A New Kind of Denial

I couldn’t get the images out of my mind of the events of earlier that day. The pulling in my heart was still going strong with the feeling of complete and utter loss. It hurts when you lose anyone close to you, but the pain is ten times worse when you lose your twin brother. I can’t even how horrible it is. I knew when it happened even without hearing the gunshot; I could feel it in my soul. The shot itself was an obvious indicator itself but I still would have known that Carson was hurt without it. The fact that I heard it as well as felt it made it as though my heart was breaking into a million pieces. That break wouldn’t go away, either; every time the scene played out in my head my heart would break into a million more pieces.

I was so lost in my own mind and my own despair that I just about screamed when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Shh, Mason, it’s just me,” Gavin whispered, stroking my hair lightly as he sat down beside me. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said shakily, wrapping my arms around him tightly, holding onto him for dear life. He held me back and rocked me a bit to help calm me down some. “But I'm so glad you’re here right now. It was torture being here alone for so long. And I don’t know what to do about any of this. I was his only family and neither of us have any kind of insurance, so I don’t know how anything is getting paid. Our parents barely left us anything because their deaths were so sudden and now – “

“Mason, sweetie, calm down, okay?”

“It’s hard to calm down in this situation, Gavin,”

“I know, but do you think that Carson would want you to be making yourself sick with worry over such a little thing as money?” he asked holding my face in his hands gently and smoothing back some of my increasingly unruly hair. “He wouldn’t like seeing you like this; freaked out and worrying yourself into oblivion.”

“I'm not worrying myself into oblivion,” I muttered, looking down at my feet, slightly embarrassed.

“Maybe not, but you’re worrying yourself into the ground. You’re going to make yourself sick and then you’re not going to be any use to anybody,”

“But how am I supposed to not worry about all of this?” I asked, looking back up into his eyes.

“I'm not saying not to worry, honey; I'm just telling you to not make yourself sick over this,” he said softly, placing a chaste kiss on my forehead. “Now I think we should go meet with Jason and Ianto, because they’ve got something to tell you too.”

“Okay,” I sighed, not wanting to leave Gavin’s side.

“I'll be right here,” he said, as if reading my mind “I have no need to leave you and I'm not going to go anywhere as long as you want me to stay.”

“Please don’t leave,” I choked out, bowing my head and laying it on his cheat. His arms curled around my body and he just held me there for a little while, rocking us back and forth ever so slightly.

“I'll never leave you Mason,” he whispered into my ear. “I promise I won’t.”

“But you will,” I sobbed, realizing it for the first time in a long time. He’s not going to stay with me forever; he can’t. He’s got a life back in New Jersey. “You’ll have to leave in a couple of months. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but you’ve been here for a month already. Actually, I was thinking about that before…before all this happened, and I realized that today is the one month anniversary of our first date.”

“It is?”

“Yeah, we went to Marie’s on the eighth of June for our first date,” I said, smiling at the memory. “And it’s July eighth today. We’ve technically been together for a month.”

“I didn’t think it had been that long,” he whispered, almost sounding as if he was in disbelief. “It hasn’t seemed like a month already. I don’t like that I only have about a month and a half left up here.”

“I don’t either,” I sighed, looking back up at his face. “But that’s what I'm saying. You’ll be leaving here sooner than either of us will realize, and back in Jersey, you’ve got your own shit to worry about. I mean, you might have a kid and you still have another year of school to finish up. Then who knows what’s up with you and – “

“Wait a second, Mason,”

“What?”

“I never got the chance to tell you yet,” Gavin started, smiling slightly at whatever it was he was about to tell me. “I'm not the father of Tanya’s kid. The other guy is. I'm not going to have a kid after all!”

“You’re not? Really?” At least there was something about today that could brighten my mood.

“Yeah,” he smiled. “She counted the weeks and all that jazz and figured out that I'm not actually the dad. So I don’t have to deal with that anymore, thank God.”

“Oh good,” I sighed, laughing. I couldn’t but be happy for that.

“But I know what you’re saying anyways. I will have to leave you eventually, but that doesn’t mean I want to. I hate that I have to go back home,” he sighed, laying his head against mine. “But even if I do, we’ll keep in touch and I can come visit a lot. What I meant when I said I’d never leave you wasn’t that I’d never physically leave you; I have to leave you eventually. But – as cheesy as this is – I meant that I’d never leave you in spirit. I'll always be right here,” he told me, placing his hand on my chest over my heart. “And you’ll always be right here,” he said, taking my hand and placing it over his heart. Another tear slid out of my eye, but this one was not other Carson. I couldn’t believe what an amazing person I’d gotten as a boyfriend. “Oh Mason, please don’t cry.”

