broken little bird
[wc: 2179, below or on ao3]
bucktommy, crash that helicopter, imagery/past abuse/memories
When Tommy looks around, confusion crawls through him, slow and sour. He sees pieces of his past dusty and dull in the fading light of the afternoon sun. The world outside is still, frozen. Quiet. Like the house has sealed him inside a memory and folded its worn palm over him, covering him from the worst of it while still forcing him to stand in the middle of what’s left.
He’s him – well, that’s to say – he’s standing in his childhood home as the man he is now. Forty years old. Every one of them heavy and rich with experience, wisdom and pain that’s made him tired in ways sleep can’t even fix anymore.
But standing there, pictures crooked and dangling along the hallway – filled with faces, some he’s never met, others that have made him angry and frail, fractured across the tapestry of his life – it feels exactly like it did back then. The air is thick. Waiting.
Humming lilts from the other end of the hall.
His old bedroom – dark and looming just ahead – fades as the humming swells, soft at first and then fuller, fearless. It brings tears to his eyes instantly, the familiar sound. It’s one he’s painted into the grooves of his heart and prayed he’d never forget, but it’s clearer now than it’s been in decades. Just beyond the shadows.
When his feet carry him closer, the sound blossoms, dancing with laughter he hasn’t felt in a lifetime. It spills into the hallway, cascading in time and wrapping around another rhythm, shifting and brightening as she bends the melody to meet it.
It’s not an intrusion to her. It’s collaboration.
A missing piece of the score she’s been waiting for.
She hums and giggles and alters the tune to match the noises it makes. Tears fall freely down Tommy’s cheeks as he inches closer, already knowing what waits on the other side and feeling both desperate and terrified to see it.
He leans against the wall and closes his eyes, lets the sound pour over him and wills himself to tumble – revert into the body at his back.
It’s him.
Six years old. Knees on a chair. Tiny fingers dusted white. Mixing flour and water and yeast to bake bread with his mother in their small kitchen. She hums as he laughs and the world feels whole again.
“That’s right, Tommy,” she hums, voice as warm as the sunlight. She crosses the kitchen and sits on a stool beside him. His tiny tongue sticks out between his lips in fierce concentration. “You’re getting the hang of it.”
He huffs, lip jutting into a pout, eyes narrowed at the bowl. “It’s clumpy.”
Her thumb brushes over his cheek where flour has settled across the rosy apple of it. Adult Tommy watches, breath catching as he presses his palm to his own cheek, willing himself to feel the warmth of her skin again. Just this once.
“It just needs a little more time, love,” she tells him gently, guiding his small hand back to the spoon. “Patience. We want the bread to be the best it can be, so we’ll use our hands to push those broken pieces together.”
She takes the spoon away and guides his hands right into the dough. He gasps, delighted, sending a puff of flour into the golden beam of sunlight cutting through the window. And then he’s laughing again, and she is too.
The melody before felt so beautiful, but the music now is profound. Tommy can only bask inside the memory, closing his eyes as he listens to her voice and wishes he could hear it every day.
When his eyes open, the kitchen is gone.
He’s standing in the upstairs bathroom.
The light bulb flickers overhead as the wiring tries to find the right path, dimming and brightening in its impending surrender. Tommy’s ten now, perched on the edge of the toilet seat with his arm braced against his ribs, blood trickling down his temple in a thin, steady line.
His body is littered with scrapes and bruises – old and new in every size, mapping out the mistakes he’s supposedly made. The punishments. The deemed price.
From the doorway, forty-year-old Tommy remembers it with terrible clarity. His arm, broken. What was likely a concussion pressing pain against his skull. The most his small body had endured from his father up to that point.
He knows this moment.
Because it only got worse from there.
Grew in size and frequency and cruelty until it became a part of their daily routine.
His mother rushes in – right past his adult self like he isn’t even there – and sets a first aid kit on the counter with shaking hands. He didn’t notice that when he was ten. Or maybe he did, in some distant part of his brain, but seeing her now in the same brutal memory makes everything so excruciatingly clear.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” she murmurs, reaching out to him.
He flinches before he realizes it’s her – automatic and instinctive. When he sees her face, he crumbles, collapsing into her to stifle the sobs he tried so hard to swallow in his father’s presence.
Adult Tommy wants to pull away, wants to go downstairs and give his dad the ass-kicking he’s deserved from this day forward, but he can’t bring himself to move. He craves her words too much. Swallows down nausea and rage just to stay.
“It just needs a little time, love,” she hums, the same melody from the kitchen, only softer now. “You’ll heal, my broken little bird.”
Her voice trembles this time. Her eyes shine with tears she never let fall when he was watching.
The world shifts.
The hallway stretches – longer and darker than it’s ever been before. Tommy stands beside himself at twelve years old looking at the cracked door at the other end. Light from the bathroom slips through, spilling into the dim hall.
He refuses to move. He knows what’s waiting for him.
But his younger self doesn’t.
The boy steps forward without the knowledge of what waits inside. Tommy reaches out, tries to grab him, tries to shield him from the sight of blood. From the lifeless body of his mother sprawled across the cold tile.
When twelve-year-old Tommy moves forward, forty-year-old Tommy moves back.
He falls, tumbling down the staircase as the world fractures again, violently ripping him away from the memory and launching him into the present.
It hurts.
Pain like he’s never experienced before shoots through his chest and down his spine, sharp and violent. Not the familiar ache of a fight. Not from fists but from gravity. Endless and absolute pain he can barely think around.
“Tommy, open your eyes,”
That voice. It’s as comforting as his mother’s, but not quite the same. It’s newer but still built into the foundation of his bones. Just as necessary – like it belongs.
