Sad Anon
Guys, Tumblr ate one of my asks. I am so upset. But, luckily, I did have a response saved before that happened.
Sad anon, this is for you.
Anon, you are never annoying, nor are you ever asking too much by wanting some Race angst, as it is my absolute favorite thing to write!
Brace yourselves. There’s angst ahead.
So, this story actually begins with Jack, like most do. Because apparently I can’t write Race without writing Jack.
Jack is seventeen at the beginning of this story. He’s had a rough life. Orphaned at four, bounced around from home to home until he lands in a boys home when he’s seven years old.
This is no ordinary boys home.
He learns fast that his new foster father, Mr. Snyder, has intentions of creating some kind of army.
And Snyder likes Jack. A little too much.
Ten years later, Jack is a trained assassin. He is extremely dangerous and has many aliases that he uses around the country. He’s Mr. Snyder’s favorite. He is trained in three different forms of martial arts, knows his way around any weapon, computer and any car, he knows seven languages. English (obviously), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, and sign language.
Jack is Snyder’s best man.
It wasn’t easy for Jack to get there.
He was constantly beat and whipped and locked away in order to ensure he would work as hard as he possibly could.
Jack grew up killing people who betrayed Snyder and threatened to turn evidence over to the FBI or local cops. Snyder is known as The Spider to most people being that he has a web of crime operations around the country. Jack was apart of all of them.
And he hated it.
He tried to tell Snyder several times that he wouldn’t do it anymore.
Snyder just took him and told him he had no one else to take care of him.
Throughout all of this, Jack managed to get close to some of Snyder’s other boys. Spot Conlon most of all.
One day, Jack is sent on a mission. It’s a blackout operation. The whole family goes.
Jack doesn’t think much of it. He’d had to take out several married couples before. He was always told they were the enemy and if he didn’t follow orders Snyder would have him tortured and killed instead.
It was him or them.
Jack goes on the mission with another one of Snyder’s boys. They kill the couple no problem.
But Snyder said there were three of them.
It isn’t until Jack hears the wails that he truly stumbles.
It’s a baby. Maybe not even a year old.
The guy he’s with, Carter, goes to just do it. But Jack shakes his head, simply looking at the child. He can’t do it. And he can’t let Carter do it either.
A shot goes off. Carter falls to the ground.
And Jack takes the baby.
He runs.
He has no idea what to do. He can’t leave the baby, chances are Snyder is still after it. He can’t let Snyder kill a child. And if Snyder does decide to let the child live and Jack does call CPS, he’ll end up the same way Jack did.
So Jack does what he can.
He lays low, erases any trace he can. He takes the kid and finds a place in Manhattan. The only person he manages to contact is Spot. Spot tells him he’s making a mistake and then meets the baby who he actually ends up liking. He tells Jack he’ll help him anyway he can.
They give the baby a name. Tyler. Tyler James Kelly.
And Jack raises him like he’s his own.
As the child grows up, he believes he lives a normal life. At least, for the most part. He believes Jack is his brother. Jack homeschools him, takes him on walks, plays with him, makes him laugh.
It took Jack years to figure out how to handle a kid, being that he was hardly a kid himself.
He teaches the boy a lot of things in a much more nurturing way than Snyder taught him. He trains him in martial arts, foreign languages, computers, cars.
When the kid gets to be around eight, Jack begins to call him Racer because of how much he loves to run around the apartment and around the park.
Race picks things up very quickly. Italian and Spanish are his favorite languages to speak, ASL is a close third. But he learns the others for the most part. Russian is the only one he struggles with.
He is very good with all the martial arts training and is decent with computers. But he’s not nearly as interested in cars as Jack is. Jack loves cars. All kinds. He was always excited to test drive old, vintage cars. He loves to draw them too.
And he loves to draw people.
Race catches him one day drawing him. And he watches the whole time.
Race loves to watch Jack draw. It always calms him down. Jack loves to draw because it’s one thing about him that he didn’t learn from Snyder.
Jack’s favorite thing to do, however, is to spoil Race as much as he can. Race loves chocolate and card games and gambling. Jack let’s Race gamble with none valuable things, like candy and trinkets. They often play poker to settle meaningless arguments.
This is a long winded way of saying that for the next fifteen years, everything was pretty normal. There were only a few instances throughout Race’s life when he questions their family situation, like asking Jack why he didn’t have a mother when another boy he’d met at the park one day had. Or asking Jack why Jack was the one taking care of him. Or asking Jack if Jack was his dad because he took care of him like he was one.
Jack always managed to answer him vaguely.
