#but it's disconcerting and ALSO it made me have to exit out of the video to select who's watching

[orcelito]

Watching critical role on my ps4 on YouTube only to have some random Google pixel 6 connect then immediately disconnect

Like who are you and why did you touch my ps4. Bitch

[katie-dub]

A Special Day of Mourning

Fleabag Fic

Summary: Last time a wedding brought us together, this time it's a funeral. Still the tragic loss of Godmother in a freak accident involving a falling wall of plaster of paris penises has got to be good for something, right?

AO3

Yes, I’m back with more Fleabag x the Priest fic. Thank you as ever to the delightful @eirabach for reading this for me, when she doesn’t even go here! I love you darling.

15 Years Later

So last time you saw me, I was sending my sister off to go get the hot Finn who was crazy about her after my almost boyfriend the actual Priest delivered a terrifying homily about love at Dad’s wedding to the ever repellent Godmother. The Priest broke my heart when he chose God over me and exited pursued by a fox.

Since then I found love, tried the whole marriage thing, had a child, realised I was surprisingly good at motherhood but less so at being married and am now amicably divorced. I still touch myself thinking about that one night with the Hot Priest who was the first man I ever loved, unless of course you count Leonardo DiCaprio, which I don’t.

Claire and Klare have three terrifyingly beautiful children and she actually smiles constantly now. It was disconcerting at first, but after all this time, I think I’m used to it.

Dad’s still alive and kicking, at 88 years of age. Godmother, however, is not. She passed away in a freak accident involving a falling wall of plaster of paris penises at her sexhibition two weeks ago. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.

Before The Funeral

I walk up to Dad’s house with my Daughter in tow. She’s 11 and has already entered her awkward teenage years a whole two years early. Fucking overachiever.

That’s not to say that she isn’t the light of my life, the apple of my eye and all other appropriate cliches. It’s just that I can finally appreciate how really fucking annoying teenage girls can be. And she hasn’t even started her period yet.

We ring the doorbell and I hum “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” very softly under my voice. If there’s a hell, I’m almost certainly heading there.

Claire answers the door. “Hello, are you ready for this sad, sad, sad day?”

“I’ve brought the champagne!” I reply, lifting the bottle I bought especially. Just to toast to our dearly departed Godmother in the manner she would have wanted, of course.

“You look absolutely gorgeous,” Claire says, eyeing me suspiciously.

“You know grief does wonders for my complexion, I can’t help it!” And if there’s an extra spring in my step at the thought of finally being free of Godmother, well you can hardly blame me.

I deliberately take a moment to compose myself. I do feel for Dad, burying his second wife has got to be monumentally shit, even if he is better off without her.

“Wait,” Claire tugs on my arm urgently, bringing me to a halt.

“Is everything OK?”

“Your Priest is in there,” Claire murmurs in an undertone, her lips barely moving.

I’m struggling to follow her meaning. “What?”

“You know, your Priest, the one you - you know?” Oh. Oh! “He’s in there with Dad, comforting him, he’s conducting the funeral. I just thought you might need some warning.”

I wonder if he’s still hot. “Is he still hot?”

“Painfully hot,” she says with a grim nod and a tone that implies catastrophe. “He’s also still a man of god, so just don’t fuck him again ok?”

“I do have some restraint! That said, he was really fucking good at it. I’m single again, why not hey?”

Claire’s jaw is tight. It’s fun to know that I can still wind her up like this at the age of nearly 50. “I mean it,” she pleads sincerely, “I know I wasn’t around much last time with Finland and everything, but I could tell how much that hurt you then and I don’t want to have to kick a Priest’s arse for hurting my little sister.”

There’s a steely glint in her eye that makes it clear she means it, and I find myself deeply touched. I swallow down a lump in my throat and shrug, an “if you say so” gesture. “Didn’t know you cared.”

She nods. “Right. Oh also, Godmother is in there.”

“Wait, Godmother? Like her body?”

“Yes, it’s a whole art thing apparently.” Claire says “art thing” like it’s an infectious disease. “Transparent coffin. It’s horrendous.”

We walk into the living room, Dad is sat on the sofa, head in his hands, the Priest is beside him, an arm around his shoulder. His neck is still beautiful.

And right where the coffee table should be, a transparent coffin, with Godmother inside, wrapped in some kind of hot pink monstrosity.

“Oh holy fuck,” I shout, stopping abruptly at the sight.

Claire somehow avoids crashing into me and steps around me muttering “I did warn you” under her voice.

I shake myself, forcing my feet to take me further into the room. I drag my eyes away from Godmother, seeking out Dad to comfort him, and I’m greeted by the sight of my Priest’s warm smile turned on me.

He has more wrinkles and his once dark hair is now salt and pepper, but age hasn’t changed one fundamental fact: he is deeply, unfairly hot. Lucky bastard.

And he looks pleased to see me, which I’ll admit does good things to my ego, I may be a divorcee fast approaching 50, but maybe I’m not completely unfuckable yet. Or maybe this is just a genuine friendly smile for a former lover. Either way, it’s a happy surprise.

“Hello,” he says, “I’m sorry to leave just as you’re getting here -” his eyes suggest that this comment is sincere “- but I need to be on my way to the church.” He grips my arm briefly as he moves past me, a small gesture of comfort that nonetheless sends a little shiver of anticipation through me. I’m surprised that even after all this time he can affect me like this. “I’m sorry for your loss, but it is lovely to see you.”

“You too,” I agree, “I’ll see you at the church.” He nods and heads out of the door.

Oh fuck, the church.

The last time I was in that church I was trying to wrestle him out of his clothes. I’ve never been back. Not inside it at least, although I may have dawdled outside it on more than one occasion. And now I have to sit through Godmother’s funeral there, all the time thinking about the way he ordered me to “kneel” in the confessional. Maybe about when he repeated that command in my house and I sucked him off.

I try to distract myself with other thoughts, but the only thing to look at is the coffin. It really is hideous, and not so much because it's a dead body, but that pink is a bit much and the embroidery on it looks suspiciously like - "is that funeral shroud really covered in fornicating skeletons?" I ask, looking to Claire in the hopes of hearing a sensible "no".

"It is," she confirms, her mouth a hard-set line of disapproval.

"Well fuck me."

The Funeral Procession

We didn’t do a funeral procession for Mum when it was her funeral. It was too over the top and showy for her. So of course Godmother insisted.

I’m packed into a car with Dad and Daughter driven by the Shepherd of the Deceased, as the man insisted on being called (I can see why Godmother liked him, but what's wrong with just calling yourself a funeral director?). Claire and her family are in the car behind us. We inch down the roads painfully slowly, surely pissing off half of London as we follow the hearse to the church.

My heart pounds at the sight of the church, a feeling that quickly gives way to confusion as we continue to drive past it. “Where the fuck are we going?”

“Language,” tuts my Daughter, and I’m tempted to stick my tongue out at her. I promise, I really am a good mum. Usually.

“No seriously, haven’t we just gone past the church?”

“Hmmm? Er, wh-what’s that dear?” asks Dad distracted and distraught and I’m beyond bewildered.

We pull up outside an entirely unfamiliar church, and it occurs to me that my Priest must have been moved to a new parish. All this time avoiding his church and he doesn’t even work there now.

I get out of the car and help Dad to do the same. I walk to the front door and that’s when I see the sign: St Jude’s Anglican Church.

Anglican?

What. The. Fuck?

The Funeral

There’s no chance for me to confront the Priest about his conversion before the service, so I sit by Dad’s side during it and stew on this startling revelation.

Anglican. He’s Anglican now, and so, apparently, no longer celibate. Not that he did all that well at the whole celibacy thing while I was around.

Does this mean he’s available? Or did he leave the Catholic Church for someone else, someone who he loved enough to really be with, someone who he is still with now?

I realise this sounds like I spent the past 15 years and all of my marriage pining for an unavailable man, when honestly, I haven’t. But it’s still something of a head fuck to discover that he is no longer forbidden fruit. The possibility of that is delicious, while also giving me doubts about what we ever had.

Like I said, a head fuck.

I can’t help but think, looking at his outfit with its minimalist design, that he must miss the robes from Catholicism. You can say what you like about their beliefs, but those Catholics have got style.

"Sometimes I worry that I'm only in it for the outfits," he'd said that night in the church, the alcohol and desire for me driving him to doubt himself. Well, he proved that wrong, didn't he?

A cameraman zooms in on my face and I find myself looking to camera, startled, before realising that I should probably focus on looking rather more distraught at Godmother’s death and rather less intrigued by the possibility of fucking the Priest again.

Trust Godmother to hire a camera crew to film her own fucking funeral.

The Wake

"I'm very interested in the conflict of my mortality, the desire to cheat death expressed in my pursuit of sexual pleasure with its promise of rebirth," Godmother narrates in her death video. "My custom-made burial shroud is a culmination of these desires, the fabric interwoven with fungal spores such that in my passing, new life springs anew."

I feel a presence beside me and assuming it's Claire, start to talk over Godmother's incessant monologue. "Is she calling death an STI? I think that's almost profound."

"Fucked if I know," a decidedly male Irish brogue replies. I turn to look at the Priest. "Sounds like a load of wank to me."

"That's Godmother in a nutshell," I agree and he laughs appreciatively.

"I'm not sure how those fungi will survive inside a sealed perspex coffin. Don't they need air?"

"Fucked if I know," I echo him with a shrug. "Still prefer funerals to weddings?"

"Generally, yes. You know I believe that we're going somewhere wonderful in the next life. This funeral has given me pause though."

"It's a bit much, isn't it?" I'm not quite sure what to say next, the thing I desperately want to say feels wildly inappropriate.

"I'm not Catholic anymore." I’m surprised by how direct he's been. "I just thought I'd put it out there. Although that now sounds like an awful chat up line, which it's not - "

"Well fuck you then," I say, trying to brush off the hurt of that decisive shutting down of my half-formed hopes.

"If you insist." There's a twinkle in his eye now. Maybe I've misread things.

"Are you propositioning me, Father?"

"You know, I think I might be."

"Mum! Mu-um!"

Of course, of fucking course, kids are the ultimate cock block. The Priest looks awkward, I probably do too. I swear he's trying to surreptitiously look at my ring finger so I use my hands in a way that probably resembles a muppet to show off how attached I'm not.

"Everything OK, darling?"

"Dad's here to take me to his place, says he's not comfortable leaving without speaking to you first." Daughter rolls her eyes. I wish I could do the same.

My ex is so considerate. What a prick.

"Sorry, Father, I have to go talk to my Ex." Had to get in that confirmation of my relationship status, just so he has all the facts. "We'll talk when I get back?"

"I'll be waiting," he says with a smile.

It takes longer than I'm totally happy with to wrap things up with my Ex. Unfortunately he's busy being concerned about my dad and asking practical questions about homework and after school clubs and I can't exactly tell him that I'm a bit busy seducing a Priest to talk.

It takes me a while to track him down when I finally escape, but I find him hiding and having a fag in the same secret corner where we once shared stolen kisses. Honestly I can't decide if it's romantic or a little pathetic that we're back here and history's potentially going to repeat itself.

Hopefully not to the same bitter conclusion.

I pull out my own fag and the Priest offers me a light. Leaning close to his hands I feel the same rush of anticipation I did back then, my heart fluttering at his presence like no time has passed at all.

"So," he starts, then breaks off.

"So," I agree with a nod. "I'm a mum - a single mum, and you're a hopefully single, no longer celibate man."

