Title: Fear No More

Summary: When everything is wrong, Collins finds himself at a loss for anything.

Notes: During-RENT; takes place a week or so before Collins comes back for the second time.

Two letters. Two letters lying on his desk, crinkled and waiting.

Collins stared at both of them. He focused on the one on the left, then quickly switched his gaze to the one on the right. Back and forth. Back. Forth.

He stopped and shook his head out. This was getting ridiculous. He'd already opened both of them; what did it matter which one he looked at now?

Even so, he carefully picked up the one on the left.

Col— it read. He made a face at the nickname and continued reading.

Col— Roger's still in Santa Fe. Don't know where Mimi is. Would have called, but I'm sick of having to go through the entire M.I.T. directory system. For the love of God, get your own phone line or something.

We miss you LOTS. Come back to us! It's almost Christmas, too.

Don't work yourself up.

Love love love,

Maureen

He actually hadn't been surprised to receive the letter. Maureen was a typical enjoyer of all sorts of overly-sentimental and halfway-jocular displays of affection. She had probably started writing it one day when she was bored, had become fully wrapped up in it, and consequently had been slightly disappointed to discover that it held elements of importance in it. She had most likely then stuffed it into an envelope and had promptly forgotten about it.

He reread the first two sentences of the letter and frowned. Then he reread the rest of the letter and frowned again.

He set the letter down and drummed his fingers on his desk. It was a Friday night. He was young, relatively speaking. Most people his age would have been out with their friends, or maybe out drinking. And it wasn't as if he was lacking either the friends to go out with or the motivation to drink.

Collins opened his drawer and dug past paper clips, empty boxes of staples, and out-of-ink pens. He picked up an interesting-looking sheet of paper, opened it to find a Shakespeare quote, and crumbled it up and threw it back into the desk. He found the piece of gum he was looking for and nodded at it triumphantly. Got ya. After reveling in his victory over the tornado called his desk drawer, he unwrapped the gum and threw it into his mouth, placing the wrapper (where else?) in his desk drawer.

He shut the drawer, sighed, chewed his gum, and picked up the other letter.

Tom, it read. He cringed at the name and continued reading.

Tom,

Stop stalling and come home. I need you.

Jen

He reread the letter lazily and set it back down on his desk, next to Maureen's letter. He leaned back in his chair and rested his chin in his hand. The hard part for him was never following through with the action; the hard part was making the decision, sifting through all of the possible choices, between right and wrong and the many, many shades that lay in between, and deciding which one to act out on.

He sighed. Who was he kidding? He had known what his decision would be as soon as he read the letters. He was a sucker for family, and it didn't matter whether it was family by blood or by choice.

He picked up his coat and his favorite knit cap and shoved the two letters into his back pockets—Maureen's into his left, Jen's into his right. It was time to go.

The train was crowded (holidays were busy times), but Collins had always been fond of traveling. He got restless when he stayed in one place too long. There was so much to do, so much to see. It took a lot to keep him in one place.

And yet…he chuckled to himself, shook his head. There were some people to whom he would always be drawn. His friends in New York. His family, including his sister, Jen. And first and foremost, always first and foremost, her.

Her…

He stared out the window. Careful, now. Some things were a little too raw to be dealt with. But at least he could acknowledge that fact. Baby steps.

The city of Cambridge was disappearing before his eyes. If he blinked, it would be gone. Traveling, for Collins, was rarely about the journey, and more about the destination. What did that mean about him?

He wasn't used to not having answers. He wasn't used to feeling so disconnected from everything.

Collins could handle things well. He had always known that. He was the rock for his friends, the one item of stability that they could rely on. He was the same for his family. But still…

He shook his head again, this time not a trace of mirth visible in his demeanor. He wasn't a very good source of stability. He liked to leave too much. Not to escape; just to leave for the sake of leaving. A new job, a new home, whatever it took. How ironic was it that everyone wanted support from the one person who hated being connected to anything for too long?

He shifted in his chair. The idea of being chained down…it made him uncomfortable. His family understood. His friends understood. Collins, quite simply, needed his space.

