redorchids | Brendon's Goodbye (Reply)

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“I’m not coming to the wedding. I just can’t.”

They’re walking down the small path that criss-crosses the area where he and Spencer both live, and Ryan bites his lip and nods, holds back the words that immediately roll to the tip of his tongue.

“Shane’s in Barcelona,” Brendon continues, “filming a documentary for BBC. I’ll start out there, see where I end up.”

“When are you leaving?” The real question is When will you come back? of course, but Ryan can’t bring himself to ask it. Not yet, anyway.

“The plane leaves in about four hours. I need to be at the airport in about two and a half. Extra security checks.”

“Need a ride?” Ryan kicks himself at the obvious hope in his voice. Brendon shakes his head. “I’m fine. I’ll take a cab.”

Ryan wants to grab him, push him, do something else—anything else—just as long as it makes Brendon drop the carefully polite monotone he’s using. Wants to scream Let me give you a fucking ride to the airport! What does it matter? God! Wants to shake Brendon until the blank façade slips and the anger he can sense beneath it all surfaces—until punches are flying and provide an outlet for all the pain and nausea that’s pooling in his chest.

Watch love get strangled by a kite's cold strings…
“Okay,” he says instead, closing his eyes, swallowing down the rising bile in his throat. “Yeah, okay.”

He sees the corners of Brendon’s mouth twitch, and his own lips follow suit almost immediately. They’re not okay. In fact, Ryan is pretty sure that he’s never been even remotely this not-okay before in his life. And from the look of Brendon’s face, the carefully painted, almost deathly pale appearance of him, Ryan’s not the only one.

“I gave all my notes to Jon,” Brendon says, eyes on his feet, kicking little pebbles across the path. “He’ll take over as toastmaster. I asked him to tell everyone that my grandma up in Toronto is really sick and that I had to fly up on short notice.” Ryan nods again, beginning to feel like a puppet, unable to do anything but move along and nod his head, even though his insides are screaming. But they’ve already done the yelling, reasoning, accusing, begging, talking, pleading, kissing, threatening, fucking, punching, shouting, crying routine over the past few days (several times over even), and all of it only served to push them here, to the point where Ryan is picking up his suit from dry-cleaning this afternoon to head over to Spencer’s house for his last night as a single man, and Brendon is leaving for an undetermined period of time on the other side of the fucking planet.

It’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality…
“I’m sorry,” Ryan whispers, blinking repeatedly to clear his sudden foggy vision. “God, Bren, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“I’m not,” Brendon replies softly. “Well, for how things turned out in the end, obviously, but I’m not really sorry that it happened. At least now, it’s all out in the open between us and we know where we stand. You made your choice. I still think it’s a shitty choice, especially not being honest with Keltie and all, but… you made it pretty clear that this is what you want to do. And I can either accept that or hate you for the rest of my life, and I don’t really want to hate you, so…”

They’ve reached the end of the path, and Brendon walks over to his car, opening the passenger door, reaching for something in the glove compartment.

“Here,” he says, handing a thin envelope to Ryan. “It’s the speech I was going to make, except when I went over it again to rewrite it on a gift card or something, I kind of realised that… well, Keltie probably shouldn’t see it. So here.” He pushes the envelope into Ryan’s hands, and Ryan’s fingers close around it numbly. “Read it, burn it, make it into a hat, you know. It’s yours. A kind of goodbye, I guess.”

“Brendon…”

“Don’t. There’s nothing you can say, anyway.” Brendon moves over to the other side of the car and opens the door. “Bye.”

Bye. Not see you later or even a talk to you soon. Ryan supposes he deserves that. It was he who nailed this particular coffin shut, after all.

All your wishes, they will sink like stones, slowly down a lonely well…
He walks back to his house slowly, dragging his feet, doing his best not to hurl himself to the side of the street and emptying what little is in his stomach into the flowering Hydrangea bushes that outline his neighbour’s garden. The letter burns steadily between his thumb and third finger. He hasn’t decided what to do with it yet.

MAKE YOUR CHOICE:
What happens with the letter?

Ryan reads it || Ryan burns it