I was wondering if you’re going to continue the panicked dad! AU? I’m not rushing you or asking you to update of course, I’m just curious, I don’t want you to think I’m pressuring you!
I receive quite a few messages about this story, and believe me I know I’m being slow as fuck with the updates. Be patients with me, please? You’re so kind and I have this chapter ready so here we are!
Also, I’m perfectly aware I said Seth was Allison’s ex who died of overdose. Try and stop me now, I’ve lost even the last fuck I gave about reasonably continuity with the books.
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Check out the tag TFCPanickedDad!AU (though Tumblr seems to hate me every so often) or the whole story on AO3!
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They take Andrew away. They tell Nicky to leave the hospital. Voices pile up in his head, overlapped by memories and nightmares and mantras he’d sworn himself he’d never listen to again.
It’s all mechanical after that.
He drives home, he packs a bag for Andrew and then watches emptily as Chuck unmakes it to move all its contents into a plastic bag. Nicky watches quietly.
They get a bag for Aaron too. The room looks emptier than ever when he stares at it from the door.
“Hey, buddy.”
Either Matt’s hands are bigger than he remembers or he shrunk in the past few hours. Probably the latter, because Nicky truly feels small, smaller, the smallest he’s ever been, and weak.
Matt spins him around and meets no resistance — what’s the point?, they took his kids — and leads him through the flat. In the corridor outside, Jean is squeezing the life out of Renee’s shirt and his eyes are far away and glassy.
Stephanie reaches out to touch Nicky’s face soberly. “You shouldn’t be alone, right now.”
And ain’t that fucking funny? Because Nicky is. He fucking is because his parents hate him and they took his kids. They took his kids.
“You’re staying with us for a bit,” Matt says, and Nicky can’t read his tone, mainly because he can’t be bothered to. “Come on. We’ll get out of this, somehow.”
Except there’s nothing to get out of, except his two-bedroom apartment that now has one room and two twin-beds in excess, because they took his kids.
They took his kids.
They took his kids.
Andrew and Aaron. His kids. His babies. They took them. From him. Because he wasn’t— He wasn’t good enough, smart enough, attentive enough. He was neglectful and distracted and selfish and he lost them because they would be so much better off with anyone else than him, he is a fuck-up, a disgrace, a sinner, he is—
They took his kids.
They took his kids, they took his kids, they took his—
Nicky has scars. He doesn’t pay them much mind because he doesn’t have the time to bother with such tiny details when he’s working to support two kids.
He doesn’t have two kids to support now, so he looks at them in the bathroom, in the guest bedroom in Matt and Dan’s apartment.
Some are years old and shaped like lightening under his skin in quarter-of-dollar rounds on his thighs and crotch. Some are older yet and almost faded, thinnest crisscrosses on his inner thighs and high on his forearms, almost at the elbows. He used to wear plastic bands around his wrists to snap against his skin whenever he had a bad thought, and they never left permanent marks but he can feel the skin burn anyway.
It was always bound to happen, says a voice in his head. It’s calm and collected and reasonable and sounds like his father’s preaching. You were never a good choice for them and social services aren’t dumb, they were bound to see it eventually. What, did you think you were fooling anyone?
He stands in front of the bathroom and watches his face reflected in the mirror.
He’s not going to cut himself again. He’s over that and he’s never giving the twins that kind of burden. Even if they took them away and he’s not going to— He’s not going to—
What if he never sees them again?
Wymack drags him out of the bathroom that he’s still crying and trashing and screaming. Dan looks like she’s staring at a ghost and she’s holding Matt in her arms.
Nicky doesn’t know. How long it has been, what everyone is doing here, where are the twins. How Aaron is. Lord, he doesn’t know how Aaron is.
He blacks out.
He comes to with a stinging cheek and gasps in his ears.
“Allison, for fuck’s sake!“ Dan’s hissing, but Nicky can’t see her because Allison’s face is all up in his and she’s seething.
In a low, poisonous voice she asks, “Are you done?” Nicky hiccups and lowers his eyes, but she grabs his face, his cheeks, and forces him to stare back at her. “No,” she growls. “Are you. Fucking. Done.“
He doesn’t know.
“This is your last quarter of hour, Hemmick. I’m letting you cry the last of it out now and when the fifteen minutes are up you better have your ass in the shower or I swear to fucking God I’ll drag you there myself and soak you into the coldest water until you turn into a popsicle or grow back a brain, you heard me?”
Just barely.
When he stands up and moves to the bathroom, he doesn’t really believe he’s going to shower. He’s planning on staying in front of the mirror and cry some more, because that’s all he’s been doing lately; except that he steps in and the phone in his pocket is buzzing with a notification from Instagram. It’s so outright absurd he feels an hysterical laughter build up in his chest and he has to bite his own knuckles not to let it out.
It says, Erik Klose, and it’s an aesthetic picture of the sight from the window of what Nicky has learnt to recognise as Erik’s office.
He chokes on his breath.
Erik’s office at the law firm. The law firm where he practices as a lawyer with specialisation in Family Law.
