And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“I’m just saying, it seems weird that you’ve spent the last week working to make sure I can still walk fine on my own and now they’re saying I won’t be able to just walk out of the hospital,” Gerry said, easing down onto the side of the hospital bed he hoped to never see again.

“Yes, well, that’s hospital policy for you.” The physiotherapist, who’d told Gerry to call her Simone, smiled wryly. “They don’t want you accidentally falling while you’re still on hospital grounds, because then you can sue us. Once you leave, it’s your own problem, not ours.”

“You Americans and your litigations.”

“It’s the American dream. To get rich without having to do any heavy lifting.” Simone laughed. “Where’s your man? He’s usually here waiting when we get back.”

Gerry shrugged. He still wasn’t sure if he wanted to hug Gertrude or strangle her for putting Tim down as his domestic partner on the hospital paperwork. It meant he could stay past visiting hours—although the nurses had started kicking him out before midnight as Gerry passed the initial crisis period—which was nice, but it also meant people kept referring to him as your man, which was just…weird. They were friends…friends who had sex a lot, granted, a friend Gerry had desperately wanted to be there when he was sick and hurt and scared, but still, friends. “He had something to do this morning, something he had to pick up, but he’ll be back before I get discharged.”

Simone nodded. “Which should be within the hour. All right. I probably won’t see you again, so take care of yourself, okay? And remember what I said about the cigarettes. You’ve gone this long without them, you can keep going.” She shook her finger at him playfully. “And leave those stitches alone!”

Gerry gave her a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

Simone laughed, fluttered her fingers in a wave, and sauntered out of the room. Gerry waited until she left before slumping back against the bed.

Unhappily, he raised his hands to his head, then lowered it. The spot they’d had to cut into in order to get at the tumor—which had evidently been fairly large—had meant they’d had to shave an awkward portion of his scalp, just behind his ear, and they’d gone to the crown because of how long it was. The resulting style had been awful and awkward, and they had been worried about the possibility of the hair on either side getting tangled up in the stitches or trailing through the wound, and in the end, they had shaved his head completely. Gerry literally couldn’t remember the last time he’d cut his hair, or had it cut, and his naked scalp made him feel exposed and vulnerable.

At least they’d promised to return his piercings before he checked out.

He was ready to go. Mentally if not physically. Well, physically he was ready to go, too, he was just still dressed in the scrubs provided by the hospital. His clothes sat neatly folded on the end of his bed, the black high-topped sneakers he’d worn for this trip in lieu of the thick-soled combat boots he preferred because Gertrude always bitched about how long it took him to lace them back up after going through the security checkpoints tucked against its side. His piercings were in a jumbled heap at the bottom of a paper cup with enough disinfectant to just about cover them, sitting on the bedside table next to the incredibly dense but surprisingly compelling novel Tim had been reading to him and the crossword puzzles he’d been doing to make sure his mind was still functioning. Everything was ready to go, except that Tim wasn’t there.

Gerry sighed, drew the curtains around the bed, and began, slowly and carefully, to dress himself.

He was just pushing the barbell through the top of his right ear when the door creaked open and footsteps approached. Tim’s voice floated from just the other side of the curtain. “Are you decent?”

“Rarely,” Gerry deadpanned. He snapped the fastening on with some satisfaction. “But I’m fully dressed.”

“Damn. Late again.” Tim tugged the curtain and stepped through, fixing Gerry with a bright, cheerful grin. The grin wasn’t the only thing that was bright. It must have gotten colder since the last time Gerry had been outside, because Tim, who’d got off the plane in a light jacket, was now wearing a double-breasted wool coat in a rich blue that brought out the color of his eyes and a knitted hat pulled low over his ears in every color of the rainbow. He was pulling off a pair of gloves as he came in, neon purple ones that somehow worked with the coat.

“Only you, Tim.” Gerry shook his head in mock despair, but he grinned. “Cold out there, is it?”

