[Henry Allard]
Henry slept like a rock last night.
Eventually his breathing had calmed to the point where his sweat was able to dry, his trembling had stopped, and he could release Tristan’s hand from his grip. His hand had rested atop the younger man’s curly head, and he had bent down to engulf the younger man in a hug, and had drowsily stated that he wanted Tristan to sleep in the bed with him tonight, even if he was still mad.
He hadn’t said ‘please.’ He could tell Tristan what he wanted but he couldn’t bring himself to beg.
So whether Tristan had been at his side or in the living room again, the paramedic had stripped out of his uniform and gotten between the sheets without showering like he usually does. His face was covered in two days’ worth of stubble when he went to sleep, and he was stripped down to nothing more than his boxers, and he had been unconscious almost as soon as his previously concussed head had hit the pillow.
It is long past his wake-up time of six o’clock when Henry stirs, taking a deep breath and opening his eyes to take in the darkness of the room around him. The wan sunlight is sneaking in through the windows in the living room, and he turns his head to the left to see if Tristan is there.
[Tristan]
He’s there.
The simple truth of the matter is this: he cannot deny Henry anything, especially when he actually voices his desire, when he tells him what he wants. Nor does he want to deny him anything that’s in his power to give to his husband. Even if it’s something as simple as laying beside him, wrapping his arms around him, and holding him close as he sleeps like a rock.
He did not sleep as easily as Henry, but he did not move from the bed, but to strip down, and crawl between the sheets with some brainless book or another. He read until tired, and is awake long before Henry is. He’d called in sick again – Paulo grumbled a bit, but there is little he can complain about because Tristan has given him 150% for almost two years now. Two days off in a row won’t kill them.
Thus, he’s here, sitting up against the headboard a bit, reading by the light of the lamp at the side of the bed, covered so as not to be too bright, to wake Henry before he is ready. And when he does, the greeting is a meeting of his gaze, a slight – oh so slight – grin, and a “Hey.”
[Henry Allard]
“Hey, gorgeous.”
Henry’s voice creaks like an old boat out on the sea as it grows used to working again, and he grimaces as he reaches out his left hand to stretch over his head and touch his husband’s hair, his face. He forces himself to keep doing this even though it hurts, even though his rotator cuff clicks and the muscles in his face tense up with the hurt. This is not as bad as the reduction, isn’t as bad as the time that Richard karate chopped his arm three days after the injury when he had been refusing to take his Vicodin.
Unless Tristan urges him to put his arm back in the anatomical position where it won’t pull at the tendons and muscles in the older man’s shoulder, his hand comes to rest against the back of his husband’s neck.
“What’re you reading?”
[Tristan]
Henry reaches to touch him, even though it hurts and it’s obvious that it does and Tristan doesn’t stop him, let’s him do what he’s wanted him to for weeks now. Instead, he folds down the corner of the page he’s on, and sets the book aside, before he takes Henry’s arm and puts it in a better place that doesn’t cause him pain – and adjusts and squirms himself until he can lay his head on Henry’s chest, his arm dropped around his husband’s chest.
“To be honest…” he finally answers. “I haven’t the faintest fucking idea.”
It was something to try and keep his mind occupied, yet he retained exactly none of it, at all. He couldn’t tell you the sentence he read just moments ago, or anything about the chapters read last night. It’s there, gone, and never to be found again. Until he reads it once more, of course.
“Feeling better?” Loaded question, that.
[Henry Allard]
Henry smiles the rarest of his smiles: it is close-lipped, but it is not forced or trying to cover something up. It just isn’t as uncontrolled and unfettered as his tooth-bearing smiles tend to be. This is a fonder, more earnest smile, and as Tristan asks his question, that is what he gets.
It’s with some difficulty that he manages to get his elbow and forearm around his husband so that he can hold him against his chest. Tristan can hear Henry’s heart gently, languidly, thumping behind his ribs, can hear the air whooshing in and out of his lungs, as he rests. This is what Henry has only been able to do when Tristan has been unconscious for the longest time, and he isn’t going to let him go unless he can help it.
“I was starting to think I was never going to sleep again,” he says, and for the first time in days, for the first time in what seems like a millennium, Henry captures Tristan’s lips in his own, prepared for the inevitability of rejection.
