1. Chapter 1 by SLWalker
Whether it’s a nightmare or memory, he isn’t sure.
It goes like this: He's ten, round-about. A wee thing, even for that age.
During school breaks, he goes with his Mum on her tours and he learns his way around a professional kitchen and loses himself in the precision required there; these are good moments, even if sometimes he's left sleeping on a bundle of table linens that need to be laundered because it got so late that he can't keep helping, and even if he ends up not actually getting to eat because he was too busy making sure others did. But Mum is often pleased and proud of him, her little sous chef, so he lives for moments like that.
But when school is in session, that's a different world.
A different reality, with a different set of rules.
So, he's ten. About ten. And his father is raging drunk in the kitchen, loud enough to be heard even from where Montgomery is hiding; it's only a matter of time before the man comes and ferrets Montgomery out, and that dread makes him feel sick and shivery, but he doesn’t run or leave because Clara is there in her bedroom and he doesn’t want their father to hurt his sister, and so he stays, because if he's there to hurt, then maybe their father won’t move onto her.
(He doesn't quite grasp yet how unlikely that is; how Robert Stuart's tendency to use his fists when he's given himself permission to is laser targeted and does not encompass her. That it's reserved for Montgomery alone.)
And so Montgomery hides in the hallway, behind the end table with the pictures of Nana and Granda on it, because hiding in the closet might mean he isn’t available to get in the way when he needs to, but he's so scared that his teeth are rattling and tears are rolling down his face because he doesn’t want this, he doesn’t want this--
And then Clara’s door creaks open and she creeps out, dressed in her pretty teal sleeping clothes, gray eyes flooded with tears just like his own are, and she grabs his arm with her tiny four-year-old’s hands and tries to tug him back to her room and he realizes she's trying to hide him and--
--Scotty wakes up in South Bristol, on a still unfamiliar bed, dragging in air like he’d dove too deep and had been under the surface for too long.
For that space, neither awake nor asleep (alive nor dead), he’s between one world and another, one name and another, until finally the present wins, in no small part because there is no escaping the pain, not even for a different kind.
His left hip is screaming; his right is just throbbing with the beat of his galloping heart. Awareness of about a thousand other things which hurt less than both of those seeps in after; neck and back and shoulders and head and.
He closes his eyes in a drawn grimace, jaw shivering a little bit. Tries to breathe it all off, but there’s no real soothing it, just becoming something like acclimated. He’s been through this enough times now that it’s practically routine.
Coming home hasn’t fixed anything. But even in this state, feeling as if he’s lost too many pieces to continue functioning as a person, he doesn’t think there is anywhere safer than here, on this island, a stone’s throw away from people who love him.
And that has to count for something.