Here's the second part to my previous Ian Gillan story, as requested by EAKitty. I hope you enjoy, my love!
--☆--
When you awoke the following morning, you still had a skull-splitting headache from the previous night. As soon as you'd managed to drag yourself home, you'd collapsed straight into bed and, quite literally, cried yourself to sleep. The incessant throbbing served as a ceaseless reminder of the heartbreak you'd had to endure the night before. Not even for a second would you be able to forget it. Even your dreams had been cracked by it. Your subconscious had plagued you with ruthless images of Ian towering above you, laughing demonically as you fell further and further away from him, all the way to the darkness of the centre of your Earth, all alone.
Your nightmares pushed you to toss and turn all night long, the sheets entwining around your body, ensconcing you in the most comfortable of damning tombs.
You wanted nothing more than to spend the day in bed and allow the crispness of your old white sheets to cradle you into eternity. Unfortunately, the dawning of the sun was an excruciating reminder that you had to force yourself to go about that tricky business known as life. Breakfast, brushing of teeth, pulling freshly laundered clothes over damp skin, dashing around for keys.
Only now you had to add some unfortunate steps to your hard-learned routine. Concealing the heaviness of your eyes with slicks of make-up, swiping used tissues into the bin, sadly stopping in the hallway to hide your favourite picture of Ian and you from the shelf by your coat rack.
Your day was a befuddled mess of laborious work and numerous mistakes that you could have easily avoided. When you were lightly reprimanded before leaving, you had to duck into the bathroom to dab at your tear-stung eyes. One glance in the circular gilt mirror confirmed that your unforeseen waterworks had revealed the leftover fragments of last night on your face, and you slipped out of the building with your head hung low and lips sealed against any attempts at friendly conversation.
All you wanted was to go to bed. As you finally slid out of the unpredicted, though fitting, thick rainstorm into your tiny bottom floor flat and grappled for the light switch with bleary eyes, you scanned the shelf by the coat rack for the comforting glint of Ian's grin. Oh... You'd forgotten that you'd put that picture away. You couldn't even have that anymore.
Dejectedly, you shuffled through the grossly familiar rooms, going through the motions of the day's end so you could succumb to the mercy of your bed before the sun had finished setting. But just as you were about to turn off the last of the lights and finally fall into the welcoming embrace of sleep, a knock came at the door.
Instantly, you were ready to ignore it. You were already dressed for bed, and whoever it was wasn't to know that you weren't extremely busy. Or in the chokehold of a depressed snooze. However, the visitor was insistent. And unignorably curt. Their knocks came in aggressive bursts, quick, sharp taps that echoed around the dark room of your flat like swarms of wasps.
After deliberating in the doorway of your bedroom for several moments more, you finally plucked up the motivation to plod down the hall in your slippers and answer it. After all, you certainly wouldn't want to be stuck on a doorstep in the middle of a storm like that one.
Slowly, you pulled open the door just a crack, so you could peek out and see who it was. With plenty of surprise, you met the startlingly green eyes of her. For a moment, you stood there in the inch gap of the opened door staring at her as though you had so much to say but not the voice with which to vocalise it, and she watched your corpse-like figure with down-turned lips and a hard glint in her eye.
It was clear she had walked there. Her luscious hair was soaked and plastered to her skull, clothes so drenched they were almost translucent beneath her unbuttoned coat and the soft, smooth skin of her hands trembling and blue.
She said your name first, not unkindly. The chirping sound of her voice was enough to pull you from the cavernous halls of your mind which were, at that moment, filled with doorways that opened onto snapshots of each passing second from the previous night, and you stumbled awkwardly through the pleasantries of inviting her in out of the rain.
She knew. You were sure of it. Ian had taken her home, explained every little detail, laughed it off over a whiskey and sent her over to say his final goodbyes. He couldn't even muster the respect to give you them in person. Of course, if you were thinking rationally, you would know that Ian would never treat you like that, even if he had loved your company the previous night and couldn't bear to look at you today. Not that that was true, either.
"Thank you," she said as you closed the door behind her. Immediately, she hung up her coat, and you almost sighed out rudely at the realisation that she clearly planned on staying a while. As she retracted back from your coat rack, you noticed her scanning the photographs on the shelf. You with your parents, you with your friends on holiday, you with Ritchie and Jon at a long-ago party.
She'd been at your house before. Hung up her coat before. Scanned those photographs hundreds of times, even gleefully commented on them during her first visit. She spotted it instantly. "Where's the picture of -"
Her voice was so quiet, like she was just thinking out loud, and you took the opportunity to bustle past her and loudly ask, "Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?" You made your way through the dimness to the kitchen, where you switched on the light and busied yourself filling the kettle.
"No, I -" she'd followed you into the kitchen and, upon seeing the unfortunate state of you under the harsh artificial lights, froze for a moment.
