Scared to be alive.
And now, scared of his own brain. His actions had triggered all of this.
His own father had been a murderer. A cruel man he’d grown up idolizing until he learned the truth about how he’d really died, who he really was, and why Nick and his mother ended up in Witness Protection.
Of course lying was a way of life for him. His whole life was a lie, and now it turned out his brain was wired to do exactly that.
JOHN
The day hadn’t started that way. It was day four after the attack, and the first time he’d been able to shower after surgery. Nick had been downright excited, even beat the Langleys out of bed and into the bathroom.
John sat down in a chair beside the bed. He was determined to get through to Nick one way or another. “You know I’m here for you, right?” he prodded.
“Yes,” came the polite, toneless reply.
“I know you’re suffering. I know it’s not just physical, but - if you’re in pain, we should have the docs give you something stronger. We can find a therapist for you to talk to. Private, no records to the FBI or the BOP.”
“I’ll get over it. Thank you.” Nick seemed to shrink, and grow even stiller.
“Will you talk to me?” asked John. He looked at Nick, remembering how close he’d come to dying. How close it’d come to losing a man he cherished. “Please.” His voice broke.
Nick was silent.
“Nick.” I love you. I’m worried about you.
He was enduring, nothing more. No emotion, no movement, no reaction beyond those horribly polite words. A shiver ran down John’s arms. Nick had learned this behavior in prison.
How to hide even overwhelming emotion, to avoid betraying any hint of vulnerability. How to shut down in order to endure the intolerable. How to respond politely to avoid aggression from the guards. How to shrink into himself when trapped in a cell.
How to suffer in silence.
“Nick, you’re not in prison.”
“I know. Thank you for opening your home to me.” Still flat. Still nothing.
John wondered if he should be trying to break a coping mechanism. If he took down this wall, Nick might just suffer more. He reached for an ice pack. They’d taken the doctor’s advice and bought a case.
No. Nick was suffering, probably intensely. It was an ingrained reaction to shut down and hide. But if he never showed when he was hurting, that meant he would never be supported when he needed it most.
John activated the cold pack, eased away the old melted one, and slipped the new one into place against the worst of the bruising covering Nick’s left cheek and eye and nose. Ice and the cat burglar were the two things Nick seemed to find genuinely comforting. Well, that and snuggling up against him and Mari when a suitable excuse could be arranged.
“You’re not responsible for fixing me,” said Nick. “I heal. It’s what I do.”
John sat gingerly on the bed and rested a hand on Nick’s upper arm. “I don’t let people suffer alone. That’s not what I do.”
Nick closed his eyes, thankfully skipping the awful polite reply. John stood and poured some pineapple juice into a cup and popped in a fresh straw. Nick wasn’t eating or drinking much, because it hurt, and using the bathroom hurt. But Mari had discovered that he loved pineapple juice too much to resist.
John pressed the cup into Nick’s hand and angled the straw, and Nick gulped it down. “Want anything to eat?” asked John.
“No.”
John went and got him a yogurt anyway. Fancy organic gourmet stuff, with raspberries in it. He knew for a fact Nick loved it, and that was why he’d picked it up at the store.
“Here,” said John, trying to hand him the open container and a spoon.
Nick shook his head.
John sighed, and scooped some out, and held the spoon in front of Nick’s lips. “Come on,” he said softly.
Nick ate it, with no pleasure.
John put another spoonful in front of him, and once again had to urge him. “It’ll make you feel better, to eat. Come on, take it.”
Once again, Nick obediently ate the stuff. But he seemed ....sad.
When John positioned a third spoonful, Nick looked at him.
Please don’t make me, the sad, anxious little look said. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll do anything you ask or tell me to. But please stop.
John sucked in a deep breath. Compliant, cooperative, submissive Nick was heartbreaking. He set the yogurt aside, and fought the urge to cry.
“I’m sorry,” said John.
Nick’s eyes had softened, and he looked quite moved by the fact that John had backed off.
“Nick ....” said John, genuinely puzzled. “You obey my orders even when they’re so absurd you’re the only person in the world who wouldn’t just flip me off. You’ll apparently even let me force-feed you yogurt.
“So why - when it comes to the big things, with consequences like death and life in prison, do you absolutely refuse to listen to me or society or anything else?”
“Brain damage doesn’t affect yogurt-eating cortex?” suggested Nick.
“I’m serious.”
“Erte once said he had a whim of iron,” said Nick. “Perhaps he was brain-damaged too.”
NICK
Nick thought of his ill-fated choice to lift the jail officer’s cell phone. If he hadn’t done that, he probably wouldn’t have been beaten, or wound up in “happy fun time land” with a selection of people willing and able to kill him. He probably would have been booked in somewhere and endured a boring and mildly unpleasant wait for John to track him down.