"I am."

There's a long silence that's almost deafening with its intensity.

"So what made you -" "I'm sorry I didn't -"

We both start speaking at once, stop and stare at each other for a minute then I gesture for him to speak.

"I'm sorry I didn't leave for you," he says, then looks me right in the eye. "I hope you know that it's not that I didn't love you, I just, I needed time to figure things out."

"I know. I knew that then too. So what did make you convert in the end?"

"The sex. I was really, really gagging for it," he deadpans. I snort with laughter, he waits for me to calm down before he carries on. "Honestly it did start with meeting you -”

“Me and my blasphemous tits.”

“Yeah.” He smirks at me, then looks a little sad. “I felt lost after we stopped - after I ended things.” He shakes his head and looks at me, swallowing a lump in his throat. “I was so lonely when we met and you came into my life and we just connected so deeply and I fell so hard for you.”

Oh fuck, I am not prepared for this conversation.

“No, don’t disappear, not now.” He takes my hand and waits for me to focus on him, so I try my best to fight against how overwhelmed I feel and to stay in the moment with him.

“I know that you don’t believe what I do, but I really do believe that God is love. 'Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.' That's what the Bible says. It just didn’t make sense to me that I could be so full of love and that that was a bad thing, something to be ashamed of. Isn’t love meant to be a wonderful gift from God?”

I can feel the tightness in my jaw, a prickle of tears, I seem to have forgotten how to breathe.

“As time went on the intensity of my love for you faded, but that seed of doubt was planted. Not in God, not in Him, but in the word of the Catholic church. A different denomination of Christianity would allow me to marry you, to celebrate our love, there’s nothing in the bible to say that we shouldn’t.”

These words hang heavy between us and there’s a long pause, while he takes a long drag on his cigarette and lets the smoke slowly drift out of his parted lips.

“Over time I noticed more and more of these inconsistencies and one day a teenage boy asked me for forgiveness for falling in love with his male best friend and I just couldn’t … I couldn’t understand why he needed it. I couldn’t in all good faith follow the teachings of the Catholic church and stay true to what I believe.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“You wanted to marry me? It'll take more than that to make an honest woman of me."

He chuckles. “I don’t know. If we could've dated and my feelings stayed as they were? Maybe. I wanted the option.”

"When did you leave?"

"Four years ago."

"Did you -" oh wow, it's so hard to ask this, but I need to know. "Did you ever think of telling me?"

"No."

Fuck me that hurts. I drop my cigarette to the floor, study it as I stomp down on it to make sure that the fire is out. It’s my way of deflecting from the sudden urge to cry. He gently lifts my chin with his finger, bringing my face up to look at his.

"I knew you were married. Your stepmum said."

"Was she a dick about it?"

"Of course. Still, you were unavailable. What good would telling you have done?" He's right. I was still married when he converted, it was for the best.

"I saw you once with him. Or I think it was him."

"Am I detecting a smidge of jealousy there, Father?"

"Oh fuck off.” He didn’t deny it. “A parishioner had died and I just, I really needed a friend and I thought of you. You just got me so well, you know? I went to Hillarys and you were there in the arms of this man and you looked so happy that I just couldn't ruin that for you. I shouldn't have gone. Not when I didn't know if I could trust myself around you."

"And what about now?"

"Well I'm allowed to kiss you now, I don't need to worry about trusting myself."

"That's true. So do you want to come over to my place for a friendly game of strip poker?" He laughs at me, shaking his head while smirking. "Spin the bottle?" That devilish gleam appears in his eyes. "Seven minutes in heaven - or is that considered blasphe -"

He cuts me off with his lips on mine.

It’s everything I remembered and so much more. Intense, passionate, devastating kisses that drive me to cliches straight out of a romance novel. Pushed up against that wall my heart races, my chest heaves, and, yes, my knickers get fucking wet.

It feels just like it did 15 years ago. It feels like love. And that’s insane, we had barely even started when things ended between us and I’ve lived and loved so much since then. But this thing between us? It just feels right.

My body is on fire, I’m pretty sure it’s in the good, aroused way and not because God’s smiting me for defiling a priest. He’s a tad late to the punishment, if that was His plan. But I’ll happily let this fire consume me because it feels so good. After all this time, I never want what we’re sharing to end. But the need to breathe becomes too strong and we break apart, noses nuzzling and foreheads resting together.

“Can I take you to dinner tonight?” he asks but I’m so staggered by our kisses I barely hear what he’s said.

“What?” I breathe out in between pants.

“Let me take you to dinner tonight,” he says, stroking my cheek before leaning in for another dizzying kiss.

"Oh, I don't know," I pretend to be thinking hard. "Sounds a bit tame, I did have plans with a rabbi for a good hard fuck."

He barks out a laugh. "Oh really?"

"Yeah and tomorrow's my night getting spanked by an imam."

He raises his eyebrows holding back a laugh at what I'm saying and playing along. "What about Friday?"

"Threesome with a pujari and a Buddhist monk."

"What if I upgraded my offer to dinner and if you're really good you get dessert?" He ran his tongue along his lips.

"And what if I'm really bad?"

"You'll have to get on your knees and pray for forgiveness."

It's ridiculous how easily this man can turn me on. Although I have kneeled for him before, I remember the effect.

"I could be tempted to agree," I say, affecting disinterest.

"But you'll have to dump your harem of religious leaders," he all but growls.

"Oh I don't -"

He slams his mouth into mine, pushing me back against the wall, cutting me off with a fierce kiss. He trails his lips along my jaw to my ear. "Please," he murmurs, then kisses down my neck and pushes my collar to one side to suck and lick where it meets my shoulder. That fire starts up inside me again, his mouth almost painfully good against me, driving me to the brink of madness until I'm half tempted to push his trousers down and fuck him against the wall where anyone could see.

“OK,” I pant. "I - I guess I can do that."

"Good girl," he growls into my ear, then pulls away, righting my collar as he does, to hide the bruise he's surely worked into my skin. “We should probably get back before they start looking for us.”

And he steps back from me, innocent smirk on his face.

"I'm going to make you pay for that," I say, trying to sound commanding, although I'm so breathless that the effect is lost.

"Oh please do," he says with a grin.

We head back towards the party and one important thing occurs to me. “If you’re Anglican now, why did you do Godmother’s funeral? Isn't she Catholic?”

“You may find this hard to believe, but I don’t think she was really all that interested in the religious side of being a Catholic.”

“Oh yes, she wanted one of those religion-free faiths.”

“Exactly. She may have intimated to me that she would very much like for me to conduct her funeral when her time came because her funeral should be a thing of beauty.”

I snort with laughter. “I didn’t realise it was possible to be vain from beyond the grave, but if anyone was going to find a way it was her.”

“You won’t hear me complaining - she brought me back to you.”

“She finally did right by me, she’ll be so disappointed.”

[lamalefix]

A whisper of smoke 2/5

[Buddie fic; Heavy Angst; Angst with a Happy Ending; Hurt/Comfort; Emotional Hurt/Comfort; Established Relationship; Major Character Injury; Blood and Injury; Eddie’s POV; I don’t know how to English; I Don’t Even Know how to tag; I don’t even know why; Author.exe has stopped working]

read ch1

[read this work on ao3]

Eddie proceeds by the sheer force of inertia.

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and it’s been months. In a blink of an eye and at the same time in what seems like an eternity, it’s been months. Something changed there’s a new life: Maddie and Chim’s baby girl, but something didn’t change.

He no longer sleeps. Or, at the very least, he’s exhausted when he wakes up every morning. Three hours a night is enough, three hours a night is enough to be able to work, the least that he can do at work. At night he reads scientific articles, inquires, studies, reviews, meta-analysis. And now he knows there was a woman in 2017 who recovered completely after a month-long coma after a severe cardiac arrest and hypoxia. And even if he knows Evan is out of time, but maybe he’s just as resilient. He read and re-read that article on communication in comatose patients, the one Evan read just before the fire, just before the accident, just before hell broke loose.

Everything changed in those months, and yet everything it’s still the same.

He goes to wake Christopher before turning in the kitchen to prepare breakfast, and looks into the fridge and pantry, and decides that today is a good day to go shopping, he’ll go to the hospital in the evening before coming back home. Today needs to be a good day. Maybe he should also buy the pancakes mix, although Christopher has stopped asking for them by now, but maybe this is due to Eddie’s disastrous culinary ability rather than the fact that it was Buck who made him the best pancakes in the world. But Chirstopher will never say it aloud, rather his child who was once sunny preferred to stop asking. He stopped with pancakes, with movie nights, with ideas for school projects, all he does is play with his Lego and do homework in his room. He has stopped being the usual ray of sunshine, the usual cheerful and courageous child, he has lost that light in the eyes.

And Eddie’s heart became a little smaller and perhaps he just must find the courage to react, to take that step that is delaying and postponing and postponing, ignoring Maddie and what his conscience continue to suggest.

Days have passed. Weeks. Months.

Months, Dios.

He must find a way to get his shit together, to go on for him and for Christopher. For Christopher who does nothing but play with his Lego, do his homework and draw in his room, who has become quieter and has lost that sparkling light in his eyes. He no longer has nightmares, or at least they are not as intense as before, and not even so frequent, but he has lost that light in his eyes. And the only flash of joy is when he goes to visit Buck, in the hospital, in the hospital in a long-term intensive care unit that certainly isn’t a place for kids like him, and chooses his books and gets help to get on the bed as close as possible to Buck, and with a disconcerting delicacy he takes his place near his Bucky and begins to read, the book open for both to see. Even if Buck has his eyes closed.

But Eddie can’t let himself go, astray, he must stop feeling that way. He must go back to having control over his life, otherwise he will bring Christopher down too.

It was difficult to find the words, but Chris understood, because Christopher is so smart and resilient and is a fighter. And he said to Eddie with his big grey eyes, “Then let’s fight with him”.

“Mornin’ daddy” mumbles his child as he drags himself with the unmistakable ticking of his crutches in the kitchen. He is already fully dressed, and although he slept tonight, even his sleep doesn’t seem to have been restful, beneath the slightly fogged glasses there are dark circles under the eyes.

“Hey buddy! You are all ready for school!” he says ruffling his hair, deliberately upsetting something he has so painstakingly combed. He wants to see him laugh, he doesn’t want to think about his eyes that are so distant and empty and tired, he wants to get his son back.

“Oh, come on daddy...” Chris snorts, moving his hand, but squeezing his fingers in a comforting way. “I-I co-combed,” he mutters, chuckling, softly.

“Oh, I see it! That’s why I had to  you,” Eddie replies, smiling. "Come on, let’s have breakfast otherwise we arrive late to school and Miss Flores scolds me."

Christopher climbs the chair without too much effort, he’s grown a couple of centimetres in the last few months, and now these movements that were more tiring before, are way easier. He stretches to retrieve the cereal box and pours them into his cup.

“Here is the milk...” Eddie says, pouring a little over the cereals, and with his other hand she brings the sugar close to him. “Before going to work I’ll go shopping, do you have any special requests?” he asks.

And Christopher shakes his head. “C-Can we see a movie tonight?”.

Eddie smiles at him and reaches out to retrieve two tablespoons of cereal for himself. “Sure!”.

And Christopher’s eyes light up, shine like two little stars. “Really?”.

Eddie can only clench his jaw and pretend that the weird, painful thrill that gave him the unbelieving tone in Christopher’s voice is attributable instead to the coffee that returns hot and bitter in the throat. He heaves a small cough. “Sure,” he replies. “And we are together tomorrow too, I’m off… I received the newsletter from your school, there is an exhibition on the stars at the science museum, would you like to go?”.

