R.E.M. Part 12

I still got this dream that you just can’t shake

I love you to the point you can no longer take

Well, all right, okay

So be that way

I hope and pray

That there’s something left to say

He woke abruptly, furious that Blair wasn’t beside him. The last thing she’d said was that they might not have ended up together if their lives had been different, and he wasn’t going to let that garbage go unchallenged.

The second phone was shaking in his hands as he called Blair’s second phone.

It rang three or four times. She must have fallen asleep. He couldn’t blame her; he had managed to sleep despite the party that had spilled into the street not far below his window.

But you

Why you wanna give me a runaround?

Is it a sure-fire way to speed things up

When all it does is slow me down…

He squinted out the window again, ignoring the party and looking toward the hospital where Peter Manning had died. Thoughts of Peter always made him want to crawl out of his skin.

“Todd?” she whispered halfway through the fourth ring.

His need shifted to anger at the sound of her voice. “You shouldn’t answer that way,” he scolded. “What if they catch me with one of these phones on me and call the number in the memory to check? Don’t talk like you’re expecting me until you’re sure it really is me.”

“Well, we won’t have to worry about that if you use all of our phones in one night!” she snapped back.

“I can get more phones. I can’t get more you if they decide I’ve told you something and try to torture it out of you.”

“You can’t get more phones if you end up searching for Victor or these people in the middle of nowhere.”

“Where I am right now, I can get more,” he told her. He decided it wasn’t that much of a violation of their own personal don’t ask, don’t tell policy. She had figured out that he wasn’t currently in the middle of nowhere the minute she’d heard the music in the background. “If I don’t call tomorrow, that won’t be why.”

He heard her swallow hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “During those eight years, there were so many times when just hearing your voice would have been the most amazing gift. I stopped wishing for most things because they seemed so far away. But your voice…” He trailed off, not sure where he’d even meant to go with this.

“I love you,” she said, and he wasted precious seconds trying to speak around the lump in his throat.

“I wanted you to know that you’re wrong,” he rasped out at last.

“That’s so sweet of you, Todd!” she said with false joviality. “Out of all the things I’ve missed about you, you telling me I’m wrong has got to be in the top thirty or forty thousand.”

“Well, you were wrong,” he told her, unapologetic. “You said that you and I might not have ended up together if our lives had been different. It’s not true. We were always going to find each other. Even if the head witch had started brainwashing you before you could talk. You would have figured it out eventually and I would have waited.  There is no alternate reality out there where you and I don’t end up together. So you need to take back what you said.”

“I take it back,” she obliged.

“Good,” he said.

“And I wouldn’t have made you wait. I never could hold out that long against you.”

“You made me wait pretty long this last time,” Todd said, in observation rather than accusation.

“Too long. I thought you… well, I thought you changed your mind.”

“Never.”

“I didn’t have any right to be jealous,” Blair said. “We weren’t together and I was the one who ended it. But when I thought about you and her… God, it killed me every time.”

It was hard not to be annoyed at the thought of yet more time lost when they’d already lost so much. “If you’d given me any encouragement at all, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“You never needed encouragement before.”

“You never decided to marry a man who put me in a hole to keep me away from our children for eight years before.”

“I know,” said Blair. No argument. No justification. No Tomas thought he was serving his country.  “That was the idea. I came up with the worst thing I could think of, the thing that would hurt the most. I didn’t ever really intend to marry him, you know.”

“No,” said Todd, his heart soaring with unexpected glee. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I didn’t. I have too much respect for our children. He took you away from them even if it wasn’t something he meant to do. He didn’t do anything to fix it when he realized he’d been wrong, either. That wasn’t his decision to make for Starr or Jack or anyone else.”

Todd’s smile widened. He hadn’t had much to smile about in the past few days. “Tell me that again.”

“Tell you what?”

“That you were never going to marry Tea’s brother with the stupid name.”

“I was never going to marry Tea’s brother with the stupid name.”

“You just wanted to make me so hopeless that I’d lose my mind and agree to crawl through the rest of my life without you so you could be mad at me for being hopeless and losing my mind and crawling through the rest of my life without you.” Anger followed delight too quickly. The situation sucked to begin with, and the dream had left Todd feeling like an exposed nerve.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Blair hesitantly.

“Like that good idea to tell me you were pregnant when you weren’t,” Todd suggested. “Or the good idea to tell me Jack wasn’t my son. Or the good idea to—”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Then you talk. By all means, Blair, enlighten me. Why did it seem like a good idea to tell me that

you were going to marry the man who made sure I was tortured every day for eight years?”

“Because sometimes the only way to break a cycle of lies is with one more lie!”

The scary thing was that that kind of made sense to Todd. “How is that?”

