A/N: Greetings!
So... before y'all ask... I have no idea where this came from. For some reason, the more I\ve thought about the cannon of Our Girl and how CJ & Molly officially ended up in the story, and all we didn't see, the more the idea of an angsty reunion of our favourites in the windy, rainy backdrop of the seaside kept coming to me.
As I say, no idea why.
This is NOT cannon with my main Our Girl story, which is Alternate Universe. This story is intended to be a take on what may have come of CJ, after the infamous (ridiculous?) affair and cliff jump.
There are more part to it, because it felt like it needed breaking up a bit. This is the first.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Title and lyrics are from a new song by Lauren Aquilina - "Hanging By Your Halo"
Trigger Warning: Mention of illness, PTSD and miscarriage.
Hanging By Your Halo – Part I
"No excuse
For the shit that I've done...
But I'm blaming my head fuck
On my Cancer sun.
Wouldn't judge you
If you wanted to run.
Isn't loving somebody
Supposed to be fun?"
––Lauren Aquilina, "Hanging By Your Halo"
The last thing he was expecting on his obligatory bi-daily walk back from the dunes with Tiny was to find the achingly familiar, yet long buried sight of a particular silhouette in his doorway. Despite the fact he hadn't seen the shape of her for over two years, Charles recognised her immediately –– his pulse stuttered with a rather sickening leap as he half considered momentarily if he had suddenly regressed back to the worst of his PTSD journey and begun seeing things again.
What was she doing here after all this time?
Tiny was frolicking around his legs, excitedly declaring to him that they have a visitor, in the form of one or two sharp barks.
"Quiet, girl. Heel!" Immediately, the tone of his voice quietened the canine and she fell in line beside him at the command, loyal and obedient as she was becoming even in her youth. Her fluffy, large beacon ears pricked forward as she eyed the figure on the doorstep with equal party suspicion and intrigue –– these days, in the depths of Cornwall at his parents once holiday house, now his primary residence, he didn't get many visitors. In the time since Tiny had been allocated to his care, she had only met a handful of people while at home, his parents and Sam being the most of it.
Charles suddenly forgot about the ache in his cursed leg and his inner grumblings about his mother's earlier phone call and took increasingly hurried strides. It had begun raining heavily around a mile into his walk, but his waders and waxed overcoat meant he had barely thought much of it, but suddenly, he realised just how torrential it had become.
As he approached ten or so metres from the front door, the sight of her was unmistakable. He couldn't put reasoning to why she would suddenly be here and still therefore wondering if his mind was making it all up. All at once, his brain began cataloging and comparing the sight of her with those of his memories, unconsciously noting the differences.
"Molly?" He went to open his mouth again, to call out to her over the volume of the rain and ask her why she was here, but to his surprise, she spoke over him.
"I…" She seemed to be gasping for oxygen, looking at him, wildly and sheepishly as though she didn't know how he'd receive her. "Sorry to just turn up, I jus'… I needed to talk to you––"
Sorry? She was sorry? He was frowning and grappling for a response immediately. Surely, given they were estranged for two years thanks to his unforgivable betrayal, he should be the one giving apologies –– and the Molly who had spent two years giving him radio silence would have agreed and then some. Tiny made a sound of questioning beside him, clearly wanting to greet their new guest but unsure whether they were friend or foe. The irony of which being, Charles himself had no idea which they were to one another now.
"Tiny –– She's a friend," he said clearly over the rain, turning his eye contact to the cocked head of the German Shepard beside him as he walked. He gave her an encouraging gesture that she could move forward and, despite his anxiety at the sight of his estranged wife, cracked an encouraging smile towards the animal. "Friend."
Immediately, Tiny moved toward quickly with a friendly wag of her bushy brown tail. It was only then that Charles was close enough to take in the sight of her through the sheeting rain and his demeanour immediately changed.
The first thing he noticed most was her hair was short –– a long, blunt bob that sat at her shoulders. It threw him to see it, having only ever known and loved her with such long, silky straight hair. She was nowhere near dressed for the April downpour, her hair and clothes soaked to the skin through her thin coat. She was shaking and her nose was red with cold, sheltering in the small front porch and looking at him almost like she was expecting him to send her away.
She barely had time to acknowledge the dog's attempts for attention at her thigh before Charles was closer than he ever dared imagine he would ever be to her again.
