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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.

Chapter Text

“Scott’s here.”

“Oh. How’s that going.”

“…fine.”

“That good, huh? I can drive down there if you want. Be the pork dripping in your passive aggression sandwich.”

“You’re offering to be the grease between me and Scott?”

“Hey, it’s all relative, baby.”

Gordon and Virgil are on a rota. They take turns to phone him up every day. John had called them on it a while ago, but Gordon had just shrugged it off. “Yeah, we’re on a rota. So what? We care about you, dude and we all know how you appreciate a good schedule.”

The truth is, it helps, those calls. He’s learned to set his clock by them, to think of every day as a Gordon day or Virgil day, even when he can’t tell his Mondays from his Wednesdays. They don’t talk about the big stuff, they did enough of that over spring break, just the minutiae of life. Virgil will recount the intricacies of his latest project. Gordon will call him simply to list off the contents of his shopping basket as he meanders around Whole Foods and debates with himself whether he wants soy or almond milk.  

But still…

Scott’s here.

“You want I should call Virgil?” Gordon asks after a minute. “I bet he could be out here by this evening.”

“No. It’s okay. I can handle it. It’s not a big deal.”

“If you say so, bud. John?”

“Yeah.”

“You should tell him, you know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

Scott’s in the gym. He’s got the stereo on loud, and the TV, wailing guitars clashing with the polished tones of the BBC news anchor.

John glances in and sees him hard at work on the treadmill in shorts and a sweat-drenched singlet. Ahead of him, footage of the forest fires burning through Western Australia is thrown up on the wall. He does not look around or show any signs of slowing down when John peeks in.

John’s jaw clicks shut. Living with his father hasn’t been easy, but at least they have beaten out a routine between them. Dad steers clear of the gym in the morning time, works out in the office, or after he comes home. John leaves the evenings to him. They eat breakfast at different times, dinner together, Dad keeps off the balcony while John’s in the apartment.

On the weekends when Virgil comes to stay, John’s learned to share his morning gym sessions. But Virgil is a silent presence when he works out, headphones on, head down, hood up, only ever interfering when he thinks John needs to rehydrate. He’s quiet and unobtrusive and everything Scott is not.

The din from the gym sets his nerves jangling like fingernails dragged across a slate. It follows him down into his room, and defies even his headphones to try and shut it out.

Better, he decides, to get out of here and go for a run.

It’s late morning and the pier is crowded. Runners, tourists, rollerbladers, all jostle past him, bumping him. He remembers why he sticks to the air-conditioned sanctity of the gym.

He sets off at a measured jog. What condition he had, he shed during that first awful week in the seaside cottage in Martha's Vineyard. Now it takes very little to make him noodle-limbed and wheezing.

“Bit-by-bit,” Gordon has taken to the role of his personal trainer with relish, even sadistic glee, pouring over the telemetry John sends him. “Take it slow. If you’d shattered your tibia you wouldn’t expect to be back running marathons straight away, would you? Your Rockport’s improving week on week.”

John is not sure whether to believe him or not. He doesn’t feel like he’s getting any stronger.  

He walks back and maybe takes more time than he needs to, stopping at the corner store to buy water. He takes a while in front of the fridge, inspecting the sodium content in the various brands.

As he approaches the counter he hears a rapid fire exchange in a language he doesn’t understand, followed by a smattering of laughter from the store’s owner, whom John had never thought of as anything but dour and suspicious. Some instinct causes him to shrink behind a stand full of jerky and protein bars so he can have an unobtrusive view of the register.

Scott is at the counter, buying a packet of mini-donuts and a six pack of soda. He speaks to the shopkeeper in a language John doesn’t even recognise, let alone understand. The shopkeeper, the same one who glares at John whenever he enters the store, who follows his progress to the dairy aisle on the monitors, who insists on handing over John’s change in ones every time he comes in, now cackles like he and Scott are old buddies and Scott has told his dirtiest joke.

John tries to back away from the counter.

Scott has eyes in the back of his head. This is a Dad Thing. It is also, as the aptitude assessor put it, ‘a marker of his superb spatial awareness” or, more aptly, as Gordon says, “a friggin’ pain in the ass, is what it is.” So maybe John shouldn’t be surprised when Scott jerks his thumb over his shoulder and  says, “John, you want to throw whatever you’re having up on the counter too?”

What John wants is to shrink back, unobserved, into the chips and dip aisle. Instead he seizes a handful of banana flavoured Protein Crunch and drops them onto the counter beside Scott’s donuts.

The man behind the counter says something in Arabic back to Scott, who snorts. John just knows he’s being laughed at.

Scott takes his change, gathers up his purchases and thanks the man, leaving John to stuff banana bars into his pockets, grunt, bob his head awkwardly and follow Scott out of the store.

The doorbell chimes as they step out onto the sidewalk and the air-conditioned cool of the store is replaced by the dense heat of early summer. Scott fishes in his shirt pocket for his Ray Bans.

“You speak Arabic?” The words are out of John before he can stop them.

“I speak Farsi.” Scott pushes his shades up his nose, but that just means John can’t see his expression properly. “Mr Harandi is from Tehran.”

“Oh.”

“And I was stationed in Afghanistan for eighteen months.”

“Yeah.”

“Iran and Afghanistan being a whole different part of the world to the Gulf Arab states.”

“I know,” he snaps. “He always gives me the wrong change.” Even to his own ears it sounds childishly petulant.

“I doubt that,” Scott swings his grocery bag and steps up to the edge of the pavement, waits for the tram to go past.

“It’s true. He insists on giving me my change in singles. Even when I break a fifty.”

“So bring exact change.”

“Well, I do now.”

Scott, gives him a look over his shades and, John, annoyed at himself for walking straight into that one, mumbles something about wanting to get home and take a shower.

They ride up together in the private elevator to the penthouse. Scott is whistling, tapping out a double-time rhythm on the leg of his jeans. He’s left music on in the apartment, the TV too, so a cacophony greets them when the elevator doors slide open.

“Sorry,” Scott grabs the remote and mutes the pounding dubstep, “Force of habit.”

“I’m going to go take a shower.”

In the penthouse you can have long showers and not feel guilty about it at all. The water is recirculated within a closed system, heated via solar panels on the roof. The nozzles are roasting hot and powerful and he can afford to stay under it until his skin is pruning.

Somehow the Farsi thing gets to him, irks him. He worries at it like it’s a raspberry pip stuck between his molars. Was he really supposed to know that Scott spoke the language? Was he supposed to have pictured him over there, memorising lists of Persian verbs?

Scott sure hadn’t given an indication of it in his infrequent video messages home. Those were all, ‘dude’, and ‘bro’ and boys’ own adventure pluck, like life on base was one big frat party. Nor is it implied in the heavy parchment envelopes that arrive home every now and then, containing pictures of Scott, beaming and in dress uniform, as another medal is pinned onto his chest. What does Scott need Farsi for anyway, except to laugh at John while he’s standing right there? He’s a pilot for fuck's sake.

And of course he knows where Scott was stationed, if he were just given a moment to think about it. That wilful ignorance had just been, well, a sort of long running private joke. My brother’s off flying planes in Yemen or somewhere. Tibet or somewhere. Venus or somewhere.   He and Scott each have their own lives, and that’s fine. It’s always been fine, since the day he bit his lip and waved Scott off at the airport for the first time.

“Hey, John?” There comes a rap on the door.

“What?”

“Don’t use up all the hot water, ‘kay?”

John grinds his teeth. His thoughts have been circling back on themselves in tighter and tighter circles for half an hour or more. Maybe he will tell Scott he needs to get out, tell him to get that hotel room at the Grande, tell him he’s busy, he’s working and that Scott can just leave him alone.

But by the time he’s out of the shower, and has shoved on jeans and a green woollen v-neck, he discovers he’s missed four calls from Brains.

He rings the engineer back. Stuttgart is nine hours ahead of L.A., so it’s already evening there. Not that John can tell, because the blackout curtains in Brains’ hotel room are pulled right across. His hair is still wet from the shower and he’s halfway through buttoning up his dress shirt. His shirt is creased in all the wrong places and he’s missed a button.

“John, c-capital,” He beams. “Sorry to ask but I’ve just had an idea with regards to optimising the weight distribution in the nosecone. It means going back to schematic 843-echo, except I’ve only got 843-victor and hotel loaded up on my tablet. Would it be possible for you to send me the relevant plans?”

It’s not uncommon for Brains to develop and discard multiple schematics a week, leaving ideas littered behind him like candy wrappers, and it’s not uncommon either for him to cycle back around to these ideas at a later date, pulling a new and refined form of one out of the detritus. The archived schematics are all stored on an isolated server in the L.A. offices.

“Sure, Brains. No problem. Uh, Brains?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing.”

Twenty minutes later, Scott enters the living room, earphones in and tablet in hand, and finds John pacing. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” says John flicking through the contact details on his phone. “It’s fine.”

Scott seats himself on the couch, but his eyebrows are up, and he’s watching John’s progress. With some effort John seats himself too. “It’s nothing. My driver’s not picking up.”

“Jasper? I gave him the day off.”

John seethes. “Why?”

“It’s his daughter’s birthday party. She’s seven.”

“How could you possibly even know that?”

Scott shrugs. “He picked me up from the airport last night. I asked him if he had any kids. He told me he had a daughter, Stephanie who was turning seven today.” Scott’s got a funny expression on. He’s watching John much too closely, like maybe John’s showing too much of himself.

And John reflects on how he used to be good at it, how no one knew for so long that anything was wrong. How his surface used to be a mirror. How people used to be impressed by him.

He misses that mirrored surface, hates how he feels now, all cracked and raw and exposed as a nerve. Wishes just for once, just for now, in front of his priggish, perfect prick of an older brother, he could still be cool and composed and brilliant.

Clack, clackclack, clack.

“I have to get into the office.”

“Number 38 bus goes from right outside, dude.” Scott’s gone back to his reading.

The thought of the bus, of the sticky, noisy atmosphere, of the closed-in spaces, makes John’s palms clammy. "I..."

Scott looks up again.“Kidding, Johnny. Just kidding. I’ll drive you.”

“No, that’s okay – ”

But Scott is already grabbing his jacket. “Come on. Let’s go visit the mistresses.”

Chapter Text

Like any secret shame, Dad keeps his mistresses in the basement. Each is more wanton than the last.

Scott grins boyishly as the lights come up. “Oh, sexy, how I’ve missed you.”

Dad’s restrained taste, his mid-century elegant style, might, most of the time, have you fooled into believing he was born into this world of money and power.

His taste in cars would not have you believing this.

The mistresses are lined up in gleaming rows, more than two dozen of them, each faster, smoother, more excessive than the last. There are Porches, Ferraris, vintage Mustangs, sleek Jaguars, even a bottle green Aston Martin. They are a car lover’s dream, and Dad’s filthy secret, flying in the face of Tracy Industries ethos of low carbon footprint, energy efficiency.

Dad likes to work on them himself, coming down here after hours.

Scott runs a hand lovingly over a silver Camino. “What do you think? The Lambourgini?”

John looks over the hotrod red sports’ car and sighs, “Aren’t you a little young for a midlife crisis?”

This gets a crackle of laughter from Scott and John has to duck his head in surprise. It’s been a long time since he made anyone laugh. Brains just blinks at him and he doesn’t dare be anything but formal and contrite around Dad. He thinks he made Uncle Lee laugh once a couple of weeks ago, but then anything can make Uncle Lee laugh; the word ‘spork’, those dancing concession stand raisinettes, even Dad’s John Wayne impression.

“I suppose you want the town car,” says Scott. “Cretin.”

Eventually they settle on a sleek black Jag.

Scott drives fast, but that’s nothing new, has been the case since he got behind the wheel of his first beat-up Impala when he was sixteen. At least he manages not to wrap the Jag around a pole.

With the window cracked and Scott moving swiftly through the gears, time seems to concertina around John. Suddenly he’s 21 again, a freshman, just been selected for crew, Scott’s picked him up from San Francisco International, he’s humming Norwegian Wood beneath his breath, the sun’s warm on John’s neck. The future's bright and he can catch it in both hands.

He almost says something to Scott then.

But then he sees Tracy Industries coming up on the horizon, his father’s personal tower of Babel, and the moment passes. 

Scott pulls up to the kerb, and John pops the door open. “Well, uh, thanks. I’ll see you at… home.”

Scott drums on the steering wheel and then says, “Hey, I’ll come too.”

“I don’t think– ”

“I wanna see where you’re working.” And before John can object he has swung the car into the reserved parking space marked, ‘C.E.O.’

“What?” he shrugs. “It is his car.”

At the entrance, John flashes his lanyard and Scott shows a somewhat dusty TI ID he puls from his wallet, and then – when the guard takes issue with the ID being three years out of date – his Air Force ID, his driver’s licence and finally a dog eared photo of all of them, his brothers, Kayo and Dad, clustered around Gordon as he holds his victory bouquet aloft, his medal round his neck.

Eventually, he’s marched off to the security office to get the whole thing sorted out. He waves at John who is able to slip away alone towards the bank of elevators.

The West Coast R&D hub takes up five subterranean levels and the top ten floors of the tower.  Tracy Industries R&D staff make their own hours. There’s always hot food, replaced hourly, strong coffee and a rainbow of junk food. There are hammocks and games rooms and a masseur and a gym. The lights stay on 24 hours a day.

Right at the top, taking up almost an entire level, and just beneath Mr Tracy’s private office, is Brains’ lab. It’s accessed through a triple set of airlocks and requires retinal, thumbprint and voice recognition to enter. Stepping inside, feels familiar, feels like home more than anywhere else in this city of angels.

It takes him fifteen minutes to isolate and clean the relevant performance data Brains is looking for and another ten to locate and upload the specs to the secure link. He lingers at the door. The blueprints still needs sorting. Brains has got Heisenberg’s own filing system, he can’t know the location of a blueprint and its purpose simultaneously. John could stay and…

But Scott will be waiting.