Family Law.
It’s the thinnest wall coming down to let the water of the dam wash away every logical reasoning, every logistic problem, any vicious voice. It drags his finger over to type a context-less, Thank you, and then his whole body out of the bathroom and Allison regards him with an arched brow, but he ignores her.
For the first time in a while, Nicky takes in the world around him.
Matt is pale as a sheet and curled over Dan as she holds him by the waist and kiss his shoulder in reassurance. Renee is there too, sitting on the armchair and looking over the situation quietly, expression just a shade darker than her usual, just enough to be terrifying. Wymack looks so much older than he did a week ago.
They’re all here. All except Roland, and God, he didn’t even tell Roland.
He wouldn’t know what to tell him.
He says, “I need to know about Aaron,” and his voice is low and cracked and dusty like an broken frame hidden in the attic. “And I need a loan.“
Allison doesn’t even blink. “Glad to see we got a step one. You think you can hold yourself together now, or do I need to slap you again?”
Nicky touches his cheek, which is still smarting from the first hit. He says, “maybe,” but he sits down on the couch and runs hands over his face.
Renee stands up quietly. “I’ll make coffee.”
They all settle.
Finding out about Aaron is actually surprisingly easy. Nicky only has to spam call Chuck’s phone for an hour before the man gives up.
“Took you about time,” he says, though, as if what they’re doing was perfectly normal. “He’s out of the woods, by the way. They’re keeping him in for seventy-two hours at least, then he’ll have some check-ups to go to, not to mention mandatory therapy to make sure this doesn’t have any lasting consequences on his psyche, but they’re planning on discharging him soon.”
Breathing comes a bit easier. He can smell coffee and closed air. He’s tired. “What about Andrew?”
He’s at the window in the kitchen, because in the living room Dan and Renee are writing down names of people they know, and Matt and Wymack went over to Nicky’s to get him some stuff and check what’s missing from the twins’. Allison is in the bedroom because she’s yelling at her lawyers.
Chuck sighs. “He’s in a foster home, at the moment.”
“A foster home?! For fuck’s sake, Chuck, he’s—“
“It was the best option at the moment, Nicholas,” there’s a edge in his voice, a bit of anger steeping through no matter what how hard he tried to keep it in. ”Your parents were insisting I let them have him, but I’m not sure it would have been a good idea.”
Andrew’s coming to terms with his sexuality hadn’t been as struggling and hard and painful as Nicky’s, but it hadn’t been easy either. He’d seen the consequences of hatred on his cousin’s skin and the hurt from Drake had taken so long to resolve. Luther’s hands on Andrew were a nightmare that had woken Nicky up at night even before his father came into the picture for real.
He gulps. “You can’t let that happen, Chuck. You really, really, can’t let that happen.”
“I’m trying to do what’s best for Andrew,” which isn’t an outright yes, but it’s as close as Chuck will get to admit it. “What did you really call me for?”
About that. “I just wanted to warn you.” And how hard it is to believe this, even as he says the words himself. “I’m taking this to court. I want the twins back.”
Allison had flipped him off when she’d learnt he needed the loan to get a good lawyer, and immediately got to work to hire an army of hers. Nicky knows this doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy or fast, but being a white rich girl is certainly speeding shit up faster than a Mexican gay man would have gotten. It’s fucking shit, but Nicky has no time to fight the good fight right now.
He’s selfish and scared and he wants his kids back.
Chuck is silent for a long time. “If you think this is the best course of action,” he says diplomatically, in the end. Nicky doesn’t wonder why is that.
He couldn’t give less of a shit, honestly.
Chuck only offers him the bare bones of how something like this would work out. Meetings with a lot of people, psychologists and social workers, just like the first time he applied to get custody of the twins; and a judicial hearing at the minors court to decide whether the twins will return to him or go to his parents. Foster care is, it’s repeated, just a temporary measure.
Nicky wants to tell him where he can shove his temporary measures, but he doesn’t. He’s very polite instead and says all the hello’s and goodbye’s before hanging up.
When he turns away from the window, he almost shrikes in terror.
Allison scoffs at him, but doesn’t move an inch out of his space or lower the hand that she has all but in his face. It’s holding her phone; Nicky needs to blink twice and lean back with his neck to read the screen.
The ticking seconds count the duration of a call with Moriyama.
Nicky’s blood freezes. “Allison, this doesn’t—”
“This does,” she interrupts him. “We’re over pride and dignity, remember? He’s got connections and you need them. Swallow, Hemmick; I know you can.”
She lets go of her phone, rather than give it, and Nicky flounders to try and catch it before it falls on the ground. When he finally has it in his hands, firmly, she’s slipped out of the kitchen as quietly as she came, in her fifteen inches stilettos.
Nicky bites his tongue to keep all his Spanish curses in his mind, so that when he brings the device to his ear, his mouth opens and says, simply, “Hello?”
“…I’m fairly convinced I wasn’t supposed to hear those last few sentences.”
