This chapter needs a warning of sorts but I'm not sure how to classify it. So, if you are affected by descriptions of death and such, this is probably not the chapter for you. Ta.
Dan woke with a gasp, trying to calm his breathing as the nightmare receded, hoping Jones wouldn't wake up, even though he knew that it was probably a lost cause, because Jones had been sleeping so lightly since...
He shifted the headphone from his ears and lay them on his pillow as he sat up, glancing down at Jones' peaceful face. He'd worried that neither of them would be able to sleep in his parents' quiet house, on their quiet street. It would be worse when they moved to the shack, and Dan had actually worried that their holiday wouldn't work out, that neither of them would ever sleep without noise and music. But Jones had obviously been thinking along the same lines.
The day before he was due to leave the hospital Dan had walked into Jones' room to find him butchering his iPod (which had already suffered through several alterations) so that it could accommodate two sets of headphones and played nothing but a seven hour loop of "sleeping music". His hands were shaky and he'd lost a lot of strength but he was working on the small device with a determined grin on his face.
And for a few hours it seemed to work. They'd arranged themselves carefully on the bed, their uninjured legs in the centre and hands touching. But now Dan was awake and sweating hard enough to leave the sheets wet and clingy.
"Wazzit?" Jones mumbled but Dan just rubbed his hand gently along the younger man's arm to calm him back to sleep.
He didn't want Jones to wake up, he needed his sleep, and he didn't want Jones to know what he'd been dreaming of.
The day he told Jones that Jonatton had died, he hadn't been able to summon any emotion at all, and Jones had just stared at him, barely conscious, bruised and frail on his pillow whilst a nurse prepped him for yet another operation. His chapped lips had moved against the tube in his throat and his glassy eyes looked concerned but Dan didn't know what question he was trying to ask and had just given his head a shake in response.
It had been a stupid thing to do, telling Jones when he was in no fit state to process the news - when he was about to be cut open again so that a couple of doctors could piece his thigh bone back together with screws and bolts and a big metal plate - but Dan had to get it out from inside of him, fearing that if he didn't tell Jones straight away it would seem suspicious, or be even more difficult. There could be no love lost between Jones and Jonatton - Jones wouldn't have been in hospital if Jonatton hadn't decided to try and ruin his life - but Jones was capable of more empathy than Dan thought was strictly healthy and he wasn't sure how Jones would react to the news.
Claire had had a melt down. Screaming and railing against the unfairness of the universe like she was auditioning for the title role in "Medea". It had been loud enough, and Dan had been tired enough, that he'd fallen asleep on her couch, but he'd been woken by nightmares, just as he had every night for a month.
It was the same every time and part of Dan's brain was frustrated beyond words that he could be reduced to a shaking, clammy wreck by a dream that he now knew too well. The less rational part of his brain just sat in the corner rocking, begging not to be sent back to bed.
He knew that Jones suffered from nightmares, reoccurring dreams like flashbacks that made him scream in his sleep and twitch like he was undergoing electroshock therapy. He'd never fully appreciated the fear that he'd see in Jones' eyes afterwards, at the prospect of going back to sleep after having one. Until now.
He tried to close his eyes, just to clear the grit from his vision enough to look at the clock, but as soon as his lids were closed he was back at the door. Jonatton's pretentious front door that, instead of his apartment number, just had the word 'Yeah?' stenciled onto it. He'd been there once before, when he'd first started working for SugarApe and Jonatton had invited him around for celebratory drinks, and he'd hated it for it's pop art prints and glass-topped table and the fact that it was so clean you spent the entire time feeling paranoid about spilling something or dropping something and then Jonatton would just tut and look at you like you were too moronic to even be trusted with an open cup.
Dan opened his eyes quickly but he couldn't shake the dream from his head. He'd never been able to remember his dreams before, even the ones about Jones that he wished he could hold on to slipped away from his conscious mind within minutes of him waking up. But the nightmare was different. Each night he had to relive the way he'd pounded on Jonatton's door, yelling and calling him every name under the sun before he checked the knob and realised that it wasn't locked. Every night he went through it again, walking into the apartment and realising that, even though it was still spotlessly clean, it stank. Every night remembering the fear that had immediately gripped his throat at the smell, and how he'd crept through the house, no longer angry just scared, and not sure why he felt the need to be quiet when he already knew what he was going to find.
Every single night he replayed the moment of walking into Jonatton's ostentatious bedroom and being hit by a wall of stench. And the word stench was the only way he could accurately describe it, but in that moment it had reminded him of Labyrinth, and 'the Bog of Eternal Stench', and all he could think of was Ludo stumbling about moaning "Smells bad!" and how Jones had once teased him and said that if they were characters in a film then they'd be Ludo and Sir Didymus, one small and pointy, the other big and hairy, and the most unlikely friends in the world. And Dan had giggled. As he'd approached the bed he couldn't help but imagine himself as a big, hairy, clumsy muppet. And he'd giggled.
And then he'd seen Jonatton's body and he'd vomited over his own shoes.
