Fandom: Linkin Park

Pairing: Sam/Chester, written from Phoenix’s point of view

Title: Damaged Shadow

Category: Angst

Rating: R, for imagery

Status: Standalone

Summary: ‘It was your eyes that made me fall in love with you.’ How do you eulogise the one thing you’ve learnt you can never replace?

Author's Notes: Okay, so no whining. I'm warning you right now that this is a death fic, and yes, it's another emotional wringer. Bring your Kleenex or equivalent along with. No refunds...

Damaged Shadow

It was your eyes that made me fall in love with you.

No. Perhaps that’s not where this should begin.

I always thought that I knew myself. I understood myself. I was sure of myself. Nothing could change that. Nothing. And then you came along. Your sharp wit, your laugh. You and your boyish charm invaded my world and turned it on its head. You and your smile, and the way your eyes were so expressive. All your emotions poured from your eyes. When you forced your easy smile, your eyes retained that melancholy that was so characteristic. Even when you appeared physically fine, your eyes turned you into glass. Your eyes made you fragile, all the pain and hurt in the world glittering in their tragic depths.

I honestly didn’t think you’d last. I never imagined that you would slip so easily into our lives. Everything about you was so wildly different. You were married. You smoked. You smoked more than just tobacco. You drank too much, but you were fighting that. You had responsibilities that the rest of us couldn’t envisage. We were college kids. You? You were already a man.

I guess we didn’t bank on your determination to succeed. We didn’t bank on the courage you possessed, or on the support that your wife gave you. We had no comprehension of what you had been through and what spurred you on. Not one of us would ever have dreamed of doing what you did. Despite there being less than a year between us, you seemed so much older from the start. We had a lot of catching up to do before we would be fit to call you our friend.

You. Everything you did was novel to us. We were loose acquaintances brought together by one thing. We didn’t really know one another, except as friends of at least one other person in the band. You didn’t even have that quasi-fraternal bond. You were outside, alone. But you were also impossible to exclude. We knew. Right from the moment we heard that demo, when you were recommended – we knew that here was something special. You blew us away. We’d struck gold. How could we possibly fail now?

You weren’t what we expected. I don’t know what we did expect, but what we got wasn’t it. Under-nourished, skinny, tattooed. You screamed punk in a way that we never would. All we would ever say in any remotely raised voice was ‘frat-boy’. But you stood apart and bellowed rock from the pit of your stomach. You pushed yourself to do things we had never dreamt of. Such was your determination when you first hit LA that you were sleeping in your car.

All of us – we were a mismatch of taste, style and sophistication. But you found you could relate to each of us in a different way. You were adaptable, and we learnt that we were as well. You taught us so much in the time that we knew you. Not least of all, you taught us the irrepressibility of the human spirit. Despite everything that rose before you, you managed to stay the course. You didn’t win every time, but at the very least, you finished. We couldn’t help but respect that. Too many times, our natural reaction would have been to give up, quit, return to day jobs. Nine till five. At least we would have been assured a steady income.

‘No,’ you declared with all your emphatic passion. Your eyes flashed black as anger rolled beneath the surface. You’d given up so much. You and Sam hadn’t had much back in Phoenix, but you’d been making something of yourself. You’d risked too much to give up. I do believe that without you, we’d have continued to mess around in Mike’s room, opening gigs for local bands, always envying them the limelight they had so effortlessly achieved.

Effortlessly.

We know the truth of ‘effortless’ and ‘overnight success’. We know how hard we worked. We know how shocked we were when the record kept selling. Rejection after rejection weighed on our minds and our hearts, but we knew that we had something.

We had you.

Even the people who didn’t like the cohesive whole that we were admired you. They admired that something as fragile looking as you could sing, scream, shout and throw itself about with the casual abandon that you did. They saw in you probably the same things that Sam always did: you were genuine, honest, funny, talented. You were you, and you weren’t ashamed of who that person was. You embraced everything about yourself. Or at least, you did in public.

You never let the crumbling walls of your sanity affect your public persona. Even when you were dying inside, you understood the commitment you had made when the band became globally recognised. As the travelling and the loneliness got to you, as you broke down slowly, it was only in your own company that you allowed the tears to fall. It was only when you were alone that you allowed the cracks to grow.

