Work Text:
One month after the events on the mountain:
Josh is awake. For the first time in weeks he feels a half-certainty that what he's seeing and hearing is all real. His new psychiatrist has told him, repeatedly, that the medication would help. She'd made him swear that he'd take them on schedule. She'd gotten his mother involved, too, somehow.
His mother, who had held him for five minutes when she got to him. She hadn't asked any questions but taken him home, not his apartment but home-home, and put him to bed. She'd given him soft promises of everything turning out okay. It was all too much.
The first weeks at home were a blur in which he slept, saw, and heard interlaced with his mother's voice and hands. There were people who commanded him to eat, drink, wash when he didn't want to. Maybe his father was there, too. He thinks he saw him once or twice.
After that he started dreaming again, but this time he saw the mines, saw Hannah's face as he recognized her last. When he wakes from the dreams where she crushes his head in her claws he isn't sure if what he's feeling is relief or a strange sense of disappointment.
He realizes how fucked up his prank was, even if he'd been so sure of it being the right thing at the time. It had seemed so logical, and the way he had planned it, down to every little detail, had been perfect. He feels sick every time he reminds himself of what he did. He can't help but wonder... how bad would it have been if he hadn't been found? If he'd been forgotten?
His psychiatrist was right, the meds give him more clarity, but clarity is the last thing he wants now.
He'd laugh if he wasn't so busy trying to keep tears at bay because isn't it fucking funny how he finally has a treatment plan that seems to be working and all he wants is to fucking disappear down a hole in the ground forever because he will never be able to look his friends in the eye again. Fuck, he can't even look at his mother's face anymore.
He's pretty much made up his mind about never seeing his friends again (because it's what's best, for all of them, he's decided) when life throws him a curve.
He's downstairs in the kitchen getting a glass of water when he hears his mother pull up the driveway and he decides to wait and see if she bought any orange juice. Then he gets distracted by a bird landing in the garden, and as he's staring out the window someone enters the kitchen.
Josh assumes it's his mother and asks about the juice, but when there's no answer but a sharp intake of breath he turns around and... the glass he's holding shatters on the tile floor.
It's Chris.
His heart's in his throat all of a sudden and he's aware that he stopped breathing so he does the only thing that feels right. Slides down to the floor, his back against a cabinet and his eyes fixed on the wooden breakfast bar before him.
Fuck.
It's not what was supposed to happen. Josh brings his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them as he fucking wishes he was still hallucinating, but he knows this is real. There's a miserable moan he can't hold back before he bites his bottom lip and squeezes his eyes shut. Chris will leave. He has to.
Except that Josh can hear someone (Chris) picking up the broken glass and put it on the counter, and then someone's (Chris) sitting down next to him.
The silence between them hurts. There are a million words bubbling inside Josh's chest but by the time they reach his mouth his tongue has turned to lead and he can't say anything. He wants to tell Chris to leave because there is no way he can ever take back what has happened, and he wants Chris to stay because he's selfish.
In the end he can only mumble “I'm sorry,” into the well-worn fabric of his gray sweatpants, and even those words feel like slugs falling from his lips, thick and heavy.
“We've gotta talk, man,” Chris says.
Two months ago Josh would've cracked a joke at his phrasing, but now he doesn't even bother with his go-to defense mechanism. “Okay,” he says, words still smothered in his pants, and tries to brace himself for what comes next.
There's a beat where he can hear Chris fumble with his shirtsleeves, something he's known Chris to do whenever he gets nervous. “I've done a lot of thinking – about what happened on the mountain, I mean. The things you did to – to Ashley, to … all of us.”
Josh cringes as he hear the unspoken to me in Chris's pause.
“You gotta promise me,” Chris says with a sense of urgency to his voice. “Never again.”
“I swear,” Josh whispers.
