Talker's Redemption (2 page)

“What in the fuck?” he stuttered.

There were three of them, and one of them looked like Trev, except the last time he’d seen Trev, the guy’s nose had been perfect, and he hadn’t had gold crowns on his teeth. And he hadn’t needed a chain, jangling ominously from his hand, to seem like a threat.

Brian took a deep breath and grabbed his shaking hand. “Don’t panic,” Brian said harshly. “He’s not here for you. Go get Jed.”

“Brian?” Why wouldn’t Trev be there for Talker? Trevor had hurt him. God, it had hurt, and so had the betrayal and so had the helplessness. Tate dreamed about Trevor, sneaking into his room and ripping his asshole open with a four-by-four and whispering,
You want it, you little bitch, you know you want it....

“Talker, just go!” Brian ordered harshly, and Tate looked around them to the three advancing figures in the darkness. Except for Trev, the other two had dark stocking caps on, the kind with spaces for their eyes and nose and mouths, and nondescript clothing, right down to their dark parkas against the December cold.

Talker might have stood there, mesmerized, terrified, until his brains were turned into pudding, but Brian grabbed his shoulders, turned him toward the door to the club and shouted, “
Run, goddammit! Get Jed, now!
” just as the first figure got to him and hit him in the back of the bad shoulder with a lead pipe. Brian let out a howl, but as Talker ran, looking behind him as he went, Brian managed to round back and land the guy a solid in the nose, right before Trevor whapped him across the head with a chain.

Talker started screaming as he ran, and when he made it to the front of the club and through the doorway, he realized he was screaming Jed’s name.

Jed was hunched over the front table, eating a sandwich with one hand while he tallied bar receipts with the other, and as Talker gasped, “Help, Jed, it’s Trev….” Talker thought he’d never seen a human being move so fast.

“Shawn,” he shouted to one of the waiters, “call nine-one-one
now
! Tell them it’s a fight and they’re gonna need medical! Sandy!” he shouted to the lead bartender, “Want to come with?”

Sandy had red hair and a hellacious temper, and he was vaulting over the bar like an action star, even as Talker led the way back out to the darkened parking lot.

Brian was down by the time they got there, a still sandbag of a figure lying in the midst of three assailants, all of them kicking the crap out of him. Jed shouted, “Trevor, you piece of shit, leave him alone!”

Trevor looked up, and wiped blood that was mostly not his from his face. “Yeah, big J? You go ahead and report me for this! Think Talker’s fuckin’ roommate’s gonna do good in jail?”

Jed ignored him, and as the other two men melted like December fog, he managed to land a solid punch in Trevor’s nose, and Talker heard something crunch as more blood spattered across the icy concrete.

But then Trevor was gone, and Tate had other things to worry about.

“Oh God… Brian… oh shit… Jed… Jed… come help him…
Brian
!”

Brian was breathing, but his eyes were swollen shut, red, puffy, bloody beyond recognition. Half his face was a mass of blood, and Tate saw one of his teeth lying on the ground two feet away.

Talker didn’t want to think about what the rest of his body looked like under his ripped jacket or the jeans. He knew that there was blood seeping through his tattered T-shirt at his stomach, and that his arm was twisted and bent at an odd angle under his body. His bad arm, the one connected to the bad shoulder, the one he wrote with and pretended didn’t hurt after a long shift waiting tables with the trays at his shoulder—that arm.

Oh Christ.

He grabbed Brian’s other hand and squeezed it, holding it to his cheek, and the bruised lumps of flesh over Brian’s eyes contorted. Brian scowled at him a little. “Told you to run.”

“I did, idiot. I got help.”

Brian breathed out, tried to nod. “Don’t worry. Won’t hurt you. He won’t hurt you. Won’t let him hurt you….”

Tate’s shoulders shook more, and his vision blurred, and Brian was still mumbling “Won’t let him hurt you….” as the staff of Gatsby’s Nick covered Brian in their own jackets and shivered in the a.m. cold. He’d stopped mumbling, though, by the time the world became red lights and harshly barked questions. Talker just sat there, ignoring the authority people and the aching cold coming up through the sidewalk to his knees. Brian was lying there, covered in other people’s jackets and winter mist and blood. Talker’s grip on the battered hand was the only thing that kept Talker from screaming.

By the time the paramedics hefted him into the ambulance, Brian was completely silent. They drove off, after Jed managed to get a hospital name from Talker. Brian had insurance which was a blessing that hardly registered, because for the moment, Brian was leaving, leaving, leaving Talker on the icy sidewalk, feeling as though a bomb had gone off and he was the only one left standing.

Dr. Sutherland
sighed and looked away from Tate as though there was something in his tattoo-masked face that was too awful to bear. Instead, he caught Brian’s eye, and Tate felt his lover physically recoil.

