I'm supposed to have spent today editing Chapter Two of TPMI. This is... not that? Whoops, lol. Spat out ~2k words of spooky vampire nonsense completely unrelated to all the other spooky vampire nonsense I've been posting about lately! As usual, this isn't beta-read, just spell-checked.
"You can't just pawn off Stanley's things!" Ford shouted.
"I can do whatever I want with anything in this house," Filbrick snapped back. "I'm the one that paid for it, so what I say goes. Stanley isn't here. Stanley isn't coming back. The sooner you get it through your skull, the sooner-"
"The sooner what, Pa? The sooner you can go back to pretending what happened wasn't your fault?" Ford shot. His fist was clenched around the strings of a red set of boxing gloves, wound so tightly around his fingers that the tips were turning white.
Filbrick took a step forward. "What happened was a tragedy. He stuck his nose somewhere it didn't belong and-"
"He wouldn't have been out there at all if you hadn't tossed him out!"
"I didn't see you raising any complaints when I did!"
They both stopped, heaving for breath, faces red. Ford was shaking where he stood, eyes glistening, teeth set hard enough to crack teeth.
"You," he spat, "were our father. You're supposed to care about what happens to us."
"Of course I care," Filbrick seethed. "You think I don't? You think I woulda paid for that funeral if I didn't care? You think I wouldn't have gone to the police station to identify his body if I didn't care, huh?"
"And you care so much you're selling everything that belonged to him so you don't have to look at what you did anymore," Ford finished.
"In case you didn't realize," Filbrick said, gesturing at the room, "there's a real world outside of all those books you keep your nose in. Funerals are expensive. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Putting food in your mouth and clothes on your back is expensive. That money doesn't come from nowhere."
"That's a double negative," Ford corrected snidely.
"Don't you get smart with me-"
"Or what? Will you toss me out, too? Let me get stabbed to death in an alley, bleeding out while you sit inside doing nothing? If I'm such a burden, why not get it over with? I'll be a legal adult tomorrow- there goes any responsibility you claim to have! You won't even have to feel any guilt if something happens to me, too-!"
There was a crack of skin-on-skin. The boxing gloves hit the ground with a soft thump. Ford stumbled back, cheek red and swelling, eyes wide with shock. Filbrick's eyebrows were raised, his jaw dropped and open palm still aloft, as if he too were surprised by his own actions. He stepped back, then, straightened his hat, and looked away.
"I'm not tossing you out," he said all matter-of-factly. He crossed his arms. "You've got a brain between those ears. Not much sense in it, but you're good with numbers. You have the chance of making something of yourself instead of rotting in the lead paint district for the rest of your life. As your father, it's my job to make sure you don't throw away your opportunities."
Ford glowered at him, rubbing at his cheek. "I suppose I'm too useful an opportunity for you to throw away, am I? Unlike my brother?"
"Stanley was… a mistake." Filbrick paused, and he seemed to flag, slightly. He pinched the bridge of his nose briefly before swiping his hand down the rest of his face. When he spoke again, his tone was subdued. "Get a box from the crawlspace. Whatever belonged to him that you wanna keep goes in there. Anything else is going downstairs tomorrow to help pay the bills."
Filbrick turned and left the room, leaving the door open. He didn't pay attention to the quiet shuffling behind him. In the living room, Caryn was pulling a late shift. She sat on the couch, wrapped in a house robe with a cigarette in one hand and the phone in the other. Her eyes lifted to his, and she placed her palm over the receiver.
"Someone's knocking at the door downstairs," she muttered briefly. She returned to her call, her casual and chirpy tone clashing wildly with the dark bags under her eyes and the lightlessness in her gaze. Filbrick grunted and trudged to the stairs.
He didn't bother with hitting the lights on his way down- there was a streetlamp that lit the steps just as well for free, and he'd been up and down this particular staircase for over two decades. Each step was as familiar to him as his own face. A quick peek through the glass window on the downstairs door revealed an empty shop and a silhouette at the front door. As he watched, the stranger raised its fist and rapped at the wood again, three times.
