Work Text:
Nocturne
by Emily Brunson
(c) 2000
By the time it was all over, my head was killing me. A hangover, only I hadn't been drinking, nosirree, not this time. This was an adrenaline headache, leftovers from the worst goddamn day I could remember since my second tour of duty, and that was saying something.
I looked over at A.J. He looked about like I felt: exhausted, scared for so long he was still trying to figure out how not-scared worked. The bruise on his cheek looked like it hurt like hell, but it was the ring around his neck that made my heart start jackhammering again. A perfect circle of dark red, that was all. This close. It had been so fucking close.
I must have made some kind of sound, because he turned his head very slowly to look at me. "What?" His voice sounded like tires on gravel; strangulation will do that to you.
"You okay?" I didn't have the excuse of a rope around my own neck for how hoarse I sounded. Just the remnants of fear.
He nodded and reached up to touch his face. His hand was shaking. "Yeah," he croaked, and coughed a little. "M'okay."
"You need to go to the goddamn hospital," I said. I didn't mean to sound pissed. I wasn't.
A.J. shook his head. "I want to go home," he said.
"It's your --" I stopped, because I'd been about to say "It's your funeral," and that was too fucking close to the god's honest truth. "--choice," I finished instead, and turned the key in the ignition.
The hell of it was, it was a gorgeous day. And not just because we'd been in hell for the two days before now, and it could have been pelting hailstones the size of chicken eggs and it would have been better than -- that. No, it was fine outside, cool and so clear you could see to Russia, and it was a great day to be alive. I rolled down the window and let the salty wind slap my face. My head still felt like I had a dozen little Pennsylvania coal miners hacking away at my gray matter, but the fresh air was like medicine.
A.J. sat silently next to me, watching the road without seeing anything. I knew that place where he was, then. That place you go when you've seen things you shouldn't see. Things no one should ever, ever see. When they get inside your head, inside your eyeballs, and everything you look at is covered with what you can't get rid of yet.
I could tell him it would pass, because it would. Eventually. After a while the afterimages would start to fade, and then one day they'd be gone. And all that would be left would be memories, and the dreams that would always come back every once in a while. Those would never go away.
Instead I said, "You hungry? We should stop off for some chow."
"No, thanks," he said softly.
"How's your throat?"
"It's all right."
"Liar. You sound like shit." I bit my lip and turned a little too sharply down Valley. "You, ah -- You want some ice cream?"
"He didn't take my tonsils out, Rick," A.J. said in that same tired voice. "It'll be better tomorrow."
"You sure?"
He didn't say anything at all to that, so I got us off Valley onto State and looked over at him. He stared out the front window, swallowed a couple of times, and then his lips pressed together, hard, and I figured it was time to stop trying to make things better and just get our asses home, because my little brother had just had the everloving shit scared out of him and he was about to blow.
He waited until I had the truck in the driveway, before it all started coming apart. I got out and tried to open the door for him, but he beat me to it. When I touched his arm he hit me hard, right in the center of my chest. "God damn it, Rick, would you just stop it? I'm okay!"
That'd be a hell of a lot more convincing if you didn't have tears on your face, there, kid, I wanted to say. I nodded, and he staggered around me to the door.
The house was cool, dark, just as neat and orderly as when we'd left it two long-ass days ago. I went over and snagged two bottles of beer out of the fridge, and held one out to him. He looked at it like I'd just tried to hand him a lit stick of dynamite, and wandered around me to the living room.
I sat on the couch and watched him sort of perambulate for a while. You do that, too, you know. When all you can see when you close your eyes is madness, you have to make yourself believe that at least what you're looking at with your eyes open is real. So you touch things, and smell things, and sort of -- reacquaint yourself with sanity.
He stopped by the patio door, and stared out at the water. After a long minute he whispered, "People have tried to kill us before."
I tried not to choke on a mouthful of Coors, and nodded. "More than once. Tried pretty hard."
"I --" He coughed a little, and his hand went up to touch his throat. In the bright sunlight he looked bled dry, as white as his shirt had been two days ago. "But I understood that," he continued raspily. "They had reasons."
"Well, if you call greed, anger or ass-covering 'reasons,' I guess so. Still didn't make what they did right."
"No. No, it didn't."
He kept on staring, and then he said, "This wasn't like that, was it?"
I put my beer down. My hands had started to shake again. "No," I agreed. I cleared my throat. "No, not this time."
"He -- He tried to -- He wanted to kill me be-because --"
"He was insane, A.J. Fuckin' loony tunes. That's all the reason you'll ever have. Don't go looking for more."
He gave me a look that made me feel like he was eight again and I'd just murdered Santa Claus with the compass from my bookbag. "There has to be more," he said in a horrible, godawful voice. "Because I can't -- If there isn't, I don't think I --"
He didn't say anything else, but it didn't matter. I could no more look at that broken expression and not move than I could have used that rope on him myself. He flinched when I came over, but he didn't try to hit me or push me away this time. It was like hugging a violin playing the highest note on the sounding board: he vibrated under my hands.
"Don't," I whispered. "Don't do this, A.J."
He coughed out something like a sob, and didn't hug me back. Just stood there, his face mashed against my jacket. "I have to. I have to -- understand."
"No." I pulled back a little, and put my hands on his shoulders. His eyes were what a buddy of mine used to call Fourth of July specials: red, white and blue all over. He blinked at me. "There's nothing to understand," I said fiercely, giving him a little shake. "He was a goddamn psychopath. This wasn't about understanding; this was about survival. And you survived. That's all that counts."