"Jesus, you must be freezing. You'll catch pneumonia!" Immediately, he hurried forward, hastily shrugging off his fleece beneath his waxed coat to place it over her shoulders. He made the mistake of grazing her wet shoulders as he placed it over her and pushed down the violent lurch of longing being so close to her upended in him.
"Yeah, yeah, Mister Responsible." She rolled her eyes at time, but he sensed she was far too distracted to actually have any malice, which, given their last interaction over two years ago, was like whiplash. "You know me –– never did do the countryside," she spoke again, her tone suddenly reminiscent of the heartbroken version of her he remembered, trying her heard to come across as though she were unaffected, sending him into a descent of dark memories. "It wasn't raining––in––London."
Her eyes noticeably glassy even through the increasingly incessant rainfall. He just stood for a moment under the porch with her, wondering what was so different about her and why this exchange felt so out of place. He hadn't heard from her since the day she walked out of their then home, leaving behind her wedding dress and her rings and never coming back, despite a year of trying and other year of quiet, careful eavesdropping on her existence from afar.
Something about her demeanour was entirely wrong. The Molly he remembered from that time had been silently enraged, then frighteningly detached and, last of all, bleakly emotionally heartbroken –– almost hollow. At the time, he had been so devoid of any emotion and perspective himself, he had lost all ability to see any of what he'd done, much less how desperate and devastated she had been with any kind of clarity.
It wasn't until much later, just over a year ago, when his endless attempts to chase any slight news of her had been met with an explosive truth from a defensive Jackie telling him to well and truly back off, that he'd had insight at what he'd truly done to his wife's mental state.
Comparatively, the Molly before him now looked manic, almost hysterical, her eyes down and her nose running. Her body seemed animated, filled up with anxiety and fidgeting in adrenaline, her breathing ragged and he could see she had been trying and failing by the red corners of her eyes that to keep herself from crying.
Immediately, the rain was no longer the cause of the chill that triggered a shudder over him.
"What is it? What's happened?"
Despite the logic of needing to get out of the splashing of the rain, he found that neither of them moved, confronted with the shock of being in such vicinity with one another again, no doubt. She couldn't look at him, looking up and then down at the dog, swallowing thickly enough that he watched the heavy lump roll in her throat she tried to swallow.
"I… I just…didn't know where else to go."
The statement was so small and sounded so frightened that it sent his anxiety through the roof. Any further questions died on his lips as he shook his head, raindrops flinging themselves down over his face with the movement. "Come inside, quickly."
He unlocked the door and guided her inside, trying to keep his breathing calm.
"Tiny –– bed!"
Immediately, the German Shepherd went and sat in her bed instead of shaking off the rain all over them both in the hallway.
"You got a dog?" The question was quiet and relevant, but the question somewhat out of place. It was too conversational and too blasé for her current state. She was watching him as he took off his wellington boots and waders and stepped out of them. He frowned, because the question sounded sad.
She'd always looked forward to the day they were going to get a dog together: another promise he had broken.
He hurried to take her wet coat from her and settle her on the open-plan living room sofa. It didn't escape his notice that she looked very pale, dark bags under her eyes. "Stay put. I'll make you some tea and a towel, something dry."
He returned in record time, handing her over the tea and placing some of his clothes next to her. She sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa drowning in his damp fleece, hair dripping as she began wringing it out, as though indecisive that she should be there surrounded by his domestic setting. She settled nervously into the mug of tea, taking down gulps despite the scolding temperature.
Charles perched at a polite distance from her, despite every cell within him wanting to take a hold of her and comfort her with his physicality. He knew he did not have that right anymore.
"What's wrong, Molly?" He implored her with his eyes to look at him, but she looked everywhere but. "Not to sound like I'm not happy to see you, because I bloody am, but…?"
With shaking hands, she put down the mug, careful to place it down on his mother's prized coasters. "I'm sorry to turn up like this when we 'even't talked in yonks but I just… I know how bonkers it must look. Honest, I don't know why I'm here, entirely. I just, I came out of my appointment and I just… I remembered one of the boys saying you lived here at Smurf's anniversary the other week –– they tried to pretend they hadn't mentioned you but I heard it – but then…after today, I just… I needed someone to tell and you were all I could think of." Holding back tears, her voice cracked. "I couldn't go home to Mum after, 'cause then I'd have to tell her…"
Frowning in concern and confusion in equal measure, he moved himself closer upon instinct, forgetting his attempt to respect his own set boundaries. "Molly, slow down, I don't understand." He tried his best to take a deep breath. "After what? Tell her what?" Automatically, he moved his hand to grasp hers after his anxiety triggered a feverish, sickening heat across the back of his neck.
