Closed P.S. I Was Wrong

[Arvel Ayers]

St Mungo's Hospital never slept, but it did occasionally close its eyes. Arvel stood by the window in the empty break room, listening to the rumble of the plumbing and looking out at the dark harbour below. His shift had finished fifteen minutes ago, but he often found peace in moments like these, when most of the world had gone to bed, and the streetlamps shone on empty streets. He could imagine the cogs of the hospital still turning under his feet while the rest of the town slept, oblivious to the barely-managed chaos, to the messes which would be made and cleared up before sunrise. Moments like these were why he still dragged himself here day after day, even though he didn't really have to. He liked to be part of the machine. It was important, even if most didn't know it.

In the bottom of his bag was an envelope. He pulled it out, worked out the crease in the corner, and went to locker number sixteen. The gap beneath the hinges was just wide enough to admit a birthday card. Arvel slipped it in before he could change his mind.

He slung his bag over his shoulder and went home.

Spoiler: The Card

Dear Zennon,

Happy birthday.

Arvel.

P.S. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I wish I could take it back. It still hurts me.

It's OK if you can't forgive me.

I think you know what I mean?

---

Arvel didn't make a habit of taking sick days. He had a good immune system, and a conscience too sensitive to take time off when he didn't need it. The guilt would eat away at him all day, making him miserable and anxious, til he wished he'd just gritted his teeth and gone in.

Today was different. His shift was supposed to start at four o'clock in the afternoon, but by midday his stomach was churning and the thought of going anywhere near St Mungo's broke him out in a sweat. Maybe the card had been a bad idea. Maybe Zennon had forgotten all about the terrible things Arvel had said, and he was needlessly re-opening old wounds. Maybe there had never been a wound in the first place, and Arvel was embarrassing himself all over again for no reason. God - he should have pushed the guilt down and let it rest. But he couldn't. He'd pushed it down for the last ten years, naively hoping the dark would kill it off like a weed, only to find that it scattered its seeds in the undergrowth of his mind and sprouted anew. He couldn't escape it - and now it was taking up more space than he could bear, and springing up faster than he could cut it back. Even if Zennon resented him for it, Arvel had to apologise. It was the right thing. He'd done the right thing.

Alas, doing the right thing came with its own set of consequences, both emotional and physical. He was only postponing the inevitable - he'd have to face work again eventually - but for now he climbed back into bed, pulling the duvet all the way up to his chin. Oh, well. If the worst came to the worst, he could always quit. He'd already lost most of the things that brought him peace. What was one more?

The clock on his bedside table read two-thirty. He watched the second hand make two loops around the face, then fell asleep.

 

[Zennon Baros]

In all honesty, the card had gone almost completely unnoticed by Zennon for most of his shift, and it was only once he was packing up that he noticed it. He certainly hadn't expected it and as he slipped it out of the tiny space it occupied and opened it, he was even more surprised to see it was from Arvel, who, honestly, he wouldn't have thought would have paid enough attention to him to know when his birthday even was. It was kind of nice to know he'd bothered to even think about it, let alone to give him a card and honestly, it made Zennon feel a little bit better after the chaos of the day. He usually started to feel good around this time of day, despite enjoying his job there was always something else happening and sometimes the day didn't go well, today was no different, and even if he didn't specifically know what the card was about, Zennon pocketed it, intentions to talk to Arvel when he caught him as he left - only he found out that Arvel wasn't working today. He'd called out because he was sick? Well that didn't sound like Arvel, he couldn't recall the man having taken a day off in the ten or so years since they'd been working here together. Maybe over that two years where Zennon hadn't been working, but certainly not at the moment.

