32.

Justin wasn’t sure what woke him, considering how bone-deep tired he was.  He had a hazy memory of Daphne waking him earlier; he had curled up on the couch after talking things out with Brian and had fallen asleep with the soft rumble of his voice echoing through the air.  There was the vague recollection of warm arms being wrapped firmly around his waist, and a solid presence at his back as he stumbled down the corridor to his bedroom.  Of a quiet voice telling him to sleep; that he was okay, that he was going to be fine.  And as the sound of Brian’s voice whispered through his mind, Justin opened his eyes.

That conversation with Brian had cracked the walls he had fought so hard to erect; he had hidden behind those walls for so long, that now they were on the verge of collapse, it left him feeling wrung out, both physically and emotionally.  For so long, he had been convinced that he had meant nothing to Brian.  For so long, he had carried the misery and loneliness of losing the man he had fought so hard to be with; he had thought that there was something wrong with him – something that he inherently lacked – that had caused the downfall of their relationship.  But then Brian had said it:

“How am I meant to tell you that I love you, when I have used that phrase for Michael and Lindsay?  Because it doesn’t mean the same thing when it’s about you.”

Brian’s voice had shaken as he spoke; and while that shaken tone had shown fear and nerves, it had also rung with conviction.  Brian hadn’t just been saying it to placate him; he’d meant it.  And with that simple sentence, Justin had finally heard what Brian had been trying to tell him for the last few months.  Venerate.  Brian didn’t just ‘care.’  He didn’t just want Justin’s ‘friendship.’  He wanted it all.  And with his depression blinding him to Brian’s actions, Justin hadn’t heard what Brian had been unable to say until the man had all but smacked him in the face with it.

That emotional blow had gone hand-in-hand with the sudden epiphany of what he and Brian had lost.  It had been their relationship; their fault.  He hadn’t realized just how far down the slippery slope he had fallen until that moment; he had been far too consumed with blaming himself, with trying to understand what he lacked; with trying to keep Brian at arm’s length out of self-preservation, to realize that it took two people to make a relationship work or fail.  But when that relationship included a third, unwanted person, who had been determined to drive them apart?  They hadn’t stood a chance.

And with that clarity came several other moments of pure lucidity; moments that had drained Justin of the conviction that he was right in how he assumed other people perceived him.  Because if his depression had blinded him to this, what else had he been blinded to?  What other cues had he missed?  And in the moments that followed, rationality had rained down on his head for the first time since he woke up after Hobbs had bashed him.  Frightened by the intensity of his thoughts, he had shoved them into a locked box in his mind – he would unlock that box when he was within the safety of Alex’s office, and the other man could help him deal with the emotional fallout.

And as he reeled from the proverbial light switch being turned on in the darkness of his mind, Brian had asked him to make him a promise.  Instead of holding Brian at arm’s length as those hazel eyes had burned down at him in desperation, he had made Brian the promise he had demanded to hear - the promise that he would continue to work on fixing his mind, and the promise to try.  To continue letting Brian get to know him.  The promise that he would let Brian back in.            

Rolling his head slowly against the pillow, Justin remembered something else as his eyes took in the glowing numbers on his clock.  Three a.m.…  His memory told him that he had reached for Brian’s hand when the other man had tugged the covers up over his shoulders.  The mere thought of being alone after the emotional confrontation with Brian had caused chills to pimple his entire body.  He hadn’t verbalized it, but it seemed that Brian had learned to read his unspoken needs, because he had eased himself down beside Justin on the bed and slipped his arm under Justin’s neck.  In the warmth of his bed, held firmly against the solid presence of Brian’s chest, Justin had closed his eyes and slept better than he had in months.  

Sliding his hand across the bed, Justin sighed.  The bed beside him was empty - Brian was gone.  That is what had awakened him.  Closing his eyes again, Justin rolled away from the empty side of the bed and towards the wall where Gus normally slept when he stayed over.  Loneliness began to creep inside, taking away the kernel of warmth Brian’s presence had produced and leaving behind the chill and doubts that Justin had grown so used to carrying.  With his emotions acting like a yo-yo, he burrowed further under his blankets in an effort to warm himself, and to maintain the tenuous grip that he had on this new state of mind.

In the darkness of his room, Justin closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.  He needed to get some more sleep; Murphy had said that Vanguard had a major client coming in within the next week or so, and that Justin would get a chance to work on the campaign.  Gardner had also pulled Justin aside to tell him that there was a possibility that he might have to work with both him and Brian on this campaign – something about it being a major coup for Vanguard, because it had something to do with politics.  And as that thought ran through his mind, Justin wondered if it would make it easier now to work with his ex-lover because of their talk, or if it would make it harder.  

