Chapter Text
The steady, soothing movement of the cool washcloth sliding from his wrist, over his palm, and down his fingers slowly but surely calmed his erratic heartbeat, but did nothing to still the violent tremor that shook his hands.
Alex sat and breathed and stared–unable to do much else.
John lifted the cloth away. The gentle splash of him carefully lowering it back into the washbasin. Trickling water ringing like church bells within the silence of their room when he wrung it out again.
Moisture cooled and dried on his still sticky hands, and Alex blinked at the wall opposite him, resisting the urge to flex his fingers and feel where the blood crusted his skin. Stubbornly ignored the tears stinging his eyes.
The cloth returned, cold, fresh, cleansing; and with it, John’s gentle hands.
He worked methodically, washed away the grime, silent but oh so comforting.
Alex didn’t want to talk yet.
His husband lowered the cloth for the final time and stood to remove the cloudy, tainted water from his immediate line of sight, then returned to sit beside him, gently, gently, gently taking both his hands in his, caressing his trembling fingers.
A shuddering breath puffed past Alex’s lips. He released the high-strung tension, and his shoulders slumped as he let himself tip over to the side, right into John’s strong chest.
His arms came up at once, cradling him close, enveloping him in warmth and safety as John carefully trailed his fingers up and down between his shoulder blades.
A long exhale against the top of his head.
“Oh, darling,” he mumbled and held him just a little tighter, and Alex squeezed his eyes shut, all his focus on keeping himself from tearing apart again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, little more than a whisper, almost lost to the fabric of his husband’s waistcoat.
“Sorry?” he repeated with a dry chuckle that held no humour, and God, Alex was so tired. What he wouldn’t give to wrap himself up in as many blankets as he could possibly claim and fall into a dead sleep for the next eighteen hours. “Don’t apologise for this, Alex. You- you were incredible. I wish you didn’t have to do this, I truly wish this hadn’t happened, believe me, not again, not ever, but- it did happen, and you made it through.”
Alex blinked slowly, unseeing. A haze had descended over his senses, and everything past his husband’s arms could have fallen out of existence the next second and he would have been none the wiser.
“I broke down,” he said quietly. Paused. “I- I saw… him. For just. Half a moment. And that was enough. I broke down.”
“And no one blames you,” he responded at once, gave a little squeeze around his shoulders that surprisingly loosened the iron knot in the pit of his stomach. “Even if this hadn’t reopened old wounds–this… was terrifying. Most men probably wouldn’t even have been able to do what you did. You’re so much stronger than you give yourself credit for, Alex.”
Alex let his heavy lids close again and swallowed against the tightness of his throat.
It had been terrifying. He had been terrified.
Jack almost got hurt. A civilian who had nothing to do with the war, targeted solely for his connection to their father–his brother who had a wife and two little girls at home with a third baby on the way, a son their parents wouldn’t have been able to bear losing, and his safety had been thrust into Alex’s hands when he couldn’t even be trusted to look after himself most days.
…was this how Pa felt? Holding people’s lives in his palms-
Alex’s life. Desperate to protect the tiny, wildly flickering flame that was him and yet forced to watch as Alex threw himself out into the storm again and again, more or less on purpose.
His gut twisted.
He longed for his father.
As if on cue, there was a knock at the door, and John buried another sigh against his hair before he left a kiss on that spot and removed himself from the bed with palpable reluctance.
Alex was left alone, slumped and curled into himself like a limp, long abandoned doll.
The door opened. Voices drifted over, but they didn’t penetrate the little bubble that had become his world, just faded into a murmur, words merging and flowing together-
Until something did pierce the bubble.
Just a hint of a more than familiar cologne, and suddenly Alex was twelve years old again, hiding away between his father’s arms after a nightmare.
He snapped his head up and returned Pa’s worried, heartbroken gaze from sore eyes that quickly clouded over with another film of tears, and then there was a hand on his face, carefully stroking away the evidence of his weakness, and all he could do was clamp his lip between his teeth to muffle a sob.
“Oh, my darling boy,” Pa mumbled, the upset, the guilt, so obvious in his voice, and it twisted itself right into Alex’s bared heart, and- and his chest constricted, his lungs strained within the tiny confines of his ribcage, the tight pressure became more unbearable with every second that passed, he couldn’t breathe-
The mattress dipped at his side, and he leaned into his father’s warmth instinctually, still blinded by his tears.