He takes the elevator down to the main engineering hub. As the door slides open his phone rings.

Brains is crouched under what appears to be a banquet table. John can see a lot of sparkly hems and patent leather oxfords. His shirt is still not buttoned up right. “John, good, glad I c-caught you. Can you send me schematics 744 Beta through 922 Xray. I’ve just had the most s-stupendous idea.”

“S-sure, Brains.”

And can you transcribe these into the central work station?” He holds up a napkin, covered in functions and calculations even more like hieroglyphs than his usual scrawl, as well as a certain amount of gravy.

“Yeah, I’ll get right on– ” He breaks off suddenly. He’s seen Scott leaning over the desk of what has to be the prettiest engineer in the place.

“Uh, J-J-John? Where’d you go?”

John grabs Scott by the sleeve of his jacket and yanks, so he loses purchase on the edge of the desk he’s been leaning on. “With me, please.”

“Uh, whoa. Johnny, hang on. She’s got some very interesting things to say about non-traditional polymers in G suit manuf…uh, nice to meet you, Dr Davis.” He’s dragged away.

John tows Scott into the elevator and the doors slide shut. “I can’t take you anywhere. You’re just a sexual-harassment law suit waiting to happen.”

Scott scratches his neck like a scolded child, but grins anyway. “You can’t say that. Not with Gordon in the family.”

“You want a prize because you know how to keep your shirt on and he doesn’t?”

Scott peers at him, peers down at him. John’s not used to having to look up to people. Even Dad he can square up to eye to eye, but Scott’s got those crucial two inches and at this distance they’re enough to have to make John tilt his head. Twenty-four years and everything’s changed but that. He’s still stuck looking up to Scott.

Scott’s got a funny expression on, now, halfway to a grin, but puzzled too. The back of John’s neck prickles. “What?”

“Nothing,” Scott’s expression rolls the rest of the way up into that grin. “I’m fine by the way. Didn’t get arrested or anything.”

“You didn’t really expect me to be worried about you?”

“Perish the thought.”

They step out onto the level of the workshop. “You should go,” says John. “I don’t know how long this will take.”

“Can’t I come in?”

“It’s authorised personnel only.”

Scott nods to the oak bench that is the anteroom’s only furniture. “I can wait a while, or…” He stoops and puts his eye to the retinal scanner. He seems just as surprised as John is when the scanner gives a confirmatory beep.

“How did you know that would work?”

“I didn’t. It was just something Kyrano said on the phone when he was bailing me out. He sends his love by the way. Well, actually what he said is ‘Tell your brother that you both can sort your own damn messes, Scott Tracy, and leave me out of it.’ Turns out it’s four in the morning in Hong Kong.” He holds the door for John.

They step inside and Scott takes a long look around the room. "So this is you? Cosy."

"It's my boss's." John goes to retrieve blueprints from the back room. “Don’t touch anything,” he says as the door closes out behind him.

He gets the correct shiny slips of technical paper from the narrow drawers and returns with them to the main lab. When he does, Scott is standing in the corner of the lab.

Brains has never said as much, but John has worked out that he has no great love of heights. He keeps the windows of the lab tinted, and the room dark all of the time. Scott’s figured out how to untint the windows, so the room is flooded with natural light. The sky is cornflower blue and the adjoining towers are cobalt and platinum. It makes the room feel so much bigger.

Scott’s got his fingertips pressed up against the glass. But he looks around when John comes in, and John thinks for a second he imagines that trace of nervousness, like he’s checking that this is alright.

The truth is John doesn’t hate the change.

He clears his throat. “Brains is going to come on in a minute. Please don’t speak. Just stay there, where he can’t see you. I’m really not supposed to have guests in the lab.” Dad had been clear on that. What is less clear is what it means that Scott can walk on in here any time he likes. But what is perfectly clear is that Brains’ muddled kindness, his tentative trust, have meant more to John than any other action not taken by a member of his immediate family. He does not want him to think John has betrayed that trust.

He expects a smart remark thrown back in his face, but Scott just nods and says, “I can be quiet,” and John manages to quell his snort as his brother takes a seat in the couch by the window.

A second later, Brains appears on screen. He’s back in his hotel room, jacket off, brimming with excitement.

“Ah, you’re here. I really think this could be a critical breakthrough in adjusting the problems we’ve had with control during pitch. I’m going to dictate some functions to you to input.”

“Sure.”

Brains begins to rattle off a list of fresh equations and John snatches up his stylus and jots them down. When he’s done Brains asks, “What do you think?”

“Um,” he says. That’s all he’s expected to say. Brains doesn’t expect sensible answers from John, he’s just being nice. But out of the corner of his eye he sees Scott’s eyebrows knot together.

And he feels heat rising up his neck. Because he told Scott that he was doing a summer internship at TI, that he was working for Dad’s lead engineer. And now it’s about to be obvious that he’s Brains’ glorified coffeemaker, that he would never even dare to tell Brains when his shirt is buttoned up wrong.

Click, click.

“Shouldn’t we consider that an arbitrary constant?” he blurts the first thing he can think of.

“No,” Brains looks puzzled, which he should because constants of integration have absolutely nothing to do with what he’s been talking about. “Let’s just do it my way.”

"Of course."

Click, click.

The noise won’t stop. But he hasn’t touched the bottle in his pocket. His hands both rest on the work station. He looks to his right and to his horror he sees that Scott is taking notes, the noise is his stylus tapping on his tablet.

Because it’s so easy to forget that Scott, with all his bluster and noise and reckless thirst for adventure, has, when you drill past all that, a bedrock of their father’s intelligence and a degree in mathematics just to prove it.

John hits a switch and the comms go dead, cutting Brains off mid-recitation. He turns on Scott. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Scott shrugs. “I think your buddy’s math is off.”

“He’s not my buddy, he’s my boss. And his math is not off.”

“I’m telling you, it’s off. Firstly, he’s accounting for shearing forces equivalent to over a hundred G. Unless that thing has an acceleration of 46,000 metres per second, it can’t possibly be– ”

“It does.”

“What?”

“It does accelerate that fast! God, what are you even doing here! It’s none of your business!”

“John…”

“John!” Brains is back, having re-established the link from his end. “As I was saying.”

And John is scrambling and umming and ahing and Scott is watching him too closely now, his mouth a hard line and sweat is dripping down the back of John’s shirt and it’s all too much and it’s…

And then it’s Occam’s Razor, isn’t it?

The simplest solution is the best.

He has a pill in his pocket. Just one. Not enough to be habit-forming but just enough to get him through this one day. Enough to make him sparkle, to make him witty and sharp and brilliant. To make him unafraid.

And it’s so obvious, that suddenly he feels calm, like he stands in the eye of the hurricane. In a steady voice he says, “Brains, can you excuse me while I go to the bathroom.” A minute alone, half a minute, is all he needs.

And then a voice says from the other side of the room, “Excuse me, but I have some thoughts.”

Sometimes you know you have hit rock bottom, and then the floor falls through. Scott has gotten to his feet and now he saunters over.

Brains looks absolutely crestfallen. “J-John, you know you can’t have your friends in here. I’ll h-have to report this to your father.”

John’s mouth opens and closes.

Scott steps up to the camera. “It’s okay, Dr Hackenbacker, really. I’m Scott Tracy.”

Brains fiddles with his glasses. “You’re Scott? You’re Mr Tracy’s –”

“I’m John’s brother,” says Scott firmly and his hand falls on John’s shoulder. “Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.”

“You’re really Scott Tracy? The Pilot.” There’s something about the way Brains says it that adds the capital P. “And you have thoughts?”

“I know it’s a bit early for in-the-loop testing but, if I may,” Scott adjusts the schematic, so it’s only showing the ship’s wiring. “If you don’t adjust this now it’s going to magnify into a serious problem with pilot induced oscillation down the road. Look.”

He transmits to Brains the series of calculations he’s been working on. Brains scrutinises it. “I’m sorry,” he says, “John, I thought it was your younger brother who was the engineer?”

John wants to die.

“It is,” says Scott. “But I am a working pilot. And John tends to forget my basic degree is in mathematics.”

“I do not,” says John, hotly.

“It’s the reason they abandoned the PlatoX7 jet. They tried a suppressor but ultimately it’s a problem they couldn’t resolve.”

“A suppressor is a blunt instrument,” Brains strokes his chin. “But, if we w-were to make adjustments… I never factored this in but maybe… It would help if we had an in-flght simulation, and I could study this in vivo.”

That is when Scott knocks John between the ribs. “John could probably whip one up for you.”

“John could?” Brains looks as doubtful as John feels.

The thing is he could have. Once. Before his concentration left him. Before even minor tasks became a struggle. Before the desperate, seductive need. He reaches for the bottle in his pocket, stops himself, swallows. Because saying no means having to explain to Scott, why.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” Scott’s attention is back on him now. “Something simple.”

“Simple. I mean, I guess.”

“Like when we were kids, John.” Scott’s hand is heavy on his shoulder. Without removing it he turns back to Brains. “Why don’t you dictate your functions to me, for a while, Doctor? And John can get started.”

So he says, “I guess I could put together something simple.” Or at least his mouth his moving, so it must be him saying it. And Scott pulls out a stool for him.  

And the funny thing is that he can. Not easily. Not well, but he can do it. Sometimes his head aches from trying to remember the language of coding that he used to hum like a favourite tune. Sometimes his fingers shake. Sometimes it’s just too hard until he has to throw out his work and start again.

But sometimes, just for a moment, just for a snatch of code or a function or two, it’s good, it’s magic. For a moment he is himself again, playing code like it’s a piano. And when he loses it it’s frustrating, it’s awful, and the grief wells up in him, like he’s lost it all over again. But if he keeps working maybe he can have it back again. And in those moments he forgets about the thought of escaping to the bathroom.

Brains is worked up in the way he gets when there’s a new problem for him to solve, pacing around his bedroom and scrawling notation on the mirror in black sharpie when he runs out of postit notes. Scott is trying to curb him in before he starts on the wallpaper. While it would never occur to John to correct Brains’ work, it doesn’t seem such a big deal to lean over and point out to Scott when he’s flubbed an integer and Scott will just laugh, scrub out his work and start again.

And the hours seem to melt by until…

Scott’s shoving black coffee and a plate of clam linguine under his nose, having gone for a kitchen raid and Brains is yawning and mentioning how maybe he should get some sleep as he has to give a keynote speech to two thousand delegates in three hours’ time. He signs off with a wave and a promise to get back to them in the morning.

Scott rubs his eyes. “We should probably call it a night.”

“Just an hour more,” says John. “I want to finish this.”

Scott stares at him, bites his lip lower lip. “I don’t know, John…”

“Tell you what, if you can solve this problem we go, if not we stay for one more hour.” He pushes the equation from his work tablet to Scott’s.

Integral of 1/cabin =

Scott sighs. “So it’s come to this? Math jokes. One more hour.”

It is midnight by the time they finish up and only because Scott makes him. The night guard lets them out.

John’s drowsy, but Scott’s sure behind the wheel. He powers through the empty streets and the window is cracked and the night air’s warm. And maybe for a moment he thinks he is 21 again, that the weight in his pocket is just his phone, that his mistakes are still ahead and can be avoided, that he can swerve out of their path like they’re just so many traffic cones.

Maybe there’s still time.  

“Scott?” his voice creaks a little.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did you learn Farsi?”

“What?”

“I mean, you’re not a ground troop. You’re not directing civilians. You’re a fighter pilot. What use is it?”

Death from Above, that’s what they used to call Dad’s unit. Dad’s unit is Scott’s unit now.

“Doesn’t it make it harder for you?”

It takes the length of a block for Scott to answer. “They’re people, John. It’s supposed to be hard.”

They ride up in silence in the elevator together and John says he is going to bed. Scott nods, goes to retrieve the glasses he left on the coffee table and the bottle of Scotch, heads to the kitchen to retrieve ice. By the time he re-enters the den, John’s already gone upstairs.

The Harvard hoodie is still lying on his bed. He throws it on the ground, climbs into bed. His thoughts are racing. It’s too hot in the bed, yet he shivers. He feels for the bottle, hidden beneath his pillow, cradles it in his hand, and then stashes it away again.

He thinks about getting up, going down to the den to join Scott, sitting down, talking, having a drink maybe. He thinks about Gordon’s words, half counsel, half warning, to tell Scott the truth.

He doesn’t move.

A little while later, a shadow skirts across the light. He feels the mattress tremble as the bedspread at the other side of the massive king-sized bed is pulled back.

Scott climbs into the bed. He doesn’t speak, he beats the pillow once to get comfortable and then puts his head down. His back is to John, in fact their backs are to each other.

“Scott,” John says after a little while.

Scott doesn’t respond. By the rhythm of his breathing, John knows he’s still awake. His presence is heavy, dense, like a gravitational force. John can’t help but think of nights spent in a tent in the desert, or under the stars on the beach, or stuck in a single mouldy motel room bed on the long drive to Kansas.

“Scott?”

“It’s okay. Go to sleep.” Scott curls a little tighter around his pillow.

“Scott.”

“Go to sleep, John.”

“…Okay.”

He sleeps.

Chapter Text

His sleep is dreamless.

At five thirty AM there’s a single beep at the other side of the bed. John’s still got his back turned, his legs tucked up against his chest, so he feels, rather than sees, the sudden shift in the mattress as the bedspread is kicked off and then gently folded back. A figure tiptoes across the room, stops to scoop clothes from the floor and slips out the door.

Scott, John thinks.

Going running, I guess.

I should go too.

He sleeps.

A while later his own alarm buzzes. He reaches out for his phone. It takes more effort than he’s used to, to do even that. There’s a pounding bass rattling his ears. For a moment he figures it’s Scott’s damn dubstep. Then he realises it’s just his own heartbeat, reverberating against his pillow.