You hadn't had to look in the mirror that morning to know you looked a state. In fact, you'd avoided it for just that reason. No mirror could have been more honest with you than yourself. No gleaming reflection could show you the heaviness of the dark bags beneath your eyes more honestly than the painting your mind had composed or as precisely depict the tangled knots and uneven tufts of hair that pricked up about your head like a twisted halo held together by rainclouds and the darkest shadows of night, or justly show the ghostly pallor of your thinly stretched skin.
Acutely aware of her wide-eyed stare, you turned your face away from her and busied yourself making two cups of tea, blissfully unaware of her turning down your previous request. For a moment, a horrible silence blanketed your small kitchen, pierced only momentarily when you placed the kettle on the countertop too harshly.
You couldn't bear to look at her, let alone listen to what she had to say. Whatever it was, you knew it was bad news. You were sure you were never going to see Ian again.
When you turned, the kettle held tightly in your hands, she had sat herself down by your small table, her handbag placed delicately between her Mary-Janes. Avoiding her eye and shouldering the awkward silence, you turned once more to retrieve the cups before sitting opposite her. While pouring the tea, you risked a glance towards her.
With some surprise, you noticed that she was avoiding your gaze too. In fact, she looked almost as anxious as you. Her eyes were focused on her fidgeting hands, her fingers restlessly playing with each other. Her hair, still wet from the rain, accentuated the shape of her head and fell in front of her face in thick, mysterious curtains.
With the tea poured, you sat back in your seat and stared at the crown of her head. Although there was non way she couldn't be aware of your gaze, she made no move to meet it. In fact, when she started talking, she was addressing her hands.
"Y/N," she began, sighing greatly after uttering your name. "I... I need to ask you something." She swallowed loudly but didn't continue straight away. Now unsure of where she was going to lead this conversation, you remained silent.
"Have you and Ian.. Has he ever..." She was looking at you now, searching your eyes for a reaction, but your attention only seemed to make her situation worse. Until...
"Have you and Ian ever slept together?"
For a moment, you sat there in shock. Your slack-jawed expression, shrouded slightly by the sweet-smelling smoke of your still steaming mug of tea, managed to give her some solace. She watched with precise attentions as your eyebrows raised and your eyes enlarged, an almost imperceptible change to the passing eye but one that wasn't lost on her guarded gaze.
In turn, you watched her alert shoulders fall to a hunch and her lips vibrate with the sigh she enigmatically released. Relief.
As though you weren't already surprised enough, she started to laugh. A few short, harsh barks, but loaded with humour that was beyond your understanding. Almost in a state of shock, you sat there, hands clenched tightly around your otherwise untouched mug, watching her as though she was an animal in a zoo. Beautiful, strange and mysterious in a familiar way.
"I thought not," she finally explained as she settled one more, now addressing her own rejected mug. "But I had to ask." She glanced up at you, a quick test of your trust, before diverting her eyes back down again. "You see, Ian, he's been acting so strange since last night."
"Strange?" you questioned when she fell silent at the odd revelation, your voice thick and cracking after almost a day's lack of usage. To ease both your sore throat and the sizzling tension of the silence that followed your monosyllabic response, you finally took a sip of your tea. Already it was beginning to cool down. Lukewarm tea went down about as well as the conversation you were just about engaged in.
"Well..." she began gently. You could almost see an encyclopaedia of words flitting behind her eyes as she searched to find the right ones. Whatever it was she had to say, it was clearly troubling her, and had been for some time. This was far more than what had happened the previous night, your realised with damning certainty. This was a secret that she'd been clinging on to for some time, locked tightly behind her lips until this, her sacred confession. And you, sat there with wide eyes and trembling fingers, were her accidental priest.
"I never wanted to ask either of you, you see. Not that it would have been an issue," she rushed so as not to offend you seemingly, "Just curiosity. It felt rude to ask, though. But yesterday, when we got back, Ian - well, he -" she paused again, avoiding your eyes. "Oh, maybe it would be best if you came and saw for yourself."
With such a mysterious prelude, it didn't take much convincing for you to change, grab a coat and follow her out into the ceaseless rain. Fortunately, you'd had the good fore sense to pick up your car keys, partly due to the dancing shadows of gloom and rain but also because you wanted to know what had happened to Ian quickly.
The car ride to Ian's apartment was only around ten minutes, but it felt as though you sat there with her for centuries. Of course, she was charming company. But you were so nervous of what had happened to Ian, that time slowed.
The battering of the rain against the glass windscreen was like a muffled drumbeat, providing background noise as she attempted to fill you in on what had happened after you'd left the previous night. Apparently, Ian had gone back into the club and demanded they go home immediately. Leaving no room for argument, he'd taken her back to his house where he'd kissed her goodnight, tucked her into bed and bustled out of the room.
