dreamlikenewyork | "Come on, baby, let me in, and show me what this really is about..."

Who? Gen Hart and Mark Campbell
What? Soaked in booze and tears
Where? The Campbell-Hart abode
When? Saturday, late morning, after this

Gen wanted to believe that she could hold it all together for her husband and son -- that when Justin was hurting, and Mark was hurting for him, she would somehow be able to be the strong one. But the truth was, her heart broke for her husband and son, too. She had come home from work and crashed out early, exhausted from a long day, and Mark had texted from work telling her that he was at work, but he was going to get Justin and he'd be home later. By the time she'd woken up, it was to a text from Ali telling her that Mark was passed out drunk on her couch. Thank fuck Justin was with Sam. Which probably said all anyone ever needed to know about the father Mark was. Even in the midst of heartbrokenly writing himself off, he was still first concerned about being sure Justin was safe. But what this meant to Gen right now was that, as Ali had told her, she had to get Mark home and really talk to him about what was going on, because if he was writing himself off? He wasn't coping with things, and that was when they needed most of all to be a team. Which was why she'd spent well over an hour after Ali's texts sobbing into her pillow in her room -- sobbing for her amazing husband whom she so loved whose heart was shattered for his precious son, and sobbing for that son himself... the wonderful boy that love had given her as a son, just as truly as if he'd been conceived and carried in her body... the boy whose innocence had been taken from him when he was still too young to even understand why this was happening.

Ali let her know when she was on the way with Mark, and Gen made her way to the bathroom, washing her face and trying to at least calm some of the puffiness down. By the time Ali got Mark home, Gen had brewed a pot of coffee, stout and strong, and was waiting for Mark on the sofa, both of their cups of coffee made just as they liked them. She'd invited Ali to stay and have a cup with them, but knowing that they needed to chat, Ali declined and left Mark on the couch with Gen, who was slowly sipping her coffee and trying to decide what to say.

It was an awkwardly long few moments that Gen and Mark sat there in silence, Gen prolonging a sip of her coffee to get her thoughts together despite the fact that hours of prep time hadn't allowed her to do that yet. And when she finally spoke, it was shaky and she felt like she might start crying all over again. "Mark," she said softly, setting her coffee down on the coffee table in front of them so that she could turn and look at her husband. "Sweetheart, I don't know where we should start talking, but we need to talk about this. Not just about you drinking, but about everything that's happened with Justin."

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Reading the contents of the envelope, Gen herself was suddenly going from being upset that Mark had gone drinking and gotten trashed to being upset that she couldn't go out right now and do the same damn thing. The pain of knowing what was done to Justin felt like a vice grip, tightening in her chest and making it so damn hard to breathe. She finished reading and slid the papers back into the envelope quickly, as if somehow, hiding the words from sight could erase the knowledge from her mind. But there just wasn't that much luck available in the world, and Gen could never unknow what she'd read -- what had been done to her precious, beautiful, talented son. In the process of trying to have a baby with Mark, only to find out later that there would be no baby, Gen had only come to be that much more grateful that she had the chance to be Justin's mother. He was enough. When she really looked at her own feelings, there was nothing missing from their family. Mark, Justin, and Sunshine were all she needed, and Ali was a gift as far as Gen was concerned, because she had no problem with Gen as Jamie's stepmother, and rather than making things difficult, was one of the strongest supports that Gen had.

Gen tucked her head into Mark's shoulder, wiping the tears from her face with the heels of her palms. "If not for the fact you would've gone to jail, I would wish that you had," she muttered, shaking her head. How dare that bitch make Justin so afraid of being given to an awful family to the point he was afraid to tell her that this was happening to him? How dare she scare him so much that his innocence was stolen from him and he couldn't even cry out for help? Gen wanted her dead, and if she could think of a way to do it without going to jail, she probably would go with it. She turned a little in her seat and wrapped her arms around his waist, cheek pressed to his shoulder as the tears continued to flow. "I don't understand how anyone hurts a child like that." Her head ached from crying so much earlier, and crying again now wasn't helping, but maybe right now, she and Mark needed to break together so they could figure out how to put the pieces back together again.

The court case had been horrific for Mark. He should be used to courtrooms, and to conflict, but when it was a case surrounding your own child and the fact he had been a victim of child abuse and neglect from his own mother, who deliberately kept Mark from him as punishment for him ruining her life, there was no way to cope with it well. He needed to be present for the whole thing, and force himself to sit there and listen to everything, but it had really impacted on him and not in a good way. "She went in there off on a tangent about how we were paying Justin off to keep him shut up about really wanting to be with her. Her amateur backdoor attorney tried to pin the bipolar on my genetics and said the only reason I married you was to put up a phony marriage front that I'm the better parent for the kid to be with because I'm a crook and just want to use Justin's status on Broadway for my own personal gain."

