by Amy Lane
“Living with the walking wounded is like dancing in an emotional mine-field.” Green’s voice was soft—typical, that Green wouldn’t just take one step forward, he’d go as far as he could.
“Yeah?” A wealth of gratitude in that word—and not a little of hope.
“What bomb went off today?”
Jack swallowed and leaned his weight on his elbows. It seemed so personal… until he remembered that Green had healed Teague once too.
“The ones I wouldn’t see until I got really…” Jack blushed, all the way down to his fingers, which were the only things he could see. “Personal.”
“Mmm.” Green wrapped his arm around Jack’s shoulder then and pulled him in to lean like… like a friend. “Adrian had scars like that.”
Jack’s breath caught. “Adrian?” He and Katy had seen Adrian the week before—a lonely, transparent presence, wandering the garden he’d created with the combined triumvirate of Green and the grumpy little college student who had captured both their hearts.
“Mmmm…” Green’s voice grew far away and remote—insulating himself from the pain of a lover gone. “He had those scars for a hundred and fifty years… they were a part of him.”
Jack shuddered from his position practically on Green’s lap. “That’s a long time.”
He felt Green’s nod in his hair. “It was. It was a long time to carry them in his heart… they crippled him in a way, you know?”
Jack imagined he did know. “How?”
“Kept him from leading—he was the best judge of character I’ve ever met. Maybe the most compassionate voice when it came for choosing people who would fit in here… he was the one who invited your sister, you knew that, right?”
“I knew…” Sarah had come to tell Jack that, not long before she’d been killed. A good man offered me a way out of the life, Jack. Offered me a home—a real home, where people take care of each other.
“Yeah—but until Cory healed him, he just didn’t have that faith in his own heart to take all those fates in his hand and cry Follow me!”
Jack laughed a little, loving the shelter of Green’s arms. “Does anybody?”
“Cory does. Teague is getting there. Think about it, Jack—think hard. What were the odds that Teague was going to turn out just like his father?”
In spite of Green’s fingers, running through Jack’s dark hair, Jack shivered closer into his arms. “It… if he’d been anybody else…”
“That’s right. His entire life has been an effort to change his pattern of behavior, so he doesn’t end up a monster. And it worked, too, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Jack had never seen Teague lose control of his temper, never beat someone outside of a fair fight, never… never try to rape a child with a broken beer bottle… The horror of what had been done to him made Jack shiver again. “But… how is he going to get beyond… oh God… Green… the shit he’s been through… how’s he going to get beyond that and be whole…”
Green sat him up then, and Jack realized that he’d pretty much been sitting in the sidhe’s lap. He tried to stand, but Green anchored his arm around Jack’s waist and forced him to stay. “No—you need to look at me and hear me, Jack. This is damned important. Brother—your beloved will never be whole, you hear me? Even when Adrian was healed, there were still parts of his heart that would never be replaced. Even though Cory and Bracken and I are happy now, there are parts of us that will never be fixed after Adrian’s death. This isn’t about being ‘whole’—this is about changing to adapt to those empty spots in your soul, right?”
Jack swallowed, then swallowed again. It was, indeed, a hard truth to get down. Teague would never be whole. His damage would always be there, walking around in his battered skin.
“Am I going to have to do this every time we get close to being close?” Jack grated, so very glad that Green had kept him on his lap. Green shook his head no.
“That’s my point, Jack—he’s going to change. He’s good at it. His whole life has been an exercise in changing his behavior to avoid being something he despises. It’s your job to have faith that he can change. It’s your job to make it safe for him to change. He’s going to order you around—he’s your alpha. You need to make him listen to you when it’s time to be his partner. And…” Green looked away, embarrassed for a moment.
“No!” Jack protested, because he knew what was coming.
“I’m not asking you to give up on making runs with him for good, Jack—just until he gets used to the idea that you’re not helpless!”
“I was never helpless, Green—that’s not why you sent me to him in the first place!”
There was a thoughtful silence, and Jack looked carefully at Green’s expression. It appeared… self-recriminatory. Angry. Haunted.
“Silly me,” he said softly. He appeared to shake himself, and the look in the sidhe’s green eyes was wry. “I’ll never regret pairing the two of you—don’t ever think I would. But… it’s extremely difficult to know someone you care for is in danger. As hard as it’s going to be for Teague in the next few months, I’m thinking you might want to take that off the table, that’s all.”
Jack’s sigh held all the frustrated disappointment of three-year-old told to postpone his birthday, and Green’s gentle chuckle did nothing to make him feel more mature.
“Look, Jack—if Teague decided to settle down and help Katy at the bakery full time, what would you do?”
Jack brightened. “I think I’d like that!” He would—he would have to ask Katy if he could do that anyway. He was getting bored, hanging around the hill with nothing to do.
Green nodded, and Jack blushed—he had a feeling Green knew exactly how appealing that notion had been.
“Teague would never think of settling down at the bakery,” Green said soberly, and Jack made a little sound that he didn’t want to identify.
“No,” he murmured. “No. I guess not.”