But when Race is about fifteen, something happens. He’s walking home from grabbing a few groceries. When he gets inside, Jack isn’t there. Another man is. A man he’s never seen before.
A man who introduces himself as a Mr. Snyder.
Jack walks in not too long after that, coming home from work (he works as a mechanic for a garage and he’s IT at some company that I haven’t come up with yet).
Jack immediately grabs Race and gets the kid behind him. And Snyder just smirks and asks Jack if this is the boy he left everything behind for. Anthony Higgins.
Race asks what the hell hes talking about and Snyder asks if Jack ever told him anything about who he used to be. That’s when he starts to tell Race about how he trained Jack from a child. How many people Jack had killed or that Snyder knows he’s killed.
And then he asks Race why he’d never wondered why he was an orphan.
And that’s when it clicks in Race’s mind.
The kid runs.
Jack tries to stop him but isn’t fast enough. Instead, he grabs a gun and stops Snyder from going after him, which is much more important at the moment.
Eventually, Jack manages to stall Snyder and then run to try and find Race.
Race is running with tears streaming down his face. He can hardly breathe. He nearly gets hit by two cars as he’s running across the street and he stops in an alley to just break down and try to think.
It all makes sense now. Why Jack is the way he is.
He tries to call the police. Someone answers. But he hangs up. Because he doesn’t know what to say.
He stands up to start running again, but is met with a gun and an order to stay still.
Shots are fired and Race screams. The man pointing the gun at him falls to the ground and Race turns around to see Jack standing there with a gun. He goes to run. But Snyder rushes around the corner and fires at Race.
A bullet grazes the boy’s head. And he has no choice but to run back to Jack. Jack fires at Snyder and Snyder’s boys who reveal themselves.
Jack practically stage Race into a small hiding spot and covers the kid’s mouth as he begins to pass out. The last thing he hears before he falls unconscious is Jack quietly telling him to stay awake.
When he wakes up, he can feel a cool cloth against his head. He hears someone shushing him. He tries to move and realizes his hands and tied behind him, around some kind of pole. It’s a support beam. The kid opens his eyes to find Jack in front of him, cleaning blood off of his face and telling him to stay calm.
But Race immediately starts struggling. He tries to start screaming but Jack cuffs a hand over his lips and tells him that he’s doing all of this to protect him. Race tries to bite him, but Jack is too fast for that. He tells Race that he needs to stay calm. That he’s got a head injury and if he tries to move around too much he’ll get dizzy.
Race just starts crying and finally just asks Jack to tell him the truth. And so Jack does.
He tells Race that it was them or him.
Race hisses out that he murdered innocent people and Jack has to explain to race that his parents worked for Snyder willingly and were only killed because they were found out by the authorities and were going to give Snyder up to get a deal.
But he says he’s still sorry. He says that if he could change everything, he would. But he can’t.
He says that Race was the best thing that ever happened to him and that the love he had for him was the most real thing he’d ever experienced.
Then he goes over to a set up of computers and tells Race he’s trying to track Snyder to see what the next move is.
When Race asks where they are, Jack says somewhere safe. For now. And Race trusts that. He tries to guilt Jack into letting him out of the ropes, so that he can help. But Jack says he knows him better than that and Race stops asking.
He’s still angry. He can’t help but be angry. But seeing Jack a bit scared triggers something in him. He wants to help. He wants Jack to be okay.
They wait for a long time. And Jack eventually unties Race. They play poker. Race still tries to hate Jack. But it’s very difficult to hate the man who had raised him so lovingly his whole life.
Jack knows Snyder’s coming for them. But he won’t tell Race.
Only a few hours later, an alarm on his computer goes off. And Jack gets up to stop it. Race asks him what’s happening and Jack grabs his phone and gives it to Race, helping him up and leading him over to a closet. It’s only then that Race sees the tears in his brother’s eyes.
Jack dials a number and tells Race that the person on the other end is gonna ask for a name. He tells Race to say Kelly and then code pink.
Race tries to ask what’s happening but before he can, Jack pulls him into a bone crushing hug and kisses his head, telling him he loves him before locking him in the closet.
Race hears gunshots. He hears doors slamming and people screaming. He tries to bang on the door to beg to be let out, but someone answers the phone. Race whimpers out what Jack told him to and the person tells him to stay quiet and crouch down as low as he can and stay on the line with them.
Race listens to the fight going on outside until everything goes quiet. Then he just starts sobbing.
It isn’t for another hour or so that someone unlocks the door. Race is practically hyperventilating. He’s about to pass out. His head is spinning. Everything happened too fast.
He never even got to tell Jack that he loved him too.
When he gets out of the closet, he sees the mess that’s been made. The computers are shattered, there’s blood and holes in the walls.
