High key sad ask, but how do you think it went when/if Ruben saw his mom and sisters again and they now know that ‘yeah that guy you sent me away with so easily kidnapped and tortured me’ I’m just in the mood for guilty family feels :(
ohhhh, oh no! (minor content warning for talk of torture/ptsd stuff bc ruben)
well. so i’ve got it in my timeline that what happens afterjamaica is that when ian returns from jamaica he plays it so that jason thinks ruben is dead. works out best for ian that way – jason won’tgo looking for ruben to get rid of ian any more, ruben’s there if/when iandecides he’ll be useful to him, and he correctly figures that jason isn’t going toturn himself in unless he absolutely has to.
unlucky for them, josh finds outthat jason was on the plane with ruben, and after that jason is pretty muchcornered into confessing to what he believes to be ruben’s murder. ruben’sfamily, of course, are kept in the loop about all of this. so for about anothermonth after that, before ruben is found and brought back home, his family justhave to live with thinking that the guy they all had dinner with straight upkilled him. and without a body and without jason even being able to say exactlywhat happened, they don’t even really understandit because let’s face it, this whole thing is a confusing, complicated situation. but that’s reallyhard for them to live with: that was the last time they saw ruben alive and, as far as they know, the last time they’ll ever have seen him.
his mom especially thinks about it all the time,thinks about how he’d said “ma, you don’t understand-“ and she’d just shushedhim and sent him on his way. god, she didn’t understand. she thinksabout that at the memorial and every time she looks at her heartbroken, hurtingdaughters and wonders whether she ever understood any of her children at all if shemanaged to miss that, and what else she might not see until it’s too late. she thinks about it every time she stands in ruben’s childhood bedroom, crying over his baby pictures, thinks about it while she’s clearing out his apartment and when she’s lying awakeat night wishing he’d just come back home so she could tell him that she’ssorry, that she should have listened harder, seen what he was trying to say.
then he does come back, of course. and she still wants totell him that she’s sorry. but there’s so much already going on – he’s unwell to thepoint of delirious when he first gets back, he can’t talk about what happenedat all, his only two modes are either violent flashback or so dissociated he’s practically comatose. enough of his own problems without dealing withhis family’s guilt. when do you find the right moment to apologize for that? how do you apologize to someone who can barely even hear you speaking to them?
the trial is hard for them all. it’s the first time theyhear the story in full, with ruben’s perspective on events. it takes weeks to get through, but by the end of it they know exactly what happened to ruben in jamaica, and they also know that by the timeian was at their house, he’d already tried to kill ruben at least once. earlier that same week, maybe that same day had gagged him and strapped him to ahospital bed and shoved a needle in his arm and left him there.
estefania remembers the person she thought was jason coleshowing up at their house a short while before ruben arrived, how she’d said that ruben doesn’t often bringfriends back because he’s so busy. how jason – ian – had laughed and with abright smile said, “you’d have to tie him down and lock him in the basement to keephim out of that lab of his,” and she’dlaughed too.
she has to run out of the courtroom at the memory of that, stands out inthe cool spring air breathing heavily and trying not to be sick. he’d known exactly what he was saying. hewas laughing about it, at her, at ruben. did he laugh after what he did to her ruben in jamaica, too?
they didn’t talk about it after. the trial was somuch to deal with, and there was so much going on. they all feel a little guilty that it’s easier for them after ruben moves to new york - he starts doing better, being more independent, and so they havespace to look at their own trauma without feeling like they should all befocused on helping him get better. all three of them, estefania and the girls,end up in therapy themselves. everyone in that family has PTSD now, to more orless of an extent. the girls never bring friends home from school any more –halfway because it’s too hard to trust anyone, halfway because they know that ifthey do then they’d be under such suspicion. they’re all very private now, from the outside world and in many ways from each other.
ruben, for his part, does actually blame them a little. he feelsterrible about it, because he loves them and they’ve done so much for him. he didn’teven tell his old therapist about it. he doesnt wantto blame them, he wants to just blame ian, keep it all nice and straightforwardand clear. but he can’t help it: he tried to tell them as much as he could without spilling the whole story, he said he didn’t want to go out, he thought it waspretty fucking obvious that he didn’t want to go anywhere with ian, and there’sbeen a lot of times especially when he was still in jamaica that he wonderedwhy the hell they couldn’t read that, how little they must understand him evenafter knowing him his whole life. how his mother always says things like sheloves him how he is, but the first chance she got she was willing to overlookevery red flag and ruben’s own preferences to see him go out and be “normal”with a friend. none of it is that simple, of course, and he knows it isn’t, butthere’s enough of an element of truth to it to make it very difficult to shake.
there’s a lot of things theyhaven’t talked about just waiting there, that they’re trying to ignore becausethings are a little better now, everyone’s a little happier now, and nobodywants to be the one to disturb the fragile sense of recovery. i think ruben has a stronger sense of his recovery when it’s just him by himself, but while in a way this brought them closer as a family there’s also such a weight of grief and guilt and everyone’s trauma that when all of them are together the progress he’s made becomes less clear, less certain, because it reminds him of how many things there are still left to deal with for all of them.
but estefania is selling the house soon, wants out ofphiladelphia and especially out of the place where that man sat and ate theirfood and they all laughed at his jokes, just days before he dragged ruben tothe middle of nowhere and tortured him. i imagine that it’ll be once they’re intheir new place then a whole lot of suppressed stuff is gonna come out. that’s how PTSD works sometimes: often it’s only when you’re actually safe that you suddenly start to process the extent of what happened and really feel the fear of it. and thatit’s going to be very messy, but god knows all of them need it.