“I'm only crying because you’re so amazing,”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re so good to me and I'm such a screw up. I don’t deserve someone like you.”

“Don’t say that Mason! You’re not a screw up. And I'm not anything special, so there wouldn’t be anything for you to deserve either way. You’re nothing less than I am in any way at all, so don’t you ever think you are,”

“See, that’s just what I mean; you always can cheer me up when I'm down and it seems like nothing ever fazes you. I'm breaking down here, bawling my eyes out, and you’re there making me feel special, but also horrible because I'm crying like a lunatic and you’re perfectly fine and –“

“Mason dear, you’re rambling,”

I chuckled lightly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, trust me. It’s perfectly fine. Honey, you lost a brother today. If you’re not bawling your eyes out right now, you either weren’t close enough to your brother or you’re a horrible person. You should never feel bad about crying over this; you’re probably not going to get over this anytime soon and nobody has the right to tell you that you can’t cry about this. He was your twin for Christ’s sake, and you guys have practically been each other’s everything for the past couple of years. You have every right to be completely and utterly devastated over this.”

“I can’t seem to grasp that you sound so experienced in all this, and you’re making me feel so much better by what you’re saying, but you have never been through anything even half this bad as this. You don’t have any siblings and I don’t think you’ve lost anyone close to you, but you’re talking like you’ve been through this five times and back again each time. That just completely baffles me.”

“I haven’t ever been through anything like this, you’re right, but I've helped a lot of people through their similar loses. In Jersey, I'm part of a program that councils kids and young adults when they lose loved ones,” he started to explain, taking my hand in his and stroking it lightly. It was such a comforting feeling having him there. “I guess it’s kind of like a group of ‘junior therapists’, if you want to call it that. I've helped quite a few people when they’ve lost siblings or parents and such. I guess that’s probably why it seems like I've got experience in this.”

“You just keep amazing me, Gavin,” I chuckled, shaking my head.

“It’s nothing,” he blushed. “I started doing it for a bit of extra credit for my sociology class, and the other people doing it are really cool, so I guess I've just kept doing it and kept doing it. I don’t know; it makes me feel like a good person, I guess.” He shrugged nonchalantly.

“You are a good person,” I smiled. “You’re a really good person and I'm so glad to even know you, let alone have you as my boyfriend.”

“I'm glad to have you as my boyfriend too, Mason. You just make my day, even if you’re not in a good mood. I love being around you,” he smiled. I smiled back and inadvertently blushed. “So, um, we should go find Ianto and Jason. They wanted to let you know about something.”

“Aren’t they wondering about…all of this?”

“They are, but they want to tell you something first,”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

He smirked a bit and took my hands in his again. “They don’t want you worrying about anything you shouldn’t be worrying about right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not going to let you freak yourself out about the money,”

“They’re not going to…”

“They are,” he nodded, smiling softly at me. “They’re paying for everything.”

“I can’t believe they would do that,” I breathed. I was having a hard time fully understanding what he was saying.

“They said that you and Carson were like their nephews, if not like their sons. They said there’s no way they would let you do this on your own because they know your situation,”

“We should go meet them. I want to talk to them about this. I just can’t believe they would be so amazing to do that,” I said, almost on the verge of tears. I took a deep breath to steady myself. Gavin and I stood up and he wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me closer to him. I smiled lightly and wiped away the last of my tears, following his lead. Ianto and Jason turned out to be at the receptionist’s desk, discussing something – probably finances – with the nurse that I’d originally spoken with. When they saw us coming, they immediately ran over to us.

“I'm so sorry Mason,” Ianto said as the both of them have me a soft hug. I hugged them back, but when they let go, I pushed them lightly in their chests.

“What was that for?” Jason asked softly.

“You damn idiots,” I muttered, smirking at them.

“What?”

“Thank you,” I nodded. “I can’t even grasp what you guys are doing for me. Thank you so much.”

“Oh, Mase, we couldn’t think of anything else that could help more than this, and it’s really no big deal for us,”

“But it’s a big deal for me, Ianto. So just…thank you guys. Thank you so much.”

I was still having a hard time processing everything, and an even harder time saying what I wanted to say. I really was at the point where I thought I would start bawling again, but this time for no apparent reason. Gavin must have realized that, because his arms wrapped around me gently and comfortingly. He then spoke up a little and said probably the same thing I wanted to say but couldn’t.

“Why don’t we go get some coffee or something and discuss everything there? I know if I was in Mason’s position, I’d not want to spend much more time in this wretched hospital. We should so somewhere else to talk.” Normally I wouldn’t like that he was talking for me and as if I wasn’t there, but at that point in time, he was saying exactly what I just couldn’t. And I loved him for that.