Rhapsody on a Theme (20 page)

“Hello,” Jayden breathed, bending to kiss the top of that curly head. “How are you feeling?”

Darren looked half-asleep, those tropical eyes distinctly hazy, and he was shivering very faintly. Jayden frowned. “M’cold,” Darren explained and scrubbed a huge hand over his face with a yawn.

Rachel turned down the TV. “He woke up about two and was shivering like crazy,” she said. “I called the quack, he said to just keep taking his temperature, but it’s probably the fluo-thing.”

“Fluoxetine.”

“Whatever.”

Jayden perched by Darren’s hip, feeling oddly happy with the unexpected development. He had expected Darren to still be sleeping—or at least not open to being bullied out of bed. He certainly hadn’t expected a verbal greeting. It felt like the first time they’d said anything remotely
normal
to each other in weeks.

“I gave him his half-dose too,” Rachel added.

“
He
is in the room,” Darren snapped and yawned again.

“He’s also knackered,” Rachel continued blithely, then grinned. “And he had a little bit of a cry.”

“Rachel.”

“You did!”

“Why?” Jayden prompted.

“Fuck knows,” Darren mumbled.

“He just went tearful and had a bit of an ugly crying jag,” Rachel said. “He’s been all right the last couple of hours. In and out a bit. You want me to watch him tomorrow?”

“Please?”

“I’m not a kid,” Darren grumbled.

“Nah, kids stick their fingers in the mains, they don’t try and brain themselves on cupboard doors,” Rachel snarked. Darren flipped her off, yawning widely again, and Jayden smiled. Despite the grouchy subject matter, and the fact he could hear in Rachel’s voice that she was semi-serious and not pleased with Darren in the slightest, Jayden felt…relieved.

Because Darren was responding, but not exploding.

Jayden brewed up some tea, made a sandwich for himself, and wriggled under the duvet with Darren. He did feel marginally chilly—for
Darren
, anyway—and curled up against Jayden’s chest and shoulder with a contented sort of noise, and Jayden rubbed his hands over those wiry biceps to warm them and begged Rachel to change the channel and find something that wasn’t James bloody Bond. Jayden
hated
James Bond. Boring, stupid, pretentious, offensive, sexist, whoremongering twat. (Darren had laughed himself sick the first time Jayden had ranted to him about it.) He ranted, and Rachel grudgingly obliged, mostly to shut him up.

But by the time Jayden won the telly ‘debate,’ Darren had dozed off again.

“He’s seemed more like himself today,” Rachel murmured. “I think the sedative helped out a bit.”

Jayden rested his cheek on the top of Darren’s head and closed his eyes briefly. “Good,” he whispered.

“This past two months has
sucked
, hasn’t it?” she said eventually, and Jayden stroked his fingers in loose patterns over Darren’s back. His skin was warm, even if he had the chills. At the very top of his shoulder, the faintly waxy layer of tattoo ink was comfortingly familiar, oddly so given how fascinating Jayden still found the feel of it.

“Yeah,” he agreed vaguely and pressed his nose into the mad hair to inhale gently. For a moment, he could pretend everything was fine, or Darren just had the flu, or…or something little and temporary and fleeting, something that wasn’t this. Wasn’t this ongoing battle with drugs and treatment, wasn’t the sensation of constantly backsliding, braking, and backsliding again, wasn’t the sensation of
losing
and of everything getting markedly, exponentially worse as time rumbled by and betrayed them. It was a constant
down
hill struggle, it seemed, and Jayden wanted it desperately to stop. Jayden was beginning to wonder, very vaguely in the back of his mind, if the dark days and the black episodes hadn’t been…

Well.

Preferable.

* * * *

Paul rang that evening, his voice audible down the phone from Rachel picking it up to the moment she dropped it unapologetically on Jayden’s face and wandered back into the kitchen. She was making her evening meal before popping out to the pub with Tony, her self-assigned treat for watching Darren during the day, and Jayden rolled his eyes at her retreating back before pressing the phone to his ear.

“Hi, Paul.”

“Hey, Jade. All right?”

“Um…,” Jayden eyed Darren, who was still dozing on his shoulder. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“…You guess so?”

