A/N: I thank you all for your wonderful reviews! I also apologise for taking a couple of weeks to get this chapter up – I don't actually have an excuse… I'm sorry! After reading through this story, I realise that I hate Chapter 3 with a vengeance… I am currently debating whether the story would flow if I just deleted it… let's see… anyway, Chapter 5! I quite like this one, actually (although I have read it through too many times and am now sick to the bones of it)…
Anyway, thank you TO: Exintaris, BingIsBack, anhonestmoose, PCGirl, BroadwayDiva, SuicidalWhisper and Sea-Angel24 for reviewing – this is your reward! (I'm poor! I can't afford anything else)!
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Nineteen minutes past four greeted him in the dusty limbo. The aching gap between a sunset and a sunrise – it was always the same – always like this. The digits were green, and they glowed their disapproval into the semi-darkness - his only light source. He let his eyes relax and mould around their shape until the arrangement of lines became a white stamp branded onto his retina. That was, until the numbers changed with the passing of time and signalled the start of a brand new dance but no one to waltz with him.
Oceans of nausea often crashed over him at night. Normally, he could plug his ears and ignore the lapping of the tide, but tonight, she was being carried away on the crest of each wave, and as she cried, her face a waterfall of tears, to him for help, he could only watch. Motionless, he stared at her as she grew increasingly smaller, his body paralysed with a fear of the unknown, as the national movements of the Earth gradually inched her away from him.
The tide was going out.
He fell out of the bed – it was easier than forcing his sluggish limbs into some pointless motion – and lay exactly as he landed, curled on the gray carpet. He was like a child enclosed inside his mother's womb – yes, he was safe now. She was coming home to him at last – the pull of the moon on the waters had changed direction finally.
And they would laugh and share some civilised bottle of wine, and then grow old on an armchair together. And then, when his number was called, and he was forced to leave the safety of this cocoon, they would blossom together – emerge triumphant and beautiful, each forming the wings of a majestic butterfly. Oh, they would fly.
"You couldn't sleep either?" Sam stood in the doorway, flannel pyjamas hanging off her skinny form, and a slight tremble – barely noticeable – held captive by the custody of her voice, and he realised how he loved her.
"No."
"Excited about tomorrow?"
"Not exactly…" He paused. "I just need to see her face. It'll be okay then… it's got to be okay then…" Inwardly, he smiled, but the emotion did not reach his eyes – the hope was not warm enough to melt them, and they remained frozen solid like ice. Tomorrow, he could begin to thaw.
"Dad – did you… did you hear what Ross said earlier? I mean – about Mom? She didn't know who she was… I mean…"
"Yes, that's right. She was lost." Just like him. They were both components on the same circuit, yes, and the wires joining them and the current running through them were the bond that they shared. They were both lost, but once they found each other, they could follow the path of breadcrumbs and find relief from the labyrinth; the labyrinth that Fate had led them into so cruelly.
"There's more than that, though… I don't think you heard this earlier, Dad, but… she – uh – she… has a kid…" The words came out in a reluctant rush.
Chandler was jolted upright by a sudden surge of electrical charge. "Benjamin?"
"Um… who?"
"Just someone I used to know," he whispered.
"Who?"
"Ex-husband."
She frowned. "Mom has an ex-husband? You never mentioned one before, Dad! Who is he?"
"Oh, no - not hers… mine."
"Is this something I should know about?"
"Probably not, no…" He swallowed. "Who's the father?"
"Of her kid? Dunno. He – Ross – didn't mention it. He was kinda in a hurry to get away, I think…"
"Isn't that something of a key fact to include?" queried Chandler, raising an eyebrow slowly. "Didn't he think that, you know, we might be interested to know that?" The pitch of his voice rose increasingly, the shrill sounds grating her ears. "Didn't he think that we – I – have a right to know?"
"You know Uncle Ross, Dad – if someone doesn't have 'saurus' at the end of their name, then he's just not interested…"
"Some things never change," he muttered. "How does that work, anyway? How come some things stay the same and other things change so much it kills you?"
"Are you talking about Mom?"
"No." He was not ready to stop lying just yet. He straightened up, and warily reached an arm out to push a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Go to bed. It's late."
"You're not in bed," she said, stubbornly, gesturing to his position on the floor.
"I'm close enough! I'm next to the bed – that counts! Go to sleep, Sam. It'll all be better in the morning."
