Chapter Text
As he took his first sip of blissfully hot coffee, Marcus Pike took in the view from the large, wraparound porch of his home for the next 7 days for the very first time. The storms that had awakened him before even a hint of sunrise touched the sky had passed through, leaving in their wake a pink-tinged woodscape, the leaves still drip-dripping with rain. For all his early resistance to the idea, a vacation to the middle of nowhere was starting to seem better and better. Not that he had any choice in the matter, he thought ruefully.
The devastating rejection still stung in his mind. A week after Theresa dumped him via text message, he felt like he was barely hanging on to his sanity. One week of haunting his office, the streets, and his apartment like a distracted ghost, unconcerned with the changes in location. Only passing from place to place because habit dictated it. Only working because that’s all he knew to do at the moment.
He found himself in the 3rd floor bathroom on a gray Tuesday, gripping the sink with white knuckled fingers. All the methods to ground himself that he learned from his therapist, whom he saw in his early twenties when he was new to adulthood and full of that misplaced sort of rage that some young men feel when they first begin those stumbling steps into manhood, were failing him. His entire body ached with tension. God, it’s like a migraine, but all over , he thought. He struggled to breathe through the weight in his chest. In fact, it felt like the rapidly increasing inhales he took were barely carrying any oxygen to his cells. His lungs couldn’t inflate enough. He took one final gasping breath before he unclenched the sink with one fist and, before the rest of his body caught up with the action, swung it at the towel dispenser.
He regretted it just before the inevitable collision.
Idiot,
he mumbled to himself, as he finally took a few slow, steadying breaths (counting to four for each inhale and exhale in time with the heartbeat that he now felt in his hand). It had been years since he had taken out his anger in such a childish way, and it felt worse than he remembered (in part due to the remorse he now felt as a grown-ass man expressing his anger with violence like some child). Now he had bloody knuckles to deal with on top of everything else, and he stalked down the hallway to the break room and the first aid kit.
Marcus returned from his lunch break (spent trying to work out his frustrations at the gym while pointedly ignoring his aching hand) to find a printout of a VRBO listing for a cabin in rural Kentucky sitting on his keyboard. Patricia, the senior office administrator and the person that every college intern referred to as their ‘work mom’, knocked tentatively on the door frame as Marcus studied the paper with a bemused expression. He looked up.
“Do you know anything about this?”
“I’m the one who left it there,” Patricia confessed with a voice that, even though lowered by too many years of cigarettes, was warm and caring, in the no-nonsense, ‘you’ll-listen-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you’ sort of care. “Marcus, the whole office agrees--you need to take some time off. You’re driving everyone crazy. They’re all walking on eggshells around you.”
“They don’t need to walk on--”
“Marcus, you’ve been snapping at everyone all week. You yelled at an intern over a fax machine on Friday. A fax machine, for Christ’s sake!”
“He asked me why the paper still came out the other end! Like a fax physically sends the damn thing to another place! YOU try explaining how faxes work five times to some college freshman who still doesn’t get it!”
“I get it, Marcus, I do.” Her gaze turns sympathetic as she puts her hand on his shoulder. “But the bags under your eyes have their own bags. You’re running yourself ragged.”
“I don’t--”
“I know you’re doing it to cope, but you can’t keep doing this to yourself. Or the interns, or let’s face it, Marcus, the whole damn department!”
“I don’t know how a vacation to the middle-of-nowhere is supposed to help. I need to stay busy, I’ll go crazy out there, you know?”
“It’s a beautiful cabin, Marcus. The property backs up onto a paved bike trail, the whole thing’s wooded, it’s as rural as you can get while still only being about 20 minutes from downtown--”
“Listen, I appreciate the idea, Patricia, I really do. I can’t-- I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t at least have the work-- ”
“Look, we insist. In fact, it’s already been paid for and your, uh, request for a week’s PTO has already been approved.”
“My what?? Patricia…” Marcus tossed the paper back down on his desk and brought his hands to the sides of his nose in frustration. “What do you mean, we insist? Who insists?”
“The whole department. This was kind of a group effort.”
“You all pitched in to rent me a cabin for a week?” Marcus asked, feeling touched despite himself.
Patricia suddenly found the scuff on the floor near the wall to be very interesting, indeed. “Actually, you rented you the cabin for the week.”
“I… I rented--? How?”
“Thompson accidentally noticed that you uh, you left your credit card in the top drawer of your desk, and we kind of, um, borrowed it.”
“He ‘accidentally noticed’ that I left my credit card in a closed drawer?”
“Mmhmm.” Patricia inspected her long, red manicure through her cat’s eye bifocal glasses.
“When, ah… When do I leave for this ‘vacation’ that I so willingly purchased for myself?” Marcus gritted out through his teeth.
“Friday after work.”
Marcus’s jaw clenched, and ticked slightly to one side in obvious irritation.
Patricia at least had the decency to look remorseful.
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It was late when he had finally arrived at his destination. Exhausted from travel and heartbreak, Marcus had passed through the dark house, paying little attention to the cozy but updated kitchen, the impressive stone fireplace, or the panoramic windows in the living room. He single-mindedly dragged his suitcase (and his own miserable feet) down a wooden-beamed hallway to what he had hoped was the bedroom.
He dumped his suitcase unceremoniously on the plush armchair in the corner and nearly threw himself, messenger bag and all, down onto the quilted bed. Letting out an exhale for what felt like the first time in hours, he felt a little of the tension he carried leave his body. Only a little. His shoulders still ached with the feeling of uneasiness and every breath still seemed to struggle against the weight in his chest.
Marcus shrugged out of his shirt and pants, all while only lifting his body off of the mattress when absolutely necessary. He rummaged through his messenger bag for his phone charger and hastily plugged it in, before setting the bag haphazardly next to the bed. He pulled the quilt over himself and turned off the bedside lamp. The room was blanketed in the most complete darkness Marcus had ever experienced. The familiar haze of streetlights coming through his apartment windows even at the latest of hours was, of course, absent here. Even if expected, the magnitude of the darkness was still a surprise. The only illumination came from the faint blue glow of Marcus’s phone charging. He curiously removed it from the charger for a moment. There was no difference in his field of vision when he blinked his eyes open and shut several times. Resisting the urge to turn on a hall light and crack the door like a toddler scared of a monster under his bed, Marcus plugged his phone back in, rolled over, and closed his eyes again.
The city sounds he was accustomed to were replaced by a different sort of cacophony. The constant peep-peep-peep of small frogs from a small pond somewhere on the property. The creaking of branches every time the wind blew through the trees. He could hear the rustling of other small, unknown nocturnal animals making their way through the undergrowth. Then there was the ceaseless droning of crickets, adding the final piece to this unfamiliar sound tapestry of the rural midwest. Even so, Marcus thought it was far too quiet to soothe the loudness he felt in his mind. How was he going to survive a week of being alone with his thoughts, with nothing to do but stare at the trees? Eventually, the thoughts swirling through his head quieted, and he fell asleep.
When the thunderstorm woke him up from a blessedly dreamless sleep, he lay in bed watching flash after flash of lightning lance through the still-dark room, and listened to the wind lashing through the trees and the rain pounding the small cabin. The violence of the storm seemed to calm his own internal tempest, and as the rain abated and the slowly lightening sky began to seep through the window, Marcus felt a little more of the tension seep out of his shoulders. He took a few deep breaths, fighting against the now-familiar weight in his chest, and got up for the day, before the sun.
Now, as he sat enjoying the warmth of the coffee against the rain-cooled morning air, he decided a few days of this idyllic view might not be so bad, after all. Mist rose off of the pond he had only assumed was there the night before, on account of the frogs he had heard. The still water, broken only by the occasional ripple of a bug on the surface, reflected the same pink hue of the sky. He tried (and failed) not to think of Theresa, of what he had lost. Had he ever even had it in the first place? He watched little spots of early sun dance between the trees and raised his coffee cup to his mouth again, finding it empty. How long had he been sitting here, lost in thought? It was as he was lowering the mug back to his knee that he heard a sudden scream cut through the quiet morning.