Christopher smiles for a moment, but then his eyes turn sad, dull, empty.

“Hey, if you don’t feel like it, we’ll go again another time. We can have a quiet day only you and me. Maybe we can sleep late and play all day... maybe we can organize an exit to the park with Denny and Nia?” he mumbles.

Christopher shakes his head. “No, it’s fine, let’s go”.

“Great!” Eddie nods, jumping to his feet. “We have to hurry, you have to finish breakfast and brush your teeth. I’m going to prepare your backpack”.

“Everything is ready,” he replies.

“Oh really? But you’re all grown up then!” mutters Eddie bending over to kiss the top of his kid’s head. “Look here, you’ll grow taller than I am in no time!”.

Christopher snorts and continues to eat, without saying anything.

And Eddie maybe should go deeper, maybe he should ask him something, but for now he decides to let it go and let his son come to him. He never was a pressing father, he is apprehensive, but never pressing. “I’m going to finish getting ready, it will end up you’ll have to accompany me to work and do the shopping if you get so big all together!”.

Eddie slips into his room and finishes getting ready. He doesn’t look at the bed, at the absence in his bedroom, he decides to take a last look at the school newsletter. The science museum labs should give Christopher some light back, he likes the stars, or at least that’s what he thought a few nights ago, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep. And all the videos on his phone, the videos of the three of them together, broke his heart again, the emptiness pressing in the bed, the silence so loud and oppressive in that room. He had found a good reason to avoid that particular activity, actually, that night, but right now he doesn’t remember what it even was. Perhaps because he has decided that today must be a good day, or perhaps because it was not a good reason, the one that he had found. It was just another way out, but for himself, not for his son, his marvellous and resilient son. In any case, he doesn’t remember now.

When he returns to the kitchen, he doesn’t expect to see Christopher staring at his cup still full of all moist cereals, the straw in his hands while his shoulders shake as he sniffs.

“Chris? Hey buddy?” Eddie calls him softly, and is a little afraid to identify how much his voice is trembling as he says his son’s name. “What’s going on, mijo?”

“I don’t want to go. At the museum… we… we had to go with Bucky” he mumbles. “I’m sorry, daddy but… but Bucky will enjoy it and… I like it when he explains everything and… and I want that, I want to wait for Bucky, can’t we wait for him?”.

And it is the first time he has seen him, his strong, beautiful kid, so broken, so shattered, so fragile. Small, so tiny, he sees behind that mask of strength and resilience that has been built around him or that perhaps is precisely his character. And then Eddie crouches next to him and embraces him, and his son breaks himself into a thousand pieces in his arms and cries louder and sobs and sniffles. Here was his good reason. They had to go with Buck. They even talked about it, about the exhibition about the stars with thematic workshops. One evening, while they were out in the backyard looking at the stars, Evan who, with his gentle low voice, had Christopher in his arms and pointed to the sky. And Eddie’s heart aches in his chest. He forgot. He forgot Evan, he forgot his soft smile when he said they could bring Christopher to the science museum.

“We won’t go there, it’s fine. Okay, let’s stay home tomorrow,” he replies, the air that scratches the back of his throat. “There is no hurry. We’ll go to the show when we’re ready, okay? When he comes back to us,” he says slowly. And he was so wrong to believe that they were ready for a good day, both of them. “Come on, finish eating, and let’s go. Or your teacher will be angry with me if we are late”.

“Can I go see him today?” Christopher asks quietly. “After school, it’s Friday so aunty Maddie doesn’t work today, can I go, dad?”. It’s like a plea, a prayer.

And Eddie nods. “Okay, after school you go read your book to him, huh?” he decides “Then I’ll come pick you up after work and we go eat a pizza, mh?”.

And Christopher lights up, as if he had told him something incredible, as if he had said that he would take him to a theme park, to Disneyworld or whatever it is. Instead, he only gave him permission to go to the hospital, to visit him.

 He drives silently, then, all the way from home to school, Christopher looks out the window and occasionally sniffs. He chose a book to read to Buck and put it in his backpack, before getting into the truck.

When they arrive at the school gates, his son takes the backpack and gets down without help.

Eddie bends down to hug him, as every time and Christopher strokes his cheek and looks him in the eye for a moment. “Be careful at work,” he says slowly, in a shaky voice.

This is a new thing that tells him since he has been in therapy or, better, since Buck is in the hospital. It’s all different, since Buck’s is there. And this little charm, his small words, murmured while he cups his cheek, are like a small blessing. Buck doesn’t have his back at work, but he can do it even without stretching out his hand to get Evan’s, he just needs to be careful.

Eddie mimics his gesture and strokes his cheek in return. “You pay attention at school,” he winks.

And Christopher snorts a small laugh and begins to stroll towards the entrance. “I am a good student!”.

Eddie doesn’t reply, while waits there see him enter and then he gets back in the car, but pulls straight in front of the supermarkets, he decides that he must see him today too, in the morning, before his shift. He too must go to Evan.

He sends a message to abuela, to ask her to do some shopping for him, which means that she will fill the fridge and the pantry with real things to clean, season, chop and cook like an adult, and a lot of homemade meals already ready to be put in the microwave. (He can already imagine Tìa Pepa groaning, but that’s okay).

And then he calls Maddie. He never calls her, they have a kind of silent non-aggression pact, they have divergent views on Evan’s condition and no, they don’t talk much.

Maddie’s speeches are yielding, they have the bitter taste of defeat. But she always likes to accompany Christopher to visit Evan.

“Eddie?” comes her voice.

“Hi Maddie, Christopher would like to come with you to the hospital this afternoon, if you’re available,” he murmurs, as monotonous as possible.

“Sure! Sure!” she says, her voice ringing. “Eddie, listen...”.

“I know, Maddie, I’m not ready” he mumbles softly. “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want... I don’t want to, even think about it. I don’t” he adds more categorically.

“Eddie...” she sighs. “Let’s have coffee before you have to go to work, mh? You’re coming to the hospital, aren’t you?” and it’s rhetoric question, of course. When Maddie stays there at night, Eddie is the one who takes over in the morning.

 .

.

.

Eddie has never loved hospitals, and he is more than certain that anyone who has ever proclaimed said love has never found in a situation like his, like theirs.

It’s very hot in hospitals, and waiting rooms are always so oppressive, sick.

They all have that unmistakable smell of plastic and disinfectant, and scots pine to cover the stale smell. And no matter how accustomed he is to waiting, now, no matter how quickly his brain adjusts to the smells, and no matter how much he believed he would get used to spending hours in there, there is still that mixture of smells pinches his nose. And he decides not to focus on that stinging pain in his chest.

Hours have passed, days have passed, weeks have passed. And if Eddie really concentrates, he could even say how many minutes, how many seconds have passed since they brought Evan in there, in that hospital. Or at the very least since Eddie, after collapsing, woke up, half sedated in the triage area, a small concussion and some bruised ribs, the verdict of his condition. A week off. And he hoped he would bring Buck home with him at the end of the week.

Instead, that week went by followed by many, many others, and he sees people whirling and murmuring in that waiting room. His condition is a strange one, he knows and doesn’t know, altogether, how long he spends there in the waiting room. He could say he knows all those faces that move around him, all those voices, and at the same time he doesn’t know anyone. Or maybe he just recognizes nobody, other than the worried, devastated, tired expression that is perhaps the same one he wears.

Whichever time Eddie is there, every time they chase him out of the little room where Evan is sleeping, there is always a constant swirl of people. People who come and go, who are welcomed and accompanied by doctors and nurses, and every time Eddie sees a white coat, his heart jumps in his chest. In hope and fear, in fear and hope. He hopes that they tell him that he is awake, that he finally responds to treatment, that soon, soon they will finally see the end of this continuous limbo in which they find themselves. And he fears, with all that he has in his body, every inch of his skin, every little cell and its micro-organisms, he fears that they will tell him that there is nothing more to do, that their time together is over, no tomorrow.

And when someone speaks to him now, Eddie responds in monosyllables, he answers because he goes with the current, shipwrecked by that sea of unspoken things, of lost time, of decision made too late, of movements that he may had made wrong.

And if he closes his eyes he feels his presence, he feels strong and clear even when Eddie isn’t sitting in that oppressive little room in which they put him, in which he is all grey, including him who is usually colorful and flamboyant, who has that infectious smile and those warm hands, the cheerful eyes and the clear and strong voice, the chatter that fills the air are now just an old memory that digs inside him with such precision, with such diligence that it seems like a torture. And gradually his heart becomes smaller and smaller and his knees tremble, inciting him in his constant escape, even if he is motionless and stands there and waits.

And waits.

And waits.

And waits.

For days, weeks, months, for so long it hurts.

 .

There is a moment, in the morning when he wakes up, those few times that he has the courage to go to bed, in their bed, that he forgets that absence. Because even if he isn’t there, even if Evan isn’t there at home with him, even if he is distant, and he sleeps and at the same time doesn’t sleep in a hospital bed, he is still so close. There is that moment, that wonderful and painful moment when Eddie doesn’t remember, doesn’t remember that he went to bed alone and that if he reached out, he would feel the mattress, the sheets, Evan’s place in the bed cold, so cold and empty. Perhaps it is because it’s their routine, his continual repetition of their routine, which anchors him to reality and also makes him live in a series of gestures, makes him retrace all those gestures that he hasn’t done for hours, days, weeks, months. And so he imagines, or maybe it is his brain that grants him this feeling of peace, he imagines that it is always one of those mornings in which they have more time, that they do not have to run to the truck and take Chris to school, and can afford a lazy morning in pyjamas, a pile of waffles, puffy and soft, in front of them on the coffee table, while more than looking at something they just browse the Disney + catalog and end up, like all the other times, looking at reruns of Avengers Assemble.

Then, then after that perfect moment of blissful ignorance, clouded by fatigue, he remembers that the bed is empty. And it’s been hours, days, weeks, months and the bed is always this cold. And hi breath hitches at the back of his throat.

Nobody can fix his heart, nobody can unbreak all those bits, nobody except Evan.

And that’s why he proceeds by the sheer force of inertia, the old routine that kicks to take back its rightful place. A few exercises in the morning, showering, breakfast, and in a hurry at school and then, if he has time, he can pay a quick visit to the hospital, before the shift at the station, like today.

And when his day is awful, and he can’t reach out and take Evan’s, because the shift is too long and he sleeps too little, and Buck is not there to make his day better, to tell absurd facts, talking continuously and filling his head with thoughts, stealing that little peck in front of the lockers, or chaining a series of kisses on his neck, as soon as they come back from a bad call, he goes over their morning routine again and again.

He retraces their morning routine, retraces every single step with his thoughts and does his best not to think, not to look at his hands, the blood that is encrusted in the beds of his fingernails, and at the same time too much time has passed for him to see it, but he feels like Lady Macbeth, and can swear he can still see those marks on his hands. And as much as he disinfected them, his hands, soapy and clean, in all those days, until they started to hurt, he can swear to still see the stains of his blood, crusted at the base of his palms.

And every time he thinks about their morning routine, then he comes to think about that push, Buck who kicked him out of that house just in time to prevent both of them from being crushed by debris. He goes through everything that happened afterwards, he thinks about the fact that maybe, with the right sling, with a rope, he could have thrown himself in there and pulled Evan out, intervening first.

