FicWad

"What?" Patrick called hoarsely, falling out of bed and stumbling down the hallway in the dark. Pete met him in the doorway of the living room.
"Look at this!" He said, standing back so Patrick could go into the living room. Patrick walked in and waited.
"What, Pete?!" He asked quickly when Pete joined him.
"Look!" Pete said, gesturing to the floor. His bass guitar lay on the floor, the tuning pegs broken and the nut scratched and scribbled on.
"You woke me up to show me your broken bass?" Patrick groaned. "We can get you a new one."
He turned to go back to bed but Pete stopped him.
"Uh, Patrick..."
"What?" Patrick snapped, his exhaustion overcoming him.
"Look." Pete said quietly, grabbing Patrick's shoulders and gently turning him around. He was faced with Josh, crawling along the floor, extremely slowly but he was definitely crawling. He was getting frustrated, knly being able to move about five centimeters before toppling back over, only to desperately try again.
"Oh my God." Patrick whispered.
"He's crawling. And without any help!" Patrick said excitedly. Pete nodded with a grin.
"Uh, Pete? Why's he in here in the first place? He should be in bed." Patrick said, his tiredness vanishing as he walked over to Josh and bent down.
"You know what I'm like. I can never sleep. And he comforted me." Pete said, watching Patrick encourage Josh to crawl towards his outstretched arms, while Josh now decided to sit and look in the opposite direction.
"Sorry for making you panic." Pete said quietly, fiddling with his hands behind his back. Patrick waved the apology off.
"It was worth it for this."
Pete stood watching Patrick for a moment, and felt sadder every second that ticked by. He wasn't even sure if he wanted kids or not, but seeing Patrick playing his dream role made Pete think about his. All he really wanted was for someone to understand him, figure out how he felt without asking and knowing what he was thinking. Or being in love, basically. Was that so hard to ask for? Just to have someone to come home to when he returned. To know he had someone's unconditional love, despite what, or who the media portrayed him as. He was sure he had found that in Jenny. He'd been sure he'd found it in every girl apart from Jenny, except he had seen a future with Jenny. With the others, he couldn't. But, he decided he couldn't live a future with a woman who had the ability to jeopardize his trust, and most importantly, his friendship. He was just sick of being alone. And watching Patrick made him realize how alone he was. Even if Patrick didn't have a girlfriend, he would never be alone in his home. He always had a reminder of a relationship, which, granted, was messy and had basically diminished after Patrick reached breaking point. But he had his children, and Pete accepted that, without Jenny, there would be no sounds in the middle of the night as she breathed quietly beside him. No sound of her singing voice in the shower as Pete woke up in the morning. Nothing. Just he and himself in his home. That was the last thing Pete wanted, to be alone with his mind.
He had to do something.
Now, he wasn't the type of guy who wept every time he looked in the mirror, or to pity himself enough to sit on a hard bar stool every night until he was paralytic. He wasn't going to pick up any girl. Because he knew any girl could hurt him. He couldn't afford to be damaged anymore.

"You bought a /dog/?" Andy asked, his eyebrow raised as they watched Pete the next day.
"It's not a dog. He's a puppy." Pete replied proudly, picking him up.
"Same difference." Joe said, also watching Pete.
"So has he got a name, or is he just 'pup'?" Andy asked.
"He's called Hemingway." Pete said, with exactly the same tone Patrick used whenever he talked about Josh or Danielle.
"As in Ernest Hemingway? Or the town in Carolina?"
"Ernest Hemingway. I read his book again, the Green Hills of Africa, and I thought it would be a good name."
"You named your dog... after a writer..." Andy repeated slowly.
"Yep. Did you know he had a son called Patrick?"
"And we needed to know that, why?" Joe asked with a shrug.
"I dunno. But look, isn't he amazing?"
"What... is he? And don't say a puppy."
"He's an English bulldog." Pete told him, stroking him.
"He's... wrinkly." Joe said, prodding the small dog.
"Quit that!" Pete said. "Anyway, Patrick's kids were wrinkly when they were born."
"Hey!" Patrick said from the floor, where he was trying to help Josh crawl again. But it was as though Josh knew Patrick knew his secret, and was now trying to frantically deny it by sitting and bawling whenever Patrick encouraged him. Andy took Danielle out of the room, as he had been holding her, to stop her becoming upset and imitating her brother. The last thing they needed was three screaming noises.
"Well, it's true. Just 'cause he's a dog doesn't mean he's isn't as cool as Patrick's kids."
"Sure. But can your dog do this?" Patrick asked, stretching out his arms to Josh, who, right on time started to cry and ignore Patrick's soothing tones. Patrick shook his head.
"No, dude, I didn't mean that. Come on, you did it last night, you can do it again. There's no use pretending." He said over Josh's wails. Pete set Hemingway on the floor and as soon as he did, the dog began to howl to match Josh's pitch. Joe and Pete held their hand over their ears as they ached, and Patrick picked Josh up and rocked him to desperately stop his crying.
Pete stood back triumphantly.
"That's my boy."

