by Cole McCade
Joseph pulled away, trying not to be obvious about putting distance between them, leaning on his crutch and adjusting as if he could pretend he only intended to shift his balance, and that balance happened to be somewhere a few inches farther away from Wally. He needed that—needed space, when somehow Wally was more real than real, his colors too bright, his voice too rich and full and invasive. He took up all of Joseph’s senses with his warmth and that scent of key lime, tart and sweet all at once and oddly making him ache for home.
“I…” He cleared his throat, keeping his gaze on the wrinkle and wind and curl of artificial iron branches, tracing them down their length, along bolts that sprouted as if fresh buds waiting for spring to burst into new blooms and twigs and furling leaves. “I don’t know either. I thought it was Willow, but that’s a lie. How could it have been my reason to live, to watch her live without living myself?”
“It can be if your reason to live was to love her. It just means, now, loving her in absentia.” There came the low sound of movement, and then Wally’s warmth drifted closer again, flowing into Joseph’s space in a storm front, led by the gentle thunder of his inquisitive voice. “Before the MS, Joseph…did you have nothing outside of work and Willow?”
Joseph flinched, opened his mouth, a fuck you on his lips. That fucking stung, this asshole acting like Joseph had no life when Wally lived above a fucking shop full of puffball dresses and did nothing with his life but that. As if he had the right to judge. He snapped a glare at Wally—and stilled, the curse dying on his lips. It was hard to curse out a man who looked at him the way Wally did now, with a frank, open, honest curiosity that carried with it something like innocence, a certain inquisitive naïveté so at odds with the words of worldly wisdom so often rolling off Walford’s tongue. Joseph frowned, his voice stolen by something odd that tangled right in the center of his chest and pulled every which way. Wally wasn’t judging, he realized.
He honestly, genuinely wanted to know.
Sometimes he didn’t know how someone like Wally could exist in this world, until he remembered the face of the ageless ingénue hid a fucking dickhead who’d tried to steal his daughter.
Goddammit. Why did Wally have to make everything so fucking complicated that Joseph couldn’t answer a simple damned question without getting lost trying to sort out the mystery of Walford Gallifrey?
He sighed, closed his mouth, swallowed back his frustrated snarl. “Some of it was my work,” he said. “I loved making things that worked, things that accomplished a purpose. Some of my fondest memories are of my workshop in the old shed out back, building things while Willow ran in circles around my feet and asked ‘what’s this do, Daddy? What’s tensile strength mean?’” He almost heard it, her voice—laughing and bright as those days long past, while she stuck a gear on her finger and told him it was her royal ring, and she was the queen of Mechanalia. Loss wrenched inside him, an ache he should be used to by now. He looked down, staring at the dirt-smudged tip of his crutch. “I miss having things to work on, tinker with, even if somewhere along the way I gave up trying when it was all I could do to keep the house together and look after Willow. But in the end…I think it was Miriam.”
In those slow simmering summers, playing with Willow and not even realizing what he had, instead thinking of what he’d lost, the woman gone but the little girl right there with him…and now that little girl was gone, too.
He closed his eyes. He was stupid, so stupid, wishing for something that was never real instead of cherishing what had been right in front of him, and now it was too late. “I longed for Miriam,” he said bitterly. “I longed for something that would never happen. I longed for the day she would actually love me, instead of a passing, entertaining facsimile of love.”
There came that advancing storm of warmth again…and then Wally’s arm linked in his. And every rational part of Joseph told him to pull away, but his heart was cracking. His heart was cracking, while Wally leaned on him—and somehow that cotton candy sweetness was everything he needed to temporarily stopper that crack, and keep him from bleeding out. The hiss of his pride was a quiet thing as he leaned back, shoulder to that bony, thin shoulder that was more solid than it had any right to be. Wally’s hand curled against his arm, as soothing as a hot mug against his palm on a cold winter day.
“Perhaps,” Wally said, “you simply longed to be loved, period.”