And they needed to move quickly, because in these cases it is the timing that matters. A minute can change things. And they wasted time, they wasted a lot of fucking time. Dios.

And every time he hopes, that little, big selfish voice that murmurs under his skin, he hopes to have gotten Evan in the hospital in time, anyway. He hopes it for Evan and for his own heart, for Christopher and for Maddie, but above all because Eddie will never have the strength to overcome this thing. If he doesn’t come home, Eddie is done, finish, caput. And it’s not a figure of speech, because as long as Christopher isn’t big, and strong, and able to look after himself on his own, Eddie will have to continue to exist, his world will continue to turn as he did in that huge before, in that part of his life before Buck.

With Shannon it was already over when her life came to an end. But with Buck it was just started.

And Eddie could list them, the days they spent together. Nights, he could count them in his hair, he could remember them one by one. Every single moment since that evening, an evening like many others when Buck was at home, after a gruelling shift of thirty hours, and Eddie was at work instead. And Eddie had made a shitty, a very big shitty fucked up decision, which now he doesn’t even have the courage to remember. When he doesn’t think he usually makes fucked up moves, and this one he did to do his job, to be a hero, and maybe a jerk.

And it was like going back, like ending up in that fucking field hospital again, after the accident with the helicopter, it was like ending up on the ground with a series of burning wounds. He doesn’t remember it, and maybe this is other material for Frank, because he remembers everything else.

He remembers never having seen Evan so pissed, the halogen light of the hospital casting a golden glow behind him, he was quivering in anger while his eyes were shimmering with tears. And he remembers having thought, clearly that he looked like a kind of avenging angel, his giant-like physique broken by sobs while shouting at him, his hair curled in a corner, because clearly when they called him, he was sleeping.

That was when Eddie realized how beautiful Evan truly is. He had never thought anyone could seem so wonderful.

He remembers thinking he had wasted time, while his arms didn’t respond to him, while his body was unable to react, however much he wanted to hug him. And Eddie is certain that it was at that moment that he managed to give a name to what he felt, to what he feels even now. And maybe he asked himself or said it out loud, he doesn’t remember it, his heart on his lips, since when, Evan, how long have I fallen in love with you? And when Evan brought him home a few nights later, the two of them spoke. And their feelings found themselves halfway, in a gurgling of sounds never heard, in a rumbling of swearing and insecurities.

It was like finally getting home, his heart finally at peace.

And now…

.

. 

.

The cafeteria at that time of morning is already full of people, doctors and nurses having breakfast, relatives who spent the night there, as Maddie did this time. She does it when she has the next day off, she gets off from work and goes directly there. Then in the morning someone usually takes over. Usually it’s Eddie who takes his place, sitting beside Evan and then when he has to go to the station leaves him with one out of Carla, abuela, Pepa, or Athena.

It doesn’t take long to find Maddie, she sits at the usual small table on the corner, in the corner of the two windows overlooking the prehensile garden of the hospital.

They talked several times there, every time Evan doesn’t respond to medications, every time there is a small improvement, every time he has a fever, every time he gets worse, every time he seems to get better. And they always end up talking about cutting off the life support, turning everything off and letting him go, letting him make one last heroic gesture. Let him donate his organs, because that’s reasonably what Evan wants.

“Hey,” she says, smiling, with that affable smile of hers, which must be a family trait, and gestures for him to take a seat in front of her. She has a takeaway cafe in her hands and another that is clearly waiting for Eddie.

“Maddie, thank you for bringing Chris here this afternoon.” murmurs. “I’ll take him back, when I get off work, today I have a short shift...”.

“Eddie,” she begins to say, holding out the other coffee to him. “I read the article you said, that one about brain activity and communication in comatose patients… and...” she sighs softly. “We can try, I thought we can try, we could ask the doctors to do that procedure, to let them perform an MRI, maybe tomorrow, so ... so we are present and...” she continues to say.

Eddie looks at her. And he knows it, that it hurts him as much as it hurts her to see Evan like this, so motionless, dull, empty, like a shell.

“But Eddie, you know that if they confirm that there is no more brain activity, we have to let him go, right?” she mutters, looking at him with her soft brown eyes. “He would like to donate his organs, saving lives in the process, his last heroic act. But I think he left us the choice” and before Eddie can object, argue, that he knows it, he knows that Buck would like to donate organs and save lives, and so on, Maddie continues “He wouldn’t want to live like that, attached to a ventilator, to leave us to dumbing down out of waiting... Eddie it’s been months, you know... the percentages... every single day he has very little chances, and yet I know, I know if one could survive this hell, this thing… that definitely is Buck.” she adds, looking down at her coffee.

“We have to fight,” Eddie declares, stoic. He doesn’t like resigned speeches like these.

“Eddie...” she calls him.

“We aren’t leaving him, not yet. The doctor said it, all the doctors who visited him... we are not sure... he... Evan is strong and...” he mumbles slowly, trying to keep calm, trying to keep calm because what she is saying, what she’s trying to say is… heinous, atrocious, excruciating. And Eddie doesn’t want to hear it. And anger mounts in his throat, a hallucinating, frightening anger. And in his heart he knows, what Maddie says, she says it because she loves him, as much as Eddie does, on a very different level but... but it’s throwing in the towel, it’s abandoning him, it’s letting him go. And it’s early, too early, and they had so little time together. And Eddie knows this isn’t going to last forever, but he just has to try. To do something about it. He never seems to do enough.

She purses her lips and heaves the air out in an almost irritated sigh. “Eddie ...”.

“We can’t abandon him, Maddie. We can’t stop fighting. Give him some time, give him some more time.” he says, and in his ears this rings like a prayer. “Please, Maddie. Let’s give it some more time”.

“Eddie you know, his condition... at the moment is...” Maddie stops and her voice trembles. “If we do this MRI thing and it confirm that there is no brain activity, we have to let him go,” she replies, a monotonous tone, such a resignation in her voice.

“But we don’t know yet, maybe they do this one more specific MRI and he reacts, so what do we do? The doctors said that we can’t know for certain, there was this case, this woman in 2017...” he begins to say but Maddie tries again to stop him.

“Eddie” she calls him again, moving her hands onto Eddie’s holding them for just a moment.

“No. No.” he replies, and maybe growls, maybe shouts. He doesn’t know it either, he only knows that his voice scratches his vocal cords, and it comes out strangled at the end. “You want to abandon him, you always leave him.” It gets away from his lips and he doesn’t have the courage, the strength, to look at her, after saying that bullshit.

Maddie moves back in her sit, and holds the cardboard cup in her hands, closing her eyes.

And Eddie has an immense need for air and really needs to start thinking before speaking.

“You’re right,” she murmurs in a whisper. Her eyes full of tears, before blinking and wiping the corners of her eyes with the fingertips. “You’re right I... I always leave him, I abandon him... I... I promised and yet… I’m giving up on him” she shakes her head. “We have to fight for him, with him. You’re right...” she nods. “But, we have to face reality, Eddie… if there is no brain activity, we have to follow what we know he would want, we have to...” she sniffles a bit and moves to retrieve a couple of napkins to wipe her tears off her face. “We love him so much Eddie, I know it. I know how much you and Christopher love him… how much the rest of the 118 love him… but we have to let him go, Eddie, to allow him to make one last heroic gesture. He... would be happy. Even if that means he’ll leave us, even if that means that at least half of our hearts will go with him”.

Eddie clenches his jaw and closes his eyes. He knows, he knows damn well that Evan would want that. “I just want more time, Maddie”.

“I also want that, you know. I want to see him happy with you, I want him to accompany me to my wedding. I want him to know my kids, when and if I’ll have them... I want a lot of things for him, I want him to be here when these things happen. I want... I want him to finally understand how important it is for all of us,” she adds and her eyes are all shiny, she wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes again, and sighs. “But, Eddie you know, you know he’s getting worse. He doesn’t react to somatosensory stimuli... he is no longer here” she finally says, her lips trembling and her voice breaking at the end.

“That woman too, in 2017, she also did not react yet...” he continues to say, this time in a whisper. In his head, his rationality murmurs that Maddie is right, but Eddie is selfish and he’s not ready. He never will be.

“Eddie,” she sighs, shaking her head.

“Give him some time, Maddie.” he murmurs. “We need time, Maddie”. And it sounds like I, I need time. And maybe as unspoken as it is, it’s true.

“Let’s do this test and that’s it, okay? It’s wearing us out, Eddie. It’s wearing him out. ” Maddie decides and swallows hard before standing up. “We have to start thinking about what he would like for us, as well as for himself... and while he’s slowly fading away, we are doing the same with him. It isn’t good for your son and it isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for me. Knowing that he is, Eddie, he...” she shakes his head. “If there is no brain activity, we’ll let him go, and we’ll make him be the hero he is one last time”.

And Eddie would like to tell her that she can’t decide, for Evan and for himself, but in reality she has allowed Eddie to bask with his broken heart and in this abyss, in this dark and painful limbo, all this time. But he just nods. “It will be hard. But I’m good with bottling up everything”. He won’t need a heart anymore, if they’ll let Evan go.

“It will be hard,” she sighs. “You were the best thing that could happen to him, you know, right? But we can’t fight this battle for him”.

And Eddie purses his lips and gets up too, he has another place to go, perhaps for the last time. He bids her goodbye with a nod and tries not to feel how bad his heart hurts when it breaks, again and again.

.

.

.

It’s frightening how he knows that hospital by heart, now. And he could arrive in the waiting room without even thinking. He shouldn’t even stop by there and wait, he could just go in and go to him, but every time he stops there to collect thoughts and tries to pretend to be in control of this situation. As if Evan could see him, all broken like that or not.

And every time Eddie is there, that Eddie waits, no matter how much his legs tell him to run away, no matter how the voices of his insecurities, and all his unspoken words vibrate under his skin, it’s a continuous fluctuation of thoughts, memories and his head always goes to some fucking hideous place, then. After the calm there is always a storm.

Eddie has been present at countless deaths. First some of his closest relatives, who had left peacefully, the luckiest with so many happy years behind them, then civilians and soldiers, when the red sand burned his face and the air smelled like dust and flames, then of the victims, when it seemed that it could no longer hurt, and instead they still cloud some of his worst nightmares, the impotence of not being able to help them enough, to never be enough that still weighs on him.

Death first takes away the power to speak, people begin to rant, and perhaps he clearly remembers a young lieutenant on his first tour, when he was still not very familiar with the war zone, who had talked for hours without saying nothing, asking and asking and asking to bring it back to her. Whoever she was, until he lost his voice and the pain clouded his vision. His last words swallowed by the ventilator and the morphine. And then he stopped seeing, moving. The only thing that remains, until the end, and this he had discovered when he was still a child and his abuelo was dying in a hospital like this, is hearing. Even if the person has lost consciousness, it isn’t that unusual for familiar voices to elicit smiles or tears. Abuelo, a big persevering man, had listened until his last breath abuela’s sweet words, a 260 lbs and over 6 ft extremely severe man, had listened to abuela’s latest recommendations with a small smile on his lips, she had never said goodbye to him, only small recommendations as if he could be stubborn and uncooperative even in the afterlife.

And Eddie does not want to think about that terrible eventuality, which is more and more palpable, every day, the more hours pass and the more the abyss swallows him. In the continuous fluctuation of improvements, of high and inexplicable fevers, of positive responses to medicines, and rejections, of fingers that tremble when Eddie holds his hand, and sudden stillness, of those times that he seems about to wake up, and then nothing, his condition just worsens.

