Art by me. Thinking about coloring it in but can decide if I want to use watercolor or pencil. Hmm…. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. Happy Monday peeps
Pairing: Tom Holland x Harrison Osterfield x Reader
Summary: ( ITALICS ARE A FLASHBACK ) The truth comes out
Warnings: Swearing, small mentions of injuries, much sadness lol
A/N: HERE IT IS HOES! One of the final chapters that tells all!! This is by far one of my favorite chapters I’ve written! Thanks again for reading and don’t forgot to hmu with an ask to be added to my tag list!
The hospital bed was warm, soft and more comfortable than any other bed you’d ever been in. Some kind of music played quietly on the TV in the room and you opened your eyes quicker than you should’ve. The back of your head was pounding, your neck cracking just as you turned to see the people in the room. There were cords and wires attached to your arm and every move you made was painful. It wasn’t fair that you had to be in this much pain in such a comfortable bed.
You caught icy blue eyes staring at you as you tried to sit up, only to be told by the nurse next to you to relax and stay laying. Those blue eyes were now looking over at a small brunette girl who was also staring at you. Harrison and Charlotte. You scanned the rest of the room to see one more person, sitting next to your bed on the right. Tom. Harrison’s friend. He looked almost as bed as you felt, with some bruises on the side of his head and a couple gashes on his cheek. His arm was in a cast and even though you wondered what happened you also wondered what he was doing here. You were never close with Tom, but maybe he knew that Harrison was close with you and wanted to show support? You really weren’t sure. Everyone in the room except maybe the nurse, all looked like they had been crying as if you just died and came back to life. Maybe you did. You weren’t sure of what happened at all, you weren’t sure why you were even in a hospital bed surrounded by the only few people in your life who seem to care about you. Suddenly you felt this overwhelming sadness in your chest, and you wanted to cry. Knowing that your dad had left years ago, was hard enough. But your mom? She was crazy and although you tried to give her the benefit of the doubt for having a hard time with her mental illness, it still didn’t change the fact that she never tried to be better or at least be there for you. She probably didn’t even know where you were. All these thoughts and memories were slowly coming back and you started to cry. Harrison looked over at Tom before placing his hand in yours. He squeezed your fingers and said something along the lines of “Everything is okay.” But everything was muffled and you could barely hear him. You could barely hear yourself think. It felt like there was a bomb in your head about to go off. But you knew you had to start thinking straight when the nurse sat down in front of Tom and started talking to you, asking questions.
“Hi sweetie, my name is Melissa. Do you remember what happened?” You didn’t even bother to wipe away your tears. You shook your head, because you truly didn’t remember.
“What’s your name?”
“Y/n.” You did remember that part of yourself thankfully.
“You know everyone in this room right?” You nodded your head yes.
“Do you know the date?” You tried hard to remember the last time you looked at the date on your phone, or even the last time you looked at the calendar hanging on your wall in your room. You were going to guess when the nurse said, “If you don’t know the exact day that’s okay. Just tell me a year.” That was nice of her. You really didn’t know what day or month it was, so you answered with the year. That was easy.
“2011.” You may not know the day or month but you knew the year. It was the end of your sophomore year and you were more excited than ever. It was stupid but being an upperclassmen meant more privileges and as much as you hated school, you enjoyed being there more than being at home. But as you confidently spoke the numbers of the year the nurse looked over to Harrison, sadness and guilt in her eyes. Tom got up, and basically ran out of the room. Melissa got up too and walked over to the other side of the room. Nothing made sense and you just watched as everyone started to cry. You had so many questions but no energy to ask them. Melissa came back over to you with a calendar in her hands.
“This might be a little hard to understand but I need you to look at this, maybe it will help you.” The kind nurse gave you the small calendar as if looking at the date would bring back your memories. Your jaw dropped to the floor as you read the top of the page which said 2014. Everything in the room was spinning now and you hoped this was all some kind of sick prank being pulled but as you stared at the calendar, you heard the cries of Harrison and Charlotte and you knew this was going to be the beginning of something terrifying.
—
“I wanted to keep you safe. I was selfish.” Harrison said weakly as you blinked away tears. Your whole world, everything you knew was just flipped upside down. It was like you were in the hospital all over again, struggling to fathom what was happening. Harrison waited this long to explain everything to you, to tell you the whole truth. All the questions you had were answered and now you regretted even asking them. At first you didn’t even believe him, just like you didn’t believe Tom. But when he brought out old pictures that he had been hiding away in his room, everything made sense. The fact that Haz kept the pictures is what bothered you most though. When was he planning on ever telling you all this?
That Tom and you were an item your junior year. That the actions you used to combat the struggles you faced at home, were sometimes illegal and harmful. The timeline was completely and totally different than what you had known, than what Harrison had told you when you woke up in that hospital bed. He lied to you, just to keep you “safe.” You had already forgotten almost two years of your life as a teen and Harrison thought it would be a good idea to make up everything you forgotten with things that you’d want to hear. A fairytale almost. Maybe the idea was nice but it wasn’t at all realistic. Now you had to reprocess it all again but this time, with the truth.