[Tristan]
For the first time in forever, Henry kisses him, prepared for rejection – a rejection that doesn’t come. There’s a softly pained sound in the back of Tristan’s throat, soft and almost desperate, almost pleading that he not be dreaming and his husband finally remembers he’s here… that he loves him.. that they can handle anything together, even when things are falling apart individually.
He lifts his hand to cup Henry’s jaw, fingers sliding from there around the back of his head, holding him there for a long, lingering minute, two, until he pulls back, pulls away, puts a stop to what his body is instantly ready to do – forgive, forget…. His breath is shaky as he pulls it into his lungs, his forehead resting against Henry’s jaw for a moment, before he takes another – slightly steadier – breath, and forces himself sit up, so that he can watch Henry’s face, to talk to him with out either of them being able to hide.
“You should have told me.” It’s soft – not exactly an accusation, but a simple statement. “..I could have helped if you had just… told me.”
[Henry Allard]
If Henry could stop time so that they could just stay like this, loving each other’s mouths and breathing each other’s air, that would be the first and last thing he would ever consciously do. They haven’t made love since before Sunday morning. Considering the fact that they could barely stand to be apart from each other back when Henry was the one working twelve-hour days, the four days that they are going on now is almost excruciating, and Henry’s arousal bubbles to the surface almost as soon as he realizes that his husband is not going to push him away.
An almost pleading moan leaves the Gnawer kinsman’s throat, and Henry gasps in through his nose as he feels himself physically responding in a way that he hasn’t in days. That breath shudders back out of his throat a moment later, and his fingers curl between Tristan’s shoulder blades, his other hand sliding over to his slender hip, as if he needs to hold him close to him to keep him from escaping, to keep himself from falling into a state of relieved ecstasy. As if he needs to entertain the notion that he isn’t going to have to talk this morning.
That is not to be, though. He isn’t going to be let off the hook until Tristan’s worry and agitation reaches some sort of dénouement that doesn’t result in Henry snapping or screaming.
If Henry goes the rest of his natural life without shouting at his husband, that will still be too short a time without doing it. He will probably never forgive himself for losing his temper when the object of his anger was entirely internal to begin with.
He should have told him, Tristan says when he sits up, and Henry closes his eyes as if he’s somehow pained. He could have helped.
“You helped,” he says, weakly, and forces his eyes back open. “Baby, you did.”
[Tristan]
“How?” It’s said with a snort of disbelief, a pained laughter. “By stopping a three way with some random stranger, by standing there helpless in the middle of the street when you walked away from me? By not flipping my shit finding you in the hospital again – or later finding out just what exactly happened the night you went out running at 2am?”
It seems he can’t stop now that he’s started, it all comes out in a rush, in an explosion of soft words that say everything he’s been holding back for over a week.. “I didn’t even stop you from running at 2am… and look what happened… I could have stopped it.”
…here’s the curious thing about Tristan, and when he loves. He does so so completely, that even now, he’s blaming himself that he slept through that sneaking out to run, that seemed to set all of this in motion. He blames himself. For all of it.
[Henry Allard]
Tristan has always been the more loquacious of the two of them. He has always been more verbal, more free with his words as well as his affection, and yet they are both equally as likely to open up floodgates when they have been holding back something that almost desperately needs to be said to the other.
Case in point: Henry’s small lecture the night that he had proposed to Tristan. He had spoken more that night than he had since the night they had lain in the hammock in the backyard at the house in Lakeview and smoked a joint together. That had calmed both of them down fairly quickly even if they had been discussing topics that were hardly comforting.
Henry has always been a good listener, has been that way his entire life, and so he just lies still and silent under the sheet as he rubs his hand up and down his husband’s shin, trying to keep his range of motion as contained as possible.
He could have stopped it.
“Unless I teleported back here last night,” Henry says, “can I assume that you were the one who got my bloody banged-up mess of a self back from the hospital last night?”
[Tristan]
“Of course it as me!” He says, lifting his hands briefly as he tries to top the floodgate, to keep the words back that he’s been holding in for so long – they have not talked in days and they do not necessarily talk in big rushes ever, at all. It’s a comfortable existance, but right now… now he’d like to go back to being silent before he goes too far, before he just explodes….
…and he knows he can’t.
“Who else would the hospital call? Who else would flip out and run to your aid only to find you beat up, bloody, not even knowing who I am, really, and also?” Here, his voice drops to a whisper, as if this is something that hurts so much more than the rest of it. He understands that the ring is taken off at work. He understands why that is necessary for the job. But when Henry walked away last night – the ring had been on, and when he’d found him in the hospital… “…with your ring in your pocket. Where were you?”
