who_is_she | yeah you leave me numb

yeah you leave me numb

Some days it felt like no matter how he tried, he always ended up in the same place. Today the place was a bar, packed tight with Korzans and there's a drink in his hand that he can't quite remember ordering. He's floating, but he knows it's not enough, can still feel the self-loathing creeping in around the edges of his consciousness. He finds a Korzan who looks high as a kite and asks to share the joy, and meets a guy in the bathroom who gives him a small packet of purple powder in exchange for the cash in Graham's pocket. Graham doesn't even know what it is, but it drives him up to that next level, so he doesn't think about anything except the beat of the music and the flex of bodies.

Vhan still hovers around in his thoughts, but now he's not thinking about adding everything up, not thinking about how Vhan looks with his kids, not thinking about how he never feels as complete as he does when he's with Vhan. He wants Vhan, has wanted him since the beginning, and thinks that maybe he's been spending his whole life comparing every romantic conquest to Vhan, including his ex-wife.

It's not even just the gay thing--he doesn't care about that anymore, not even if it would mean losing his job, he doesn't care, but he can't subject someone else to himself again. He'd almost broken Victoria that way, and he'd loved her--honestly, totally had loved her--and he'd still failed miserably. And Vhan is important, the most important, and that means Graham can't let him down. Won't let him down.

And so, instead of knocking down Vhan's door and professing his undying love, he's here. The kids are home--he told them he was working late, he knows that's a mistake but just couldn't deal with them, thinking about Vhan with them, so he left. Victoria will be furious, but Graham is too blissfully high to care.

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Vhan was worried; he hadn't been able to get ahold of Graham at all today, and he'd been acting strange the days before. He wasn't too concerned, not yet, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. When he still wasn't responding to his messages by the late afternoon, he decided to make his way over to his house, hesitating momentarily when he reaches their doorstep.

"Come on, man, it's probably fine, you're being a freak about this," he mumbles to himself, hitting the palm of his hand against his forehead as if he could shake the anxiety-ridden thoughts out of his imagination. Nevertheless, he extends a hand and knocks on the door. When there's no immediate answer, he cautiously turns the door handle and steps inside.

"Graham? Sam? Greg? You guys here?"

When Vhan enters Sam and Greg are curled up together on the couch, watching TV.

"Vhan?" Sam asks, looking at Vhan somewhat warily, "What are you doing here? Is my dad with you?" She sits up a little, one hand on Greg's shoulder as if she meant to shield him.

Sam's reply makes Vhan's stomach churn, and he takes another step inside and shuts the door.

"Ah, no, he's not," he says gently, keeping his voice calm for their sakes. There doesn't seem to be any babysitter with them, and he can feel a slight twinge of anger mixing in with the fear. Nevertheless, he puts on a smile as he walks over to where Sam and Greg are sitting on the couch, hands resting casually in his jacket pockets.

"Hey, it's all right though, right? He's probably working a little late today. Are you guys hungry? I can, uh, order you guys something, didn't they just open up a pizza place around the corner? I heard they use imported ingredients from Earth, it's supposed to be pretty authentic."

Sam nods, relieved and grateful to have an adult take responsibility for the situation. They get a pizza and Sam and Greg both fall asleep in front of another movie, both too stressed by the situation to go through their usual nighttime rituals.

It takes another couple of hours for Graham to stagger home, still high and drunk and he stumbles over himself trying to get his key in the lock. It takes him a long minute to get the door open, and when he does he's surprised by the door swinging open and he almost face plants in his doorway.

Vhan tenses at the sound of the door being unlocked. The sight of Graham standing there, alive and unharmed and not dead of an overdose in a grimy nightclub bathroom, as he had been imagining he might be for the past several hours, brought him a momentary sense of overwhelming relief. However, it's quickly replaced by anger, and he comes at him, grabbing him by the sleeve of his shirt and dragging him into the bedroom, away from where Sam and Greg were sleeping on the couch.

"You fucker," he hisses quietly through his teeth, "What the hell do you think you're doing, fucking leaving your kids here by themselves? Var Gaarnon, Graham, where the fuck have you been?"

The room shifts and lurches, and it takes Graham a long moment to realize that someone else is here, and grabbing him by his shirt. He stumbled when Vhan releases him, pitching forward onto his bed and turning back to blink blearily at Vhan.

"I've been... out," he says distantly, sitting up and clumsily trying to remove his suit jacket, "Just needed to blow off some steam after work. It's no big deal." He can't bring himself to look directly at Vhan, too afraid of what might spill out of his mouth if he does.

"Oh, you were out, okay," Vhan says, struggling to keep himself from raising his voice, "Well, that's awesome, that's fucking great, buddy, I hope you had a really good time because your kids were too worried about you to go to sleep until, like, five seconds ago. What's the deal with you right now, anyway? You don't answer my calls for days at a time, when you do answer it's like you're not even - I mean, whatever, that shit doesn't matter, I'm just-"

Vhan presses his fingers to his temples, and heaves a loud sigh.

