FIC: That Middle Road (19/?)
Jun. 24th, 2010 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nilchanceTitle: That Middle Road (19/?)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nilchance
Pairing: Misha Collins/Jeremy Sisto
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: This isn't real.
A/N: Set inpoisontaster's A Kept Boy 'verse. This story deals with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder, and with slavery as used in the AKB 'verse. There's also mention of child abuse, suicide, institutionalization and self-harm. And polyamory. And kink. And a partridge in a pear tree.
He brings Marisa flowers; that's the most humiliating thing Jeremy remembers about it. Like some love-struck kid he never actually was, he springs for flowers and a vase (shatterproof) and everything. White daisies, simple and clean. It's never a good idea to get Marisa anything the color of blood.
Somehow he manages not to see Jane on his way into Applewood. He snags a nurse, instead, a tall thin woman with dyed blue hair. The blue makes him feel a little better about the place. She doesn't fill the walk down to Marisa with inane chatter, instead eating up the hall with her long strides. Almost as long as Jeremy's own. Jeremy's fingers sweat against the slick plastic surface of the vase; he wishes he didn't leave Misha at home, even if that was his own decision and the only real way to avoid the detonation of Mar's temper.
It's quiet in the little therapy room, no yelling and no objects thrown against the door. Reassuring. The nurse unlocks the room, flicks Jeremy a look over her shoulder, and then calls, "Ryan? You up for visitors?"
Marisa asks a muffled question. The nurse says, "Yeah, it's him," and Marisa is silent for a moment. Later, Jeremy remembers this; at the time, he drums his fingers against the vase. He has an appointment that evening. He's thinking of other things.
The nurse steps aside to let him in the room. Marisa is seated, dwarfed in a ratty nightrobe. She sees the flowers and her mouth draws thin. She looks like she's more with it than she's been; he feels a fatal lurch of hope.
"C'mere and sit down," Marisa says, her voice hoarse from talking. Group therapy, maybe, or she's screaming in her sleep again. He wonders, not without guilt, who's talking her down in the middle of the night. She doesn't have a Misha; he doesn't think she's even asked whether he got a slave to cover for her while she's treated.
(If she cares, some part of him adds, bitterly.)
They have to meet sometime, preferably before Marisa comes home and finds Misha in their bed. Better to give her time to adjust to the idea. So why is his voice locked inside his throat?
Her voice gentling, Marisa repeats, "Sit down."
Jeremy comes to the shitty little table and sits down, putting the vase between them like a chess-board. Marisa runs her thumb over the fragile petals of the daisy; there's a groove worn in the pad, like she's been writing letters, a smudge of lead from the pencil. Once she sees that she's turning the white to gray, she grimaces and drops her hand to the table. She doesn't try to touch him.
"This is hard," she says to herself.
Cracking a smile, Jeremy says, "That's what she said."
At least she laughs, erasing the worry lines around her mouth. "That was an old line at Stonehenge."
"You know me. I like the classics."
Her expression darkens, as if drawn towards the event horizon of her silence. In seconds, she looks like a woman who never laughs. She puts her hand out, palm up; the scar on her inner wrist winds like a river on a map. Jeremy strokes the scar with his thumb before he takes her hand.
"You've been so kind to me," Marisa says. Her words sound practiced. Too careful. Later, he hates himself for not seeing it coming. "Nothing but kind. No, don't shrug, you know it's true."
"It's not--" Jeremy swallows, looks at their joined hands. "It's not like that. You don't have to-- you're a person."
"I'm a slave," she says, not unkindly.
"Not to me."
She scoffs. "Thanks, Jer. That's very guilty liberal of you. Right up there with 'I don't think you're like those other black people'."
Jeremy winces. "That's not exactly fair."
"It's true, though." Marisa squeezes his hand once, a little too hard to be just comfort. "You've been around Jeff too long. He rubs off on people like you."
Jeremy can't hone the sharp edge off his voice. "People like me. Crazy or queer? Or just weak?"
"People half in love with him."
Stung, Jeremy takes his hand back. "It's not like that."
Marisa lifts an eyebrow. "Bullshit it isn't. He's been the other man for a long time."
"That'll be news to Zach."
