Part XIII.

 

Here’s the evidence of human existence:
A splitting bin bag next to two damp boxes,
And I cannot find a name for them,
They hardly show that I have lived;
And the dust, it settles on these things, displays my age again,
Like a new skin made from old skin that has barely been lived in.

I didn't need these things, I didn't need them, oh,
Pointless artefacts from a mediocre past,
So I shed my clothes, I shed my flesh down to the bone and burned the rest;
I didn't need these things, I didn't need them, oh,
Took ‘em all to bits, turned ‘em outside in,
And I left them on the floor and ran for dear life through the door.

-Frightened Rabbit; Things

He came into Aberdeen out for blood.

Later, he would find that ironic; that despite drawing it plenty of times in his life, he’d never really wanted to when he had.  And those times he did want to, he’d held back.

And later, he would also find it ironic that he was wearing the Saltire, in the form of Arthur Murray’s grandson’s hooded sweatshirt, a flag he’d tried to get out from under and still didn’t feel belonged to him, not even as he went to war just like many other battered young Scots throughout history, whose voices had been stolen from them.

And later, he would be sort of amazed that he could get all the way to Edinburgh’s central transit hub, onto the high speed train for Aberdeen, then from Aberdeen’s central station to a hired driver to his family’s driveway, and barely even feel it; that the rage he’d been swallowing since he was a child powered him through it better than any antimatter reactor might have. Where the supernova that was his chest made every other thing he felt inconsequential.

Later, Scotty would have a little space to contemplate the convergence of everything that had made him; the things that he’d run from and the things that he’d run to and that better place that he’d found, too, which was represented by a green metal swing bridge and the brother waiting on the other side of it.

But that was all later; now had no such mercy nor reason.

 

 

 

Clara looked afraid, and in a moment he was two ages: twelve and twenty-six.  In a moment, in his eyes, she was two ages: six and twenty.

Him, twelve, trying to pull backwards against and get away from the fingers locked around his wrist, the smell of alcohol burning his nose and his heart hammering so hard it drowned out every other sound; her, six, cowering in the other room with wide eyes, watching him from under the table with love and innocence and terror, all at once.

“Dinna ye come a step closer, Montgomery, or I’ll call the authorities on ye,� she said, voice sharp with fear, half in and half out of the front door, using her body to block it, and the past dissolved and left behind only the fractured present.

He hadn’t seen his sister in years by this point; when he’d gone back to Aberdeen after the court-martial had been the last time.  They’d spoken more recently, but they hadn’t been in each other’s presence since then.

“Then call them,� he answered, voice raw, advancing on the door regardless and barely hindered by still needing crutches to do it. “But in the meantime, either get out o’ the way or send him out here, Clara.�

They didn’t used to have sensors on the drive to warn anyone in the house someone was out here, but maybe they’d been installed since.

Maybe even because of him.

Good, he thought, with a kind of vicious pleasure, even as he heard the sound of a skimmer turn up the drive behind him.  He didn’t turn around, though; he didn’t feel any satisfaction at the way his sister was trembling, but he was prepared to go through her if he had to.

“Ye’ve no business bein’ here," she went on, in a clear panic, voice raising as he got closer to the front step; lies, all, his name was in their mother's will just the same as hers, part of this miserable place was his, too, "an’ I dinna ken what ye think ye'll gain, he's still grievin'--!"

“--fuck his grief!� he roared right back, shocking her into shrinking back with eyes the size of saucers, shocking himself at the same time; behind him, doors closed and the sound of boots approaching on the drive had him brace on one crutch and come around with the other in a broad swipe--

--only to nearly take Charlie’s face off with the end of it.

For a moment, silence fell but for their breathing.  Charlie looked stricken.  Behind him, Edward looked stunned.

His balance was precarious enough, but Scotty still drew himself up, looking his uncle Charlie dead in the face.  “Don’t put yer hands on me,� he warned, way the hell calmer than he actually was, rebalancing as well as he could and retreating back towards the house a step, unwilling to let them get between him and that front door.

“We’re nae here t’ hurt ye, nephew,� Edward said, hands up and empty, sounding almost dazed. “Charlie got a call from that blond lad o’ yers, he told us ye might need help.  Or-- at least checked on, aye?"