With a little push, Green made Jack lean his head on Green’s chest again, and he stayed that way, absorbing comfort, thinking quietly about things, for a long time. Eventually, they stood up and Green kissed his forehead and left, leaving Jack alone in the room again with a pile of pages, a full head, and not a single plan of attack.
He’d just about decided to go out and search for Teague himself, when Katy pattered in, smelling like cookies and covered with flour dust. She took one look at him—and even he knew he looked sulky—and the empty room, and threw her purse across the room to tag him in the chest.
“What in the hell!” She was a werewolf, and damn that thing stung!
“What did you say to him?” she demanded. “You nagged him about the job, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Jack protested. “I swear, Katy—I didn’t…” he looked away. He’d been replaying the moment again and again, and he couldn’t think of anything he should have done differently. That one sound—the sound of surprise and of sympathy—there was no way he could have not made that sound even if he knew what was coming.
“I saw scars,” Jack said at last. “We… we had sex in the daytime and I saw scars.”
Katy blanched and sat abruptly on the bed. “Oh. Those kinds of scars.”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
Jack sat down next to her, not touching. “Said he’d have done anything for food. I don’t think he counted on the broken bottle.”
Katy rubbed her face and leaned against him, and he wrapped an arm around her and found he took comfort from giving her comfort. “You knew it had to have happened, right?”
Jack hadn’t known. But then, he hadn’t had a childhood like Teague and Katy’s either. “The broken glass was a surprise.”
“Yeah. The shit that surprises you… but yeah. It’s a surprise.” Suddenly she sat up and glared at him. “And you just let him go? How long’s he been out...”
“Running,” Jack finished for her. “He didn’t leave the hill—his keys are still here. He�
�s been out running for…” he looked at the clock and swallowed. “Two hours?”
“Two hours! Jacky, you can’t let him do this! You need to…”
“What—stop him? What can I possibly do or say to stop him, Katy? Help me out here! We see something he doesn’t want us to see, and he takes off—you know that! What am I supposed to do?”
“Anything!” she shouted. “You say anything you have to! You’re a smart boy! You need to keep talking until something sticks. Make him think running’s not the only thing he can do! Come on, Jacky—you’ve got his heart in your hand…”
“Well so do you!”
“But you were first! You were tightest! Don’t think I don’t know that—don’t think I’m mad or hurt about it—goddammit, Jacky, use it!” Katy glared at him, angry and sad and so many things Jack was pretty sure she couldn’t put a name to them all. “You and me, mijo—we’re what he gots. If we got to argue with him to make him better, then that’s what we do!”
She was right, Jack knew it. She was right, Green was right… and Jack was stuck, wondering how he could use all this really fucking useful human insight to help make it right with Teague.
He wrapped an arm around Katy and sighed into her hair. She sighed back, then sat up and kissed him—a lover’s kiss—then broke off and moved towards the bathroom, gathering clothes from the dresser that Jack hadn’t known were there.
“Give me five minutes,” she said softly. “I’ll take you to the were’s common room—you haven’t been yet. It’ll give us something to do besides worry, right?”
“Right.”
No worries. Teague was out there, alone with his memories, bound and determined to make the world a better place. No worries at all.
Teague
Gentle Instruction
As Teague came sweating down the stairs and towards the kitchen, he had to pass through the main common room of the hill. Cory and Bracken were there, sitting on the large couch, backs to the ends and playing footsies in the middle—and arguing fiercely.
“Yes, I know I gave in… I just thought you guys would come to your senses…” Cory punctuated her whine with a little kick to Bracken’s large bare foot, which was in the way of her stretching out.
“Are you kidding? We let you go to work on Black Friday,” Bracken grunted, kicking her back. “If that wasn’t taking your life in both hands…” he shuddered, and she kicked both feet in tandem until he bent his knees and glared at her.
“Let me? Let me? Bracken Brine Granite op Crocken Green… you didn’t let me do a goddamned thing. Grace needed my help, and it wasn’t like I was out picking up a boatload of strange werewolves who may very well try rip your throat out!”
With a grunt of outrage she swung her legs over the couch and stood up and kicked the couch with her bare foot—it must have hurt, but she didn’t wince—she snarled instead.
“Let me. I’m letting you put me in a fucking padded cage…”
“Gilded cage,” Bracken corrected with a scowl, and Teague wondered if ‘op Crocken’ meant ‘testicles’ or something, because the guy must have had balls of solid rock.
“Fucked up fucking cage of fucking bullshit!” she snapped. “I’m fine. There is no reason on the goddamned planet to put you out on the line and Nicky out on the line and leave me here…”
Bracken stood so fluidly it was like he didn’t move at all—he was suddenly looming over her and yelling in her face. “Except for the fact that you almost died last year…”
“And so did you, asshole, and so did Nicky, and why doesn’t anybody remember that?”
“Because we weren’t the ones having a week long conversation with our dead lovers while we were in a fucking coma!”
Teague was stuck, there in front of the refrigerator, like a poor Greek peasant who walked out of his hovel to take a leak and saw Hades and Persephone having a meltdown from hell.