This, right here, is just proof that Nicky’s life is never done kicking him in the face when he’s down. “Ichirou, listen I—”
“Reynolds explained,” the man interrupts him. His voice is unperturbed as always, and Nicky refuses to admit that it’s the kind of firmness, the kind of stability, he longs for in the middle of this storm. “Regardless of the state of the relationship between us, you’ve given me invaluable information about my family, Nicky. I would be glad to repay my debt, somehow. Just say the word.”
It’s wrong in all the ways something can be wrong, Nicky is absolutely certain of it, but he’s never been good at right and proper and clean-cut standard-procedure shit, and life isn’t a fairy tail where good people always have their happy endings and evil ones get the punishment they deserve. Big eats small, he thinks.
His father never played fair, anyway.
“I’m saying it now,” he whispers, the lowest he’s ever spoken. “I’m begging you.”
Ichirou’s reply comes immediate. “Consider it done.” Nicky closes his eyes. Thank you, he doesn’t say. “I have to leave you, now. I will call you again.”
It is sunset outside the window. Nicky watches it turn into night as he listens to the phone falling silent.
*
It’s not easy to go to sleep. Matt’s bed is more comfortable than anything Nicky’s ever slept in, but the sheets coil around his legs like snakes, the heat from inside his brain spreads and leaves him sweaty, itchy and desperate, and the sounds of the cars outside are the threatening memory of a five seats truck several years in the past.
It’s been two days.
Nicky tosses and turns and cries silently in his pillow as his only way to lover the pressure building in his chest, threatening to suffocate him, and he’s considering just giving up. He could go to the kitchen, get himself some coffee or better yet some alcohol — though he has a feeling Dan and Matt got rid of it all when they took him over — and he could sit himself down to write what Allison’s lawyers asked for their first meeting tomorrow afternoon.
“Everything works,” the woman with the New York’s accent had said. “If they ever hurt you, if they ever forgot about something on you. Miss Reynolds told me about a conversion therapy camp? I want it on paper, every single thing that happened there. If we get the right judge, that alone will be enough to shut their case down, and then we can move forward on making ours.”
Nicky’s darkest nightmare written on paper. He’d tried last evening but the page had remained just as blank as he’d felt back then.
The thing is, he doesn’t remember lots of it. There are wide blanks in his memories spanning for weeks at time that he cannot dig up no matter how much he tries. And the things he remembers, he hates viscerally because some were awful, some make him want to puke still, but some moments were those in which he felt almost, almost, good. When they told him he was making it, when they praised him for admitting his sins and fighting them, when they painted him the picture of his triumphant return home, an healed boy, a straight man. He’d hold onto those delusions with bleeding fingers, and then they turned out to be just another lie.
In paper, she asked. Are there even the words for it?
His phone buzzes on the nightstand, and at first Nicky stares at it blankly. Allison? Ichirou?
Erik?
It’s four in the morning, the alarm clock says on the nightstand. Nicky gulps and sits up and pushes a hand through his hair, but the phone keeps ringing. Careful, so careful, scared that it’d, what?, explode in his hands? (If only.) He picks it up.
Unknown number.
Nicky sighs. Ichirou then, probably to tell him from an untraceable source that it’s done, whatever it is that he could accomplish. Nicky didn’t really ask, he didn’t really want to know the details.
What great example he’s setting, isn’t he?
His voice is strung to barely a breath of air when he answers, bone-deep tiredness laced to every single letter. “Hello?”
It sounds so stupid a greeting, and yet he can’t think of anything else.
“Nicky.”
A lightening quick recognition, wide eyes, a stray hiccup. Nicky almost chokes on his own spit. “Andrew!”
Too many words rush at his tongue, twisting it and making speaking them out impossible. Inquiries, demands, pleads, all alike and elbowing each others, but the voice at the other end of the call, pitched too high for the night but fitting adolescence like a tailored dress, interrupts them all. “Nicky,” Andrew repeats, so much distress in the forced — fake, so fake — indifference. “Come and get me.”
There’s so many things wrong with this situation. Nicky is not supposed to be in contact with the twins, Luther’s lawyer might destroy him if they heard of it, claim he’d threatened or plied the twin some way, make the whole trial seem unfair, make him look suspicious and dangerous and fishy with something to hide. A call like this, in the middle of the night, and where the fuck even is Andrew? Is he calling from the foster home? Nicky can’t show up there, the parents would surely tell social services if he does!
The only right thing right now, in this whole mess, is being able to hear Andrew’s voice.
What is Nicky supposed to do?
“Tell me where you are.”
He goes.
*
A parking lot. Nicky will admit only to himself that he snickered hysterically to himself the whole drive there.
To the empty parking lot outside a closed mall at motherfucking four in the morning because Andrew ran away from the foster home. He’d been calling from a phone boot. Nicky hadn’t even known there were still functional phone boots in this day and age.
Because Andrew’s foster parents took his phone from him. Curfew. His twin brother was in the hospital and these assholes—
Nicky swerves a bit too tight to get into the parking lot but he can hardly care. A lamppost is flickering, more off than on, and there’s a group of people outside of the pub on the other side of the street with beer bottles in their hands and loud words on their tongues. They don’t seem belligerent, but Nicky can’t help but try and assess them for danger knowing that Andrew straight up went and asked them for spare coin for a call.
