He should have called in sick, Tommy realized, as he walked through the front doors to NBR. As soon as he woke up and realized his mistake, as soon as he remembered he was scheduled to work, he should've just texted Jamie and Spiederman to say he needed to come in a few hours late. To say he was sick, that his headache would have made focusing on music impossible, wouldn't have even been a lie. But instead, here he was, the combined effects of Vicodin and bourbon filling his head with fog. Nearly stumbling as he headed in the direction of the studio, he instantly knew he'd fucked up, and majorly.
This week had been hard, to say the least. He'd been in Toronto a little over two weeks, and he'd just moved into a new apartment within walking distance of NBR. The place was pre-furnished, but sparsely decorated, and he'd packed too lightly from London to add any kind of real personal touches to it. The walls were almost mockingly bare. Their place in London, by contrast, was covered in photos, a result of Jude's sentimental streak. She'd given him a few to take with him, a couple from tour of them with the band, one of him and Kwest and Jude and Sadie at Jamie's wedding, and one of Jude holding Caroline that he hadn't yet been able to bring himself to unpack from the box. He tried hanging a couple, but they only seemed to emphasize how blank the rest of the walls were. Being in the new place felt empty and foreign and lonely, and he wasn't sure whether or not that was worse than the memories that had been a constant presence at Kwest's apartment. He'd thought he'd been eager to get away from Kwest's sad, watchful sympathy, but the small amount of relief brought by the solitude was tempered by the loneliness and the stress of being alone with his thoughts.
The six month anniversary of Caroline's death was in two days. He tried to tell himself that it was arbitrary, that marking the date shouldn't have any particular meaning. It was just a day like any other day, he told himself, and she was no more dead this week than she had been last week. It didn't work, of course. He couldn't help but let the grief become bigger than everything else, remember that six months had passed since he'd last held his daughter, since he'd last been honestly happy. He hadn't told anyone about the anniversary, and no one else remembered. Jude was the only person he wanted to talk to about it, the only person he knew would understand, but he couldn't bring himself to call her, to be vulnerable with her again, not after everything. He didn't know if she would want to hear from him anyway. He'd given up the right to rely on her for any sort of emotional support when he'd decided forgiving her was impossible.
The last straw, the thing that had finally broken his resolve, had been the release of Benjamin's duet with Jude. He'd listened to it out of something that was probably masochism, but it had hurt so much more than he had expected. Surprisingly, the thing that hurt most had nothing to do with Benjamin, with hearing his voice and Jude's weave together. Instead, unexpectedly, it had been the lyrics. Whether the words had been written by Jude or Benjamin, Tommy didn't know and couldn't ask, but hearing Jude's voice sing the words I'm giving up on you had been a blow he couldn't recover from. The Jude in the recording sang You're the one that I love, and I'm saying goodbye, and he pictured her tear-streaked face the last time he'd seen her, her whispered we hurt each other.
The words say something cut like daggers, because if he rewound his memories further, he'd reach a point when he could have stopped it, could've saved them. Not everything about the way things ended had been his fault, not everything in his control. By the time the idea of him coming to Toronto had been presented, it had been far too late for either of them to stop the inevitable, and to leave on tour initially had been what he needed to do to process what she'd done and what she meant to him, to even start really trying to forgive her. But the moment when he held her phone in his hand, fury creeping up inside of him at the text messages from Benjamin, that was when he'd had the power to save their relationship.
Jude and Benjamin sang say something, and he knew he could have held her phone out to her and said, "explain this," instead of shouting. He could have listened when she told the truth about the duet, how she hadn't had a choice, instead of letting himself see red and throw her phone across the room. Say something, and he could've thought it through, remembered that he knew from experience how easy it could be to cheat, and that he had treated Jude unforgivably badly in the past and she had responded with fully undeserved grace and love and mercy. Say something, and he could have said, "I forgive you. Let's move on." Instead, he had let the anger control him, pushed Jude away so harshly for so long that she had finally been forced to push back, to sever the few threads that still held their relationship together. Say something, I'm giving up on you, and he was losing her all over again, this time with the full knowledge that it was his fault.
It had all been much too much, and he hadn't been able to think past the pounding in his head and the pain in his chest and the feeling of wanting to crawl out of his skin. He encountered again the gulf between what he wanted to do and what he knew he should do, but his baby girl was dead and Jude was three thousand miles away as the most important love he'd ever known lay in tatters, and what else mattered? What else did he have to keep him from drinking until the pain stopped? So he'd given in, drove with numb resolve to a liquor store and then drank and drank until the world went dark.
