Chapter Text
Trigger warning: This piece contains some adult themes and deals with issues of drug use, anxiety and some bad language, including an instance of a slur of a racially insensitive type.
John is just dropping off into the fitful doze that characterises so much of his sleep now, when a hand smacks him hard in the face.
Out of the soup of sleep, he is startled into that acute state of hyperawareness, where it's as if he can feel every molecule of air on his skin, hear every pulse of his neurons. In the dark he sees nothing but the figure looming above him. The heel of a big, sturdy hand strangles his yell and closes over his mouth so he can't breathe.
A second later a heavy body lands on the bed beside him, causing the gel foam mattress to quiver. The hand, rather than reaching down to strangle him, continues an exploratory grope across the bridge of his nose and over his cheek, squashing his face down into the pillow.
Then a voice in the dark says, “Huh, uh. Whoa! Johnny! John. Johnny. Howsit going?”
The black-out curtains are pulled right across, blocking out the neon stretch of the city below, but there’s just enough light leaking in from the hallway to see a pair of blue eyes blearing at him from six inches away. And he doesn’t need light to know that jovially slurred voice, or to smell the fumes of alcohol rolling off his breath. He doesn’t need light to recognise that swaggering, intrusive, room-filling presence.
“Scott.” John’s fully awake now.
“What’re you doin’ in m’bed?” Scott hasn’t removed his hand; continues to paw absently at John’s face. A finger goes up his nostril.
“It’s not your bed! Get off!”
He tries to shove Scott off the bed, but it’s like he’s ten years old again, and Scott’s a sturdy thirteen. Big brother’s larger, heavier, in better condition. He laughs off John’s attempt to push him out of bed and doesn’t budge. “’S’not very nice.”
John sits up. Almost too late he remembers to drag the Egyptian cotton sheets up around his chest, so that Scott won’t catch a glimpse of protruding collarbones and columns of ribs beneath stretched out skin. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Because Scott’s not supposed to be here. Scott’s categorically not supposed to be here. One of the few small perks of this whole, sorry quasi-imprisonment under Dad’s watch was the guarantee that Scott was eight thousand miles away in Iran, shooting pig farmers or murdering towel-heads or whatever jingoistic madness that decorated Air force captains get up to nowadays.
“Huh-huh,” says Scott.
John wonders for a moment if he’s having another night terror. But no, it can’t be, because he can feel that uptick in his heart rate, that pulse in the balls of his palm as his hands knead the bedspread, that want like an itch he can’t scratch. If he could just take the edge off… If he could just be okay for a moment…
“I’m…” Scott’s silhouette rolls over into the space John has vacated. He stretches out, puts booted feet up on the snow white bedspread. By the time he’s done all this he seems to have forgotten his answer, or even John’s question. He doesn’t seem the least bit interested in how John’s pulled the covers up to his chest like a discovered maiden, or how John’s glaring at him like that same maiden, or in anything much at all until…
“Scott?” A voice calls from the hallway outside, musical, feminine.
John’s stomach does another flip. There’s someone in the apartment. Not the calm, harrier presence of his father, not even the obnoxious, obtrusive bulk of is elder brother. A stranger, intruding on his sanctuary.
He feels his hands grow clammy, feels his heart rate rise further; takes a slow, deliberate inhalation through his nose to keep his breathing steady. Doesn’t scream. Doesn’t cry. Doesn’t yell at his brother to get out, now, doesn’t do any of the things that might tell Scott, even a drunken mess of Scott, that he might not be one hundred per cent okay.
“Whoops!” Scott chuckles, oblivious, then rolls off the bed, and those booted feet land with a thump on the white pine floor. “Duty call…hah, calls.” He heads out the door again without another word, his swagger more of a stagger, and knocks the door closed with his elbow. John hears him moving down the hall.
John buries himself beneath the covers, clings to his pillow like it’s a floatation device, tries to breathe in blue and breathe out red, as Dr Lapin, the psychologist Dad is making him see, taught him to do. Let’s his heart rate settle as he tries to exist from moment to moment.
