Work Text:
Big boys don't cry... Big boys don't cry... Big boys don't cry...
He didn't have a stag night as it was more of a verbal agreement than anything, and they were too young to protest to anyone. He had given up complaining to his mum years ago. What would he have done to celebrate, sit in the living room with the Robinson's orange squash and send everyone home with a little bag of cake?
Cat found that funny, lying next to him on the overlarge bed they were given as their own. Some present.
‘I’d like one of those hen dos where you all wear a matching outfit and you get your hair done and you go down all the pubs.’
‘They're shutting too many of them to crawl anywhere, it'd be a two pub crawl ‘round here.’
‘That’s probably enough, if you've got to crawl.’
Who was Dylan to correct her?
Years later, he had the prestigious honour of presiding over every stag do the lads ever had. Here, Jimmy Mac had won the conehead joust so he got to shin up the horse and put his crown on top of its rider. Wellesley, Dylan learned later. Whoever that was. Bladdered hand eye coordination wasn't much and Jimmy Mac was slipping right off as Dylan himself was losing his own footing, heavily sitting on the edge of the kerb. Quickly, a strong thumb pried at one of his eyelids, twinkling lights were the last thing before darkness.
The drip was nearly dry and there was no-one around to watch him. Dylan slid from the side of the bench and wandered out into the waiting area. There was a strong cohort of his lads in the seats, all standing on seeing him.
‘Not got me wallet,’ he asked of the group at large. None of them had it either. It was at home, he hadn't paid for a drink all night. He'd forgotten what it was like to be royalty.
His dad was pleased when he had a growth spurt at fifteen, coming up to being a real strapping young one. It was the first time he was noticed properly, interrogated, and then it didn't stop. He couldn't just have his own space anymore. The house, his room, the garden. A small world that only grew incrementally once his dad divulged what else was theirs, where else they had their tentacles. Even abroad, he only saw the interiors. The controlled spaces. Dipping his toes in the water. Knuckles bruised, lasting longer.
Ten or so years of being shuffled around as a prop, the future, his own future diminishing in front of him. Sometimes Cat held him and stroked his hair in a way that his mother never had. He did want to kiss Cat, to see how it felt, and he eventually found out. It was the same feeling for a while, when someone offered him a couple of keys in a club bathroom. All dazzle, all heart racing. Scared himself with it, how he felt he wanted it. Maybe everything he'd been told was right. His life was not his own. Was anyone's?
‘Yes. You can allow yourself not to always think of others.’
Tom had stopped writing things down about three sessions back. He admitted to Dylan that he was conscious of it, big eyes watching. Nerves rising. When he watched his hands anyway, the nerves still rose. ‘Saw you going home the other day,’ sounding threatening, he caught himself, ‘I was thinking about you then. Can I let myself do that?’ Tom was taken aback, he didn't guard his emotions. He watched his professionalism falling away. Dylan’s words were always the right kind of cutting when he wanted them to be. But he didn't want to cut, to harm, he wanted to be powerless. He wanted to put himself in Tom’s hands and let him take care of it, of him.
She had to know. She didn't have to know. She couldn't know because it would blow the whole house of cards into smithereens.
He had to know. He didn't have to know. He couldn't know because it would crush something special that had barely broken through yet.
Dylan was threadbare in the middle, holding all the eggshells. Work trips, specific names, demands to the men. It became easier to parcel it out over time until he was two separate people, bisected. He could have two perfect lives. The kids added to that, two little perfect packages of possibility and the opportunity to give them the whole world. If he and Cat couldn't have it, they could. He put them into their own zone in his mind. He was already there at Tom’s side as he walked across the lawn. Slotted into the compartment much too early. Blind to everything around him when he read the diagnosis. So much for it all. So fragile all along. Tom could tell he had shut down even when he himself was still going strong. How was it so easy to be so open? He cried more than Tom. It could all be over in days, minutes. All they needed was more time. He didn't have it, if he carried on the same way. The change was impossible, but he had made it without even thinking about it. He understood that Shannon didn't want to pick up all his pieces. He wouldn't want to himself, not in her shoes. Still, it made sense to eventually show her each of them, every little piece of history. He couldn't explain in any other way. She had some of the same pieces already within her, making up her edges.
The kids felt like the first things in the world that were just Dylan and Cat’s, not given and not forced on them or each other. Shannon sat on his knee in all of his meetings, until she said ‘what’s it mean, sorting him out?’ Canny little thing. Both of them, Shannon and Luke, everything about them had skipped a generation and they were probably better off for it. Dylan had never once outwitted his dad, there was no way of getting the better of him. He'd learned more from reading Cat’s favourite books, upper crust couples wanting each other from afar, betraying each other at the drop of a monogrammed handkerchief.
He found Cat on the back step, watching the kids running around with their foam swords as the light dropped and the power station came alive with lights in the distance. He folded himself around her where she sat, resting his head on her shoulder, and for a single moment they were somewhere else, amongst the stars.