He switches off the alarm altogether and shuts his eyes.

He sleeps.

When he wakes again, it’s because Scott’s crouching by his bed, shaking him awake.

“John, wake up,” he says and lets go of his forearm when he sees John’s gaze drift down to where he’s touching him. He tucks his hand behind his back. “Sorry.”

John’s eyes are stuck down with sleep. He paws at them. “What?”

“Juice,” Scott says and plants a glass of fresh-squeezed OJ on the night stand by John’s bed. “Or there’s coffee.”

“Okay,” mumbles John and closes his eyes again.

“John,” Scott shakes him again. “John, it’s ten thirty, man.”

“So?” John’s tongue unsticks from the roof of his mouth with a wet smack. “It’s Sunday morning. People sleep in on Sunday mornings.”

“But you don’t.”

“How do you know what I do?” There’s more rancour in it than he intended, but his head is pounding like he went four bottles deep on Dad’s best Bourbon. He drops back onto the pillow.

Scott’s brows come together tight and that little furrow appears above the bridge of his nose. Annoyed or puzzled, John can’t tell. John’s not, he supposes, doing a great job of keeping the mask on, but right now he’s too tired to care.

“Brains called,” says Scott. Somehow this nettles John, because when had it stopped being Dr Hackenbacker? It had taken two weeks for John to manage to call Brains anything at all. Why can Scott do it when he’s known the man for twenty-four hours?

But he checks himself, knows in his heart that this is being unfair. Scott had been on his best behaviour last night, had been polite and uncomplaining as he completed Brains’ endless rounds of distracted errands, parked his usual impatience at the door.

By the looks of it, that impatience is back with a vengeance this morning. “He says that the problems with PIO in extended pitch are secondary. He says what he really needs to work on right now is armament in the nose cone. He says he has my email address if we need to talk more.” He scratches his head. “I mean, what the hell?”

John wants to say that this is normal. He wants to explain that this is a side effect of Brains’ giant, polynominal brain. That to Brains every element is equally important and that he’s thinking about them all, all the time. He wants to explain that Brains will come back to the PIO problem when he’s ready, when the ideas have been left to percolate for a while, and that when he does Scott’s likely to get a hundred question email.

Instead he says, “Okay,” and rolls over in the bed, buries his face in the pillow.

“Are you just going to stay in bed all day?” He can hear that ring of disapproval.

“Maybe,” he murmurs.

Scott shifts and even though John can’t see him, he knows he’s no longer crouched at his level, that he’s towering over him again. “Fine,” he says. “fine, whatever.”

John grunts, and a moment later he senses Scott leave. But rather than pull the door closed behind him, he leaves it hanging ajar, lets a shaft of mid-morning sun into the room, wriggling into John’s blessed darkness like a splinter.

He’s pretty sure someone’s trying to drill a hole in his head. Right there, just above his right orbit.

He’s trying to get back to sleep when his phone trills right next to his ear.

Gordon day? Virgil day? Gordon day? Virgil day? He can’t remember.

Gordon day.

He grabs for the phone and shoves it against his ear. “Hullo?” His voice is as raw as the rest of him.

No, wait. It’s a Virgil day. And that means it’s too early for Virgil to call. Who’s calling him? Who-?

“It’s me.”

There’s a soft burr to Dad’s voice. He sounds tired.

“Hey.” He looks at his watch, does some arithmetic. “It must be late there.”

“It is. I just thought I’d call. See how you’re doing.”

“Oh.”

There’s a long pause on the end of the line and then Dad says, “John, how’re you doing?”

John’s tired of lying, but he’s not sure what the truth is. “My head hurts.”

“That’s okay.”

“And I’m tired.”

“That’s normal too.”

He imagines Dad on the computer, late at night, researching the ins and outs of amphetamine addiction, learning the signs, studying the complications. Jeff Tracy likes to be informed. "Argue from a position of strength." He had always said that to them. “You can’t argue anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Gordon says your mile is getting faster.”

Gordon talks to Dad about him. Gordon talks to Dad. The thought seems bizarre. He wonders what they talk about. Him, he supposes.

He remembers that it’s his turn to talk. “Yes,” he says.

“That means you’re getting stronger.”

He wants to contradict him, doesn’t know how. Doesn’t know how to put into words that this is somehow wrong. That he is getting weaker by the day.

There’s a little v shaped chink in the black-out curtain where the two separate curtains meet. John can’t help but stare at it. “How’s your dispute going?” he asks, just to change the subject. “Settled yet?”

“Not yet, but close now. I think we’ll have it tied down by tomorrow. How’s your weekend going? What did you do?”

“Just the usual stuff. Went for a run. And I showed Scott around the office.”

The pause is so short that John can’t figure out if it’s calculated or not. “Scott’s there with you?”

“Yes.”

There’s a knot in his voice. “That’s good. You two don’t spend enough time together anymore.”

“You didn’t send him? I thought he was my babysitter.”

There’s an abrupt, rumbling laugh at the other end of the phone and it stings, until Dad says, “Son, if I thought you needed babysitting, I think you would give me more credit than to send your brother.  This is Scott we’re talking about. I can think of 15 people off the top of my head that are more suited to the job.”

“Oh yeah?” says John, caught between half believing him and half not.

“You want a list. Virgil, Gordon, Kayo, Kyrano, my mother, Lee, your Uncle Ted, Catherine Casey, Annette, Dr Price, Alan.”

“That’s only eleven people.”

“Let me pull up my contact list.”

“And I’m not counting Alan.”

“John, Alan is your ideal babysitter. If I were an even greater piece of work than I am, he’d be camped out in the living room right now, doing his geography homework.”

For a moment John’s in freefall. His throat locks up. His fingernails catch in the sheets, and to his shame Dad must hear it because he says. “Aw, John. No, I’m sorry. That wasn’t a threat. I was just…damn… thinking aloud. Or not thinking. John, breathe.”

Breathe in blue. Breathe out red.

He doesn’t know how long it takes for his breathing to slow right back down, only knows that when he’s finally calm enough, his phone is still blinking, the international call is still connected and he can still hear his Dad’s breathing down the line, working in tandem with John’s.

“I’m sorry,” says John.

“Not your fault.” Dad’s voice is gruff. “That was stupid. I know how much he means to you.” There’s a long silence on the end of the line and then, “It’s not the worst instinct in the world, you know. To want someone to look up to you. To want to be someone’s hero.”

The bark of hurt laughter escapes him before he can stop himself. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Dad?”

“I’m listening.”

“I haven’t told him.” He knows that his father will understand which him he means. “I know you wanted me to. I’m sorry.”

“Johnny…” The use of the nickname catches him off guard. He can’t remember the last time Dad called him Johnny. “Johnny, you can’t disappoint me.”

John emits a watery laugh. “Rock bottom, huh?”

“Johnny,” he says again, in the same steady voice that must make Hong Kong negotiators quake. “You can’t disappoint me.”

That’s an up-is-down thought, a right-is-left thought, a sky-is-falling thought. It makes him feel queasy, and he’s much too tired to think about it, about what it means, right now. Instead he says. “I can disappoint Scott.”

There’s silence down the line. “Don’t make assumptions without knowing all the variables.”

John sighs. “No one can know all the variables.”

“But you have an incomplete data set.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

He waits for something more, some extra nugget of information, some explanation that will make telling Scott seem okay, seem easy.

But Dad doesn’t give you the answers, that’s not how Dad operates. Dad just points you to the puzzle and tells you to go work it out for yourself.

“I should go,” he says. “It’s late.”

“Okay.”

“Tell your brother I said ‘hello’.”

“I will.”

“See you soon, John.”

“See you, Dad.”

The line goes dead.

A little while later John gets up.

Chapter Text

John stumbles from his bedroom into the bathroom.

He twists every nozzle of the shower as far as it can go, even then, standing under the steaming spray, he feels cold. In his bones. His eyeballs feel peeled. He’s been overdoing it, he supposes. Staying up, trying to get Scott’s – Brains’! – sim finished. Pushing himself past his endurance threshold. Stupid.

He wonders what Dad is doing right now, on the other side of the world. He wonders what Scott’s doing, downstairs.

Maybe he should have told Dad that Scott’s been driving the jag.

He rests his arm against the creamy marble, rests his head against his arm. Shuts his eyes. With his free hand he grasps for the nozzle and switches off the water. He’s shivering now.

He stumbles back across the hall.  

He reaches for the first clothes he can find, pulls them on, only remembers as he’s dragging the hoodie on over his head, the trap that was waiting for him on the floor of his bedroom. Feels – ridiculously – panic start to well up as he struggles, half-In, half out of the hooded sweater.

But when he pulls the collar down over his head, he realises that the sweatshirt is a dark navy blue, with the air force insignia over the breast and a pair of silver bars embroidered onto the shoulder. S. C. Tracy is stitched onto the  sleeve in silver thread. Scott must have left it behind this morning when he was going for his run. It’s fleece lined and worn soft and doesn't smell particularly of anything. He goes to take it off, but he's still shaking with the cold, and the idea of stripping again is too painful. He towels off his hair and goes downstairs.

The penthouse is very quiet. He can't hear music, TV or any of the the usual noise assault that must naturally follow Scott. John treads through the rooms. It’s strange how much he suddenly feels like an intruder in his own home. “Scott?”

He tiptoes into the kitchen.

There’s a note on the fridge. ‘Gone for swim. Breakfast on the hob. (Come too if you want.)'

There’s a fifteen metre pool on the roof, the sort of well-appointed tepidarium that Gordon scorns as ‘amateur hour’. It wouldn’t take much to go upstairs and join Scott, if what he wanted was to submit himself to the scrutiny of stripping down to his swim trunks, to flailing and gasping up and down the pool.

He wipes the note away with the heel of his palm.

What he really wants is aspirin, but for the moment coffee will have to do.

Brains is a coffee connoisseur. He has three special blends roasted for him in a boutique coffee house up in San Francisco and couriered down weekly. He had taken John through the use of the burr grinder, the scales and the manual filters the first week, as if they were delicate lab equipment. There are printed instructions taped to the fridge in the lab kitchen, detailing the step by step of how to make the ideal coffee. He even arranged a tasting for John one lunchtime to educate him on the subtleties between his morning and evening blends.

The truth is John can’t taste the difference. He drinks coffee the same way his father does, the same way all his brothers do, bitumen black and thick as treacle. This, at least, Scott has got right. You could pave a runway with the coffee John finds brewing on the hob.

He dumps the sludge into a blue mug with the blueprints for the 1903 Wright Flyer on it's side. There’s food there as well, English muffins and a carved up pineapple, cooling scrambled eggs sitting in a bilious lump in the pan. The thought of eating any of it turns his stomach. Even the smell is making him nauseous.

He’s heading out of the kitchen again when the door swings in towards him, hard. The edge of it catches his mug and it flies out of his hand.

There’s a split second, just as the mug shatters on the floor, or right before it, when he and Scott are facing each other from the opposite sides of the doorway and Scott’s eyes are weirdly blank, unfocused. Then the coffee sprays them both in dark, mucousy droplets and he snaps back to life.

“Shit.” He whips the towel, still smelling of chlorine, from around his neck. “Sorry. I’m such a klutz.” He drops the towel onto the floor to cover the mess.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” John kneels and starts to mop up the coffee with the towel, gathering up the shards of broken porcelain.

“Let me get that. I’ll get the dustpan.”

“No, it’s okay.” He scrubs at the floor, the coffee’s going everywhere, staining the cream tile teak. “You’ve done enough.”

“You’re going to cut yourself if you do it like that.” Scott’s still crowding him. He kneels down too, and tries to pull the towel off him.

“Stop! I said it’s– fuck!” Predictably he has slit his hand open, a razor-edged lump of porcelain slices into the ball of his thumb. Blood drips from his hand, mingles with the coffee on the floor.

“You see,” Scott sighs, smug and all-knowing. “I told you.”

He tries to reach out and grab him. John is struck by the difference between their two hands. How Scott’s forearm is tanned and brawny. How John’s wrist looks half the size of his. He thinks Scott cannot help but see it too.

He’s quick to snatch his hand away but Scott is quicker and stronger.  He takes a firm but gentle hold of John’s wrist. “Here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Don't be a baby.”

“No! It’s fine.” Droplets of blood spill out of his clenched fist and onto the floor.

“C’mon. What if it needs stitches?”

“I’ve got it.”

Scott’s brow furrows in annoyance. “It’s not like I’ve never patched you up before.”

This is true in its way, part of the covenant of ‘Don’t tell Dad,” that has existed between all of them for as long as he can remember. It’s the same covenant that meant broken vases were hidden and kitchen explosions cleaned up. It’s that same covenant that left a defibrillator sitting on John’s coffee table like an esoteric conversation piece. Over the course of their childhood Scott had patched all four of his younger brothers and been patched up in return.

However, it doesn’t feel to John like Scott’s talking about scraped knees and skinned elbows, but rather those other times, those rare, ugly times, when John had returned home late from school limping or with a split lip and murmurs of “I fell”’ and big brother had sailed forth, his righteous anger as sharp and steely as the edge of his pity .

“I said ‘no’, okay?” he snaps and tries to yank his hand away. “Maybe you forgot, but you’re not my commanding officer.”

He wants to say that he pulls free. But really Scott let’s go, a careful steady movement like he’s setting down a loaded weapon. John stands up, cradles his hand to his chest.

Scott follows him to his feet and those inches, those crucial inches, are back in play. And there’s something else, a sudden stoniness to Scott that seems completely alien. “No, you’re right. I’m you’re older brother.”

“Like I could forget.” John’s birthday is September, Scott’s is April. That means in winter John’s only two years younger, but in summertime the gap stretches to three. Scott has always taken great pains to remind him of it, that by the simple meritocracy of brotherhood he is the best, that being the eldest makes him the best.

