I am most assuredly not your sunshine.” He got up and tried to keep the discomfort from showing on his face. His feet were killing him, but not literally, of course, as his body would never do him such a kindness.
“What are you then?” the patient called as he was trying to leave.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Wren looked back. “Pardon?”
Focusing his eyes wasn’t as bad from a distance. Wren observed his annoying patient. Now that Wren was looking at him properly, he realized the man was pretty fucking attractive. He had a youthful face and an unusual combination of red hair and tan skin. Yes, Wren was working and there was a level of professionalism he was expected to adhere to, but he was also gay. Sue him.
Then the patient opened his mouth again and spoke right into the splitting headache between Wren’s temples.
“If you don’t want me to call you Sunshine then you should give me something else to call you.”
Wren pulled the curtain aside. “This is the end of my rotation with emergency medicine, you won’t see me again.”
That persistent voice followed him. “You never know.”
He put the clipboard back on the wall. Finally, he could leave . Wren glanced at the top of the sheet. The patient information was larger than the list on the next page, easier for his blurry eyes to read. “Blair Kennedy,” he murmured.
Whatever. Not my problem anymore.
Present
Over, under, over… no. Over, under, then the other piece, and then… under?
Wren gave up, pulling the haphazard braid loose and running his fingers through his hair. He could see his reflection well enough in the glass in the living room but being able to see what he was doing wasn’t helping. Blair had done some braid-thing when they were at the hotel and it had helped keep some of Wren’s hair out of his eyes, but Wren didn’t have the patience to keep trying to recreate it. He sighed and smoothed his hands down the front of his black vest.
A few months ago he had been counting the days until graduation. It had been the only thing getting him through each grueling hour. In the recent weeks, though, he had stopped counting, and more surprising still graduation had rushed up on him sooner than he expected. He straightened his shirt collar, fingers brushing the chain of his necklace. He ran his fingers over the pendant laying against his chest. Serotonin. Happiness. He made someone… happy.
And his father, the one who believed happiness could only curse him, had been so quiet. Wren had been questioning everything he thought he knew about himself, and there was usually another voice in his head that wasn’t his own, eagerly waiting to answer him but it had been quiet lately. No guidance, no berating Wren for letting the iron-tight seal around his emotions get chipped away until it was shattered entirely. There had always been something. Until Blair.
Always cold until Blair. Always numb until Blair. Wren closed his eyes and a pale face danced behind them; a loopy patient on a day that must have been a lifetime ago. Wren’s fingers curled tighter around his necklace. He had been so tired but he remembered Blair’s words following him out, words that were still following him. You never know.
He turned at the sound of rapping on the door. There were only two people who ever knocked on his door and that wasn’t Reymond’s knock, so he already knew who would be on the other side when he opened it.
“Hey,” Blair said, sounding for all the world like someone had put a needle in him and sucked his soul out.
Wren raised an eyebrow and stepped back. “Long day at the office?”
“I… yeah.” Blair tugged at the sleeves of his wet jacket. He looked around even though there was nothing in the apartment he hadn’t seen before. “Looks like more rain out there.”
Wren clicked his tongue and went into the kitchen. He’d heard the coffee maker stop while he was still trying to unfuck his hair. “Of course. Perfect weather to be driving in. At least you won’t be on your bike, it might slack off by the time you leave. In the morning,” he added, throwing a smirk over his shoulder.
Blair looked him up and down like he hadn’t seen him until that moment. “You’re all dressed up.” No sooner than he said it his face fell even further, if that were possible. “Graduation.”
Wren poured coffee into a thermos. He couldn’t blame Blair for forgetting, not with everything else going on. “You can stay here. I’m skipping on whatever mind-numbing festivities they want to have afterward and coming back here. I don’t feel like listening to Andy do karaoke.”
Blair didn’t answer him. At first Wren thought Blair might be considering it, but he had returned the carafe to the coffee maker, put the lid on his thermos and Blair was still uncharacteristically silent.