Joseph lifted his head, looking up at Wally. He’d never noticed that Wally was really only an inch or two taller than him, when the man so often towered practically to the sky, a tall and graceful maypole ever turning, turning. Dark eyes looked into him, too close, seeing every moment in which he’d been weak. Weak enough to take Miriam back when she came flitting home on the wind; weak enough to continue to live for her when she’d never, ever lived for him. And still there was no judgment, yet what he saw in those dark, depthless eyes was somehow even more devastating.
Understanding.
He’d been angry at Wally for so long that he didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t want understanding and yet he craved it, craved one second when he didn’t feel a complete and utter fool for everything he’d given up and everything he’d lost for it.
He drew free of that arm linked in his, shifting his weight onto his crutch and stepping back, the click-hiss of the spring locking and releasing accusatory and so very loud between them. He glanced around the construction site again, taking in the carnival of strange creatures rising around them as if Wally’s circus had come to life one last time, come to haunt them with a bizarre and silent show of motionless pageantry.
“Can we stay here for a while?” Joseph asked, the words hard and wedged in his throat. “I just need to rest for a bit.”
Wally exhaled, running a hand through his hair, troubled lines creasing around his eyes.
But “Of course,” was all he said. “Of course.”
CHAPTER FIVE
WALLY WISHED HE HAD NEVER opened his mouth.
If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t now be carrying the weight of a choice he didn’t want to make.
You’re still in love with my sister, aren’t you.
I don’t know, Joseph had said, but the wretched, aching look on his face had answered so much more clearly, more certainly.
Yes.
God, Walford was a fool.
He sat against the fence ringing the construction site, his back against the canvas, Joseph at his side and the shade of the trees outside the fence falling over them. They’d been there for nearly half an hour, saying not a word. He didn’t think he’d ever spent this much time alone with Joseph when they were both awake, not without one or the other of them excusing themselves from the room in a mess of either nerves or fury. He wanted to enjoy it: the morning sun soaking into his bones, the scent of dusty earth baking dry as the morning’s dew evaporated into the sky, the oddly pleasant texture of the green canvas against his back. And Joseph at his side, quiet and introspective, their arms nearly touching. Wally ached to cross that last distance, to lean quietly shoulder to shoulder as they had before.
But he couldn’t bear it if Joseph flinched back from him again.
What did he expect? Did he really think Joseph would be open to him?
Child-stealing faggot, whispered down the halls of memory, cold and ugly.
What kind of masochist was he, falling in love with a man who would call him such things?
Even more masochistic than falling for a man who had been captured in Miriam’s undertow. He should have known better. He should have known better years ago, before Willow had even been a thought and Miriam and Joseph had been young and feckless and so very in love—or at least, Joseph had been. Still was. Wally sometimes wondered if his sister even knew what love was, or if she thought loving something meant using it until it burned into cinders, then leaving it behind.
He closed his eyes, thunking his head back against the chain link fence with a bitter chuckle under his breath. God, she might as w
ell be here, sitting between them. She was always here, by her very absence. That was her way. She stayed not in flesh, but in the wake of destruction she left behind, the lives she wrecked and left to pick up the pieces alone.
“You’re thinking about her too, aren’t you?” Joseph asked quietly.
Wally exhaled, opening his eyes, staring up as a thin curl of cloud unfurled and expanded, this pretty thing spreading itself so thin soon it would be nothing at all. “Was it that obvious?”
“Nobody laughs that way who isn’t thinking about Miriam Gallifrey.” And Joseph demonstrated with a bitter chuckle of his own, trailing into a sigh. “Sorry. Miriam West.”
Wally snorted. “Why do we let her do this to us?”
“Because it’s hard to stop caring. She’s your sister. She’s my…” Joseph shook his head. “She’s not anything to me anymore. Or she shouldn’t be.”
“She’s Willow’s mother.”
“And Willow left, too. Anything between her and Miriam is between her and Miriam.” Joseph draped his arm over his upraised knee. “I need to get over this.”