“No, I guess not,” Scott’s gaze is hard, searching. It is Dad’s gaze, he realises, that pared down ‘I know all your secrets’ look that their father gives his competitors, his sons and other assorted insects.

But it only lasts a moment. Scott’s gaze darts away, lands on the kitchen counter. He exhales. “Okay, fine. You want to catch tetanus, be my guest.” He flicks a dish towel in John’s direction, then turns to leave. “Unclench your fist,” he says, “Or you’ll bleed out faster.”

John wraps the dishcloth around his hand and counts slowly to twenty, gives Scott time to clear out of his way, then goes back into the main sitting room.

Scott’s out on the balcony now. He can see him through the glass, but he’s got his back to him, both hands fixed to the railing.

With his own hand still clutched to his chest, John runs to the bathroom, opens up the cupboard, concealed behind the mirror. Among the stacks of pill bottles is a neat little first aid kit… that’s been completely denuded of bandages. It’s empty except for a triangular sling and a blunted scissors.

He remembers suddenly that two weekends ago, when Virgil had been visiting, he had mentioned something about knocking the nail off of his big toe while kickboxing. There had been white gauze on the couch when John had come down in the morning, and a bloody footprint that wouldn’t come out of the cream Persian rug. Virgil had been cheerfully contrite to Dad about the rug and had offered to show John the pictures.

Left with no other choice, he wraps the dish towel tighter around his hand, grabs his keys and jumps into the elevator.

The argon-generated chill of the corner store is usually cool. Today it’s cold. His muscles ripple with an involuntary tremor as he steps inside. For a moment, confronted with row after row of highlighter hued energy drinks, he finds himself disorientated, unsure why he came or even where he is.

He fumbles with his good hand for his pocket and feels for his pill bottle. His heart trips a rapid fandango as he realises it is not there. He must have left it wedged between his pillows. His fingers twist and snap in anxious movements.

Breathe in blue. Breathe out red.

The shop’s proprietor watches from behind the counter.

Remembering himself, he makes his way to the back of the store, past the bottles of cheap whiskey and lurid cereal boxes to the store’s meagre pharmacy shelf. There’s not much to be had, it’s mainly bottles of antacid, tampons, blue bottles of antiseptic ointment. He gathers up armfuls of bandages and gauze, depleting the store’s entire supply and trudges back to front of the store, scatters them across the counter.

He realises he only has a hundred dollar note in the pocket of his jeans. He thrusts it under the man’s nose, and realising with sinking certainty that he will have to stand there until the man counts out eighty-nine dollars in singles, he barks, “Keep the change.”

But the man – Mr Harandi Scott had called him – makes no move to take the money. He stares at John, his head cocked slightly to the left and says, “Sir, you are bleeding all over my floor.”

John looks back and sees that this is true. Dark blobs of blood line the floor behind him like a bread crumb trail. He shudders. “I’m sorry,” he says and proffers the hundred dollars again. Surely, it’s enough. “Please.”

But the man doesn’t take it. Instead he rises from his seat, takes a set of keys from his pocket and unlocks the door nestled behind the counter. “Come with me, please,” he says, almost as an afterthought.

John follows dumbly.

The room is half a store room, half a kitchenette, lit by a single, swinging bulb. A grimy window sits high up in the rear wall.

John has to step carefully over the prayer mat set out on the floor, cupping his bandaged hand so no blood can fall on it.

“Sit,” says Mr Harandi and points to the blue plastic bucket chair near the table by the window.

John, numb, sits.

Mr Harandi unlocks a mirrored cupboard with his set of keys and retrieves a slender green box, a soft package and a small vial. He places all three items on the table next to John so he can see they are a first aid kit, a pair of sterile surgical gloves and a vial of local anaesthetic. He goes to wash his hands.  

“This… thank you but this isn’t necessary,” says John, alarmed. He tries to rise from the chair.

Mr Harandi turns to look at him, his fingers interlacing as he scrubs his hands. “It is quite necessary,” he says. “A laceration to the hand is always a serious matter. There may be nerve or tendon damage and you might lose function without proper care.” He sits down next to John.

 He opens up the green package, spreads out it’s contents: scalpel, forceps, scissors, needle, gauze. He takes his time, like a master craftsman preparing his tools. He opens the packet of surgical gloves and slides them onto his hands like a man placing a love letter into an envelope.

John watches, fascinated as he unwinds a needle from its holder. “I don’t think…”

“Your hand.” Despite himself, John finds himself obeying.

With the back of one gloved pinkie finger, Mr Harandi nudges the folds of cloth away from John’s hand. Blood has already turned the dish towel a rich plumb colour, and leaves dark smudges on the nickel table top.

John’s never been disturbed by blood, not even his own. He’s done his own share of patching and being patched up. He had been the one to mop Virgil’s broken and bloody nose when Virg had tried to defend the honour of the ungrateful Stacy Spivek. He had cradled Alan’s head in his lap for an hour while they waited for an ambulance after a fall from an oak tree had snapped Alan’s radius so the bone broke through the skin. He had even the one with the presence of mind to put Gordon’s ring finger on ice the day he had chopped it off, age eight, while playing ‘Sushi Ninja Chef Master’ with Grandpa’s best kitchen knife.

But the sight of the slender gouge between his thumb and forefinger sets his teeth on edge. He can feel sweat beading on his forehead, feel the flick of his pulse in his neck.

“You may sit back,” says Mr Harandi, priming a syringe full of local anaesthetic. “Put your head back.”

He does so, ashamed of himself, stares up at the naked light bulb and the unfinished brick peaking out from behind the plaster in a corner of the room. He feels the prick as Mr Harandi injects a  bleb of local anaesthetic into his hand, and then coldness as he sloshes saline over the wound. Eventually the coldness fades to nothing too.

“You are fortunate. The wound is deep but clean and the abductor policis tendon remains intact. You should not lose function of your thumb.”

John watches him from the corner of his eye. “How do you know how to do this?”

“I learned. At the University of Medical Sciences and later the Babol University Hospital.”

“You’re a doctor?” says John.

“That is correct.”

“But…” John says and blushes. Not just for the sound of disbelief that had almost come falling out of his mouth, but also for every other time he had spoken to him in a loud, slow, patronising voice or tried to explain to him the correct way to give change.

Mr Harandi seems absorbed in clipping a tiny, curved needle into a forceps, but John thinks he sees the corner of his moustache twitch as if surpressing a laugh. It only makes John blush deeper.

“I didn’t know,” said John, and doesn’t add that he had never even thought about it. Until now he had always dismissed the man’s quietness for stupidity, his formality for parochialism. Now he just feels ashamed. Mr Harandi isn’t, he realises, even that old. Closer to thirty than forty. The thick moustache makes him look older. Or maybe that was one of his own projections too. Maybe hadn’t looked past the end of his own nose.

The man shrugs. “Once I worked in plastic surgery, in the burns unit in Tehran. Now I sell men like your father People Magazine.”

John shakes his head with a rueful grimace, “The only time my dad ever bought People Magazine was the day he threatened to have them prosecuted for solicitation of minors if they didn’t take my brother off the ‘World’s 100 Most Eligible Bachelors’ list.”

Gordon had been seventeen. He had been photographed doing a jubilant backflip into the pool after winning the two hundred metres butterfly at nationals, and later that night, slow dancing much too close with a Latvian steel heiress several years his senior. The paparazzi had lapped it up, even before it was recalled that Gordon’s father was also one of the richest men on the planet.

Dad had been furious. Gordon had been almost as aggrieved when he learned that Dad had forced the magazine to take him off the list. That had been the beginning of his real party hard phase.

Scott had been… amused. He had even asked Gordon for the steel heiress’s phone number.

Sometime later, when the first paparazzo had started to follow Alan, Scott had been the one to slug him. Only an injection of TI’s most bloodthirsty lawyers had stopped that being a story itself.

“The Financial Times then,” says Mr Harandi. John can feel a tugging sensation in his hand as he works but no pain.

“How long have you been in America?”

“Three years.”

“Don’t you miss practicing?”

“I do,” says Mr Harandi and says no more.

John is suddenly filled with a potent curiosity. About this man, about his life, about how he ended up here on the west coast of America tending a corner store instead of working at the profession he has trained long and hard for, and obviously is very skillful at, but can tell that the thread of conversation has been definitively shut down, that to ask any more would be rude and unwelcome.

His thoughts keep drifting to Scott. How the two of them had stood at the store counter, chatting breezily as if they were old friends. Surely he had realised where Scott had acquired his language skills? Surely he knew what he was? That he must be somehow involved in the invasion of Iran.

The burn unit in Tehran. What sort of horrors must he have seen there?

Death from above.

But still he’s able to keep going in this hostile place, sell people their morning papers, laugh at Scott’s dumb jokes.

Maybe it doesn’t matter to him. Maybe you get hardened to it, develop a rind. Or maybe Scott made it not matter. People just like Scott. He has inherited some potent admixture of his father’s charisma and his mother’s affable charm that makes people just respond to him. Gordon has it too.

John does not.

Yet he cannot not but poke at the question, in just the way he knows he will poke at his stitches tonight, even after Mr Harandi tells him not to.

“You spoke to my friend yesterday.” His tongue betrays him, trips and stutters over the white lie of ‘friend’.

“I did.”

“He’s been in Iran, as well as Afghanistan.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what he does there?”

Mr Harandi shrugs and his gaze is keen as he looks up from his work. “Do you?”

John doesn’t have an answer to this immediately. His mouth is dry. He licks his front teeth. “Of course,” he says. “Of course.”

Mr Harandi nods. “Keep the wound dry and clean. The stitches are to be removed in ten days.” John looks down and sees the wound has been covered by a neat white dressing. “If you come back then, I will do it for you.”

“Oh, thank you,” he says absently and then stammers, “I mean, thank you. There was no need for you to do that. I don’t know how to repay you.”

The surgeon shrugs again, and points to the dusty desktop computer tucked into the corner. “Our accounting software needs updating. Your friend says you are good with computers. One of these days you can do it for us.”

John gives a vigourous nod and then, because it’s playing at his conscience he says, “He’s not my friend.”

“I know that. Ten days. Don't forget.”

John rides up in the elevator alone. His fingers trace the ridge of sutures beneath the bandage. It hurts to do so, but he can’t seem to help himself.

He feels terrible. Maybe it’s the blood loss. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s the appraising way Mr Harandi looked at him as he gave him a couple of fresh bandages for later. All he wants to do is go back to bed.

But he needs to talk to Scott. It’s what Dad wants. It’s what Gordon wants. It’s probably what Scott wants. Everyone but John himself, seems to want it.  

His phone tells him he has seven missed calls. The first three are from Brains. He scrolls no further.

The elevator doors chime as they open. He steps into the penthouse.

“There you are!” says Alan.

Chapter Text

There are two types of panic.

Over the course of the last year John has got to know both very well.

The first sort is the kind that starts in the body. This is the rushing sort of panic. It’s a pounding heart rate, sweaty palms, dilating pupils, churning stomach sort of panic, as your body floods with cortisol and adrenalin in a rush of fight or flight reflexes.

The second panic is the panic that starts in the mind. It’s the insidious kind, stealing upon you and freezing you. It roots your feet to the floor. It makes you feel cold and strange, until it seems like you’re not really experiencing events, but watching them on a very small video screen with the sound turned down.

It’s this second sort that strikes John as he enters the apartment and hears Alan say, loud and cheery and exasperated. “There you are!”

Panic makes him pause. Panic makes him linger. Panic makes him consider for a moment that maybe he is still dreaming and that any minute he will wake up.

It’s enough time to wonder what Alan is doing here, whether Scott brought him here, whether he invited him.

It’s enough time to go through a dozen worst case scenarios about what will happen when he meets baby brother for the first time in this uncontrolled environment.

It’s enough time for Alan to blurt, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” and for John to realise, with a feeling that scrapes upon his nerves, that Alan’s appearance, his presence, is an illusion cast by his father’s impeccable sound system.

He takes a half a step forward.

In the mirror he can see that the video-screen in the den, the one usually camouflaged as an eight foot plate glass art feature, is showing footage of the shaky unfocused kind that is the hallmark of amateur videography.

It shows an outdoor pool, large and ovid, with a fantail of steps at one end and a diving board at the other. There are palm trees and tiki huts and a young man in a pressed cream polo shirt making umbrella drinks behind the bar.

The videographer sways his way across the pool deck, dodging beach balls, lounge chairs and other flotsam. The camera swings low for a glimpse of his bare feet and high to catch a shot of the rich blue sky, then turns back to focus on the poolside.

Kayo is lying on a sun lounger, in a gun metal grey bikini and a floppy straw hat. A paperback is pinched between her thumb and forefinger and there’s a tall glass full of crushed ice and cherries by her elbow.

The camera trails over her in just the sort of slavish, adolescent wonderment with which his brother always treats their foster-sister and zooms in clumsily on her face. “I thought you were supposed to be babysitting?” whines Alan, cheerful and puppyish. “For all you know I could be at the bottom of a gorge somewhere. Buzzards could be eating my liver. Or wolves.” He sounds delighted at this prospect.

Kayo looks over her shades at the camera – at Alan – imperiously. “Have you been eaten by wolves?”

“Obviously not.”

“Pity. Try harder next time.” She goes back to reading.

“Ha ha. You’re so funny.” The camera dips as Alan drops down to Kayo’s level. “What ya reading?” He zooms in on Kayo’s paperback, which features a constipated-looking young woman in a purple negligee being eaten by a curtain. Kayo has never been apologetic about her appalling taste in trashy literature. “Ooh. Compromising Positions by Veronica Bliss. Is it any good?”

“No.”

“Is it sexy?”