Then, for the first time in their entire exchange, she met his eyes. It was as though the first skin to skin contact between the two of them in nine hundred days awakened her to the present through her residual state of panic. It was like a jolt of electricity as the sheer volume of her worry, fear and pain hit him through their eye contact, so loud that it would have been crippling had he not put in over a years work to get himself to a place of acceptance for all the damage he had done.
All that work and he had still not been prepared for this moment.
"God, you're shaking," he whispered almost to himself, moving even further into her almost on autopilot. He immediately went to move back, freezing mid-reach for her, realising too late what he was doing. Fearing her rejection, he stopped even breathing. "Molly, you're scaring me." He has to clench his fist to keep his nervous tremble from showing. "Talk to me." She let him hold her hand, which sent fear and elation through his system simultaneously: fear that she'd take it back…and elation that she let him comfort her at all.
"I, uh…" He watched as tension froze her face in a grimace, telling of her attempt to try and keep back tears. "I went to see a consultant today."
He hadn't been sure what he'd expected to hear, but it hadn't been that.
Like a fast approaching train, he wanted to tell her to stop, to take it back. He had been so filled with joy to her on his doorstep…but this…
"And he thinks––" Her voice cracked, rising with distress as she looked away and dashed a tear from her eye. "He thinks I might have…um…ovarian cysts that…could be, um…an issue."
She watched him watching her and digesting the information, his eyes going wide with confusion and then immediately glassy with panic.
"Wh…" He attempted to speak, but his mind was suddenly racing, running a mile a minute in the way he thought was behind him. "What? An issue as in… as in… cancerous?"
He knew from the look on her face, in that moment, just what she'd meant.
She wheezed with an aggressive sniff of the nose. "He doesn't know until after the…biopsy results." Her hand left his, moving to around her own middle as though to hold herself together. "I just… I just was having…so much blood––pain––and I'm…" Her green eyes, so expressive and so full of fear, asking so much of him. "I'm so scared, Charles. I' ain't ready for this to be it…What if it'––"
He felt his world wobble, only tenuously keeping to its axis, his breathing coming shallow. He may have not seen her in over two years, but he knew she was out there and he knew she was safe. He kept enough tabs on her for that. As he had gotten better, it became all about that: he no longer deserved her in his life as he dreamed of, but that didn't mean she wasn't everything to him still.
The words she spoke were the crux of his weakness: he had thought losing Elvis had broken him, but losing her, in any kind of physical, finite way from this earth, would, he knew, be the final mortal straw for him. What would it leave him with?
She was speaking to him, but he could no longer hear her. He was looking down at her, panic racing through his veins, trying desperately to keep himself on course. Feeling claustrophobic, he reached for her face, flashes of long ago when he'd done just that in an Afghani hospital ward blinkering his focus. Negative thoughts on top of negative thoughts building on top of each other like bricks and cement.
Focus on the here, focus on the now. What can you feel beneath your hands?
Sofa cushions. Wet, silky, cold hair, short and tangled. The soft curve of her waist beneath his fleece, body trembling. Her stifled crying caught her breath in her throat, strangled.
Flashes of concrete and Georgie's cries, Elvis' burnt face, the tragedy and brutality of senseless death in every way he had ever seen it, suddenly invaded his senses like a siren, sending icy dread through his veins.
"I'm sorry, I'll um…get you some water. One minute."
He somehow managed to get up and moved away, silent and numb on the outside and desperate to shield her from what he knew had arrived on the inside: a full blown panic episode.
In the depths of his mind, he hated himself, loudly shouting at his body for leaving her to cry on his sofa and making it all about him, but it was like swimming against the ocean current. "Charlie––what the fuck? Are you even listenin' to me?"
She was tearfully calling out after him, no doubt thinking him rude or detached like the lat time they had been in each other's presence, but it was like he was in a wind tunnel, drowned out by his heartbeat. He'd come off some of the stronger medications recently, unsure if it weren't too much by the horrible way they left him feeling, but now he felt the full force of his PTSD in a way he had begged was long behind him and he wondered if he had made a grave mistake.