"Look, I know shit's rough. You miss Victoria, I get it, all right? But your kids need their dad, you've got a responsibility, I had to...I called Victoria and she...figured out I was your drug dealer, I mean, you can't leave your kids with your fucking drug dealer."

"I don't miss Victoria," Graham says automatically with a light chuckle, before anything else Vhan said registers, then he pauses while trying to take off his shoes, "You called Victoria?" He looks up at Vhan, staring hard for a moment before his expression cracks into a frown and he looks away, "Whatever. It was inevitable, I guess."

He turns his attention back to his shoes, managing to get one off and toss it across the room.

"Yeah, I did," Vhan says emphatically, "Because you left you guys' tiny ass kids here with nothing to eat to go snort shit up your nose with a bunch of strangers! Was I supposed to keep sitting here letting you put your kids in danger like that? Besides, Sam was scared, she wanted to talk to her fuckin' mom. Look, man, you can't keep doing this, I...I can't sell to you anymore, all right? Like...I can't."

He looks down at the ground when he says this, bent under the weight of the guilt he felt at having contributed to this, enabling his habits, profiting off of fueling Graham's addictions.

Graham's head jerks up at Vhan's words, a motion that makes the room spin and he has to grab onto the blankets to steady himself.

"What?" he says, honest panic creeping into his voice as he tries to process this through the haze of drugs and alcohol, "What do you mean you can't? You're just-- you're gonna leave?" Graham's head is spinning and he's having trouble thinking through the haze, especially with the threat of losing his supply looming over his head ad making him panic. It's not just the drugs, though, because if Vhan won't sell to him anymore, then what reason would Vhan have to stick around?

"You can't just cut me off."

"Yeah, I can," Vhan snaps irritably, any gentleness in his tone vanishing, "I'm not going to just...sit here helping you do this to Sam and Greg, I can't. If this isn't a wake up call then...fine, whatever, just find someone else."

His voice starts to shake, and he closes his mouth.

"A wake up call?" Graham repeats disbelievingly, "A wake up call for what? For figuring out I'm a weak, pathetic failure? I already knew that, thanks, I don't need my fucking dealer to tell me that," he spits viciously, kicking off his other shoe and then standing and stalking somewhat unevenly over to his closet. He starts to strip off his tie and shirt, hating that phrase, my dealer, in his head. It's been a long time since he's thought of Vhan that way--if he ever did--but here he is, letting his miserable self-loathing leak into everything and poison it. It would probably be better if he'd never walked into Vhan's life in the first place.

"Whatever," he says, sitting down hard on his bed wearing just his underwear, "I don't care," he says in a weary, hollow voice, even though he knows that is absolutely a lie. He's just exhausted.

"I didn't say any of that shit! And yeah, no kidding you don't care, asshole," Vhan snaps, speaking louder to keep his voice from wavering and furiously wiping his eyes, which were beginning to water, "You don't care about anything!"

Graham grits his teeth at that, holding back everything he could say. His hands tighten into fists and he doesn't say he does care, he doesn't explain how much he cares about Vhan, doesn't say that lately Vhan is all he thinks about, doesn't say how aside from his kids he doesn't want to see anybody else more.

He manages to swallow all that back and relaxes his jaw and his fists, slumping dejectedly and speaking in a hollow voice.

"Yeah," he says, rubbing his hands over his face and head, "I can't... I can't do this." His head is still spinning dizzily, and he thinks that if he could just get a couple hours of sleep he'd be able to have this conversation.

Vhan presses his tongue against the inside of his cheek and stares at the ground for a long minute, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. He feels sick to his stomach, his chest tight, and it takes all his strength to keep standing up.

"So that's it, we're...you're just done," he says, almost disbelievingly, then shakes his head.

"You know - yeah. Fine. I'll get out of your hair." He makes his way out of his room, hesitating in the doorway, trying to think of something else to say, but nothing comes. He keeps walking, grabbing his jacket off the back of the couch and heading out the front door.

It takes Graham a couple minutes of silence to realize the meaning behind Vhan's words, how he'd misunderstood what Graham had said, and he stands up to rush out the door and find him. But then he pauses, considers what going after Vhan to explain that he didn't mean he was done with Vhan would mean, considers pulling Vhan back into his shit pile of a life when he'd only just managed to escape.

No.

Graham sits back down on the bed, putting his head in his hands as his shoulders shudder.

Vhan's better off out there, on his own, and it's not like Graham deserves him anyways. When he thinks about it like that it's almost comforting, in a horrible, heartbreaking way.

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yeah you leave me numb

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