Brian had never been one for emotional confrontation.  He had never wanted to talk things out; he had always said that actions spoke louder than words, that words could be twisted and distorted.  Justin frowned as a new thought clouded his mind.  Had he pushed Brian into talking?  Into spilling those tightly guarded emotions at his feet?  And if he had pushed the man too far in the emotional confrontation they had found themselves in, what would Brian do to protect himself?  He always reacted badly when he was cornered; maybe Brian had decided that trying to work things out would be too hard – that Justin was too much work; that was probably why he had woken up alone.

Not that it would have been any easier waking up with Brian in the morning.  Justin had sworn to himself when he had moved in with Daphne that he would never let a man sleep in this bed with him.  That it would remain his bed, and his alone.  The dark memory of wet stains on the sheets momentarily stole his breath, and he exhaled shakily.  Jesus.  So much for that vow… his walls had cracked, and he had all but offered himself up to Brian on the proverbial silver fucking platter. 

Justin squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed convulsively.  Was he really thinking about giving Brian another chance to rip his heart out of his chest and stomp on it?  Was he really that dependent on the other man, that he was thinking about handing him what was left of his pride?  Was he really that fucking stupid?  Waking up alone told him all that he needed to know – Brian hadn’t ever wanted anything more with him than what they had had – and even that hadn’t been enough to keep him satisfied.  

Maybe he had gone to the baths to fuck someone after realizing that Justin wouldn’t – couldn’t – bend over for him.  It wouldn’t be the first time Brian had left him in bed and had gone to get his needs met – needs that Justin hadn’t been able to satisfy.  He hadn’t been enough back then – why the fuck did he think he would be enough to keep Brian satisfied now?  His brain was a broken maze of tangled up shit.  Blond boy ass – a novelty fuck.  One who couldn’t even get it up, let alone keep it up.  A trick who had stayed too long. 

The distant sound of the toilet being flushed shattered the quiet and jarred him out of the destructive voices in his head. 

Justin blinked, and fought back the stirrings of panic; he strained to listen to the sounds of the night, and forced himself to breathe steadily.  Quiet footsteps.  The clunk of the pipes as the water was turned on in the bathroom.  The soft click of Daphne’s door being closed.  Sitting up, Justin pushed his hands through his hair and took another steadying breath; he could feel the dark thoughts that had filled his mind hovering in the background, and he gritted his teeth as he forcibly shoved them away; clenching his hands into fists, Justin yanked at handfuls of his hair, and the pain in his scalp centered him as he panted.

The voices were wrong - Brian had told him he was enough, that his tricking had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with how Brian had been feeling at the time.  He had let doubt and insecurity fill his head before.  He couldn’t afford to let it win now; he couldn’t afford to wait to see Alex.  He had told Brian that he was a big boy now – capable of making his own decisions.  Maybe it was time he learned to deal with this shit on his own.  Crawling out of the safety of his bed took effort; he knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep now, and he reached out for the notebook that lived as a constant companion on his bedside table.  Maneuvering his way through the darkened apartment, Justin turned on a lamp in the living room and curled up on the couch. 

Opening the spiral-bound book, Justin ran his eyes over some of the earlier entries he had made.  He had fought Alex on filling in this journal, but as he read over his past words, Justin felt the first bloom of relief that he had begrudgingly done what Alex had asked.  This was proof of just how fucked up his mind had become.  These were his thoughts; his pain and humiliation, written down on paper.  And as he read over them, Justin was torn between keeping the words written down as a painful reminder or tearing the pages out of the book and committing the words to memory.  Jesus – no wonder everyone had looked at him as if he was one small breeze away from shattering!

It wasn’t that he had used words stating that he was a failure or anything like that; it was the overwhelming sense of self-loathing that coated his words.  The written down thoughts that echoed every derogatory insult that he had been told over the last two years.  When had he lost his confidence?  When had he lost the absolute conviction in who he was?  He’d been wrong - Brian hadn’t taken it from him; he’d lost it somewhere along the way.  He had gone from being in-your-face confident, to this shell of a person who had finally broken under the force of a hateful torrent of words.   

It took him an hour to read through his journal; an hour during which Justin realized just how far down the rabbit hole he had fallen.  When he was finished, Justin rested the book in his lap while he reached up to wipe away the wet streaks his tears had left behind.  He had told Brian that he couldn’t go back; that was the truth.  He couldn’t go back to where this twisted place in his mind was.  Blowing out a cleansing breath, he reached out to pick up one of his pencils; turning to a fresh page, he wrote a single phrase: 

I’m Justin fucking Taylor.  And I’m stronger than this.