He reached for a glass in the kitchen with a shaking hand, intent on bringing it back to her, just taking a moment and then he'd be fine. When he attempted to fill it, the stream fell down over his hands, half missing its intended placement in the glass. Somehow, now with wet fingers, he lost his grip and it shattered with a crash against the porcelain.
"Shit!" As blood rushed in, pounding in his ears and breaking a sweat across the nape his neck, only one thought was left.
Not her, too.
From the doorway of the open plan living, Tiny took her cue. Ever the diligent trauma service dog in training, she came to his side and immediately reached up with her paws to comfort him, making a sound of communication as she tried to burrow her face into him as a distraction.
Molly came round into the kitchen, all guns blazing. However, suddenly her tone changed as she took in the right of him leaning forward against the counter with a hand to his chest. "Charles?! What's wrong?"
"I just… need a minute… Heart's racing…" He tried to say, but even he knew he was convincing no one, making sounds of distress in his attempt to get his heart rate back to a level that didn't feel like he was dying. Before he knew it, he was on the floor of the kitchen, Tiny with her wet muzzle in his ear. This kind of panic episode hadn't happened to him in so long, he had hoped he would never need Tiny for this… More than anything though, he had hoped he'd be better, better than all that, before he ever saw Molly again.
And yet, she was there, on her knees on the floor, touching his face. "Charles, hey! Hey, look at me." She was speaking through her own tears, her own fear, reaching to hold him as tight a panic hold as he could ever remember. "I'm here. You're here with me. It ain't all that! Me and your furry friend, yeah? She's worried about ya!"
Even in terror and existential dread, she cared enough for others to care for his dog's worry. If he'd been altogether with it, he'd have laughed.
"Fuck, sorry," he said tearfully, a hand reaching for her face as he patted Tiny away. "Fuck, what you said is not about me, I know it's not about me, I'm sorry. God, I hate myself for this––."
"––Hey! None of that!"
"I have… I've been so much better for a long whiles, I swear––" He gritted his teeth against the nausea of anxiety that was racing through him. "I just can't––Molly––"
His pulse leapt in the most addictive way as, this time, she was the one to reach for his face. A kind, gentle palm against his cheek, guiding them back to eye contact. "I'm here."
"I'm sorry!" he said, the words coming hurried and rather nonsensical, letting her pull his head against her shoulder maternally, allowing his weight to sink against her. "I'm not good with panic these days––" He gulped for oxygen. "I just, I can get into these catastrophe spirals and the thoughts just get darker and darker and hearing that kind of news from you…" His hands flexed on reflex, squeezing her waist hard. "I can't lose you, too," he croaked, no saliva in his mouth. As she smoothed a hand over his wet curls, ignoring the ache of her bottom on the solid stone floor, she felt her throat entirely clog up with emotion. "I won't survive it," he wheezed, his grip so tight around her middle she almost gasped for breath herself. "It would end me. It would be the end of me."
"I ain't dying yet," she murmured awkwardly as she hushed him, her own voice wobbling with emotion and an attempt to cover it up.
"God, Molly," he groaned with an incredulous, pained laugh as he gasped for breath. "Don't make jokes."
"It could all be a false alarm, that's all," she offered weakly, tearfully laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. "Sorry, I shouldn't have told you."
"Oh, rubbish!" He scolded adamantly in his breathless state. "I'm glad you did." Tiny made a gentle noise of upset at being ignored and pushed her nose against his face. "It's okay, girl. It's okay," he sighed, smoothing a hand over her smooth furry head, just as Molly reached to do the same.
"She's a well good dog. What's her name?"
"Tiny," he replied, her voice hoarse, levelling out his breathing and smiling a small smile at her clear attempt to redirect his attention.
Molly pulled back and looked down at him with a cocked eyebrow. "She ain't at all 'tiny'. Is that one of your jokes?"
He could feel his face flush a bit. "As in, Tiny Dancer––"
She couldn't help herself, and he knew she couldn't, by the way her expression twisted to try and keep back a burst of inappropriate laughter. "––Ya' really named ya' dog after an Elton John song?! Oh, you old git!"