And Jack isn’t there.
The kid let’s this stranger led him into a car and take him to a hospital. The man introduces himself as Spot. Spot Conlon.
Race doesn’t say a word the entire way.
In fact, he doesn’t speak for a long while after that.
The doctors check him out and give him stitches for the head wound, telling Race he did a good job in bandaging it up like he did. And all Race can think about is Jack.
Someone comes in. A social worker. They try to ask him questions. He doesn’t say anything. He just stares aimlessly out the window with tears streaming down his face.
They tell him they’ve found a placement for him. With a Miss Medda Larkin.
They still don’t know his name. There’s no record of him in the system. To them, he came out of nowhere. But Medda doesn’t mind.
She gives him a room and new clothes and food every night.
It’s not like it was with Jack. It’s clear that it’s not normal. Medda is kind and sweet and Race likes her. But she doesn’t play poker with him to bet on who’ll be making dinner that night. She doesn’t spare with him at night to tire him out for bed. They don’t go for full days speaking in other languages. Race doesn’t feel comfortable laying across her lap while she’s watching tv.
Race cries the first few nights he’s there. And Medda can hear him. She just doesnt know what to do.
She tries to coax the story out of him. Eventually he gives in a little and writes something down on a piece of paper.
Tyler James. Racer.
She’s ecstatic at this. She tries to get more out of him, but he refuses, mostly keeping to himself.
Race falls into a sort of depression. Medda enrolls him in a public school and that terrified Race.
The morning of his first day, he wakes up to find a bar of dark chocolate and a deck of cards on his night stand.
Race looks around for any sign of entry. He can’t find it.
He takes the chocolate and the cards and goes to his first day with a bit more peace of mind. He still doesn’t speak. But on his first day, he meets a boy. Deaf and mute with a mangled leg. Product of a sickness when he was just a baby.
Race signs with him. And he makes a friend.
Crutchie.
He tells Crutchie a little about himself. And Crutchie promises to keep all of his secrets.
Medda tries to talk to him more, even signs him up for therapy. But it still gets her nowhere. Though she can tell while the weeks pass by that Tyler is a beginning to get a bit more comfortable.
She just doesn’t know about the small gifts that he finds on his night stand every few days.
Chocolate. Drawings. Candy cigarettes.
One of Jack’s old sweatshirts.
It’s that one that Medda notices a bit. A sweatshirt she didn’t buy Race that he wears almost everyday.
Race tries to catch Jack sometimes. But he never manages it. He always falls asleep. So he tries to spot Jack on the street, knowing he must be around somewhere.
He manages that only once. And it’s only for a brief moment.
One more gift is left on his nightstand. With a letter. One that tells Race how much Jack loves him and how it’s okay it Race is mad or if Race hates him because he spent so much of his life hating himself. But the note tells Race that no matter what, there’s always someone out there for him, someone who’s on his side even if they can’t truly be together.
Race carries that letter with him everywhere.
After that, Race doesn’t receive another gift. A few of his things actually go missing. And he gets nothing in return. Not for weeks. And he starts to get a little worried.
He tries to spot Jack around, but there’s some kind of feeling in him that tells him Jack isn’t there.
About a month and a half goes by. The only person Race communicates with is Crutchie. His best friend. No one else even knows if he’s capable of real communication. Crutchie knows a lot about him. That he knows six languages and struggles with Russian. That he loves to gamble. That he has a brother he can’t see. Crutchie can read his moods really well.
Anyways, a month and a half later, Race is freaking out. He can’t decide if something bad happened or if Jack decided it was time to leave him behind.
One night, after Race goes to bed, Medda is downstairs alone. She hears something from the hallway and grabs a knife from the kitchen, believing that there was an intruder.
She was right.
When she hears that the person is close, she goes to attack, only for Race to jump in her way and block the knife. She freezes.
By now, it’s been almost a year since Race has been with Medda. He hasn’t spoken the whole time.
But in that moment, he finds his voice again.
The first thing he says in almost a year is. “I-It’s Jack! It’s j’st Jack!”
He doesn’t have to look to know that. He knows it’s Jack. He just knows. He turns around to see Jack and Jack is just staring at him like he’ll disappear. So Race asks what Jack was doing there and Jack would just rush forward and hug him and start crying uncontrollably. Eventually it would slip out.
Jack would say he thought Race was dead. And Race wouldn’t know what happened in any kind of way.
Jack would pass out in his arms. And Race would panic.
He’d start speaking in tongues because he was so panicked. Medda would recognize the language he was using most as Italian.
