Cold Water

The Affirmation

"You need to talk to him, Declan," Ant murmured after they had sat in their own thoughts for a little too long. Dec couldn't convince himself to lift his head from the other man's shoulder, in the midst of persuading himself that he could stay there forever without ever having to confront Stephen.

"What about the show?" he asked, trying not to let that fear seep into his voice. Not that Ant needed an audible cue to figure him out. Not for the first time in their long friendship, Dec wished that he was just a little harder to read.

"It will be worse if you haven't talked before then," Ant said practically, his voice ducking down reluctantly as if he didn't want to carry on. "You know Steve will struggle if he's thinking about all this. It gets to him, not knowing where he stands with people. And he's already going to be nervous enough in front of a crowd this big."

In between his preoccupation, Dec had noticed Stephen's frequent scans of the seating in front of the stage that morning. He'd watched the younger man purse his lips, eyes flashing with an anxiety that was entirely unwarranted. They all knew he could talk in front of far bigger audiences; BGT had proven that the year before. He knew Ant was right though – Stephen was already worried enough about successfully completing his own parts of the show; he didn't need to be worked up about Dec at the same time.

"When the two of you talked about your flashbacks, did you tell him everything?" he asked eventually, feeling Ant's chin rest in his hair and knowing intuitively that he was frowning. He continued before the other man could ask him what he meant. "Did you hold anything back?"

"I – don't know," Ant said thoughtfully before letting out a slightly bitter laugh. "I gave him a panic attack and a flashback in the process though so if you're worried about doing a worse job than I did, you're probably going to be fine."

Dec felt his brow furrow, closing his eyes as he pressed closer to Ant's side. He ached to drag out some of the self-blame he heard in that answer, simultaneously terrified of putting Stephen through exactly the same ordeal. "Don't, Anth. You didn't do anything wrong."

"I didn't know how to stop talking, once I started," the younger man admitted quietly, "I could see him struggling to keep his own thoughts at bay but I couldn't keep mine in either. That's how it happened."

They hadn't talked a lot about what had happened before Ant had phoned Dec that day. It hadn't been Dec's priority when he'd shown up to find Stephen hyperventilating and Ant approaching a similar state. And after that, it had seemed easier not to dwell on it. Ant and Stephen had talked a little. Stephen had blamed himself far too much. But then they'd got back on track.

Dec wondered if Ant had worried about irreparably damaging his friendship with Stephen before having that first, difficult conversation. He wondered if Ant imagined a hundred ways it could go wrong or if that was just the way his own catastrophising brain tended to work.

"Decs," Ant prompted patiently. The hand wrapped around Dec's upper arm loosened, lifting to card through his hair lightly then dropping to skim the shell of his ear. A silent gesture but one that said a thousand things at once to Dec. Talk to me. Stop keeping everything inside. Say whatever you need to say.

"I don't want to lose him," Dec murmured suddenly, his voice cutting out on the final few syllables although he knew Ant heard him. He thought of his nightmare again, of the all-consuming fear that he'd had to contend with until a photo on his phone reassured him that Stephen was okay. It all came back to losing Stephen in the end – an irrational fear, maybe, but one that had taken root since the accident and never quite went away.

"You're not going to lose him by talking to him, pet," Ant reassured him unwaveringly. Beneath that was something more complicated – shared trauma that they didn't have the time or energy to unpack. The accident had made both of them realise that they'd nearly lost one of their best friends; once that idea escaped into the open, it was hard to get it back in a box.