“They’re calling for snow later. I believe it.” Tim got the gloves off and tucked them into a pocket, then began unbuttoning the coat. “I brought a hat for you, too. Don’t worry, they had one that was as black as your soul.”

Gerry hummed skeptically. Knowing Tim, it was probably something blinding white, his little optimistic joke. For now, though, he decided to let it go. “Well, you might as well get comfortable. They haven’t even brought me the discharge papers yet, so it’ll be a while yet.”

Tim finished unbuttoning the coat and shrugged out of it, laying it over the back of the chair next to the bed. As he did so, he leaned forward to claim Gerry’s lips in a kiss. “You’re worth the wait.”

“Thanks. I think.” Gerry tugged playfully at the hat. “Still cold, or just going for a fashion statement? You can get comfortable, you know.”

Tim’s grin returned, and along with it the mischievous sparkle in his eyes that said he was up to something nefarious. “What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

“Oh, it’s fine, but I’m shocked the brightness hasn’t melted any snow that might be on the ground out there,” Gerry drawled. “I can’t look directly at it without sunglasses.”

Tim laughed. “Well. If it bothers you that much…I’ll just have to take it off.”

With a flourish, he did exactly that.

Gerry stared, momentarily robbed of speech, and indeed of breath. Instead of the mop of tousled, every-which-way hair he’d been expecting, Tim’s dark hair flattened in odd places or perhaps standing on end from the static—the hat was definitely acrylic rather than wool, he was sure of it—beneath the garish knit was…nothing. Bare skin. Tim had shaved his own hair down to the scalp, not even stubble covering it. He tried to speak a couple of times, failed, and then just gestured weakly at Tim’s head.

Tim’s grin never faltered. “Well, how else was I supposed to know if you’d be comfortable outside the hospital if I didn’t try it out first?”

That got the words working again. “Tim.”

“Gerry.” Tim’s smile softened, and he sat down on the bed next to Gerry. He took his hand and laced their fingers together, the silver rings on Gerry’s hand clinking against the hammered black band on Tim’s. More seriously, he said, “I saw how much it was bothering you. I reckoned it might make you feel a little better if you weren’t in it alone. And, you know, it’s pretty common for people to shave their heads in solidarity with someone who’s lost their hair to cancer, so I thought this would make things look less suspicious.” He kissed Gerry’s temple lightly. “I’m with you. One hundred percent. Whatever that means.”

Gerry swallowed hard and rested his head against Tim’s. The words I love you bubbled up to his lips, but he swallowed them back. They didn’t…feel right. Not here. Not now. Not until he figured out what they meant for them.

“Thank you,” he said instead.

Tim nodded, and Gerry kind of wondered if he got what he meant without him having to say it out loud.

They sat in silence for several moments. Finally, Tim said, “Your coat should be warm enough, but if you need to, we can make a stop. We’re going to have to be here for a bit anyway, so we might as well do the whole tourist thing. Go to the Navy Pier, catch a sports game, whatever.”

Gerry hadn’t considered that they weren’t leaving Chicago immediately. “How long is ‘a bit’?”

“Depends on when your follow-up appointment is. I guess the doctors will tell you, if they haven’t already.”

“Damn. I didn’t think I’d have to come back.” Gerry sighed heavily. “You don’t think I can get away with saying I’ll go to my doctor back home, do you?”

Tim snorted. “You can’t fly for another six weeks at least, so no.”

“How do you know that?”

“Gerry, you just had surgery on your brain. They’ve got to make sure the bits are fitting back together properly before you can safely go up in something that affects the air pressure.”

“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean I have to like it. So we’re in Chicago for six weeks?”

Tim shook his head, surprising Gerry again. “Once you’ve had your follow-up appointment, we’re moving on. We just won’t be flying.”

Several more questions rose to Gerry’s lips, but before he could answer them, the curtain rattled back, exposing the lead nurse with a cheerful smile. “Well, Mr. Keay, it looks like everything is in order. Are you ready to start getting the hell out of here?”

“Yes. Please.” Gerry returned the woman’s smile. It was hard not to.