[Henry Allard]
Tristan knows that Henry takes the ring off when he goes to work because, as Henry found out the hard way, it can get caught on people’s clothing, or caught on equipment, and dislocate his finger when he accidentally wrenches his hand back. He had nearly torn his knuckle apart one day because someone managed to hook the jewelry even underneath his nitrile glove and wrenched the joint out of socket. The pain had been excruciating, and as soon as Deon got the rig to the hospital and they passed off the patient, Deon had had to wait in the hallway while one of the residents popped the medic’s finger back in place.
That had been embarrassing, and that had been the day that Henry started leaving the ring on the dresser in the mornings and putting it back on when he got home from his run at night. He ought to wear it on a chain around his neck but he’s joked about a chain pulling his chest hair out.
There is no end in sight to the cascade of words leaving Tristan’s body, and the older man leaves his ring-bearing hand lying still on his husband’s knee.
Henry has never been able to lie, but he can’t bring himself to say that he had been losing his mind last night, and so he gives a modified version of the story.
“I went to a bar to have a few drinks and get myself together,” he says. “And I know this was stupid, I know I can’t drink on this medication but I just felt like I was losing my mind… and I took the ring off for the same reason I take it off when I go to work or when I go out running. If I ever get hurt as bad as I did when my arm broke and they have to send me up to surgery half-conscious I don’t want them cutting it off of me. It’s safer if I leave it at home when I go out like that, and I didn’t go home first so I put it in my pocket.”
It had made enough sense at the time. Now he’s looking back and thinking how stupid that sounds even just coming out of his mouth.
[Tristan]
He went… to a bar. To drink. And get himself together. “You know you can’t…”
Stop. Put a lid on it, Stern!
He runs his hands through his hair, those curls tangling around his fingers as he does so, until he pulls them out again. He watches his hands fall to his lap, one resting on Henry’s where it rests on his knee. He can’t make Henry’s decisions for him, he can’t make him obey what the doctor says even though they both know it’ for the best, he can’t be there every second of the day to [cockblock a flirty redhead] make sure everything is the way it should be, that everything remains in this perfect existence they’ve fought so hard for… he just can’t.
And he doesn’t want to. And Henry doesn’t want him too. And he’s just so frustrated and tired and worried and… scared.
“So what happened there?” At the bar – how did it go from drinking to beaten the hell up in a hospital bed?
[Henry Allard]
What happened there.
“I don’t know,” Henry sighs, and he doesn’t sound like he’s lying. He squeezes Tristan’s knee. “The last thing I remember is walking away from you, and the first cognizant thought I have after that is…”
He frowns. There are hazy recollections of last night. He doesn’t remember being sent to CT scan to make sure he wasn’t hemorrhaging internally, and he can’t remember them having to physically sit him up and coach him into blowing into the breath analyzer; he can’t remember that he should have recognized a good deal of the staff from the nights that he works doubles, that the male tech who was assigned to his room used to be assigned to one of the other engines as an EMT-B and recognized him; he vaguely remembers Tristan being in the room when pain lanced through his shoulder.
“… waking up back here.”
He leaves out the ‘without you next to me.’ That’s a given.
“What did they tell you at the ED?”
[Tristan]
He winces – because he knows he should have followed, should have made Henry talk, should have stayed with him. Another thing that is his fault in all of this. But he doesn’t say anything until he mentions that he’d blacked out completely, everything. He sighs, softly, and then…
“Not much. They found you in the bathroom – no one knows what really happened, but you were unresponsive so they called a bus. You denied being on any medication, or even drinking, even when your breathalizer came back saying otherwise. You just kept saying you had to get home to me.”
There’s a wry smile for that last bit, since that’s what Henry had actively been avoiding by going to the bar in the first place. “I filled them in on your meds, and then took you home after they’d done the C scan, and all the other stuff. You were pretty out of it.”
[Henry Allard]
Henry has no idea how guilt-wracked his husband is. Last night he had been given a hint, but he hadn’t realized the extent of the self-doubt and the persecution that Tristan is inflicting upon himself because of what Henry, a grown man, chose to do last night.