She’s try to calm him down by saying she’d call an ambulance. But Race grabs the phone from her hands and turns on a light, eventually able to explain in English that Jack was a criminal and Race couldn’t turn him in and risk never seeing him again.
That would just make Medda more nervous. She’d try to get Race away from Jack, but Race would shove her away and try to clean Jack up. He’d finally scream out that Jack was his brother and that he’d be dead without him.
Medda doesn’t know what else she can do but help Race find the issues.
They find Jack’s back has several fresh lushes on it. From both belts and whips. They find that Jack has several cracked and bruised ribs but most of the damage is on the outside. Medda tells Race that Jack will be okay and sets up the guest bed for him.
Race doesn’t leave his side the entire time. He helps carry Jack to the bed and he cleans the blood off of his back, causing Jack to hiss and wake up when he feels the sting.
He sees Race and starts crying again, reaching out for Race’s hand. Race takes it and cries right along with him and asks him what happened in German (because he can and he still doesn’t trust Medda completely). Jack responds in a mix of Italian and Spanish because he’s too shaken and hurt to think straight.
He tells Race that Snyder found him somehow. And this time Jack couldn’t trick them or overpower them. Snyder knocked him out and he woke up somewhere underground. He’d try to leave out as much detail as he could, not wanting Race to see him as weak or pathetic. But Race tries to pry and ask. He wants to know everything.
Eventually, Jack reveals that he was kept down there, chained down in a small room with one light in the center of the room. He got a piece of fruit or stale bread every couple days. Snyder came in everyday to torture him, telling him it was a punishment fifteen years overdue.
After about three and half weeks, Snyder came into the room with a hat that Jack has bought for Race years ago. A baseball cap that Race loved to wear backwards on his head.
There was a hole in it and blood splattered all over it.
Snyder told Jack that his last mission was now complete, leading Jack to believe that Race was dead.
Jack tells Race what that felt like, finally switching to English. He can still feel that feeling. The pure anguish he felt. He tells Race that he screamed. That he hadn’t stopped crying for days. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t taken the food they’d brought him.
He could hardly move.
He’d tell Race that he had held that cap in his hands for a week before he truly looked at it. And he’d tell Race that he managed to escaped to see if he could still go to a funeral of some kind, just to say goodbye. To see him one more time.
And then he found him alive and well in his home.
He’d take Race hand and kiss his fingers and tell Race all he wanted to do was hug him. And Race would cry for his brother who had just been through so much.
Medda would still be trying to get Race to leave the room. She’d heard all of it.
Race wouldn’t leave. He would just grasp Jack’s hand tighter and stand his ground. So Medda would let him stay. And she’d ask what crimes Jack had committed that warranted Race calling him a criminal.
Jack doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’t know how. Eventually he tells Medda his story, explaining he would tell her everything because of what she’d done for his kid.
And by the end of Jack’s story, Medda can’t help but feel sorry for him.
Race can’t help but let the tears fall at the whole story just the same, as it’s the first time he’s ever heard it.
Medda promises to keep him safe.
But she is still hesitant about Race sticking himself to Jack’s side and tells him to give the man some space.
Jack is laid up at Medda’s for about a week before he begins to get up and walk around. He helps Medda in anyway he can, around the house mostly. He cooks for her and Race. She’s very hesitant to truly trust him, but seeing the way Race puts all his faith the man is touching to her.
She learns more about Race from Jack in two days than Race let her in on in ten months.
Jack tried to leave again after he’s fully healed. Race catches him at two in the morning, trying to sneak out his own window. So Race gets up while Jack sits on the sill. And he asks Jack if that’s how he left all the gifts. Jack explains that he had to take apart the entire window and put it all back again.
Race goes and hugs Jack as tight as he can, begging Jack not to leave him.
Jack holds him tightly and tells Race that he loves him and tries to tell him he’d be better off without him.
And then he slips out the window and climbs down into the yard. That’s when he hears Medda on the porch. He laughs about how he must be losing his touch.
She just smiles at him and walks down to give him a hug. And before Jack leaves, she gives him a key. A key to the house. She tells him to come and visit anytime he can. Because his brother needs him in his life.
Jack takes it and disappears.
But not for too long.
Jack visits Race three times a week in anyways he can. He moves into an apartment building three blocks away and tries to lead a normal life.
He does the best he can. But Snyder’s still out there somewhere.
Just waiting to strike.
And that’s the end of this outline. I know that’s an ominous ending, but I like it.
What do you all think? Questions? Concerns?
I hope this helped, Sad Anon! I’ve been feeling a bit down lately too and this definitely help me. Much love!
And, in case no one has told you today, you matter to me!
Have a great day! (Or night)