Wally couldn’t bear the spark of hope that flared in his chest. If Joseph was broken for pining after Miriam, then Wally was broken for still wanting something, anything, from a man who hated him so deeply—and who would always, always be in love with his sister. Something black and awful bloomed inside him, something hateful and oily that didn’t feel like him, when he…he…
“She thought it was amusing to steal men from me,” he blurted, before he could stop himself. His own voice sounded strange, odd, hard-edged and wrong, as though he listened to himself from another room and heard only a stranger. He stared blankly at that thin-stretched cloud, its white wisps almost gone. “I gave up on dating by the time I was twenty-five, because if I had them, she wanted them. I don’t know if she couldn’t stand letting me have anything, or couldn’t stand anyone having something she didn’t. Couldn’t. As if she took it as a challenge.”
Joseph stared at him. “But…you’re gay…so they…how did she?”
“Sexuality is a fluid spectrum, my friend. Some of my lovers were bisexual, some were curious, some simply vulnerable to her predations and manipulation after enough wine.” Wally sighed. “I learned to stop loving them, too. It hurt less that way, when I wanted to help them after the hurt she inflicted and they only turned away.”
Except for you. I couldn’t learn to not love you.
That sour rasp of laughter escaped Joseph’s lips again. “I wish I could blame wine. Drugs. Anything. God, what the fuck is wrong with me?”
Wally wished he had an answer, because then he might know what was wrong with him, as well. But this wasn’t about him. It was never about him, and right now…right now, even if Joseph would never admit it, he was waiting for something from Wally. For him to dispense sage words like a coin-operated fortune teller. Feed misery in, and he would spit out a happy little ticket written with something pithy and inspiring.
Except he didn’t have anything left but God’s honest truth, and he wasn’t sure Joseph would want to hear it.
“Joseph…” He wet his lips uncertainly, then made himself continue. “Miriam infects men’s blood like a sickness, dear boy. It’s her absences that do it. It’s…” He clenched and unclenched his hands helplessly. “God, I hate to speak ill of my own sister. But she abuses people. She draws them in, plays her games. It’s not even about love. People think they love her, but it’s more an obsessive desperation. She makes you need something, then takes it away. It creates a balance of power that will always keep you scrambling after her, until you recognize it for what it is and walk away. That is, unfortunately, how abusive relationships work.”
Joseph’s face hardened into a cold mask. “I wasn’t abused.”
“Weren’t you?”
Joseph said nothing, looking at Wally flatly, dark brown eyes closed, cold, forbidding. He’d seen that look before. When Aidan had left him; when Marc had left him; when Alonzo had left him. Each one some version of I’m sorry, I’m in love and that look of a hunted animal that didn’t know it was being hunted, cornered desperation mixed with obstinate denial, a snarl of it’s my choice even as the jaws closed on its throat. Those beautiful men were memories so old he was amazed he even remembered their names, when they all blended into a single faceless entity standing at Miriam’s side with that look, that tone, that harsh, cutting denial while Wally had kept his mouth shut out of love for his sister. Out of loyalty.
But Miriam wasn’t here now. Only Miriam’s ghost, her shadow, the scars she’d left behind, and he’d be damned if he let her do this without even being here. Joseph wasn’t his for her to steal, but God, Joseph could belong to himself instead of to Miriam’s memory.
“Just think about it,” Wally pleaded—pleaded with him to open his eyes, even if he wasn’t sure if he begged for Joseph’s sake or out of some sick desperation of his own, or both. Sometimes being in love was bloody abuse in and of itself.
Only it was abuse he inflicted on himself.
“Please,” he continued in the taut-coiled silence. “Do you even know what life is like in the now, instead of asking yourself over and over again what you should have done then to make her stay? Even if you find your answer, you cannot go back and change it. She moved on years ago. It’s best if you do, as well.”
“Stop.” Rigid muscles bunched in Joseph’s jaw. “Just stop.”
Wally curled his hands together in his lap, then looked away. “Of course.”