A few hours later, she was pulled out of her slumber by loud banging on the wall, accompanied by an indistinguishable shout from the neighbours. Still drowsy, she'd ignored it, until a crash came from the living room, followed by a series of smashes.
Beginning to wake, she rolled over to ask Ian what was going on, only to find that Ian wasn't beside her. Now alert, she'd put two and two together, pulled on her dressing gown and made her way to the living room.
She was met with a dark room, illuminated only by the lamp on the side table. She'd tried to switch the overhead light on but, when nothing happened, she looked up to find the bulb half-smashed, hanging off the fixture like a loose tooth. Further inspection found the light shade, cracked and lying on its side.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Because, around the fracture lampshade, the furniture of Ian's living room was spread around the space, splintered, broken, in pieces. The sofas were upturned, glass statuettes smashed into glittering shards, bookcase teetering on only three legs with its contents scattered all around the floor, the TV leaning against the wall with a hole through the screen.
Everything that had once stood proud in Ian's living room, specially chosen pieces meant to express his soul, lay in bits around the room. The place looked like a demolition site. Perhaps she would have mistaken it for the scene of a crime if it weren't for three vital things that she'd spotted in quick succession as she scanned the bomb-struck room with Ian's name dying on her lips: the lamp and the coffee table on which it stood remained untouched, the record player and the multiple cases of records had been pushed into a corner out of harm's way and - this she spotted in abrupt shock - Ian was sprawled against the wall, sitting almost directly opposite her from where she had stopped in the doorway, but so immobile and away from the accusing glare of the lamp that she'd almost missed him.
"He'd obviously put me to bed and carried right on drinking," she said as you turned onto Ian's street. "Thank God the liquor cabinet's in the hallway. He wouldn't speak to me, not even when I shouted, but I knew he was awake. The only move he made was when I tried to take the damn whiskey from him. Wouldn't let me even touch the bottle. I ended up leaving him where he was and going back to bed. For all I know, he's still there. He'd fallen asleep by the time I left for work this morning, and I came straight to you once I finished."
The end of her story tied in neatly with the end of your journey, and you pulled in behind Ian's car just as she finished talking. This you were immensely glad of - you had little desire to engage in conversation about the subject. You didn't believe that Ian, your Ian, was capable of behaving so madly. So aggressively. He rarely got angry with you, and even less so with her.
She rushed you inside, barely speaking now that you knew what had happened. Neither of you stopped to take off your shoes or coats, although they were sodden - she just pushed you to the living room door.
With your hand on the handle, feeling the slight grooves of Ian's strong grip and the sharp coldness of untouched metal against your clammy skin, you took a deep breath. Then, you pushed open the door.
Slowly, inch by inch, a disaster was revealed to you. And she had been in no way exaggerating. All of Ian's treasured belongings, from the trinkets he'd gathered on tour to the books he proudly clustered, the sofa you'd spent many a hungover morning on to the coffee table stained with mug rings and ink were scattered around the room like the victims of an air raid. Everything besides the table and its lamp, the record player and its records and Ian, slumped against the wall with his head and hair hung low looking like a hollowed-out man.
The entire scene broke your heart. The curtains were still drawn, and the fading lamplight gave the room a glow of eeriness. As though you were a police constable who had got there too late. The stillness and the silence only added to your tremoring nerves.
You took a step into the room, and immediately glass crunched under your feet. Not the comforting sound of fallen leaves in autumn, but the noise of a pub brawl in the darkness. As though you'd received an electric shock, you pulled your foot up immediately. You couldn't even tell whether you'd stepped on a shattered bulb or one of Ian's beloved ornaments.
You were so shocked by the state of the room you knew so well that you didn't hear her step into the room behind you. "He was saying your name." She materialised at your elbow, staring over at Ian with a surprising mix of empathy and irritation that didn't sit right on her soft features. "That's why I thought..." She didn't finish her sentence. Instead, she went over to Ian, a move you were too nervous to make.
She knelt by him but didn't reach out to him, only said his name several times, loud enough for you to hear from across the room. When that didn't stir him, she said, "Ian, Y/N's here to see you."
That, however, struck a chord within him. You heard him mumble your name, then watched him perk up in slow motion. First, his hands, his right unclenching from the fist it had been trapped in and his left releasing the whiskey bottle to rise, trembling, to his face beneath the barrier of his thick hair, which he wiped furiously with his palms. Then, his hair, which he used his hands to push back from his face before raising his head. Finally, his body, which he pushed further up the wall into a seat, his bones cracking as he situated himself.
If you looked awful, poor Ian looked almost dead. His bloodshot eyes were ringed with heavy, deep black circles, his paled face damp from what looked like sweat and tears, and you noticed there was dried blood caked on his hands.