He had to sign about a dozen forms stating that he understood the hospital wasn’t liable for anything that happened once he left the doors, that he was responsible for his own care, that he would return for the follow-up or speak to his own doctor, that he wasn’t supposed to smoke or drink for a certain period of time, and probably that he owed them his soul, his firstborn, and a tun of port wine. He signed them all without doing much more than skimming and trusted that Tim would tell him if there was anything important in them. The nurse—Debbie was her name—also reiterated some of the information, which helped a little.

“You’ve got a follow-up appointment with Dr. Greene on the twenty-fourth,” Debbie said. “I know you boys aren’t from around here, so depending on how you’re doing, you should be able to make your next appointment after that with your doctor at home.”

Gerry didn’t tell her that he didn’t have a doctor back home, that he hadn’t been in a hospital since he’d fought with Diego Molina over that Leitner and didn’t have any intention of going to one again. “I will, thanks. Will you be here then?”

“I’ll probably be on rotation up here, but I’ll try to stop down and see you, sugar.” Debbie smiled. “We’ve called your prescriptions in down in the hospital here—make sure you take all of them, and follow all directions. And physical activity is important, but—“ She waggled her finger at Tim with a smirk. “Take it slow, and don’t overexert yourself.”

Tim grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of him.”

“Not if I take care of you first,” Gerry shot back, then paused. “That sounded better in my head.”

Debbie rolled her eyes so hard Gerry was surprised they didn’t fall out of her head. “I’m sending Izzy in here with the wheelchair. Get out of my hospital.”

Gerry saluted sardonically. “Yes, ma’am.”

Tim put his coat, hat, and gloves back on, then waited until Gerry had bundled himself into his own long leather coat before reaching into his pocket and producing another pair of gloves and a hat. To Gerry’s relief, both were actually black. “Here. Better bundle up, it really is cold out there.”

Gerry complied, and was ready to go when the short, stocky blonde nurse came in with the wheelchair. After another token protest, he seated himself in it and let her push him out the door. To his embarrassment, all of the nurses—and a number of the patients—lined the corridors and applauded as Izzy pushed him past.

“It’s tradition,” she explained in the elevator. “We celebrate that you get to leave the hospital and hope that everyone else will get to leave soon, too.”

“Even the nurses?” Gerry asked with a raised eyebrow.

Izzy laughed. “Especially the nurses.”

There was a taxi pulled right up to the front of the hospital. Izzy wheeled him right up to the side of the taxi, and Tim helped him into the backseat before sliding in beside him and giving the driver the name of what Gerry presumed to be a hotel. Then he put his arm around Gerry’s shoulders, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

It turned out to be a place that specialized in stays of longer than a few days, and from the way Tim led Gerry in the front door with absolute confidence, it was obviously where he’d been staying when the staff made him leave the hospital. The building was tall—the numbers on the elevator went up to fifteen—but Gerry chose not to examine the small surge of relief he felt when Tim pressed the button for the sixth floor. When it disgorged them, he led him down a clean if dated corridor to a room tucked away in a corner, swiped the key card, and ushered him in.

Gertrude never put much thought into where they stayed. Her only criteria were that it be a fixed address and that it have free wi-fi; beyond that, she honestly wouldn’t have cared if there were beds, let alone if they were comfortable. This room was practically palatial by her standards. It was actually a small suite, with a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a sitting room. In the back of the suite, on the outer wall of the hotel, was the bedroom, small but neat, with a bed plenty big enough for both of them and a nightstand on either side. The heat was going, not too high but enough to be nice and warm. In short, it was cozy, a good place to stay for a week or so while he healed and while he waited for his appointment at the hospital, and it felt safe.

Gerry couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that way.

“Have you eaten?” Tim asked as he began pulling off his gloves again. “I laid in some groceries last night, just some staples, but I can make sandwiches or something. Or soup. You feel like soup?”

“Soup sounds good.” Gerry rubbed at his face. “I’m going to take a shower. They washed my clothes, but I still smell like hospital.”

