Taking a quick detour once he hit the top landing, Josh closed himself in the bathroom, locking the door behind him before cautiously stepping up to the sink. He turned on the water as cold as he could get it and leaned down, cupping it in his hands and splashing it across his face several times. He needed the coolness to help to settle him again. It worked well enough after three or four minutes, but he still couldn't get the phone call out of his head. With water still dripping from his lashes, the blond turned off the spigot and pulled himself upright, staring into the mirror.
"The cops couldn't find him," the blond mumbled. "He could still fucking kill me. I really could be dead. They couldn't find him and he's still out there." Each time he spoke, the syllables sharpened, slipping between his ribs with very little resistance and piercing their way into his heart. Each time he opened his mouth, the words hurt a bit more until he was gripping the edge of the sink for all he was worth. "He wasn't found, but I'm okay. I'm okay." Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Josh inhaled roughly and bent over the sink once more when the pain in his chest got a bit too unbearable. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," he continued to chant until the words lost all meaning. They didn't make sense anymore. 'I'm okay'...what did that mean? Matt was right. He needed help. Josh needed him.
Taking another deep breath and righting himself again, Josh forced his gaze back to his mirror image. The bruises he'd been inspecting daily for weeks had finally completely faded, no longer staining his skin with darker hues. The only colours left across his face were a slight natural blush to his cheeks and nose, the pinkness of his lips and the smudged purple streaks below his eyes that always seemed to be there. He was outwardly physically back to himself again, for whatever that was worth. But in his mind's eye, he could still see the discolouration, could still feel the tightness in his muscles that came from fighting for his life, could still feel his ribs shifting beneath his skin each time he twisted ever-so-slightly, could still feel the blood as it dripped down his upper lip and smeared across his cheeks. He would never be free from all of that, but he could learn to live with it and move past it. He didn't have a choice.
The blond slowly let go of the sink and took a step back, lifting the hem of his shirt up to his throat. He peeked down over it, running his hand over smooth skin that held no remnants of ever being injured. His ribs still ached a bit if he did too much, but even that original constant minute-to-minute caveat he'd come away with was gone, replaced by only an occasional reminder that would soon be gone as well, leaving him with just a series of mental images to be played out like some silent movie in his head. Josh pressed a hand lightly to the center of his chest, fingers spanning the area where the darkest bruise had once been.
Shaking his head, he let go of his shirt, smoothing it down as he stepped back up to the mirror over the counter. "You're okay. You're okay, you're okay, you're fucking okay," Josh said, hoping that the slight change in phrasing would make a bit of a difference as he stared directly into the reflection of his eyes. "Gotta move on." He swallowed hard, dried his face on the towel beside the door and left the bathroom behind in an effort to do exactly what he was demanding of himself.
Back in his bedroom, Josh quietly closed the door behind him, stepped up to the foot of the bed and sat, feeling a little winded by the conversation he'd just had with himself. It was only mid-afternoon and it already felt like it had been an incredibly long day. In retrospect, that may have been because it had been going on since the afternoon before. Twenty-four hours. That's how long he'd been a prisoner of those voices and their words. Though he'd long since stopped hearing them, they were still ever-present because he couldn't stop thinking about them. Twenty-four hours was all it had been since he'd turned into a raving lunatic and had been pulled back to normalcy, yet it felt like much longer. The singer still didn't feel like he was a hundred percent after all of that, but his head was clear enough to feel the impact of the phone call from the cop and the fact that Matt had been right about so much through all of this. Josh had spent so long trying to deal with it all in his head that the aural conversations, the admittance of everything, the call from the police, the bad news he'd received, and the fact that he was quite literally cleaning up pieces of his life made the ceiling feel like it was caving in right over his head.
With a quiet groan, he knew that he couldn't keep dwelling on things or it would get that much worse, that much more quickly. He was his own living proof of that. The blond ran a hand through his hair, tucking it back behind his ear and stood, making the mess around him the new main concern while trying to decide where to start. It would've been easier if there'd been someone to tell him what to do first, but he had to stop depending on everyone to do that for him. He had to stop leaning so heavily on others for the little things.
The bed was the closest thing that needed tending to, so re-making that seemed like the obvious thing to do. Josh pulled the fitted sheet around the corners, kneeling and crawling to the center of the mattress to tug the wrinkles out, paying an odd amount of attention to detail just to drag the chore out longer than necessary. The rest of the covers were tossed into the center and straightened over the handful of pillows he owned. After a bit of a struggle to do something he'd never done particularly well and a steady stream of four-letter words, that task alone was finished and the room looked marginally better.
The blond closed the closet door and shut the empty dresser drawers, making a mental note to actually refill them with his clothing later instead of just living out of the laundry bag once everything was clean and dry. He used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the dust from the guitar and set it back down in the stand near the desk before turning to the landfill the top of his desk resembled. Pens were recapped and tossed in the long narrow drawer at the top, his laptop was dusted and closed, set off to the side, trash was thrown out and tied up in a garbage bag to be taken out to the dumpster as soon as he could make it there, and the notebook he consistently scribbled in was filed away in the bookcase. Josh knew that the notebook would most likely come back out later that night, but he was on a roll and it felt good to start putting everything in a proper place.
Just as he stood to shove the chair back under the desk, there was a quiet knock on his bedroom door. "Josh?"
"C'mon in."
Matt pushed the door open and Josh laughed as the brunet's eyebrows nearly met his hairline. "You cleaned all of this by yourself?"
Nodding, the singer rested his hands on his hips and looked around the room, feeling proud of himself. "Yeah. There was no reason not to, ya know?"
"I would've helped."