“Oh, ye’re way the hell too late to help me,� he answered, before flashing them a fierce grin and continuing to find a twisted sort of satisfaction in how unnerved they looked. “If ye wanted to do that, Edward, ye shoulda started long before now.  But if ye don’t mind, I think I'll just help myself."

Charlie looked more and more confused, but beyond him, the same couldn't be said for Edward, whose face traveled across a few different emotions before landing on a kind of bastard hybrid of sternness and guilt. “Now listen, nothin' good comes o' this.  If ye would just maybe come home with Charlie or I, we can talk about all o' this.�

This was just stalling, though to what end, Scotty didn’t know.  Maybe in the hopes he’d somehow see some nonexistent reason.  Maybe they really would call the authorities.  Or maybe even the same sorts of people who had--

The fresh rush of rage in the already boiling caldera of it had him lock his teeth so hard together that he chipped one; even as he felt the grit of it on his tongue, though, he was shaking his head at them. “How long before ye knew what she’d done?� he asked, once he managed to wrestle that down enough to breathe and speak.

The question was mostly rhetorical because it didn’t actually matter; it changed nothing.  But he wanted to drive the knives home, and he could see that one land; the way both his uncles grimaced.

“We came an’ got ye that same day we found out,� Charlie said, barely above a whisper, looking on the edge of tears.

“ How long? Say it," Scotty bit out in answer, lip raised and eyes narrowed.

“Lad--� Edward tried.

It took a lot more willpower than Scotty knew he had to keep from swiping out with a crutch again. “Fuckin’ say it!�

Charlie flinched at the language and Edward’s mouth twisted into a grim, wounded line, but then he admitted, “A month.�

Even wanting to hear them have to admit it aloud, there was no satisfaction to be found there.  Not that Scotty expected there to be.  He jerked his chin up in acknowledgment of it, staring until Edward looked away, but he wasn’t done.

He turned back to where his sister was in the door, all the blood in her face having fled elsewhere; looked at her through stinging, blurred eyes and felt the mirrored tracks she wore, and someday he would understand that she’d been just as damaged by living in this miserable place, just differently.

That none of them got away clean.

But that wasn’t going to be today.

“Tell them what happened that night,� he said, taking another step towards her and that door, tears hot on his face.

“Ye’re mad,� Clara whispered, trembling; too quiet to hear, but not to see.  Then she repeated, louder, shaking her head, “Ye’re mad, Montgomery.�

“Oh, maybe, but I know ye remember that night, so tell them,� he answered, because even if the shape of it all was still nebulous, even if he was only just starting to really grasp how it all fit together, he knew they were related, he knew they were related, his broken arm and what his mother tried to have done to him, and if he had to bleed with that knowledge, then he wasn’t going to bleed alone.

Clara somehow looked even more ghostly, staring at him, and again for a moment they were six and twelve, two terrified children who once loved one another, but then she snapped right back to the now, spitting at him, “She was right t’ send ye away, she was right, an’ he was right, what he said, ye’re just a dirty brood parasite, an’ ye’re sick, too, broken in the head--!�

And the sound he made, the one he’d been grinding between his teeth all this time, wasn’t really a scream, or a roar, or a howl, but all of those, and maybe there was grief, maybe there was terror, but absolutely there was rage and he came around all fangs flashing and brought that crutch around and threw it with every bit of his strength at that door, not even at his sister but at the man she was protecting cowering in the house; lost his balance on the turn and then landed hard enough on the ground to make his world go

white

and then gray

and then red.

 

Something was pinning his arms to his sides; something was digging into his ribs.

 

There was so much blood in his mouth that he had to spit it to the side before he was even able to see again.

In pieces, filtered through the iron on his bitten tongue:

His sister’s wretched sobbing.  Edward talking to her.

The feeling of a thousand shards of glass in his left hip, pointing in every angle.  His own cold sweat and hot tears.

Charlie’s barn coat, brown, the familiar scents of hay and horse, one of the few things Scotty had taken from his childhood and carried with warmth, and the same arms that once carried him up those stairs in that godforsaken house now pinned his own to his sides.