Instantly, he was looking for you. When he found you, he repeated your name more cheerfully and made to get up. But, with a firm hand on his arm, she stopped the unwise movement, and his glazed eyes rolled to her as though he'd just realised that she was there. "Oh," he said, somewhat carelessly, and she just watched him for a moment more as he dodged her gaze and pretended to focus on fruitlessly wiping the dried blood from his hands. She glanced to you, then looked back at Ian once more.
The silence was awkward and deafening. But the noise that broke it mere moments later was the soft sound of the quick kiss she pressed against his forehead before standing up and turning to you. "I should go. Leave you two alone."
Her eyes were glossy, shining like beacons in the reflective glow of the light. For a moment, it took away the sparkle you had always resented. Yesterday, you had hated her. Now, you could almost love her yourself.
"No, don't, you can.." You didn't know what you were going to say to her. Something to comfort her, perhaps give her a reason to stay.
But she smiled sadly and shook her head as she walked over to you. "It's okay," she said gently, laying a soft hand on your arm. "That's life."
You could tell she loved him. From the way she looked at him even after he'd committed such a heinous, out-of-character act. From the way she'd held his head while she kissed him. From the way she was willing to let him be happy without her. And you felt so sad for her, because she was truly lovely. Far more deserving of the king of a castle than the prince of a dressing room. Unfortunately, in this state, Ian was suited to be neither.
"Take care of each other," she patted your arm gently, then made a swift exit without so much as a glance back.
Only when the front door slammed did Ian look up again, a smile unbefitting to the situation gracing his face. Upon seeing your expression, it slipped from his face quickly. "Y/N?"
You ignored him and broke your gaze to step carefully through the splintered pieces that decorated your memories and open the curtains of the front windows. Ian groaned, slowly lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the meagre light of the burgeoning twilight. The rain was still going, pelting the pavement with hatred, and you watched her retreating back somewhat guiltily.
When she turned the corner, you turned back to face Ian. He'd removed his hand from his face, and was now struggling to sit himself up more, possibly preparing to stand up once more. "Ian, no," you chided quietly, taking a tentative step towards him. Hearing your voice at last, he stilled instantly and looked at you sheepishly.
His face dropped as he saw you in the light. "Y/N... you look... God, are you okay?! You look... well, you look terrible."
Disbelievingly, you couldn't help but laugh at his diffident admittance. "Me?!" you exclaimed. "You should see you." He grinned again, a more welcome expression this time, and shrugged slightly. "What a pair we are," he said fondly.
You'd reverted back to your usual camaraderie so suddenly it was like slipping on ice. But you couldn't simply let everything that had happened go just like that.
"Ian, look what you've done." You gestured around you uselessly, and once to the window through which you'd just watched her walk away. "What happened? What's wrong?"
He looked around the room forlornly, like a child scanning the bedroom he hadn't cleaned. "I never liked this room anyway," he said, trying to lighten the atmosphere of the room. When your raised eyebrows told him he hadn't succeeded, he sighed.
"I'm sorry," he said, fighting the urge to address his hands as he looked at you, outlined like an angel by the rain-shadowed twilight through the window. "Sorry for everything. Last night I - I don't know what I was thinking. I thought I'd never see you again, that I'd ruined everything, I couldn't help it. There was whiskey in the cupboard, I couldn't stop. I got so drunk... and so angry. I was so bloody angry at myself. I blacked out. I didn't even now... I don't really remember doing it, I didn't know what I was doing. I woke up this morning with the bloody worst hangover and... I'm sorry Y/N. I couldn't not see you again."
With your heart aching for him, you picked your way through the room to sit by him. Ian wasn't an angry man, that you were sure of. However, he was an expressive one. He wasn't shy in expressing his emotions. Fortunately, he'd managed to express the anger at himself in an unharmful, though unhelpful, way. Furniture, ornaments, books - these things could be replaced. But he now knew that you, on the other hand, could not be.
Finding a comfortable seat beside him, you took his hand gently, the way you'd seen her do many times, only slightly different. Your thumb stroked the bone of his pointer finger tenderly in a way he didn't know he enjoyed until that moment, his palm lay sideways against yours with his fingers clutching onto the back of your hand with a warm, tight grip that you'd never had the spine-tingling pleasure of experiencing before, and you both held on tighter than ever before.
He looked at you, down to your intertwined hands, and back up to your face, his bleary eyes still managing to glisten in the weak light. "We can try, can't we? You and me? Can we try?"
You were silent for a moment, watching the cracked glass face of the clock on the wall count the seconds of silence within the ghostly reflection of the now lamp-lit twilight outside and thinking about her retreating back through the window into the darkness.
Amends would have to be made. And discussions would have to be had. It certainly wouldn't be smooth sailing.
Eventually, you nodded. "We can try."
--☆--
Up next is a request for Jeff Buckley, one of my personal favourite artists. Keep your eyes on those notifications, my loves!