Brother (Petekey)

Keep Me Breathing

   It was the third night in a row that Pete had sat alone on his bed, clutching his phone in his hands with one thumb hovering over the 'call' button on Mikey's number. He knew he should have just texted by now, but he felt that no simple text could convey how sorry he was for everything: it was all his fucking fault. He had been so careless at that party with all that booze and all those drugs going around, and really, it had been no different to any of his other parties, in terms of the amount of stuff there'd been, but this one was crazy - crazier than normal, that is - and everyone, including himself, had just been too out of it to realise what was going on. He knew that he could have stopped it, but he'd been having so much fun, and he'd had that stupid approach to life that made him believe that tragedies were only things that happened to other people.

And then, the next morning, just to top it off, he had just abandoned Mikey outside that hospital. Yeah, he had been kind of hurting, but how the fuck did he think Mikey was feeling? He'd just decided to put himself first, as fucking always. That knowledge was buried so painfully in his mind. And it burned.

Once the immediate emotion of the morning had faded, he had tried telling himself that he'd had to leave to look after his mother - that she couldn't be left by herself for that long, in case something unexpected happened to her - but he knew all the time that it was simply untrue. There hadn't been a night through which she hadn't slept soundly for over a year now, and she'd been predicted at least another year to live.

In the end, he decided that calling was pointless. Third day, and third excuse. But this one, he really thought made a bit of sense, at least. The funeral was tomorrow, and he would have a chance to talk to Mikey face to face then. For now, he could just try to forget.

He threw his phone face down on the bed and fell back to sprawl beside it for a moment. He took a deep breath and sighed it out through his nose before gathering the courage to head downstairs to see his mum. Her room was on the part of the house that jutted out at the front; this room used to be a garage before they converted it into a bedroom, or, more accurately, an attempt at a home hospital room.

His mother spent most of the day lying in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, but never being really, fully awake. She was kept constantly on an IV of morphine, because without it, as the doctors said, she would be in agony.

She'd had a car crash three years ago which brought her to the very point of death, but paramedics managed to resuscitate her, only to leave her paralysed from the waist down and with severe brain damage, leaving her relying on Pete for everything. For the first year, when Pete was just seventeen, his father had stuck around, because legally, Pete couldn't live alone with her and care for her, but as soon as he turned eighteen, that bastard had left him without a single word.

Thankfully, by law, Pete's father had to cover the cost of keeping Pete's mother alive, and he technically still owned the house, so the bills were his problem, but Pete himself had been forced to leave education and get a job to provide for himself. And, of course, he wasted most of his already meagre income on alcohol, nicotine and, when things were particularly tough, far stronger drugs to keep him going.

Now, as he entered his mother's room, he could tell instantly that she was awake. The sound of the door opening - for it was behind her bed, and she couldn't see it - stimulated a kind of strangled moan from her. She could never visibly remember who Pete was, and even once she became cooperative, after several minutes spent talking to her and soothing her, he figured that she was just trying to get to know him anew. He wasn't her son anymore, not really, and as much as he hated to admit it - because she wasn't dead, she wasn't gone, and it just felt wrong to think - he could only conclude that she was no longer his mum.