His face crumpled, and he shook his head.
It took a few minutes and making him sit his tired nearly-killed ass on the couch before he started to let go of some of it. Crying, yeah, but not all of this was crying from fear. It was anger, and some guilt, and all sorts of crap that I probably will never come close to understanding. Just like I didn't understand how he could have gone with Perkins in the first place. Maybe he thought he could save him? It'd be just like A.J., to think that. And what would it take for him to learn that there are some people on this earth who can't be saved? People who are just rotten to the core?
I had a feeling today had been a real learning experience. I was just sorry it cost him so much in the process.
"Why was it -- me?" he gasped at one point. "He didn't even -- know me. I was nobody. J-just this -- nothing. Why did he pick me?"
I leaned my cheek against his hair, and had a weird, disconnected flash from when I was a kid, and A.J.'s baby hair hot and sticky on his skull. "I don't know," I lied. "All I know is, it's over. You're okay."
"Am I?" He barked a short little laugh. "Am I really?"
"You will be."
I got him to drink his somewhat room-temperature beer after a while, and finally got some food into him, and when he looked sleepy and relaxed and like he might not be quite as close to either crying or screaming for the moment, I felt like I could maybe let go a little, too. There'd be hell to pay tomorrow; phone calls and some kind of report to Town, and Mom was going to either kill us both or else lock A.J. in his bedroom and throw away the key, for his own goddamn protection, but that was tomorrow. Tonight, we were in the eye of the hurricane. Storms earlier, storms later, but for now, nothing but blue, blue sky.
"You know what I said to him?"
Food and brandy had turned me into a slug; I looked over at him with a hell of a lot more effort than I should have taken. "Do I want to know?"
He smiled a little. His eyes looked glazed, which was exactly the effect I'd hoped for. "Told him -- You'd be there. You'd get there soon. And I wasn't wrong. You always get there. Always."
My throat started hurting again, and I cleared my throat, frowning. "Damn straight," I said hoarsely.
"I didn't want to die," he whispered. His tiny smile went away, like it had never been. "That was -- all I could think about. I didn't want to die like that. But -- I was so sure, it was all --"
"Now, you see? First you say you were sure I'd get there in time, then you say you weren't." I tried to smile at him, nudging him with my knee. "But I wouldn't let you down." God, the easy tone just wasn't fucking working. I sounded like I was the one being strangled now. "Scared the shit out of me," I mumbled. "Oh, man."
He slid over on the couch, the way he did when he was a kid, when he knew it drove me nuts to have this rugrat dogging me everywhere I went, but he didn't know how it made me feel ten feet tall at the same time. He smelled like sweat and aftershave, sort of A.J.'s version of gamy, which I didn't mind, either. "I'm sorry," he said in a choked voice. "I'm really, really sorry."
I reached my arm over his shoulders, and he glued himself to my side, another goddamn flashback to twenty-five years ago. Had to watch it; if we kept going we'd forget that we disagreed on just about everything under the sun, and scare Mom so bad she'd write us out of the will. "S'okay. Turned out all right."
"Yeah," he said softly, after a moment.
By ten I was contemplating death by pure exhaustion, and A.J. looked like he'd spent the last week being tortured with sleep deprivation, so I sent him off to take a shower, and used the time to call Mom. That ate up fifteen minutes, most of them spent holding the receiver a safe three inches from my ear while she did a damn good job of trying to rip me a new one through the phone wires. Finally she got the gist of what I was trying to say, which was that we were both alive and well, and muttered something evil at me when I explained we'd see her tomorrow. I hung up feeling like I'd just gone ten rounds with Timmy the Tiny Titan and lost, and looked up to see my brother smiling at me.
"I'll call her," he said, wrapping his arms around himself. "She'll calm down. She always does."
I nodded. "You gonna be okay?"
"Yeah. Oh, yeah, listen, I'm fine." He frowned and made a really stupid shooing gesture. "Go get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning."
"You sure?"
He looked down. "Yes. I'm sure."
"Because I can stay. Isn't like I haven't done that before."
"You don't need to. Really."
"I know. It's no problem."
He still didn't look at me. "Okay," he said softly.
"Go to bed."
"Okay."
He stood there until I gave him a little push, and it hit me then, all over again. Any closer, any change at all, and he wouldn't be here right now. Anything, and instead of trying to get a word in edgewise with our mother I'd have spent tonight watching her cry, mourning her younger son whom her elder son had not been in time to save. It hadn't been fun, it hadn't been exciting, it hadn't been worth it. A.J. had been within whispering distance of getting scragged by a guy who thought that blond hair would make a nice addition to his collection of scalps, and I never -- ever -- wanted to go through that again.
Ever.
A.J. gave me another awful look. "Oh, God," he whispered. "Rick."
This time I wasn't careful at all when I hugged him. Just grabbed him and held him as tight as I needed to. "I know," I said thickly. "I know."
I put him to bed, and then sat there with him while he shivered and twitched and did that funky mattress dance you do when you're so tired and stressed out you can't possibly sleep. Finally I slid down next to him and put my arms around him again, and five minutes later he was down for the count, just a warm, boneless weight against me.
I stared at the shadowy patterns on the far wall, and brushed my lips against the top of his head, the way I could remember doing when he was a snotty-nosed kid. "It's gonna be okay," I whispered into his hair. "I love you."
He made a sound in his sleep and didn't move a muscle. I kissed the top of his head again and finally closed my eyes.
END
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