And what’s happening right at this moment is that Scott has turned up without invitation, without permission and without warning and brought a strange woman, or – Christ, is that multiple voices? – women, into the heart of John’s private space. He can hear them out there; soft laughter and the clink of glasses and Scott’s occasional hiccups of ‘ssh, sssh.”
Part of him wants to storm out there and scream at them to get out. But then he pictures himself standing in the hallway in his shorts and tube socks, bony knees on display. He imagines their tipsy laughter, or worse, their pitying looks as Scott herds him back to bed, and his face burns. So he doesn’t move.
Instead he lies there and tries to meditate, breathe in, breathe out, and maybe he dozes a little, because the next thing he knows Scott is crouched beside him, his hand around John’s forearm, shaking him. “Johnny, hey, Johnny.”
“What do you want?” His head hurts.
“Do you wanta go sleep in Dad’s bed?”
“No.”
“Please.”
When they used to stay in the ski lodge in Aspen as kids, Scott would sometimes sneak back in late, kick John out of his bed and crawl into it, enjoying John’s preheated cocoon for himself and leaving John to warm up the other, cold bed. That was a long time ago though.
“No.”
“C’mon Johnny, just for one night.”
“No. Go away.” Scott may not want to have his fun in their father’s bed. That’s his business, but John’s sure as hell not going to facilitate it in his.
“Fine. Whatever, man.” Scott stumbles from the room again. “Whatever.”
John lies there, holding tight to fistfuls of pillow, his breathing coming in tightly regulated gasps.
After a while, he rises, clambers out of bed and goes into the master bedroom.
***
The morning brings with it a new form of disorientating terror. He wakes in a strange bed, in a strange room with no memory of how he got there.
There’s a pounding behind his eyes, a raw, scraped feeling on the inside of his skull that makes it hard to concentrate. There’s an ache across the back of his shoulders and his tongue feels dry and coated.
He reaches for the little bottle, the one he keeps tucked beneath his pillow at night, the one with the single pill locked inside. Finds nothing, no bottle, no pill. Panic freezes him and for a long time all he can do is lie there, working his way through Dr Lapin’s mindfulness tricks one by one. Breathe in blue, breathe out red.
Dad has eschewed the usual dark woods and mahoganies of alpha male interior design, and instead favours sky blues and cornfield golds, but the bed in the master bedroom is still vast and alien and the suite around it even more so. There’s a painting hanging on the far wall, in oils, of a sea in storm. Threads of green and red and purple cut through the blues and greys of a churning sky. It’s on this he fixates as he pulls, piecemeal, at the events of the early hours, Scott’s sudden arrival, and his own retreat to their father’s bed.
In remembering that the fear, and the terrible, aching need retreat a little.
The clock by the bed reads seven thirty. Past time he got up. He’s gone back running, though often he can only huff and stumble on for half a mile or so before he has to stop.
Remembering that in all probability he is not alone in the penthouse, he raids Dad’s wardrobe. Among the row after row of expertly pressed, carefully tailored shirts and cashmere jumpers he finds a pair of sweat pants, and an ancient hoodie. He shakes the sweatshirt out and pulls it on, pads out into the hall.
The door of his bedroom is ajar and he cranes his neck to get a look inside, to see what level of debauchery he is dealing with, and whether he is going to need to boil his sheets or just burn them. But everything is just as he left it, the corner of the bedspread folded back where he slipped out hours before.
He goes inside and digs beneath the pillows until he finds the small, white plastic bottle. Its label has been all but scratched away by anxious fingernails, but the rhythmic click of the childproof lid, spun between thumb and forefinger and the rattle of the single tablet within make him calmer.
He moves slowly through the penthouse. Examination of the rest of the upper level, Dad’s study, the main bathroom, the balcony, the gym, reveal no Scott, no girls, either dressed or undressed, no signs of life. Perhaps it’s okay then? Perhaps it was just a nightmare?