He let her laugh at him, inwardly reliving every moment he spent debating on what to name Tiny when she had been just a small puppy. What she didn't know, of course, was he'd deliberately named the little thing something he hoped would have made Molly laugh… had she been there. In this smallest of moments, he could stop himself from smiling. At least some things haven't changed.
"She's a PTSD support dog –– I've been training her for myself, since it's part of the work the foundation funds already for others. I work for a PTSD veteran foundation part-time now," he added after her questioning look. He sounded apologetic and as he peeped at Molly from under his lashes, she was nodding, solemnly.
"That's good," she said, giving little away. "That's really good, Charles. I'm glad for you."
""The clinic suggested if I were struggling with an empty house and recovery, it might be worth a try, so I thought I should probably try and practice what I preach for once. How hard could it be? Well, this moment notwithstanding, it had been working."
Molly pursed his lips together, suddenly rigid and looking away with a slight bristle.
"What?"
"Nothin'."
"Molly…"
"I don't wan'a do this now, Charles!" She denied sharply, but he could see her mind whirring.
"Say whatever it is you're thinking so hard about over there," he said, smiling sadly across at her, petting Tiny for distraction. "I mean it when I said, I always want to hear the truth from you."
She sighed, swallowing hard as though to push back fresh tears. Suddenly, the flint of familiars cold anger was back in her eyes, her reason for being here momentarily forgotten. "Why couldn't you get better when I needed you to?"
He stiffened against the onslaught but tried his best to give her the eye contact she deserved.
"I mean, I'm glad and all Charles, but I gotta admit it fucking hurts. Why now are you suddenly the reformed and the former of all the broken soldiers with PTSD? Why not when I begged and begged you to see how ill you were? Before you fucking butchered everything in my life." She was suddenly standing up, pacing the kitchen space in front of the island. "Why couldn't you be this enlightened back then? Why did you have to destroy us to get here?"
He felt the punch of remorse square in the chest and did his best to take it entirely aboard without any defensiveness. She was right, after all.
"I don't… I wish I knew why it had to happen that way – It weighs on me all the time. I can never forgive myself for how many people I hurt, most of all you." He sniffed and rubbed the remnants tears from his eyes. "My psychiatrist says one has sometimes hit rock bottom to any anything solid to push off to get back up."
Molly scoffed, but he could see she had marginally lost some of her earlier bluster.
He carefully rose back to his feet to move closer to her, patting Tiny in recognition of her attentions before putting his palms up before him almost in a gesture of surrender. Looking right at her, she was now somewhat trapped against the island, unable to flee without passing him.
"And make no mistake, Molly: my absolute rock bottom wasn't losing him, it was losing you."
Her expression twisted from the detached numbness she was trying too hard to project, momentarily giving away a visible flash of agony. Then, just as quickly, the anger was back. "Well, that's bloody great to know now, Charles, but it's all too little too bloody late! I'm so glad destroying every inch of my self worth and happiness at least propelled your mental heath back on fucking track." Suddenly, all the previous moments of maternal empathy were gone, replaced with the kind of reaction he always feared she would have for him if they ever reunited. She crowded him against the counter despite their height difference, no longer showing any trace of her previous existential panic that brought her here.
"I know," he murmured, quietly, humbly taking her anger with a bowed head. "I am unspeakably sorry."
"I don't know why I came here," she whispered, gazing up at him, looking both bitter and exhausted.
"I'm just glad that you are. I wanted so much to…have the chance to show you how much better I've been…and try and apologise."
This close to her, he could smell the traces of fresh rain and the slight traces of her perfume. It was like a siren call to finally smell it again, and he found himself clenching his fists. The shake of her favourite bangle on her wrist chimed a sweet sound between them as she gestured with her hand as she pointed at him and sneered.
"As if an apology could ever fix that. Shame you couldn't come to enlightenment before you stuck your cock in my best friend."
"Molly, please." He physically cringed with shame at the brutality of her wording, crass but all too true, unable to look at the visceral fury in her green eyes. He attempted to take a step back, hands up in surrender.
"Was she at least worth it?"
She was taunting him, deliberately pushing up into his space. In his chest, his heart was racing, unaccustomed to any woman being so close to him after all this time. He had daydreamed so many times about finally having Molly this close again…but his fantasises and this moment were painfully jarring in their stark differences. Her concept and aggressive advances had nothing of love in them and everything of revenge and fury.
