Heartbeats From Afar
Disclaimer: I do not own Big Time Rush or any of the characters, but I am wondering when She Drives is going to be released.
Author's Note: No, contrary to popular belief, I have not died! I know it's been a while since I've written ANYTHING, but I've just started a new job and it's been rather exhausting to hit the ground running. However, I will try to write more often; and on that note, I thought it would be nice if I broke my creative hiatus with a oneshot. This story was inspired a book I read recently (see if you can guess which one). You guys know the drill; I always look forward to your thoughts, comments and suggestions, so please hit that review button and tell me what you want to see!
"No, I don't think you understand, I-"
"Sir, our most recent records indicate that you are to have power of attorney over Mr. Knight and to act as his medical guardian." The voice over the phone bit into my ear with its weary snap, but I was still too frozen to even fight over the base conditions of politeness one should have when dealing with others. Throughout this barely curt conversation, my eyes had never left the head of soft golden spikes bobbing up and down in the living room to the annoyingly catchy theme song of some cartoon show. My heart lurched sickeningly against my chest, dancing away in some macabre tattoo as I was hypnotized by the energetic sway of the sunlit pastel locks. Five years, had that really been it? It felt like five millennia, five thousand years of moving in futile cycles of aching downs and destructive collapses into and out of this infinite sea. Heartache had become my home, and Pain my only companion; they carried me when I saw no way out, their touches like comforting stabs to my martyrdom. I am what I am today because I had eventually separated myself from everything that was him – I learned to see the seeds of my new life instead of the flaming ruins of my old ones. This phone call, no matter how rude it was, made me realize how incredibly foolish I had been: instead of moving forward, I had been stuck in that same moment for so long, I mistook my numbness for my own progress. "He… We're not together anymore" I whispered weakly, trying my utmost to fend of the need to fall away into nothingness and pretend it never happened. "He has a wife now, I'm sure she's with him."
"And she most certainly is sir, but unfortunately Mr. Knight never updated his records. If you no longer wish to act as his guardian, you can sign a transfer over to his wife and then not have to deal with any of this." Adrenalin flooded my blood in an icy burst. Is that what I want? Just one signature, and I'd be back to believing my wonderfully ignorant lie. It wasn't reality, but in the end what really mattered was that I would be whole enough to shower that frenzied little ball of energy with so much love, he'd never suspect in the least that his father had left me a hollow shell of the man I used to be.
No matter how you look at it, life is nothing more than an equilibrium of actions. Happiness, misery, wrath, love; every single emotion we are capable of feeling as human beings have all been carefully crafted to counter each other in some cosmically synergistic design. We aren't supposed to feel anything in excess because we're weak. I am living proof of that – find one person that tips the proverbial scales and that equilibrium in irreversibly disrupted. With every single facet of my life bleeding into each other, I could only think of him. In the chaos that came, he was the only rock I had to hold onto. The funny thing was he never knew it. Each time he would ask me if I was alright, I'd make up some excuse and say that my work drained the hell out of me. He'd flip his lips into that irresistible grin and take me into his arms, never once mindful of the fact that he gloriously slaughtered me every time my body was against his. Every night when I felt his adoring breath caress the back of my neck, I'd pray to God to save me from him. The truth was simple: I was starting to lose myself. I had willingly handed him so much of me, there wasn't anything left to hold my being together. It wasn't easy when you dealt with someone so entirely perfect, but I stayed. And five years ago, at least for a little while, our lives grew to accommodate another. That little pulse of time had grown to become an incandescent fantasy over the years in the hell of my mind. I have tried my best to kill it, but I guess there are some things that have to remain, like scars to remind you not to make the same mistake twice. "Mason" I called throatily, feeling my voice catch painfully in my throat. "Come on buddy, we have to go."
"But Dad, Transformers Armada is on!" In a single second, my son had turned around and gazed up at me with that defiant innocence I knew so well from my past. I say he's my son, but he looks nothing like me at all – those penetratingly green eyes haunt me every time I latch onto them, much like his did. He shares a grand total of zero percent of my DNA, but that doesn't matter to me. Or at least it didn't. I was the one who raised him, who loved him to the point where he wasn't a trophy from my nightmare, but a son, an actual extension of me. And now, I was taking him to the person who I had to thank for all this, who had put me here in a single night and quietly left the both of us to rot in his shadow. I don't hate him, but its one thing to shatter me. It's another to shatter my world. "We've got somewhere to go."