If they were good people, why hadn’t they just gave him the phone to call? Where they just too drunk and didn’t think of it?
The phone boot’s glasses are either broken and taped with trash bags or dirty beyond saving so Nicky can only guess at the shapes moving inside it, but he doubts from within it’s possible tell him apart from any other random dude. The figure is still and quiet and his heart breaks some more. “Andrew?”
The door cracks open an inch and Nicky takes in what he can see, blond hair, golden eyes and wary attention, and, fuck, he’s crying again, isn’t he?
Andrew is out of the boot and in front of him in a second. His hand fists Nicky’s jackets but the other stays wrapped around his stomach and he stops just far enough that their bodies aren’t touching.
Nicky wants to hug him so badly, but he’s attuned to the signs now. He stands still, quietly so, and takes in more details. A pyjama under a windbreaker, that’s all Andrew’s wearing and thank fuck it’s summer. Socks, two pairs of them from the looks of it, but no shoes.
No. Damn. Shoes.
Nicky telegraphs his gestures as much as he can force himself to and he puts his hands on Andrew’s cheeks, taking in his expression. The kid’s eyes have always been more telling than he liked to admit. He says, “I’m here,” because it’s all there is to it, all that will matter.
Andrew doesn’t trust words. He trusts promises and actions, and Nicky made one when he said he was coming to get him and followed through with the motions. Now it’s just about letting Andrew take it in.
It seems like an eternity when he says, “Okay,” and then he takes the last step and he doesn’t bury himself in Nicky’s chest but he raises a hand and wraps it tight around Nicky’s middle finger.
It’s a regression, Lord knows as well as Nicky, but it’s not a complete shut out, Andrew’s not so retracted he’d refuse himself even the barest touch of comfort as he did just after Linda’s death, and that’s more than anyone could have hoped for. He’s still standing still, still finding his own ways of asking and saying, and Nicky wants to destroy the world and build it better for him and Aaron.
God, Aaron.
“Uh.” Nicky looks up and blinks because, sure enough, there’s someone else in the phone booth and he has no idea of who this kid might be.
He’s black and he looks a bit older than the twins — though fairly enough they’re more often than not the ones that don’t really look their age —, but he’s wrapped in a sweatshirt over pyjamas and missing his shoes as well. If Nicky needed any more hint that the two were somehow together in this mess of a night.
Genially, he mimics the kid. “Uh?”
“Seth,” Andrew says, low. “Foster kid, same house. Helped.”
Structures rendered in bare bones of sentences, rapid words as if shooting bullets. Nicky lets Andrew’s face go just so he can tuck the kid a bit closer by pulling the hand he’s still hanging on, then he turns to Seth. “Alright, then. Can either of you tell me what’s happening?”
Seth has an angry scowl on his face, but it somehow twists even more as he grunts. “Brat wouldn’t keep quiet,” he huffed. “Was gonna get us all in troubles.”
Nicky would have doubted that even if he hadn’t known Andrew as the least likely kid to throw a tantrum in a scary, strange environment. Something in Seth’s hunched posture, in the overplayed bravado, just screams façade. Therefore, he nods. “Okay. Now, want to try with the truth?”
Seth stiffens and Nicky almost kicks himself. He raised two traumatised kids, did he forget everything about how it is already?
Andrew headbutts Nicky’s arm. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s shivering. It might be the middle of June, but it’s four in the morning and the kid just walked who knows how many blocks barefoot and terrified. It might not be cold, but Nicky doesn’t know how else to deal with it and he crushes the cuss in his mouth between his teeth and his tongue. “Alright,” he caves, not even trying. “Both of you get in the car. We can talk when you’re less likely to turn into puberty popsicles.”
Seth doesn’t seem too eager of obeying, but he takes his cues from Andrew clearly because he follows them to the car with only a couple steps distance. The men at the pub staring at the scene might have something to do with his choice.
In the car, Andrew takes shotgun, Nicky turns the engine on and gets them the fuck out of there. He drives without a real aim, just waiting for the heating to do its magic on the kids’ feet, and when he stops outside Sweetie’s, well. It’s instinct and it’s not like shit hasn’t already blown up, right?
“Banana-split,” he decides, meeting Andrew’s eyes for confirmation. “With all the chocolate and all the syrup and all the cherries the whole place has. Okay?”
Andrew nods quietly. It’s too subdue to truly be reassuring.
Nicky shoots a text to Allison while he gets the kids in. She’ll see it, she always sees everything, no matter the hour, and she’ll get her lawyers up so they can deal with this before it gets to Luther.
The waitress is a new one and doesn’t recognise him when he goes up to the counter to place their order in faster. It’s almost reassuring.
Andrew sits by the window, facing the entrance door so he can see who gets in, and he stares at Nicky until he seats beside him, a buffer wall between him and the rest of the diner. He doesn’t take his jacket off. Seth wriggles awkwardly in front of them.