"You re-strung the guitar. That was helping," Josh argued, gesturing down to the floor in the direction of his office before stooping down to pick up a couple of books near his feet.
Matt wordlessly followed suit, stepping further into the room and around to the side of the bed. He reached down to pick up the book that Josh had semi-given up reading the first night Matt had spent in the guest room across the hall. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, the guitar player flipped it over, holding it open with both hands and scanning the words. "You've got your good days and you've got your bad days. Looking back, you'll realize that most things don't matter twenty-four hours, a week or even a year from the time they happened. What does matter is that you give a little gravity to it all. In the end, you're the kindergarten graduation you missed because of chicken pox; you're the first failing test grade you ever received; you're your first time, last time and all the sweaty, loud, sloppy, desperate times in between. You're the job you got fired from because you got lazy, and you're every moment you spent with someone who needed your company. You're the smile on your friend's face when you walk into a room, and you're the finger flip from an enemy when you successfully do better than they do. You're the sleepless nights you've spent pacing the floors and the early morning sunrises you've been witness to. You're every secret you've ever written on a slip of paper and burned before the world could see your thoughts. You're heartfelt speeches and light-hearted jokes. You're every movie you've ever loved, the endings of your favourite stories, and the coda to every song you've ever screamed at the top of your lungs at two a.m.. You're a gimmick with a revelation," he read from the last page. With a smile, he looked up at the singer.
"Good, isn't it? Borrow it if you want," Josh offered, tipping his head toward the unsystematically stacked tier of books on the nightstand to Matt's right, indicating that he had plenty to keep him busy until the novel was returned.
The brunet closed the pages and set it carefully on the bed beside his hip. "Thanks," he said, tapping the front hard cover. "I might."
Josh placed the two other partially read books in his hands back onto the shelf below his notebooks and turned back to the younger man. "That's a lot to think about, you know?"
"What is?" The guitar player now stood in the center of the room holding another book in his hand, looking over the description on the back and apparently deeming it unworthy of reading as he reached past the blond to slide it next to the books Josh had just shelved.
"That part you just read about kinda owning everything that happens to you."
"Ring some bells, does it?" Matt asked knowingly with a smile, stepping back and hooking his thumbs into his belt loops.
Shrugging, the singer dropped down into the wicker bucket chair near the desk. "Maybe a couple."
Matt took another step to the side and sat again, perching on the corner of the bed facing Josh this time. "Like, cow bells or jingle bells?"
"Like...doorbells, loud and clear. Like, maybe I don't wanna become a character in a fuckin' Arthur Miller novel." Knowing that Matt probably wouldn't make the connection, he explained a bit further. "Like, maybe I don't wanna die because I came to too many wrong conclusions or chose not to talk to you guys about what goes on in my head."
"That's fair enough, man." Matt pulled his hands from his belt loop and straightened his arms out behind him, leaning back on his hands. "You're character enough for your own book," he said with a quiet laugh.
"If...," Josh started, waiting for Matt to quiet down as he traced a fingertip over the rough wicker under his hand, "you were to write a book about your life, how would it go? I know that sounds fuckin' hokey as hell, dude, but..."
"No, no, it's a good question. I dunno," Matt admitted, sitting up a little straighter. "I guess... I guess I could only write up to this point. I dunno how the rest would go. What about you?"
"A chapter for each year of my life," Josh said matter-of-factly, fixing his eyes on a spot on the carpet just beyond the tips of his sneakers. "I guess I'd have to include all the obvious childhood shit in some kind of "Part One: The Early Years" thing. Then, somewhere around the middle of chapter twenty-nine, I get shot and ask you to stay in my house to make the ghosts disappear. You do, then, after a couple weeks, once I'm doing okay again, you eventually get to go back home to your own place and I write some super-hit record based on a recent near death experience that makes the band famous all across the globe." He paused to let Matt laugh a little at the exaggeration in ego. "After that..." Josh shrugged his shoulders, looking over at the younger man, "I dunno. We all retire and live comfortably on our piles of money?"
"With any luck, in my "Part Three", I'll live happily ever after as a dirty old man in some old folks home somewhere," Matt laughed again.
"Yeah, well, we know that's Ian's story. But what about me? What about the ending - the last chapters?"
"Of your story?"
Josh nodded, curious as to the conclusion Matt would write for him.
"Well..." The brunet leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "It's cliché, man, but this is your life. You decide what happens and who your supporting characters are. We're already your backup singers, and you count on us on stage," he said with a grin. "I'd like to think that you'll continue to choose to count on us when you need us until the last line of your final chapter is written."
Josh nodded again, raising a hand to draw a small "X" on his chest over his heart, just as he'd done to make a promise to Matt when he was at his worst. The singer then stood and reached into his hip pocket, feeling the familiar grooves of that stupid fucking bottle cap between his fingers. It was time to let go. It was time to let himself heal and move on. It was time to let Matt help him. It was time to accept things for what they were and learn that he can always start over. Never too late.
He reached over the desk and dropped the piece of plastic into the empty garbage can, momentarily closing his eyes against the resounding clang when it hit the bottom. "Do you think I'll be okay?" the singer asked, turning to face Matt and leaning back against the desk, hands braced on the edge against his sides.
The brunet smiled gently and stood, pointing toward the bottle cap that contained all of the misery the singer had been holding onto without quite realizing it. "Yeah, I'm positive of that, man. But, Josh, listen to me, okay? As sure as I am that you're gonna be okay, and as sure as I am that I'll help you make sure that you're okay, you're the only one who can make the decisions to trust that. You're the writer of this masterpiece, and in the end you're the only one who knows."
The End