-xoxoxoxoxo-
"Dad, where are we going?" I bit my lip protectively as the same question burst forth from my boy's mouth for the sixth time. The sinew in my knuckles forced themselves to blanch ice white on the steering wheel as my feet shook anxiously on the clutch and brake. How am I supposed to tell him that we're on our way to his biological father, the breathing reason why I stand so alone in my life? I stared resolutely up at the ruby glow of the traffic light, my head spinning in delirious orbits. Kendall Knight would do the same thing when he wanted an answer, charging completely past the barricade of my demure silence until I was bothered enough to conjure up some lie. "We're on our way to see a friend of Daddy's" I murmured softly, feeling the car hum reassuringly as blood red surrendered to piercing green. The corner of my eye caught Mason's expression bloom joyously, his face lighting up into the song of a million fireworks. "Ooh, is it one of my friends? Are we on our way to see Tyler?"
"No buddy, this is… this is one of Daddy's friends." It was half true – Kendall and I went back all the way to our flurrying days of Minnesota snowball fights. Before we fell in love, we were friends, something that had resonated harmoniously throughout our relationship. Even now, a cold slap of Los Angeles air was enough to send me flying right back to dodging my lover's deadly throwing arm. The thing was, how could I ever tell him that the man we were about to see had me wrapped around his finger without so much as a word from his heavenly lips? Why was I even bringing him along when I could call out a babysitter at the last minute? Part of me felt that maybe Kendall had to see this; that I could stand on my own two feet despite my desire to fall to pieces. Then again, what could I prove to a man in need of a medical guardian?
"Dad?" Mason's voice pulled my thoughts away from themselves, tearing me back to reality. I cleared my throat with an unceremonious cough. "Yeah?"
"You don't have any friends." I let a soft snigger punctuate the air between us, allowing my son's blatant honesty to curl around my lips. Like father like son – I made a mental note to cultivate a new respect for genetics. "This is one of my old friends, from before you were born."
"Then how come we never see him? Did you two stop being friends?" I nodded slowly, bringing the car to a gradual halt in the bask of another red light. Mason might not have known it, but he was slowly dissecting the mechanics of my coveted past with painstaking attention to detail, but I owed him this much at least. For now, my precious five year-old would have to make do with convoluted distortions until I could safely confide in him that my love for his father was beyond saving: we both had simply decided to give up on what was. He moved on, I didn't – simple as that. "Something like that Mason."
It had been quite an impulsive decision on both our parts. Kendall was under the blissful delusion that all was well with us, and I being the pathetic idiot that I was, was powerless to tell him otherwise. I was scared to tell that I needed to breathe, fearing that I would lose him forever. Every single second of my existence was spent walking a very fine balance between being the perfect partner and secretly running through the hollow carvings of soul where I was once complete. I was at the end of my precarious tether – I wanted to let go, until I felt safe enough to be with him and not feel my essence swathed away to some ebony void of depression. I had planned to end it on that day. Well, not quite end it, but at least pause the both of us until I gained some semblance of sanity. I walked through the door of our apartment, but before I could even draw breath, Kendall had grabbed my shoulders, his face so childishly gleeful. "We're missing something" he had exclaimed, his eyes ablaze with an inferno of passion. I still remember the way I raised my eyebrow questioningly. "You seem so excited about that."
"Logan, let's start a family."
Some say that Time would not stop her march for any man. I, however, like to believe that she saw my plea, and in her all knowing grace, took pity on me. A family. Something to bond us together forever no matter what happened. I could either break his dream and end my suffering, or hold my breath forever. As I looked on into those imploring eyes, I felt the world around me stop to watch, every object hanging on to my words for fear of missing my decision. I did what any lovesick fool would do – I took a deep gulp of air, and prayed to God he'd never have to know my pain. "Let's start a family babe."
Don't ask me how nine months passed on like intangible dreams, but they practically slipped through my hands. Every visit we took to the obstetrician with our surrogate brought us one step closer to our bundle of joy, one more inch of hope I'd put out into the world that somehow I'd be OK. The minute our son came screaming into this world, the breath I'd held for so long finally gave way. I didn't need to see that golden mop of hair to know that my little guy would grow up to be the spitting image of my love. Those quiet green eyes that stared so confidently back up into my own told me that on their own. In fact, whenever Kendall was around, I'd limit my contact with Mason, preferring to watch him bounce the kid around as he talked in goo goo's and gurgles. I seemed like a bad father, but I just could not bring myself to even look at my baby boy, let alone take him into my arms with carefree abandon. I was the intruder of this perfect world, because this was not what I had seen for us. This was someone else's dream, I was just fortunate enough to pay rent. Little was I to know that my chance to breathe again was soon to come with an unfortunate price.