Zennon dropped his stuff at his apartment before heading further down to the door he knew Arvel was behind. Finding out they lived in the same building a couple of years ago had been a bit of a surprise, but it made sense since they always started or finished work at two completely different times. Arvel tended to work overnight, and Zennon was more of a daytime guy, not that he hadn't done nightshifts, but even then, his hours tended to be longer or more flexible than Arvel's were, though he couldn't say that for certain, he'd regrettably not taken a particularly close look at schedules. It was starting to get dark by the time he managed to knock on Arvel's door, both to say thanks for the card, and to bring him something to eat. He had a potion with him as well, incase whatever Arvel was dealing with was a bit more than a nice soup can help. He was a healer at his core after all, and if he could help ease illness, or suffering, then he was going to try. "Arvel, it's Zennon, heard you weren't feeling well and wanted to check on you, can you open the door?" Ace twisted himself around Zennon's neck, flicking his tongue at the air. "I'm just checking, it's alright, you're fine," he hissed lightly, making sure Ace was calm.​

 

[Arvel Ayers]

When Arvel opened his eyes again, his bedroom was dark. He squinted at the clock, which advised him the hour was six, but the instinct which told him whether it was six in the morning or six in the evening was missing. Typically, he fell asleep darkness and woke up in the middle of the day. Doing it the other way around gave him a sick, light-headed feeling which was not at all helped by the sound of Zennon's voice travelling through the wall. Oh, no. He remembered, now. He'd gone to bed to stop himself from thinking about the birthday card. It had worked, for a few blissful hours, but that was the problem with sleeping to forget about the future: it was even closer when you woke up.

And now it was on his doorstep, and he couldn't ignore it without making himself feel worse. Spurred by this thought, he threw off the covers and stood up. Thank god he'd gone to bed fully clothed. He shambled out into the hall, groped for the light switch, and was still squinting against the brightness when he opened the front door.

He looked at the floating containers, and at the snake, and then finally at his coworker. Amidst his disoriented panic, he'd failed to register what Zennon had actually said, and now it completely failed to dawn on him what the man was doing here. "Oh," he said. "Hi." Another few seconds passed before he recognised his cue. "Sorry. Come in." With a foot, he swept some errant shoes aside and let Zennon through. The place was a bit of a mess, but it wasn't the total dump it had been a few weeks ago. The living room might even be called tidy, if you ignored the glasses on the coffee table. Arvel vanished them now to make room for whatever Zennon had brought. "Sorry. Haven't really had time to... you know." Clean, he thought. He gestured to the polystyrene tub. "What's that?"

 

[Zennon Baros]

He did look like he was having a bit of a day, so Zennon was even more glad he'd decided to come and check up on him. He waved the potion and the tub to the table, and they set themselves down with a slight noise as he took a second to look around. "A soup, I wasn't sure if you'd have felt well enough to make anything on your own so I thought you might appreciate something to eat, it's sort of lightly veggie noodle," he'd gotten used to less meaty foods over the years since Finley had started telling him he needed to eat less animal products, probably as a result of how much time he'd spent with Rowan over the past years and so now most of what he made was vegetarian, though not entire bereft of animal products. "And I have a potion, it's just a general wellness potion, nothing specific in it, do you need something specific?" He asked, giving him a once over to see if he there was anything physically wrong with him. "Thanks for the card, I appreciated it." How did he start a conversation about the contents of the card? "And, I guess I wanted to talk to you about what was in it. I... think I know what you were referring to, but I don't want to assume, in case I'm wrong?"​

 

[Arvel Ayers]

And then it clicked. Zennon had come to see if he was all right. For a moment, Arvel just stood there, silently processing this improbable revelation. Someone had to be at the bottom of people’s priorities, and most of the time, that someone was Arvel. It didn’t surprise him any more. It had been a constant in his life since the age of eight. Even his mother had put him last; he would never forget the time he’d stumbled downstairs, exhausted and shivering with the flu, to discover an empty house and a note in the kitchen which read, ‘DINNER GOT COLD - TRY TOAST’. There must have been something wrong with him, he’d decided eventually. He must have done something to deserve it. And the older he’d got, the more failings he’d found in himself to support this theory, until he’d actively begun to treat others coldly, because it hurt less to be rejected for being awful than to be rejected for no reason at all.

Yet here Zennon was, in spite of all that, come to see if he was all right. It was these sorts of moments which made an apology so necessary. Zennon was a good person. He cared for others, even when they’d done nothing to deserve his kindness, even when he would have been forgiven for cutting them out of his life for good.