“Too sexy for you, shrimp.” She taps her finger against the book’s cover as Alan goes in for an extreme close-up of her right nostril. “Am I going to have to dump you and your camera in the pool, Alan?”

“Aw, don’t!” Alan whines. “C’mon. I’m recording a postcard to send to Scott.”

This piques Kayo’s interest. She pushes her glasses up onto her head. “Really?”

“Yeah. Don’t you have a message you want to send him?”

There’s a bit of shuffling with the camera and then the two of them are squeezed next to each other, seated on the sun lounger. Alan’s in red swim trunks. His freckles stand out in high colour against his tan. He’s got his arm around Kayo’s shoulder. He looks younger. They both do. Kayo’s hair is still bobbed up to her ears. The footage must be a couple of years old.

Alan holds the camera out and away from them and they grin into it. Kayo, so supremely body confident in almost every situation, now fidgets a little. “Hey Scott. From Hawaii. It’s the end of our second week here. We’ve had an amazing time. Virgil ate almost an entire roast pig by himself at the Luau on Thursday night. That was a mistake. He hasn’t been able to leave his room since.”

Alan guffaws and nods. “And Kayo’s an awesome hoolah dancer.”

Despite herself, Kayo glows at the compliment. “We’re going scuba diving again this afternoon. And um… we miss you. We worry about you. We hope you’re safe. Come home soon, okay?”

Suddenly Alan hoots. “Look, look! Tracicus Gingerus, far from his natural environment.”

The camera swings wildly and catches a young man traipsing down the pathway from the hotel. He’s in a grey v-necked t-shirt and denim board shorts. A beach towel is tucked beneath his arm along with Professor Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. A smudge of red-gold hair thrusts out at an awkward angle from beneath his NASA baseball cap. He looks healthy, unworried, even happy.

“Hey, John.” Alan hollers. “Do you have something you wanna say to Scotty?”

The young man looks up…

And freezes as the footage is put on pause.

The remote wobbles as John points it at the screen. He’s shivering again. He can’t seem to help it. The chill has got into his marrow. His legs feel like jelly.  He switches channels: the news, a ball game, a stream of Spanish infomercials, anything not to have to look at that sunburnt young man.

“Scott? Scott!” There’s no answer. None of Scott’s comet trail of sound. Just silence.

The memories of that holiday are crisp and clear. They hurt. They had been in Honolulu for two weeks just before he went back to school, just before… well, just before. He had eaten papaya salad with Grandma, watched Perseids with Alan every night. In the evenings – after Virgil had recovered from his pork coma – he had tried to break Virg of his ill-advised crush on The Fountainhead. He shakes his head, tries to clear his field of vision. “Scott?”

No sign. But the balcony door is open a crack.

Rising slowly he goes to the door and slides it open.

Scott’s on one of the lounge chairs. When he hears the screen door slide he jumps to his feet. It’s the sort of furtive movement that can’t help but attract attention. A half-smoked cigarette falls out of his hand. He stamps on it, as if it’s a spider. “Hey.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” says John.

“I don’t!” His words overtake John’s. “It’s just sometimes it helps me to… It’s a nasty habit,” he says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Please don’t tell Dad,” adds Scott.

John shrugs.

“How’s the hand?”

“Okay.”

There’s a gym bag sitting on the tile by Scott’s feet. It bulges at the zippers. Scott picks it up now, sidesteps John as he steps back into the apartment. John trails after him.

A soft grey leather jacket hangs over a chair. Scott shrugs it on. “Okay,” he says.

It’s only then that John realises what’s happening. “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah.”

Maybe the panic isn’t out of his system quite yet. Because he doesn’t feel like he’s supposed to feel. He doesn’t feel joy or relief or even regret. He just feels that same constrained numbness that seems to make everything unreal.

He hears himself murmur some platitude about flight times and safe trips. Hears Scott’s non-committal reply.

And then the two of them are standing there, just standing there, neither of them ready to move and he keeps waiting for Scott to leave, except Scott doesn’t. And maybe he should be the one to leave. Maybe he should just go upstairs. Maybe he should…

“John?” says Scott.

“What?” he barks.

“I want to say something to you. Just promise not to get upset.”

"Upset!" Fury boils off the numbness in an instant. There’s a high pitched braying sound in his ears. He’s laughing, he realises. He’s laughing so hard it becomes a fit of coughing that shakes his lungs and tears at his throat.

“Jesus.” Scott takes a step towards him and John careens away.

“Upset? Upset how? Upset like I was upset when you invaded my home? My workplace? Upset like when you woke me up and blundered into my private space? How about upset like when you stuck your fucking hand up my nose?! That kind of upset?”

The anger makes him nauseous, makes him giddy. He didn’t know there was so much of it, but now it’s uncorked there seems to be an endless supply. Because is he now to be managed by Scott? By thoughtless, foolish, reckless Scott. Scott, who breaks hearts and noses without a thought. Who was simply entertained by Gordon’s antics. Scott, who thought John should be grateful if he remembered to call up once a month and asked ‘Hey J, how’s it hanging?” Scott, who should have been the one to fight for him, when he was 18, timid, well-meaning and being shunted into a life of balancing books and not equations.

“It must be fun, to tell me what I can and cannot do and how exactly I can and cannot feel. Big brother, down from on high to instruct me in the ways of not getting upset. Thank goodness I have you.”

He watches for Scott’s eyes to flash, for the muscles of his mandible tighten, because his fingers curl around the strap of his bag, and in the adrenalin frenzy what John feels is almost delight. And it’ll be good, won’t it, to reduce Scott to the lowest common denominator too? To wind him up, to watch that careful control crack. To render him down to temper and ego and violence kept just in check?  

“Tell me all about it, Scott. How should I be better?”

“You should stop ignoring Alan’s phone calls.”

Scott doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t say it with malice or even any particular emphasis. There isn’t any of Dad’s ringing authority behind it either, just weariness. Scott looks tired, sort of empty, like he’s a stuffed toy and someone’s taken the fluff out of him. “He misses you and he’s worried. You’re scaring him.”

The cold that is infecting his bones hits the rest of him all at once. He turns to ice, or maybe to stone.

Scott shifts the weight of his bag on his shoulder.  “I’m going to be at The Grand. Room 1222. Call me, if you want to talk.” He takes a step towards him, then changes his mind. “Sorry, if I ruined your weekend.”

After the door shuts behind him the first thing John does is run upstairs. At the top of the stairs he’s caught by another coughing fit, but he stumbles on nevertheless, digs under his pillows until he finds the little bottle, stuffs it into his pocket.  

Clack. Clack. Clack.

His head is swimming.

He stumbles back downstairs.  

There’s a throw on the couch. He wraps it around his shoulders. His fingers pick at the tines of the bottle, over and over. He’s still shivering. There’s sweat beading on his forehead. His limbs feel like they’ve turned to concrete and there’s a grey buzzing in this ear, he hasn’t felt this bad since…

Since the early days of withdrawal. Since long sleeps and lasagne.

Is that what this is? Is that why he feels so awful? Is he back in withdrawal?

Clack-clack.

Since he last took a tablet it’s been… It’s been… He doesn’t know how long it’s been. He was supposed to be keeping count. That’s a Step. Even Uncle Lee had said… But somewhere along the way he lost hold of the count and the days just seemed to slip through his fingers like water. Gordon day. Virgil day. How many Gordon days? How many Virgil days? He could work it out if he thought about it. If he could just concentrate. If the numbers didn’t seem to wriggle and dance when he tried to grasp them. How many days? Too many.

The symptoms of acute metamphetamine withdrawal are dysphoria, anhedonia, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety. They will usually peak within 48 hours. A subacute withdrawal phase with symptoms of insomnia, hypersomnia, appetite changes and depression may exist for a further three weeks. How many weeks has it been? How many days? It must be longer than that by now. Which means…

Which means he no longer has a physical dependency on the medication. So, this need, this awful craving, this constant ache, it isn’t coming from his body’s biological need for amphetamines. It’s coming from him. Just him. His weakness. His secret want to get back what he’s been missing.

If he could just feel okay.

If he could just feel okay for a single minute.

If he could just have one.

He’s so weak. So pathetic. Pathetic addict.

Gordon threw his stashes out. Virgil, too educated by far in the hiding places of older brothers, slid his fingers along the edge of his mattress until he found the slit in the lining and pulled the hidden plastic bag out. His father’s apartment is too pristine for hidden stores.

Some nights in his dreams he opens his mouth and white tablets rattle out of him in their hundreds, like mints from a dime store dispenser. Some nights he dreams he has found his stash in the lining of his mattress and he stuffs handfuls into his mouth, crunching them like candy.

Some nights…

Click, click-click, clickclick-click.

Stop the ride, I want to get off. Stop the ride, I want to be sick.

He presses down on the childproof cap and turns.

The lid of the bottle spins open.

He tips it over and lets its contents roll out.

A single tablet lies on the transparent surface of the coffee table, as round and white as a full moon.

His world contracts around that tablet.  

Gordon said he would be alright so long as he had that one tablet. But that was a lie. He’s not alright. He’s disgusting and weak and so, so tired. He makes himself sick.

So Gordon’s a liar.

Dad said that he didn’t hate him. But how can he not hate him after all John’s done.

Which makes Dad a liar too.

But that’s okay. Because John’s the biggest liar of them all. He’s lied to Dad, to Gordon and Virgil, to Uncle Lee. He’s lied to registered physicians and clinical psychologists. I don’t have a problem. I want to get better. I’m doing okay. I’m glad you’re here. I’m fine. I’m fine.

He splays his fingers on the coffee table. They leave streaky marks on the glass.

He tips the tablet with his finger and it spins counter-clockwise.

Fascinated, he spins it again.

This time he taps it too hard and the tablet goes careening, rolling off the side of the coffee table, skitters across the polished wooden floorboards.

No, I need it. It’s my totem, to keep the monster at bay.

No, I need it. I want a hit.

There’s no angel and demon on his shoulder. He can hold two opposing views simultaneously. That’s a sign of first rate intelligence. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that. Or was it Emmerson?

He rises, staggers. There are grey dots swimming before his eyes…

He doesn’t remember falling. Just remembers finding himself on the floor. There’s blood in his eyes. Coming from, he doesn’t know where.

He tries to rise and can’t. His head slumps forward and he cracks his chin off the floor.

The wold goes runny, strange. He thinks about dying and what that means. Juanita will be the one to find him, when she comes to clean the apartment on Monday morning. He’s sorry for that. Wish he could spare her. Or is it Julia?

His head hurts.

He wonders if there’s a formula to work out how many second chances one can have. There must be. Severity of offence multiplied by times re-occurring and divided by n. Would severity be calculated on a simple scale? Perhaps log rhythmic would be better? Surely some offences are several orders of magnitude greater than others? Is his formula too simplistic? Would severity degrade over time? Could extenuating circumstance be calculated for? Besides, the formula wouldn’t work. Not if n is an unknown co-efficient.

n is other people.

“John? John! Oh Shit! John!”

Scott’s calling him, he realises. Why is Scott calling him? Did he sleep in again? He must be late for school.

“Johnny,” A hand rests across his brow. It’s cool against his flushed skin. He moans. “Shit. You’re burning up.”

He can feel his limbs being rearranged for him, a pillow goes beneath his head and two fingers slide beneath his jaw for fifteen seconds. “Le’me’be. Tired.”

“I know you’re tired. This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.” Sticky hair is swept off his forehead. “You’re okay.”

He wants to say he’s not okay. He wants to explain about his formula and how it’s incomplete, unsolvable. Maybe percentage help is a variable. Maybe he needs to include it. Except the trick is he can’t get help, mustn’t ask for it or the equation collapses. He lets out a dry sob.

“I’m here. I’m here. Okay?” The hand is on his forehead."I'm right here."

"mmm"

“Emergency services? I need an ambulance at 1179 Orion Heights. The penthouse. I have a 24 year old male, unconscious and rigouring, heart rate 133. Please hurry. He’s my brother.”

Chapter Text

All he wants is to sleep, but they just won’t leave him alone.

“Prepare to move…. And move.”

He’s swung like a sack of potatoes from the rattling, shuddering gurney onto a hospital trolley. Someone strokes his forehead and a motherly voice says, “It’s okay, hun.”

He wants to scream at them, to tell him to leave him alone. To let him sleep, that he’s fine. I’m fine. But the words stick in his throat and it’s like he can’t breathe. He can't breathe. The light’s too bright and it hurts his eyes.

“24 year old male, found 25 minutes ago. GCS was 12 on arrival. Now fallen to 11. Heart rate 142. BP is 89/40. O-two sats are 89% on 4 Litres.”

“Let’s get the rebreather on him. Sasha, get an ABG.”

They’re poking and pulling at him, interfering with his mouth, his nose. An elastic snaps on tight around the back of his head as a mask goes over his face.

Please stop.

There’s a sharp pain in the tender flesh of his inner elbow as they take blood. He can feel it being drawn out of him and into those little vacuum tubes. He shudders.

“Get a litre of Ringer’s into him, stat. And check his glucose.”

Stop.

They’re pulling at his clothes. Trying to expose his chest. And for a moment he thinks, good. That at least they’ll do something about the hated Harvard hoodie. Except then he remembers it’s Scott’s air force sweatshirt that he’s wearing.

There’s the distinctive sound of a scissors slicing through cloth. Scott will be mad.

Please.

They expose him. Some deep part of him is mortified, because now they can all see him, his pale, pigeon chest, his bony collarbones, even his ugly appendix scars, standing out bright red against parchment skin. If only they would leave him alone. Why won’t they listen?

Leads, sticky and repulsive go on his chest.

“Hun, don’t do that. Don’t do that, sweetheart.” They’re trying to restrain him now, his arms are being bent back around. “Did anyone catch his name?”

“’s shirt says, S. Tracy. He’s an air force captain by the looks of it.”