"C'mon, Charlie." Her hand was suddenly down his front, deliberately taunting him by smoothing her hand over his crotch. His entirely body shuddered at the unexpected contact, with both surprise and long-surpassed desire. He had be celibate since his infidelity with Georgie Lane and often wondered if he would ever allow himself to feel desire again with all the trauma and heartbreak to had brought him then…
In this moment, however, it was like a violent, guttural awakening.
"Sweetheart, please––" He could feel the familiar, unmistakable tug of his balls as she touched him, the rush of blood to the region arriving with a heady speed unknown to him after years of solitude.
"Don't you dare call me that," she whispered, angrily. "You don't get to call me that."
His breathing trembled as she massaged him with the most gentle of touches through his jeans, in such great contrast to her steely fury, leaving him dizzy and his breathing ragged.
"––Fuck, Molly. Don't––"
She smirked in a manner that was cold and angry, quietly smug, huskily whispering against him. "––Did she make you hard, the way you're hard for me?"
"Stop it, Molly," he begged between his gritted teeth. "It was nothing like it was with us. Irrevocably different…"
"Wasn't it?" She sneered in disbelief, her hand fighting to surpass his belt and dip into the well-worn blue jeans. He was trying to grab at her wrists, but his resolve was weakening every time her fingertips touched him. "So, you didn't let her touch you like this?" His fly now undone, she all too suddenly had her slipped her hand inside the warmth of his briefs. His blood was flooding south at a rate of knots and he was losing his train of thought that he gasped as her hands, still so cold, touched him. Holding onto the counter behind him, he willingly let out a whimper.
"No one could ever touch me like you," he sighed, the words slipping from him in a lapse of focus. "There is no comparison."
"Then why did you want to be inside her?" She was speaking through an entirely locked jaw, holding everything back but failing. "You forgot about the wife you left at home, who had begged you to get help, just for a chance to be inside my glamorous replacement?"
"No!" he whispered, disgusted by the imagery, closing his eyes and grabbing her wrist and successfully halting her stroking at his pulsing, hyper-sensitive skin. "It was a desperation to feel anything… It…feels like another life. Like it happened to someone else. It was all over so quickly––"
He was hard and they could both feel it, harder than he'd been even on a years worth of waking alone and haunted by wet dreams.
"––Oh, well, I am glad," she snorted, coldly.
Before he lost his last shred of decorum, he reached down and grabbed her face between his two large, trembling hands. "Sex with you was never just about sex and you know it. We made love, every time we were together. What we had was––"
"––Yes, I bloody remember!" She snapped, hurt. "It was bloody life-changing and you killed it. You destroyed me."
"I wasn't well. I can't defend it, it was unforgivable, but it is the reason."
She was so furious she couldn't stand still, but her glassy eyes gave away the secret of the devastating sadness at the root of the fire that was on show. "I bloody know that; it's almost like I was the one trying to tell you to get help for months on end, but you kept running off on tour with her! But I wasn't enough to get better for. Not like her." She launched herself out of the kitchen and back into the open plan living room, away from him. Without second thought, he was on her tail, filled with a sudden fear that she was about to flee.
"Her?" He felt like a desperate shadow, following her to the front door and blocking it with his body as he suddenly felt the rush of need to explain and his words trip over themselves, incredulous. "I didn't get better for Georgie – not at all!" He reached for her on instinct, but she jumped back.
"An' I'm meant to believe that?"
"It's the truth," he implored, shrugging helplessly. "I wanted to in some messed up way try and make things up to you…to maybe one day be worthy of this conversation. I needed to feel I could get better for you, because it was either that or––" He stopped himself, dashing his eyes. "I haven't spoken to her since the cliff jump. I woke up in that hospital ward and it's like I'd finally broken my head above water after months of drowning. When you didn't come, I knew you knew and I was so ashamed, I tried to––."
He stopped himself before he said too much, pulling down his long sleeves in self consciousness as his brain shuttered with past thoughts of absolute self hatred. She was watching him so intently, no longer fleeing, and he momentarily worried she could see right through him and read his mind and see the unfathomable darkness his thoughts has been in at that time.
Thankfully, she didn't push him to finish that sentence.