She gave a wide grin. "You know what, Dad? I think it will…"
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"She's outside." Sam's voice was detached and did nothing to betray the tumultuous hysteria rumbling around her empty stomach. She had not been able to eat anything for breakfast. None of them had eaten since Ross's visit. There was no point. Food wouldn't change anything.
Marcus, who had been lying flat on his back on his mattress and fiddling with the flapping trim of his leather shoes, bolted upright. "What?"
"She is outside. There. Getting out of Uncle Ross's car."
He leapt off the bed and landed, sprawling, flat onto the ground. Grasping the windowsill with shaking hands, he pulled himself upwards, trying to find some higher level, and pressed his nose up against the window pane.
An empty road.
"Is this meant to be a joke?" he demanded, not letting his eyes move from the gray winter sidewalk.
"To the right," Sam whispered, and he craned his head to see a solitary red car sitting quietly in the middle of the road, its engine still running.
A slim, dark-haired woman stood, partly obscured by a flickering yellow lamppost on the garbage streaked concrete, clasping her purse, white-knuckled, like a Bible – as if she were praying for some kind of salvation.
And that was her. His mother. The woman who, in some parallel universe, had given birth to him – had held him in her arms and promised him that she would love him for always. But had the promises been empty?
And if he focused entirely on her, let everything around him – gleaming metal and spray painted red dreams – blur into the luminescent shade of myopia, he could almost carry himself there, on the back of those long forgotten memories. To the days when tree branches were pistols and he was both Cowboy and Indian, the mud smeared across his face the symbol of his pride. When power was measured by whether you scrawled in pencil or pen, or whether you did joined up writing yet – and when he still had some kind of faith. When family was the strongest damn word he knew.
He shook like a leaf gently pried from its branch and left, with no allies, to the mercy of the unforgiving wind. And he was falling and falling and falling and –
"Put your head between your knees!" barked Sam.
"Excuse me?"
"Look – if I have to miss out on seeing her because I have to take my great lump of a brother to the Emergency Room, then I'll – I'll – well, let's just say it ain't gonna be pretty… now put your damn head between your freaking knees, okay?"
He obliged, and felt an immediate rush of blood, bringing with it sharp relief. "Thanks," he mumbled gratefully. "I may have lost it a little there."
"Really?" remarked Sam dryly. "I hadn't noticed."
"Come on – we'd better get to the front door," sighed Marcus. "If we don't, she's gonna be greeted by a little boy who won't talk to her, and… well, Dad. Who, let's face it, is probably unconscious by now… God, what a great welcome committee we really are…"
They both smirked, savouring the moment as if it were the last.
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The knocking came quietly at first, and they were unsure whether someone was there or whatever it was just boys with torn jeans and hooded sweatshirts kicking a football against someone's door. But the sound intensified and germinated, and blossomed into a wild jungle of frenzied noise – and then they knew.
Glancing across at his father, who was sitting upon the sofa, still and lifeless as a resident of the morgue, Marcus nodded encouragingly at his siblings. He tried to stride confidently towards the door, wishing beyond wish that his legs wouldn't tremble so much, and that his forehead wasn't so wet with cold sweat and anticipation. He flung the door open, and with it, the flood gates.
She stood there, frozen still – halfway through a motion, her eyes fixed upon him. She had his eyes, he realised – or, rather, he had hers - they were the color that the sky is painted by the sun in the early morning. And so, he understood, the sunrise had finally come.
He swallowed. "Um… hi." His voice was lower than normal, and it cracked with each movement of his tongue.
"Marcus?"
He nodded slowly.
She had been expecting the sturdy, self-confident little child that she had left behind; chubby and rosy-cheeked with closely cropped sandy hair plastered to the top of his head, and a wide grin that stretched immeasurably. Instead, she found a tall and frowning youth. Skinny and solemn, with long dark hair dripping to his shoulders and loosely fitting black clothes hanging off his trembling frame, he was unrecognisable as her son – her boy.
"Shit!" she exclaimed, trying to hide her disappointment at the immense change that stood before her. "You're huge!"
He stared at her uncertainly – almost, she thought, as if he were afraid that, if he let his gaze drift from her, then she would dissolve into a million droplets of water again and evaporate back into the sea of the past.
As it was, she was right. He was terrified of letting her go – terrified that she would not be able to rescue them from this house – from this life.
"Hello, Mom," he whispered.
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A/N: Yes, I am terrifically mean for ending it there and not letting you find out what happens between Chandler and Monica, but, hey! I'm the author! It's my prerogative!