Chapter Text
‘David, wake up.’
‘Mm, what?’
‘Oh my God, David, we’re meant to be going now! Get out of bed!’
David awoke to a sharp tug, a bite of fresh air and a soft whump as Alexis pulled his bedspread away. He curled in against the cold, but still tried to prop himself up on his elbow. Alexis was right. They really did have to go now.
‘Fuck. What time is it?’
‘Five. The time we both said we’d be up.’
David grumbled for half a moment more then launched himself out of bed before his body could protest. As he stumbled over his already-packed bags to the bathroom, Alexis flew around their tiny motel room, checking in nooks and crannies for stray possessions. David huffed a small, mirthless laugh through his nose as he watched her. Room 5 of the Rosebud Motel was half a shoe closet in their old home, and now Alexis was really checking to see if they’d missed anything in the corners of it.
As though he knew he wouldn’t have enough time in the morning, David had spent all of yesterday evening taking in the sight of the room.
‘Ew, David! We’ve been trapped in here for five years, and you want to spend your whole night looking at it?’ Alexis had said. But he hadn’t had the energy for some stinging retort, so he said nothing. He still didn’t say anything when he realised Alexis had been on a walk instead of going to The Wobbly Elm with Twyla, like she said she would. She had come back sober and puffy-eyed.
He couldn't imagine spending his last night any other way. He had looked at this room every single day for the past five years, but it had been a while since he'd really seen it. It had taken about two years for David to get used to living in Schitt’s Creek with an attitude that resembled something beyond unwilling tolerance. The first time he felt it was the night after Sebastien. David had tucked his bedspread a little higher that night and grounded himself in the feeling of it. The soft down of the blanket that he lay his hand atop gently. The musky, wooden scent of his bedside table. The hollow, rhythmic clunk of the water pipes cooling down. It had been nice to feel small and unseen, when what had happened that night was so confusing and devastatingly reminiscent of the person he once was. He swallowed down the bitter taste of being used and thought about nothing but his single bed in their little motel room. If he fantasised hard enough, he could picture all the other things that might have made living here even more tolerable. With the right chords on the right guitar, the right blue button-downs, the right business-savvy snark, he might have even been convinced to stay.
But that person didn’t exist. They’d never had the chance.
The ride to the airport was filled with the same heavy silence that had engulfed the motel the night that Johnny and Moira left a week ago. The air was gritty and cracked with the faintest hint of a new dawn, the day promising to be slightly cooler than the one before. The night had been hot and stuffy, just like their first fitful sleep here. David wondered what everyone would be doing. The weather was better; maybe Ronnie would get started on those beets she'd been planning on growing. He forced himself to think about the town some more, scratching through the dust for semblances of fondness, but since last week things had felt even more lonely and surreal. Their parents' farewell had had all the disassociated affection of a family who didn’t know what to think. They were four people stranded and abandoned by fate, chewed up and spit out over the ends of the earth, scratching together a new living that they were grateful didn’t mirror their old life yet didn’t quite carry all the nostalgia and hope of leaving behind a home that would always be there. Returning to Schitt’s Creek would, for all of them, take some guts.
When Johnny, Stevie and Roland had made traction with the motel business and given them an out, it was without question that David would go with Alexis to New York. He had negotiated with a number of independent vendors over the past couple of months and was just financially ready to up his sticks and hand over the Schitt’s Creek branch of Rose Apothecary to the fumbling hands to an overenthusiastic young couple who promised to call David with updates far more often than he was comfortable with. Even so, he welcomed the sharing of the load that had felt a little too heavy for someone with such a passion over the past two years. Handling business finance had the same panicked, deadline feeling as college homework, only this time the results actually mattered.
It had been hard to juggle both the creative and business side of Rose Apothecary for the last two years, but something like spite and a little too much like desperation had kept him going. For a minute, he had a vague, unapproachable young adult in his employ, someone fresh out of a finance degree that he clearly had no business taking. David faintly recognised him from some failed pep talk that Jocelyn had made him give in his first few months in Schitt’s Creek. Firing him was more like reaching a mutual agreement. David had barely given him an explanation, and the kid just nodded in the first solidarity they’d shown each other in months, took his bag, and noped out. Johnny had called him foolish for letting him go. Little did he know that David had given up on trying to stop people from going.
‘I’m going to the duty free, want anything?’
‘God, no. Who do you think I am, a jetlagged middle-aged businesswoman?’
But David still grabbed Alexis’ wrist as she turned away. ‘If they have any BBQ chips, though…’
There was something about airports that David had always liked. There had been pieces of him in every corner of North America in his old life, every state on this damn continent in holiday homes and acquaintances and PO Boxes. Airports were literally between worlds, and if David Rose wanted to sit on the floor at 6:30 wearing chunky FILAs and sip on white hot chocolate, then David Rose would damn well sit on the floor at 6:30 wearing chunky FILAs and sip on white hot chocolate. The passing feet and rolling of suitcase wheels had no idea who he was, nor did they notice. Not one bit. Only Alexis could see him, and she didn’t really count.
There was also something about them that David did not like. In his old life, they’d brought just as much uncertainty and anguish as they had cathartic nonsense hours. Airports were Alexis stumbling into his arms from customs, they were holding back rough tears as he waited to meet people who would never show, they were clambering half-high into private jets to fly to island resorts where he knew at least one person would try and bet on his body. It embarrassed him to think that he once assumed everyone cared, but he had quickly learned that normal people saw airports as elevated levels of existence where anything you did or said simply dissolved into the off-white linoleum. For a place so big, they really were cramped with the deepest of thoughts.
He sat and waited for Alexis and his BBQ chips, steeped in a solid mix of both of these feelings. He took a long gulp of his sickly drink and thought about everything that had led him here, all the fated flaps of butterfly wings that had kept him up at night for the past two years and frustrated him beyond comprehension. It sent him almost delirious to think, now, that things could have been so different. That things had been so different. He thought about all the things his person could have been to him; what would they have done? Would they have recovered from that fight, and perhaps had another one somewhere down the line about housewarming parties or hiking or spray tans or –
David felt the sharp thwap of aluminium-plastic catch his cheekbone.
‘They didn’t have any BBQ, so I got you cheese & jalapeno instead.’
David nodded in thanks. Alexis sat herself down on the double-sided metal bench opposite the wall David was crouched against, talking to their dad over the phone about the best strategies for keeping business up whilst dealing with major personal upheavals. He sat back and listened, astonished at the logical, proactive woman his sister had become.
The snips of advice he caught through the speaker – Johnny had yelled down the phone ever since David had taught him how to use one – put his own coping methods to shame, that was for sure. He sometimes felt like no one knew what it meant to deal with major personal upheavals whilst running a business. Like no one had the right to even mention it.
David had shut the store for two weeks in shock when it happened. He'd told his vendors to cut back their stock and he'd wandered Schitt’s Creek like a shark that would die if it stopped swimming. He had to do something, but it couldn’t be the business he’d hoped to keep forever with one of his best friends. So he just walked, walked around like Alexis had on their last night. There was something about the town that haunted them all a little differently; they all had their ghosts there, the unharvested grains of a life almost lived.
He had tried being angry about it to see if it was easier. Typical Patrick, always running away from his problems. Typical Patrick, too nice to have the ugly conversations. Too fucking beautiful to have anything ugly in his life. Maybe that’s why he left – nope. We’re not going there again, David, we’re better than that.
It was Stevie who’d first said that to him, and she hadn’t let him forget it. She’d let him cry until he was sick on her shoes sometimes, though.
‘While you’re out getting lunch, do you think – do you think you could get me some lunch?’
David wasn’t sure what had done it, wasn’t sure at all whether his final words had really had any contribution to that look on Patrick's face. It was a small thing to say, really, and it was so, so stupid, but something had broken in there. Some unfamiliar darkness had flooded Patrick’s eyes like the cracking of a black glowstick, releasing a cavern of hurt and vulnerability that David had never seen before.
‘…Unbelievable.’
And then he was gone. In his better moments, David was almost glad. It meant he never had to see that look again.