Mason had been four months old and asleep the day Kendall had taken me aside. I could never quite place the grim lines furrowing into his expression, they looked so out of place where they sat now. My own façade was a slightly quizzical one as he took one of my hands into his own, his sighs coming out in short blasts as if he was trying to pick his words with the most precise of thoughts. "Whatever you have to say, please just go ahead" I had whispered softly, surprised that my own voice had deserted me. "You're scaring me."
"I cheated on you." His words were barely a murmur, but he might as well as shouted them right in my ear. Suddenly my perfect nightmare wasn't so perfect anymore. "You… you what?"
"I slept with… with someone. I'm so sorry Logan."
Time again took pity on my situation, and for the second time in my life, she placed the world on hold for me. Am I ashamed of what I did? In retrospect, yes. But you have to know that I never saw the pain that was to come or the hurt that would become my own shadow. I only saw a way out, a way that looked like I would live again. So I chose once more, but this time I took the easy way out. I chose to breathe.
-xoxoxoxoxo-
"Hey, this is where we come to see Dr Sinclair!" said Mason excitedly, practically leaping out of my hand to lead my path across the sparkling gems of tiles, naively ignoring the wave of consternated stares he created as he went along. Unfortunately, I could not share in my son's enthusiasm, feeling my own will to go on drain with every step I took. Los Angeles wasn't exactly someone's backyard, but I figured Kendall and I would cross paths sooner or later. I had it all planned out to the last detail – a couple of awkward 'hi's', an uncomfortable exchange of 'how have you been', all topped off with two wistful sighs and longing stares before we made some excuse of having to go to some made up appointment. "But to think that I'm actually meeting a shell instead of him" I thought darkly, taking Mason's hand in a brief burst of speed before I slowed us down to a brisk walk. To be honest, it wasn't the thought of his body mangled in the goriest of twists that scared me, but it was what I didn't know: what would the doctors say? What if there wasn't any hope for him? In spite of all my shortcomings to love as freely and openly as he did, he was still a part of me, time couldn't erase that. Then again, this wasn't any of my business at all. The last I heard of my angel was through a mutual friend who casually dropped the fact that he'd gotten married to one of his old girlfriends in the same way one would casually drop a child on his head. It didn't matter to me then, of course. I had my work to distract me for eight hours of the day, and Mason to take up every free moment that I should have reserved for myself. Why I was still his appointed guardian was beyond me, but how could I be of any use when he had clearly moved on with his life? "One signature" I muttered under my breath, careful not to let any of my thoughts form into words for the pair of little ears beneath me to hear. One careless fleck of ink and plastic, and I could forget that I ever came here or that my heart lay lost here in the cold hands of someone who might not be here in any sense at all. As I stepped in synch to the furious drum in my chest, I woefully chose to pay no heed to the murderous irony that I once forgot how to breathe on my own, and now Kendall was probably in the exact same position.
"Logan?" My feet automatically ceased their pounding on the mirror-like floor beneath us, turning around at the sharp, almost fearful blast of my name. My eyes snapped onto an ethereal brunette woman, anxiously seated on the edge of her plastic seat. The fine strands of her hair crowded around her face in thin, straight locks of frosted brown worry, shielding her cheeks away from sight. Her eyes were red from tears just flooded, her skin bearing testament to her sad beauty. "Who are you?" asked Mason suspiciously, drawing himself closer to my body. It took a full thirty seconds for my warped head to register his words. "Mason, don't be rude." The woman briefly smiled at my son's youthful impetuousness, pulling herself off the chair as if the weight of every single anxiety that ever existed was placed upon her delicate little shoulders. "I'm… I'm Kendall's…" Her sentence trailed off into discomfited quiet, but it would take an ass of galactic note not to complete it. Here was my female counterpart, my replacement if you will. This was the living embodiment of the path I had let my love walk to, while I selfishly tried to pick up pieces of something I couldn't even see. "How is he?" I asked softly, absentmindedly gripping Mason's palm into my own. She shook her head vehemently, swaying slightly on the spot. "Bad."
