BEYOND THE LIGHTS «j.p.»

daddy's name was pain

Aiden looks down at his feet, he's too hurt to even cry.

"You can't, Aiden. You can't." James says, shaking his head. "How do you think this would make your mother feel? Huh?"

For the first time since his father started scolding him, he didn't feel pain or hurt, all he felt was anger, a fury that he's never experienced before, slowly boiling up inside of him until he can't take it anymore.

"How dare you say that? How dare you bring mom into this when it's your fault that she's dead?" Aiden yells, his chest swollen up and his hands balled into fist. He didn't know when it happened, but sometime he had dropped his ice pack and it had landed on the ground at his feet.

"What?" James asks, looking at him crazy, as if there's no possible way that Aiden's mother's death could've been his fault. "Are you crazy?"

"No, but you thought I was. I told you time and time again what was happening to mom, what Ike was doing to her, and you didn't listen." Aiden says. "I saw the cuts and bruises, I saw how he treated her in public, I saw how badly he was hurting her."

"Your mother chose to leave me and get married to another man." James shouts. "It wasn't my place to stick my nose in her marriage."

"It's your fault it ended between the two of you! You were too worried about our image, too worried about work, to even pay your family any attention. You were too busy trying to be Superman for the city when you couldn't even save your own damn family!" Aiden shouts back, his entire body shaking with anger now, hot tears falling down his cheeks.

"You better watch what you say next, boy." James says warningly.

Aiden stares at him for a beat, and then he quietly says, "I hate you."

James takes a step back, his face falling as he hears the words coming from Aiden's mouth, and for the first time he sees hurt in his father's eyes, but he doesn't care.

Aiden walks by him, brushing against his shoulder as he does, and he keeps walking until he can flag down a taxi, and he gets in.

"Where to?" The driver asks him.

"Just drive." Aiden says softly, looking out the window, and watching as the arena slowly disappears from view.

•••

Rio, Daphne, and the rest of the crew walk back into Rio's house a few hours later. They had to run from the press, which was practically following them around like a funeral parade. Rio has been quiet ever since he was picked up and carried off the stage by a security guard. The only thing he can think about is the look in Aiden's eyes right before complete and utter chaos broke out.

"How are we going to fix this?" Daphne barks into the phone to the publicist. "It's your job to figure that out!"

Rio walks through the living room and past the posters of himself barely dressed hanging on the wall. He walks into the master bathroom, shutting and locking the door, and then drawing a bath for himself.

When the bathtub is full, scalding hot, and steaming, Rio steps out of his clothes and sinks into the water. The heat of the water burns his skin, but he revels in it, he wants to get his mind on something other than the pain he feels inside.