He'd woken to an alarm he hadn't expected to go off, sicker than he'd been in a very long time. The horror built in him as he remembered he was scheduled to work, a fact he'd entirely forgotten last night. His headache was the worst since the first few weeks after the accident, and standing upright, the dizziness and nausea were enough to knock him back down. He'd taken half a Vicodin, his second-to-last pill, to take the edge off the headache, and downed as much water and coffee as he could tolerate without throwing up, but the hangover was massive, especially combined with the residual brain injury symptoms, and so he had made a very big mistake by pulling out the bourbon again. His tolerance since the accident was different and less predictable than it had been, especially combined with the Vicodin. Hair of the dog, a balancing act at which he'd once been an expert, had backfired epically, and now he was drunk at work. Noticeably drunk.
He hoped to be able to head to the studio where he could sit down and finish his travel mug of coffee, both things he desperately hoped could help restore his ability to function and focus somewhat normally. But as he was thinking this, he ran straight into Zeppelin as she was walking across the lobby.
"Whoa!" she exclaimed, startled. She frowned as she looked up at Tommy. "Hey, are you okay? You look…"
"I'm fine," Tommy said quickly, but Zeppelin frowned and leaned forward towards him, inhaling. He stepped back from her quickly, but not quickly enough. He knew she could smell the alcohol on him when her eyes widened, then narrowed.
"Tom, are you actually–"
"I'm fine," he cut her off, firmly, and tried to walk around her in the direction of the studio.
"Whoa, hold up, we need to talk about this," she said, putting an arm out in front of him. "If you're–"
"Drop it, Zeppelin," he practically growled at her, and pushed her arm out of his path.
Jamie's voice came from behind Zeppelin as he walked up. "What's going on?" he asked, sounding concerned.
Zeppelin turned to her husband and said quietly, "I've got this, okay?"
"You need to come with me to my office, now." Zeppelin's voice was stern, but Tommy ignored her, turning away and starting to head down the hall.
"Hey!" Jamie protested. "Quincy!"
Zeppelin cut him off, softly saying, "Jamie, don't," before addressing Tommy again. "Stop right there." Her voice was commanding, surprisingly so, and Tommy slowed his steps in response, though he didn't stop. She tried again, speaking louder. "Sobriety is a condition of your contract, Tom. If I have to end that contract, I absolutely will." That made him stop and turn to her. She was standing with her arms crossed. They made eye contact, and she held his gaze, her stern expression not wavering even as he glared at her. "My office," she said again, somewhat more quietly. "Now."
Every defiant, proud bone in his body wanted to object, but something about seeing the normally timid Zeppelin hold her ground made him stop. "Fine," he said curtly, brushing past Jamie, who was staring with awed admiration at his wife.
Tommy sat down in the office Zeppelin and Jamie shared, and shame quickly replaced the defiant anger. Zeppelin entered after a moment, and closed the door behind her. He didn't look at her. "So," she said quietly as she walked up. She sat in the chair on the other side of her desk. "You're drunk at work? Tell me I'm wrong."
He glanced up at her, then away, at the wedding photo of Jamie and Zeppelin on the wall. "Are you going to fire me?" he asked, his tone more sarcastic than it probably should've been if he were genuinely trying to smooth things over.
"Should I?"
"Probably," he mumbled. Jamie and Zeppelin looked so happy, in the photo. They were looking at each other like there was no one else in the world, their smiles both radiant. He and Jude had been that happy, once.
"What's going on, Tommy?" Zeppelin's voice was gentle. He just looked down at his hands in his lap and shrugged. She sighed, and her tone was harsher when she spoke again. "You're obviously really talented, and we're happy to have you, but we gave you this contract as a favor, and you are far from irreplaceable here." He didn't say anything, and Zeppelin came around to the front of the desk, leaning against it and looking at him. "We hired you because you're family, you know? You and Jude. To Kwest, to Jamie, to me. I mean that. We all genuinely care about you, alright? We just want you to be okay." Tommy squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, but still didn't say anything. Her voice was soft as she asked again, "Come on, Tommy, you can talk to me. What's going on?"
"On Saturday it will have been six months," he said finally, looking back up at Zeppelin. His voice was soft, his face expressionless.
She looked confused for a second, then it clicked and sorrow filled her expression. "Oh, God. I'm so sorry."