He'd had a thing for crime novels as a teenager, had even daydreamed about becoming a famous crime writer himself, before he'd realised just how difficult it was to develop unique characters and maintain a plot beyond the first two thousand words. And eventually he'd given up on reading crime novels as well. But in all of the books he'd read, no one had described a corpse well enough to prepare him for Jonatton's purple, almost black, bloated, body. His tongue was overflowing from his mouth and his eyes were bulging from his face, unseeing and absurdly, horribly, surprised.
Dan's fingers had stretched out, without his brain even realising, to touch the dead man's skin at his wrist, as if there could possibly be a pulse to feel for. And the skin had peeled away and stuck to his fingers, like the scraps of white ash that would float out above a campfire and cling to hair and skin and eye lashes. It had made his stomach heave but even the sting of stomach acid in his nose couldn't mask the stench of Jonatton's body.
And in reality he'd run from the room and called the police and had gone home to strip off the clothes that smelt like death before realising he couldn't stand to be on his own and seeking out his sister. But in the dream he just stood there, staring at the body. And when he blinked he was no longer looking at Jonatton Yeah?'s lifeless face, but at Jones, his face coated in blood and his throat dark and swollen and his eyes staring up and seeming to ask why all of this had happened.
And the problem was that Dan knew it had happened because of him.
He was a prat, and he deserved everything he got, but he'd dragged Jones down with him. One of the few things that had actually made him happy over the last few years was seeing Jones succeed. Even when he felt so detached from his own life that he did idiotic things just to feel something, he could look at Jones and believe that he'd helped a bit, that he'd done something right, that writing shit for SugaRape in exchange for money to get Jones the stuff he needed while he worked on his craft was worth it. It had been. And when he wasn't swamped by his... depression (which was still difficult to admit even to himself) things had been good. They'd been happy.
A month ago he'd still thought they could move forward and be happy and the same as they'd always been. He'd read too many books about triumphing over adversity and how it made people better. It was a trope he didn't particularly care for, but he'd never hated it so much as he did now. Adversity just kicked your teeth in and left you feeling weak and useless and even if you crawled back to some semblance of normalcy, there was nothing good in it for you. Strangers and people who thought of themselves as your friends could look at you and use you as inspiration, "food for thought", a romantically tragic image that they could wank over in order to feel something in the course of their tepid lives. There was nothing more than that.
He pulled his notebook and biro toward him and wrote that thought down, even though he knew he'd look at it tomorrow and see it for the melodramatic swill it was. He'd seen a hospital chaplain a couple of times, in an attempt to fill the long hours, waiting for Jones to come back from surgeries, and it had been suggested that he try writing down how he felt, just to get it out, like draining a wound.
He'd glared at the chaplain, a woman in her forties, who'd just stared right back.
"Write it down," she'd told him, handing him a pad and a biro. "Just see. Some things work, some things don't. But you won't know until you try."
"I don't believe in God," he replied but she'd shaken her head like he was missing the point.
"Didn't say you had to. I didn't believe in him either, after my husband died. But writing helped. Just try it."
He quite liked her. She'd been there when Jones had arrived at the hospital and Dan couldn't quite get his head around someone who chose to be an Intensive Care Chaplain and work for pittance and put up with death and tears all day. She didn't seem like the martyr sort and even if he didn't quite trust her, he didn't hate her.
Because when Dan had collapsed into a chair, unable to keep the tears back, she'd sat down next to him, and she hadn't told him that it would be ok, or that God had a plan, hadn't spouted bilge about trial and adversity, she'd just been there. And when a nurse came to ask for contact details for Jones' next of kin, and had kept calling him Thomas and Mr Pearce instead of Jones, and had told Dan bluntly that he wasn't allowed in to Jones' room because he was not a relative and that boyfriends didn't count if you weren't straight... the chaplain had been there and had quietly spoken to one of the hospital administrators on his behalf.
Jones was an orphan. No parents, no siblings, no grandparents. Dan had no legal right to be with him or have any say in his treatment. And no one had time to feel any sympathy for that, because hospitals were busy places, and intensive care wards even more so. And Dan had been scared.
He hadn't had to think about any of that when he'd been the one in the hospital bed. Jones had taken care of most things but Claire had been there as his next of kin and Jones had kept their parents in the loop. Dan had been in a regular ward, he hadn't been unconscious for long, there hadn't been any surgeries or consent forms to sign, he'd been allowed visitors straight away.
But things had been different with Jones, and when Dan was finally allowed to see him it had been with special permission and with the chaplain at his side.
The next day, when Jones was moved to a different ward, it was easier, but Dan had felt indebted to that woman, and he couldn't dislike her. And he hated the fact that he couldn't remember her name.
He scrawled a few more notes onto the paper, even though writing in the dark meant it would be next to impossible to read, and lay back down, realising that he did in fact, feel a bit better. The movement, however, woke Jones, who opened one eye blearily and shifted the headphones away from his ears as he tried to focus on Dan.
"Whassa matter?" he asked croakily and Dan felt the familiar pain in his heart as he stroked Jones' fringe away from his clammy forehead.
"Nothing, love," Dan whispered. "Just a dream."