He’d known it was dumb. He’d already been punched once for merely asking a question, it wasn’t like the outcome of being caught taking the phone was hard to predict.
The decision to risk being beaten senseless had hinged on, “eh, I’m bored.”
It wasn’t like he was a masochist who secretly enjoyed being beat up on. He found it heartbreaking and horrifying, even setting aside pain, which he was decidedly not fond of either.
Some guys in Sing Sing had deliberately provoked use of force. Usually it was defiance, refusing as a matter of principle to follow humiliating orders. Sometimes they wanted the bragging rights, or occasionally attention and sympathy. Sometimes they were hoping to win a lawsuit. Nick had never once seen the merit in any of those things. He’d never been beaten in Sing Sing. He’d always wanted to avoid conflict, and for the most part the COs had never been eager to use force on him.
No. He’d simply been bored, pissed off at having been punched for no good reason, and decided to take the damn phone. There had been no fear of getting caught, even though he knew it would end painfully and violently for him if he was.
That probably wasn’t normal.
He closed his eyes and heard himself screaming with the primal horror and terror of an animal being maimed, and he started throwing up. The nightmares were starting.
JOHN
Nick let out a low, miserable cry, and started retching. John managed to get a bowl in place before he threw up, and placed a steadying hand on his back. Throwing up hurt, and Nick cried out again.
When it was over, he managed to coax Nick into gulping down some water, and put his hand on Nick’s back again. His friend was trembling, and his eyes were wide in distress, his breathing pained and uneven. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“We need to get you to a doctor?” asked John.
Nick shook his head, hiding his face.
“You sure, Mr. Of Course I Haven’t Been Stabbed?”
“It’s psychological, okay?” muttered Nick with a sort of ashamed anger.
“Oh.” Nick was lying on his side, angled forward so he was nearly on his stomach, but not quite.
John sought out the tight, hot ridges of strained muscles in Nick’s lower neck and down his shoulders and back, the result of having his cuffed arms wrenched. He’d discovered the day before that they were causing Nick conside
rable pain, and that ice and gentle massage and tiger balm soothed him so much, John half expected him to start purring. He rubbed slowly, with light pressure, until Nick’s breathing evened out again.
“Nick --- I know you’re going to be okay. But you aren’t, not right now. I get that you’ve had to endure ....so much, on your own. If there is anything I can do to comfort you or make this easier, tell me.”
Nick was silent.
“Please.”
When he finally did reply, Nick sounded almost timid. “Just -- talk? Read or something?”
“You saying I have a soothing voice?” John had to smile. Most of the time when he talked, people gave him the look of, oh dear lord, shut up now before you dig any deeper. Including Nick. But Nick seemed to get him, get that what came out of his mouth sometimes didn’t read right.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” said Nick weakly.
So John read to him, and it did seem to soothe something in Nick, who relaxed and closed his eyes, and started to breathe more easily.
“Talk to me?” asked John after a bit.
“Mm okay,” muttered Nick.
“Yeah, you’re the picture of okay,” said John. “Under ‘okay’ in the dictionary, there’s a gif of you throwing up and screaming and shaking.”
That incited a low chuckle. “What sort of perverted dictionary do you own?” asked Nick.
“The same as you, apparently. Talk.”
“Listen -- healing emotionally isn’t much different from healing physically,” said Nick. “Everything hurts for a while, then you get over it. That’s all.”
John pointed to the collection of orange bottles living on the nightstand. “Half of those are to keep you from hurting too bad while you recover. I don’t see a damn thing there for psychological pain, an’ that’s not fair. Because you’ll get over it doesn’t mean you can’t use some help getting through the rough parts.”
“How - do you - make your mind work right again after you’ve had to bear something unbearable? It felt like they were killing me, like I was dying, but I’m still alive. I can’t reconcile that.”
Something was pressing on John’s heart, grinding down until he wanted to gasp. Nick had been tortured.
Nick.
That was what his own mind couldn’t reconcile. Someone had looked into those intelligent, feeling, playful blue eyes and rubbed pepper spray into them. Someone had faced cooperative, non-violent Nick Aster and beaten him savagely.
“I -- don’t know,” admitted John.
“It feels like nobody could knowingly do that to another human being,” said Nick. “Ergo, I must not be really human.”
"You know that's not true, right?" asked John.
“I wasn’t a person to them. I was bubble wrap.”
“Bubble wrap?”
“Makes fun noises when you pop it, and you can throw it out when you’re done.”
John shivered.
“Sadism, I can comprehend, at least,” said Nick. “It’s powered by one of man’s strongest drives, for sexual arousal. Revenge, I get. But these guys ....just got mild satisfaction out of hurting hard enough to get a reaction, like it’s satisfying to pop bubble wrap.”