"Jeff's the one who's got your heart in a jar on his desk--"
"Wow, hey, thanks for the creepy metaphor." Jeremy stands. "This is going to be 20 rounds of you poking at old wounds, so I'm gonna go. I'll see you tomorrow, okay? I--"
"There's someone else for me," Marisa says.
Jeremy doesn't remember dropping back into the chair, but when his brain returns from its short vacation, he's sitting across from her again. He tries to school his expression back into careful blankness, but it's not working. His mouth is shaking.
"When?" he asks finally, his voice like a scrape of a knife being sharpened. "Who?"
Marisa looks away from him, tucking her hair behind the shell of her ear. "Scott. Six months."
Scott. Scott with his sleazy smile and his pills. Fuck, Jeremy did his fucking taxes this year. Slumping back in the chair, Jeremy says too quietly, "I can't believe you did that."
Marisa's mouth twists. "Don't you act so high and mighty. You fuck Zach and Wendy, and--"
"That's different, Mar, you knew about that, I asked if you were okay with--"
"-- and she doesn't even like me!"
"Jesus." Jeremy covers his face with one hand. "Jesus Christ. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Let's just..."
With a sigh that seems to well from deep inside her, to take the life out of her, Marisa turns to watch him. Part of Jeremy wants to say she looks satisfied by the scene, but that's only his pettiness talking; she just looks exhausted and sick.
"Okay," Jeremy says, aware he's saying it to fill up the quiet. "Scott. We can work that out. We can set up... fuck, a lunch or something? We can talk about whether he wants to use condoms or fluid bond or whatever. We--"
Marisa shakes her head, slowly. "Baby," she says, and it's the most tender she's ever sounded. "No."
His chest hitches once. He should shut up, he should stop, but he feels like chased a car and caught the bumper and is clinging now at 60 mph. "Fine, okay, you can go to him whenever, you can do whatever you want. You don't even have to tell me. Just come home, okay? I--"
"Jeremy." All the sadness in the world is in her voice. "No. It's over."
Jeremy's pulse is drumming in his ears. He stops looking at her face and stares at the flowers instead. They're pretty but they're dying without the ground.
Funny, but he didn't think his heart could be broken anymore.
"Tell the hospital I've still got the bill," he says, and he leaves her before she can get scared.
***
He doesn't remember driving home.
He shouldn't be driving. He should call somebody to come get him.
He doesn't know who to call, or who he could count on to come.
He drives himself.
***
The house is quiet when he gets back. Jeremy closes the door behind him and hangs his keys up, very carefully, because he thinks the clatter of them into the change dish would break him. Surface tension is holding him now, trembling above the edge of the cup, ready to spill.
"Jeremy?" Gina calls from the kitchen. "Hey, love, I made muffins."
He ignores her. Goes upstairs. Winston meets him at the top, waving his tail like a flag, and doesn't resist when Jeremy scoops him up. There have been other times that Jeremy's crated him in the upstairs bathroom, and so Winston is resigned rather than curious. Jeremy rubs the top of his head, tells him he's a good boy.
The bedroom door is open. Misha is curled up there, cat-like, absorbed enough in his book that he doesn't hear Jeremy pass by on his way to the office.
Jeremy goes into the office and shuts the door. There's a chair for his clients; he wedges it under the knob and locks the door. He removes the flash drive from his computer, all of his clients' information, and slips it under the door. He's crazy, not stupid, although it occurs to him that he doesn't care too much if the drive is crushed beneath someone's careless step.
With that done, he destroys everything.
There's no fury in it; he's methodical, deepening circles of calm around his pounding heart. He just breaks it all, less and less quietly, because it's better than what he really wants to do.
(alone alone cut the skin open the vein)
It takes some time before he's finished. He tunes out and lets the darkness in, the violence that he wants to do and can't, the secrets and the mess and the chaos in his head. He goes away because he'd rather be somewhere else, somewhere that his heart is intact.
When he comes back, it's because he runs out of things to break. There's not even enough left around him to try to reconstruct. His hands bristle with splinters, slick with sweat and blood. Someone is thudding their shoulder into the door, a repetitive driving beat punctuated by Denis cursing.
Right. They probably think he's dangling from the rafters. Jeremy hates how little that bothers him, beneath the numbness of shock. He goes and opens the door, then catches Denis before he can get a shoulder in the throat.