"Oh." I immediately berated myself for not coming up with a more responsive answer. Here I was, standing before my ex-boyfriend's wife with the son he left me with at the hospital where he was hovering between life and death, and all I could muster, all my emotions led me to were 'oh'. With a slight gasp of air, I pursed my lips together in a single quiver, searching for Mason's shoulder with my arm. From afar, it looked as if I owed her something, but really we both needed the other. She needed me to let go, and I needed answers to do that. My universe was already broken, so I was certain whatever she had to say couldn't hurt me any further. "Should we talk?"
-xoxoxoxoxo-
The shelter of my eyes never once left Mason as he happily let himself loose upon the small plastic table and chair, his tiny arms flying across to every crayon and sheet of paper within reach. Beside me, I heard the woman chuckle softly, her voice coming out more like a restrained choke rather than an amused show. "He's wonderful" she whispered, following my line of sight over to the untamed scribbling of my bundle of joy, taking in the untamed scribbles of blue and red crayon he brought to life on his cheap canvas. I nodded blankly, feeling a faint nausea rise inside my body. I didn't want to be here. I wanted this to be as painless as possible for me, but something kept me here, rooted to my wallowing hurt. Kendall's wife tapped me gently on the shoulder, hypnotically pulling my eyes to her face. "I'm Lucy."
"I'm-"
"I know who you are" she smiled sadly, fiddling her fingers together. "I've seen pictures, heard all the stories. You have quite a mythology built around you."
"He told you about us?" I asked dryly, arching my brow curiously. Lucy nodded faintly, dropping her gaze from my own. "It's hard being the other person."
"You shouldn't take it too personally. Kendall has a way of exaggerating things."
"Not when it comes to you I'm afraid" she murmured distantly. I felt an ominous shiver pass through my spine at her words. I couldn't do the pleasantries. "How is he?" Lucy's eyes melted into chocolate pools of despair, birthing twin tears to trail down her cheek. "He was in an accident three nights ago. Head on collision with a drunk driver" she said, my ears pricking up at the deathly whisper. "The doctors… they say that there's no recovery. The trauma on his brain was too much and he's not breathing on his own." My blood froze into crimson ice in my veins, numbing my body into useless sheets of cold flesh. No recovery… as in gone forever from my reach. "Don't they…" My head struggled to put together words coherently. "Don't they wait a couple of days to see how he responds?"
"With the damage he's suffered, it's unlikely he'll ever wake up. At least that's what they say." This wasn't happening, this couldn't be real. Yes, we abandoned each other, but he was THERE! Right there, just a confusing drive away to see, but never gone from this world… never truly gone from me.
"Lucy, I-"
"You have to decide what happens next Logan. You knew him best." she said quietly, wiping away her tears, but they just kept coming. My own eyes began to sting with my regret, forming a painful lump in my throat. I wanted to scream and let the black fire inside of me take over my every fiber, but I was trapped in my own body, a prison all for myself. "You're his wife."
"We're not married. We never were." I stared on incredulously, temporarily forgetting that my son was five feet away from me. "You're lying."
"I met him at a movie theatre" she said, lifting her head to bring her pleading tears to my full sight. "We decided to skip the show and grab coffee instead. He told me everything, about how you guys were dads, and how he was slowly losing you." My mouth hung open in shock, unable to place even a single word in my defense onto the air. He knew… despite all my acting, he knew what I strove so hard to keep hidden deep inside. Lucy took a tentative stare at me before continuing. "He said that he didn't know exactly what it was, but you were distant and he couldn't stand it. He thought that Mason would bring you guys closer together, but you drifted further away instead. I felt sorry for him. He talked about you being so utterly perfect for him that he couldn't stand that you were slipping away from him."
"I wasn't-" My breath automatically killed itself in my throat. Whatever I said now would be a lie, an insulting mistruth to the god I threw away so blindly. "Then, the story about him cheating on me-"
"My idea. He was too afraid to confront you outright on it, so I said he should give you a way out. It was his plan to leave Mason with you because he reminded him too much of what the two of you had been through. After that, the two of us just stayed together and let people believe what they wanted to believe about us."
"I am such a fucking asshole" I gasped, feeling my chest open up in ecstatic explosions of pain. I brought this on myself, on him. "He's here because of me."
"No." Lucy gripped my arm firmly, staring me down the barrel of my guilty mist of tears. "This isn't your fault."
"If I-"
"No. He never once blamed you for anything. He loved you and Mason so much that there wasn't any room for anyone else." She leaned in closer, pulling my head towards her lips. "He needs you now more than ever Logan. Whatever you decide, I'll support you. And he… he will too."
-xoxoxoxoxo-
The light dramatically thinned itself out in the ICU room, the quiet shadows standing sentry over the lone body placed up against the middle of the wall. I'd left Mason to continue his preschool Picasso yearnings with Lucy, afraid that I might have to burst myself apart if he had to walk in here with me. As it stood, I couldn't even bring myself to stare out there into the sight of the man who held my heart in such divine pedestals. My eyes stubbornly chose to avert themselves to the clinical boredom of the floor, but my ears caught onto the timely sighs of the respirator. My feet, just a few minutes ago so sentient, suddenly deserted me in my hour of need, forcing me to wade through guilty lead every time I took a step forward. This was a place caught outside of time, somewhere were reality was at its heaviest and yet didn't seem to exist at all. Could he even hear me? Did he know I was here? Should I pretend that he did? All this pain, all my walls and defenses seemed so trivial now – even the blame I placed on my shoulders seemed to fall by the wayside. For the first time in five years, I wanted him: I wanted to wrap my arms around him and beg him to come back to me. I wanted to tell him that it didn't matter whether I was whole or not, but that I'd figure out how to live as his extension instead of my own person. "But I'm too late, aren't I?" I whispered hoarsely, feeling my heart cringe and contort in feral agony. "I'm too late…"
In a surge of want, my eyes flew up to study how much this visage had changed, how much of the Kendall I knew was still there. The upper left corner of his head was wrapped away in bandages, carefully laced over his eye. A long scar punctuated with stitches spiraled down his cheek, aligning itself perfectly against his jawbone. An IV drip fell with fatal precision down the clear snake of tube into hand, totally in rhythm with the beep of the heart monitor on the other side of the bed. Whatever I knew of this angel was gone in the past three days or so, and my selfishness was to blame. No one ever needed to live as their own person when perfection touched their lives, and I had stupidly banished it out of my existence. I didn't need an identity; I needed him –that fucking breath I held for so long, that must have been him all along! And now, it was stalled forever, destined to suffocate me. "You fucking son of a bitch" I muttered, slowly locking my fingers in between his. "Why didn't you tell me anything? Why didn't you stop me?" A slight heave on the chest I'd lay against for so many nights answered my fury, like some wanton call to me despair. "You know what your problem was?" I said, the air quaking inside of me. "You were too damn perfect for me! Every time, every FUCKING time we were together, you stole me! You made me like this; you made me so empty that I couldn't stand it anymore! And now you want me to just watch you walk away from all this?" The deathly silence answered me this time – I had caught myself in between the beep of his heart monitor. My hand traveled up to line against his face, the stitches of his scar slicing between my skin. "What am I supposed to tell Mason when he grows up and asks why he looks nothing like me? Did you even think of that? NO YOU JUST FUCKING LEFT ME!" My sobs created tears, my tears gave birth to voids, and those voids into infinities of black. There was so much more I wanted to say, so much I wanted to still do, but it was all so pointless now. "Please forgive me" I moaned weakly, my sight obscured by the acidic mist. "I am so sorry Kendall. I love you so much. Don't let go… please don't let me go."
-xoxoxoxoxo-
ONE YEAR LATER
"Happy birthday buddy!" I grinned, handing over the giant package to my bouncing six year old. I guess it was a bad idea to let him have free reign over the soda stash, but hey, birthdays only come once a year. Mason's face threatened to split into two as he placed the package next to his other presents, surveying them like some kind of premature Golem. "Can I open them now?" There was no hiding the glee in that question, nor where he got that from. I smirked slyly at him. "Why don't you wait for Lucy, I think she might have the biggest one of all!"
"No way!"
"Yeah way!" I laughed solidly as my son traipsed out of the living room, his feet echoing with the joyful innocence I had sworn to protect. My smile lessened as I stared at the silver band around my finger, yet my heart soared ecstatically for my baby boy. Today was his day, and a chance to honor where he came from. There were no pictures from six years ago here because all I needed was the strength in my heart to remember those adoring flashes for memories. It had been a year since I finally said goodbye, and swore off all others. I stopped breathing, but somehow I still lived. In my emptiness, I found solace and in the silence, Mason's laughter rang true like an angel's chorus. "I'll tell him one day, I swear. We won't ever forget you" I murmured softly. It would be a while for me to heal, maybe I wouldn't ever. But I have a chance to do right by this, by Mason, and there was no room for mistakes this time. From now until I die, breathing just seems so second hand.
So what did you guys think? Please let me know via a review, you all know how happy those make me! If you have any ideas of what you want me to write, just contact me and I'll do my best to make it happen! Till next time guys, ciao!