“Because I can't go through something like that again. I had to – I thought I'd... that you were dead. And then, the gun, the fucking – I almost–” Chris cuts himself off and Josh can hear him breathe deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth. When he continues his voice is steady. “I've been really angry about what happened. I still don't understand everything, like why you didn't come talk to me or Sam, or why I didn't notice something before. Sam said she found records going back years.”
“You can go,” Josh says, and hates himself for it. “You don't have to stay, I get it, you don't have to explain to me why –”
“I came here because I need my best friend back.”
The words are said in such a rush there's a moment Josh thinks he misheard what Chris was saying. When he dares to glance up at Chris's face he sees the furrowed brow, the sleepless nights, and the bleeding honesty behind Chris's eyes. He looks like shit.
“You're fucking with me.”
“Am not.”
Josh swallows thickly. “If this is you getting back at me for what I did, it's not funny.”
“I wouldn't,” Chris says with a seriousness that should only be reserved for life or death situations. “I mean it. At first I thought I just wanted to be left alone, to try and forget everything, but I've been miserable. I talked to Sam a couple of times but it wasn't the same. I kept thinking about calling you because I... because I missed you.”
Josh swears he can see Chris's eyes mist over and fuck. He blinks hard trying not to get teary-eyed himself. He's still trying to think of a cheesy line to brighten the mood and fill the awkward silence that has fallen when Chris opens his arms towards him.
Josh scoots over and lays his head on Chris's shoulder, and Chris's arms wrap around him, pulling him tight against his friend. The warmth of the embrace sinks into his skin immediately. It feels like a privilege, something he forfeited the moment he invited everyone up to the mountain. He doesn't deserve this, but Chris has always had a blind spot when it comes to others, especially Josh.
“What's better than this, bros being bros,” Chris says in a ridiculous voice making Josh snort loudly before there are big, fat tears welling up behind Josh's eyelids. There's no stopping them from rolling down his face and seeping into Chris's shirt.
“I'm so fucking sorry,” he says. He feels Chris nod, his hand drawing soothing circles on Josh's back which only makes the tears come harder.
“I know, bro.”
The next time Chris says something is after a few minutes, and when he speaks his voice is softer than before. “I was so fucking scared when the helicopters didn't find you. All I could think of was the way it was back when your sisters... and I just, I just hoped they'd find you alive and they did.”
“I don't remember much of it,” Josh admits. By the time the rescue team got to him he'd been at the height of his psychotic episode. In his memories Sam and Mike are there at the same time, but he knows it didn't happen in that order. “What happened after you took me to the shed? You and Mike. That happened, right?”
Chris nods. “Short version, I went back to check on the others, Em and Mike showed up separately, then this flamethrower guy busted through the door and started talking about a curse on the mountain and monsters -”
“The Wendigo.” There's a niggling thought at the back of Josh's mind. Sam had said something about that down in the mine, or maybe Mike had. Josh can recall bits and pieces but most of it he'd dismissed as part of his psychosis. “What did it look like?”
“Ten-thousand teeth,” Chris says immediately. “Balding head, long limbs, really skinny, and claws like Freddy Krueger.”
It's surreal to hear Chris describe the way Hannah looked in Josh's dreams. Josh knows he shouldn't, but it's like he's found a piece of string hanging from a tapestry, begging to be pulled. He didn't imagine the creature. He tightens his arms around his knees, feeling the throbbing pulse of his heart under his stomach.
“Did it have Hannah's tattoo?” he hears himself ask. There's a rushing sound in his ears, getting louder and louder. He doesn't hear Chris's answer, but he doesn't need it. He knows. He knows.
His sister, down in the mines and alive. She'd recognized him through those sickly white eyes. The bruises he'd been found with, the ones on his neck, came from her hands.
He's dimly aware of being moved from the cold kitchen tiles into the living room, sitting down on the couch. Hannah had been so close all this time. He has to go back to the– he needs to find–
His lungs are burning, his vision swimming. He needs air.
Someone's telling him to breathe slower, and he tries to, drawing from the few therapy sessions where he practiced relaxation techniques. It doesn't feel like it's working but before he can start panicking there's a cold, heavy glass pushed into his hands.
