Savior Complex (Teddy/Quest)

I got an unaddressed letter from Wilfred a few weeks ago. No return address, no stamp, nothing to tell me why after eight years, he’d chosen to come back from the dead and haunt me. Which, to be fair, is exactly something he would do, thinking it was some sort of funny prank to get my goat, rile me up and have me swearing back and forth before he jumped out from some corner to show he wasn’t a ghost after all. And I’d thought, when it’d been mixed in with a notice about discount glassware, this is a cruel joke from my father, which – tells you how much work I still have to do with my therapist about my childhood.

The letter sat unopened on the edge of the bar. Staring me down with the curled letters unmistakably from his chickenscratch, Wilfred, in blue ink etched across the yellowed envelope. I told myself that I was just going to rip it open and get it over with, whatever had been hiding beneath the surface, whether a shark waiting to rip my head off and pull me under the waves, or a bunch of air and nothing. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to sliding a finger underneath the fold and catching the tear along the top. I could put it off for a little while longer. Hell, it’d taken eight years for the letter to get to me, and if there’d been any sort of urgency, Wilfred would’ve known how to blow that out of the water.

So I’d taken to keeping the envelop in the breast pocket of my leatherjacket, tucked close to my heart. Close enough that at any moment I could retrieve it, rip open the side and expose whatever was there to ruin my day.

I should’ve been overjoyed that my dead best friend had left something behind for me.

He’s dead, because I refused to believe that the person who’d been my impetus to say ‘fuck it all, I might as well commit suicide by throwing myself into the hunger games’ could have been sitting anywhere safe and warm without me. And eight years of, finding out that everything I’d bottled up between my fists had been – anger, at the world that we’d cursed at together, hatred for what it did to those who weren’t strong enough, depression, for what I knew wasn’t in my power to change, even as hard as I might have worked for it – he deserved the punch that would’ve knocked his front teeth out.

It wasn’t fair to hate a ghost. Ether was the one to say that, by the way, because my brother had somehow been born with the empathy I’d had to learn. He had it in spades, playing concertos of understanding, while I still practiced scales of how I might feel, if placed in someone else’s shoes. Ain’t it a gas that I was the one who’d gone and become a psychiatrist? They did always say that the most fucked up were the ones that gave advice about mental health.

Maybe I just hadn’t made myself clear, or maybe it’d been so long, no one else could understand what it meant to see that letter. Part of me wished what’s-her-face hadn’t gotten booted out of the mayor’s office and I could still waltz in and use the phone like old times, just so I could call Fiona or Shy and ramble on about how bullshit all of it was. At least Shy would just stay quiet, not give an ounce of what he was thinking, until he let the moment hang and be so awkward both of us either changed the subject or I begged off the phone. Fiona would’ve been the one to tell me to open it, because she would’ve asked if I really wanted to spend my whole life being angry at someone that I’d loved so much. Forgiveness would’ve set all of that free.

The thing about forgiveness was that it sounded all good in theory, but it meant walking across glass and swallowing down poison before you came out the other side. And even then, you wondered whether or not that light headed feeling wasn’t just from all the pain you’d had to endure to tell youself, this is better now. Relationships could be toxic, and sometimes burning them to oblivion left you with a fuller heart than trying to go back on what had hurt you in the first place.

It’s half past midnight when the dishwasher breaks, and I’m the one closing up at Second Chances. Which means I’m the one to push back my sleeves and pull open the smoking metal box to try and make sense of why the thing has decided to try to off itself. Ether blends into the background, topping off the regulars, taking their tips and laughing about how April’s brought snow and rain (some spring we’re having). All of it fades away as I settle into another project, thoughts turning back again to the letter, even as I ply apart the fan and wrench free the clog.

By the time I finish, Ether asks me if he wants me to lock the door before heading upstairs, but I tell him it’s fine. He’s mopped up the mess on the floor and turned the wood chairs atop the tables, taken the napkin holders and put them off the back, and done another inventory of where the kegs were.

“I’m going to be up a little while,” I say, “I’ll close up in another half hour or so.”

I poured a thumb full of whiskey to sip at the bar. We turned the house lights down to low, so only the hanging lights over the bar stayed on to cast shadows from underneath their stained glass covers.

For a while there's silence, save the drink of the dishwasher, or the occasional whisp of wind against the windows.

Tomorrow I’d have a couple of appointments in my office, then a conversation with some distributors. A life that seventeen-year-old me would’ve seen as foreign as a man on the moon.

“We’re closed,” Is what escapes from my lips without missing a beat, my body hunched over the bar, another thimble of whiskey in front me. I turned to throw a glare over my shoulder, which, given the state of my face, was usually enough to do the trick.

“Oh. It’s you.” I gave a grin and turned my whole body on the barstool to face Teddy. “If it isn’t the man who lived. You forget how to read the sign outside, or just felt like making a late visit?”