His eyes flutter open.
Tommy feels more solid, the dusty haze of memory dissolves, replaced by the grit of the earth.
Evan’s leaning over him, eyes rimmed red, grime and sweat streaking his temples, turnouts blazing bright against the sun.
“H-hey, Tommy, yes, that’s right,” Evan says, glancing up to shout something before he looks down again, frantic and focused all at once. “You’re okay. We’re getting you out.”
“Wha–” Tommy’s voice is barely a whisper, and the effort it takes to even make noise drains all his energy.
“Ju-just stay still, okay?” Evan sounds terrified.
Tommy wants to tell him he just needs time. That broken pieces can be pressed back together. That he’s been worse but he always heals.
But he can’t, can’t do more than wheeze, tries to reach for Evan but his arms are too weak to lift on their own.
Evan sees it anyway. He yanks his glove off with his teeth and grabs Tommy’s hand, squeezing hard.
They’ve been together five months, but it feels like a lifetime. Tommy wants to promise Evan he’ll be there for it all, but he’s not even sure he can make it to the ambulance he hears somewhere nearby.
It all comes back in an instant – the helicopter shaking midair as the engine sputtered – a mechanical failure that tore them from the clouds. He’d been with someone, he’d had someone else on board, he–
“They’re okay,” Evan says as if he can read Tommy’s mind. “Johnson’s conscious. Jenkins stayed at the hospital with Martin, remember?”
Tommy doesn’t remember.
But he nods anyway before his eyes slip closed, swears it’s only for a second but Evan’s voice is shouting again and his hand tightens around Tommy’s. He forces his eyes open again and Evan exhales in relief, brushing away a tear with the back of his wrist.
“Keep your eyes open, okay?” he says, voice tight. There’s a flurry of activity at his back, other voices, equipment, broken branches and smoke.
Above them, the sky is impossibly blue. The clouds are soft and bright and indifferent. The contrast between the peace overhead and the destruction around them isn’t lost on Tommy.
It never has been.
“Broken little bird,” he murmurs, breath torn.
Evan leans in close, brings a hand to Tommy’s temple and pushes back at matted curl. There’s a neck brace locked around him that he feels distantly. He can’t find it in himself to care.
He thinks about flying. About the way the sky made him feel whole in a way nothing else could. Like his mom always said he would, he’ll heal. He just needs time and patience.
He tries to stay awake, to reassure Evan he’s here and anchor himself in his grip. But his mother’s humming rises again from the recesses of his mind, and he’d hate to lose the opportunity to hear it again in crystal clarity.
The melody pulls him under and he surrenders, sinking into the sound and the darkness once again.
When he wakes again, it’s still to pain, but this time it’s dulled – a distant memory of something horrible softened into something less harsh. The humming is gone, replaced by the incessant beeping of an IV waiting to be changed, the whir of a blood pressure cuff as it tightens around his arm.
He groans, trying to pull away from the noise and sink back into quiet, but a calloused hand in his pulls him back.
“Tommy?”
He blinks his eyes open and sees Evan sitting there. He’s wrecked and exhausted, hunched in a chair at the side of Tommy’s bed and it all becomes clear.
Hospital.
The crash.
“Hm,” Tommy hums, testing the strength of his voice. It’s raspy but steady enough. “Evan.”
“Y-yeah. I’m – I’m here, Tommy,” Evan says, chair scraping closer. “You’re okay.”
“D’know if I’d call it that,” Tommy mutter, grunting and stifling a cough as his ribs protest each breath.
Evan huffs out a shaky laugh, “Wrong choice of words. You’re not…in danger.”
“How bad?”
Evan’s palm brushes over his forearm and Tommy leeches warmth from the touch.
“Concussion, broken ribs, fractured scapula, broken tibia.”
Tommy’s brows lift faintly. He’s floating on medication, that explains the distance from the agony.
“That all?” Tommy asks, going for levity. Evan doesn’t laugh.
“That’s just the bones – you lost two liters of blood. I-Internal bleeding around your liver, and smoke inhalation,” Evan’s voice falters and his eyes shine brighter at the end.
Tommy doesn’t blame him. Can’t say he’d be any better if the roles were reversed. Even thinking about it kicks his heart rate up enough that Evan’s eyes flick to the monitor. Tommy takes a shuddering breath and squeezes his hand.
“Broken little bird,” Tommy murmurs softly, the voice of his mother still sitting just inside his memory, tucked away for safekeeping.
“Yeah,” Evan sighs. “Your chopper’s n-not gonna be fixed…it didn’t make it.”
Tommy grins faintly, shaking his head before thinking better of it. He breathes through a spike of pain. “Something my mom used to say,” he explains. “When my dad would…”
He quiets when the words dry up, clears his throat and swallows back tears.
“Was thinking about her,” he finishes softly. “I saw her when I was…when we were out there.”
Evan’s fingers are back in his hair, threading through the curls. It’s soft and soothing, warmth radiating from his palm and love radiating from his touch.
“It’ll take time,” Evan says, hands never leaving Tommy. “But you’ll heal. You’ll be okay, we’ll get you back up there soon.”
Tommy’s mouth softens into a smile, Evan whispering words his mother would’ve said if she’d had the chance. Words she planted in him anyway.
As Tommy starts to drift, he hears her melody again. This time it weaves with Evan’s murmured reassurances, harmonizing into something new.
A safe world where patience is allowed. Where broken pieces can be pressed together. Where a little bird can mend its wings, learning and re-learning, how to fly.
A broken little bird healing and growing, soaring in her memory, carrying her love forward into every sky he claims.
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