flamboyant and a little bit sinister

hello i started writing this after the midseason finale and never finished it but on rereading this section kind of works on its own so while i fight for my life to actually finish a fic can i interest anyone in whatever this is
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Eddie expects Frank to be the first one with objections, so the frown isn’t a surprise.

Frank is also the second person he’s told, but that’s neither here nor there. He needs to start making arrangements - which makes it sound like someone is dying, actually, but this is a good thing—

“I just want to make sure you understand the implications here,” Frank says, pretending to take notes, but Eddie has seen him doodling random thinking spirals too many times not to recognize the motion. “You’ve moved states before, you know how challenging it can be, and I dare say you’ve put down more roots here than you ever did back in Texas.”

The back of Eddie’s neck feels unnaturally hot. He knew this would happen, and he figures the least he owes Frank is a real goodbye session, and maybe a promise to keep up with therapy that he already knows he’s going to break.

Doesn’t make it any easier to sit through, though.

“Chris wants to stay there,” Eddie says, because he’s understood as much in the months of superficial phone calls and I gotta gos and we’re thinking about putting in a fucking pools. If he’s understood anything at all about the mess his life has become, it’s that whatever roots he has don’t fucking matter. He’s been dug right up out of the soil, trying to survive in a glass of water, and he doesn’t know how to keep going that way.

He has to reach out for joy, for the one thing that gives him life. There’s plenty of time to bloom where he’s planted, as his mother is so fond of saying.

“Okay,” Frank nods, pressing hard enough that the paper crinkles. “But Christoper is—fourteen, is that right?”

“I know you’re not going to tell me that he has to do what I say because he’s a kid,” Eddie says.

“You’re right, I’m not,” Frank replies, and his frown finally eases a little. “But I’m wondering. Do you remember what you wanted to do or be when you were fourteen?”

“Not the truth,” says Eddie. They’ve talked about this more than he would have liked, back when things were better for a little bit. All the wants and needs and thoughts and ideas that he’d squash as soon as they popped up because he couldn’t say, think, be that. Those things were set in stone long before he was even born. “But that’s the point, Frank. I’m not going to—to order him back like he doesn’t have agency over his life. That’s not who I want to be.”

Frank hums, tilts his head, even smiles a bit. Eddie knows him well enough by now to know that he’s in the danger zone, where the things his therapist says make perfect sense, except they’re the exact opposite of everything he’s ever believed.

“When I was fourteen,” Frank says, amused at the look Eddie gives him,”I wanted to be a NASCAR driver.”

Eddie folds his hands together, then traps them between his knees. He’ll sit through this, listen, and call his realtor once he’s in the car. There’s no room for anything else.

“I was going to grow a beard,” Frank says, tugging at the one he does have. “And long hair, that part’s very important. I was obsessed with having a ponytail.”

“I think that’s a very reasonable dream,” Eddie says, softening. He usually tries not to think about how much time he’s spent in this office over the years, and how well he’s come to know Frank, or the parts of him he shows his patients anyway. All he knows is that it’s enough that he might—miss this. “And I’m sure your parents were very supportive of that.”

“They were, actually,” Frank smiles. “My mother tried really hard to bite her tongue when I started growing my hair out, and my father started taking me to his buddy’s shop on Saturdays. I played with car parts until my hands were black.”

“And?”

“And then I forgot about it,” Frank shrugs. “Got my first girlfriend at sixteen, she didn’t like the hair. And she wanted to go to Columbia, so I decided I needed to be an entrepreneur and start a business. Be a serious man.”

“Of course,” Eddie nods, smiling now because Frank is too, trying to run back his own life at that age. No girlfriend, but he’s pretty sure he’d wanted to have one, to make his mom smile at him in that elusive, genuine way where the corners of her eyes crinkled. He’d wanted to save up for a car so he could drive his sisters to things. He’d wanted to listen to his dad on the phone one day, talking to the mysterious business associates on the other end of the line, and hear him say yes, Edmundo, my son, he’ll handle it. Don’t you worry, sir, he’s the best we got.

“So I spent all my summer job savings on some ridiculous thing that was never going to work out,” Frank says. “And my parents did not like that one. They were right, and they tried to tell me, but I was never going to listen.”

Eddie squirms in his seat.

“Then I wanted to major in philosophy, which went about as well as you’d expect, and then i wanted the army to spite the people who called me names, and every time I was so convinced that this was finally the thing my life was meant to be. I wouldn’t hear otherwise, and my parents could have stopped me because I was living off their money, but they wanted me to have what I wanted.”

“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing,” Eddie says, even as he imagines Chris deciding that he wants to drive race cars, the fear he’d live with every day. He’s not sure it’s all that different to the darkness of every day he’s living right now.

“It’s not bad,” Frank shrugs. “It’s human to love your children beyond reason, and it’s human to want things that are the exact opposite of what’s good for you.”

Eddie squeezes his knees until his hands, trapped in the middle, start going a little numb. What’s good for Chris is being where he deserves to be. Safe and comfortable, with his new friends, and his new pool, and his grandfather teaching him chess, and Eddie—he’s only going to encroach a little. Watch from a slightly lesser distance, just enough to survive.

“But when I lost the leg,” Frank says, and Eddie’s stomach quivers then falls, “I didn’t want to be anything at all.”

Eddie is hopelessly, sinkingly familiar with that feeling.

“And my parents,” Frank continues, “and my sister, even my sister-in-law - they didn’t let me do that. I wanted to lie down and fade away, and they said no.”

Except Eddie wants–

He doesn’t, really. He’d been trying to practice wanting things, before, and then the wanting got the best of him.

“Christopher wants to stay,” he says. “And I just—I’ll miss him growing up if I don’t go. It’s the only option.”

Frank nods. Eddie feels like he should thank him, or something, for speedrunning his entire life’s story that may or may not be real, even if Eddie’s going to try his damndest to ignore every implication he doesn’t like.

But then—

“What would you prefer?”

“What would I prefer?” Eddie repeats, and he’s not sure he’s ever been so afraid of a single word. Prefer. As if.

“In a hypothetical world where no one can be hurt by anything you do,” Frank says, gutting Eddie like a stupid little fish without so much moving a muscle, “and you can have it work out the way it would if none of this was complicated. You’re allowed to think about a world like that.”

Eddie knows Frank doesn’t actually need him to answer out loud, and he’s never been more glad, because it’s enough to close his eyes for a second, and then he knows exactly what that would look like. The perfect world: Chris, here, and Eddie by his side, with their family, in their home. He’s imagined it over and over, but he’s also proficient in lying to himself.

It doesn’t matter. What he would prefer goes on the same pile as the things fourteen-year-old Eddie was somehow brave enough to want, if only for a second.

“I’m not sure what your point was,” he says instead, just to rile Frank up one last time.

Frank leans back. “Oh, I probably lost it along the way,” he smiles, and Eddie doesn’t buy it for a second. “Think of it as a parting gift. Some of my sage wisdom.”

I’ll miss you, Eddie thinks, but he stops it from coming out of his mouth. It’d be the first domino, the first of his LA lasts set in stone, and Frank would say something like it’s been an honor with that benevolent tilt to his head, and then Eddie would have to start thinking about how much lighter he always feels for being able to tell these things to someone who seems to understand how he ticks even at his most idiotic, and then the finality, the impossibility of it all would hit him on the drive home and he’d have to pull over and breathe and remember that this is a good thing he’s doing—

And what he’d prefer doesn’t matter, anyway.