“I loved you so much. I always have. I always will. Once you’ve forgiven a man for telling you that your son is dead, you know there’s no hope for anything other than loving that man until you die. And you swore to me that you’d changed, that you weren’t going to lie to me or the kids like that again. But you pulled the rug out from us when you lied about shooting Victor. I would have forgiven you like that for shooting Victor.” She snapped her fingers. “My problem has never been the stupid crap you do. It’s the way you lie to me. That’s why it meant so much to me when you showed me those notes and the surveillance cameras. That’s when I knew I could be with you. But two years ago, Jack was so fragile. He’s not like Starr. Things don’t roll off his back. I couldn’t put him through another round of trusting someone and finding out that that person had lied to him like his feelings didn’t even matter. And the only way to make sure that didn’t happen would be to make sure I had an excuse for not melting into you the minute I saw you. Because my willpower is obviously non-existent when it comes to you.”

“I tried to make it up to Jack.”

“I know you did. You were wonderful. You were patient. You were tenacious.”

“I wish I’d had more time.”

“You’ll have it. I believe you’ll have it. Jack knows that this time you’re not leaving because you want to.”

“I didn’t want to leave last time. Jack wouldn’t even look at me after I was arrested for killing the father he actually wanted.”

“It wasn’t just that, Todd. It was that you lied about it and then you didn’t want to face the consequences. Jack had a right to be angry.”

“I know that.”

“I know you do. But back then, it seemed to Jack like you’d just chosen Starr over him because she always lets you get away with anything. Then we saw the stories coming out of Port Charles about how you begged Carly for forgiveness, how you promised her that you would spend the rest of your life fighting for her. But you weren’t going to spend the rest of your life fighting for Jack and his forgiveness.”

“Fighting for Jack and the rest of the people on that list is what I’m doing right now. That’s why I’m sitting here trying to figure out who these people are who sent the notes. I could have gone back to Port Charles and gotten together with her again, you know. Carly Jacks is an idiot.”

“I liked her.”

“She’s an idiot,” Todd repeated. “If she wasn’t, she never would have divorced her husband. Did you meet Jax? No, I don’t think you did. If you had, you would have chased him to Australia and tried to mend his broken heart or something.”

“Todd!”

“I’m just saying, Jasper Jacks gave me the best handshake I’ve ever had in my life. For real, it was like a warm chocolate chip cookie.”

“Maybe I should be worried about you leaving me for him instead of for Carly.”

Even though he knew Blair was joking, he answered seriously. “The last thing you have to worry about is me leaving you for anyone. I know I said I’d fight for her for the rest of my life. You know why I could say that? I could say that because I knew it wouldn’t take my whole life. It would have been easy because she’s a fool and because we didn’t really care about each other. You matter. Jack matters. When it was so clear that nothing I did was ever going to get either of you to forgive me… I wasn’t like I used to be. When you were married to Max and I wanted to be married to you, I just decided to destroy your marriage.”

“No kidding.”

“You would have destroyed things yourselves, anyway,” Todd pointed out. “And you know no one deserves to be stuck with Max for the rest of her life. I think even Skye mentioned that she was happy that she dodged that bullet.”

Blair ignored the tangent. “But this time, after you went to Port Charles, it was different because Tomas was the one who turned you over to Irene’s organization.”

“Eight years is a long time. Everyone gives Victor a pass for poisoning me and dumping his kid and never washing his hoodie because he was tortured for one year, right?”

“I don’t give him a pass for any of that.”

“Good. But everyone else does. And no one… no one cared what happened to me for eight years and even though I screwed up I was tired. I couldn’t do it again.”

“I’m sorry I let you think I didn’t care.”

“I’m not telling you this so you can apologize. I’m telling you this because you’re right. You and me, we’re always better when we’re honest with each other even though that goes against our usual instincts.”

He could feel her smile. “I’m glad you called back.”

“Me too. I had this dream.” He shuddered. “Peter Manning was in it. But it was okay, because so were you.”

“I hope I kicked his ass.”

“Don’t worry. You did.”

“Then I’m glad you got some sleep, even if it was only a few hours.”

“I’m sorry for waking you up, though.”

“Don’t be. The only reason I can sleep at all is that I imagine that you’re in the corner of the room, sitting in a chair watching me. Doing that stalker thing you do that would be creepy on any other man.”

“Blair, it’s creepy when I do that, too. You just happen to like creepy.”

“Like we said before you left. We don’t do normal.”

“No.” Todd glanced at the latest note instructing him to return to the house at 10:00 that night.

“But I wouldn’t mind if we got a little bit closer to normal when this mess is over. Just a little bit.”

“You have a deal, Todd,” she said, as their phones beeped a warning and separated them once more.

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