The tip of the pencil caught on the paper when he pressed too hard, and the curve of the letters he had written was slightly jagged.  But the words were there; his truth.  And as he stared down at his name, his thoughts and fears flowed out of him and onto the paper.  Alex had once told him that he was far stronger than he gave himself credit for.  He didn’t need to see Alex to purge the poison; he could do it here and now.  The conversations he had had with Brian – both past and present – were written down so that he couldn’t forget.  His fears.  His wants and needs.  His memories.  Those hateful fucking voices that threatened to tip him back over the edge.

Brian had apologized for what had happened after Michael had told him that he was cheating on him with Ethan.  He had said he hadn’t known – that he should have just asked him what was going on.  That scene in Brian’s loft played out through his mind in heartbreaking clarity; forcing himself to relive it, Justin clenched his jaw.  He’d felt dirty after Brian had left him on the floor – like he hadn’t even been worthy of being in his lover’s presence.  That feeling – the shame that had crawled over his body like ants – still made him shiver.

He’d told Brian that it didn’t matter, that he understood, but if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t.  Alex had said that he had been acting like a rape victim… Justin shuddered, and drew a blanket from the couch around his shoulders as he shivered in the predawn light.  He was sick of being a victim.  Poor little Justin – he got his head bashed in.  He got kicked out of his home, because his Daddy didn’t love him.  He couldn’t keep his lover satisfied, and he let everyone around him use him as a fucking emotional punching bag! 

He’d been honest when he’d told Brian that they would have ended anyway.  Maybe not because of Ethan and Michael.  But because he had been convinced that he meant nothing to him.  But now he knew differently; now he knew that he meant more to Brian than any other person in his life.  He just didn’t know how to feel about that.  Brian had hurt him – he had let Brian hurt him.  He had hidden just how much he had hurt him.  And it had all but destroyed him.  The tricking to punish, Brian’s inability to stand up for him when one of his family or friends was saying shit; Brian’s constant push/pull, and his need to lash out.

The words uttered by Michael, and Ted, and Emmett; words spoken carelessly by Debbie, and Lindsay, and Mel.  Things that had hurt him, yet rather than show that, he had swallowed those things down.  He hadn’t spoken up – he hadn’t called them out on what they had said. He hadn’t told his mother that she had hurt him when she told his father that he was gay.  He hadn’t told Daphne that he felt betrayed by what had happened between them after they had made the mistake of having sex.

More than that, he hadn’t spoken up to his father and told the man that no one could live up to the expectations that he had.  That Justin was human – with human thoughts and feelings.  That if his father couldn’t love him as he was, then he was no longer worthy of having the honor of being called “Dad.”  And he was so fucking done feeling guilty for being a failure in his father’s eyes.  He wasn’t a failure.  He wasn’t weak.  He wasn’t all of the things that people mistakenly saw him as.  He wasn’t a fucking victim.          

And as those thoughts were committed to paper, he felt the pressing weight he had carried for so long begin to slide from his shoulders.  By the time he had finished – by the time he had purged the contents of that locked box in his brain – Justin felt a sense of freedom that he hadn’t felt in a long time.  Staring down at the book, he licked his lips briefly before he nodded.  That saying his art professor had been so fond of quoting had never been truer: The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.*  

No, he couldn’t go back.  And as he ran his fingers lightly over the book on his lap, he knew that he could only go forward.  And maybe, just maybe, the journey that Brian was currently taking would eventually converge with the path he had been dragging himself along.  But as dawn creeped through the windows and the sunrise kissed his face, Justin knew that he was no longer dragging himself.  And while he might still be on his knees, he would one day be standing on his own two feet.

He would continue to talk to Alex, but he would no longer hide behind his walls.  He would be open and honest, and if people didn’t like it, well… too fucking bad.  He was done hiding.  He was done letting people get away with how they had treated him.  He was done being weak.  He was Justin fucking Taylor.  He was in charge of his own life.  Of his own destiny.  And if this one didn’t work?  He would change it.  He would confront his demons, one by one.  Those in his reality, and those in his head. 

Turning his eyes towards the window so that he could watch the sky lighten, Justin smiled slightly.  For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt like he could beat the monster in his head.  He could beat it – move past it – and be happy.  Not just content – not merely satisfied.  But truly, deep-down-in-his-gut happy.  He didn’t need anyone else to fix him – he had to fight that battle himself.  But that didn’t mean he was alone.  He had friends.  He had a family.  Justin shuddered, but let the thought rise and then blossom in his mind.  He had Brian; although he still struggled to give him words, Brian had promised him that he would be there.  That he would try.  And if Brian could do it – so could he. 

*Helen Keller.