“Let me go, Charlie,� he managed to whisper, on the tail of a sob, not the first nor the last.

“I canna understand what’s gotten inta ye,� Charlie said back, plaintively, and this was the man who once put Montgomery -- a wee’un then, already too quiet and too serious and too much -- up on his shoulders to watch a sunset on the shores of a loch, while his own children waited in the skimmer, and maybe that’s why it hurt quite as much as it did that he didn’t notice.

And for a few seconds there, Scotty really did think of just-- letting it go.

But-- there was still a thirteen-year-old in that house, looking at his mother’s good knives.

He laid his head back against his uncle’s shoulder, and felt the tears burn his temples, and swallowed the blood, and then he asked, “What child twists his own arm to breakin’?�

There was a moment where Charlie’s arms loosened a little, though not enough to get away from, and he sounded confused as he tried, “But ye said...�

That got Scotty laughing, sobbing, both.  He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, when his uncles found him cold and in pain, out shivering in some sad little fort he’d built, and he couldn’t remember what he’d told the doctors, either, but he knew what he didn’t tell them. “I lied, Charlie.  He was standin’ right there, o’ course I lied.  But none o’ ye ever really liked askin’ those questions, did ye?�

“Eddie?� Charlie asked, finally letting Scotty go, somehow sounding even more pained.

Edward had come back; Scotty looked up just in time to see that he hadn’t actually managed to hit Clara, who vanished back into the house and closed the door.  The crutch was laying on the stoop to the side and there was a nice dent in the siding.

He was glad he didn’t hit her and yet still wished he’d done more damage.

Edward looked a little defensive, but mostly just stricken. “It got sorted, though, nephew.  He didna lay another hand on ye after we were back from Edinburgh, aye?  I stayed t’ make sure.�

Scotty just looked at him; wiped his mouth absently, getting blood on Cor’s coat sleeve and Arthur Murray’s grandson’s sweatshirt cuff, and then he asked, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?�

And to that, Edward had no answer.

The silence hung in the air between them again, all three, then Charlie broke it by crowding his brother off to the side and, at least for a moment, Scotty was something like alone.

Suddenly exhausted, all that heat and fury abandoning him, he just sat in his parents’ drive; he could hear them talking, Charlie demanding the answers to questions he had never asked back when it might have made a difference and Edward explaining, maybe, who knew.  Nor did it matter.

Scotty reached into the coat’s inner pocket, though, because he could feel the painful spot in his ribs where whatever was in there had dug into him while Charlie had him pinned, and even if it was just one more spot of hurt in a whole body of it, he didn’t want any more of the same, and thought maybe to move the culprit to somewhere else.

The split second his fingers grazed it, though, he knew what it was.

A tiny, cracked sound caught in his throat, as he pulled his penlight out of Cor’s inner coat pocket; and there, etched silver in the matte black case of it, around the light end, the other name he’d earned--

ᴡ � ʟ ꜰ

--and his brother’s words in his ears.

“In case you find yourself in the dark, at least you won’t be there alone.�

Even deeper in the same pocket, the compass Scotty had given Corry at the same time, so that Corry could find his way back home.

He felt the edges of those letters with his thumb.  He dragged in one shuddering breath, then a second, and closed his hands tight around both objects as if he could write them into his skin deeper than Aberdeen; dragged in a third breath and cried his wounded heart out.

And he wasn’t done crying, but then he put both the light and the compass back in that same pocket, where Cor had kept them next to his heart and where Scotty could do no less, and managed to get his remaining crutch and fight his way up to his feet.

“Here, Montgomery--�

“Ye can pick yer skimmer up at the port, Edward, once I'm done with it,� Scotty said, after he got his breath back, warning his uncles off with a look and then making no real effort to mop the tears off of his face as he made his way past them; he figured the keys were in it, anyway, and he wasn’t about to stick around waiting for a hired driver.

“Wait, where are ye goin’?� Charlie asked, pleading, following.

There was only one honest answer to that question, and whether he knew the way back or not, whether he felt he had a right to it or not, at least he knew where he wanted it to be, and so Scotty answered without once looking behind him:

“Home.