“Anyone get a history here? OD?”

“Not sure. I don’t see tract marks. We’re awaiting collateral.”

“Where are the damn paramedics gone off to?”

“Glucose level, 8.3.”

“Let’s run a full tox screen.”

Yeah, that makes sense. He’s an addict. Run a tox screen. Better to be sure.

Everything is hazy. Outlines over outlines, like one of Virgil’s pencil sketches.  Faces. Lights. A sharp stab in his wrist as they take more blood. Breathe in blue, breathe out… he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

“Captain? Captain Tracy, we need you to hold still.”

They’re calling Scott, which is ridiculous. He needs to correct them on that point urgently. Scott can’t hear them. Scott’s halfway around the world, in Afghanistan, fighting a war he can’t win. John had asked him not to go, hadn’t he? Or had he? Maybe he had meant to, but only ended up shushing Alan when he cried at the airport? He can’t remember anymore.

Scott’s not here, he wants to tell them, but hang on, has he got it wrong again? He has, hasn’t he? Somehow he’s always getting it wrong.

There’s an awful buzzing now, flies attracted to a rotting carcass, settling and rising in a black cloud. Why can’t he breathe?

“Captain, don’t pull at that. It’s okay, love.”

“Are we going to need to get security?”

Stop!

“John!”

In the rush of buzzing, brutal, distorted sound, Scott’s voice is sharp as a blade, a line of lightning in the dark.  

“Sir, you can’t go in there. Sir!”

A hand goes around his wrist, as heavy as a handcuff. “Johnny, it’s okay. Stop.”

You’re always telling me what to do. Stop telling me what to do.

“Johnny, it’s okay. I'm here.”

“Are you with this young man?”

“Yes.”

“His C.O?”

“He’s not military… I mean, sorry… no. He’s my brother. I’m his older brother.”

Jeez, John thinks. Do you always have to bring that up? I’m his older brother. I’m his better brother. Subtract off me and you get him.

“Were you the one who found him?”

“Yes. He was on the floor. I was only out of the apartment twenty minutes.”

“Did you witness any tongue biting? Jerking movements? Any incontinence?”

“No.”

“Does your brother have any medical history that you know of?”

“He had an appendectomy, age 14. Radial ulnar fracture when he came off his bike at ten. He’s allergic to penicillin.” There’s a scratch suddenly in Scott’s voice. “He has a methamphetamine addiction. 18 months or so, we think. But he’s been clean for 62 days.”

62 days. Someone’s been counting where John hasn’t. That someone knows how long, that Scott knows. That the number of days is somehow quantifiable, makes him feel strange, and squirmy and somehow better.

Scott knows.

That seems like it’s important, but the thought is a Penrose Stairs, a polygon with too many sides. He just can’t make sense of it now.

“I see. Did you find anything on him? Or around him? Pills or empty bottles?”

“No.” And for a confused moment, John thinks, Dad?

“Were there any signs that –”

“If my brother says he’s not using, he’s not using.”

“Mr Tracy…”

“Captain.”

“Captain Tracy, I know this is a hard thing to discuss, but the truth is up to 90 per cent of addicts relapse. There’s no shame in it.”

90 per cent. The number is a lot higher than plain old 62. The fear eats into him, like a rat gnawing on his guts. Because of course he’s going to fail, of course. Of course. He’s failing as we speak.

He’s a failure.

“I understand that.” Scott’s voice suddenly goes soft, the steel edge, the Dadness vanishing. “But he doesn’t. Doctor, I know you don’t know me, or my brother. I understand that you are just doing your job, and I’m happy to provide you with any information I can, but let me be clear, my brother is the stupidest, stubbornest, bravest person I know. He will grind himself into a nub rather than go back to that place. He will rend himself in two rather than fail again. So this. Is. Not. That. Please, look again.”

“Understood.”

“John,” and now Scott’s voice is neither soft nor hard, not Dad’s voice anymore, but a voice remembered from long ago, to a night of bug bites and burnt sausages and a glimmering moon caught in the sea, and of two boys lying of the beach and one telling stories of thunderheads and cumulus cloud formations and the great swell of the sky, and the other weaving tales about the space between the moon and the stars and the great expanse beyond and how he wished he could go there some day, even though he knew he never would.

And how a pair of blue eyes had fixed on him, earnest and honest and unafraid and said, “Of course you can, Johnny.  You can do anything you want.”

“You’re going to be okay. I promise. Whatever this is we’ll get through. Just hang on for me?” A hand closes over his knuckles.

And then John’s falling into the black well of nothing again. And he’s a failure, and he hates himself and he wants to die.

But Scott believes in him, and that’s something.

Chapter Text

Clack. Clack-clack. Clack, clack, clack.

Waking up is a slow, slow process. It’s rising from the bottom of a deep river. There’s nothing you can do but let the current carry you, hope it lifts you to the surface and doesn’t sweep you out to sea. The light finds you, sometimes, but it’s distorted, broken up into dappled fractals. Other times you hang in darkness. Sometimes you forget the world above exists entirely.

Clackclack. Clack.

Finally, you burst through to the surface, and it’s worse even then the darkness. Your lungs burn as they howl for air. Your body is helpless. Beneath the water it’s peaceful, it’s only when you break the surface that you know you’re drowning.

John opens his eyes.

At first he sees nothing, only light and shadow. There’s a rectangle of cool blue light that must be the doorway, and a green haze that might be a monitor. The place is strange, unfamiliar, but he’s too tired to be scared. There’s a beeping close to his ear, but it’s the soft pulse of all is well.

Beneath it is the clacking sound, repetitive but without rhythm, reassuring and frightening all at once.

As his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom he picks out other shapes. A picture on the wall. His own feet tucked, apple pie, into the hospital bed, the nightstand.

And the figure in the chair.

Scott’s got the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head, the drawstring drawn tight, His earphones are stuffed in his ears and his phone is in his lap. His fingers are engaged with something in his hands. They twist and untwist without a sense of real purpose. It’s giving him déjà vu.

John tries to call his name. It comes out as a croak, yet Scott starts at the sound of it. His fingers stop moving and he yanks the earbuds out of his ears, immediately wide awake. When he sees John the light in his eyes fades up, just as gently as the light in the room. “Hiya, champ.”

“Scott?” The sound is scraped, more a growl than a name.

“Right here.” He leans forward.

“W-what happened?” His memory is guttering like a candle flame. Or maybe it’s flickering like a dying light bulb, the flashes of light punctuated by long spells in darkness. It’s in the darkness that he collides with what must be the truth and he sucks in a gulp. “Was I using again? I was using again, wasn’t I?”

Scott sighs, leans even further forward. “No, you dope. You have the flu.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Yeah, really. This is why we get flu shots, Johnny.”

They had been offering them one day in the quad. He had queued up, filled out the form, but then been overwhelmed with the sudden irrational fear that the nurse administering the jabs would look into his eyes and somehow know. He had dropped out of line and hurried away.

“The flu?”

“Yeah. Type A. Appropriately.” Scott opens his hands. Inside is a cube of brightly coloured squares, nine to a side. It’s a children’s toy, a Rubik’s cube. Scott’s been trying to get it out. That must be where the clacking is coming from. He sets it down on the bedside table.

“Huh. I thought it was something else.”

“I know,” says Scott.

“Scott?” He’s not sure how long it’s been since he last spoke. Time’s doing funny things to him, stretching out and squishing back, like taffy. Scott’s still in the chair, though his head is resting on his arm now.

“Right here.”

“Did you know? All along?”

There’s a moment put on pause. He can see Scott’s jaw slide left, then right. There’s a soft rush of breath as he exhales. “Yeah, I knew.”

“But I was careful, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, John. You were a regular master of disguise.”

A spark of anger flares, like a thumbnail dragged across a flint strip, but it lacks the fuel to catch alight. He’s tired. “W-who told you?”

Scott’s jaw sets with a click. “Nobody told me.”

“It was Dad, wasn’t it? I bet it was Dad.”

Scott hunkers forward. “There’s a good chance you won’t remember anyway.”

“Yes, I will,” says John, and promptly falls asleep.

He dreams he is a Rubik’s cube. People try to solve him, turning him this way and that, but no one ever does.

When he wakes again he is better enough to know he is feeling dreadful. Everything feels stretched out and abused, like he’s been broken down and reassembled on the atomic level. The roof of his mouth seems to have grown a pelt.

The room’s empty. The only sign of Scott’s presence is a jacket draped on the back of the chair, and the Rubik’s cube, still unsolved on the bedside table. He reaches out for it, spins the top layer on one of its axes.

Then the lights come on as the motion sensors pick up someone crossing the threshold. A nurse in blue scrubs bustles in. “How are you feeling, hun?” The flimsy blue surgical mask she wears lends credence to Scott’s flu story. “I’m Diane. I’ll be looking after you tonight.”

“’m okay,” he sighs. “Where’s –?”

“I sent him downstairs to get a cup of tea while we sorted you out,” she says. “That’s a good friend you’ve got there.” She gives John a smile, the cadence of which would have him rolling his eyes if it didn’t hurt to move everything. “The day staff say he was here with you all afternoon too.”

“He’s my brother.” That spark of anger, the one that wouldn’t catch before, has been smouldering in the leaf mould of his soul. Now it’s ready to ignite. And he lied to me.

“Really? You two sure don’t look much alike,” she peers at him. “Maybe around the face.”

Nurse Diane is nice. She checks his blood pressure and takes his temperature and tells him that his fever has broken. She changes his surgical gown and helps him to the bathroom and reassures him when he realises that he has suffered the ignominy of having a catheter tube put up into his bladder.

She puts him back to bed, fluffs his pillow for him. His head sinks back. The room is dark and he’s sleepy, but he can’t sleep, because in a minute Scott will be back, in a minute he will need to confront him. In just one minute…

The next thing he knows he’s roused by a shrill alarm. He lurches up, looks to the monitor to try and decipher the hieroglyphs. With a snatch of humour, pitch black and maybe borderline hysterical, he thinks that if he’s dying then at least his body hasn’t cottoned on yet, because he feels just about the same. Then realises what he’s hearing, actually, is the yip of his own phone.

He snatches it up. “Hullo?”

“Phew. I thought I was going to miss my day,” says a familiar voice down the line.

As he lets his breathing settle, he glances at the clock on his phone. It’s quarter to midnight. “You still did. It’s 12:45 in Denver right now.”

Virgil chuckles, low and warm. “I won’t tell Gordon if you won’t. Scott called. How’re you feeling?”

“Like I just experienced the theory of black hole complementarity personally.”

Another laugh. “Oh good, you’re still you. If you’d started making actual sense, I’d really worry. How’s your weekend going?”

“Shit,” he croaks. “You?”

“If I hear Bohemian Rhapsody one more time I might be looking for an event horizon to jump into myself. Are they looking after you in there?”

“I’m fine. Virgil?”

“Yeah.”

“Virgil?”

“Ye-ah.”

“He knows. Scott knows.” When Virgil’s only response is a non-committal hum, John continues, “Dad must have told him.”

Virgil sighs. “Dad wouldn’t have told him. No one told him. You made us all swear not to tell him.”

“Yeah, but…”

“So I wrote it down.”

The silence stretches like the space between two mirrors. He can hear the rising tempo of his heart rate monitor as it spikes. “Pardon?”

“Sixteen pages. Single spaced. Plus illustrations.” Virgil has the indecency to actually sound pleased with himself, as if this is some off the cuff remark, some prank he played on Gordon.

“You didn’t – You wouldn’t – You had no right– ”

“You’re the one who went to business school, bucko,” says Virgil, all nonchalance. “You oughta know that binding contracts need to be watertight.”

“You think this is funny?” The fog of exhaustion is melting away under the blowtorch of fury. The unfairness of this is breath-taking. “Did you send him here too?”

“I may have mentioned that your entire support structure was out of town the same weekend he happened to be in California, yeah.” John can hear the soft tap, tap that says he is texting even as they talk.

“How could you do that to me?”

“Don’t be such a hard ass.” Virgil tends to stay calm. He’s almost immune to button pushing. It’s why he’s so good with Gordon. John always thought it was an asset. Now he realises how wrong he was. The cheery, pathologically patient tones down the phone make him want to explode. “Maybe I just wanted someone to be there to cook you breakfast, make sure you slept, drive you to the hospital if you collapsed from a raging flu. For instance.”

“He burnt my breakfast.”

“Hah.”

“You had no right. I don’t need you two to– ”

“John, shut the fuck up for a second, will you?” Virgil doesn’t get angry much, but he knows how to deliver a stopping blow. John falls silent.

“You’ve got your right to privacy, sure,” says Virgil. “And I’ve got an equal right to look out for my family.”

“You think you were looking out for me?”

“You know,” says Virgil, and there’s a silkiness to his voice that is entirely untypical, and John reflects briefly that maybe sometimes Virgil does get angry. “There’s a possibility this isn’t all about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” John snaps and hears the echo of Virgil’s laugh, short and mirthless down the phone.

“It means, dude, for a start, that Scott quit the air force.”

“What?” No Virgil’s got it wrong. “But Scott loves the air force. He’s good at the air force.”

“Yeah, well he emailed the brass his REFRAD package this morning. In the middle of us all freaking out about you, Dad got a personal email from his C.O. ‘Dear Col. Tracy, I know you by reputation.  Please can you intervene…. Bright star of the unit…. Stop him throwing a promising career on a whim etcetera.’”

Despite everything, John’s first flash of emotion is one of jealousy. “I bet Harvard didn’t write to Dad about me.”

This time the dense silence down the phone is all Virgil and John realises that if he’s fishing for reassurance, he’s not going to get it. “John, that’s beneath you, man.”