The only thing that matters is that he is still fighting, that the doctors still haven’t given up, they try and try to find a way to make him come back, but... but hope is scary, hope is scary and one shouldn’t never find himself in Eddie’s shoes, in Eddie’s very position, three steps back with someone, with Evan who would never want to go away who runs away from his hands, all that enormous love that slips between Eddie’s fingers.

Eddie has seen many, has seen more than he wants to admit, of wounds like Evan’s. And even if he wants to silence that voice, the field doctor in him knows perfectly well that if not treated quickly, sucking chest wounds can be lethal. Taking a quick first aid in the first few minutes and taking the injured person to the hospital can save lives and prevent long-term complications.

Evan came out on his shaking legs from that terrible hell, and now he is in danger of dying because they, because they didn’t move fast enough, they didn’t have the courage to run in there and get him out. Timing is important, and they’ve thrown everything, all of Evan’s efforts down the drain.

Eddie does everything to remain at the helm of his emotions and navigate calm waters, without having to go through them, those storms that cloud over the horizon, because if he were to give free rein to what he feels, the best thing that could happen to him is ending up in jail, after head-butting the centre of Bobby’s face. And this is the best-case scenario.

Because they wasted time and it’s Bobby’s fault. In every sense, that day, as before. They wasted time, a time that will never come back. And even if the doctors have been explicit, even if he knows those complications painfully by heart, those consequences, now more than he knew them before, with his work, with his previous life, he wants to ignore them.

Eddie definitely doesn’t want to think about the consequences, the complications, those horrible names they have, as they ring deep in his head. Because he is sure he has seen at least two or three symptoms of two or three different complications in an ambulance, and he doesn’t have the courage to remember. All that blood will cloud his nightmares for the rest of his life, that noise, that strangled noise of his breaking breath, his cough, will be forever in his mind, will accompany him for the rest of his life. And this is enough for him to have his sleep ruined forever, to no longer be able to work, to end up drifting, astray, he really doesn’t need to know anything else, to know more than he already knows, that the situation is a great fat mess and one has limited chance of surviving all that shit that is thrown at him. He must not think of whose fault it is, as far as he knows perfectly well that it’s theirs, that is all their fault. Them, who stalled, who waited too much, who could find a solution, but actually couldn’t.

But if one can get by, if one can survive all of this, that’s Buck. And if he struggles, if he struggles then they must fight too. But he almost immediately stopped reacting to stimuli, his electroencephalography, has only a couple of curled waves. And if Eddie would listen to his rationality, maybe he’ll just accept what Maddie has already accepted: the machines are what is keeping him alive.

But Eddie, Eddie who always runs away, is in for this fight.

And whatever happens tomorrow, whether there is brain activity or not, his life will return as before, as before Evan, or not. And as much as he wants to stay in control, he wants to stay at the helm, for himself and for Christopher, it’s so hard. Because if he loses Evan, he’ll lose himself a bit more.

 .

He already lost himself, a part of himself when the doctors came back that fateful day, when hell broke loose and Evan stopped breathing in the ambulance.

The doctors, an elderly sixty-something doctor with the solemn posture of someone who has seen these things a time too many, and a young surgeon instead, almost like a young girl just out of med school, with the flat and dim and tired expression of someone that puts everything she has in the job, they were very direct. They spoke with Maddie and with him the first time, and every subsequent time, with a certain kindness, they listened with kindness to the questions, which only Maddie asked, extremely punctual and technical, while grasping at Eddie’s hand firmly .

They talked about complications, all with high-sounding and frightening names. They spoke about pneumothorax, pleural effusion, a perforated and collapsed lung, they spoke of respiratory and cardiac arrest. They talked about further surgeries, which were necessary, but he was too fragile back then, he and his athletic six feet tall body was too fragile and might not survive. They spoke about saturation, about pressure, spills, transfusions, and cardiac activity. They talked about the need to defibrillate him, several times, because at least twice he flatlined but came back, Evan came back. They spoke about ataxia, hypotension, fluids that have accumulated in the chest cavity, and something that has a chilling and frightening name, something that concerns the brain and doesn’t give much hope, hypoxia. They talked about damage to vital organs, heart, and lungs. They spoke about the accumulation of smoke.

And they used, they still use, all those medical terms that are monotonous on paper only, but they are so fucking scary. They talked about coma, before he even went into a coma, about how his body could have reacted to all that stress, about how normal it is that, after a resuscitation, the body gives up and goes into reset. And later, sometime after that first surgery, after that chain of long operations, to bring him back without any success, they talked about solutions, to disconnect the machines, to donate the organs, to let him go.

And Eddie remembers, the sound of Maddie’s breath, her breath that broke between her teeth, as she collapsed on him and sobbed softly. When the possibility of never having him back with them has become increasingly palpable.

She who has been a nurse in a previous life and knows, knows what this means. Something Eddie doesn’t want to think about.

The young surgeon who then hastened to say more, her voice still heavy, of tiredness and shared pain, a pain that perhaps, with a little hope, she might not know as well as them.

They had stabilized him, she said.

And Eddie remembers having wrinkled his nose, and if he still thinks about it his eyes burn, because it’s clear that Evan still wants to fight today, that he is so strong and resilient, and… and…

But Eddie already knew then what they meant, even before entering there in that little room, even before hell broke loose and that... that he...

They had stabilized him to give him time.

They had stabilized him to give Evan time to recover before the next surgery.

They had stabilized him to give them time. That’s it, that’s how it sounded, and how it sounds in retrospect, as if that were the right time to bid their goodbyes, that maybe Evan would hear them say goodbye.

They said more, back then, but Eddie didn’t want to listen. Or maybe he heard, but he didn’t have the courage to process all that amount of information.

Thankfully, even now, when the doctors talk, they also talk to Maddie, and therefore he can’t listen, he can silence rationality and think only about Evan, abandoned in a bed in a long-term intensive care unit. And now even if he doesn’t want to listen, he knows the percentages and how they thin out every day that he is there on the bed, unconscious. Of how his response to medicines, to stimuli, to everything else, of how unique and different each patient is, and how young and strong Evan is.

But basically, the more time passes, the more it is difficult for him to return.

Eddie doesn’t have the courage to hope.

Indeed, he always tries to listen to that voice, his rationality, which mutters in his head. That he is intubated, and that can further aggravate his already precarious situation, as far as he knows, that he probably won’t wake up, they can talk, not him. But he can hear, like abuelo, he can hear. And Eddie hopes that Evan’s brain lights up like the night of the 4th of July, like in that article, every time he hears his voice, as well as all his loved ones’.

 .

  And every time it’s like the first time he got in there. Each time it’s like the first. Even today, of all the other days. 

The first time he stayed three steps behind, he followed the doctors and Maddie over the panic door of the surgical intensive care unit. Evan had just come out of an operating room, after hours of surgery, and therefore they got them disinfected, and that smell entered Eddie’s skin in that moment and never went away, and the surreal heat of that place crushed his chest, and still steals all the air from his lungs, every step was heavy, every step is heavier than the previous one, today as then.

In a medication room, a nurse helped them get prepared. Now this is no longer the practice, now that he is in another unit, but Eddie still disinfects his hands every time he goes to him. No longer follows the protocol of the SICU, he doesn’t have to wear gown, gloves and cover shoes, mask and cap, Evan’s situation is stable there, but they had to follow a much more strict protocol in the post-surgery to limit the germs that can be brought in there, in such a delicate space.

Eddie let her go in first, and Maddie, and walked behind her, with his head down because he didn’t have the courage to look, because he knew already know what he would see.

And every time it’s like this, and every time he doesn’t want to see him like that. He would never have wanted to find himself in this position, standing in a fucking hospital, waiting, hearing all those horrible words bubbling in his head in a chilling echo.

And every time before entering, he feels his knees fail, and he clearly remembers the strangled sound of Maddie’s hiccups when she first entered. He can feel his fingers tremble and tears in his eyes, every single fucking time. And every time he doesn’t focus on Evan, he doesn’t focus on what’s on the bed, he doesn’t even look at the bed, maybe he sees it, but he doesn’t perceive it.

Evan is perhaps the human embodiment of the concept of enthusiasm, vitality, joy. He manages to bring incredible light wherever he goes, he bonds with anyone, he is always so radiant. That’s it, Evan is the sun, he is the sun and all the stars, and it’s all this and much much more. Eddie doesn’t even have the words, the right property of language to describe him. He doesn’t even want to find them, the right words, in all honesty, he’s something transcendent. Transcendent is the right word. Evan is like a concept, a concept behind Eddie’s sanity.

 .

And maybe Eddie has a lot of that fear and devastation in his eyes, even today, after all those days, weeks, months, there is nothing but devastation and dread, anxiety, his breath burns in the back of his throat, which tightens, and the voice that gets caught in the vocal cords every time, in that exact moment before crossing the threshold.

And then he enters, slowly.

A step.

A step.

A step.

He focuses on the noise of his shoes, which almost creak on the linoleum. He doesn’t hear anything else, he doesn’t even hear the noise of the machines, the heart monitor, the ventilator, he doesn’t hear anything else because he has his heart that hammers in his ears, that fills his head. He feels his own breath, he feels himself living, he feels his life running through his veins, and Evan’s running away with every step, in that painful limbo.

A step.

A step.

A step.

Evan is no longer colourful, no longer flamboyant, no longer cheerful, no longer noisy, no longer enthusiastic. He is no longer him. That’s not Evan, on the bad, it is some kind of ghost.

Eddie focuses on hearing the sound of his own heart, he feels his jugular throbbing against the collar of the shirt he wears. He feels himself living, and he feels like dying at the same time, his breath that becomes shorter screeching at the beck of the throat.

If he was alone, back then, when he entered there, in that other little room in the SICU the first time, he would never have been able to stay there, to enter, if Maddie hadn’t been there, Eddie would never have entered alone. Because Eddie is someone who runs away, someone who runs and lets his fears get the upper hand. And this is perhaps one of his biggest fears. Yet perhaps, in his heart, he would never have found the courage to leave. Perhaps he would simply be annihilated in his own dread.

And there is no sound in that room, besides Eddie’s heart beating fast, rumbling in his head, in his ears, murmuring on his neck. There is no noise, or perhaps there is, in that almost sacred and silent environment that looks like a chapel.

The room is very small, and it smells like disinfectants. In front of the door there is a long and thin window, that takes horizontally almost the entire wall, and in the morning it lets in a soft natural light.

The air is thick and smells of medicines and something ferrous and sweetish.

 He moves his gaze from one wall to the other, against which is placed the white bed. It’s only with extreme slowness, that Eddie drinks in, every time, all the details of the room. The canary yellow dye that breaks into a thick white strip, to then turn straw yellow to the ceiling. The metal arm to which the various bags full of transparent solutions are attached full, each bag releases droplets at different times, at a very precise and distinct rhythm. The cardiac monitor tracks time in a very particular way. The ventilator that roars, the sound of the pump rising and falling and pushing air into his lungs.

It is strange how Eddie perceives things, he doesn’t identify immediately Evan, lying in that bed. He knows and doesn’t know at the same time what he will see. Like the first time he went into that other room, and looked at him, but he didn’t really see him, not immediately.