Tim nodded and squeezed Gerry’s hand. “There’s some toiletries provided by the hotel in the bathroom, but if you have a brand you like better, we can run to the store later.”

“No thanks, I’m good,” Gerry said automatically, focused on unbuttoning his jacket and hanging it in the closet right by the door.

It was only after he was stripped down and contemplating the dilemma of all travelers everywhere staying in a particular hotel or chain for the first time—how the hell to operate the damn shower—that his battered, stitched-together brain caught up to the fact that Tim had offered to buy him soap and shampoo, not help him with the shower.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, honestly. On the one hand, he would have said no even if he had—he had in fact said no when he thought he had—so maybe Tim had just picked up on that and was letting him be. On the other hand, it kind of hurt that Tim hadn’t even offered. True, when they showered together it usually had very little to do with getting clean, and since Gerry wasn’t supposed to overexert himself, shower sex was probably out of the question. And the last thing he wanted was to be babied.

Still…memories of trying to pull a brush through his hair with his dominant hand and arm immobilized in bandages to the elbow, of attempting to shower while bent double from the pain in his abdomen, of fevers that made him afraid of falling if he tried to stand too long, swirled through his head. His mother had always insisted he be presentable, that he not embarrass her by being dirty or unkempt, but at the same time she couldn’t be bothered to do anything for him herself, not once he was old enough to dress himself. He’d often wondered if she would have cared if he had drowned in the bathtub before he’d been big enough to take proper showers, or if accidental death would have been good enough for her to bind him into her Book. She’d never cared. Gertrude wasn’t much better, really, although she’d at least noticed before he collapsed and gotten him help, and she’d asked.

Gerry turned the water up as hot as he could stand it, then turned it up a little more. The shower had decent water pressure—better than—enough to sting. He picked up the washcloth draped over the bar, poured half the tiny bottle of shower gel onto it, and worked up a lather. There wasn’t any visible grime on him, but he could feel the hospital on his skin like a thin, viscous oil, so he set to work with a vengeance. He scrubbed hard at the raised ridge on his stomach, the impossibly white lines against his already pale arms, the irregular splashes where the jagged outlines of burns hadn’t quite settled into normalcy. His mother’s dabbling into the various Fears, not wanting to tie herself to one or the other, had meant she’d dragged her son into enough situations that he’d been Marked by fully half of them before he was old enough to drink legally, and plenty of them had left physical scars as well as emotional and mental ones.

Did this count as an End Mark?. Logically, Gerry knew that sometimes people just got sick and died without the Fourteen interfering, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was something deliberately done to him? Was Terminus trying to claim him, perhaps as payment for letting Gertrude destroy his mother’s page? The rest of the Book was still intact, after all, surely it hadn’t been that bad…or was it Gertrude being tormented, trying to get her to sacrifice herself for him, or maybe just as a favor to the Stranger to slow her down, make her too late to stop the Unknowing? They didn’t think Terminus was all that interested in a ritual, but you never knew…

Gerry’s skin went from white to pink, a combination of the heat and the friction and the needle-sharp impact of the water. Still he scrubbed until he realized the washcloth was no longer producing suds. He draped it carelessly over the bar and reached for the shampoo. It was a tiny bottle, he wasn’t sure it would have enough to get all of his hair…

It hit him, all of a sudden, that he didn’t need much in the way of shampoo, maybe anything. They hadn’t exactly taken his hair down to the skin, except where they needed to in order to cut into his skull and get at his brain, but the rest of it was so short that it hardly mattered.

That was the final straw. Gerry couldn’t have said why, but it didn’t matter, his thoughts were no longer his own. He was drowning, suffocated in an overwhelming tide of thoughts and memories, rising up and tearing at him like a thousand angry ravens, plucking him raw and exposing all his flaws, all his faults, all his sins, everything he had ever done, everything that had ever been done to him, everything he’d been complicit in because it was easier and safer than saying no.