Denis shakes him off, but not before a second where he leans into Jeremy's hands. Jeremy knows where Denis thinks he would go if Jeremy died; never mind that Jeremy's told him they'll all go to Jeff in case of his untimely (increasingly likely) death. And yeah, now he feels that guilt he expected.
"Hey, man," Denis says, brusque. "Hey. Should I call Zach?"
Zach, Jeremy thinks, I should've thought of calling Z. Automatically, he looks for Winston and finds him in Gina's arms, far above the mess. Jeremy says in a dry croak, "Careful, there's glass."
"No shit," Denis snarks. "Z?"
Jeremy shakes his head no.
Denis looks like he's going to yell for a minute, and then someone else is taking Jeremy from him. Just latching on, like this is natural as gravity, and leading him from the wreckage. Jeremy takes a few slow (manic you know you're manic) seconds to recognize Misha, and then to be horrified by doing this to the poor guy in his first week, but Misha seems unfazed. He guides Jeremy to the bathroom and turns the tap on, then signs, First aid kit.
"Under the sink," Jeremy says. Thank fuck he restocked it after Ryzer started toddling around, knocking his head into things, and if Jeremy has to wear Sponge Bob bandaids, he deserves it. "I'm sorry."
Misha flicks a look at him, serious blue eyes seeing deeper than Jeremy really wants. He wets the washcloth and wipes the sweat off Jeremy's face, gentle as if he's dealing with a child. Jeremy blinks.
I'm sure the desk started it, Misha signs, and starts picking the splinters out of Jeremy's hands.
Author:
nilchancePairing: Misha Collins/Jeremy Sisto
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: This isn't real.
A/N: Set in
poisontaster's A Kept Boy 'verse. This story deals with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder, and with slavery as used in the AKB 'verse. There's also mention of child abuse, suicide, institutionalization and self-harm. And polyamory. And kink. And a partridge in a pear tree.He brings Marisa flowers; that's the most humiliating thing Jeremy remembers about it. Like some love-struck kid he never actually was, he springs for flowers and a vase (shatterproof) and everything. White daisies, simple and clean. It's never a good idea to get Marisa anything the color of blood.
Somehow he manages not to see Jane on his way into Applewood. He snags a nurse, instead, a tall thin woman with dyed blue hair. The blue makes him feel a little better about the place. She doesn't fill the walk down to Marisa with inane chatter, instead eating up the hall with her long strides. Almost as long as Jeremy's own. Jeremy's fingers sweat against the slick plastic surface of the vase; he wishes he didn't leave Misha at home, even if that was his own decision and the only real way to avoid the detonation of Mar's temper.
It's quiet in the little therapy room, no yelling and no objects thrown against the door. Reassuring. The nurse unlocks the room, flicks Jeremy a look over her shoulder, and then calls, "Ryan? You up for visitors?"
Marisa asks a muffled question. The nurse says, "Yeah, it's him," and Marisa is silent for a moment. Later, Jeremy remembers this; at the time, he drums his fingers against the vase. He has an appointment that evening. He's thinking of other things.
The nurse steps aside to let him in the room. Marisa is seated, dwarfed in a ratty nightrobe. She sees the flowers and her mouth draws thin. She looks like she's more with it than she's been; he feels a fatal lurch of hope.
"C'mere and sit down," Marisa says, her voice hoarse from talking. Group therapy, maybe, or she's screaming in her sleep again. He wonders, not without guilt, who's talking her down in the middle of the night. She doesn't have a Misha; he doesn't think she's even asked whether he got a slave to cover for her while she's treated.
(If she cares, some part of him adds, bitterly.)
They have to meet sometime, preferably before Marisa comes home and finds Misha in their bed. Better to give her time to adjust to the idea. So why is his voice locked inside his throat?
Her voice gentling, Marisa repeats, "Sit down."
Jeremy comes to the shitty little table and sits down, putting the vase between them like a chess-board. Marisa runs her thumb over the fragile petals of the daisy; there's a groove worn in the pad, like she's been writing letters, a smudge of lead from the pencil. Once she sees that she's turning the white to gray, she grimaces and drops her hand to the table. She doesn't try to touch him.
"This is hard," she says to herself.
Cracking a smile, Jeremy says, "That's what she said."
At least she laughs, erasing the worry lines around her mouth. "That was an old line at Stonehenge."
"You know me. I like the classics."