Now the room is more colourful. On the walls there’s a patchwork of Christopher’s drawings, on a thin shelf there are books for children and something that Chim and Hen are certainly reading to him, scientific publications, magazines of all sorts, and a vase with flowers, always fresh and colorful which abuela brings every Tuesday and Pepa changes every Friday. There is an unspecified number of stuffed animals, which Christopher brings him when he knows he won’t be able to stay long, and will have to leave him alone, and he doesn’t like to leave his Bucky alone. There’s that multicoloured patchwork duvet that Athena brought him to make his bed more welcoming. There are pictures, of May in college with a large group of friends, of Nia who is now older and chasing Hen and Karen’s dog with Denny, of Harry with Michael grilling ribs on the Grant house patio, of Christopher’s latest science fair, complete with a blue first prize cockade attached nearby. There are all the moments that he’s lost. Maddie keeps a journal and leaves it there, open for everyone’s update.

And after appreciating each time a small, new addition, without wanting to, because he is one who runs away, for the hills, approaches the bed, one step after another, and the sound that reaches his head is now the cardiac monitor’s that keeps telling him, that keeps reminding him that Evan is alive. Is alive. Is alive. Is alive. Is alive. Is alive…

It doesn’t look like him, that thing on the bed, doesn’t look like him. Because the hospital changes you, it changes you as soon as you enter, but at the same time it’s him. And he’s been there for so long, that his hair is long and all curly, and opaque, a thin veil of beard caresses his now sharper profile.

He is there.

He is simply there in a bed that looks just barely longer than he is, that looks like a cage for a bird, unable to fly away.

Evan is intubated. And when a patient is unable to breathe for himself intubation may provide lifesaving airflow, oxygen. However, the process itself is painful and carries its own risks, and ventilator adjustments are important for reducing lung injuries. There’s always the same nurse, a old caring woman, who takes care of him, that provides clinical management for him, that monitors his vital signs frequently, and adjusts the levels of oxygen, and uses a moistened gauze over his eyes. She is so patient and caring with him, that Eddie’s heart aches every time he sees her. And with her wrinkled face she shots Eddie a bright soft smile and murmurs something along the line of a blessing, because he is still fighting, he is still struggling all the way back home. And Eddie hopes that she’s right, that Evan is coming back home with him.

But when the old nurse leaves, he focuses on something else, he tries to remember that he can’t hope, that he must not hope because hope is scary, hope hurts. And he doesn’t have this luxury, they don’t have this luxury. Yet he is selfish and hopes, he hopes he won’t have to grow old without him, he doesn’t have to spend another night alone, he hopes he won’t have to tell his son, that maybe loves his Bucky more than Eddie, that his Bucky won’t come back, he hopes he won’t have to put the pieces of his broken heart in a bottle, he hopes to have more time. Time to live with him.

He moves his gaze and every time the first thing you can record is that big needle that keeps him connected to those bags hanging nearby, and every now and then moves gradually on the length of his arm, leaving a constellation of bluish bruises on his skin.

Evan’s hands, his wrists, his arms, Evan himself seems so slender, so thin, so tiny in that bed he hardly fits in. The skin is paper-thin, especially the skin on his hands is so fucking thin like tissue paper, almost transparent and the veins are swollen and bluish on the backs. The tattoos look like marbling streaks in alabaster, his birthmark seems extremely darker, on that skin so pale, almost whitish, and the always dark circles, always swollen, under his eyes are like bruises.

Eddie sits nearby, usually in that shoddy metal and plastic chair, but sometimes he has the courage to sit on the bed, near his bad leg, he touches his hand with his fingertips and barely intertwines their fingers, with a delicacy that perhaps he only used with Christopher when he was just born.

Eddie never has the perception of how long he stays there, sitting, with shortness of breath, the air that burns at the bottom of his throat, the silence that is pure noise in there, that absence that rains down on him every time, even if Evan is there, within his reach but at the same time miles away. But then he starts talking to him slowly, because maybe if he can hear Eddie, Evan finds his way home, he speaks to him slowly, sweet nothings or something more deep. He doesn’t know what he tells him, really, but at least he must have changed a bit what he said at the beginning. That constant apology, that constant murmur of not having been enough, of not having done enough. In all senses, but perhaps Evan doesn’t even think it, that Eddie didn’t do enough in all senses: that he didn’t love him enough, that he didn’t support him enough and not only that day, but all the others times.

And he talks and talks and talks. His voice an indistinct murmur for his ears, his lips against the almost transparent skin of his hand, and he looks at him, Evan sleeping and not sleeping at the same time. Once upon a time seeing him sleep was a source of unspeakable joy, being able to see him at a time when his defences were all lowered, where he was abandoned in a peaceful sleep, his neck relaxed, his jaw soft, the small expression that occasionally ruffled his forehead only a memory.

 And Eddie hopes, every single time he sits there, that it will happen again. That what happened the first time he entered that small room in the SICU, he hopes it will happen again and permanently this time, that Evan will open his eyes and look at him and never go away.

“Come back to me,” he murmurs on his knuckles, against his swollen bluish veins, under that transparent veil of paper-thin skin. “I need you”.

The other time Evan had grasped his hand, as if to stop those words that gushed like a waterfall from his mouth, apologies, remorse, fears. Eddie remembers losing all his words, forgetting the thread of the speech, a hope that sprouted in his heart. For that moment, at that moment, it didn’t matter, everything Eddie didn’t do to help him, to make him feel loved, to make him happy, it only mattered that he was stirring slowly, that he was waking up slowly. He remembers his voice as he tried to get him back to him, broken, all trembling, loving and kind, and something different, something more. And those small movements, very weak, under the eyelids, were their little miracle. And he remembers Maddie gasping softly, all tearing up.

That time, months, weeks, days ago, Evan opened his eyes. And it was the last time Eddie saw those eyes. His kind eyes, yet so different from the usual. Evan opened them slowly, with a disarming, painful effort. The inside of the eyelids was marked with an unnatural and bruised red, the irises were pale blue, almost greyish. But when Evan saw the two them in the periphery of his visual field, he seemed to smile: he who smiles with his whole body, his face that lights up, even if in that moment he could move only his eyes, he was smiling. Eddie and Maddie could have said that he was smiling.

He remembers the total absence of any noise coming from him, not even a slight groan, suffocated, and Eddie could remember thinking that he was awake, yeah, yet miles away. A concern rose in Eddie’s throat, in the back of his head, swelled in his chest and to which he hadn’t wanted to give name, to listen. Evan was clinging to him, yet his grip was so weak, it was like he was about to let go. And an impossible fear mounted deep in his whole body, something similar to what he had felt back in the ambulance. It was as if, as if... but he had decided not to think about it, to talk to him constantly, to tell him everything he could to convince him, to make him stay there, stay there with him, with them.

But it had been only a handful of minutes, his and Maddie’s voices a constant fond murmur, because he was awake, he had managed to come back, which got lost in an echo of beeps and screeching sounds, the same sounds that did the cardiac monitor in the ambulance.

And he will never forget the way Evan stiffened a second later, collapsing. And the world collapsed on Eddie. And, before they could do anything else, he and Maddie had been tossed out.

All those complications, all those ominous words, all those horrible eventualities. And trivially the voice of his rationality murmured in the back of his head, that he could only get worse.

The swirling of voices, the confusion still fills his ears, the high-pitched whistle of the cardiac monitor that goes further and further, but still pungent, while a nurse accompanies them outside those panic doors, will always remain with him, he will darken his dreams until his last breath.

And days, weeks have passed and Eddie is so tired, so tired of sleeping alone, so tired of not being able to hear his voice, and he’s so afraid of not remembering everything, of not being able to remember every single thing that Evan did for him, every single moment they shared, every tiny bit of their short love. And he is afraid that if he stops watching videos, hearing voicemails, he will forget his voice, the way his words roll up on his tongue, the feeling of his lips on him. He forgot about the science museum, already, he already forgot him.

And so, this time, slowly, as if it’s their last long goodbye Eddie speaks to him what he doesn’t really want to give voice.

And when he looks up and sees him, so pale and thin, so dull, Eddie feels like an empty shell too. A piece of himself will go away even with this infinite farewell, in a whisper of smoke. And Eddie hates himself because nothing is sure, maybe tomorrow they’ll know that Evan is still experiencing something, that his brain reacts on a different substrate, he just needs more time, he always sleeps like a rock so, maybe… maybe he can still hope.

And there’s so much left to say, there’s so much more he would say, but…

“I love you” he murmurs softly his lips on his forehead “I always will”. And in Eddie’s ears it sounds like grief. I’ll never love like this again. But he doesn’t want to tell him this, he wants to be like his abuela, comforting him, and not actually bid him farewell.

He kisses his forehead slowly, before leaving. Christopher told him that if Bucky is like Sleeping Beauty, then a kiss is enough to wake him up and every time he hopes it is enough, that suddenly he wakes up in a somewhat theatrical and dramatic way, a little cliché, like the romantic movies, like Hallmark movies, like Disney fairy-tales.

And when he leaves, he leaves him there, in that bed and today breathing is harder than usual.

A/N:

If you reached the end of this chapter, you are now (and again, I hope?) my favourite person! Before the usual closing rituals, can I be brutally honest with you? I imagined this chapter way differently in its first draft. I have it written in two (three, lets be honest, there are 3 different drafts of this chapter here) and none of them were of my taste. I don't think this version is better than the others, but I had to chose if I should have posted a middle, passageway chapter, right after the "incident", or something like a time jump chapter. It occurred to me that while I was writing the second draft I didn't have a line of dialogue in its whole 10k words, you can imagine how I panicked *ahahah*. In the end I opted for this solution that's somewhere in between the other two(?). I'm not a fan of telling and not showing things, but I guess I'll have to set my heart on this half show & half tell (???) thing XD So, please let me know if this is as shitty as I think it is (it probably is). I don't think it is clear enough in some points, and maybe a little heavy in the narrative (and that's more likely the case XD).

As always, stay safe and take care of you!

tagging @buckleystrand; @sparksfly-buddie; @chrrlees; @lieselfh and whoever wants to be tagged!

[my-dark-words]

I Can Wait

A one-off Darkiplier story, based on the version of Darkiplier I write in Choose Your Mistakes. This was requested, as somebody wanted to see how Dark might interact with a child. 

He never knew where he was going to turn up. The locations were always unpredictable, but the prey waiting for him at the other end rarely varied. Souls that were lost, weary and worn out were easy pickings, and while Dark enjoyed the occasional challenge, he could not tolerate defiance. His prey was not yet here. Dark liked it that way. He greatly preferred to lay in wait rather that pursue an undignified chase. It also gave him time to understand the soul he was about to take.

