"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 60

The blond fiddled with the cap of his own water bottle, unscrewing it, then screwing it back on repeatedly. "A lot, dude. You asked me a lot of shit last night that I didn't have answers to. No, wait, that's not quite true. The inside of my head was just too fucked up in too many ways to figure out how to explain anything. But I wanna be straight with you, ya know?" he asked, looking up. 

Matt nodded in encouragement, giving Josh the floor and all the time and room he needed for this. 

"It's... I can't promise this is gonna be fuckin' pretty, so just let me say this straight through, okay? I'll answer anything you still wanna know at the end, but if I don't say this now...never mind. I just owe you that much for a lot of reasons, but mostly because you were right." Josh uncrossed his legs and crossed them in the opposite direction, tucking the water bottle between the arm of the chair and his hip. "In fact, I owe you more than just explanations." 

"You don't," Matt interrupted, only to receive a frustrated look from the singer.  

"I asked you to let me get through this. Please. And I do, Matt. I owe you my fucking life." The blond paused only long enough to bite at his lip and pull his shirt away from his belly; the latter was another ingrained nervous habit he'd picked up in his younger years when he was restless, uncomfortable or bored. "You know what happened the night I got shot." He pointed behind him toward the base of the staircase. The scene. "You've heard the story enough times. I don't need to tell it again, right?" 

The younger man shook his head. No, he didn't need, nor did he want to go through that again. The handful of times he'd heard it had been more than enough. 

Taking a deep breath, Josh seemed to be working up the nerve to keep talking. "I tried so goddamn hard to be okay right from the start," he said, shaking his head and, for once, brushing the hair up and out of his eyes while he spoke. "But, I was fucking terrified to be in this house after everything happened. You dropped me off here that first night, and I didn't last an hour before I thought for sure that I was seriously gonna die. I was either gonna have a fucking heart attack or get killed by these people I kept seeing, kept imagining behind every closed door. I couldn't... That's why I showed up your place. I couldn't handle being alone. I know you figured that out all on your own. I still... Once the sun goes down... The shadows... Jesus... It's better when I'm not here, in this place, but it still happens. It's why you fuckin' found me at the studio. I'd been living there for, like, two weeks... And it's no fuckin' joke, the nightmares..." Josh picked up the bottle and started to peel the label off, one small strip at a time, setting the carnage on the table beside him. 

"Night terrors," Matt interjected quietly. 

"Okay. Night terrors. Semantics, but alright. They're bad, Matt. They happen every goddamn time I close my eyes. I get chased by these...I dunno...these faceless people that I can't really see. I know they're trying to kill me, and I fight. I swear, I fight as hard as I can to avoid it, but I can't get away from it. I sleep for maybe an hour and then I'm dead. I'm dead in every fucking dream and I can't stop it." He sighed quietly, tearing the last piece of paper from the bottle and abandoning the pile and the plastic on the table. Josh turned to snapping a loose string from the hole in the knee of his jeans and rolling it between his fingers instead. 

Matt nodded again, and he could feel his heart start to beat a little harder. He was slowly discovering that the more he and Josh spoke about these things, the more there was to uncover, the more there was to his friend, and the more there was that he wasn't sure he wanted to know. He wanted to think of Josh as indestructible, infallible, a super hero. The truth was that...he wasn't, and it scared the brunet to hear Josh admit to that. Josh talked a good game and played it up like he was king of the world, despite the occasional problem that he vaguely broke the surface with when speaking to the public, and Matt didn't like watching the singer turn from Superman to Clark Kent right in front of his eyes now.