Jayden switched the phone to his other hand and tucked his arm back around Darren’s shoulder. The lack of any movement suggested he’d probably gone to sleep proper now, but his face was tucked into Jayden’s chest and Jayden just couldn’t tell. “Darren’s being taken off the fluoxetine,” he murmured, and Paul made a sound that was like…a verbalised grimace, or something. “He had a panic attack or something and hurt his head, so yeah, we’re giving up on the fluoxetine and the doctor’s going to try something else.”

“…How bad are we talking?”

“…Pretty bad,” Jayden admitted quietly.

“Shit,” Paul muttered. “He hurt himself?”

“Mm. I don’t…I don’t know, it might have been like how he used to self-harm. It wasn’t a suicide attempt.”

“Right,” Paul said. “Uh. Right. Should we be cancelling plans and taking leave and coming down there?”

“I don’t think so,” Jayden said lowly. “We’ve set up a watch system and he seems a
little
bit better today, so…I don’t know. Not yet anyway.”

Paul hummed.

“I might have to call his brother though,” Jayden admitted and wrinkled his nose. “He tends to drop by for random visits and he’ll go spare if he realises we haven’t told him stuff and he doesn’t like me very much as it is and…”

“Whoa, okay,” Paul interrupted. “But Daz
is
, you know. Sorted now?”

“As much as we can for the minute,” Jayden said lowly. “Why, um…why are you calling? I mean, I don’t want to get rid of you or anything, he’s just…he’s asleep on me right now, and I don’t want to disturb him, so…”

“Yeah, well…”

“Paul?” Jayden prompted. “I mean, is it about the wedding or just a social call or what?”

“…Ah,” Paul said eventually.

“Ah?”

“Er.” Paul sounded hesitant. “How, um, how is when he’s
not
panicking? Crazy like usual, or crazy not like usual?”

“Um…not like usual,” Jayden said gingerly, twisting a curl around his fingers. Darren sighed and shifted marginally. “Why?”

“Well, Ethan’s looking at setting the stag do, and you know, you and Daz have gotta be here…”

“Oh,” Jayden said and winced. “Um…”

“I’m gonna guess that isn’t happening any time soon?”

“No,” Jayden admitted lowly. “He
is
doing a bit better now. He’s on the sofa with me instead of in bed and everything but he’s not right yet, and the doctor’s going to try something else once he’s come off the fluoxetine fully and…”

“All right,” Paul interrupted. “So he’s not going to be levelled off by the twenty-second?”

Jayden’s stomach lurched. “I…I don’t think so,” he whispered. That was only two weeks away. “When’s the
wedding
?”

“Oh, not for a bit yet,” Paul said hastily. “Just getting it out the way, you know, especially given it’s a bunch of city types wanting to get arsed, and office blokes are weirdly good at that shit. Time off work needs booking and all that. Look, I’ll get him to push it back. We can’t have the stag do without Daz.”

Jayden turned his face to press his cheek to the top of Darren’s head. He was definitely asleep if he hadn’t grumbled yet. “I don’t know when he’ll be…you know. Better. Fit for it. I don’t know what we’re going to do after this. That’s citalopram
and
fluoxetine, and we can’t just drop it because the episodes have been worse ever since…since Cambridge, and…”

“Hey,” Paul interrupted again. “Chill out. Don’t worry about this wedding, ‘cause if Daz can’t come, then you know as well I do Ethan will put it off until he
can
come. And it’s going to be a right laugh watching that twat get married, and Darren’s going to be there. So just get him sorted out best you can and don’t worry about a deadline. I’ll sort that.”

Jayden felt a lump forming in his throat. “Thanks, Paul,” he croaked.

“No worries, mate. Get him straightened out and give us a ring if you need anything. Especially if he
does
need a pick-me-up visit, ‘cause you know we’ll be down there instant like.”

Jayden swallowed. “I know, Paul. I’m glad he has you guys too.”

“Don’t go mushy on me,” Paul warned, and Jayden laughed.

“Okay, fine. I’ll let you know.”

“Sweet. Cheers, Jade!”

Jayden said his goodbyes, and when Paul hung up, dropped the phone to wrap his arm around Darren’s back and hug him tightly for a minute, momentarily disregarding the risk of disturbing him. “They love you too,” he murmured into that warm scalp, and inhaled, long and deep, the heat and smell of him.

