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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R.E.M. Part 11

The next few days were even harder. The pain got worse, not better, thanks to the doctors weaning Todd off the drugs they’d put him on to get him through the surgery. His face looked worse, too.

Todd had played football long enough to see plenty of gruesome injuries: bones poking out of legs, arms bending in places arms should never bend, bloody faces behind shattered face shields. That didn’t mean he was prepared to see himself looking like this. And it was difficult to take Blair seriously when she said that she’d pretty much always planned on being the good looking one in their relationship, anyway.

It wasn’t until the third day that the doctors decided that Todd was steady enough in an upright position to visit his father. They hadn’t told him much about Peter’s latest heart attack, but Todd knew that it had to have been a bad one because Peter hadn’t been brought in to see Todd.

He worried even more when Blair came in to visit him and hour later than he’d expected.

“Where were you?” he whined. He figured that it was okay to whine for at least a week after your face exploded and you lost hearing in one ear.

Blair sat beside him, looking very serious. “Your father wanted to talk to me.”

That pissed Todd off in at least six different ways. “Why? Was it so he could tell you to stay away from me because all women are evil whores or was it so he could tell you what a loser I am and you should run while you have a chance?”

“Neither,” said Blair. “I mean, both of those things came up but I don’t think that that’s why he asked for me. I don’t know what the real reason is, but it’s something weird.”

“What makes you say that?” Todd sat up as much as the bed allowed. It was nice to be interested in something normal instead of medication, his father’s possible impending demise, and his own grotesque reflection.

“When I had an argument with him before—when he wouldn’t let me see you— I accused him of taking things from you.”

Todd thought he remembered that, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been very with it at the time. It was a wonder that he’d managed to get out of his bed. “Okay,” he said slowly.

“Your father kept coming back to that. He didn’t really ask me straight out what I meant, but he mentioned it over and over. ‘Those things you say I took from my son’ or whatever. It was like he wanted to be sure what I did or didn’t know.”

“What do you know?”

Blair shook her head. “Nothing. All I meant was that he didn’t appreciate you like he should have. As proud as he was when you made some amazing play on the football field, that’s how proud he should have been all the time. When you made a mistake he should have helped you do better the next time instead of calling you names. You aren’t stupid, you know. You never have been. You should have had parents who told you that.”

“My mom did,” Todd said softly. “But he took her away, too. Even before she died, he wouldn’t let her see me. Just because he hated her and he hated me and he wanted to punish us both. Then, when she did died, the day after her funeral—literally the day after—he said he was going to work and he didn’t have time for a snot-nosed kid who was hanging around crying.”

Blair’s eyes widened and she took his hand. “That’s horrible.”

“He hated me because I reminded him of my mother. He hated her because she was a women. That’s Peter Manning: he hates women and he hates me.”

“Did he ever have a girlfriend after your mom left?”

Todd started to roll his eyes, then stopped as a jolt of pain shot through his head. “Dozens. He never kept them very long. He wouldn’t want to start seeing them as people or anything crazy like that. Sometimes one of them would be nice to me and he’d get rid of her right away. The smart ones, they pretended to be nice to me and then they’d laugh when he did his imitation of me crying.”

Blair kissed Todd’s hand. “He didn’t deserve you.”

“Doesn’t,” Todd corrected. “He’d not dead yet. He’s dying, isn’t he? He looked bad when you saw him?”

Blair nodded. “Real bad.”

He appreciated that she hadn’t whitewashed it. “So why would he care what you knew or didn’t know? If he’s dying anyway?”

“I don’t know,” said Blair. “But I know he was harping on it for a reason. He thought I wouldn’t notice in between him calling me a gold digger and saying you were an idiot, but I did.”

“How are you a gold digger? You have more money than I do.”

“Maybe that’s it.” Blair flashed him a bright, dizzying grin. “Remember how that first night we met, I told you that I dreamed of being a princess? Maybe you’re the wealthy prince of some exotic country—Mendorra or someplace. Maybe he kidnapped you at birth, and he thinks I know that and he’s afraid I want to help you reclaim your rightful place on the throne—”

“You really think this is the time for fairytales, Blair?”

Blair shrugged. “I don’t think there’s ever a bad time for fairytales.”

“So suppose your nice little story is true. How would you know? How could you possibly get that information?”

“I don’t know. Dorian knows a lot of people. Maybe he thinks she told me.”

“No. I know your aunt. She’d be working the angle herself, not letting you do it.”

“You’re probably right,” Blair admitted.

“I know my dad, too,” Todd said rapidly, warming to the subject. “If he thinks you know something, it isn’t for no reason. He’s a bastard a lot of the time, but he’s not stupid and he doesn’t give other people a lot of credit. Especially women-people. He doesn’t go in for big conspiracy theories like if X, Y, and Z all happened, maybe you could know.”