He sank to the floor of the shower, not even noticing, and clutched at his hair. Things only got worse when it hit him anew that there was nothing to grab. That was good, it was good, it meant nobody else could…but it was his hair, he’d always had it, he didn’t…what else had they taken from him? What had gone out with the tumor? Had they really only taken what wasn’t supposed to be there? What if they had decided there was something else important to remove? What had he lost that he didn’t even remember losing? How much of him was left? Was he really even him anymore? Again and again he tried to find something, anything, that he could get hold of, anything he could grab to ground him to reality, anything to reassure him…

“Hey, hey, none of that. Those need to stay where they are for now. Let the professionals handle that.”

Tim. It was Tim’s voice, low and gentle and tender and faintly teasing but only a little bit, and it was Tim’s hands carefully pulling Gerry’s away from his scalp and bringing them down. He put his arms around him, pulled him close, practically onto his lap, and held him, tightly but not too tightly.

Gerry couldn’t stop himself. He clung to Tim’s shirt, buried his face in his shoulder, and shook. He wanted to cry, to break down sobbing and let it all out, but…he couldn’t. He couldn’t remember ever crying, any more than he could remember when he’d ever laughed like Tim made him laugh. All he could do was tremble—not the violent, random spasms that had quietly worried him when he’d first noticed them, but the jelly-like quivering his mother always induced in him. He was lost, he was scared, he was…

“Shh. You’re safe,” Tim rumbled in his ear. One hand came up to rub his spine in gentle, soothing strokes. “I’ve got you. I’m here.”

Tim was warm, and solid, and safe, and Gerry hadn’t had a lot of any of those things in his life. He clutched him like a drowning man holding a rock in a storm, anchoring himself to the present. He was here. He was in a hotel room in Chicago. He was thirty-four fucking years old, and his mother could never touch him again.

He was safe. He had Tim. Tim said he was safe, and Tim had never once lied to him, not in the whole year he’d known him. He was safe.

Gradually, the shaking slowed, then stopped, and he could think rationally again…for a given degree of rational, anyway. He wanted to tell Tim something, anything, about what this meant, about what he was feeling, about how important it was that he was there.

What came out of his mouth, murmured into Tim’s shoulder, probably made no sense. “I didn’t think it would bother me that much.”

“Want to talk about it?” Tim’s voice was calm and neutral. The tone and the words told Gerry that if the answer was no, that would still be okay. He was allowed to say no. Tim wouldn’t press.

The thing was, that actually made him want to talk about it. “She never…when I was a kid, she wouldn’t spend money on things like haircuts. I don’t think she ever really cared, as long as it was clean and brushed. But she’d grab it when she—” He broke off with a shiver. Tim held him a little tighter, but said nothing. “It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. It’s just hair.”

“It’s not just hair,” Tim said firmly. “It’s something that’s been part of you your whole life. It’s something you’ve been reclaiming, making your own, taking the neglect you got as a kid and turning it into a triumph. It’s something you could control, even when everything else in your life was spiraling out of it, and it’s part of a decision you made about yourself and your life. And you didn’t get a choice about having it cut off. They didn’t even ask. Just one more decision taken out of your hands.” He pressed a soft kiss to the top of Gerry’s head. Gerry had to admit that he did kind of like that he could feel it better now. “But it’s not just about the hair, is it?”

Gerry exhaled heavily. Leave it to Tim. “No. Not really. It’s…like you said, it was one more decision that I didn’t get to make, one more thing I couldn’t control. I guess it all just kind of came crashing down on me, you know? I could have died. I probably would have died, if Gertrude hadn’t got me to the hospital as quick as she did. And the fact that I smoke could’ve had all kinds of consequences on the surgery, and I don’t even know where the tumor came from, and I just…it all got to be too much.”

Tim sat holding him silently for a few minutes longer. Finally, he said quietly, “I don’t think anything did it to you on purpose, Gerry. And it wasn’t because of anything you did. It was just bad luck and shitty genetics. The doctors are pretty confident they got all of it—your follow-up appointments are just to make sure you’re healing okay really. And I’m here to help you with that.”