This was a fairly average home, in about the state that you’d expect when the occupants are not expecting visitors. A few toys were scattered around the living room, but not many. Family photos lined the wall, displaying a happy family of three in each one. Dark didn’t yet know which parent was marked for him to take. He never did ahead of time. All would be clear soon, it was early evening and most humans returned home at this time. He removed a blanket strewn across the couch, folded it neatly on the side, and waited. Dark was very good at waiting. It was easy to be patient when he knew he’d always win in the end. “Who are you?” The question apparently came from nowhere, jolting Dark from his thoughts. He turned slowly on the couch to stare at the interruption. A child stood in a doorway, clutching an electronic game in one hand. “That is a profoundly interesting question,” Dark mused, glaring at the child as he stood. “Did Dad let you in?” the child asked. Dark regarded him coldly. He was probably no more than 8 years old, and in need of new shoes and a haircut. “Where is he?” the child insisted. “I am waiting for him,” Dark rumbled, a small smile creeping across his lips. Most adults found the expression concerning, but it was always hard to know how kids would react. “He’s kind of late,” the child mumbled, shuffling his feet. “Are you his friend?” Dark straightened his suit to hide his irritation. The souls of children were not completely formed. They were not ripe for the harvest. “Would I be able to get in if I was not?” Dark asked back. “Oh, okay,” the child replied, apparently satisfied with this answer. He returned slowly to his room. Dark presumed he’d been there the whole time. Dark sighed quietly and continued inspecting the house. Other witnesses were inconvenient for his purposes, but they did not render his task impossible. The house was fairly clean, but plain. A bouquet of white lilies and a line of cards decorated the mantelpiece below the collection of family photos. It wasn’t to Dark’s taste, but he was not here to comment on the décor. He found nobody else inconveniently lurking around the house as he investigated the master bedroom. This room at least was messy, but only along one side of the bed. The other side was untouched, and not slept in. “Mister?” Dark turned slowly to face the child. “What?” he growled, doing his best to keep his anger from surfacing. “Can you get me some crackers from the pantry? I’ll show you where they are.” Dark blinked slowly. “What?” he said again, his voice a little softer. “Can’t you get them yourself?” “Dad says I’m not allowed to just take food,” he mumbled, staring down and shuffling his feet, “but if an adult gets it then it’s okay.” Dark took a deep breath and rolled his neck. “Will you return to your room and be quiet if I do?” The child nodded quickly. “Then I will do so,” Dark conceded in one of the most generous deals he’d made in some time. The child led him to the kitchen, as quickly as a child would manage to do. He opened the pantry and pointed to a box of crackers at Dark’s chest height. “Why are you here by yourself?” Dark asked, indulging in a moment of curiosity as he handed the child the box. The child tore it open eagerly, grabbing a handful of crackers before offering the, to Dark. Dark shook his head and declined. “Because Dad has to work,” the child said between mouthfuls of food, “and Mummy’s in heaven.” Dark paused. “Is she now?” he muttered. “That’s what Dad says,” the child replied, unfortunately chewing with his mouth open. Dark regarded this with a mix of concealed disgust and fascination. “Ta.” The child handed the box back to Dark, who replaced it on the shelf and closed the pantry. “Now, I believe you were going to return to your room and be quiet?” Dark said, the slightest hint of a threat to his voice. The child apparently didn’t notice. “You wanna see my Pokémon?” he offered. “No,” Dark stated. The child’s activities held absolutely zero interest for him, he was not here to be a babysitter. His cold response did not deter the child. “Wanna see my Legos?” “No,” Dark repeated, harsher the second time. His shell cracked just a little, a second, angry echo of himself appearing for just a second. The child apparently didn’t notice. “Wanna play video games?” the child tried a third time. “No…” Dark grumbled, “… But I will watch.” The child’s face lit up with excitement as he led Dark back towards the living room. He’d reached for Dark’s hand, but Dark hastily set about straightening his tie. “My name’s Tim,” the boy said as he set up his console. Dark smiled, a small one, but a genuine one. “Well, Timothy,” he said softly, “I’m-” “No it’s just Tim,” the boy insisted. Dark was silent. He wasn’t used to being interrupted. The kid was entranced in his video game, some silly platform puzzle game, when the front door unlocked. Dark stood up quickly, straightening his suit as the boy’s father walked in. This was it. This was the soul he was meant to take. “What the…” the man gaped in surprise, a bag of take away food in one hand, “Who are you? How did you get into my house?” Dark smiled a disconcerting smile at the man before returning his attention to Tim for a moment. “I wish you luck in your future endeavours, Tim,” he said. Then Dark stepped confidently up to the worried man. “You and I had some… matters to discuss, Mr Stevenson,” he said, his voice so low it was practically a growl, “but fortunately for you, I have now seen the situation for myself.” “You’re… you’re not from the welfare office, are you?” Tim’s father whispered hurriedly with a worried glance at Tim, happily playing his game. “Please don’t take him away!” Dark smiled in a way that was not at all comforting, showing a little more teeth than was necessary. “No Mr Stevenson, I’m not taking him away.” Dark patted the confused, bedraggled man on the shoulder. “We will talk another time,” Dark said as he exited through the front door, “I can wait.”

[ursafilms]

The House is Somewhat Unfriendly to its Occupants

Chapter 1 – Sale No Longer Pending

My wife and I sold our San Francisco home. Hallelujah! Huzzah! Thank God. Much as we loved Kooktown, USA, it was time to move on.

A sense of NO REGRETS came over me, as I reflected on a 30 year life in the State Formerly Known as Golden.

The house, a 3400 square foot split level neo-deco beauty designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Aram Torrossian, sits in the made-up neighborhood of Clarendon Heights. The exact address is 310 Twin Peaks Blvd.

And perhaps the location’s monikered connection to a certain TV show created by David Lynch should have alerted us to the next 24 years. A run of comic, tragic, and coincidental events that had me wiping the sweat off my brow all the way, and up through the official closing date of . . .

. . . Friday the 13th. With an added bonus of A FULL MOON.

****

Don’t misunderstand. The house was not a construction disaster replete with Escher-like structure and sitting on an Indian (Cherokee Not Hindi) burial ground. Not at all. The property inspector who examined it before we bought raved about its structural integrity. In particular, the use of concrete and rebar to fortify floors and to support walls. He also fell in love with the countersunk bolts that secured the foundation and resisted earthquakes.

Prior to finishing, he pointed to a component of the build that included a support beam running the length of the storage facility just off the garage.

“Balances out the stressors on the top three floors,” he said.

“Uh, okay,” came the brilliant reply.

310 Twin Peaks was a design and engineering dream. I’ve included a photo at the conclusion of this introduction. Most important, it solved a dilemma Lee and I had regarding renting office space.

Our previous house, a cozy Marina-style home in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, had three bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room, living room, and one bathroom all on one floor. Perfect for the two of us and an occasional guest.

Not so great for running my business, I was an independent film and video producer at the time, out of one of the bedrooms. Subcontractors coming and going; equipment in the garage; and a client meeting or three during the six years we lived there. I parked a coordinator at a spare desk once in a while as well. Not good for privacy.

In 1993, Lee suggested I rent an office somewhere in the city, which I did not want to do. If I had to go away from the house to work, I’d never see my wife, an unacceptable situation.

And this meant the hunt for a new house commenced and the very first of a series of disconcerting events sat just ahead of the stern of the good ship, George.

Bear in a mind a few facts as this unfolds.

1.  We started looking for a new house in 1993. We didn’t buy, or take possession, until late 1995.

2.  I was working on Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” when the search began. It turned out to be a fitting starting point.

3.  Lee and I are HUGE fans of Halloween. It might be our favorite Holiday.

310 Twin Peaks Blvd. Seems harmless despite the odd connection to the odd David Lynch show of the era. Yes? No?

Chapter 2 – The Nightmare Before Escrow

In the Autumn of 1992 the Mouse (Disney) hired me to work on Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” To that point, the biggest job of my production career. It also served as the house-buying inception point because Lee and I took the opportunity of Yours truly having a somewhat normal schedule (Monday-Friday, few weekends) to be squired around by Joan Foppiano and Vickie Tucker, the World’s Greatest Real Estate Agents.

And that’s not a false claim. They got us into our house on 28th Street in Noe Valley, no small feat considering we looked at 48 properties before deciding on this particular one, and yes I kept track. They would get us out during a down market two years later, and in Guiness World Record time, subjective as that sounds.

All of this would get us into . . .

310 Twin Peaks Blvd.

But first, Tim Burton.

Or, should I say, Halloween.

For those readers who don’t know “The Nightmare Before Christmas” or “TNBC” as insiders called the film, it was a creepy stop-motion feature that involved a skeleton in a tuxedo named Jack Skellington, who decided to hijack Christmas.

Yes, I’ve heard all the Grinch comparisons. Leave me alone.

I am looking at this in hindsight. I worked on a movie that made a lot of people uncomfortable and entertained at the same time. And that is exactly how the coinciding search for a new house felt when we discovered 310 Twin Peaks Blvd. in the Spring of 1993.

To that point, with the patient Joan and Vickie, we had looked at about a dozen properties and none of them seemed right. Too small. No truly separate room to run the business.

If a house had an in-law unit, very popular in the Bay Area . . . must be a lot of in-laws looking to be banished to the backyard . . . , it either needed $100,000 in work, had never been permitted, or did not afford more privacy than Lee and I had in the Noe Valley residence.

One weekend in mid-April of 1993, we were schlepping, actually being schlepped by Vickie, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We pulled up in front of what appeared to be an overgrown weed and vine infested lot. We exited the car.

“I really like what they’ve done with the place,” I offered.

Vickie laughed her “If I Only I Could Beat My Clients With An Ax Handle I Would” laugh, and dragged us up four flights of moss covered brick stairs. She gave us the tour, which included the following highlights, sure to close any quick sale.

1.  The kitchen, admittedly a good-sized one, still had the original cabinets, floors, walls, AND (BONUS!) oven from 1939. However, the faucet was a Moen.

2.  Water damage covered the entire north wall of the kitchen, a result of an ongoing second floor patio leak.

3.  The washer and dryer were definitely from 1972, but the Maytag repairman had left his business card taped to one of the lids, so we had that going for us.

4.  All the upstairs bedrooms (three) had bits and pieces of broken glass on the floor.

5.  The downstairs powder room contained the ORIGINAL FIXTURES, which the seller consider a plus as that little fact was called out in the abstract. Abstract is real estate speak for flyer.

6.  The garage, at 400 square foot had been designed to accommodate a single car, because it was constructed in the late 30’s when most families were lucky to own one. However, no adjustments had been made over the years and the garage had only enough room for a 1939 Hudson.

“We’ll take it!” I exclaimed. “Okay, maybe not.”

“I hear the Mini is a nice little car,” said Vickie.

After that comment landed with a thud, we moved onto the separate room, which would serve as my office. It’s location? The bottom floor of the house, just off the aforementioned garage.

****

Four hundred square feet. One wall entirely of mirrors. Wall-to-Wall carpeting that had seen better days, but just needed a cleaning. A storage closet next to it completed the floor.

And the high points. You could get to it without entering the front door of the house. AND no other common areas or rooms existed on the same floor with it.

“Again, where do I sign?” I asked, hoping the earnest tone of my voice would convince Vickie of my intentions.

“There are a few things to consider, first,” she said, and won Understatement of the Year from Dr. Paul Ehrlich, PhD in Hyperbolics.

“Oh?”

“Yes, let’s start with the previous owner’s suicide . . . on the property.”

[junker-town]

Cody Bellinger is modern baseball, and that’s not a bad thing

Well, it is for the rest of the National League, but the sport will be just fine.

On Monday night, Cody Bellinger mashed two home runs, and the baseball world went bananas. Every time he hits a dinger, he’s setting a new record, after all. Quickest rookie to 19 homers. Quickest rookie to 20 homers. This will go on for a while, apparently, and everyone is paying attention. Bellinger was trending on Twitter throughout the night. MLB Network broke down his at-bats. MLB.com featured a link to the video prominently on its front page. On Tuesday morning, breathless appreciations of him were published on Deadspin, USA Today, and ESPN.

It’s all Cody, all the time. And while my editors rejected this article idea ...

Here are some words that rhyme with Cody

... that doesn’t mean it won’t draw thousands of clicks one day. Saved to drafts, suckers. People love their Cody Bellinger.

