Boone somehow made it home safely and immediately headed up to his room, leaving Tom and Heather to deal with the aftermath of Andrews' reaction to the look on his face.
To say that the next few days didn't go well was putting it mildly.
They managed to keep the extremely upset boy downstairs through dinner, even getting some food into him.
Bedtime, however, found him outside Boone's locked bedroom door knocking futilely on the centre panel and calling his dads' name, refusing to be budged until he'd actually seen Boone.
Tom used a skeleton key to spring the antique lock on the old door and gain access to Boone's private space.
The man was lying on the bed in the foetal position, his face puffy and his eyes red from the tears he'd run out of several hours earlier. He was staring blankly into space.
Andrew slept with Boone that night, each of them needing the comfort of the physical presence of the other.
Boone lay sleepless through the long hours of darkness, holding on tightly to his small five-year-old lifeline, thanking everything he could think of for the anchor snuggled against his chest that kept him firmly tethered to his life. He arose pale and shaky with the arrival of the morning.
Andrew absolutely refused to go to school on Monday and Boone was in no condition to fight with him about it.
He pieced himself together enough in the afternoon to phone the principal of the school and arrange, in a surprisingly coherent and calm manner, for Andrew's homeroom to be changed to grade two. He realized that it would be far too uncomfortable and awkward for all three parties if Andrew remained in Pamela's class.
The man was only too happy to comply, pleased that Mr. Carlyle had reconsidered his earlier decision from the beginning of the school year. Mr. Thompson had already gotten several reports from Miss Phillips that she was becoming concerned about Andrew. He'd already outstripped his classmates and she was having a hard time keeping him challenged.
He advised the boys' father that the change would be immediate and that the required paperwork would be ready for Boone to sign in the morning.
While still horribly concerned about his dad, Andrew was, none the less, excited about the news. He was already bonding more with the older kids in second grade.
Boone sat quietly up in his bedroom with Andrew for the balance of the day, propped up against the headboard on top of the neatly made bed, trying to put a brave face on in front of the boy but failing miserably. He was more successful in keeping his thoughts carefully shielded however and spent some time explaining that things just hadn't worked out and it wasn't anyone's fault, impressing upon him that he expected him to still be pleasant and respectful to Miss Phillips if he should see her.
Boone was silent through dinner, though he did manage a few forkfuls of food in deference to Andrews' watchful scrutiny, and he actually got a bit of sleep that night.
He dropped an only slightly protesting Andrew off at school, reminding him about his new homeroom, and reporting to the office to sign the waiting papers. Afterwards, dreading every minute as he covered the miles to his destination, he headed for his regular Tuesday therapy.
The session was a disaster. Boone broke down into tears within the first five minutes and threw up twice. After his hour was up, they put him in one of the small private rooms, set aside for just this purpose, and the doctor gave him a shot to calm him down. It was almost two hours later when, at his increasingly agitated insistence, they finally let him leave.
Heather was waiting for him at home, the doctors' assistant having called ahead and advised her of the situation. Boone had signed several waivers when he'd started with the guy, one of which permitted the notification of Tom and Heather of instances such as this.
Heather held him while he cried himself to sleep, emotional and physical exhaustion finally taking their toll, along with the residual effects of the injection. At three-thirty, she went to check on him. Finding him still blessedly out cold, she went to pick Andrew up after school herself.
Boone became increasingly withdrawn after that, thought he did muster up a bit of the old Boone, at least the one he'd been before the dating fiasco, and get into the holiday spirit over Christmas. There was about a week, during Andrews' first school holiday, where he actually had a bit of a smile on his face at times. But once the tree was down and New Years' had come and gone, he was, if anything even more subdued than before.
In early February, he quit therapy, deciding that there really wasn't anything more that he could get out of it. He'd resigned himself to the fact that he was going to spend the rest of his days alone, and was trying to come to terms with the aching emptiness of not having someone to love, at least not on a spousal level. The only women who could possibly understand him came from the impossibly small pool of his fellow Flight 815 survivor friends and were all taken. He wasn't going to make the same mistake twice and try to connect with someone outside the group again. The mess with Pamela had proven to him that he had both too much baggage to try to explain and too much baggage to try and conceal.
Shortly after Andrews' sixth birthday, Tom and Heather sat them both down and carefully broke the news that they were moving. Their daughter, April, had married late in life, and she, along with her husband and two teenaged children, was moving to Palm Springs. The Marshall's wanted to be close to their grand children for the few more years that the kids would spend at home before going off to college, and so, seeing as the new house had an in-law apartment, were going with them.
Neither Boone nor Andrew took the news well. Andrew cried inconsolably, they were the only family he'd ever known, and he felt like he was being abandoned all over again. After a few days, though, he came to accept it, and actually got a little excited, and reassured, over the prospect of going to visit them. Boone had always known in the back of his mind, that they would inevitably move on at some point, but they'd become so important to him, so much more like parents than the ones he'd never actually had, that he'd forgotten that he wasn't actually related to them.