Her expression darkens, as if drawn towards the event horizon of her silence. In seconds, she looks like a woman who never laughs. She puts her hand out, palm up; the scar on her inner wrist winds like a river on a map. Jeremy strokes the scar with his thumb before he takes her hand.
"You've been so kind to me," Marisa says. Her words sound practiced. Too careful. Later, he hates himself for not seeing it coming. "Nothing but kind. No, don't shrug, you know it's true."
"It's not--" Jeremy swallows, looks at their joined hands. "It's not like that. You don't have to-- you're a person."
"I'm a slave," she says, not unkindly.
"Not to me."
She scoffs. "Thanks, Jer. That's very guilty liberal of you. Right up there with 'I don't think you're like those other black people'."
Jeremy winces. "That's not exactly fair."
"It's true, though." Marisa squeezes his hand once, a little too hard to be just comfort. "You've been around Jeff too long. He rubs off on people like you."
Jeremy can't hone the sharp edge off his voice. "People like me. Crazy or queer? Or just weak?"
"People half in love with him."
Stung, Jeremy takes his hand back. "It's not like that."
Marisa lifts an eyebrow. "Bullshit it isn't. He's been the other man for a long time."
"That'll be news to Zach."
"Jeff's the one who's got your heart in a jar on his desk--"
"Wow, hey, thanks for the creepy metaphor." Jeremy stands. "This is going to be 20 rounds of you poking at old wounds, so I'm gonna go. I'll see you tomorrow, okay? I--"
"There's someone else for me," Marisa says.
Jeremy doesn't remember dropping back into the chair, but when his brain returns from its short vacation, he's sitting across from her again. He tries to school his expression back into careful blankness, but it's not working. His mouth is shaking.
"When?" he asks finally, his voice like a scrape of a knife being sharpened. "Who?"
Marisa looks away from him, tucking her hair behind the shell of her ear. "Scott. Six months."
Scott. Scott with his sleazy smile and his pills. Fuck, Jeremy did his fucking taxes this year. Slumping back in the chair, Jeremy says too quietly, "I can't believe you did that."
Marisa's mouth twists. "Don't you act so high and mighty. You fuck Zach and Wendy, and--"
"That's different, Mar, you knew about that, I asked if you were okay with--"
"-- and she doesn't even like me!"
"Jesus." Jeremy covers his face with one hand. "Jesus Christ. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Let's just..."
With a sigh that seems to well from deep inside her, to take the life out of her, Marisa turns to watch him. Part of Jeremy wants to say she looks satisfied by the scene, but that's only his pettiness talking; she just looks exhausted and sick.
"Okay," Jeremy says, aware he's saying it to fill up the quiet. "Scott. We can work that out. We can set up... fuck, a lunch or something? We can talk about whether he wants to use condoms or fluid bond or whatever. We--"
Marisa shakes her head, slowly. "Baby," she says, and it's the most tender she's ever sounded. "No."
His chest hitches once. He should shut up, he should stop, but he feels like chased a car and caught the bumper and is clinging now at 60 mph. "Fine, okay, you can go to him whenever, you can do whatever you want. You don't even have to tell me. Just come home, okay? I--"
"Jeremy." All the sadness in the world is in her voice. "No. It's over."
Jeremy's pulse is drumming in his ears. He stops looking at her face and stares at the flowers instead. They're pretty but they're dying without the ground.
Funny, but he didn't think his heart could be broken anymore.
"Tell the hospital I've still got the bill," he says, and he leaves her before she can get scared.
***
He doesn't remember driving home.
He shouldn't be driving. He should call somebody to come get him.
He doesn't know who to call, or who he could count on to come.
He drives himself.
***
The house is quiet when he gets back. Jeremy closes the door behind him and hangs his keys up, very carefully, because he thinks the clatter of them into the change dish would break him. Surface tension is holding him now, trembling above the edge of the cup, ready to spill.
"Jeremy?" Gina calls from the kitchen. "Hey, love, I made muffins."
He ignores her. Goes upstairs. Winston meets him at the top, waving his tail like a flag, and doesn't resist when Jeremy scoops him up. There have been other times that Jeremy's crated him in the upstairs bathroom, and so Winston is resigned rather than curious. Jeremy rubs the top of his head, tells him he's a good boy.