"Aye,” said Arvel. “I think you know.” He sank onto the sofa, tucking his feet up under his knees. There was another short silence as he blankly contemplated the gifts on the table. “Thank you.” Where to begin? He wasn’t about to make excuses for himself, but Zennon deserved some sort of explanation. “I meant what I said. After class that day. I meant what I said, at the time. I was naive, and angry.” The anger had consumed him sometimes. Being a teenager full of hormones probably hadn’t helped. “You were everything I wished I was - funny, kind, clever. And you were also a monster. That’s what I'd heard. That’s what I grew up with. I believed it.” He couldn’t look at Zennon, so he concentrated on the table. “I looked up to you for years, and then one day, you were gone - just another person who’d betrayed me. I couldn’t stand that people still cared for you. I tried so hard to be good, to be kind, and everyone hated me. There was a dark wizard in the school, and they made me the pariah.

"And then I grew up. I moved away. I realised that… I’d been lied to. My father - he was the dark wizard. He made people suffer, and then pinned the blame on an innocent person, a parselmouth, because he was too cowardly to own the truth.” He shook his head. He was saying too much now - things Zennon didn’t need to hear. “And I lived with that. I believed his lies. I trusted him.

“Anyway. What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry.” Arvel looked up at last. Delivering this to Zennon’s face was worth the discomfort. “It’s not an excuse. I just thought you should know. I was wrong, and it haunts me every day, and I hate myself for it, and I’m sorry.”

 

[Zennon Baros]

Zennon frowned when he watched Arvel sink into his sofa and almost moved to check if there was some pain, before he realised it was just a way to sort of gather his thoughts, and so when Arvel started talking, he took a step back, leaning against the wall and just listening. He got the feeling that was what he was supposed to do, listen, to... whatever it was that Arvel had to get off of his chest. It felt strange to be standing here and getting an apology for something that happened years ago, more than a decade ago, before Finley, before he and Sam had been a thing even. That was sort of how he'd compartmented his life these days, there was before Finley and then there was during Finley, and when Finley went to school there would be after Finley - all significant milestones in his life. The weird conversation they'd had out in the corridors had not been something he'd thought about in a long time. He wasn't even sure he would have said he'd forgiven Arvel for it because it was so long ago, he hadn't even really thought about it, certainly not enough for it to cause him any difficulty at all. But then, maybe that was part of the problem, because it hadn't affected him at all, but apparently it had affected Arvel, enough that after all this time it still clearly weighed on him, and for that alone, Zennon was sorry too.

"I laughed at you, I shouldn't have, so let me apologise for that first," he said, his shoulder still leant against the wall as Arvel looked up at him to deliver his apology. "And look, if it means anything to you, I appreciate you've said all this, but, honestly, I haven't really thought about that day, or what you said, since the day you said it, to be honest," he admitted, shrugging. "I forgave you the moment you said it, we were all stressed, sh!t was happening, we both clearly had things going on," what Arvel was saying about his dad made Zennon sad, and he found himself thinking about his own dad, and their relationship and how even though it hadn't always been the best, at times they had fought, but he'd always known he could trust his dad, that the man had the best intentions with him, and that he loved him. None of these sounded like they were similar to what Arvel had experienced with his father, and honestly, it really did go a long way to explaining Arvel a little bit. "You can't wear the blame of the naivete of a child who wanted his father to love him, of course you believed him, he was your dad, and look, hey, for the longest time I believed him too - everything you said was only a reflection of everything I'd been feeling for the years before that. If you had said any of the things you'd said to me before you did, I wouldn't have taken it the same way - maybe then you would have had something to apologise for, but... now? Arvel, it's water under the bridge. I want you to let it go, with my permission. I've accepted your apology, you don't need to let it keep rotting inside you." Because sometimes that's exactly what guilt and regret were, a rotten diseased ball of black ichor that had no business being there. "Don't hate yourself on my account. Makes it a bit harder for me to like you. I only have so much like to go around so I can't afford to be using it on two people."​