He’s right and John knows it, can feel the heat rising in his face as he blushes, alone in the darkened room. “I’m sorry.” he says, “I just can’t believe that he would quit. I thought that was where he belonged. All he ever seemed to want to do was fly planes.” Scott had chased his dream, hadn’t he? He had seen his lodestar and set his course by it. John was the one who had foundered on the shores of Dad’s ambitions.  

“I think if this year taught me anything,” says Virgil, “It’s not to take anything for granted.” His voice softens. “I know you value your privacy. I know you think maybe I shouldn’t have told him, but I just couldn’t do it to him, Johnny. I couldn’t leave an unexploded emotional bomb under him not after-”

“After what?”  

“No, never mind.” There’s a shrill beep on Virgil’s end of the line. “Oh, that’s Grandma. I better go.”

“Virgil! After what?”

But Virgil just goes back to tapping on his phone. “I’m sending you something.”

“An apology?”

“Leverage.”

There’s a sharp ping as an email comes through. John glances down at it. “You’re a bastard, Virg.”

Some of the smirk comes back into Virgil’s voice. “You have met my father, right? Tell him I installed a brand new fuel injector. That’ll really get under his skin. And don’t forget to take lots of vitamin C. Love you, nerd.” He hangs up.

John throws the phone on the bed, nestles back into the pillows. His body feels leaden, no more so his brain. He wants to sleep but feels too tired to do so.

Scott’s Rubik’s cube lies on the bedside table. He snatches it up. And spins one of the axes.

Clack. Clackclack. Clack.

A Rubik’s cube is a toy, but it’s also a complex mathematical puzzle. There are nineteen quintillion permutations of a Rubik’s cube. That means that there are 8 billion times more permutations than there are people who have ever lived, yet it can be solved in a couple of dozen moves, if you know the right algorithm. That means other people, being infinitely less complex, should be solvable too.

So why can’t he ever predict what they’re going to do? Virgil’s betrayal, Gordon’s kindness, his father’s fear, each of them were so outside the range of expected results that he didn’t even consider them. It’s like he’s got one side of the cube solved, but when he goes and tries to solve the other faces they knock his first set of blocks out of alignment.

“Hey.” Scott hovers at the door. There’s a tray in his hands.

“Hey.” John sits up, wary. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Every move of Scott’s seems different now, imbued with a new significance.

“Hey,” says Scott again. “Nurses said I was to get you to eat something,” he says, setting his tray down. There’s tea and toast, a bowl of wilting jello and ice cream.

“Thank you,” says John, his mouth dry.

“You want a drink?”

John nods and Scott fills the tumbler of water from the jug. John picks the tumbler up in both hands. His hands shake as he lifts the straw to his mouth, and he sees Scott’s hand curl as he reaches out to help and then stops himself. He picks up the Rubik’s cube again and begins to play with it. The coloured blocks slide over each other in turn. John watches, close to mesmerised.

He rubs the side of his head. “Scott?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we get out of here?”

Scott chuckles. “Sure. We’ll take a road trip to Tijuana. Let me pull the car around.”

“I mean it.”

He’s always hated hospitals. In the back of his mind Scott must know this, must remember what John was like when he had his appendix out. Come to think of it, Scott had been the first to visit him, played hooky from boarding school and driven cross country to be there when John woke. He had rolled up his shirt to show him his matching scar, earned when his own appendix had ruptured dramatically during a visit to Yellowstone the year before. “Welcome to the astronaut’s club,” he had said, because so many folk at NASA got their appendix out prophylactically.

“We could sneak out to the roof.”

“Johnny, you had a temperature of 104. Less than four hours ago I had to watch them suction vomit from your mouth as you screamed about spiders in your bed.”

He begins to protest that this didn’t happen and then wonders if it did, and then finally becomes certain that it had, remembers the feel of the yankar tube sucking vomit out from between his molars, remembers the feel of insects crawling all over his skin and how he had known they were not real even as he was convinced they were. The thought of it, of being that far gone, makes his skin crawl.

“I want to see the stars,” he says to shake that thought.  

Gordon had understood. When things got bad and John couldn’t sleep those first couple of nights, he had dragged him out to the woods surrounding the chalet in Boston and they had lain out, naming and misnaming stars for hours. He wishes he were back there now.

Scott runs a hand through his high and tight. “We’re in the centre of downtown LA. The only stars you’re likely to see are the kind with PAs and designer handbags.”

“When you were sixteen you would have snuck me out.” John pushes back his own sweat-slicked hair. “But I get it, if you’re scared.”

Scott eyeballs him. “That’s what you’re going with, huh? ‘Gee Scott, what are you, chicken?’ You’ve been hanging out with Gordon too much.”

“Gordon’s okay,” says John.

“Gordon’s a little shit,” Scott’s fingers pause in their twisting and untwisting the Rubik’s cube. “But he’s the little shit who saved your life, so he gets a pass.” The blocks of the cube begin to move again.

Clack-clack.

And then, “I was scared, dummy.”

And John stares at Scott and sees for the first time…

The way his fingers flick over the surface of the cube and are never still.

The way he is never now without his headphones.

The way there are purple hollows beneath his eyes.

Months ago, Virgil and Gordon had left a defibrillator on his coffee table. They had never had to use it. Idly, in his bleakest moments, he had wondered what it would be like to have your heart restarted.

Now he knows.

It sucks.

Because he’s thinking how it’s frightening to conceive that the person he’s been perceiving and the person who is there are such different people, that the overlap between them can be so marginal, that his brother, his infuriating, indomitable brother might be anything other than that which he presents himself as.

He clears his throat and says in his steadiest voice, “I bet you couldn’t sneak me out.”

Scott looks up from the cube, distracted. “We’re not playing this game.”

“Of course we are.”

“What could you possibly bet me that would make me bet against you?”

John shrugs and pushes his phone across the bed, open to the email he just received.

“How about the deed of ownership for a vintage 1966 Camarro?”

Chapter Text

As great escapes go there have been more elegant ones.

When John plants the phone, containing the details of Virgil’s – or should that be Scott’s lost – camaro on the table, Scott peruses it, pinches the bridge of his nose, mutters something under his breath that John doesn’t catch and then says, “I’m going to need twenty minutes.”

He’s back in fifteen, with a bag from Target and a tray full of Frappuccinos for the nurses, which is a slick move and one John wouldn’t have thought of.

Next, he loads John into the wheelchair, ostennsibly to help him to the bathroom. Nurse Diane comes to offer assistance, but Scott waves her away, saying that John wants him to help.

Because direct sabotage is hardly in the spirit of the bet, and because Scott is drilling a thumb into the flesh at the base of his neck, John says, “Yeah, I want my brother. Thank you, nurse.”

Moving from bed to chair is no small thing. His limbs have taken on a distressing, noodle-like quality and when he takes a deep breath, there’s a deep hurt way down in his chest. He has to lean bodily on Scott to allow himself to swing into the wheelchair.

Before he does, Scott pulls a hoodie out of his carrier bag. It’s navy blue, plush, still has the tags on it. When Scott helps him into it, he sees that it’s got Marvin the Martian printed on it. “I asked, but they were out of NASA ones,” says Scott, a little sheepish. “I gave the other one to a homeless man. I hope you don’t mind.”

He helps him into the hoodie and zips it up for him. When he puts his hand in his pocket, there’s a small plastic bottle inside, and inside that a single pill. He doesn’t mention it, and neither does Scott.

After the hoodie is on, Scott piles on several strata of blankets. John protests and is ignored.

Bribing the nurses is out of the question, but slipping Mrs Cole in room 14 a twenty to yank the leads out of her heart monitor, just at the critical moment, is apparently okay. They swing into the corridor just as her monitor squeals and the nurses run to her room to make sure she hasn’t had a cardiac arrest. They’re into the elevator before anyone notices they’re missing.

Getting outside is harder. John has to sit in his chair at the bottom of the concrete well of the fire escape as Scott jemmies the door open with duct tape and plastic ties to make sure that the alarms don’t go off. After that, John has to get up the stairs. It’s eleven steps but it feels like ten times that many. Scott has to sling his arm under his armpit and help him up, taking almost all his weight.

“Oh fuck, you’re heavy,” he exclaims, and just shakes his head when John burbles with unexpected laughter.

They make it to the top and Scott helps him across the roof. Pieces of gravel get between his bare toes and the warm air sticks to his skin.

Scott lowers him to the ground, resting up against one of the rooftop air conditioning cooling towers and embalms him in blankets once more, insisting that at “at least here you’re going to be warm”.

“Air conditioners kill people, you know?” John taps the brushed metal surface of the tower supporting his back. “Contaminated mist from the cooling towers of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia killed nearly fifty people in 1976.”

“Can’t keep your fun facts to yourself, can you?” Scott piles another blanket onto him.

“You’ll miss them, when I die of Legionnaire’s disease.” He turns his gaze skyward. Scott’s right. You can’t see the stars from here. The city is awash with neon blues and yellows and the sky is dirty orange.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Scott ruffles John’s rumpled hair, a gesture calculated both to be affectionate and annoying. “I never miss.” He sits down, leans against the parapet wall, facing John, they’re close enough that when he stretches out, their knees almost touch.

There’s silence, enough time for John’s breathing to return to a regulation twenty breaths per minutes. Scott takes the Rubik’s cube from his pocket again and begins to turn it over in his hands, starts to twist it again. The colours flip past, kaleidoscope-like.

The aimless motion is so familiar that on instinct John reaches into his own pocket. “You do know those are meant to be solved?” he says.

“Are they?” says Scott. He balances the two diagonally opposite edges of the cube between his two forefingers, and spins the whole cube on its long axis. “I had heard something about that.”

John puts his head back, his neck is stiff. The air-con tower rings as he bangs his skull against it. “It’s too bad you couldn’t win your bet, though.” He puts it out there casually, and watches Scott’s eyebrow go up.

“I got you out, didn’t I?”

“You couldn’t even get me out of the building.” He shuts his eyes. “But I’ll give you a second chance.”

There’s a cautiousness to Scott still, like he’s expecting all the time to have to say no. “What do you have in mind?”

“If I can’t solve that,” he points to the Rubik’s cube, you get the camaro. “But if I can –”

“If?”

“Fine then. If I can’t solve it in a hundred moves you get the car. But if I can, I get to ask you a question, and you’ve got to answer it truthfully.”

“Truth or dare, huh?” There’s a moment when he thinks Scott will decline. But then he pushes himself off the wall, leans over and presses the cube into John’s hand. “Impress me.”

There’s a trick to it. Actually there are several tricks. A Rubik’s cube is group theory and algorithms. He’s rusty and he hits more than a few dead ends, but the muscle memory begins to return, piecemeal.

U R U’ R’ U’ F’ U F

Now that there’s a sense of purpose the noise doesn’t get to him. He twists the block by quarter-turns. Up and right clockwise, then up and right counter-clockwise. Finally he gets the puzzle out, so the six faces are uniform blocks of colour. He’s been counting, and he knows so has Scott.

98.

He tosses the block back to Scott, but overshoots and Scott has to dive to catch it to stop it going over the roof. He starts to take the block apart, turn by turn, and John’s order descends back into mayhem. “So, ask your question,” he keeps his eyes on the cube.

“Are you in LA because you thought I couldn’t handle myself?”

Clackity-clack.

Now Scott does raise his head. “No, dude. C’mon. I wanted to see you, but I was in California anyway.”

“Were you? Really?”

“Yeah, actually. I had to go before a review board on Friday morning. Down near Lancaster.”

“Lancaster?”

He can only mean one thing. Edwards Air Force Base. John knows that name. In a family that watches The Right Stuff at Christmas the same way other families watch It’s A Wonderful Life, they all do. NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Centre is based there. And the Airforce Rocket Research Centre.

“At Edwards, yeah. There was a special sitting of the Test Pilot School Selection Board. I was invited to attend.”

The Air Force Test Pilot School. It’s a breeding ground for legends, a starting point for so many of John’s heroes. Gus Grissom had trained there, and Chris Hadfield. Buzz Aldrin had been commandant.

“They just called you up to attend?”

Clack-clack.

Scott shakes his head. “It wasn’t like that. I applied. A couple of months back. Dad doesn’t know… I don’t think. Nobody knows. I thought it might be a good fit for me… a better fit.”

“And what happened?”

“I met with the board.” Scott seems a little dazed. “They said I was an exceptional candidate. That I met and surpassed every criterion required to join the school.”

“So you’ve been accepted, then?” The bite of jealousy is back. John does not want to be a pilot, has never wanted to be a pilot, but the idea of rubbing shoulders with giants, of Scott being one step closer to John’s dream, gnaws at him in the worst way. “Congratulations.”  

Scott shifts. “It was then pointed out to me by the board that there was a conflict of interest.” He swallows. “That my father is founder and CEO of the third largest aeronautics company in the world. That I might one day be expected to inherit at least a portion of his controlling stake. The board felt that given these extenuating and exceptional circumstances it would be unfair of them to place me in such a compromised position. That they wouldn’t want me to feel I was being forced to choose between my loyalty to my country and to my family.”

“Scott…”

“I told them… Damn. I told them I would sign any non-disclosure agreement they liked, that I would forfeit any claim I had to a stake in TI. They thanked me for my time.” For a moment he looks crushed.

“I’m sorry.”

Scott shrugs the moment off, bares his teeth in an automatic smile. “After that, you might have noticed, I got a little drunk. I was supposed to meet my old staff sergeant Friday night in LA. She and her wife had to escort me home from the bar.”

“Oh,” says John, as another bald assumption goes up in flames.

“Sorry, about... That couldn’t have helped things.”

“It’s okay.”

The Rubik’s cube lands in John’s lap again. Its sides are once again uniform blocks of colour. Scott has gone and solved it while he’s been talking. “87,” he says. “Your turn.”

John rolls the cube over in his hands. The sides match up. Blue, green, red, yellow and orange. Exceptional spatial awareness. Dammit. “I didn’t… I never said…” But they’ve come this far, so he relents. “What is it you want to know?”