“Okay,” Nicky says. “Am I getting an answer now?” Seth looks at Andrew, but Andrew is destroying a napkin so he just shrugs. “Drew?”
Andrew’s hands stop.
Quietly, “The husband was scary.” Quieter, “Like Drake.”
It’s some sort of out of body experience. Nicky doesn’t feel anything. This is just another curveball thrown at his kids and it’s like he’s gotten used to the feeling, like his brain is wired to act-first freak-out-later by now.
He crosses his arms on the table and curls forward, protectively around Andrew, non-threateningly toward Seth. “Did he touch you?”
Andrew shakes his head. “He looked,” he says. “Tried to stay and watch when I was changing. Said something ‘bout behaving or else.”
“He’s an asshole,” Seth pipes in. Nicky turns to him, but he’s looking at Andrew still. Following his lead in this as well. “He never touched me, but he hits hard. He’s got this thick belt and the wooden leg of a desk he got some-fucking-where. They fucking hurt.”
Nicky lets the picture raise in his head out of a morbid need to understand how, why, someone would take the leg of a table and use it to hit a kit. What kind of fucked up sadist, with what fucking guts.
The waitress approaches them with their order, tells them cheerily to dig in and leaves their table. Nicky takes one look at the sweet and feels like puking.
Andrew has always had a stronger stomach than him and he picks his spoon to start eating. A glare and a spoon thrown to the face, in pure Andrew’s manners, and Seth is following him suit.
Nicky stares.
When his phone rings again, it says Chuck instead of Allison, but that’s okay. That’s good. Nicky has some words to tell the man.
He picks it up as he heads outside and opens with, “You huge fucking piece of shit.”
***
“Steven and Lorraine had perfect marks,” Chuck says, but his face is white and not for the lights of the diner. “All the surprise visits, all the interviews with the kids— none of this ever came up!”
“Well, fuck,“ Wymack grouches right back. He’s sitting beside Seth because Allison dragged Nicky out to call the lawyers thirty minutes ago and Andrew demanded Renee by his side and David by his friend’s. In no words at all, of course. “I wonder how it could happen that some terrified, traumatised kids lied to the social workers about the man in whose house they lived beating the crap out of them. How impossibly strange.”
Andrew has ducked under Renee’s arm and she rested her head on his. Her eyes never left Chuck and her shoulders held the coiled strength of a snake ready to strike.
Nicky interrupted before Chuck could say anything else that would get him punched. Not that he didn’t want the man to get punched, he very much wished to do so himself, but it wouldn’t look good on their records, considering the situation.
“Allison’s lawyers contacted a judge of the juvenile court. The trial is sped up to this morning, considering the extenuating circumstances. We’re expected at eight.” He can’t help the way his eyes fall to slits as he stares at Chuck. “Aaron’s getting discharged so he can testify, the judge was adamant they hear the twins’ version, so you have to go pick him up.”
Andrew’s reaction is as predictable as heartbreaking. “He can’t!” he hisses. “Nicky!”
Renee cards a hand through his hair as she gently tugs him back into her side. “Chuck is going to bring Aaron straight to the court, Drew,” she says, her tone lite but impossible to be mistaken as anything but an order. “You’ll see him soon and he won’t have to meet Steven.”
Nicky almost asks her not to say that name. He’s been on the edge of throwing up for the past forty hours straight and he really doesn’t want to do it in front of the judge deciding the fate of his family.
Chuck leaves soberly. He tries to meet Andrew’s or Nicky’s eyes, but neither return his gaze. Instead, Renee gets up and helps Andrew to wear his jacket again. He has a pair of sneakers on that Matt hurriedly fetched from Nicky’s apartment, and so is Seth.
Seth has awkwardly shifted closer to Dan and Matt during the hours. Nicky hasn’t heard what they’d been telling, but he guesses it’s an instinctive feeling: Andrew hasn’t been much vocal about Steven, but Seth had called him racist enough times that Nicky can understand the kid’s desire to stick to the other two black people of the group.
Nicky is brown, just like his mother is. Luther had never really liked that, deep down, and Nicky doesn’t know how to be a person of colour, doesn’t know how to be black enough, brown enough, to belong. He’s always been too scared of trying and being told he didn’t belong; he’d had enough of that as the gay kid in church, he wouldn’t have lived through another rejection.
Not enough, not enough, not enough, not Mexican enough, not American enough, not white enough, not brown enough, not man enough, not religious enough, not good, never good enough.
He forces himself to think it’s the best choice in any case: Dan could kick anyone’s ass at any time of day, and Matt wouldn’t enjoy it, his heart too big for it, but he’s tall and big and strong and he could fight if his hand was forced. Nicky is no good in a fight.
The surprise is Allison, actually. She’s brought along a thick sweater that fit nothing with the weather and with the logo of a University she hadn’t attended, a bit old, a bit worn out, but that Seth had shrugged on and had been holding on ever since.
Her face is tight under the perfect make up as she puts her bag on the desk and pulls out a beauty case. “Ten minutes to fix that face of yours,” she mutters under her breath. “This might be the most pressure I’ve ever been under.”