Filbrick grumbled lowly under his breath and passed through the shop floor. Whoever it was, they'd serve as a fine outlet for the aggression laced through every taut muscle in his body. The stranger's face was shadowed with darkness, unlit by the streetlight behind it- he hit the light as he opened the door, his breath prepared with the reaming of a lifetime- until he saw who it was.
Stanford was on the porch, inexplicably. His hair was combed neatly, for once, and he was dressed in a worn-but-well-kept black suit. His glasses had also gone missing, leaving nothing between his face and Filbrick's to disguise the wided-eyed blankness in his dark brown eyes. His hand lowered- his hand.
His hand.
Filbrick held eye contact with him. Kept his voice level. "Stanford. What are you doing on the stoop?"
"Can I come in, Pa?"
He wasn't doing that thing he liked to do, where he pitched his voice to make it sound like he wasn't from New Jersey. As if he was trying to do an impression of his brother. Filbrick looked his son in the eyes and stayed where he was. The too-warm air filtered in from the streets, the sure cause of the sweat beading at the back of his neck.
"What's with the monkey suit? What are you trying to pull?"
His son stared back at him, guileless and unblinking. Despite the heat, and despite the thick suit with its starched-stiff collar that pressed, ever-so-slightly, to the underside of his chin, the young man was not sweating.
Filbrick blinked. Then he shook his head. "No, no, I'm not- whatever you think you're doing, Stanford, whatever stupid game you're trying to play? I'm not letting you. You can forget about the box- get the hell out of my sight before I do something I'm gonna regret."
There were voices on the stairwell behind him. Filbrick didn't turn to look as he kept his eyes forward, trained on the unmoving young man.
"Filbrick, if you're done at the door you need to apologize to your boy-" Caryn stopped, the click of her heels arresting in place somewhere between the corner of the room and where he was standing.
"-told you, I'm not speaking to him, Ma! I don't care if he didn't mean it!" Stanford's voice carried down from upstairs. There was the clomp of heavy footsteps, the weight of a teenager who didn't mind what kind of racket he was making. The squeak of sneakers on the hardwood floor, and then the creak of new weight on old support beams stopped. "I won't stay in this house anymore-"
Filbrick stared at his son.
The young man broke eye contact and turned to look behind him with a tone that was soft and melancholy. "Stanford."
"…Stanley?" the voice behind Filbrick cracked. Filbrick himself took one step back, then another, eyes never leaving the young man on the stoop outside. In his peripherals, there was another young man already in his house, dressed much the same as Filbrick had last seen him, with a skewed set of glasses set above a purpling and swollen cheek. They were mirror images of each other. But that didn't make sense.
"Can I come in?" The young man who was not Stanford asked.
"What? What kind of question is that? Of course you-" Caryn gripped Stanford by the arm and pulled him back.
"Filbrick? What's going on? Who is that?" she asked. Filbrick didn't have an answer for her.
He steeled himself, marched forward, and shut the door. The young man on the stoop continued to watch him with those wide, dark eyes.
"Some-" he swallowed. "Some punk with too much time on his hands. I oughta call the cops on him."
"Are you kidding me?" Stanford broke from his mother's grip, marching forward to stop Filbrick from locking the door. "'Some punk?' That's my brother! You're not leaving him out there again!"
"Are you mental?" Filbrick grabbed Stanford's wrist, trying to stop him. "We buried your brother six feet under! Whoever's loitering out there can't be him. It's some kinda sick freak trying to mess with us."
"Are you even looking at him? How can it be anyone but Stanley?" Stanford threw his other hand out to the door, opening it back up to the stranger on the front step. Filbrick tried to yank him back, but the damage was done. Stanford was taking the stranger by the hand.
"Come in," his son said, "Please- please come back inside. I don't care if you're a ghost, or a revenant, or anything like that. Come home."
He tugged, and the stranger followed, and a pair of old, polished loafers crossed the threshold. A change seemed to overcome the young man's expression, a kind of life that Filbrick hadn't noticed was missing. He blinked once, then again, expression crumpling and shoulders caving in until he crashed, hiccupping, into Stanford's arms.
Filbrick watched red tears spill down his cheeks, and felt his own gut churn uneasily.