To begin with, we didn’t know you well enough, didn’t know enough about you to help or stop the onslaught. It was only as friendship became deeper – until friendship could be recognised as love and trust – that we knew what to watch for. Understand, initially we didn’t know that there was a problem with you drinking. We never stopped to consider that weed was a poor substitute for something stronger. We knew you had to be missing Sam, but there wasn’t anything we could do…

It was Sam who told us in the end. Sam told Mike, because Mike had taken on the role of spokesman for our concern. Mike told us. ‘He’s on The Wagon,’ he said, his voice fully justifying the capitals. Suddenly it was so obvious. How had we not noticed? What kind of friends were we?

As one, we were ashamed of ourselves. When Joe pointed out that as we hadn’t known there was nothing we could have done, it didn’t really make us feel any better. He made a good point, but it didn’t alleviate the guilt.

All the while we were in America, Sam came with us. She made all the difference to you. Being apart from her was crippling for you. You hadn’t been separated from her for any length of time since you’d been married. That first touring cycle, you were home for perhaps a week at most. It was draining for all of us, but a blow to you. I think we all learnt something that year. And you learnt that being on a different continent to the one thing that made life feel liveable was almost more than you could bear.

We all grew up and grew closer simultaneously. We learnt a lot about you, but then, you weren’t shy about talking about it. You felt you owed it to the kids still suffering. You owed it to yourself to do all that you could. There was light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

You had your flaws. No one’s perfect. That was your mantra. A little cliché for you, really, but you wore it well. No one’s perfect; shit happens; you just got to roll with it… You made us smile and laugh, and even when you were angry you tried to make sure you kept it quiet. Not one of us had the words to explain how much we looked up to you. We tried and we failed, but you still understood.

You were a walking paradox. On the one hand, you craved your privacy and your personal space. On the other, you couldn’t bear to be completely alone. You made jokes to take the edge off of loneliness. You wouldn’t stay on the bus with no one else there. The shadows frightened you, and you laughed at your own stupidity. Without Sam, you would insist that one of us at least share a room with you. Even if you didn’t talk, you needed the certainty that someone was in the room with you. No matter where we were in the world, you spent hours on your phone talking to your wife. Sam remained the only grasp you still had on the reality of your every day life.

You used to describe her as an angel. You always said that she was perfect, that you didn’t deserve her. Your devotion seeped from every pore, and your fans loved her as much as you did. How could they fail to respect her when she was clearly the centre of your spinning world?

We thought – always knew innately – that we would falter and fail eventually. We would have liked to pretend for a short while that we could have existed independently of your burning star. Each of us knew that it wasn’t true, but we didn’t mind. There should have been some burning malice, some ugly emotion, but the truth is that there wasn’t. There should have been resentment. You were the last member to join, and yet you usurped even Mike as the spokesman. But you were the light relief. Mike was too long-winded, too technical. When Mike got boring, you were the person still there to interject something stupid. Some atypical remark so characteristic of you. As for the rest of us, we were content to be ‘the band’. We were happy with our anonymity. Although perhaps not so immediately unrecognisable as many musicians, we were still largely untroubled by global fame.

You had quirks, the same insecurities as so many people. In myriad small ways, you tested us every day that we knew you. Sam explained this to us as well. Your wife explained so much about your character. You were an enigma, cloaked in mystery and intrigue. Every day revealed something new, and every time we thought that at long last we knew Chester, you revealed something more. Extravagance and excess were bywords for your lifestyle.

You revelled in the simplest things. Your guilty pleasures were few and innocent at that. Your car, your son, your friends, the warmth of the afternoon sun. Cold beer and trashy vampire novels. Your wife. At the end of it all and after everything else, your principle source of light was always Sam, because you knew that after everything else had faded, Sam would still be there with you. To the end of the world with you.

What happened to us, then? We had everything. Health, money, serenity. We existed on a plain with all the self-assurance of people who could do nothing wrong. It was Sam who told us again. Actually, this time Sam told me. She couldn’t tell Mike, she said. The love for Chester was too clear in his eyes. She said, ‘You know him best, Dave. Probably because, of all of you, you’re the most like him. He sees in you the person he could have been, if things had been different for him.’

I wondered briefly if perhaps she thought that I didn’t love him like Mike did, but one look at her dissolved my concern. ‘You care,’ she murmured, her heart breaking. ‘You love him as much as I do. I see that in you. I’m not blind. And so you should know. Perhaps you can tell the rest. You’ll have to learn to live without him. He won’t be here forever.’

She barely got the words out, her whispering voice breaking around each syllable that passed her lips. Her eyes gazed at me, and somewhere in their shimmering depths crystal tears welled and fell. I took her in my arms and held her against me. Her cheek pressed against my chest as she hugged me in response.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I murmured. She pulled back, licking her dry, damaged lips.