"It's nothing." He looked away, his gaze falling on another photo on Zeppelin's desk, this one of Jamie holding a newborn Michael, and he remembered holding Caroline in the hospital as a newborn, then her body four months later, so tiny and limp and horribly still. His stomach turned and he looked away from the picture, back down at his hands. "It doesn't matter, it's just another day."
"Of course it matters," Zeppelin said. "You know you could've asked for time off, we would've let you."
He looked back up at her and said, harshly, "I can handle it." Zeppelin raised her eyebrows. Tommy clenched his jaw, then sighed and looked down, muttering, "I thought I could handle it."
"You're not alone, you know?" she said after a minute. "I can see how it maybe feels like you are, the way things happened between you and Jude, being back in Toronto… And I know you and I were never close, and I know you and Jamie weren't exactly friends back in the day, but you have to at least know that Kwest is here for you. But we all are, Tom. Kwest, Jamie, me, Sadie, Speid… We want to help you. There's no reason you have to go through this all alone. I meant it when I said you're family."
Tommy had no response to that, so he just sat, looking down at his hands and chewing on the inside of his cheek. Her words blurred in his ears, his head full of fog, and he just wanted to sleep, or to rewind, or…
When Zeppelin finally spoke again, her voice was a little harder again. "Okay, here's this, then. You came back to Toronto to get your life back together. I understand that you have been through some impossible stuff, but you owe it to a lot of people not to do things like drinking yourself sick when you have to work. This isn't acceptable. I can understand how it might feel like–"
"Can you?" he snapped, looking back up at her. "Do you really think you can understand, Zeppelin?"
"That's not what I meant," she said patiently. "If something happened to Fee…" She shook her head. "I can't imagine. I don't want to imagine. And then on top of it to have Jamie… No, of course I don't understand. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm trying to say is that I can see how all of this might feel impossible. I'm sure it feels a lot easier to give up, and I can see why you would have trouble believing it's worth it to try. But here's the thing. You owe it to me and Jamie and Kwest, and you owe it to the memory of your daughter, but mostly you owe it to yourself, yeah?"
To his horror, Tommy felt himself getting choked up, tears starting to prick at the backs of his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut. "I am so tired, Zep," he said in a broken, exhausted voice.
"I know," Zeppelin said softly. There was a long pause before she said, "The thing is that you don't have to do it by yourself. I get that that's who you are, and you don't like to rely on people, and I'm not saying it has to be me, but Tom, this is hard stuff, okay?" Tommy sighed again, and Zeppelin said, "Can you look at me for a second?" He looked up and met her eyes, and she said, "I really think that you can figure out how to be happy again. I honestly believe you can get through this." He just shrugged and she said, "You should come over for dinner on Saturday. We can invite Kwest too, we can leave the baby with Nana… You shouldn't have to be alone. Because you're not, Tommy. You aren't alone."
He couldn't decide whether the invitation made him feel supported or just pitied, but he said, "I'll think about it, thanks."
"Okay."
"So… I take it I'm not fired, then?" Tommy asked.
Zeppelin smiled a little. "Not this time." She looked more serious as she said, "Seriously, though, sobriety at work is a condition of your contract. You made a promise here, a commitment. You don't get to brush that off."
"I know," he sighed. "I forgot I had to work today and then the painkillers, and…" He shook his head. "I messed up, and I'm sorry."
"If it happens again…" she warned.
"You'll, uh, kick my ass, right?" Tommy joked.
Zeppelin laughed. "If that's what it takes." She stood up straight and gestured toward the door with her head. "Come on, I'll take you home. I'm heading home anyway. Technically I'm still on maternity leave."
He almost protested, but the wooziness became stronger as he stood up again, so he just followed Zeppelin out to her car.
When she pulled up to his building she said, "You okay?"
"Yeah," he answered quickly. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"You don't have to come in this afternoon or tomorrow if you aren't up for it, we'll figure out the schedule with Speid. But tomorrow's a new day, okay? You just made a mistake today, but you're okay. You're gonna be okay. Take a shower, sleep it off… You're going to be fine."
He looked over and met her eyes. "Thank you."
She smiled. "Of course."
When he got out of the car, he turned back and said, "You know something, Zeppelin? You're gonna be a good mom. That kid won't get away with shit." Zeppelin laughed, and he smiled a little as he shut the car door. As she drove away, he took a deep breath, feeling just a little bit less alone, and a little bit more like things might be okay.