He shook his head in a vain yet fruitless attempt to stop himself from crying. But he just couldn't. He was wrecked and this was something he was seriously struggling to process. "I could handle all that. I expected it. It's why I made sure Dani and Curtis went in armed with everything to counter it all. But this?" he said, gesturing to the folder. "Anyone can tell me until they're blue in the face that it's not my fault, but the bottom line is, she kept him from me to punish me for fucking her and never speaking to her again. It's my fault my child was sexually abused, neglected, let to suffer the torture of a mental illness alone, scared, without help. It's my fault. It's not his, like she made him believe since he was old enough to understand what was being said to him."

Gen had stayed out of the courtroom for the duration of Justin's case. It wasn't that she didn't want to be there to support him and Mark, but that she knew that she wouldn't be able to hold her shit together to keep from constantly wanting to murder Justin's mother, and the last thing Mark needed was sensing her tension on top of his own already being there. "Fuck her. She's not the one who's up at night with Justin when he's feeling shitty. We do that. We make sure he's fed, that he's taken care of the best he can be... that he makes his doctors' appointments and gets his homework done." It wasn't as if Mark didn't know this, but Gen was so incredibly angered by the awful things this bitch had said about them that she kind of went off. She wanted to find the bitch and claw her eyes out for what she'd allowed to happen to Justin.

Then Mark was crying again -- they both were -- and Gen just held onto him, kissing his cheek as she rested her head on his shoulder. "I know you blame yourself, babe," she told him, not trying to argue with him, because as much as she knew it wasn't Mark's fault that Justin was abused, she also knew that she would never be able to convince him of that at this point. Mark needed to face the fact that he was blaming himself for all of this, regardless of how much it truly wasn't his fault. "It's definitely not Justin's fault," she said softly, holding onto Mark's hand. "I mostly blame the horrible cunt who let this happen to him and refused to tell his father that he existed. I understand you blame yourself, Mark. I get it, because if I were in your shoes, I'd probably do the exact same thing. But don't let the bitch off that easily. She made the choice not to include you in raising your son, when she didn't want to raise him either. I know you feel guilty and at fault for what happened, and I don't deny you the right to feel exactly how you feel. But if she didn't want him, she could've given him to you. Instead, she tortured him constantly just for being born."

Mark had been to hell and back with Justin multiple times since the kid turned up on his doorstep. Hell, his very welcome of them was to spew all other Mark's feet. At that point, Gen had understandably freaked out and questioned everything. Mark never judged her for that, but it was those initial moments where he hadn't remotely had a choice to back away and analyse the situation. The kid was his son. Well, either his son or Sam's, because he looked so much like him. Sam had never been promiscuous or slept around, so it wasn't even a possibility. Mark had taken Justin in and been determined to care for him no matter what. The kid was his son, and he was sick and in a really bad mess. It hadn't taken long for him to realise that there was something much deeper at play than just a delinquent kid who abused booze and drugs. He was absolutely screaming out for help, and with the right medical attention, the mental illness diagnosis had come. Even then, it was only gradual and piecemeal that Justin began to revealed traumas of his past. Mark remembered questioning Nathan about the possibility that Justin was being so secretive. It was Nathan who said that it was unlikely Justin was being secretive, and much more likely he was blocking things out in his past. It was something young people often did, especially mentally ill kids. He told Mark that over time, more things might come to light and warned him to be prepared for it. Nothing could have prepared any of them for this. "We can't keep holding on to the anger because it's going to spill over onto him. Like Ali said, the only way he's going to know it's okay to not be okay is if he sees that we're not either. But on the same token, he can't see that we're continuously angry either because he'll react to that too. You have to let it go."

The anger for him was dissipating for that very reason, but he couldn't shed the grief or the nauseating sickness inside from what had been in that statement Justin had made. There had been an attempt from the cunt's legal defence to try to say Justin was lying and making up stories, like he always did for attention. That he had a lengthy history of attention-seeking. That had been the nail in the coffin for the presiding judge. She chose to throw the book at them and now Justin's mother had a very lengthy jail sentence to serve and she couldn't get to him at all. "I know that. I do. But I have a hell of a lot to work through and I'm not dealing with any of it. At all. But I've made an urgent appointment with my therapist, and I've set up a session for all three of us to see Justin's therapist together so he can have a chance to open up about what he said in the statement if he wants to. I fucked up. I know I did. But I needed to shut down. I couldn't handle the pain. It's the worse pain I've ever felt in my life. Even above and beyond when I was told Jim was dead."

"Come on, baby, let me in, and show me what this really is about..."

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