Blair considered that. “So if I’m right about how he’s acting, it’s not because I could hypothetically know something…”

“It’s because you do know something,” Todd completed. “Maybe not as much as he thinks you know. But you know something that is so simple that you don’t know you know it. It’s so close to home that you don’t even think about it.”

Blair puzzled over that for a moment. “Does he even know anything about me? Does he research the women you get involved with?”

Todd snorted with laughter. “No, he’d never bother. All he knows about you is your name and that I met you in Llanview.”

“Did your family have any connections to Llanview before you went to L.U.? Why did you go there?”

“Best football program that offered me a scholarship. Nothing more complicated than that.”

“Your dad doesn’t have any business contacts there?”

“Not as far as I know. He sucked up to Viki when he met her, but he always sucks up to people who are richer than he is.”

“Viki,” Blair murmured to herself. “Viki’s sister Tina, her mother’s name was Manning. Irene Manning. You’re sure she wasn’t a relative?”

“Not as far as I know.”

They tumbled through several more theories, but found nothing that Todd thought would have made Peter call Blair in to talk to him when he hadn’t asked for his own son. But then, it wouldn’t have surprised Todd to learn that his father had approached Blair for the express purpose of hurting Todd’s feelings.

“It doesn’t even matter,” he said to Blair after a while. “He’s not going to ask to see me anyway.”

“Why do you need his permission? Just go see him.”

“Like this?” Todd gestured at his bandaged face, suddenly keenly aware of it after a brief reprieve spent talking to Blair. “What if it gave him another heart attack?”

“It’s not as bad as you think it is,” Blair wheedled. “Just ask the nurses to take you to see him. It’s the only way you’ll ever know.”

***

“You’re sure it won’t kill him? Seeing me looking like Seth in The Fly? He’s just had a heart attack,” Todd asked as the nurses ordered him into a wheelchair he didn’t entirely need.

“You’re his son. He should see you,” one of them said.

“He’s not doing well. He’s weaker today than yesterday,” said the other nurse with real compassion. “He might not be able to talk to you, but since you can sit with him you should.”

As soon as they arrived at the room, the nurses retreated to give Todd and Peter privacy.

At first Todd wasn’t sure that Peter was even conscious, but then Peter moved and tried to speak.

“Don’t talk,” Todd said automatically. “Just listen.” He’d heard that enough the past few days when the doctors and Blair hadn’t wanted him to upset his bandages by opening his mouth. “You need to listen,” he added, made stronger by his own voice. “This might be the last time I ever talk to you.”

Peter’s silence seemed like acquiescence.

“You should know,” said Todd, “that I’m going to stay with Blair even though you don’t like her. I know you think I’m a screwup. And I have screwed up. But I’ve also been screwed. And I’ve been screwed by you.” It was strange to hear the words coming out of his mouth when for the past few years, really, things had been almost okay between them. Peter hadn’t threatened to disown Todd since Todd had implied that he wasn’t positive that he wanted to play professional football. Peter hadn’t really verbally eviscerated Todd since the night of the Spring Fling. And Peter hadn’t beat Todd, since, well… not since Todd had gotten bigger than Peter.

“Nothing was ever good enough for you, Dad,” Todd continued. “If I wanted to be your son, I had to be the biggest, the strongest, the toughest. The superstar. The bigshot. That’s a loser’s game, Dad. And I’m not playing any more. And I didn’t come here to ask you if that’s okay, or to tell you that I’m sorry, or anything. I don’t even care what you think. You’re not hurting me any more, and I just wanted to let you know that. And from here on in, I’m not just your son. I’m me. Just me.”

The only sound in the room was Peter’s labored breathing, amplified by the machines the helped him. Peter really did look terrible, just as Blair had warned. Todd stood up. He didn’t need to play any games or search for any secret information. He just needed to leave. He could feel tears pricking behind his eyes and he certainly wasn’t about to let them fall in Peter’s presence. “I can see that you need your rest,” he told Peter. He stood, ignoring the wheelchair, and made for the door.

To his shock, Peter’s hand closed around his wrist. “Todd.” He turned, disbelieving. “Please, don’t go. I don’t want to hurt you. I was so frightened when I heard that you’d been injured. I’m glad to see you on your feet again even if I know I’ll never be on mine. I won’t say I’m not concerned about your continued attachment to that… woman.”

“If this is gonna be another lecture about how Blair’s no good, I’m out of here,” Todd warned.

Peter signaled that this conversation would be different. Todd doubtfully let Peter speak. “You know, lying here, in a room like this, with a tube helping me breathe, listening to that machine count out my heartbeats, you look at me as though I’m different.” That was true, but Todd couldn’t quite respond. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. I was… I didn’t help you. I didn’t know how. I was a lousy father.”