But on the lower level he finds Scott, fully clothed and fast asleep on the wraparound sofa, his face glued to the white leather by a string of drool. There’s a bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses sitting on the coffee table, but no sign of anyone else.
John turns to tiptoe back upstairs, but stumbles and bangs against the metal railing, causing it to jangle.
Too late. Scott stirs.
In the pocket of the big hooded sweatshirt John’s fingers twist at the cap of the little white bottle, picking at the plastic tines. Clack, clack.
In what feels like slow motion, Scott’s eyes come open. He unsticks his cheek from the sofa cushions, rubs as his temple and groans, looks about him, as if he too can’t understand where he is. Finally, he spots John standing frozen on the stairs.
And John waits, for the creasing of brow and the crinkling of eye, for the sad, “Heya, Johnny,” and the silence afterwards of not knowing what to say, for the groundswell of pity as he remembers why John’s here, what he’s done and who he is. He searches for the signs that Scott must know.
Last night was different, last night, blind drunk and stumbling, it’s possible that Scott just didn’t remember.
But it’s morning now.
And what other explanation can there be for this sudden arrival? Even though John had sworn Gordon and Virgil to secrecy. Even though even Dad had agreed in the end, “Okay, you can tell him on your own terms, but you must tell him.”
He knows he’s going to have to tell them all – Grandma and Alan and Kayo. And he will, soon, when he feels like himself, when it doesn’t feel like his edges are blurring and being washed away, day by day.
“When I’m stronger, okay?”
“Don’t wait too long.”
Clackclack, clack.
Because maybe he has to tell him, and maybe he knows this, but maybe an even bigger part of him wishes that Scott need never know. To not tell Alan would be a betrayal, but to have Scott never find out would be a relief.
Scott, who has never but lived up to Dad’s expectations. Scott, who had breezed through Yale on a whim and a song, who had been a campus man, track and field superstar and still somehow managed to graduate summa cum laude. Who had followed Dad into the air force where the executive had proceeded to hang gold trinkets off him like he was some sort of Christmas tree. Gordon may be the family MVP for medal quality, but when it comes to quantity Scott’s got him beat. Mr Valedictorian. Mr Can-Do. Mr What-Do-You-Mean-You-Can’t-Do-It-Just-Try-Harder.
Scott, who would want to meddle. Who would try and fix the broken parts of him. Scott, whose pity would fall as hard and heavy as a stone.
John can deal with Gordon’s anger, Virgil’s kindness, even Alan’s grief.
But the thought of Scott’s pity is intolerable.
Clack, Clackclack.
He waits, bracing himself for the wave to come crashing down. For the start of the “How could you do this?”s and the “Why didn’t you tell me?”s and the “I’m so glad that you’re okay”’s. For the stride across the room and the bone crushing hug and the whole awful shitshow.
But Scott just yawns and says, “John. What? Did term finish early or something?”
In the pocket of his sweatshirt the cap stops turning.
“Something like that.”
“You look rough, man. They working you too hard?” Scott’s own bloodshot eyeballs come to rest on him.
“No.”
“Just hard living then?” Scott chuckles, then stops, moans, as if the sound of his own laughter is splitting his skull open. “Goddamit.”
John shifts uneasily from foot to foot. “Scott, why are you here?”
Scott looks at him sideways, massages his neck in the ponderous way of the truly hung over and says, “Bacon.”
And before he knows what’s happening, Scott’s hopped up off the couch and is striding for the kitchen without a backwards glance.
And John is left reeling from a blow that hasn’t come.
By the time he has recovered enough to come and linger in the kitchen doorway, Scott’s got the hob going and the oil in the pan is starting to hiss. He necks orange juice straight from the carton and wipes his mouth.
“What are you doing here?” John repeats a variation on his earlier question, like he’s poking a loose tooth to see whether it’s going to fall out.
“Furlough.” Scott wipes his mouth and tosses the empty carton into the recycling. “Dad said he was away for a couple of days, so I figured I could stay here. You know. It’s been a while since I hit up L.A.”