“So, Brian,” the nice man said in a voice that was a little too hearty. “You’re trying to tell Tate that what hurts him hurts you too. How did
you
feel after The Worst. Date. Ever.?”

Brian, steadfast Brian who could endure about anything, went very, very, very terribly still.

Talker turned to him, a little surprised. There was a look on Brian’s face, like he’d gone to Mars on vacation and had left his body there to answer messages.

“He was fine,” Tate said, unnerved by Brian’s silence. “He was great. Helped put me back together. Made me feel safe. It wasn’t….” Tate’s voice faltered, and he looked down to his hand with the half-glove on it. He had this game he played, with his scarred, damaged fingers, where he’d try to get them to twitch, and then a little bit further, and then a little bit further. When he was a kid, the doctors told him that it would help him keep mobility in his hand, and he liked that. Now that he was an adult it just made him feel in control. He could control that hand, even though it had been damaged. The analogy to his life was just too hard to ignore.

“Brian?” Dr. Sutherland asked carefully. “Brian, you know….” The doctor sighed, seemingly at a loss, and slouched back against his comfy tapestry chair. “You boys know, you’ve been coming to see me for about six months, and… I’m glad. I look forward to seeing you in here every week. But I’m worried. You’ve made some progress in some things—Tate, you seem to be less… uhm… high-strung every week, and you can keep your attention focused for almost the entire session. But….” He looked away from them, his eyes seeming to find patterns in the random dance of tinsel across his bookshelf.

When he looked back, he was as resolved as Talker had ever seen him.

“You boys have got to start to talk about this thing like it really happened—both of you. You have to grab it by the horns and stare it in the face, and call it what it is.”

Talker heard his whimper and hated himself, and his hand twitched in his lap hard enough to startle himself. Brian moved, finally, to put his hand over Talker’s and to calm him down.

Dr. Sutherland watched them, and his jaw tightened, and he sighed determinedly.

“Brian, if you think I’m less worried about you than I am about Talker, then you haven’t been paying attention. You’ve got a lot of shit, just threatening to explode out your chest, and I don’t know what you’re going to do if you can’t let it out….”

Brian made an unexpected sound then, as he held Tate’s hand in his lap and stroked absently at the wrist with his thumbs. Tate had to look at him carefully before he identified it as a bitter, ironic sort of laugh.

“Don’t worry about me, Doc,” Brian said, his eyes still far away, the part of him that Talker loved still mostly on Mars. “Don’t worry about me. I found a way to let it out. Trust me. Most of it’s not in my chest anymore.”

Brian had smiled then, and it was a chilling, dark-side-of-the-moon sort of smile, and not Talker’s Brian’s smile at all. Tate shivered, and Brian seemed to snap inside himself, and his smile warmed up and became Talker’s Prince Charming smile again, and the session went on.

Tate would wonder, though. What was behind that smile? What was it that Tate had missed, when he’d run his own mission to Mars? A lot could have happened when he was getting his shit together after The Worst. Date. Ever.

“So the
thing is,” Jed said seriously as they were in his car, following the ambulance through the mostly empty streets of Sacramento, “the thing is, you can’t mention Trevor’s name.”

Talker jerked—hard enough to run into Jed’s arm as he shifted the ancient Ford Escort, and beyond swearing under his breath, Jed didn’t say or do anything.

“Why wouldn’t I tell the cops it was Trev?”

He’d been living for that moment, the moment they came and took Trev away, Brian’s ruined face being the only thing they needed to convict the guy.

Jed looked at him sideways as they sat at a red light. It was the moonless part of the night, and Jed’s dark face was hard to read anyway. Talker could only wait for him, patiently, and hope he could make himself clear.

Jed shook his head. “You were out of it, you know. For a while, you really didn’t notice shit. Let’s just say that some shit went on between Brian and Trev that won’t look too good if the cops hear about it, okay?”

Talker stared at him like he was from far away. “Do you know we’ve got a rat?” he said after a minute, and Jed just stepped on the accelerator. Tate watched him
fight
not to give a double-take to his passenger, but he couldn’t help it. Sometimes his brain was as confused as the scars and the tattoos on his face.

“She’s really sweet—Brian wanted to name her ‘Talkette’, right, because she’s a pied rat, and she’s all patchy, but only one side of her face is black, like me, but I said name her something happy, and so we named her Sunshine. We keep her with a sunlamp, you know? And Brian made her a blanket over her cage, because it’s cold, and even though we have heat this year, the place is drafty still, and he heard that they get delicate with temperature drops. And he cleans her cage every week, and gives her a bath and trims her toenails. I mean, we get home, and he just plops her on his shoulder and she puts her paws on his ear and reaches over and gives him little rat kisses and… and….”

Talker twitched—Tate-the-twitch, that’s what they called him in school, and even his favorite teachers had moments when their eyes got big and they breathed hard through their noses because he would do it when things got quiet, and it would always,
always
send the class into chaos.