“Did you, Virgil and Gordon really eat one of Grandpa’s famous lasagnes by yourselves?”

John, expecting altogether another kind of question, snorts. He begins to break the cube up again. “He told you about that?”

“He included the recipe.”

The laugh makes John’s chest ache. “He confiscated most of it, if I remember.”

“Can you not be mad at him?” says Scott. “I know you asked him not to tell you, but he has reasons for doing what he did.”

“I’m not mad. Or maybe I am.” The cube reshuffled, he begins to solve it again. It’s satisfying to watch the sides come together the cube’s puzzle unravelling. “I always forget what a sneaky bastard he is.”

“That’s little brothers for you. You can’t trust ‘em.”

“Big brothers either. Apparently.” He shoots Scott a sideways look

Scott squirms. “Fortunately, I’ll never have to find out on that count. I didn’t mean to lie about not knowing. It’s just when you came down on Saturday morning in that goddam hoody it seemed like you were going all in and there just didn’t seem to be the right moment...”

The hoody. The stupid damn hoody. He clicks the last orange block into place, spins the completed cube on its axis and lobs it back to Scott. “72. Why are you quitting the Air Force?”

Scott grimaces, like he’s bitten into a lemon. “I suppose it was too much to ask for that to stay secret for more than a hot minute. It’s not exactly quitting. They’ve got to accept my REFRAD and I’ve still got to be on a boat back to Kabul in, oh,” he checks his phone, “Seventeen hours. But I don’t have any service commitment left and my tour is up in three weeks, so they might push it through quick.”

“Is it because you’re disappointed about test pilot school?”

“No.”

“I thought you liked the Air Force.” He’s aware how childish it sounds.

“I’m good at the Air Force,” says Scott, leaning back further into the wall, tilting his head towards the sky.

“Is it,” John clears his throat, “Is it because of me?”

“No.” Scott flips the cube from hand to hand. “And then again, yes.”

John can feel his pulse rising in dread of what Scott’s going to say next. He tries to pre-empt him, in case Scott’s going to say that he needs to be here to look after him, that he needs to be managed. “I don’t need you giving up for my sake– ”

At the same time as Scott says, “What you did took guts.”

John wants to protest at this, protest at how he’s been terrified the whole time. How he could have done nothing at all if Gordon and Virgil hadn’t forced him and cajoled him and made him stop. How some days staying alive and sane is all he can do. Sometimes it seems like it’s more than he can do. “None of it was brave, Scott.”

“More than you know.” Scott fidgets. “The truth is that I haven’t believed in what we’re doing out there for a long time.  I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the violence. I’m sick of watching friends get blown away, of following orders I can’t countenance. I’m sick of the blood on my hands and the filth, and how cynical it makes me. I say I stay in for the guys in my unit, or because of Dad, but the truth is, I think I just didn’t want it to beat me. I guess I knew it was going to be hard out there. I just never thought that I would be this weak.”

“Scott.”  His mouth is dry. In retrospect it seems obvious, the restlessness and early waking, the need for loud noise wherever he goes, all symptoms of post-traumatic stress or designed to mask it. Hypervigilence, anxiety, insomnia. “I didn’t know.”

“You weren’t supposed to, dummy. I didn’t want you to think… I didn’t want you to worry about me.” He tosses the cube from hand to hand, growls, “This is hard.”

“Do they know in your unit?”

Another watery chuckle. “Who are you talking to? I’m the best at what I do and I’ve got that Tracy swagger, you know, the one where you seem on top of the world, right up until the moment when you fall off it. They’re giving me the Silver Star next month, believe it or not.” He gives a queasy, embarrassed half-smile, as if this is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “There are people I’m responsible for out there who’ve seen worse, who have it worse. I couldn’t go letting them down. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

“And I’m getting better,” he goes on, “I saw a shrink. Privately. That was fucking awful, but it helped. And I talked to Virgil about it. Dad, a little too. It’s a work in progress, I guess. But I’m getting there. Maybe. I think. Hey!” He flicks a pebble in John’s direction, bumps his knee against John’s own. “Don’t go looking like that.” John wasn’t aware he was looking like anything. “I’m okay now. I’m okay. 75 per cent okay anyway.”

“75 per cent?” And for a moment the green eyed monster snarls again. “That sounds like a lot.”

Scott doesn’t speak. The cube stops moving in his hands, and into the silence John slips his admission. “I think I’m only 25 per cent okay.”

Scott scratches his forehead. He looks older all of a sudden. “Yeah, I know, bud.”

“I’m tired, Scott.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think it’s ever getting any better.”

“I know you think so. But it will. It does.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can. I do. I’ve been there. Worse than 25 per cent even. Five per cent.” Scott’s solved the puzzle again. He spins it on the tip of his finger. “My second ever mission in Afghanistan I shot down a Red Cross transport plane.”

Whatever John had expected it wasn’t this.

“My targeting instruments malfunctioned. Not my fault, the review board said. An unfortunate and unavoidable technical error. But if I had just waited one second, if I had held on for visual confirmation… I killed nine people. A pilot, two doctors, three nurses, three patients, two boys and a little girl. They had had been caught in a mine explosion. They were being transported to a field hospital outside Kabul.”

“Scott, I…”

“Afterwards, I couldn’t live with the shame. I mean, I couldn’t live with the shame.” His meaning stretches between the two of them like a bottomless gulf. One more step and he’ll be over the edge. “I had the gun in my mouth, John.”

And maybe after everything that has happened, everything he’s been through he should be more detached about it, he should nod and understand and say, ‘interesting, go on’. But instead he lurches upright, flimsy hospital gown flapping, and the gulf is deeper than he ever knew, filled with horror and grief and panic and an overwhelming sense of desperate, unaccountable loss.

And the sky is spinning because leaping up was ambitious right now and all the blood is draining from his head, and he’s wheezing and Scott has to reach out and steady him and settle him back down.

“When?” John asks, between wheezes. “How long ago?”

“Eighteen months now.” Scott’s hand is warm and real on his back.

“Shit, Scott. Shit.” And the fear and the loss are as sharp as they would have been in that moment when someone would have knocked on his dorm room door, and Dad would have come inside and told him to sit down and that the news wasn’t good. Even though Scott’s right here, with one hand on his clavicle and the other between his shoulder blades, telling him that it’s okay, and to breathe.

“Why didn’t you?” It’s as much an accusation as a question.

“Alan called me.” Scott says.

They’re not even supposed to be able to make direct calls to Scott when he’s deployed, but Alan’s picked up some of John’s old tricks. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. I… couldn’t even bring myself to pick up. I just sat there and waited for the ringing to stop. I kept thinking to myself that when it rang off I would pull the trigger. But then it didn’t, not for ages. And I kept thinking about him, about how it would effect him. That’s what kept running in my head. How it would fuck up Alan. How it would fuck up you all.”

“You didn’t do it because you thought it would fuck us up?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a terrible reason not to do something!”  

He blurts it out before he can think about what he’s saying, but Scott doesn’t even seem to mind. He barks out a surprised laugh. “You’re right. It’s stupid. But just then, it was enough. It was enough to make me holster my gun. It was enough to get me up out of bed the next morning, even though a big part of me, the big part of me, wanted to die. It was enough to keep me ploughing forward, even though every step feels like you’re up to your chest in ash and muck and filth, even though you don’t know why you’re doing it, except that one reason. It was enough to help me find other reasons.”

“Jesus, Scott.” And he hears the irony as the words fall out of his mouth. “You should have told someone. You should have told me.”

“I know that now. I felt like I couldn’t, not then.” Scott stands up and walks to the edge of the roof. “But if I had my time over, I’d tell everyone who would listen. You, Virg, Gordon, Kayo, Dad, the mailman, whoever. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“I’m getting better.” His hand brushes the edge of the roof. “It’s a slow process. It’s so fucking slow. And some days are still bad. Some days it’s like the world wants to piss in my face. But sometimes I go hours, even days without thinking about it. Sometimes I feel just like myself. And the reasons I want to live, there are so many more of them now than the reasons I want to die. Like... how the light looks coming up over the city when you fly into Tokyo at dawn, that’s a good one, or a frosty beer at the first ballgame of the season. Girls with strawberry blonde hair. Getting home for Christmas and seeing who can hide the most of Grandma’s trifle. Being able to talk to you on a shitty rooftop in downtown LA. Telling you that I know you’re going to be okay, that you’re the bravest, toughest bastard I’ve ever met. Big reasons. Small reasons. Stupid reasons. Profound reasons. Doesn’t matter.”

“Perseid meteor showers,” says John. “They’re coming back in August. I’d like to see them.”

“Yeah. Riding out at sunset at home.”

“I want to see Gordon swim another gala.”

“And watch Alan take his first steps on the moon.”

“The moon? Do you really think so?”

“Yeah, I do. And you, I’d like to hang on to see your graduation from MIT.”

“MIT?”

“Yeah. Or Cambridge. Or Harvard. Or the Paris School of Culinary Art. Whatever. Oh! I’d like to finally beat Dad at chess.”

John nods. “I’d like to do that too. And I want to see Brains’ rocket complete. I want to be there for its launch. I want to sit like this, all five of us, together, just talking. And I want to not feel this way, like I’m going to break.”

Scott hunkers down, so they’re at eye level. Down here the two inches of height are erased. “I want to be there when you do. Just give it some time, okay?”

John nods.

Scott snatches up the Rubik’s cube from the dirt, spins it on the tip of his finger and then takes it in both hands. He reassembles it, slamming the pieces into place, one by one, so the puzzle comes out. This takes him twenty-seconds and less than two dozen moves.

There’s a thing called the God Algorithm. It predicts the minimum number of moves to solve a puzzle. It’s the sort of thing you would only know about if you speed-solve rubik’s cubes. Or if you majored in mathematics and came top at your class at Yale.

“Nerd,” says John.

“Asshole.”

“I suppose you want the Camaro back?”

Scott shakes his head, holds out his phone. “Truth,” he says, “Or dare.”

*

The phone rings for a long time. He thinks no one is going to pick up.

Scott’s slipped back inside. He’s probably sitting on the top of the stairs, close enough to come if called but far enough away not to eavesdrop.

Finally, there’s a click on the end of the line. “Whoizzit? I’m’m up. ‘t’s fi-oooah.” The last word becomes an extended yawn.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Johnny?” Alan’s suddenly wide awake. John can imagine him pulling himself off the floor or his beanbag, rubbing his eyes. “Is that you?”

“Hi Alan.”

“Is something the… is something wrong?” Alan’s voice, newly broken, squeaks a little when he’s worried. “It’s five in the morning, here.”

“No,” says John, “No, nothing’s wrong.”

“It’s not even dawn here yet, Johnny.”

“Yeah, I know.” John tilts his head up, imagines a night sky suffused with light. “But you know, that’s the best time for seeing stars.”

Chapter Text

Dawn splits the sky in streaks of green, blue, white and gold, as a young man lets himself out the door of the of the ER of a downtown LA hospital. He holds the door open for an ER doctor just coming on shift, smiles at her and then continues on down the sidewalk.

The black car idles at the other side of the road and its single passenger watches the young man walk along the sidewalk.

A word to the driver and the car pulls off from the kerb, trails behind the young man. The young man keeps walking, though the sole passenger has no doubt that he knows that they are following him. ‘Exceptional special awareness’, he had seen that phrase pop up again recently in a report that had landed across his desk.

He had commissioned the report anonymously from a private headhunting firm, which he had asked to assess fifteen candidates for a particular position.

He rolls down the window. “Scott.”

“I didn’t think you’d be back until tomorrow.” Scott doesn’t stop walking.

One of the few cons on Scott’s assessment had been, “Hard-nosed, mega-rich industrialist father. Over-manages all five of his sons. Likely to make trouble if he doesn’t approve of your project.” This had made Jeff wince.

There had been other, uglier notes in the report too. ‘High levels of responsibility but corresponding high levels of self-recrimination. Has been minimising his own symptoms of PTSD for the sake of others under his command.’

 “Got an earlier flight.”

“What about Hong Kong?”

“What about it?”

Scott stops. He tugs at the collar of his jacket and says, “He’s going to be okay.”

“I know.”

“He just doesn’t know it yet, but he will be. You should be proud of him, Dad.”

“Yes.”

“He’s a good person.”

“Yes.”

And suddenly he’s struck by a memory of a little boy, no older than twelve fists clenched at the injustice of his younger brother being expelled from the science fair for being too brilliant. He remembers a second little boy, his arm fastened around his brother’s wrist, calm down, it doesn’t matter, there’s always next year.

He remembers two heads, one red, one chestnut, bent in serious conversation as the discussed their next project.

He remembers how strongly he had sworn that he would make the world a better place for them.

“How are you, Scott?”

He sees the tension in Scott wind tighter, like the coiling of a spring, then he sees the tension drop away without a fight. “Pretty crappy I guess. Yeah, pretty crappy.” He glances towards his Dad and then quickly away.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Scott dips his head. “Yeah, but not right now. John’s sleeping. I’m going to grab some food while he’s down and pick up Gordon from the airport.” He sighs. “I guess he’s going to yell at me some more. I’ve got to make some changes, Dad. We all do. We’ll talk about it later.” He starts walking again.

Jeff rolls up the window, has another word with his driver and then cracks open the door. He has to trot to catch up with his son’s long strides and fall into step beside him. Scott looks puzzled, but doesn’t say anything.

The report he had had commissioned had been 200 pages of in-depth analysis on 15 of the best young field commanders out there and had ranked them in terms of suitability for his post.

He had been gratified when the young man beside him had come back as the top candidate, particularly as he would have offered him the job anyway.

“Walk with me, a little,” he says. “It’s a nice morning and we could both use the fresh air. And I want to tell you about an idea I had, about what comes next.”