Nicky has no doubt of his state, he’s pretty sure the bags under his eyes reach the base of his nose by now, but he forces a grateful smile to his lips. “You lead a multimillionaire company.”
She glares at him, “Exactly.”
A few times Allison went crazy with make-up on Nicky’s face. Lipstick, eyeliner, foundation and eyeshadow, everything. She always managed to make him look otherworldly beautiful, but that’s not what she’s aiming for today and her brushes, though as precise as always, are stiff and empty of her usual gleeful pride that made her look like a young girl, for once. Her cold-hearted bitch attitude stays on the whole time.
“Stand straight,” she orders. “Don’t drop your gaze, look at the judge, don’t look at your parents. Be smart about this, throw them under the bus for every single stunt they pulled on you.“ Only a handful of inches from her face, she looks at him with eyes twirling. Knowledge, understanding. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for them.”
Nicky nods.
It’s not like he’s afraid of what might happen to his father when he loses this trial — and he will, because Ichirou made sure of it —, but if he stops to think about this carefully, if he pulls himself out just enough, he could feel bad for his mother, feel sorry for all she’d given up for Luther. Maybe, if he were still sixteen, he’d hate the mere idea of hurting her.
“I won’t,” he promises instead, because he’s grown up now and it’s a child’s duty to take care of their parent.
He’s got kids himself, and he can’t comprehend or excuse what she has allowed to happen to him any longer.
Allison nods, lips thin. Nicky can guess what she’s thinking, I’ve been there, I’ve fought my family as well, I know the pain mixed in with the hatred, but she’s better than any person and she doesn’t. Their pains are different, their backgrounds even more so, and she won’t take the spotlight of his suffering to underline her own.
She pulls back shortly after. “The best I could do,” she says grimly, not sounding too satisfied.
“That’s alright,” Renee offers gently. “The bulk of the convincing will be done by Nicky’s words.”
Only Andrew’s presence kept Nicky from exploding. Crying, laughing maniacally, he doesn’t know how, but he really wanted to burst. Fuck.
Wymack grunted, but he patted Nicky’s arm. “Let’s get this over with. Abby, Kevin and Katelyn won’t forgive me if the twins don’t get home right now.”
***
Probably, the underwhelming feeling of the whole ordeal was due to the exhaustion of feelings in seeing Aaron for the first time since the hospitalisation. After getting that, his cousin in his arms, crying in his neck that he didn’t do it, he didn’t want it, he was so fucking sorry, what was the sight of his father’s outraged reddened face? It not like he was saying anything Nicky had never heard before from him.
The judge heard Chuck’s side of the story first, agent Higgins’ second, and the twins’ third. Aaron first, Andrew second. The medical records confirmed the non-consensual drugging theory, and Andrew’s clipped recap of Steven’s behaviour in the past day brought Seth over to the stand as well.
Nicky closed his eyes and brought his lips to his entwined fingers as the words filled the courtroom, barely censored of profanities and still shamefully explicit. Seth laid his trauma bare as if yelling at the stormy sea from on top of a cliff. Listen to me, he seemed to say. Listen to what they did to me. Listen!
Judge Rollins, a black woman in her sixties, asked with hard voice if Allison’s lawyers intended to pursue the case of this young man as well. Mrs Perez didn’t turn to her employer as she claimed that they were going to file the new case as soon as this was over, and Nicky realised: they’d talked about it already, they decided on it.
When he turned to meet Allison’s eyes, she refused him.
Seth’s, she met head on. He seemed to deflate just light, with his face coloured a painful shade of earnest surprise.
It was over so fast Nicky’s terror seemed horribly exaggerated compared to the reality of facts. Mrs Perez passed him a note halfway through Luther’s testimony on Nicky’s alleged unreliability. Apparently, the judge they got had solved many cases with denial of custody to strictly-religious family; her own background presented a history of an abusive marriage with a Catholic extremist man.
Nicky went through the motions of his own statement almost in trance. It was all bureaucracy after all, no less staged than a play in a theatre, and Luther seemed to realised it as the judge shut him down more and more.
He was asked, did he realise the danger he’d left his kids exposed to?, and he said yes.
Did your kid call you in the middle of the night for help? He didn’t know who else to call.
Did you go to him? Of course he did, what kind of question was that?!
Judge Rollins held her hand up to stop Luther’s lawyer from objecting. “I’ve heard quite enough.” She shuffled the papers in front of her for a while, head shaking just lightly, but then she placed them down and looked up at her small, tired audience. “There is no doubt in my mind that returning these children to their cousin’s care is the best course of action, for their safety above all.”
Nicky hears Aaron’s strangled gasp, unsure, disbelieving, and then Renee’s voice, ever so gentle, soothing both of the twins down with barely restrained happiness in her whispers. For himself, he’s not sure. Something is stirring in his throat, but all he can do is fall into old habits: with the corner of his eye, he spies his father’s reaction waiting trying to gauge the best way to dam it back into something manageable.