John recalled the images from that revolting camera footage. They were all horrible, but the ones that had hit him with the most visceral rage were the ones where Nick was restrained, and after he'd been beaten so badly he couldn't even try to escape the blows raining down on his body. In other words, when he was helpless. Utterly defenseless, and in no possible way a threat to anyone. Vulnerable to everyone.
John had been taught in Quantico that once you restrained someone, you took over absolute responsibility for their welfare. He’d been taught the many ways handcuffs could be used to inflict severe pain, and how to use that to bring a fighting suspect under control. But using them to hurt someone once they were restrained? If you rendered someone helpless, they became dependent on you for their safety.
If you struck or otherwise used force on a handcuffed suspect, you’d better have a damn compelling reason you weren’t the worst kind of bully. Once the cuffs went on, you were their protector as well as their captor.
NICK
John knelt down beside with bed, and with a slow, cautious gentleness that was almost timid, wrapped his arms around Nick and tucked him into a soft hug, his touch light against Nick’s bruised body.
“Nick -- buddy. I wish you could have gone to Quantico.”
“Uh -- me too?” Nick was confused, and wished John would just hold him. He needed to hide, right now, and in the arms of his favorite FBI agent would work just fine.
“The instructors, the students....they were all just so -- good,” said John. “I wish you could’ve had the experience of training with those bright, idealistic, realistic, educated -- people who never in a million years would beat someone, or torture and drag a handcuffed suspect, or lock a human being in a cell like the one you were in.”
Nick let his head fall against John’s arm. He wondered where all those good people had gone. Evaporated, dispersed into the world like water particles in a desert? The only one left was right here.
“This wasn’t -- a few bad apples,” said Nick. He heard his voice shake. “This was -- normal there. They -- John, they kill people in that jail. They beat people, they torture and drag. What they did to me, they did out in the open and I just happened to survive. There’s this entire jail in New York that -- where it's okay if their inmates die.”
He curled his legs up tighter in front of his body in horror. He was in the category of people that were disposable in that nightmare of a jail that lived in his city, his beloved New York. Theo. Alice’s son Lyndon.
“When they rubbed pepper spray into my eyes, I just - screamed and screamed, because if anyone knew how horribly that hurt, of course they’d stop.” Nausea rose in his throat, and he gulped over and over again until it subsided.
“That’s -- a lesson I never learn.” Nick shifted to increase the contact with the gentle touch that cared about him. That, he reminded himself firmly, would never, ever beat him. Or anyone.
Where there was one person who absolutely would not, there had to be more. Right?
“Not - when I was old enough to remember. But my father - beat me with a belt. I don’t remember - I know it happened, because I had nightmares about it. About crying and begging him to stop. This was - that kind of hurt, when someone you want to trust to protect you is....My dad, at least in my nightmares, taught me that pleading for mercy didn’t work.”
“Nick.” John sounded horrified.
“But I think - there was a part of me that still thinks people can’t be that awful, not if it’s truly unbearable and screaming is like - trying to show that it is. Realizing someone can want you to suffer that badly --”
“Nick. That’s violent crime,” said John. “That’s child abuse. Torture. Those are words that represent horrible crimes against - the soul of what it means to be human. What they did to you was - murder a part of your heart where trust and hope live. I know. I can’t do anything, but I know.”
Nick shivered, and thought about those words. “I don’t feel like an abused child. I wasn’t, really. Or a torture victim, even though --” his voice choked. “Even though you’d think by the time I’m restrained and screaming I’d admit it. Those are things that happen to other people I feel sorry for.”
John rubbed his back softly in silence for a long time. “I guess what I’m trying to say is - you have a right to everything you’re going through. If automatically recovering is what you know you do, that’s amazing. But it’s not normal, and it’s not required of you.”
The desperate tension in Nick’s stomach and heart eased. It’s not required of you.
“I’m just not sure about casting myself as a victim,” said Nick after a bit. “The most miserable people I know do that. And then they turn into targets for every asshole who lays eyes on them.”
“Not suggesting you should
,” said John. “I agree on that score. But beating a toddler with a belt is child abuse, you were just tortured by people who were supposed to care for you, an’ you owe it to yourself to recognize that. Otherwise the strongest, toughest guy I know’s gonna start blaming himself for suffering, or thinking he's weak.”
Nick shivered. Recognizing what had happened to him was the last thing he needed. He’d been feeling better, until he went in for a shower and saw himself in the mirror for the first time since the attack. He'd been trying not to look at anything until now.
His face looked ....awful, swollen and cut and bruised. One eye was black, the other red. His stomach was crisscrossed with incisions medical and not so medical. There were bruises all over his body, but when he turned his back to the mirror and peered around to see where he’d been beaten with batons, his stomach turned.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 12