Sure, Dr. Wentz is going to try to argue that the medication not working and the stress in Henry’s–Dr. Wentz will call him ‘Hank,’ just like everybody else associated with the Chicago Fire Department does when they aren’t calling him ‘Allard’ or ‘Allie’–life. He’s going to try to say that he wasn’t thinking clearly and it wasn’t his fault that he blew up at Tristan when he was just trying to help, that it wasn’t his fault that he walked away after wounding him so badly.
And last night at the hospital he was pretty out of it.
It doesn’t amuse him to hear that he kept telling the staff that he needed to get home to Tristan. That’s not funny because he doesn’t know what the hell he was thinking by going to the bar in the first place, and it’s sad that he had to have his ass handed to him by what he can only imagine was a homophobe who couldn’t stand the sight of him or a would-have-been rapist who didn’t get what he wanted.
The first scenario doesn’t make sense because so far as Henry can tell he was alone last night, and the second one just makes his blood run cold.
“Sounds like if they had to take me in then I was having cognitive impairment from the concussion,” is all he has to say about that. He reaches up to push his shaggy hair off of his bruised forehead, then flicks his eyes up to his husband again, tongue pushed against the surface of one of his molars as he thinks but doesn’t speak.
[Tristan]
He’s so frustrated, so damn scared, that for along time, he has nothing to say, nothing he can say. The past week has been something that he can’t figure out at all, something isn’t right and there’s nothing he can think of to fix it, nothing that he can think of that he did actively wrong that might send things this way. And he’s not sure how to get back, get it all back, get his life back so that they can resume their happy homo homemaking.
His voice is soft when he speaks, finally. “What do you need me to do? I’m at a loss – I… You’ve been beat to shit twice in a week, and I couldn’t stop it, your pulling away and I don’t know how to stop it… so tell me what you want, what you want me to do… how can I make it better?”
What he means is… what did he do wrong?
[Henry Allard]
It’s hard to listen to Tristan struggle like this, hard to know that the reason he’s beating himself up–and it’s hard to ignore right now that Tristan is beating himself up–is because of stupid decisions that Henry’s made in the last few days. Ever since he took that double shift on Thursday it’s been like he hasn’t had a grip on his life or anything happening in it.
Tristan wants to know what he can do to make it better, and Henry’s gaze softens as he slides his tongue out from between his two rows of teeth and lets his jaws click shut for a moment.
“Captain McMahon made me make an appointment to see Wentz on Friday,” he says. “So I’m going. And it’ll be alright. I just… um…” He looks hesitant to say what he says next, but he does it anyway. “Would you make love to me? Please? I just… I miss you, and I want you inside me, and…”
Realizing how pathetic he sounds, Henry looks up at the ceiling and stops talking.
[Tristan]
He has an appointment on Friday, and Tristan breathes a sigh of relief. Maybe Wentz can talk some sense into him, make him see, make him… help him get better, so that they can go back to what they’ve become used too.
Then he makes his request, and he looks up, and he studies Henry’s gaze, catching it and holding it until he leans back and looks at the ceiling and all Tristan can think in that moment is exactly how much he loves – and is IN love – with his husband. He lifts Henry’s hand from his knee, lifting it to his lips, and pressing a kiss on his palm. Henry may never understand how much he loves him, how willing Tristan is to lay down and die for him, even if he feels the same way. He may never get just how much more life is worth living just because Henry is there. He may never get that Tristan feels just as he does – all the time.
Tristan takes a breath, deep and slow, and lets it out again, before the muscles of his belly crunch, pulling his torso forward in a fluid movement that brings him right to where he’s wanted to be all along – living and loving his husbands lips, sharing his breath, tasting his lips and tongue and mouth and remembering every second of this kiss as if it’s the very first one, imprinting it in his memory just in case it’s the very last one, even though he knows it won’t be.
This is where Tristan wants to be.
He brushes the hair back from Henry’ forehead, his fingers gentle, his kiss unending, as he puts every last bit of his heart and soul into this connection that he’s ached for, desired, and wanted to beg for since the distance began growing between them. He just wants to be here, in bed, with his husband, forever. (Is it too much to ask for catering in bed? Yes? ok – most of forever.)
He only pulls away to murmur across his lips. “I love you, you big idiot.” It trails into that boyish grin that is so comfortable across prettyboi lips, moments before Henry’s are claimed again, and his intentions are made perfectly clear – he has no intention of leaving this bed, or Henry, at all today.
[Henry Allard]
[GEE I WONDER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT]