ethan

The gang calmed my overwhelmed brain when they came back in the morning. Amy was pleased to see Tyler curled up in the blanket I made him. Mark seemed a lot more like himself, smiling and happier than he was yesterday. There was almost a hopefulness in his eyes when he sat down next to me.

Tyler woke up and started talking to everyone as they joined him, making the start of the day nearly like it used to be, just without me.

It made me happy to see them like that together. Happy and laughing.

Each got to spend a little time talking to me and interacting with me, even though I was just laying there.

Some of my wounds were healing which brought a smile to Tyler's face.

All seemed well.

Until the door slammed open, scaring all of us.

My eyes were greeted with my mom's worried face, my dad rushing in after her. Tyler instantly tensed at the sight of him and stood up without a second thought, Mark recognizing the look on his face and taking action.

"What the hell happened to him!?"

Tyler was furious at the words that flew from my father's mouth.

"Maybe you would know if you cared enough to visit your only living son to know he flipped his car three fucking times. For Christ's sake, they got here before you and they live across the country. You're so caught up in your ego that you can't drive 20 minutes to see him, it's honestly disgusting that call yourself a father to the man I love."

"How dare you!" My dad's face twisted with anger. "You don't know anything, stop acting like it!"

"I don't know anything?!" Tyler managed to hold himself back from violence. "I was the one who called the police! I was the one who rode with him to the hospital! I'm the one who has spent the past week sitting next to him hoping that he'll wake up! I'm the one who's destroyed from the inside out, the one who can't sleep at night, the one that cries at just thinking of living without him. You have the audacity to barely care about your last son, the one that you still love, because he was born with a male soulmate name?" Tyler pushes past Mark to get right into my dad's face. "I bet you didn't wait 8 days to see Andrew!"

"Do NOT bring Andrew into this!"

"Why not!? You'd rather just wait until Ethan died!"

"ENOUGH!" The room was silenced. "If you hadn't brought him here we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place! He's better off staying away from us!"

"ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!" Tyler was dripping with rage. "All he has ever wanted was for you to accept him and love him for who he is! To be the best father that you can be for him! What, just because he has a male soulmate name, he's written off as nothing!? He's your son! He's irreplaceable! How are you so much of a bastard that you can't even speak to your son without calling him a mistake?"

Mark quickly stood between them, his composure somehow collected in such a situation.

"Arguing is not going to solve any of the problems in front of us. Ethan wouldn't want you guys to fight." The feeling in the room shifted once Mark said that. "We can't fix the past, but the future is still in our hands and we owe it to Ethan to fix it for when he wakes up."

Tyler walked to sit down, his face still stone-cold.

"I know that you think that Ethan's soulmark is a mistake, I get that it's hard to change something you've believed for your entire life, but...He's your son. Even if he was a mistake in the system, you should love him for who he is. Treating him like he was nothing only made your relationship worse. How could any father live with the fact that his son didn't want to see him? How could a dad sleep at night knowing that he upset his child in ways that would haunt him for life?" Mark's way with words always seemed to calm the anxious and comfort the saddened. "Could you at least try to change your ways?"

I saw my dad in a way that I had never seen before.

His eyes were filled with sorrow. He looked like a new person, someone who finally broke out through a door that they were stuck behind. In a sad way, he looked like his old self again.

"Having the idea of same-sex soulmates being wrong ingrained in your head is something that isn't easy to get rid of. Eventually, I couldn't see it any other way other than what I was taught. It was never a problem until Ethan woke up on his 13th birthday." He sighed, shocking me with something I had never seen him do before. Tears sat at the brims of his eyes. "I never saw the damage until the crash. When Ethan woke up, I saw the shell of my son. He was gone. My beautiful boy vanished. I lost both of my boys to that crash. Anger filled me after that horrible day, I couldn't get it to go away. It was when Ethan left that I realized how much I really did lose that day. Ethan was gone and I had spent the last 5 years not being there for him. He was afraid of me. I had forgotten about the sweet little face that I met when he was born."

I was on the verge of tears as my dad talked about me in the most positive way he could. I've only heard hatred from him for the longest time. In that moment, I found my dad again.

"I can't change what I've done to him, I wish I could. Seeing him like this...God, I am so sorry, Ethan." He walks over and grabs my hand, making me wish so badly to actually be there to listen. I walk to the other side of the bed, opposite him, wanting to hear every detail. "I'm so proud of you. Following your dreams, despite the world telling you not to. You even managed to find your soulmate while you've been gone, imagine that. I've seen how happy he makes you. Seeing him here, caring for you, being there for you through thick and thin...it proves to me that this soul mark thing is not a mistake. You're not a mistake. I'm so terribly sorry that I ever made you think you were." I was choking on my breath, not being able to handle that my dad was apologizing to me. "I love you, Ethan."

Tears cascaded down my face, my hand shaking as I went to place it on his. It was heartbreaking to not be able to say it back. When my hand made contact with his, the expression on his face changed.