Heather made Boone swear a solemn promise that he would go back to therapy, at least for a little while, in order to help him through the transition, and he grudgingly agreed.
They were gone by mid-July, so he decided to do the renovations to the upstairs of the house that he'd been contemplating for a while. He called Michael, who gladly agreed to come and arrange for the work and then stay on to supervise. Michael was only too happy at the chance to get out of L.A. for the summer. He arrived, with his art supplies and Walt, by the end of the week, and had a crew in ripping up the place just a few days later.
For the balance of the season, Boone headed off once a week to visit his old doctor, leaving Andrew under the watchful eye of Walt. The older boy was excellent with the kid, and they spent most of their time together down at the lake. Once Boone had assured himself that Walt was responsible enough to take the boat out, and after checking with Michael, he gave him full access to the craft, just reminding him that they both had to wear PFD's at all times. The two boys shook their heads and rolled their eyes at the typical parental caution, making Boone laugh when he realized what a dork he sounded like.
The work was wrapped up just before Labour Day, and the Dawson's packed up their stuff, including the few canvases of new paintings that Michael had finished during breaks in the reconstruction. Once they headed back to the city, Boone and Andrew were left alone to get used to their new, and suddenly very empty, home.
Once again Boone quit the therapy sessions, feeling that the two months' worth he'd just endured had met the requirements of the promise Heather had extracted from him. It was perhaps not the best time to do that, because now he faced another period of transition as Andrew went back to school. His thoughts turned to possibilities of other ways to fill his time.
He'd always loved cooking, and had easily picked up the slack on the baked goods for sale end of things when Heather left, so he decided to expand on that and had a small commercial kitchen added to the house. He researched restaurant equipment on the internet endlessly before proceeding though, in typical Boone fashion. And after making his carefully considered choices and having the equipment installed, he then spent hours pouring over the manuals for the industrial mixers and ovens. The new food preparation space seemed to suck him in like a vortex; he found himself gravitating to it more and more, to the point where he made the decision to hire an extremely competent empty nester to pretty much run the store, so he could devote more time to his new found distraction.
Joan proved to be a treasure, his ability to correctly assess people once again not letting him down. She smoothly took over, and even added Andrew to the payroll. She had him working on restocking the lower shelves and doing general clean up during his spare time as soon as she saw that he was a bit at loose ends when Boone disappeared into his new playroom.
Once word got out about the quality of his products, Boone found himself not just making things for sale in his own store, but filling orders for school bake sales, church bazaars and local social clubs. Christmases became an especially busy time for him, much to Andrews' chagrin however.
He also, somehow, found time to volunteer at Andrews' school. It started innocently enough; a notice came home with a permission slip for a class trip to the zoo; the facility was looking for parent volunteers to help chaperone the day trip. Thinking nothing of it, Boone checked the yes box, signed the waiver and sent both documents back.
One of only two parents who positively responded, he found himself crammed into an extremely under-padded seat on a ubiquitous orange school bus with a mortified Andrew beside him. The boy couldn't believe that his dad was actually coming on a field trip with his class; he wished that instead of ESP he had the ability to become invisible instead.
It actually went really well, and Boone couldn't have been cooler, in his understated taciturn way. The girls all loved him, including the teacher, and the boys all wanted to be him. Andrew actually found himself jealous of his own father at one point before realizing, in his pseudo-adult way, how absolutely ridiculous that was. Once the teacher spread the word about the marvellous Mr. Carlyle, he became a regular addition any time there was a requirement for parental involvement in any activity.
Time passed in front of the mostly unengaged grey eyes, as he moved through it like an automaton, not allowing himself to experience too many highs or lows, thinking it safer that way, the mindless drudgery of his existence unceasing.
Shannon had a bit of a medical issue in the fourth year, and flew back to the States to have it taken care of, though the closest she could bring herself to come to him was New York. Filing the information they'd given her after the surgery away to be acted on at a later date if at all, she settled into a small studio apartment in Manhattan.
After her recovery, she found that even the space of an entire continent between them couldn't stop her from imagining herself back with him, not that it had really been any different when she'd lived half way around the globe. The fact that she went by several places they'd gone together when she visited him while he was in university didn't help.
She wasn't sure if it was the familiarity of the American culture, or something fundamentally different within her, but instead of picturing him with her, the way she had for the past four plus years, she found herself homesick and imagining herself back at home with him. Confused and wanting to put some perspective on things after almost a year in New York, she moved to Rio.
As the weeks turned into months, and the months into almost a full year, she came to realize that her visceral longing, her need for him had had nothing to do with New York at all, but everything to do with the fact that, fundamentally, she belonged with him, forever and for always.
Finally giving into the inevitable she packed her things for a final time and boarded a plane.
They were in the back yard, throwing the ball back and forth; it was early evening. Boone smiled at his son as he caught the ball and tossed it back. A movement at the back gate caught his attention. He looked over, the ball that Andrew threw catching him fully in the chest. He didn't even notice; she was standing on the grass just inside the gate, staring at the two of them. 'Shan, oh my dear god, Shan,' he thought.