Todd certainly hadn’t expected an admission like that. “That’s in the past. I’m trying to put all of that behind me.” He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, looking at Peter’s gray tinged face, that this was his last chance. “Blair can talk about those things that you took from me. I just want to move on.”

There was a flash of light in Peter’s dim eyes. “What did Blair tell you?”

Todd answered a question with a question, going on instinct alone. “Who was Irene Manning?”

Peter groaned against his breathing tube. “She was my cousin.”

Todd did his best to hide his surprise. “She had a kid with Victor Lord. Tina, her name is.”

“She had two children with Victor Lord,” Peter managed. “First Tina. Then, years later, a boy. She couldn’t raise him. Victor didn’t want her raising him. He didn’t want suspicion thrown on her and the child, although he had always wanted a son. He told Irene to get rid of the baby. Irene had a dear friend who couldn’t have children of her own, a woman named Bitsy who just so happened to be married to her cousin Peter.”

Todd’s knees went weak and he sank back into his wheelchair, head throbbing anew.

“I’ve never loved you like a son,” said Peter, his voice suddenly stronger. “Because you are not my son.”

Peter’s last rally had been just that-- his last. The monitors tracking his heart sped up; Peter writhed in pain on the bed. Todd called for the nurses, but they were already there, moving Todd aside with kindness, doing what they could for Peter. Peter groped for the drawer beside his bed over Todd’s objections.

“This is yours,” he told Todd passing him a key on a long chain.

Every alarm in the room went off as Peter’s body went rigid. He didn’t speak anymore.

Through tears, Todd found his way back to his room. Blair was waiting for him and she helped him into bed, then climbed up beside him and lay with her arms around him until he decided that it was time to tell her. “It’s over. I know you think it’s stupid that I’m crying even though I know he’s a jackass.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” Blair said. “All kids want to love their parents and want their parents to love them. Some day you’ll have a son who calls another jackass ‘Dad,’ and you’ll have to understand why he loves him even though the guy treated him like dirt on the bottom of his shoe, almost ruined him.”

Todd couldn’t understand how Blair could know a thing like that, but the world was so full of strange things that he didn’t question it. Instead, he held out the key for Blair’s inspection. “My legacy.”

“I suppose it doesn’t unlock a vault that reveals that you’re a prince?”

“Worse,” said Todd. “A Lord.”

Blair looked at him, puzzled.

“Remember that day you came into my room at Viki’s and we drew on that portrait with your lipstick?”

“Yeah,” said Blair. “One of my favorite memories.”

“That man was my father. Not Peter Manning. I was right. You knew something you didn’t know you knew. Irene Manning was his cousin but she was my mother.”

“Oh, Todd,” Blair gasped. “No wonder he thought I was a gold-digger.” She batted her eyes playfully. “Want to get married?”

Todd leaned over and kissed her. “Absolutely. But you gotta let me do the asking. I’m the guy. And you gotta wait until I can get a ring, and I can’t do that until they let me out of here. And we should wait until I look a little less like Quasimodo so the priest doesn’t have you declared mentally incompetent for marrying me, money or no money.”

“Todd,” said Blair. “I was kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“We’ve been together for less than a month. That’s fast.”

“We’ve known each other for two years. That’s plenty.”

A cat that ate the cream smile spread over Blair’s face. “There’s something appealing about going back to Llanview married to Victor Lord’s son.”

Todd didn’t mind Blair’s status-seeking and shock-hunting. He knew that she’d liked him long before she’d known about his secret past.

“I don’t know if it comes with any money,” Todd said. “For all I know, Peter was lying.”

“You don’t think that,” Blair said, and she was right; he didn’t. “You just don’t want Kevin to be your nephew.”

Todd cringed. He hadn’t even thought of that. “But if Kevin is my nephew, that makes Viki…”

“Your big sister,” said Blair with a soft smile. “No wonder she liked you so much. She sensed the blue blood under all that fratboy jock.”

“Well, that’s one good thing about this. It’s weird. I knew there was something about her. Almost like I knew there was something about you.”

“You knew there was something about me?”

 

“Always.” He leaned into her, tired from his injuries and the medicine and the revelations and the shock of knowing Peter was gone forever. But he could handle it all if he had Blair.

In one of the nearby rooms, someone was playing music to soothe another patient. Todd didn’t mind. He would ignore it and breathe in Blair and think of the future they had together even though the end of football and the end of Peter should have been the end of him. It seemed like a dream.

Once upon a midnight dreary

I woke with something in my head

I couldn't escape the memory

Of a phone call and of what you said…

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