"I've been feeling incredibly guilty, Amanda." Patrick said, a few nights later, sitting on the bar stool by his breakfast bar. Amanda was round at his house, and was cooking a meal for him to make up for his lack of cooking.
"Why's that?" She asked over preparing dinner. It would be the first properly cooked meal that would be prepared in Patrick's house. He couldn't cook, just bought bags of microwavable food and ordered take-out.
"I just read something last night, and it got me thinking. But I don't know if you'd feel comfortable discussing it."
"Go on, I'll never know unless you tell me." Amanda smiled.
"Alright, well... I read this book, and it had this paragraph in it..." Patrick said, pulling the book closer to him. He flipped it open to a bookmarked page, and began to read it out loud.
"When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing."
He looked up, as though expecting her to nod and understand what he was meaning, but she really had no clue what he was talking about it.
"And you're upset because... you've killed someone?" She asked, half joking, half confused.
"Sort of. Well, not in the literal sense. Metaphorically, yes."
"I don't understand." Amanda said, continuing to prepare dinner.
"OK, stop me if you don't wanna talk about it. But I told Christina, that's Josh and Danni's..."
"Oh so loving mother, yep." Amanda said, rolling her eyes. Not that he was talking about Christina, about what Christina had done to Patrick and their kids. She didn't understand how someone could do it. No one who knew Patrick's story did. But thankfully, that wasn't a lot of people.
"Yeah." Patrick said, his face flushing in case he'd offended her. "Well, she hadn't shown any affection or, interest in Danni and Josh. And she told me a few things I didn't know before, that just made me snap, and I basically cut her out of my life."
"So why do you regret it? Why did you do it in the first place?" Amanda asked reasonably. Her reply got Patrick thinking. Was it a spur or the moment decision or had he done something he had been meaning to do for a long time? And why was he beginning to feel bad about it if he'd felt so good before? Like he was taking a stand, once again for his children.
"I thought I was doing Danni and Josh a favor. I mean, their mom is crazy. She doesn't love them, and look at them! I just can't understand why no one could love a child. Especially your own."
"Some people are just like that, Patrick. It's fate - you can't help it. I mean you could try, but most of the time your efforts will be in vain."
Patrick nodded sadly, his heart silently breaking all over again with the thought of his kids and an absent mother that he had once planned a future with.

Later on, Patrick and Amanda had sat down to the dinner Amanda had prepared. It was by far superior than anything Patrick could even pretended he'd cooked. The best he would probably manage to top this was a microwavable macaroni cheese. At least he would have the knowledge to pick the 'for two' option.
"Alright, Patrick. I wanna tell you this before we get into anything."
"OK..." Patrick said slowly, his heat sinking. Was she ending it before it had even properly begun?
"I hope this won't change your opinion of me. Because if it does then this won't work."
"Alright..." Patrick said into the expectant silence. This was the time he would be able to tell whether she was living some sort of secret life, or was secretly married or something. Maybe something worse.
"I lost a baby once." Amanda said stunning Patrick into silence. Definitely worse than being secretly married.
Patrick couldn't bear to even think about the pain of losing a baby. To lose someone you'd worked so hard to bring into the world and provide for, all the emotions you'd gone through to stay sane, to all be thrown away by losing the one person you could love without a question. And again, Christina crept into his mind.
I guess maybe you can not love them... Patrick thought, the wonder of why Christina couldn't bring herself to love her children still eating away at him. But he pushed it out of his mind, tonight was about him and Amanda, and he'd wasted enough of his life thinking about Christina.
No, you do love them without question. She's just messed up.
"God, Amanda, I don't know what I can say..." He started, but Amanda shook her head.
"It's OK. I mean it's shaped my life completely, you know? But it's in the past, and I can't let it stop me from having the chance of being happy."
Despite the subject of conversation, Patrick couldn't help his chest feeling warm and his face flushing yet again as he met her gaze. She thought she had a chance of being happy with him. At least, he hoped she was meaning with him.
"In the past I usually waited to tell a guy that. You know, figure I could trust him and all that. But it just hurts more when they realize I think about the future, I nearly had a future, and it scares them off and once again, I'm the one left being hurt. So you should tell me now if that would be a problem between you and me."
Patrick liked her even more by the second. She thought about the future, and she practically wanted the same future as him.
"It wouldn't be a problem, at all." He replied, not dropping his focus on her bright eyes. "I have kids myself. That's usually a problem for guys who date."
"I was really attracted to you when I saw you with your kids. You're unlike other guys, Patrick. Not many could do what you do."
"Oh, they could. Some of them are just too cowardly. And some can't handle it, you know, that sort of stuff."
Amanda laughed slightly and cocked her head to one side, watching him.
"I like the fact all your future is just here." She replied. Patrick's heart sank, because he knew his future was made here, but it was etched all over the world in the form of his voice, his songs and his band.
"Amanda, I'll never be 'just here', I have to travel."
"This might sound... a little, um, quick. I mean, it is early days, but the way I feel about you know, I think I would travel the world over and over just to see you smile."
Patrick stopped eating and watched her, trying to read her expression on her face and in her eyes. Her face didn't flicker and she kept eye contact as he did the same.
"You're really serious, aren't you?" He asked, putting down his knife and fork.
"Yes. I really am." She replied, her voice steady and serious. "I realize that sounds a bit scary because it's so early, but I..." She stopped, trying to find the right words. "I can't explain it, but I really like you. And I think we could be something special."
"So do I." Patrick said, failing to hide the grin that appeared in his face at the sound of her words. He stopped.
"But... what about my kids? That's a huge thing."
"Patrick, I absolutely adore your kids. Because the way I feel now, anything that holds a place that close in your heart, holds it in mine too. And because I know how you can love a child like the way you love Josh and Danni. I genuinely care for them."
"Does it not scare you?"
"If you let me in, you won't be hurt or disappointed. I would love to see them live a happy life. And, forgive me if I'm jumping in, but if that means they live a happy life with me in their life, I have no problems about that. It would make me extremely happy."
Patrick again searched her eyes. So many times he'd done the same to Christina, and so far he'd seen no signs of lying or fake promises, like so many times he'd seen Christina break eye contact, or not form any at all.
Amanda was serious.
She was really serious.
Maybe his kids would grow up with a mother. Not their biological one, but Amanda genuinely seemed to have a keen interest in them.
Maybe he would finally have the relationship he thought he'd had with Christina.
Maybe he was falling in love again.