“Look at the water, Josh.”
The water ripples inside the glass, reacting to the tremors Josh feels in his arms. He has to concentrate hard on keeping a firm grip in his hands and forgets about his breathing, instead following the ripples until he lets out a shaky sigh.
Chris is crouched down in front of him, one of his hands hovering near the bottom of the glass. Josh gives him an disbelieving look.
“What am I, twelve?” he says, batting Chris's hand away before taking a sip. A pinching ache behind his forehead is making itself known. “I'm not gonna drop another of my mother's favored glasses.”
Chris chuckles. “Not like her hand etched crystal set, right?”
“Hey fuck you, man,” Josh says, the corners of his lips twitching upward as he remembers the night of his eighteenth birthday. “I offered to buy a new set but she'd have none of it, just wanted me to ... stop drinking so much, I guess.”
The frailty of their light humored conversation is revealed when Chris looks away with a pained expression. The excessive nature of Josh's drinking had been an ill-kept secret in the group. Everyone knew Josh could outdrink them, but no one had linked the trained ease with which he could throw back shots to his depressive moods. Mostly because he didn't tell them about those.
Looks like the cat is out the bag, and for good this time. “Stop it,” Josh mutters. “You don't get to blame yourself for … whatever.”
“I always pushed you to take it a step further.” Chris's face has lost its color. “I should've–”
“Stop,” Josh cuts him off, harshly. He places the glass on the ground so he can reach out and grab Chris's arms. “You didn't see shit because I didn't want you to. I hid it, actively, and I did a good job of it before last year.”
After the incident, Josh's parents would talk to his teachers to inform them of his condition, usually after the first week of school. He'd get five days of normal treatment and after that worried looks the rest of the year. He'd talked about it in therapy, or rather, been made to talk about his paranoid feelings. He'd been told he couldn't change who he was, but could change the way he reacted to the reactions of others.
It felt like shitty advice at the time. Probably more so because it came from the mouth of a therapist incapable of inspiring any form of compassion in himself, much less in others, combined with the charismatic properties of a dead fish. The less he talked about what was troubling him, the less time he had to spend in a stuffy office, so he hid it.
After his sisters' disappearance he'd tried so hard to keep everything hidden, but there'd been too many eyes on him. All there was left for him to do at that time had been damage control. Look where that got you.
“It's not a question of trust or loyalty. It's about dignity,” Josh says in an effort to explain. “And please, bro, for the love of pie, get your ass on the couch 'cause my back hurts just from looking at you.”
Chris still looks pained as he moves to get up, and it's not because of the position he's held himself in for too long. He does do a little stretch and runs his knuckles across his lower back before sitting down next to Josh. “You thought I wouldn't respect you anymore,” he says slowly, like he's trying to glue the pieces together.
Josh curses. “That's not what I – just – drop it, Chris.”
“I'm not dropping it,” Chris says. There's steel behind his words, and Josh knows he won't be able to dissuade him. “I'm sitting here because you didn't want to talk about what's wrong. So we're gonna, gonna sit here and talk until you've convinced me it'll... fuck, I don't know.”
“I don't want to talk about it.”
“And I didn't ask for a fist to the face but I still got to walk with the bruises for days,” Chris says and fuck, that's not fair.
Josh curls up on his end of the couch, arms hugging his middle. “I'm sorry I punched you.”
“Why didn't you come to me before?”
His eyes start stinging and he turns his back to Chris a bit more before answering because he knows he's gonna start crying again, and soon. But fuck it. There's nothing he can do to save himself from this conversation without Chris finding a way to resume it on a later date.
“I didn't want you to think I'm weak.”
“You thought I'd... make fun of you?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, just, look at me like I'm the speshul kid in school. Treat me like I'm about to break. Talk behind my back about crazy little Josh who needs extra attention because he wasn't breastfed long enough or something.”
Chris hums softly. “Why'd you think I'd react like that?”