What do I say, what do I do, the right answer, what’s the right—
He’s ripped out of that well with his name called in a firm but carefully blunt voice.
When he turns, the judge is looking at him directly. “Mr Hemmick, I need you to hear something. This room—“ she gestures vaguely to the court, somber, “—has rarely ever seen accidents. When I get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for a hearing, usually, it’s because a child died, and it was for the voluntary actions of someone who, in most cases, should have protected them. When i walked in here today, I had expectations of what I was going to hear. I am extremely glad to find I was wrong.”
He wants to tell her there’s a boy in this room who’s been drugged, one who’s been harassed and one who’s been abused; this is not a happy ending, no matter how much worse she’s seen. He doesn’t; he nods instead.
“This wasn’t your fault,” the judge finishes. “I’m not sure you’ll believe it soon enough, but for once I can say it.” A nod. “Now, you should go home and rest with your family.”
The hammer comes down at some point. Nicky barely registers it, under the noise of his father’s outraged screams.
***
They don’t turn back. Nicky tucks Aaron to one side and Andrew to the other, Allison holds a protective arm over Seth’s shoulders and their tiny group leaves, goes.
He doesn’t check whether his parents are looking at him, and how.
Maybe he’s finally stopped caring.
***
Oh, no. He still does.
***
Wymack passes him a glass with water and lemon juice and watches unflinchingly as he twirls it in his mouth before spitting it into the toilet. He feels like he could puke again any second if he tries to move from the cold tiled floor, but logically he knows he hasn’t eaten enough in the past Lord knows how many hours to have anything else to let out.
“You’re giving those kids quite the scare,” the man says. On top of everything else they’ve been through recently, he keeps to himself, but Nicky hears anyway.
His only answer is a grunt, but he forces himself up to his feet with only a third of success owed to the arm Wymack wraps around his waist. Brushes his teeth, checks his terrifying reflection on the mirror and decides, okay, let’s get out.
Not having the twins in hand-reach is terrifying, anyway.
They’re back home, for as upturned as it still looks from Nicky’s impromptu abandonment, but Andrew and Aaron are in their bedroom while everybody else is speed between the living room, discussing Seth’s upcoming trial, and the kitchen to provide some nutrients to everyone.
Wymack stops in the latter, Nicky just aims for the first.
The twins are both on Andrew’s bed, curled closer with their hands held in a tangle of bone-white fingers. Drew is not talking but Aaron is sobbing his heart out. Their Worry-Eaters keep guard from their laps.
Nicky closes the door behind himself and speed-walks to the mattress. The moment his ass touches the cover, Aaron is buried deep in his chest, trembling and crying but never letting go of his twin’s hands.
It’s easy, and terribly familiar from older days filled with nightmares of Tilda, to gather him in his lap and then gently coax Andrew closer himself.
The fake earring is gone, Nicky notices.
“I can’t—” His voice is a raven’s croak. “I can’t lose you guys. I couldn’t let it happen even if it were the right thing for you, and I’m sorry for that.”
Aaron gulps down mouthfuls of air as he apologises for the world, for everything and nothing, and sometimes he slips, sometimes he says mom and don’t and I’ll be good, and Nicky dies a bit every time but he lets it happen because Aaron needs to let it go. Andrew taps on Nicky’s forearm, a drawn out rhythm where every note is faded scar.
It takes a while for it to register. Nicky wants to chalk it up to tiredness, but maybe his brain just didn’t want to see it.
Andrew still has the jacket on. Never took it off, never let the sleeves get any higher than the line of his knuckles. A slight trembling in his hands.
Nicky keeps an arm firmly on Aaron’s lithe frame, but he gently pries the other out of Andrew’s grip to reach for the sleeves instead.
Just a tug is enough to see them, and the first thought, dumb and irrational and pathetically useless, is that relief-tinged assessment that they are clearly marks made by unexperienced hand. The cuts are crusted in red, but they seem relatively light, probably survival instinct catching up and turning into hesitance. There are so many all over the forearm, but they are too low, easily spottable, which means made without intention of hiding, without method.
It’s the first time, probably.
Still.
Nicky closes his eyes and tries to breath through his nose alone least he throws up again. His heart is pumping so fast.
Aaron cries out louder when he sees. Nicky’s hand snaps up to his nape before he can pull away, and he trashes in the hold. Desperation turns to anger, to pain, to hatred, then slowly to desperation again as his efforts to escape break against Nicky’s hold. “I’m sorry,” he yells in his shirt once again. “I ruined it, I’m sorry!”
Andrew clenches his teeth. “I wanted to go,” he hisses. His voice is cold and hoarse as if the silence he’d hold until now had scratched his throat open, as if he’d been quietly screaming this whole time. “He didn’t even— I wanted to go. I insisted we went and I didn’t even pay attention that—”
“Enough.” There’s another Nicky under his skin. He’s taking over the situation with a gentle hand on the reins but firm grip on his throat. It’s an older, better-adjusted version of him that knows what to do, and Nicky lets the illusion take over for a moment. “Enough.”