Dad is away, dealing with some regulatory crisis in Hong Kong branch. John misses him, if only in the way that the man walking in the desert misses the circling vulture.
Brains is gone too. He’s spending the weekend at an aeronautics conference in Stuttgart and had given John the weekend off. “You don’t want to be cooped up in here. Go to the beach. Get some sun. You’re young, you should have some fun,” he had said in the tone of one who’d never actually had any fun himself, wasn’t sure how to get some, but felt it might have been something he had missed out on.
And John hadn’t been able to explain to the dapper little engineer how much he would rather stay in the lab. He hadn’t been able to tell him how much going into work, nodding and umming at Brains’ rhetorical questions, fetching his coffee, had meant to him. He couldn’t tell him that the only moments of genuine thrill he has had in this last hazy stretch of months, have been watching Brains’ mind switch from intricate detail to broad strokes of genius and then back again. He hadn’t said that the nuts and bolts of their odd almost friendship was some days the only thing that kept John going.
He had almost asked to go along to Stuttgart, but the thought of the crush of people, all those engineers and scientists clamouring to be heard, to share ideas and insight, was so terrifying, that instead he had said, “Yeah, sure, okay. Have a good time.”
So he’s here, alone. The twin poles of his life have vanished, leaving him adrift.
And now there’s Scott.
“You talked to Dad?”
John is a believer in coincidence. Coincidence is an inevitable and often mundane fact of probability theory. But he doesn’t for an instant believe that Scott just happened to rock up from halfway across the world on the one weekend his two caretakers are away.
“Yeah. He told me he was going to Hong Kong. I figured since I’d have the run of the place, why not?”
So maybe that’s it? Dad, interfering. Dad dropping hints that it’s time to confess. He checks the notepad on the fridge, their most consistent channel of father-son communication, in case Dad’s scribbled “TELL HIM” in big letters on there.
“You’re, you’re not going to be here all weekend, are you?” Scott doesn’t do much to hide his eagerness to have him gone.
“I live here,” says John, short.
“Oh. Right. Cool.”
“I’ve got a summer internship at TI.”
“Right.”
“Here.”
“Okay. That’s okay.” Scott clears his throat and finally seems to get some sort of reading off him, “Look, if you want me out of here, that’s fine. I can check into The Grande, no problem. So if you’ve got plans… if you want me gone…”
So much, John doesn’t say. You and your noise and your bombast and your smug self righteous grin. I want you out of my private space. I want the silence to come rolling back and to be left in peace. I don’t want you here, asking awkward questions. Hey Johnny, when did you get so thin? Hey Johnny, what’s with the thing with the pill bottle? Hey Johnny, what do you mean school’s out already?
“No, it’s fine,” he says. “I’m just busy.”
“Sure. Well, I’ll be careful not to disturb you… again. Oh damn!” He’s distracted by burning the bacon. He rescues half a dozen rashers from the pan and flips them onto the plate, glances up at John. “You like yours pretty burned, right?”
This is a statement without even some basis in fact, but when the plate of moderately blackened bacon on a golden English muffin is slapped in front of him, his stomach growls and he realises that maybe he was hungry after all. He picks up a fork and spears the first piece of bacon. “Thanks.”
Scott, his first attempt at breakfast suitably scrubbed, scrapes out the pan and starts again. “Hey, we should catch a movie or something.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Catch up.”
“Sure.”
“If you want.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t suppose you’d want to go for a drink? I’ve got these friends in town…”
John picks up his plate and puts it in the sink. “Anyway, I’ve got mail to write. I’ll talk to you later, Scott.”
“Okay, sure. Later days.” Scott glances briefly around from his pan full of bacon, but only briefly. “You’ve sure got the ol’ crimson pride, huh?”
“What?”
Scott raises an eyebrow and offers a pointed look at John’s sweatshirt.
It’s only then he figures out that it’s got Harvard emblazoned across the front of it in big, bold letters.