"Dad? Can you hear me?"

I was let down when I got no response.

"Honey, what's wrong?"

He slowly let my hand rest back down on the bed, his eyes never leaving his hand as he staggered back to sit down.

"I-I swear...it felt like he was there."

"What do you mean?"

Mom comforted him as everyone else listened.

"I felt his hand on mine." Everyone around him gave him weird looks. "I know it sounds crazy but I felt it!"

The room eventually calmed down.

Tyler and my dad were able to have a conversation with each other. It made me smile to see them happy.

My mom was entertaining the rest of the gang with old pictures of me and making them laugh.

Our attention was later caught by a knock on the door.

"Can I speak to you?"

"Is it about Ethan?"

The doctor nodded his head to Tyler, looking to all us in a quick glance.

"Then we should all hear what it is."

The doctor sighed, closing the door and taking a chair to sit in.

"This isn't going to be easy to hear, and it's not going to be easy for me to tell you, but...we aren't seeing enough good progress.

Ethan's body is experiencing what I can only explain as a 'fight or flight' battle with himself."

"What does that mean?"

"Since Ethan has been through this kind of injury before, his body is working on overdrive to try and repair its self. On the other hand, his heart is letting itself deteriorate and is trying to stop itself because it believes that it is going to be replaced."

"What-What do we do from here?"

"Nothing.

If we were to take Ethan off of life support for his heart, his body will kill it as fast as it can. We can leave him on life support but that leaves him in this coma state as long as he is on it."

"So...There's nothing you can do?"

Tyler covered his face with his hands, Mark rubbing his back as he tried to keep himself composed. I could see it wasn't an easy task.

"Ethan has about a 3% chance of waking up."

"What can we do to make that chance better?"

"Not much. All of that is based on if Ethan's body decides to wake itself up or that it realizes that it isn't going to receive a heart. But, again, that is not likely.

There are things we can do to better his state of life-"

"Like what?"

"With the low chance of getting out of a coma, the painless way of dealing with the situation would be taking him off of Life Support."

I trembled as the people around me started crying. I didn't want to die, I wanted to live the rest of my life. Why was this happening to me?

"I'll let you take that in, I know that it's a lot to think about. Please come to me with any questions you have-"

"Can you save him?"

I pained to give Tyler a hug at that moment. The broken look in his eyes as he desperately asked that question hurt more than anything I've ever felt.

"I've done it once before, I've never forgotten the boy that I saved the night he came into my ER.

I'm working to get this kid home to you all, I'm hoping that I can, but my hope is slowly slipping.

There's the possibility that we could transplant a heart, but the possibility that the body rejects that heart is far greater than the body accepting it. The body doesn't accept organs like those as easily as we would want them to." The doctor opened the door to leave. "I will do everything that I possibly can to save him."

The mood of the room never changed after that.

More and more people fell asleep as the night grew closer. The hospital was nice enough to provide my parents with a hotel room to sleep in.

Eventually, Tyler was the only one left.

"Eventful day, huh bud?"

He says next to me, admiring me as tiredness gripped him more by the second.

Without a second thought, he grabbed his guitar from under my bed, tuning it a little before surprising me with another song.

How many of these did he learn?

"Lost and awaiting my fate, I wonder.

Far from your shelter, far from your love.

Just like a lark in the midnight hour,

The song I'm singing is just a sigh."

This song was the one I listened to when I was having a bad day. Nothing fixed a terrible mood like Michael Bublé's sultry voice.

I guess it became Tyler's bad day song too.

"When you're not here, the flowers don't blossom.

When you're not here, I'm lost on an ocean.

And the night is long and all is silent.

Staring at a star that never shines.

When you're not here, nothing seems to matter.

All hope is gone when you're not around.

Helplessly awaiting, while my heart is breaking.

Everything's blue when you're not around."

Tyler had no hesitation when tears started stinging his eyes. Neither did I. My heart was ripped out of my chest when his fingers became too shaken to press down on the strings.

"When you are near me, the dawn starts glowing,

Bright as a morning beneath the sun.

Yours is a love that could move a mountain.

And light this laughter when you're around.

But when you're not here, the flowers don't blossom.

When you're not here, I'm lost on an ocean.

And the night is long and all is silent.

Staring at a star that never shines.

When you're not here, nothing seems to matter

All hope is gone when you're not around.

Helplessly awaiting, while my heart is breaking.

Everything's blue when you're not around."

He tossed his guitar onto the bed and took my hand in the blink of an eye. He was a broken man missing me more than anything.

"Please come home soon." Tyler gets up, going to kiss my cheek, stooped with a gasp. I watched as he gently wiped a tear off my motionless face, his hand running along my cheek. "I love you."

"I love you too."

Again, he's taken off guard. He shakes off hearing me with the excuse of being tired.

I wish I was there to say it to him.

To hug him.

And kiss him.

God, I missed him and he was right there.

I knew I had to get back to him.

I just didn't know how.