He kisses Aaron’s forehead, then brings Andrew in as well and kisses him too. His eyes stare at the wall, but his brain picks apart his past for him to push the planimetry of today on it, looking for matches.
“I’ll call Bee tomorrow morning,” he says, when it becomes clear how far they went back to. “You both should talk to her.” Lower, “Maybe I will too.”
Andrew’s shoulders drop, but in a good way; relaxing rather than giving up, abandoning a crushing weight rather than succumbing to it.
Aaron keeps on crying. Nicky promises in his ear that it’s gonna be alright.
Renee brings them tea a few minutes later, and bandages for Andrew because of course she noticed first. She wraps him up and then tucks all three of them under a quilt. The bed is minuscule, but they somehow make it fits.
Nicky whispers, thank you. She nods solemnly before sliding out of the room, and the three of them are out as lights just a second after.
***
Bee listens to half of Nicky’s rambling begging on the phone before telling him to come over to her study, now, so they can talk face to face. He sits in with the twins this time, because Aaron refuses to let go of his sleeve and Andrew won’t stop picking at his bandages.
Bee speaks to him first. “Have you felt the urge to do it again?”
Andrew shakes his head without hesitation. “I was— foggy. Aaron was in the hospital, Nicky was alone, the Pig brought me to that place, Steven said to take that faggy shit off my face and—“ he stops.
Bee looks at him patiently. “Everything you felt is okay, Andrew. It was a terrible moment. We all deal with circumstances the best way our brains can find.”
Andrew keeps quiet for a bit more, with his eyes darting to Aaron every so often, before he finally speaks again, in a much lower voice. “—my stuff was in a trash bag.”
It’s such a small thing, logically, when compared with everything that went down, but the way he says the words cuts Nicky down in a thousand pieces. Trash, like what Tilda always told her kids were.
“That was an awful thing to do to a kid.”
“I don’t know why I cut myself, I never thought of it before.” Andrew’s hands twitch in his lap. “It’s just that Steven had left a razor on the sink and my stuff was in a trash bag.”
“Can you tell me if you were thinking of killing yourself, Andrew?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “I just wanted it to hurt.” Bee waits. “It was supposed to hurt. With everything and— But I didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything. I should have hurt but I didn’t and I had to.”
Nicky bites his tongue hard. Andrew tilts to the side just enough to fall into him.
Bee nods quietly. “Alright, then.” Nothing is alright, actually, but she turns to Aaron. “And how are you feeling?”
Aaron shrugs. Bee waits for him for three whole endless minutes, but nothing comes out of it.
She looks at Nicky, then. “I think you should also book some hours for yourself,” she opens, without hesitation. “I’m thinking joint therapy for them, but you should follow an individual program at a different moment.”
He knew it already, of course. She’d mentioned on the phone, but even if she didn’t he was smart enough to understand she didn’t want to have him lay out his pain for the twins to see and have them carry it as well as theirs. It would be too much, he knew, so he nodded without hesitation.
When Andrew frowned at him, he forces himself to smile a bit. “There’s more than just tonight that I ought to take care of,” he admits quietly. “Seeing my dad and mom—it hurt me a lot. I need to understand how and why and how to get better.”
“They’re assholes,” Aaron mutters and Nicky hates himself a bit for it but snorts anyway.
Bee smiles at the three of them. “I am a non-judgmental party,” she offered mildly, but Nicky had a feeling where she stood in the privacy of her mind.
Judging by Andrew’s nod, he knew it too.
“So,” Bee said, bring them both to attention. “Shall we find a schedule that works for us? I would suggest a few days to recharge and take a breath, but returning to school, practice and work as soon as possible could help you all to settle back into your routine.”
Nicky had been arranging things around in his head all morning, trying to come up with something that worked, but the first thing out of Andrew’s scrunched up face was, “Kevin’s gonna be annoying.”
“We missed the qualification match for the Little League cup,” Aaron huffed.
The thing was, Nicky couldn’t tell them it was gonna be okay or that Kevin wouldn’t be pissed. Kevin would absolutely be pissed, it was his way of displaying that he cared, which for some reason looked like the most absurdly normal thing to have happened in the past week.
So Nicky laughed, if a bit hysterically, and Aaron sighed and Andrew rolled his eyes and, okay, there were far from alright.
They had to start from somewhere, didn’t they?
***
DM from Erik Klose:
You’re welcome? Not sure what I did, but I’m happy I helped!
Damn, it’s been a while, isn’t it?
How are you doing, Nicky?
_____________________________________________________
Authoress’ notes:
I don’t know if I forgot to post a chapter on here - I’m pretty sure I posted it though - or if Tumblr is fucking with me but there seems to be at least one part missing. I’ll try and fix it soon, for now the AO3 version is the easiest way to keep track of this story.
Aaaaaaand we have another Seth. Sue me, I wanted to give him another chance. Also the twins get joint therapy finally. There is probably going to be one other chapter for this Arc, maybe two? Then we’re off to a new one! Exciting stuff!
Happy Holidays to everyone, guys!
Agap