Silence fell again, and yet gone was the quiet peace of the morning—as if the iron-bound effigies surrounding them had stood, silent judge and jury, to a trial that he had failed. He bowed his head, staring at his hands as he wound them around and around each other until they hurt, knuckles twisting and aching. What had he expected? Even if Joseph was ready to hear this, he wasn’t ready to hear it from Wally. Perhaps Willow might have been able to get past that stubborn pride, but Wally…Wally didn’t have that advantage.
All he had was the dawning and hurtful realization that maybe it was time for him to move on, as well.
All he did was antagonize Joseph, and the man had made it quite clear that he didn’t want or need him hovering around.
He looked up at the sky again, but that cloud had disappeared—not even wisps left, torn away on the wind and dispersed into nothing but cloud droplets, invisible against the featureless, endless blue stretch of the sky.
Bloody hell.
“Joseph…”
“What.”
Walford’s stomach sank at that harsh, inflectionless tone. Yes, this was for the best. “I…I think after I walk you home, perhaps I shouldn’t come back.” He sucked in a struggling breath. His eyes ached all the way in the backs, a deep and quiet pain. This shouldn’t be so hard. He’d spent the last twenty years keeping a safe distance from Joseph; he could deal with a life leaving Joseph in peace. “You can call me or Maxi if you need anything, hm?”
“Sure.”
That was it. Sure. Wally stole a glance from the corner of his eye, but Joseph only stared straight ahead, motionless save for the hand resting against his knee. His fingers cycled through a rapid drumming, one after the other, a tense, agitated movement that might as well have been the buzzling of a hornet’s nest.
“You’re annoyed with me,” Wally said.
“I shouldn’t be,” Joseph shot back. “Any more than normal, that is.”
“Because I prodded you about Miriam?”
“Yes. No.” Joseph swore under his breath and clenched his hand against his knee until his fingers dug in. “It’s not you. Only it is you, but it’s not only you.” A glower turned on Wally. “What is it with your family? You’re always fucking leaving. Always. You just…leave people behind. This shadow ducking in and out of people’s lives, and I—don’t you ever get sick of it?”
“Sometimes,” Wally admitted. “It seems natural, at this point. People always leave me, as well. You’ve truly no id
ea.” He tried to smile, but his mouth didn’t want to move, frozen with the weight of the unspoken words on his tongue, the secrets he kept from Joseph. “Perhaps I subconsciously try to head them off, but…” He stared at Joseph. What Wally was thinking, what he was wondering, didn’t make sense. “Are you angry because you want me to stay?”
“I’m angry because this is the second time you’ve tried to leave me,” Joseph exploded, red crawling high in his cheeks and his temples furrowing into hard and mounting crags, “and last time you tried to take my daughter with you!”
There it was. The monster that had been sitting between them, creeping across all their dark spaces, exposed in the light. Not the first of Wally’s mistakes, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but the one fatal error that had ensured Joseph would hate him for the rest of his natural life and beyond.
He didn’t blame him.
Whether Joseph knew it or not, in that moment, that one moment of folly when Wally had stood across a courtroom from Joseph and tried to take daughter from father…Wally had been putting Miriam first. Not Willow. Not even Joseph.
If anything, he knew more about Miriam’s control than any of her men, when he’d been in her thrall from the day she’d been born.
“Joseph,” he pleaded. “Joseph, all I ever wanted was to help—”
“What you did wasn’t helping,” Joseph snarled. “It was presumptuous. It was dehumanizing. It was infantilizing. In one act, you turned me from a human being into trash. A wall of trash to be broken down, because I was in the way.” He glared down at the dirt. No—not the dirt, Wally realized. The crutch resting next to him, stretched out along his leg. “All because you couldn’t see past the crutches to see me.”
“I know,” he replied. “I know. And I know that every time I’ve tried to help you, I’ve only hurt you because I didn’t have the sense to ask what you needed instead of trying to do. It was wrong of me. Shameful. I make no excuses. I’m sorry. I can never be sorry enough.”