Why did Tom come onto you so quickly when he started staying with Haz? Because he had been in love with you since Junior year and you loved him back, before the accident. He missed you and he had to pretend since high school graduation which was four fucking years ago, he didn’t love you. All because Harrison told him to. And your odd attraction to Tom even though you barely knew him; That was because you did know him. You loved him and now you wished you could remember loving him. Harrison told you that the car accident was all because Tom told you to run away with him. You must’ve loved him quite a bit to want to run away in the middle of senior year. The pictures Harrison showed you were just even more proof of that love you had for him.
And Tom’s bad fuckboy behavior? Apparently he never used to be that way. It was you. During high school, home life was hard and you turned to all the wrong things to relieve your stress and according to Harrison you dragged Tom into it all. After the accident though Tom went into a depression and coped with it the way you taught him to. This was supposedly another reason Haz didn’t want to tell you anything, because he didn’t want you feel guilty for bringing Tom into your issues. He knew you’d blame yourself for the accident even if you knew that Tom was the one driving. But none of it mattered now. You didn’t even know what to say or do, so you just stood there in front of Harrison and cried.
Oh Hi, I’m here again!! Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend. I tried to mentally prepare myself for sharing today way back on Wed night when I had a marvelous meltdown…and it appears to have worked bc here I am! Hooray!
Also, I wrote this morning…words appear to still be pouring out of this brain into this new fic so *shrugs* let’s keep going…
**I AM POSTING QUICKLY WHILE MY BRAIN APPEARS TO BE COOPERATING, I WILL RESPOND TO ALL OF YOUR AMAZING POSTS LATER TONIGHT!**
So I mentioned I always write with music (I always *everything* all day long with music) so I’m going to share the song I’m writing this scene to…it feels like cheating! Bc I’m kinda telling you what vibes you should be getting from this piece of writing when ideally the writing should speak for itself…but well, you can skip it if you want .
So this is from the same fic I shared on Wed, (sad Baz back in London)…but this scene is…sexier? This is literally from this morning so…obvs, very WIP.
******
BAZ
I can hear his footsteps behind me. “Hey!” he shouts, and it’s a demand.
I turn slowly to him, steeling my face, hands in my pockets.
“Snow.”
I take him in for a moment before he shakes his head at me. “You’re scared.” It’s accusatory. His jaw is locked, eyes bright.
“Scared?” I attempt a look of sneering indifference.
“Scared.” He lets the word fall, heavy from his lips as he takes a step toward me. “Do I frighten you, Baz?”
That goddamned jaw. I want to grab him there. Hold him in place, bite him, taste him (I still know the way he tastes), keep him.
“Do you…frighten me?” I take a slow predatory step toward him.
“It’s ok to admit it, Baz.” He’s not being soft, he’s challenging me.
I take another step. I can meet a challenge.
“I’m scared of nothing.” Can he feel the lie? I step closer still. The air between us is thick, heady.
I watch the muscles in his neck, the bob of his throat as he swallows. The twisting of tendons in his forearms. He’s a taut line…can I make him snap? Explode? Come undone? He’s so beautiful when he comes undone.
“Do you really want to do this right now, Simon? Hmm? You want to keep pushing me to do bad things to you?”
“Bad things?” His eyes are on my mouth as he steps closer.
“Horrible,” I whisper, and he’s close enough to feel my breath on his lips. I’m vibrating with the tension.
Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.
Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. (…) Harrington explainedwhat she was told about the cause of her child’s death.
“Nobody could tell me. They just said it’s a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn’t sit well with my scientific brain.”
Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.
"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault,” she said.
(…) As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.
TW: discussion of sudden and sleep-related infant death
I am extremely concerned that the above reblog cuts out (without even indicating the cut with an elipses) a VITAL paragraph when quoting the article.
After the paragraph about preventing SIDS through various precautions, it should read “While safe sleep practices are still important for protecting infants, many children whose parents took every precaution still died from SIDS. These parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.”
Without this paragraph, the text as widely spread on Tumblr (where following through to the original article is low) implies that precautions such as laying baby on their back, keeping toys out of cribs, and temperature regulation are not important. This is an extremely dangerous take to spread uncritically.
While this part of my professional life isn’t something I go into online, my line of work is such that–over my lifetime–I have held and washed far, far more dead children than living. Some have been SIDS deaths, some ultimately found to be related to other previously undiagnosed congenital issue, but in the overwhelming majority of the cases I’ve seen, suffocation due to an unsafe sleep environment was the sole cause or at minimum a major contributing factor of death. Infants with faces pressed against a stuffed animal or fold in a blanket, infants who fell off an adult bed or sleeping caregiver and become wedged, infants unintentionally smothered by a sleeping or incapacitated adult’s body weight, infants laid down on an adult pillow, and on and on and on and on. In almost all these cases the adults thought they were being safe, because they had done the same thing without incident for most of the child’s life or with previous children. That’s why Safe to Sleep programs are so important.
If people walk away from the news of this enzyme discovery thinking that internal biochemical factors are solely to blame for sleep related deaths in infants rather than an explanation for why some infants die even if all recomended precautions have been taken, the infant mortality rate will not improve, and families will continue to suffer preventable tragedies.