Look at how excited Sports Illustrated is, for example:

WATCH: Cody Bellinger broke Gary Sanchez's record by smashing 21 homers in his first 51 games https://t.co/TiFF8sqYHf http://pic.twitter.com/z6gSBFDnAJ

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) June 20, 2017

However, eight minutes before sending that, Sports Illustrated tweeted out their new cover story from the ridiculously talented Tom Verducci. It’s titled “What Happened To Baseball?”, and Bellinger makes an appearance.

He’s in the last paragraph, where he’s used as an example of how baseball is changing for the worse.

This isn’t to suggest that SI is being hypocritical, or that Verducci is out of touch. It’s to suggest that baseball is caught between competing realities. Baseballs are flying out of the park. Baseballs are flying past the helpless bats of sluggers trying to do too much. Home runs are up, up, up. Strikeouts are up, up, up. The sport is turning into whiffwhiffwhiffwhiffwalkdingerwhiff, and it’s different than what we’re used to.

For all its stodginess, though, baseball has changed plenty over its history. Home Run Baker got his nickname because he lead the league in homers for four straight seasons, but his career high was 12 homers. When he retired, he was teammates with Babe Ruth, who sloughed off dinger spores and reshaped the league in his own image.

The ‘60s saw the mound get lowered because pitchers were too dominant, and the ‘70s saw the rise of fake grass, roofs, and concrete. The ‘80s were filled with stolen bases, and the ‘90s were filled with hideous logos.

Goodness.

There were steroids and new ballparks mixed in. Then the steroids were partially curtailed and the new ballparks became old ballparks. The players keep getting bigger and stronger, and the balls keep getting thrown and hit harder. Baseball is, and will always be, changing.

The question at hand is if the modern game has gone too far. Verducci bemoans the lack of action between the homers and whiffs, and he isn’t alone. My former boss spent many thousands of words on the same complaint and that was before the strikeout rates went truly bonkers around the league. If you like baseball for the deft strategy and the subtle notes and the white noise between the action, these trends are alarming.

If you want to distill everything into a crude sentence, here you go: Baseball is getting dumber. The dumb is being obscured by numbers — spin rates, exit velocities, launch angles — but it’s still obvious. Throw ball HARD. Hit ball HARD. If ball not hit hard, player in TROUBLE, but chance to hit ball HARD always come around again. This is disconcerting, I agree.

And yet, holy heck, did you see Bellinger’s home runs? The dude whips his bat through the zone with an uppercut that makes it look like every third frame was removed from the video. It’s not dumb. It’s art. It’s a delicate ballet, a triumph of the nervous system over physics.

Also, baseball go real far.

You can see the tension between the two extremes in those two SI tweets, eight minutes apart. The message of the first one:

Add them up and virtually half of Bellinger’s turns at bat, 104 of 210, served as a proxy for how the game is played these days: All or nothing.

The message of the second one:

WATCH this home run.

The first one makes me nod. The second one makes me click. This is the push and pull of baseball in 2017. We are ingesting high-fructose corn syrup, and we cannot stop.

Except, hold on. Allow me to posit a wild new theory: Things aren’t nearly as bad or different as they’re made out to be. Not yet. Even if baseball isn’t just in the middle of something temporary and cyclical — probably the likeliest explanation, if history is any guide — we are not drinking a six-pack of soda just yet. There is room for indulgence before we get to gluttony. A soda every other day is tasty, and it doesn’t have to kill you. More dingers are fine. We don’t have a problem yet. We’re fine.

If you want to justify the empty calories, check out this brussel sprout of a paragraph:

Home runs are so easy to come by that teams are more likely to just wait for them rather than be creative. Sacrifice hits are at an all-time low. Intentional walks have been at near-record-low levels the past four years. Nobody has stolen 75 bases in 10 years. The hit-and-run is an endangered play. The veteran pinch hitter has been eliminated so that teams can carry eight relief pitchers.

Sacrifice bunts are boring as hell. Even if they were good strategy, which they often aren’t, there’s no joy to be found in them. If you can get excited about a typical sacrifice bunt, you can get excited about a crafty tax deduction, and good for you. But I’m not there. Intentional walks are one of the least exciting events in baseball. The hit-and-run is fun when it works, and it’s miserable when it fails. And while I carry a soft spot in my heart for Lenny Harris and Matt Stairs, I’m not going to pretend like I’ve spent a lot of time pining for the modern equivalents.

Stolen bases are rad, though. We can agree on that. I will vote for you in a general election if you run on a “More Billy Hamiltons” platform.

Cody Bellinger is a symbol of how baseball has changed, yes. He’s not a symbol of how it’s broken. This is something to watch. It’s also something to WATCH:, in internetese. While I agree that baseball needs something more than the three true outcomes, and while I fear that the Rob Deer Fan Club has moles employed at the highest levels of the game, I’m still okay with the balance. There are more strikeouts. There are more home runs. And there are still an awful lot of baseball plays in between.

Keep an eye on the strikeouts and homers. For now, however, I will enjoy baseball go boom and big man throw rock hard. It’s a little more extreme than it used to be, but this sport isn’t unrecognizable to me.

(Now if we can just get some pitch clocks in here ...)

[ursafilms]

The House is Somewhat Unfriendly to Occupants

Chapter 1 – Sale No Longer Pending

My wife and I sold our San Francisco home. Hallelujah! Huzzah! Thank God. Much as we loved Kooktown, USA, it was time to move on.

A sense of NO REGRETS came over me, as I reflected on a 30 year life in the State Formerly Known as Golden.

The house, a 3400 square foot split level neo-deco beauty designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Aram Torrossian, sits in the made-up neighborhood of Clarendon Heights. The exact address is 310 Twin Peaks Blvd.

And perhaps the location’s monikered connection to a certain TV show created by David Lynch should have alerted us to the next 24 years. A run of comic, tragic, and coincidental events that had me wiping the sweat off my brow all the way, and up through the official closing date of . . .

. . . Friday the 13th. With an added bonus of A FULL MOON.

****

Don’t misunderstand. The house was not a construction disaster replete with Escher-like structure and sitting on an Indian (Cherokee Not Hindi) burial ground. Not at all. The property inspector who examined it before we bought raved about its structural integrity. In particular, the use of concrete and rebar to fortify floors and to support walls. He also fell in love with the countersunk bolts that secured the foundation and resisted earthquakes.

Prior to finishing, he pointed to a component of the build that included a support beam running the length of the storage facility just off the garage.

“Balances out the stressors on the top three floors,” he said.

“Uh, okay,” came the brilliant reply.

310 Twin Peaks was a design and engineering dream. I’ve included a photo at the conclusion of this introduction. Most important, it solved a dilemma Lee and I had regarding renting office space.

Our previous house, a cozy Marina-style home in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, had three bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room, living room, and one bathroom all on one floor. Perfect for the two of us and an occasional guest.

Not so great for running my business, I was an independent film and video producer at the time, out of one of the bedrooms. Subcontractors coming and going; equipment in the garage; and a client meeting or three during the six years we lived there. I parked a coordinator at a spare desk once in a while as well. Not good for privacy.

In 1993, Lee suggested I rent an office somewhere in the city, which I did not want to do. If I had to go away from the house to work, I’d never see my wife, an unacceptable situation.

And this meant the hunt for a new house commenced and the very first of a series of disconcerting events sat just ahead of the stern of the good ship, George.

Bear in a mind a few facts as this unfolds.

1.     We started looking for a new house in 1993. We didn’t buy, or take possession, until late 1995.

2.     I was working on Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” when the search began. It turned out to be a fitting starting point.

3.     Lee and I are HUGE fans of Halloween. It might be our favorite Holiday.

310 Twin Peaks Blvd. Seems harmless despite the odd connection to the odd David Lynch show of the era. Yes? No?

Chapter 2 – The Nightmare Before Escrow

In the Autumn of 1992 the Mouse (Disney) hired me to work on Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” To that point, the biggest job of my production career. It also served as the house-buying inception point because Lee and I took the opportunity of Yours truly having a somewhat normal schedule (Monday-Friday, few weekends) to be squired around by Joan Foppiano and Vickie Tucker, the World’s Greatest Real Estate Agents.

And that’s not a false claim. They got us into our house on 28th Street in Noe Valley, no small feat considering we looked at 48 properties before deciding on this particular one, and yes I kept track. They would get us out during a down market two years later, and in Guiness World Record time, subjective as that sounds.

All of this would get us into . . .

310 Twin Peaks Blvd.

But first, Tim Burton.

Or, should I say, Halloween.

For those readers who don’t know “The Nightmare Before Christmas” or “TNBC” as insiders called the film, it was a creepy stop-motion feature that involved a skeleton in a tuxedo who decided to hijack Christmas.

Yes, I’ve heard all the Grinch comparisons. Leave me alone.

I am looking at this in hindsight. I worked on a movie that made a lot of people uncomfortable and entertained at the same time. And that is exactly how the coinciding search for a new house felt when we discovered 310 Twin Peaks Blvd. in the Spring of 1993.

To that point, with the patient Joan and Vickie, we had looked at about a dozen properties and none of them seemed right. Too small. No truly separate room to run the business.

If a house had an in-law unit, very popular in the Bay Area . . . must be a lot of in-laws looking to be banished to the backyard . . . , it either needed $100,000 in work, had never been permitted, or did not afford more privacy than Lee and I had in the Noe Valley residence.

One weekend in mid-April of 1993, we were schlepping, actually being schlepped by Vickie, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We pulled up in front of what appeared to be an overgrown weed and vine infested lot. We exited the car.

“I really like what they’ve done with the place,” I offered.

Vickie laughed her “If I Only I Could Beat My Clients With An Ax Handle I Would” laugh, and dragged us up four flights of moss covered brick stairs. She gave us the tour, which included the following highlights, sure to close any quick sale.

1.     The kitchen, admittedly a good-sized one, still had the original cabinets, floors, walls, AND (BONUS!) oven from 1939. However, the faucet was a Moen.

2.     Water damage covered the entire north wall of the kitchen, a result of an ongoing second floor patio leak.

3.     The washer and dryer were definitely from 1972, but the Maytag repairman had left his business card taped to one of the lids, so we had that going for us.

4.     All the upstairs bedrooms (three) had bits and pieces of broken glass on the floor.

5.     The downstairs powder room contained the ORIGINAL FIXTURES, which the seller consider a plus as that little fact was called out in the abstract. Abstract is real estate speak for flyer.

6.     The garage, at 400 square foot had been designed to accommodate a single car, because it was constructed in the late 30’s when most families were lucky to own one. However, no adjustments had been made over the years and the garage had only enough room for a 1939 Hudson.

“We’ll take it!” I exclaimed. “Okay, maybe not.”

“I hear the Mini is a nice little car,” said Vickie.

After that comment landed with a thud, we moved onto the separate room, which would serve as my office. It’s location? The bottom floor of the house, just off the aforementioned garage. 

****

Four hundred square feet. One wall entirely of mirrors. Wall-to-Wall carpeting that had seen better days, but just needed a cleaning. A storage closet next to it completed the floor.

And the high points. You could get to it without entering the front door of the house. AND no other common areas or rooms existed on the same floor with it.

“Again, where do I sign?” I asked, hoping the earnest tone of my voice would convince Vickie of my intentions.

“There are a few things to consider, first,” she said, and won Understatement of the Year from Dr. Paul Ehrlich, PhD in Hyperbolics.

“Oh?”

“Yes, let’s start with the previous owner’s suicide . . . on the property.”