Which Way To Happy? (Sean)

When Josh refused to take his sleeve, Sean slipped his hand through the hole again without comment. It had been worth the offer.

The telepath let Josh shift on the sofa, and he moved accordingly. Now his partner was seated beside him before leaning back, and once again, the telepath wrapped his arm around the other man to hold him securely.

He didn’t sigh when he heard the other man’s persistent thoughts that he was a burden. Sean had told him outright, several times now, that he was not a burden, and he was honest when he said so. Josh was suffering from trauma, they were a family, and thus Sean was here to help; he held no resentment for that. He simply wished that the other man would believe him.

Then came Josh’s protests that he was fine now, which was a poor lie. The attorney had never been a good liar and this was more transparent than usual, given that Sean had explained how trauma and therapy worked mere moments before, and the other man had been crying since he reached the sofa.

He wanted Josh to understand that another breakdown was inevitable unless he was willing to work on this properly. As such, he said, “The walls you try to build will do nothing but put distance between us and further hurt you when this comes to a fore.”

The telepath didn’t fault Josh for wanting to return to normal or wanting to rebuild his walls. However, the walls that Josh had built to repress the traumatic memories weren’t healthy, and he would not enable Josh to resume burying this so that it could reemerge later. Josh needed to deal with this effectively, and unfortunately, it would not be instantaneous; Sean had listed the single option that would involve near-instantaneous recovery and Josh had refused. Not that he expected otherwise; not that he faulted Josh his decision because it was a life-altering offer, with which most were uncomfortable.

As the other man shifted to rub his temples, the telepath loosened his arm to afford Josh greater mobility.

“I know you want to be better; I want you to be better too.” Unfortunately, this was not as simple as wanting the outcome.

“You feel miserable.” It was a simple observation; certainly anyone would notice that after this conversation and Josh’s tears. “If you refuse to deal with this effectively, you’ll continue to feel miserable. You sleep in the other room every night, and I don’t fault you for that because we agreed that room is yours for when you need the time to yourself. I certainly have no desire to guilt you into spending time with me. But, realistically, how long do you think this is tolerable?”

It wasn’t entirely a rhetorical question. Sean knew how Josh’s mind operated. The guilt would begin to affect him, had already begun to affect him. Eventually, Josh would attempt to prove that he was better by undertaking something he wasn’t capable of doing, and it would shatter. Or Josh would withdraw even further until he decided that it was too much.

The telepath sighed softly and rested his head back against the sofa. “I don’t want to lose you to this; I don’t want you to lose yourself to this. And you haven’t been fine; you’ve been repressing. They aren’t the same, and repression is a short-term coping mechanism, not a long-term model of healthy living.”

Sean heard the other man’s thoughts about everything that had been amiss in his life, as though this was comparable, as though Josh was expected to live by the same standards as Sean when they weren’t the same person. He sighed again. “It was only a mild head injury, and I was discharged that same day.” He had told Josh that the bout of unconsciousness wasn’t related to the head injury and that coma wasn’t even an accurate term for the unconsciousness, but that had fallen on deaf ears because Josh had been worried.

It also wasn’t the point. He had survived what had happened and had gotten out in better condition than almost everyone else, against all odds. He had coped because there had been no other choice. He had coped because he was Sean Neville and other people needed him. He had coped because he wasn’t like everyone else, a lesson he had learned time and again as a boy; he was different. He had coped because he was a Weeble; and while Weebles wobbled, they never fell down.

There were few Weebles in this world. He had only known two others, and both of them were dead.

“Relationships aren’t about fairness; they’re about trust and caring and sharing burdens. You know I don’t keep a scale or a running tab of this. The point of a relationship is that we both get our needs met, and I’m fine.” The telepath shook his head because the other man’s insistence otherwise was absurd and non-conducive to solving the problem; all it would do was make Josh feel more guilty about his self-perceived failings. “If you’re worried about my needs, then please worry about yourself. I want you to recover, to actually recover not merely to berate yourself. Not to bury this and ignore it the way you do with everything else because it doesn’t work. It only hurts you. Numbness isn’t health, you know that.”

After Josh’s remark about how he should be fine, Sean decided it was time to share a story and hope that the analogy was enough to bridge this cognitive distance Josh had. “When I was in private practice, I had a patient whom I had to treat for depression. She’d been in a car accident, and as a result, she’d lost partial use of her legs. She primarily used a wheelchair, although she could stand a bit. She was alive, she still had her job, she had family support; she’d won her lawsuit against the other driver so that her medical bills were paid and she was compensated for her pain and suffering. By the time I saw her, the accident had been four years prior but she still suffered from depression. And she had every right to be depressed. Time is irrelevant when you haven’t started your mental and emotional recovery.”

Sean wasn’t sure how many different ways he could say this, but Josh wasn’t listening to him.

“You would never dream of saying that to another person,” he pointed out when Josh tried to brush off his own suffering with such a glib remark. “If you believed that as a world philosophy, you wouldn’t practice law in the United States. We’re richer than any other nation in this world; we have it better than many other nations in this world. But you know that injustice and pain is real no matter who suffers it. I wish that you would apply that to yourself when you apply it to everyone else.”

The telepath reached out to caress his partner’s cheek, blue eyes insistent with his next words. “If you’re unwilling to do this for yourself, to accept this and make actual progress for yourself, then do it for me. Please.”

He didn’t want to make this about him, but Josh was demonstrating, distressingly, that he was unwilling to accept his limitations and needs for his own sake. That couldn’t stand.

The telepath sighed softly again as he heard Josh’s mental diatribe; he hadn’t intended to make the other man feel further guilt over this. The entire point when he had brought up that Josh slept every night in his personal bedroom had been to show that the other man had already withdrawn so much that he was near bottom already. He hadn’t intended to show that he was somehow failing as his partner because he wasn’t.

Sean also didn’t like when Josh responded to emotional appeals rather than logic because the other man’s capitulation wasn’t from true understanding. It was from obligation, which the telepath strove to avoid. That, also, wasn’t healthy.

However, that is what had led to their reconciliation, and Josh was now agreeing to future therapy to treat this trauma. Those were important concessions, even if they had been gained for less than optimal reasons.

The telepath leaned in to press a soft kiss to the other man’s forehead. “We start fresh tomorrow, after a night of rest. You and I will sit down and talk about this; we will go at a slow pace, and I will talk you through all of it. And if find you aren’t comfortable talking, I can recommend someone else. But you need to trust me.”

Sean embraced his partner lightly, a loving, encouraging touch to ground him. “Tonight, however, since you missed supper, I’ll make you a sandwich and a milkshake. How does that sound?”