“Wren, I have to go,” Blair said flatly.
“Okay,” Wren said, finding himself with the foreign urge to reach for him, to soothe whatever malady of the brain plagued him and made his usually expressive voice sound so empty. This whole concern thing was new.
“Not just tonight.”
He leaned back against the counter. “What nonsense does Clifford have you doing now?”
“It’s not that.” Blair swallowed visibly and looked at his feet. He dragged his eyes back up to Wren’s like there was nothing that could take greater effort. “Wren, you are the most intelligent and beautiful person I have ever met. And I wish I could have met you before all this, or maybe after,” he continued, sounding oddly distant, “but I didn’t.”
An unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation formed in Wren’s chest. “I’ve told you I don’t care about this mess with your gang.”
“I do. I also care about you, and things are about to get really nasty with Phantom. Ever since we got together, I’ve been slipping. They know it. I’ve known it. I just chose to ignore it.”
The sensation was spreading to his face, making it warm, making his eyes hot like when he looked at the computer screen for too long. “Blair.” It came out quieter than he wanted but the strange feeling was in his throat, too.
Blair’s eyes, his stunning green eyes that bled into hazel around his pupil, looked at him but the man himself seemed to be a million miles away. “I should have decided this sooner, before we were both so invested. I never, ever wanted to hurt you. God, it’s the last thing I want to do. But I can’t be distracted right now.”
Wren sat his thermos down too hard, his fingers unsteady. “Distracted,” he echoed.
“I’m sorry, Wren.”
“Don’t you dare.” Wren took a long step forward that brought Blair within arm’s reach, and he took the stupid idiot’s face in his hands. “I don’t know where this is coming from, but don’t you dare treat me like some defenseless whelp that you have to shield from danger. You know full well you don’t have to distract yourself with me, so you better tell me right the fuck now what’s going on.”
Blair looked like he was in more pain than the night he was brought in with a hole in his leg, but that didn’t make any sense because then why was Blair doing this?
“I just can’t do this anymore, I can’t make myself not worry about you. I can’t have my heart divided between you and Incindious. I took an oath to them first.”
“You...” Wren shook his head. Blair put his hands on top of Wren’s, and disgusting, traitorous hope flared in his aching chest.
Blair’s eyes were misted with tears but hard, and he pulled Wren’s hands away. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“We weren’t a mistake,” Wren said, and god, was that really his voice cracking like that?
“Goodbye, Wren.”
“Don’t you walk away from me,” Wren hissed, but his fingertips were numb, legs rooted to the ground, his heart heavy. Fuck his heart. Fuck the fickle thing that was betraying him, making him feel this way, after it had never let him feel anything before. “Blair.”
Blair stopped. It was an instant that seemed to last forever. Wren saw his hands ball into fists, and then he reached for the door. The door closed. The numbness spread, until Wren couldn’t feel the ache. He didn’t realize he had fallen back until he found his hand closing around the edge of the counter to steady himself. His phone started vibrating. It was probably Reymond. He swiped the green icon, but his throat had closed, caving in around his words.
“Wren?”
The word came out like he was choking on it. “Reymond.”
“You don’t sound like yourself. It’s graduation, can’t have a cat getting your tongue now.”
Wren choked again but rather than words, the feeling in his chest erupted once more from the numbness and rushed into his face, into his eyelids. There was an unfamiliar sting in them. “Reymond,” he repeated, and he no longer sounded like himself to his own ears, either. He didn’t know what was happening. Or what had just happened. Or what he was supposed to do now.
He didn’t know how Reymond heard the questions in his voice or how he seemed to know of the burning that left hot trails on his face and scorched a salty taste in the back of his throat, but he heard Reymond sigh. “Oh, no.”
His back hit the cabinets and more of those wretched sounds came as he slid down to the floor, and Reymond sat silently on the other end of the line.