"Why her?" Her upper lip curled in disgust as she stormed to the large glass and gazed at the storm. "I could understand if you wanted sex with someone else in some kind of attempt to give yourself something to feel. I maybe understand it… But it was my best mate and Elvis, your best friend's fucking girlfriend." He flinched at the mention of his oldest friend, despite trying really hard not to bury thoughts of him these days. His psychiatrist had to remind him that burying all memory of a lost loved one was actually the opposite of healthy coping and thus, he had to try and keep his memory alive, instead.
It was one area where he currently thoroughly struggled as much as the very first day.
"It was fucking disgusting," he agreed quietly, leaning against the door. "I know. All I make sense of is I felt…I felt you were better off without me, that I was dragging you down with me. You'd asked me to leave you––"
"No!" She was suddenly whirled around and facing him, her eyes with angry tears. "I said you had to get help or leave me. You chose the latter, Charles. You did––!"
"––You left me first!"
His accusation was a shock to them both. He had meant to stay above defensive reactions, as he knew it was unfair and he didn't want to enflame an already exhausting conversation, but he was only human…and the roundabout zigzag of the highly emotional exchange had him at the end of his tether. He was no longer the entirely restrained, buttoned up man he used to be. "You told me to leave you if I couldn't get help, and then ran off to Afghanistan before I could do anything either way! Didn't you think how that would feel to someone drowning in self hatred and doubt?! I needed my wife and she ran to the other side of the world."
Molly gasped as though he had hit her, tears shining in the increasing dim of the room.
"An' what about when you ran from me? Don't you think I was all those things, too?!" Her tone was almost shrill as her fight struck against his chest. "I had a miscarriage and your response was to come home two months later and completely shut off from me! All I had was self-doubt and absolute hatred for myself."Her memories of copper stained lino, strangers staring, her attempts to hide behind her trolling and scurry to the car to hide as quickly as possible, all of to was something she tried never to think about. But here, with him, the fury seemed to dig it up.
"I lost her, too, Molly," he sighed, letting impatience and defensiveness slip into his voice as it rose in volume to compete with hers.
"An' god forbid if you let me forget it!" She violently paced up and down, knocking a pile of his mothers magazines blindly to the floor. Neither noticed. "There was no room for anything but your grief, Charles."
"That's not fair," he tried, his voice weak with tears. "You know I tried time after time to get premature comp leave and it was declined. I tried. And then, Elvis––I couldn't––function––" He still to this day couldn't say the words, but the images could fill his brain easily still, like scolding branding behind his eyes as he had to sit and bury his head in his hands. He had to stop talking, taking breaths and closing his eyes to try and push back the sound of bones hitting concrete or the smell of burning flesh as the memories invaded his consciousness, uninvited.
Immediately, she seemed even through her fury to see that his suffering had shifted from communicative to something much more dangerously physical and transformative, as she stepped up to him long enough to place a hand on his arm, though stiff and angry, ever the medic.
"I left because I couldn't watch the shell you were becoming and be gaslit any further that it was all in my head. Because you left me in the ways that really mattered long before Elvis died. Or had you forgotten?"
Behind her, Charles slowly approached her, his body language sagging with shame. "No. No, I haven't forgotten. Sorry I snapped. I can't begin to imagine what that was like for you –– I hated the job for taking me away from you. If anything, it only added to the shit-storm that would become the self-hatred my brain would use to tell me I wasn't worthy of you. I just… What I needed was the very thing I couldn't ask for."
Her shoulders sagged as she leant her head against the glass, gazing out at nothing and for a long moment there was complete quiet between them, both sniffing snottily and trying to reel back in all they had released in a spiral of catharsis.
"I bled all over the supermarket floor in front of strangers and you weren't there. You weren't there."
He grimaced against her words, momentarily pressing his palms to his ears against the invasive mental image as heavy, salty tears spilled over. Without a second thought, he reached for her, seeing the distress twisting her features and needing it himself. He held her from behind, burying his face into the curve of her neck, but she didn't turn around, sobbing instead into her hands against the glass.
"I'm so sorry." The words were so inadequate, but he couldn't formulate anything coherent beyond the images circling his mind. "I'm so sorry."
"All I wanted was you to hold me and tell me it wasn't my fault that our baby died… and you came back so empty you wouldn't even look at me." By now, they had both given into their tears, running noses and inelegant, uneven breathing. "I hate you for how you destroyed me," she finished.
