Any Kinda Breath: Part 3A

by Kaylee

In between dusk and the quietude of midnight, when the sky was as dark as a New York sky ever got and the traffic in the city was easing out of chaos, there was a time, Marcus decided, for tired doctors and other weary souls.  It was a time for contemplation and reflection to displace the fervent drive that kept him going day after day, heedless of exhaustion and fear of failure.  Within it he would stop, take a breath, look behind him at a day or a week or a month or six months and the culmination of that time in a single moment in which, today, he'd taken a lung from a living body and found himself pondering that unwelcome question:

Was it worth it?

He'd walked for an hour with no destination in mind, sparing the barest thoughts toward gratitude that his affluent neighborhood could easily afford to maintain this park.  As a young man he would have been evicted summarily.  These days his wealth bought him access, polite reception, and he couldn't find it in him to worry much about whatever hypocrisy there might be in that.  Marcus cared little for the nuances of social realities.  There were more vital things to spend his mental resources on.

Like the weight of two very blue eyes that'd watched his every move throughout the pneumonectomy this morning.  Or the careful questions following the procedure, the very precise echoing of the technical speech as if it were being imprinted in memory, or the little tremble to Robert Drake's hand when he signed the waiver of indemnity forms, giving up his legal rights as current executor of Remy LeBeau's estate to sue should his lover die during the operation or come out of it with some unpredicted impairment. 

Marcus had particularly hated explaining the purposes of the forms to him.

And such questions...  In his field, seeing the faces he saw nearly every day, Marcus had warily allowed himself to consider hope an ally.  Even the mildest cancer took its toll on the patient's fears; the very word - cancer - seemed ingrained in a collective unconscious, linked now with the kind of primal instinct that used to belong to scared hominids cowering beside tiny fires while things rustled and watched from just outside the light.  Cancer.  Modern medicine knew so much, yet still what wasn't known could fill encyclopedias.  Facing such an indiscriminate killer, knowing how little he really knew...  Yes, even a man who thought rarely about God had to learn a little something about faith.  Often enough it was the only thing that sustained a patient when the percentages kept dropping.

He hardly noticed when he stopped walking.  The park sat in silence perfect enough to serve as backdrop for his heartbeat, his healthy lungs.  Unobtrusive stillness.  No helpful distractions there.

LeBeau had found that little bit of faith somewhere in the preceding months.  Whether it was the realization of what he had to lose or the stark example of a child's strength or sheer stubbornness rekindled in any number of ways, he'd reaffirmed his decision to fight, and he'd done so with full knowledge that his chances barely even merited the label of 'fair.'  Marcus had put it to him bluntly: the cancer was aggressive enough to have returned after the affected part of the lung was removed and the body was bombarded with chemicals designed to kill carcinoma cells.  It had spread to the lymph nodes surrounding the lung.  Those lymph nodes acted as filters, sifting the cancer from the bloodstream, but their effective defense wasn't foolproof.  If possibly as few as fifty cancer cells slipped through, it could easily recur yet again.  A million cancer cells could fit in a typewritten period.  Fifty was a very small number.

Knowing this, LeBeau had stepped in with his eyes open and trusted Marcus to do all he could.

Was a minimal chance enough to try for?  It had to be, because they were trying.  Would it ultimately have saved LeBeau and his friends and loved ones unnecessary suffering if they'd gone with pain management instead and allowed the cancer to run its course?  That answer didn't even exist yet.

At the very least the operation and the chemotherapy would give LeBeau more time than he'd have otherwise.  Marcus let his gaze wander up to be dazzled by a streetlight, lost in contemplation that he wished he could entertain instead in daylight, when the sun itself seemed optimistic.  More time.  If it came down to that...were a few extra months worth everything the man had gone and would go through?

An awful lot could happen in a few months, part of him remembered.  The time could be worth as much as those living it permitted it to be.

So there was that hope again, that fickle companion.  Not comforting, invigorating or inspiring, no, but something at the least that he could take home at day's end.  Maybe enough.  Worth exactly as much as he permitted it to be.

Blinking half-blinded eyes, he shoved his hands deeply into pockets and started walking again.

***

Bobby's Journal:
            I love my parents.  I really do.  I love all they taught me.  I love all they gave me.  I love them.

  "Yeah, Mom, Jean told me you called.  I've just been pretty busy..."

When I was a kid I used to think my dad was ashamed of me.  Kids and their uncertainties.  It wasn't until I became an "adult" recently (Hank says he thinks it happened around ten fifteen a.m. this time, but I'm inclined to nine forty-five) that I got it through my thick skull that I didn't have to think my dad was ashamed of me anymore.  Now I can say pretty much positively that I know he is.
            Yea, and the truth shall set you free, grasshopper.  Live long and prosper and throw the Trix away, boy, because Trix are for kids.  Grownups just get to deal.

"I know I didn't really explain Christmas.  I'm sorry I couldn't be there...  Oh geez, Mom, please stop.  I'm sorry, really, I just couldn't get away this year...and I can't believe you're still on about that..."

You know, when I came out to my friends and told them about me and Remy, I thought for a little bit that I could take on any challenge in the world after that, anything, and face it and win.  Nothing could touch that feeling.  For ONCE I showed everybody (not to mention myself, but I think I'd sort of suspected anyways) that I could be totally and completely ME.  Just Bobby Drake, no punchline.  It felt like I was dropping off this big, huge, gigantic suit of armor that nobody ever even saw because it was don't-look-too-close armor instead of hit-me-and-watch-me-laugh armor, and it was honestly pretty freaking terrifying to ask people to look at me and listen to me when I wasn't wearing it, but the funny thing was, they did.  And it was okay.
            I'm sure there's some valid psychological insight I could gain into myself right now if I wanted to examine all this.  I want attention, right?  That's why I clown around and replace Rogue's adamantium razors with plain old Bics and one time got a whole laundry basket full of socks all staticky and "accidentally" tripped and tossed all of them on Hank.  All for attention, all to make people look at me.  Makes sense.  Probably true.
            But whenever someone starts to look TOO close, like behind the grin, I can't help feeling like - almost like -

"No, Mom, I don't wanna talk to him.  Not right now, okay?  I don't--  Yeah.  Yeah, hi Pop.  Look, I've already been through this with Mom...  No, it's not that.  I'm just busy these days, okay?  Y'know, with saving the whole fucking world and that kinda thing.  ... No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that...  Look, I'm just really tired.  I haven't been getting much sleep."

Mom's always been kind to me.  Always.  Never the disciplinarian, not Mom.  But she never steps in, either, when things are going kind of maybe a little too far.  I don't know if she's afraid to stand up for me or if she really just agrees with him, deep down.  If she thinks I'm as small as he does.  Even though I spent a lot more time with her when I was a kid, I don't think I know her all that well.  I can't find her in me when I go looking.
            Dad?  Well.  He's there.  Some of him.  I don't think he likes me very much.

"It's...  No, I know, I need to make time for you guys.  Stop yelling, Dad, I'm not deaf.  I...  Upsetting her?  I'm upsetting her?  She sounds more worried about what you think than how much I'm visiting, Pop.  ... Yes.  Yeah, there's a reason.  There's lots of reasons.  A lot has happened that I didn't tell you.  ... No, not...not really 'that mutant stuff'...  I really just...I'm not real sure how to..."

He stood up for me once, my dad.  Stood up in a crowd of people, right up in public, and told a racist bastard that he was proud of me, and that the guy could stick his bigoted rhetoric where the sun don't shine, and that he, Dad, would like to help.  I'm embellishing.  He didn't take it that far.  But he DID change my opinion of him entirely that day, and he got his ass handed to him for it.  Never took it back, either, even while he was lying in a hospital bed.  "My son is a mutant, and I'm proud of him."
            We figured out a little later that those words didn't make everything "okay" or anything.  They were just a start.  I didn't really help to keep the ball rolling by hiding Remy from him and Mom, I guess.  It's just that it seemed like such a GOOD thing, what was happening with me and Dad, and what I had with Remy was also such a GOOD thing, but if I brought them together it'd just all poof into smoke.  And.  Maybe I was scared.  Because maybe I was kind of thinking - maybe I AM kind of thinking - that Dad's suspected for a long time, and that's part of why he was always so disgusted with me.
            Maybe.

"The past year's been really...really kinda rough.  I...I don't know how much more I can take, Pop, honestly, it's like I've been gutted...  I...there's...  No, I'm not, I'm just a little hoarse.  My throat's dry, that's..."

My throat's all tight.  I'm crying again.  I don't want anyone to see me like this.  They'll think it's about Remy - I guess it is, a little bit - and they'll try to be comforting and they'll just remind me of how everything's so uncertain and he's so sick and I just - don't need that comfort right now.  I really don't.

"I'm so tired of doing this...and so damn tired of lying to you..."

Dad always told me to stand up for what I believe.  "Have a spine," is what he said.  Be like him, is the part that went unsaid.  Stand up.

"I can't do this anymore.  I can't.  Dad, I'm gay.  I'm gay and my boyfriend may be dying and that...that's why I haven't been around."

                        So I did.

"Dad?  Are you still there?"

                        Still proud of me, Pop?

"... Dad...?"

***

"What's wrong...?"  His voice was no longer his own.  Not his, rich and smooth and made of chocolate silk, but an imposter's.  Too soft, raspy and weak with this painfully slow recovery from the surgery.  Words he used as sparingly as possible, because he was noticing that when he talked too much he actually found himself growing short of breath.  From talking.  Him.

Bobby shook his head and walked over to the recliner he was resting on, not smiling or really even looking at him.  A hand went absently to Remy's forehead.  Remy pulled away with a grimace.

"No fever.  Stop.  What's wrong?"

For a moment Bobby's hand hung in the air, waiting patiently for the return of a forehead, but eventually his eyelids shuttered once or twice as his mind caught up and he dropped his hand.  "What?"

Every question meant more words.  Why did they still ask him questions?  "Y' haven' even looked at me," he said carefully, pacing himself.  "Where's y' mind?"

"How should I know?" Bobby asked automatically, voice faking lightness with robotic efficiency.  "I'm hardly ever in it."

Remy closed his eyes for a slow breath.  His throat itched, but he wasn't about to cough.  "Don't."

"Don't what?"  But when Remy looked at him from under heavy eyelids Bobby dropped his own eyes and sighed apologetically.  "I just...  I told my parents.  My dad.  About us."

Breathe.  Again.  Think.  Bobby told them?  "What'd he say?"

A pained smile and a glance flickering to him and back down too fast to be caught.  "Nothing."

"Eh?"

With a whisper of jeans and a sigh of shirt over skin Bobby dropped into a crouch beside the chair and lightly rested his elbows on the cushioned arm, crossing forearms and very meticulously placing his chin on them.  His eyes were looking past Remy out the window, staring without seeing.  The Cajun hadn't felt so invisible in a long while.  "He didn't say anything.  He just sat there on the line, breathing and not talking.  For like five minutes.  Or two or something, but it was a long time."

"Not a word...?"

"Not a word."

Asked or not, Remy decided that a little human contact belonged here.  He slipped a hand unaffectedly over the near shoulder (so tight, so tense, that shoulder) and rubbed lightly with circular strokes.  "You say anyt'ing...?"

"I said I was sorry."

Remy's hand stopped.  "For...?"

"Disappointing him.  Being gay.  I don't know."

Fingers curled, closed, pulled away and rested in a loose fist over Remy's lap.  "Oh."

"I didn't mean it."

"Non."

"I don't know why I said it."

"'s okay."

"I told him that if he wanted to talk to me again he should call, and that I wasn't gonna call him otherwise.  Then I hung up on him."

"If he wasn' sayin' not'in' it don' really count as hangin' up..."

"He didn't say goodbye."

"That's his problem, ain' it?"

Blue eyes slanted sideways, up, and fixed on his face.  Looked at him, finally.  "Yeah."

Remy nodded and pretended he wasn't out of breath from that exchange.

"Yeah," Bobby said again, voice soft over hard.  "That is his problem, isn't it?"

"Oui, cher."

"And he'll have to get over it on his own."  Everything about him was motionless except the narrowing blue eyes and angry mouth.  "Because I told him the truth.  I did what I could.  I can't lie to him and just pretend everything's okay anymore."

An overdue realization, but Remy felt no urge to point that out.  It was enough right then that Bobby was talking to him about this, sharing something that hurt and angered and had nothing to do with illness of the physical kind or fear of being alone or exhausted rambling about anything or nothing at all.

Bobby reached for his hand and grasped it firmly.  His jaw took on an uncharacteristic stubborn cast.  "I'm gonna call him back and say I'm not sorry," he said decisively.

What air Remy had left was wasted in a startled laugh, so it took him a few moments to get his breath back enough to say, "Non, cher, don'...  Jus' let it be...let it be..."

Bobby searched his face openly, looking for a lie.  He got a half-smile instead, with a twist of Gambit spicing up a more sedate Remy.

"But I keep thinking that I shoulda--"

Remy squeezed the hand back and shook his head.  "He knows."

"... I'm not sorry...I was just tired and I said it and I didn't mean it...I hate that I said it..."

"Let it be."

Bobby pressed his face into the armrest with an unsteady sigh, falling silent.  Not good enough, Remy decided.  He pulled on the hand in his, tugged up, and found and gave a hug.  The arms holding him were tighter than the cautious, fragility-fearing things from the past few months.  Like maybe Bobby forgot for a moment to think he was breakable.

It felt good.  He closed his eyes and imprinted the feeling on memory with as much detail as he could.

Fleeting remembrance.  He wanted to grab every new thing, clutch every maybe-the-last-time old thing, and find a way to hold just a piece of it all and not forget this time when he could offer comfort or that time when he made Bobby squirm. A lot was changing now, faster and faster every day, and the world seemed so full of never-agains... 

It wouldn't do to forget anything anymore.

***

Bobby's Journal:
            Remy starts chemo again today.  It's almost six a.m. right now, still dark outside.  Everything's quiet.  And here I am sitting at the desk and scribbling away like a good industrious student, except I'm not a student anymore and this is too rambly to ever show anyone anyways.  It's amazing how much you find in your head when you try to put it down on paper.
            Remy's still sleeping.  He doesn't sleep so well these days.  His body's going to take a while to adjust to the reduced oxygen level, Hank says.  Now there's a crazy thing to think about.  Reduced oxygen level.  He's only got one lung left in there.  I wonder what it feels like.  Is it like you're sort of drowning a little bit, all the time?  Sometimes I sit here while he's sleeping and I just take deep breaths over and over again and try to think about how the air goes in and my chest expands and the air feels cool inside and warm when I breathe it back out and how AWESOME that is.  You never really think about that, do you?  As long as it WORKS you don't.
            I don't breathe when I'm ice.  My body's made of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy conversion doesn't work the way it does with flesh and blood.  I really can't imagine what it would feel like to lose what Remy lost.  I suppose if I did, I could just grow another one.  Ice-regeneration.  Maybe it means I'll never hurt bad and long like Remy is.  Does he ever think about that?  That I can't possibly understand what he's going through?
            Funny thing is that I can SAY it, and think I mean it.  "I'd trade places with him in a heartbeat if I could."  I can SAY it because I can't possibly DO it.  I can hurt with him and for him, but I can't take THAT hurt on INSTEAD of him.  So it's safe to say I would.  I feel wrong about that.  I don't know how to make it right.
            Six a.m.  I have to wake him up soon to get ready to go down to the medlab so we can start it all over again.  Bet you a million dollars he pretends it's no big deal.  I think he thinks that once he makes up his mind he can define reality just by deciding how to act about it.  That's part of what got him into trouble in the first place when he started getting sick.  This time he's facing it though.  I just can't help feeling like some of his act is meant to make ME feel better, and he's got enough to worry about.  I wish I knew some way to tell him I can handle it and he doesn't hav
            He's waking up!

***

What he hadn't expected, Remy reflected dully, was for the world to shrink so much.

Intellectually he knew it was just as big as it had always been.  There were still almost sixty million miles of land surface area out there, thick with people.  New York was still a tightly packed forty-seven thousand, two hundred twenty-four square miles, and the Xavier estate still occupied four-point-eight-seven-five of those.  Give or take a fraction.

But the world had shrunk, just for him, piece by piece, until the journey to the bathroom seemed about as laborious as any he wanted to undertake.

Bobby still went out.  Remy pretty much insisted that he do so, unwilling to let himself be the reason for Bobby's world to shrink as well.  Jean was his favorite coconspirator.  She had a gift tantamount to sheer genius for convincing his lover that there were indeed a few things worth doing outside the walls of the estate, and Remy truly wouldn't mind if Bobby took a few hours away from watching him vegetate to actually have something resembling a life.  Really.  Trust her and go into town for a bit.

And when Bobby wandered reluctantly and temporarily out of this diminished world, Remy actually allowed himself the indulgence of acting every bit as miserable as he felt.  Alone in their room he'd scowl at walls, curse fluently and profanely in English and French and a handful of other languages he never bothered mentioning he knew, pace unsteadily until his one remaining lung complained and he had to sit down or pass out...  There was only so much he could hold back, reserve as his, and it was a wonderful irony that what he managed most effectively to keep from showing the others was his resentment.  His bitterness.  His fury that this disease threatened a life he was just remembering how to hold dear again.  Henri saw fear-tinged determination from him.  Scott, Jean, and most of the others saw cultivated arrogance that he knew they worried over.  Logan saw...well.  Logan saw what Logan saw, and didn't see fit to share it.  And all Remy let himself show Bobby these days was calm resolution and unshakable confidence.  On some level he told himself that if he acted it, then he believed it, and then it was true.

But with no distractions, no audience, he let himself feel it.  He let himself get angry.  And afterwards he sagged into exhaustion and wondered if anger would ever be a strong enough emotion to carry a person through this. 

Today he'd already hit exhaustion and finally decided on a shower to wash the sweat away.  Steaming water ran over him, cascading down shoulders that he thought dismally would never be muscled again, snaking to follow the sharp lines of the lean back and down legs that didn't look nearly as good in Speedos as they used to.  Here, where no one was watching, he let himself rest a hand against the patterned tiles, trying and failing to convince himself that he was holding the wall up.  It took too much energy at the moment to invest any real will or humor into the thought.  Better to just stay up, breathe shallowly into his single lung (no backup spare anymore) and get this shower over with before a certain someone came home and got worried.

A few days into Round One of the new series of chemotherapy, and it had him against the ropes listening for the bell already.  This was the first shower he'd felt up to grabbing.  A layer of grime begged to be washed from skin and hair, and he exhaustedly moved to comply.  A shoulder replaced his hand against the wall.  Damn cold wall, despite the water's heat.  He reached for shampoo and dumped too much in his hand, then, uncaring of the excess, ran it into hair lethargically.  Just scrub hair, rinse, crawl out and back into bed.  Curl up with a book or a boyfriend, if he was home.  Sounded like a plan he could really get...into...

His fingers froze, curved against his scalp, and he swallowed against a suddenly dry throat.  That...had felt wrong.  That had...his fingers, through his hair, and then the tension there had just...a dozen, a hundred tiny popping sensations, somehow almost a sound in his ears but-not-quite...

He brought his hand down slowly, fingers curling more.  Loosely woven through them were thick hanks of water-darkened auburn hair, pulled too painlessly from his head.  Dead leaves shed from a late autumn tree.

For a moment he stared, oblivious to the clouding steam and the faint aroma of shampoo tickling his nose and begging a sneeze.  His other hand lifted.  Lightly rubbed at the slight roughness of newly bare scalp.

"Damn," he muttered, clenching fingers around the dark strands, momentarily squeezing tight.  He closed his eyes.  Took a slow, controlled breath.

Then he opened his eyes, reached through the curtain to drop the wet mass in the garbage, and ducked his head back beneath the spray, refusing to let himself flinch as fingers slid again into hair and scrubbed hard.

***

Bobby's Journal:
            Something occurred to me today.
            This guy was standing outside the department store.  He was waving a bible and being loud, like a lot of people are when they wave bibles.  He was being aggressive, too.  Every time someone escaped, he turned right back around and jumped the next person who came out and said, "God is good, and it's GOOD to know God, hallelujah!"
            Everyone was pretty much just trying to ignore the loud guy.  I still don't know what he was doing.  He didn't try to sell anyone anything, he wasn't really preaching, he didn't ask anyone any questions.  He was just - yelling.  About God, at anyone who looked at him.  And extra loudly at anyone who didn't.
            I talked to the guy.  I don't know why.  I said, "Why is God good?"  And he said he's good because he let us kill his son.  He didn't say it like that, but that was still what he meant.  I said, "If I gave my son to a mob and let them murder him, would I be good, too?"  He laughed and said only if I was God, but since I wasn't it was my responsibility to raise my son to THE WORD and see to it that he became the same kind of person as the yelling guy.
            So I said, "I don't have a son.  I'm gay.  I might never have one."  Yeah, me.  I said that.  Just opened my yap and bam, there ya go, I'm out to a total stranger.  It should have been one of those Remember Forever moments, I think.  That's what all the books say.  But it didn't feel good or bad or memorable or anything, because he was pissing me off too much for me to care about that.
            He told me I was a sinner, but he said it the same way you say "Me llamo Bobby" in Spanish 1 after reading the first lesson.  You know the words and you know what they mean, but only sort of, and you're only saying them because you've got this vague sense that if you DON'T say them a time's going to come when you get an F, and then you'll have to do it all over again.  And it'll be even more boring.
            I asked him how to be good.  He said I had to put my faith in God, like whassisname - that guy who took his son up to an altar and was going to kill the kid because God told him to.  I told the guy that it seemed pretty cruel to me.  What right did whassisname have to decide something like that?  What right did God have to tell him to?
            The loud guy got all smiley, in the eyes, the way people do when they think you've just blundered and they've got an easy corner pocket to sink the last ball on the table into.  "And it comes back to how God gave us his own son's life in sacrifice.  He asked nothing more of whassisname than he later gave himself, hallelujah."
            I didn't get smiley, because I didn't find it fun at all.  I just told him, "The book says Jesus had a choice.  The kid didn't."
            That's when I walked away, and when it occurred to me that God is a hypocrite.  He is.  Would we have built this huge religious culture around "the death of the son of God" if instead being crucified as an adult, Jesus was dragged to an altar when he was twelve and had his throat slit by someone he trusted?  Would we praise his dad for sacrificing him THEN?
            I know God let that father-guy off the hook at the last minute.  The whole thing was a test for loyalty - a "do you love me more than your flesh and blood" thing.  Or that's how the story was told to me.
            But you know what I want to know?  I want to know when EXACTLY God decided to let him off the hook.  Did he know all along, or could it have gone either way?  Would whassisname have gone to hell if he wasn't willing to murder his son?
            How many times before whassisname did God put people through that same test, and maybe it went - further?
            I keep thinking about all this stuff in circles.  I can't find a place for it inside my head anymore - it's driving me a totally new kind of nuts.  The only thing I can think that makes much sense about all of it is that God is really fucking MEAN.  And I wonder why I ever bothered praying to someone like that.
            I don't know how much of this I mean.  It's been a long day.  My head really hurts and I feel sick and Remy shaved his hair off while I was gone because half of it fell out and I don't care about the way it looks but he never should've HAD to.  It's not FAIR.  Why does God get to be so cruel to people who don't even OWN bibles?
            Me llamo Sinner.  None of it's fair. 

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