He heard that same exasperated breath from Jed, and tried to focus himself on what he was talking about.

“He’s the gentlest person on the planet, Jed. What could he have possibly done to deserve this?”

Jed’s indrawn breath had a very different quality to it this time. “He defended
you
.”

Tate’s goddamned vision went gray at the edges, and red spots surfed in front of his eyes. His lungs burned, and he must have made a strangled sound because suddenly Jed was pulling over and putting the car in park and shoving his head down and yelling at him to breathe.

He did, eventually, remember to breathe, and the burning in his lungs and the strange auras in front of his eyes all eased up, and there was nothing but the steady rubbing of Jed’s hand on his back.

“He didn’t… he didn’t… he didn’t….” Oh Christ. Not
that
again. He’d cleared up that little problem when he was twelve, when he yelled, “I
am
a fucking faggot and get the h-h-h-hell a-ww-waayyy from me!” at his father, when the fucker had come to visit him (beat him) while he was living in foster care.

But Tate had to get this out on his own; Brian wasn’t here to read his mind for him, to stroke his hand, to make him believe he was safe. It
was
just like being twelve again. It was him and the faltering infrastructure that cared for him. Of course, it only cared for him when it suited the purposes of the alien, adult intelligences in the surrounding stratosphere.

“Oh God,” he whispered, half to himself and half to Brian, unconscious in the ambulance that was two blocks down the road. “Brian, what did you do?”

Jed’s voice next to him was a little bit angry. “His hands were tore up for weeks, Talker. How could you not see it?”

“Same way I lived with him for almost a year and didn’t see that he was in love with me!” Tate snarled back, so bitterly angry with himself he was surprised he didn’t just crawl out of his own damaged, macabre skin and run down the streets as a bloody skeleton, shrieking in pain. “I… I just didn’t see him.”

Not all of him, anyway. Not the part that loved him. Not the part that would, apparently, become violent to protect him.

“How….” Tate had to start again, and it had nothing to do with the stammering that he’d overcome as a kid. “How bad was it?”

Jed grunted, and put the car in drive. Apparently Tate wasn’t going to hyperventilate and pass out, and they both wanted to get to Kaiser when the ambulance did. “It was a fair fight,” he said. “Brian gave him a chance to defend himself. But… man, Brian’s strong. And he was pissed. And you were scaring the hell out of everyone. I had to pull him off, and Trev needed a trip to the hospital.” Jed blew out a breath—a shaky one. Talker realized that Jed cared about Brian, a lot. Not like a lover, but like a little brother, maybe. Like Jed had been caring for Tate, since he’d started working at Gatsby’s Nick.

“But it wasn’t this bad… not nearly this bad. Brian used his fists, and there was only one of him. Trev… he was out the next morning….”

Talker whimpered. Brian would
not
be out the next morning.

“Would the police really arrest him?” he asked after a moment. Jed negotiated a right hand turn onto Alta Arden before he answered.

“They would if they thought Brian’s attack was unprovoked.”

Tate didn’t have anything to say to that, so for once, he stayed silent.

The hospital was a nightmare, but a familiar one. Tate had spent over a year in the hospital after the fire that had scarred the right side of his body, and even though he’d been a kid then, he still understood doctors and nurses and the rhythms they danced to. In fact, it had been a nurse in the burn ward, a kind one, who had first brought him music to listen to while he was healing. She’d been young, and she’d brought him Green Day, The Cult, and Pearl Jam, as well as old stuff (for her) like The Ramones and The Clash. He’d clung to that music when the pain had gotten too bad. When other people had simply whimpered or cried when they’d ripped off the burn scabs, Tate had been screaming the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” and bless his nurse, she’d been singing with him.
Jeremy spoke in… class today…

Talker found he was humming that song while he sat next to Brian’s bed and heard the doctors talk about ultrasounds and internal damage and whether Brian had it or not. He knew what internal damage was too. He’d been beaten by a foster father once, and had spent a few nights being measured for the big medical boogie man of internal damage. It had been a “no” on the surgery (and a new foster home, one a little more “gay-friendly”) but he remembered the somber looks on the faces of the doctors as they’d palpated Tate’s swollen abdomen, and he feared for Brian now more than he’d ever feared for himself.

His body was tough: damaged, but tough. His body could take one more surgery, one more beating, one more disaster.

His heart couldn’t take even the thought of no more Brian.

There was a motion behind him, and he had to suppress a violent twitch as he felt a thin, female hand on his shoulder.

“How’s he doin’… oh God.”

Tate closed his eyes and grabbed the hand on his shoulder.

“Hi, Aunt Lyndie.”

Lyndsay Cooper was Brian’s only living family—Tate had called her while Brian was being triaged and prepped for a room. It was the only thing he could remember doing in the last three hours, besides trying not to climb out of his own skin.