The bedroom door is open. Misha is curled up there, cat-like, absorbed enough in his book that he doesn't hear Jeremy pass by on his way to the office.
Jeremy goes into the office and shuts the door. There's a chair for his clients; he wedges it under the knob and locks the door. He removes the flash drive from his computer, all of his clients' information, and slips it under the door. He's crazy, not stupid, although it occurs to him that he doesn't care too much if the drive is crushed beneath someone's careless step.
With that done, he destroys everything.
There's no fury in it; he's methodical, deepening circles of calm around his pounding heart. He just breaks it all, less and less quietly, because it's better than what he really wants to do.
(alone alone cut the skin open the vein)
It takes some time before he's finished. He tunes out and lets the darkness in, the violence that he wants to do and can't, the secrets and the mess and the chaos in his head. He goes away because he'd rather be somewhere else, somewhere that his heart is intact.
When he comes back, it's because he runs out of things to break. There's not even enough left around him to try to reconstruct. His hands bristle with splinters, slick with sweat and blood. Someone is thudding their shoulder into the door, a repetitive driving beat punctuated by Denis cursing.
Right. They probably think he's dangling from the rafters. Jeremy hates how little that bothers him, beneath the numbness of shock. He goes and opens the door, then catches Denis before he can get a shoulder in the throat.
Denis shakes him off, but not before a second where he leans into Jeremy's hands. Jeremy knows where Denis thinks he would go if Jeremy died; never mind that Jeremy's told him they'll all go to Jeff in case of his untimely (increasingly likely) death. And yeah, now he feels that guilt he expected.
"Hey, man," Denis says, brusque. "Hey. Should I call Zach?"
Zach, Jeremy thinks, I should've thought of calling Z. Automatically, he looks for Winston and finds him in Gina's arms, far above the mess. Jeremy says in a dry croak, "Careful, there's glass."
"No shit," Denis snarks. "Z?"
Jeremy shakes his head no.
Denis looks like he's going to yell for a minute, and then someone else is taking Jeremy from him. Just latching on, like this is natural as gravity, and leading him from the wreckage. Jeremy takes a few slow (manic you know you're manic) seconds to recognize Misha, and then to be horrified by doing this to the poor guy in his first week, but Misha seems unfazed. He guides Jeremy to the bathroom and turns the tap on, then signs, First aid kit.
"Under the sink," Jeremy says. Thank fuck he restocked it after Ryzer started toddling around, knocking his head into things, and if Jeremy has to wear Sponge Bob bandaids, he deserves it. "I'm sorry."
Misha flicks a look at him, serious blue eyes seeing deeper than Jeremy really wants. He wets the washcloth and wipes the sweat off Jeremy's face, gentle as if he's dealing with a child. Jeremy blinks.
I'm sure the desk started it, Misha signs, and starts picking the splinters out of Jeremy's hands.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 08:29 pm (UTC)Beautifully done, missy. It was so vivid. I ache for Jeremy and an equal part of me aches for Marisa.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 06:08 pm (UTC)Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-26 06:14 pm (UTC)I love that icon.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 09:22 pm (UTC)Oh Jeremy... what a painful way to have things end. I love how calmly Misha is accepting things and just taking charge of Jeremy to take care of him. He is exactly what Jeremy needs :D
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 11:26 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for telling this story.
I have so much empathy for Jeremy. I think Misha is going to be very good for him.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 02:50 am (UTC)And that? Right there? Is why Misha is so perfect for Jeremy.
This was lovely and sharp and oh-so-painful, just like a surprise punch to the kidney, and so perfect.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 05:54 am (UTC)Which (in all my incoherent babbling) is to say that this was fantastic. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 06:03 pm (UTC)"I'm sure the desk started it, Misha signs, and starts picking the splinters out of Jeremy's hands."
-Aw Misha, how so completely appropriate! :)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-27 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-27 01:29 am (UTC)This story and this verse and I love it all so so so amazing. Thank God it's still updated.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-28 02:24 am (UTC)poor Jeremy, poor Marisa! (even if that was a shitty thing to do)
love the matter-of-fact way Misha knows how to take care of him.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-10 01:00 pm (UTC)I really wanted to know the Jeremy, misha, marrissa story, so this is brilliant. And I like your writing style, too many Internet writers are monotonous and not creative enough.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-10 01:14 pm (UTC)