‘Tumour,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘In his brain. There’s nothing they can do. Too far along. All they can do is alleviate the pain.’

We added a new awareness fund to the growing list. The heart of Trinity Hospice Care is the team, a group of professionals who provide comfort and care to those individuals for whom a cure is no longer possible. Suddenly their work was invaluable to us.

We realised full force in record time just how invaluable you were as well. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you that I knew. None of us could. It’s impossibly difficult to look your friend in the eye and tell him you know he’s dying. I loved you too much, respected you too much.

‘You know,’ you said. Your eyes caught mine and wouldn’t let them go. You sat behind the wheel of your car. You were playing a game and wouldn’t let me out. And then the atmosphere changed. You sprang the question on me. I couldn’t lie to you.

‘I know,’ I whispered. You touched my arm gently. How was it that you were the one comforting me? And the look in your eyes summarised all the reasons I loved and respected you so much. Behind the film of tears, behind the layer of glass… behind it all was the resolute strength of personality that shone from you at all times, a beacon to warn others on their way.

The band was over, finished. You were irreplaceable, and you obviously couldn’t continue. Weeks rolled into months that became a year. You swore by the magic powers of weed. Sam told us that you were on enough medication to kill an elephant. In a way it was true. You were on medication to counteract the side effects of the pills and shots to alleviate the pain. You became even more emotionally charged, flicking between anger and tears in seconds. You lashed out at all of us, and at Sam who was there with you around the clock. Nothing, Chester, nothing could stop that woman from loving you with her whole being.

The only person completely spared was your son. You cherished every single moment that you could spend with him, and tried to keep as much of your illness from him as you could. Sam never let you out of her sight with him. She never really let you out of her sight at all. Unpaid and un-begrudging, she tended you night and day. When you lashed out at each of us, pushing us away – perhaps trying to stop us caring, to stop it hurting when you were finally gone for good – it was Sam who was always there.

When your increasingly erratic behaviour became too much for her to handle, Sam would spend time with us. Your mom came out to help her care for you, and when she needed time away from you, you mom was always there. It broke everyone’s hearts to see you, unaware of who you were or what day of the week it was. Sam would come to me with stories about you. I learnt so much about you in the last days of your life. Between her broken sobs, wracked with pain and broken beyond repair, she would relay the stories regarding how you met, every anniversary, her birthdays – all the little things you’d ever done that had lodged forever in her mind. As she talked, everything about you snapped into vivid focus. I felt your loss in the same way she did, and it hurt me more to see the dying man that I did when I saw you.

The last couple of months were the worst. You were admitted to hospital. Sam couldn’t do any more than she had. We all knew that. You knew that, but when she met your eyes all she saw was non-existent accusation. It broke her heart. She wanted you to be at home when the inevitable happened, but they didn’t have medication available to numb the pain. You were in no state to administer morphine, and she couldn’t. She was there with you day and night. She would call me at around midnight, when you had finally drifted into fitful sleep.

‘It’s not long, Phi,’ she’d say with a choked sob. ‘It can’t be. Keep the guys informed for me.’

One of us would go in every day to see her, take in the flowers that still arrived daily, the condolences that flooded from across the globe. It was amazing how many people had honestly found a place for you and for us in their hearts and in their minds. You told Sam you were scared, but never us. You told us to take care of her, that you were worried for her. We, in turn, told you that she would never want for anything.

They let you out for Christmas. By January, a minor complication had become a major one. You were rushed back into hospital on the first day of the New Year. I think we all knew that this was it. We knew that this time you weren’t coming back. I don’t think any of us expected you to deteriorate so quickly, however.

‘Dave?’ she whispered down the phone, and something in the quiet exhaustion told me before she said another word. ‘Dave, can you come pick me up?’

She sat in the passenger seat and glanced sidelong at me through the curtain of her hair. She was trying so hard to be strong, but none of it seemed to matter. She bit her lip as the threatening tears finally became too much and rolled ceaselessly down her face. She swiped at them angrily, and laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.

‘What now, Phi?’ she murmured. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close. I didn’t have the answers and didn’t know how to respond. I told Mike, and Mike told the guys. Together, as one, we mourned you. Each of us remembered something different. It was enlightening, to see you as each of us had done while you had still been with us.

And me? I’ll always remember your eyes, and the way that they made me fall in love with you…

FIN

© FyrMaiden: September 2004