But right now…something was wrong, that much was clear. Because even after leaving, even after living in Cambridge, away from everyone, he wasn't feeling better. He needed something, he needed someone…and he wouldn't be getting what he needed, that much was certain.

He was tired of things not being right, but he didn't know how to fix them. Therein lies my problem, Collins thought sardonically. He pulled out the letter in his back right pocket, reread it, and sighed.

"Just in time for Christmas!" His Aunt Carla had said when he walked through the door. "I'm so glad you came. We all know how much you hate comin' home." She had wrapped him up in a hug, and even as she chuckled he could tell that she meant what she said.

"No," He insisted, holding her close. There had been a time when he didn't tower over her, when he could hide his face in her shirt and still feel invincible. "I just hate having to say good-bye to you."

She laughed when he said it, and rubbed his back comfortingly. She was consoling herself, not him; that was the effect that Collins had on people.

"How have you been?" She asked him. "We never hear from you."

"I call!"

"You call, talk for five minutes about the newest place you're moving to, then tell us that you have to go. If you think that qualifies as a good call, then you must be crazy." She shook her head at him as she finally let go and leaned to rest against the counter. He saw her for what she was. She was getting smaller, there were more gray hairs on her head than ever. And yet, she still radiated that same sense of motherliness. He almost felt ashamed for not having called more, especially when he looked at her and found himself struck with the thought that even she isn't immune.

"I'm sorry, Ma." She wasn't his mother, but she might as well have been. She was the one who had raised Jenny and him, after his mom and dad had died before he was old enough to remember what they looked like. "I'll try harder, you know I will." He smiled charmingly at her, and she laughed. She had always loved to laugh; it was she who had instilled that love of life in him.

"You always say that," she grumbled. "And then you smile like that and you know I can't help but tell you that it's okay and I understand how you're busy."

"I love you for it, though." He kissed her on her cheek and held her in his arms, pressing his cheek against hers.

She pushed him away. "Yeah, yeah, I'm just some old lady to you." She suddenly turned serious. "Your sister's upstairs. Go up and talk to her." She leaned back to study him for a moment. "Things are better now that you're here. They're better."

What he didn't understand, Collins thought to himself as he walked up the stairs to Jen's room, was how he could comfort others when he was feeling so uncomfortable. It was a physical thing, partly—the house was too small, the hallways too narrow, everything a little too much—but he had been feeling like this for awhile. The world was too much with him, though not in the sense that Wordsworth had meant.

He wasn't sure of how he was feeling, though. It was a sense, he guessed, a sense that he didn't belong here or anywhere.

And the problem, he knew, was that the one place he belonged was with the one person who no longer—

Still too soon, he reminded himself. God, it was too soon for anything.

He was standing outside of Jen's door. He knocked twice, quietly, waited for a few seconds, and walked in.

The room was just as it had been a little less than ten years ago, when he and Jen had both still lived at home. The same pictures hung on the bulletin board, the same inspirational quotes were on post-it notes on her dresser. Her favorite quote lay in the center, in print too small for Collins to read. He squinted, but all he could make out was the author—Shakespeare.

Jen was laying on her bed, covered by her quilt (the one she had sewn herself). Collins didn't say anything, just came and sat in the chair beside her bed and waited.

As he waited, he thought about his friends in New York. He thought about his job, about his students. He thought about the way that life had been curved around the edges, lately, the way that things hadn't been making sense. He thought about how much he hated the way things had been.

When it was apparent that Jen was not going to talk, he leaned back in his chair, sighed, and began to speak.

"Yesterday," He began quietly, "I cried." He leaned forward again, clasped his hands together with his elbows pressing down on his legs. "But it wasn't a big deal. I cry all the time. Sometimes I don't even realize that I'm doing it."

Jen shifted slightly, under her covers. He waited, and sure enough, soon he heard a muffled, "Why?"

He immediately shrugged. "Don't know."

"Yes you do," she countered. She pulled the covers off her face. She looked the same as she did the last time she had seen him, only with redder eyes. They looked at each other for awhile, in silence, and then she sighed.

"Go ahead and say it," She said defiantly. "Go ahead."

"I'm not going to say it," Collins said evenly.