Behind her, Charles was unable to keep down the utter devastation of hearing those words escape the mouth of the person he loved most, letting it wash over him in an oddly cathartic kind of brutal, masochistic acceptance. It took everything in him not to openly weep.
"You took every single part of me that I'd built up through years of finally growing confident and believing you really meant it when you said I was brilliant and that you loved me –– you took every inch of that person and you crushed her with every promise you broke."
He blinked rapidly as a heavy tears finally spilled over, nodding silently.
She laughed, quietly and shallowly without humour as she rubbed her streaming nose on her sleeve, her voice wobbling with tears. "An' you know what the cruelest shit of all this is? Even after all that… it was still you that I wanted today, when that doctor sat me down in that room and told me that I might have fucking cancer." Now only a metre or so apart, Molly sunk herself down onto the nearest chair. "You're still the last person I wanted to see."
His expression taut with the distress of his tears, he sunk himself down as close to her as he dare. The silent relief of hearing her say such a thing practically knocked him sideways as he dropped his head into his hands again, momentarily speechless. "It's more than I deserve," he confessed, his voice painfully quiet.
"Yeah, well." The words were like a verbal full-stop, punctuating her decision that she was done with her emotions as she wiped her eyes aggressively. "I've decided: I don't want to die filled with the kind of hate I've been carrying around, Charles. I can't live like this: just…runnin'."
There was the truth of it, of why she'd come. Sudden fear of loss of morality could make a person do strange things and they both knew it. In Afghanistan, it had made him kiss her in that bunker, despite all previous absolute boundaries he had set for until the tour was over. Later, when it was real mortal danger and he'd almost bled out on that bridge, he could see the change in Molly's eyes when she saw him again in Birmingham. She had no longer cared about rules and absconded to be with him.
Sometimes, life was just too short.
She looked over at him and her malice was gone. "I've been so exhausted, hating the both of you… and today I suddenly thought: where does it end? Unless I decide to try an' end it, it will end up being all I've done in years and what a waste of life that would be."
Slowly, he shuffled closer until they were next to one another again and, holding his breath, reached out his hand. Their fingers met and immediately meshed together the way they always used to and her bright green eyes captured his.
"I can never, ever apologise enough for how I hurt you," he whispered lowly, allowing himself to finally take a deep breath. "I felt so guilty for––" His friend's name choked him temporarily. "Elvis' death that I felt I owed Her my care… It was co-dependance and avoidance at best. At worst, it was the worst kind of blindness to all that actually should have mattered to me in that moment… I'm––not explaining myself well, sorry."
She shrugged and made a noise of acceptance, turning her body of her own free will and leaning her face against his shoulder in the faintest of nuzzling. She let out a large, bold exhale, as though she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. "You were ill, I get that, it's hard to explain," she murmured. "I've just been so fucking angry… mostly because I couldn't stop loving you, even when I hated you."
Charles was frozen, not daring to move an inch as he let the weight of her face press against his arm. His body responded in kind to her words, making him want to whirl around and ask her to repeat it.
"Molly, I love you, too," he whispered, cringing at how emotional he sounded as he brought their hands up to his mouth on autopilot. "That never stopped, never could. I just got lost."
Stiff, Molly pulled back enough to look up at him, suddenly studying him intensely like he were a museum exhibit. Her teary eyes scanned over his face, as though looking for something. When she reached up to touch the delicate skin under his eye, he almost jumped out his skin at such gentle contact.
"You look tired," she said, immediately looking remorseful for how the words came out. "Sorry, I didn't mean––"
"––I don't sleep well," he replied with a small smile that didn't reach his eyes, not elaborating as neither needed it. "They give me sleeping pills, but the things are horrible."
"Me either, really," she confessed with a whispered, lowering her head to his chest for a brief moment. "I haven't slept for days worrying about the appointment today and now… Well, now I'll be stuck without a blink of sleep tonight waiting for the results."
"You and me both."
They shared a pair of sad smiles in that moment, seeming to reach an impasse.
"Stay here tonight if you like –– get some rest. Either way, go and change out of those wet clothes before you really do catch pneumonia," he offered. "Are you hungry?"
She shook her head, suddenly overcome by yawn as she stood up and went to retrieve the clothes. "Nah, I'm alright –– could do with a bloody drink, though."
At that, he laughed, though it was hollow. "I'm sure I can rustle up something."