“You didn’t offer to help me shower.” The sentence slipped out without Gerry meaning to say it, and he wished he could take it back. Tim was being so kind and supportive, and here he was complaining about something he wouldn’t have said he wanted anyway.

“I should have,” Tim agreed. “Even knowing you would say no. I guess I thought if I didn’t offer, and you didn’t refuse, you wouldn’t get upset if I had to come in and help after all. But I need you to know that I’m here for you. No matter what you need. Space or assistance, food or bad jokes, really hot sex or just someone to hold you while you break down. I’m here.”

“I know.” Gerry sighed and—finally—relaxed, slumping bonelessly against Tim’s side. “I love you.”

Tim laughed softly. “I know.”

“Arse,” Gerry grumbled, but his heart felt a little lighter as he said it. He knew Tim didn’t love him, but still…

“You like my arse.” Tim kissed his temple. “And for the record, not that I have to say it out loud any more than you do, but I love you, too. Now then. How about you put some pants back on and we go have some lunch?”

Gerry blinked and looked up at Tim. “Wait, what?”

Tim shrugged. His cerulean eyes sparkled with mischief. “I mean, you can eat naked if you really want to, but the soup is hot. Or should be. I left it on a low simmer.”

“No, I—” Gerry shook his head. “What do you mean, we don’t have to say it out loud?”

“Gerry, I told you. I know you love me. Or, well. You trust me with things you’ve never told anyone. You laugh at my stupid jokes. You looked like the world was ending when we said goodbye in London five months ago, and you looked like it had tilted back into place when I came around the curtain in the emergency room ten days ago. And you spent most of those five months waiting to tell me that you thought you were the allegro from the Winter portion of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ because you didn’t get the chance to answer my stupid question from the pub.” Tim smiled. “And I’d like to think you realized that if the only reason I flew halfway around the world was because Gertrude Robinson told me to come out and help her, I’d have gone back to London with her instead of staying with you. Maybe I don’t exactly get the whole romance thing, not really, but romantic love isn’t the only kind of love out there, and I think the way I love you is better.”

Gerry picked at that for a moment. Several things about the last year made a lot more sense in this new context. “I think I might be stupid.”

“I think that might be one of the things I love about you.” Tim grinned and kissed the end of his nose playfully. “C’mon. Get dressed. I need to change, too, I think, and then we can eat.”

“Sorry if I…wait, I didn’t cry on you. Or at all.”

“No, but it’s not like I took the time to wait for all of the water to drain out before I sat down.”

For the first time, it hit Gerry that they were still sitting on the floor of the shower. The water had been turned off, and it had evidently been long enough that the steam had dissipated, and he was still completely nude, while Tim was still fully dressed. His t-shirt and trousers were, as he’d said, rather damp, though. “I—I don’t remember turning the water off.”

“You didn’t. I did.” Tim got to his feet and offered Gerry a hand; Gerry accepted and let him leverage him upright. “Realized you’d been in here a while, so I came to check on you and found you curled up on the floor trying to yank your stitches off because you don’t have enough hair to grab yet.” He held onto Gerry’s hands as he tried to pull them away. “It’ll grow out, Ger. You know that, right?”

“It’ll come in red.” Gerry sighed heavily as he thought about the other thing he’d always hated about his hair, the other reason he kept dyeing it over and over again despite being terrible at it. “It was the same color as hers.”

Tim shrugged. “The doctors said you can start dyeing it again in another six weeks or so. Probably have to wait until the new year, and you’ll have enough to dye by then. You can pick the color. For what it’s worth, I think you’d make a good ginger, even if it is the same color as your mum’s, but it’s up to you. You can let it grow back out again or keep it short or whatever you want. It’s your hair. Who knows, maybe you’ll decide you like having it above your collar. But whatever you decide, I’ll help you with it. Later. For now, let’s just eat.”

Gerry smiled and felt the last of the stress and panic fade away. For now. It would definitely be back, but for now, he was okay. “Oh, yeah, I definitely love you.”