She laughed derisively. "Then I will for you. You told me so. You knew from the beginning that he wasn't in love with me no matter how much he thought he was. You knew that he was the type that would cheat on me, you knew that I shouldn't have given my heart to him. You knew, but I was stubborn, and I wouldn't listen, and now I have to pay the consequences. There."

Collins remained quiet. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock in the corner, and the quiet thud of Collins' foot tapping the ground. He waited for Jen to speak again.

"Well," She said, resigned. "Tell me how I fix this."

At this, Collins laughed incredulously. "Me? Tell you?" He resisted the urge to enter into a long rant about the reasons why he was in no place to tell anyone else how to fix problems in their lives. He decided instead to admit, "I'm too screwed up to advise anyone else."

"I'm not anyone else. I'm your sister. You know me. And you're you, you always know what to do."

Collins pushed down his irritation. He'd forgotten how his little sister always knew how to annoy him. "I'm not perfect, Jen, and I'm not your problem-solver."

"Okay, I get it, your life sucks. Please, Tom, I need your help here. You're the only person who seems to have this whole life thing figured out. Please, Tom. I need advice."

"Me too," Collins shot back.

"I need it more," Jen told him, her competitive side kicking in.

"You don't know that." He could be competitive, too. And all the frustration at the standstill that his life had become was suddenly rising up to be poured out upon the person who needed it least.

"I've kept myself locked up in my old room for two weeks."

"I haven't been able to let myself call my friends in months."

"I haven't been going to work for all the time I've been here. I don't know if I still even have a job."

"I've kept a job that I hate for no other reason than that I don't know what else to do with myself."

"I'm afraid of letting myself be with other people."

"I'm afraid of letting myself acknowledge my relationships with other people."

"My husband cheated on me!" Jen whispered fiercely. "And I was too much of a coward to confront him about it, so I ran away! Because I knew the whole time that he was going to do it, but I couldn't admit it to myself."

Collins shook his head. He nearly laughed, because he held the trump card in this stupid, stupid, argument of theirs. "My girlfriend died." He said.

Jen opened her mouth and shut it.

"I'm lost She's dead, and I'm gone, and I can't even let myself say her name." He put his head in his hands. This was what acceptance felt like.

"I'm sorry," Jen whispered. "I'm so sorry."

Collins wanted to tell her not to be. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry for taking everything out on her. He wanted to be able to talk about how he needed to learn how to acknowledge things, he needed to stop himself from drifting into nowhere. He wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault that he didn't know how to fix himself, and that he didn't know why this time he couldn't push aside his own suffering to look at hers. He didn't say anything.

Jenny moved over in the bed. She squeezed herself against the wall, and looked at him. He got up and lay down beside her.

"Maybe it's okay," Jenny began. She stopped, and forced herself to speak once more. "Maybe it's okay for us not to be okay."

Collins thought about that. There didn't seem to be any answers coming soon, and in a world where the greatest things were still nonsensical, why try to make sense of it all? Why not just try to go with it?

They laid next to each other in silence. All Collins could hear was the stillness of the room and the pounding of his thoughts in his head. But no, those weren't his thoughts; that was his heart. He'd confused the two.

"What was her name?" Jenny asked. Her voice blended with the silence.

"Angel," Collins said. He felt like he was far away from himself and from her, but where was he? "I loved her."

He more felt than saw Jen nodding. He turned away from her, and she turned to face the wall, and still they felt united. Nothing had changed, but the fact that he could see that suddenly made all the difference.

It would be up to him to decide when the worst was over, he realized. It had been up to him all along, and that was the hard part.

Tomorrow, he would go back to New York, for the Christmas holidays. Jen and Aunt C would understand. His friends would be happy to see him. And they'd know, they would most certainly know, how he was still mourning. He wouldn't be okay, but they would be there. They would help make things okay.

And what was that Shakespeare quote, the one he had put back into his desk drawer? Perhaps the same one that Jen had written on the post-it on her mirror?

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun

Nor the furious winter's rages."

Fear no more, Collins thought drowsily. And he couldn't help but internally smile, as he drifted off, because he was sure that she…Angel, would have liked it.