“I lived…” Cory said needlessly, but Bracken wasn’t listening.
“And we weren’t the ones who hacked up a lung for a month…”
“Two weeks…”
“And we weren’t the ones so weak by the end of Christmas that we needed an escort to run around the track!”
“The escort was your idea, genius!”
“And the one time you didn’t take me, you almost died again!”
“That is an entirely different argument!”
“It’s the same argument!”
They were toe to toe now, which meant Cory had to tilt her head back so far she was on the verge of losing her balance. “It’s not today’s argument,” she insisted, but she’d lowered her voice a little and Bracken’s scowl grew less severe.
“No—today’s argument comes down to one thing,” Brack said on a low growl.
“And what’s that?” she asked, and Teague was a second away from taking a breath of relief.
“Whether or not you mean to honor your promise to stay home for this one, dammit!” Bracken had a fierce grin of triumph on his face—he’d gotten her where she lived, and he knew it.
“Awww. Bracken, fuck you!”
She groaned and flopped down on the couch, and Brack snapped, “You can do the honors, beloved, as soon as we get back from the run.” With that he whirled around towards the hallway, then started thumping up the stairs. “I’ll be in the Goddess grove,” he called unnecessarily. “Just in case you want to make up or anything!”
“Bite me!” she called after him, but she had her hands over her eyes still and her voice lacked any real heat.
Teague let out his sigh of relief and had taken a tentative step towards the hall and the hell away from the kitchen when she spoke up again.
“At least get some chocolate milk and some leftovers, Teague—you’ve been out running for hours, you need to eat.”
Teague froze, and because he’d been thinking about food the entire time he’d been an unwilling witness, he did what she said. He came out of the refrigerator with a bottle full of chocolate milk and a plate full of food.
“You want some?” he asked, pointing to the plate of leftovers, and Cory shook her head.
“No thanks… I’ll get a soda later.” She looked over her shoulder to the granite stairs and growled. “Or maybe they’ll give me an IV to make sure I take my vitamins…” She shook herself and tried a gamine smile in his direction.
“Sorry you got a front row seat to that—it’s been brewing all week.”
Teague nodded. “So I gather… you ever think that they might have a point?”
She shot him a knowing look from her murky brown eyes. “No, Teague. I haven’t thought that even once. A gilded cage is a padded cell to me—always has been, you know?”
“But it’s not a coffin,” Teague said stubbornly, and she grimaced.
“Nice one. Do me a favor and don’t give that to Bracken—he doesn’t need any more ammo.”
Teague flushed and concentrated on making himself a turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce sandwich with the leftovers. Jack had made dinner for them last year—it hadn’t been this good, but it had been Teague’s first. He’d learned to love leftover sandwiches.
He took a bite and swallowed, and asked into the silence, “Did you really almost die?”
“Yes,” she said shortly, making patterns on the counter with her finger as she sat.
“How?” Teague had heard some of the story the night before, but not all of it. Given the way she shrugged now, he doubted he’d hear the full version from her either.
“I… I made myself sick with grief. Then some bad shit happened, and I barely recovered, then Bracken got kidnapped and I damned near killed myself trying to find him, and then some more bad shit happened and then we got attacked.” She wouldn’t look at him and he had to wonder how bad it had been.
“So, bad shit mostly,” he said dryly, and she quirked an eyebrow at him.
“In a nutshell. How ‘bout you?”
He grunted and took a bite of his sandwich. “Wha’ ‘bout
me?”
“What sent you out on a two hour run when you should be in bed with Jack?”
“Grnnsaadgghh…” She pounded on his back helpfully when he tried to choke on his sandwich, and he swallowed—hard—and glared at her.
“I saw Green as we came in,” she said mildly. “I think we’ve had the ‘this place is worse than high school’ conversation?”
He grunted and took a smaller bite of his sandwich. “Yeah.”
“So?”
He swallowed. “That thing that happened to you, where you almost died—it leave any marks on you?”
She flushed. “Scars? Yeah. Ugly fuckers. Make bikini season lots of fun.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her as he said it, but she got it.
“Jacky saw your scars. The kind of scars you can only see when you’re naked and too close.” Her voice was low and sober.
“You see too much,” he muttered.
“So did Jack, apparently.”
There was a silence, and he looked without appetite at his sandwich and took a bite anyway.
“Yeah.”
“Would it help if I told you that he doesn’t care? I mean he cares, because you were hurt, and he loves you, but it doesn’t change who he fell in love with. He’s not going to see you any differently because he saw you… really saw all of you. Would that help?” Her hands were fluttering nervously, and he could see her looking longingly for her knitting.
He grunted and gave her the leftover dish with sweet potato casserole instead.
“I’m not hungry,” she muttered, and he grunted again.
“You’re too skinny.”
“Fuck you.”
“How do you know?
Blank silence. Teague realized he’d switched topics a little fast.
“How do you know it won’t change?”
Cory laughed a little, looked down at the sweet potatoes and took a glum bite. “I knew someone with scars like that,” she said quietly.
Knew. Past tense.
“Adrian?” He asked, seeing her push the bowl of potatoes away.