It took another four weeks, and when Darren seemed to even out—after another, milder version of his kitchen rampage and another retreat to the boxing gym—the doctor cut out the fluoxetine entirely. From there, Jayden couldn’t really see any difference: Darren was quiet, moody, quick to offend, and still suffered from the erectile dysfunction and the violent veering between insomnia and near-narcolepsy. He wasn’t
Darren
, not really, and Jayden sorely missed him.

As spring bloomed properly, and the bitter cold of winter eased its grip, Dr. Zielinski called them back into his little office to prescribe a new pill—for anxiety. “I suspect,” he said at that appointment, “that judging by Darren’s reactions to SSRIs in general, prescribing him another medication from that group isn’t going to be any more successful, particularly as he’s having problems with persistent side effects as well as increasing anxiety.”

“So what do we do?” Jayden asked.

“I don’t want to put him on tricyclic antidepressants,” the doctor said flatly. “The side effects are usually much worse, the medication less effective, and the risk if an overdose is taken much higher. I’m not prepared to subject Darren or yourself to that danger, so I think we’re going to try treating the anxiety rather than the depression itself. I’ll start you on a low dose of pregabalin, Darren.”

“What?”

“Pregabalin,” Dr. Zielinski repeated calmly. “It’s typically an epilepsy medication, but it also has a good track record as a treatment for anxiety.” The printer hummed to life, and one of those awful sheets of side effects was run off. When he passed it over, however, Jayden was relieved to note it was a lot shorter than the fluoxetine sheet. And not so…they were milder. Maybe. “We’ll start at twenty-five milligrams for a six month course. As before, I’d like you back in here every couple of weeks. Be warned, pregabalin should make itself known much faster than fluoxetine. Jayden, I also want you to keep a very careful eye on Darren the first few times he takes his painkillers on pregabalin. The two
shouldn’t
interact, but the odd case has been recorded.”

“Okay,” Jayden whispered.

“Now the side effects for pregabalin shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though it may make him quite drowsy at first,” Dr. Zielinski explained calmly. “Whether or not it will work remains to be seen, as it does rely on Darren’s anxiety feeding into his depressive episodes. But the human mind is a vastly complicated thing, and what works for one patient may not for another.”

Darren said nothing to that—it was a seven o’clock appointment, and he was groggy—but when Jayden had started him on the pregabalin the next morning, he’d frowned at the pills and mumbled something about being a guinea pig.

“Well, if it helps, I’m all for it,” Jayden murmured, and Darren downed the drug without further argument.

* * * *

He slept.

That the first thing. Between the blonde doctor (Darren couldn’t remember her
name
, just her face that awful night) and the new pill, Darren mostly slept. The weight on his chest was refusing to move, and the shadows were not so much shadows as walls, but…but he could breathe.

He could finally just
breathe
.

And then came the new pill. It was a little smaller, and for the first day, nothing happened, and Darren slept some more.

And then things started to…shift. Slip, even. Like before, but instead of
Darren
slipping, it was the shadows slipping. They became riddled with holes, and hard to grasp instead of hard to elude. They became fluid and shy. Slowly, the weight on his chest at night began to ease; a week after starting with the new pills, Darren returned to work starting at four days a week, and when he came home from his first day shift, managed to stave off the dogged exhaustion long enough to make a sandwich before going to bed. He slept nearly twelve hours. When the darkness tried to build, it simply failed. When the apathy tried to tighten its grip, something else to do slithered between the cracks and it was broken off.

Darren was anchored, but the
depression
was slipping.

He stopped complaining about taking the pills.

The headaches followed the fluidity, dull and aching ones in the sides of his skull, but Darren didn’t mind those. Headaches were fine. The insomnia ebbed, although the drowsiness stuck, and yet every time he felt pathetic, every time he felt as though the force were trying to sack him and Jayden was sick of him and both had every right to be, it just…

Slipped away.

Something was changing.

Three weeks to the day after Jayden had put a new pill by his morning drink, Darren lifted the piano lid, and the buzzing around the back of his mind flowed out onto the middle C in a single, short note. Something unknotted in his gut. He sank onto the leather piano stool as though he’d never left, and a memory bubbled up out of his childhood and his life here, mirrored in a sarcastic remark made months ago. Made when he had been…not well, but better.