“What are you, my therapist?” Josh scoffs, but he can't muster the right amount of funny or venom to put behind that statement and it falls flat. “I don't know. I don't know why.”
“I care about you because you're my friend.”
“I know, I know, I just.” He swallows to clear his throat. “It feels like you'd react like that, and I know you wouldn't, but it feels like you would. I'm older, right, I'm supposed to be the put together one, not flunk out of college because of head troubles.”
“I thought you quit because you wanted to do something else.”
Josh laughs breathlessly. “Yeah. That's what I told everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Washington, professional liar.” His voice cracks on the last words and he swallows again, trying to stop his throat from closing around the lump growing there.
“You're not weak,” Chris says, and if Josh wasn't crying before, he sure as fuck is now. “You're fucked up because of what happened, you've messed up pretty bad, but all of that is – you can make amends. You're in therapy, right? You got new meds?”
Josh nods. “Bupropion and haloperidol, for now,” he says in a hoarse whisper.
“So an antidepressant and an antipsychotic,” Chris says. Josh wonders when his friend learned so much about medication. “That's a good thing. I'm not trying to say you'll be back to full speed in no time or anything, just... you're doing what you can. It's hard work, and you don't have to be alone in this.”
“No one's gonna– after what I did–”
“Your mom,” Chris cuts in. “There's nothing in the world she wouldn't do for you. There's Sam, who's already forgiven you,” Chris continues before Josh can protest that mothers don't count. “Jess, she's still pretty banged up but not because of you. She knows you had nothing to do with what happened to her. The others are gonna need time but I'm sure they'll come 'round, and I'm... I'm right here, Josh.” There's a rustling sound of plastic against cloth. “I even have some tissues for you, or you can use my shirt again, if you want. I don't mind,” he adds in a lighthearted tone.
He doesn't know how Chris does it, but his words are like sunlight breaking through a deck of clouds. He wipes his eyes with his palms before turning to Chris and accepting the paper tissue to blow his nose.
“When did you learn to speak like that, Cochise?” he asks when he feels less like a vase on the edge of a table.
Chris gives him a tight-lipped smile before handing him another tissue. “Let's just say the Washingtons aren't the only family with cases of head troubles.”
“I never knew.”
“Not everyone has to know everything,” Chris says, putting a tissue on Josh's knee. “Sometimes it's enough if just a few people know about stuff, so long as they're the right people.”
“What are you doing,” Josh asks as yet another tissue finds its way onto him.
“I'm trying to run out of tissues,” Chris says with a devious glint in his eyes. “You're not crying enough so I'm speeding up the process by giving them away.”
“So you can, what, force me to blow my nose in your shirt?”
“Alas!” Chris cries with a dramatic gesture. “As my frail masculinity does not permit me to ask for hugs and snuggles I am forced to create schemes involving tissues!”
Josh unfolds himself, dropping tissues from him, and turns to Chris. “C'mere, you big nerd.”
It takes a bit of maneuvering to find a comfortable position for them both but the couch is wide enough that they can both lay down on it without one of them almost falling off. Being this close to Chris isn't unpleasant, at all. Even though he's officially taller, Josh has his head tucked until Chris's chin.
“One of us should probably say no homo,” Chris says like he's reciting an ancient rule but makes no move to untangle their embrace. If anything, he might be holding on tighter than before.
Josh snuggles deeper into the collection of shirts Chris is wearing. “If this is homo I want all the homo, all day long,” he says and feels Chris laugh.
“And night?”
“Damn right,” he mumbles. He could sleep for days like this, feeling warm and safe and, dare he say it, loved. He hears the grandfather clock strike in the distance, signaling that time stops for no one and evening is approaching.
“Stay,” he says softly. “Don't go. I don't want you to. Stay for dinner?”
He feels Chris exhale against his hair. “Actually, and please don't get upset,” Chris says in a voice matching his own volume. Josh swears he can hear Chris smile. “I already asked your mom if I could stay the weekend.”