“Shh, dearheart,” he said gently and reached for his hand, clasped it in his. Next thing he knew, his palm was pressed flat to his father’s chest, the steady rise and fall of it conjuring the memories of a hundred other nights into his mind, when he had been so much smaller, choking on his own breath because of another phantom from his nightmares. “You’re safe now, love. Breathe with me.”
Alex forced his resisting lungs to suck in air, encouraged by his father’s low murmurs of affirmation, and slowly, slowly he managed to match the deep, steady breaths that swelled Pa’s chest under his palm.
“Papa,” he choked, unsure of what to say, if there even was anything to say for him, if he should apologise or explain himself or ask how everyone else was doing, offer his services to help deal with the aftermath of him slitting an enemy soldier’s throat in their office-
Pa kissed his brow. He hugged him to his chest, stroked a broad hand over his hair, fingers ever so gently working out knots, and kissed the top of his head.
“You did so well, dearheart. I’m so proud of you.” A shuddering breath drawn. “You shouldn’t have had to do this. I’m sorry- I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
Something settled.
Something gave.
The bubble popped, and on his next blink, the world snapped back into place around him.
Alex peered beyond his father’s arms and only now noticed Jack lingering by the closed door, fingers tangled in front of himself as if in prayer, watching them with a deep crease between his brows.
Of course he was here. Where else would he be? Pa wouldn’t have let him out of his sight after this.
John hovered a few feet from the bed, but his tensed shoulders relaxed when their gazes met, and he settled back at Alex’s other side. His presence soothed the last of his upset away–he never did feel as safe as he did with both his father and his husband by his side.
Alex swallowed and sat back, carefully freeing himself from his father’s arms.
“I’m glad you weren’t,” he croaked and attempted a wobbly smile. “He would have shot you.”
Pa closed his eyes for a long moment and squeezed his hand before he blinked them open again.
"Better me than any of you," he said with a meaningful glance from Alex to Jack. Alex swallowed against his once more tightening throat, his gaze dropping to their clasped hands, and his thoughts turned to those first few waking moments after his imprisonment. He reached for John’s hand and linked their fingers without a word; his husband raised that hand carefully and pressed his lips to the back of it, and Alex didn’t try to suppress the tiny smile that struggled past his troubles at the gesture.
A drawn out sigh snapped his attention back to his father–he rubbed at his forehead as if attempting to massage away a headache, and deep lines creased shadowy valleys into his features.
“I have to- I can’t stay much longer,” he said, the corner of his mouth twisted down as if the words caused him physical pain, and Alex’s stomach plummeted even though he knew that just as well as his father did.
Pa couldn’t stay with them all night. He had people to lead. The whole camp was probably in a frenzy right about now, and-
And there still was a dead man in the house. He’d have to deal with that as well, sooner rather than later.
“I know,” he croaked and watched his father lift the hand still in his grasp to press a kiss to his knuckles, much like John had done just moments prior. “I- we will be fine.”
Pa drew a steadying breath, then let go of his hand. Alex's fingers curled into his palm uselessly like the legs of a dead insect, perhaps in an effort to make up for the lost warmth of his father’s touch.
He stood. Paused. Bent to gently take Alex by the jaw and put a last kiss to his brow.
When he straightened again, the troubled concern had been wiped from his expression, and he was back to the military commander their people needed him to be right now.
“Jack,” his father said, but Jack didn’t bother to respond, already suspecting what was to come next. “You’re staying here.”
“Of course.”
Not even another assassination attempt would be enough to part him from his brother now.
Pa turned to Laurens, and his gaze softened by just a fraction when he noted the white-knuckled grip Alex had on the man’s hand.
“I hate to ask this of you, but… I need you to guard the room. Another attack is highly unlikely, but-” He broke off abruptly, clenched jaws working in silence.
“But,” Laurens agreed with a–to Jack unfamiliar–severity about him. He knew Laurens to be nothing but good-natured and jovial. At times, he regretted to admit, annoyingly so.
Nothing of that amiable to a fault man Jack had so unfairly envied over the duration of his stay was present now. All good humour had vanished, his mouth was pressed into a grim, worried line, and his eyes were sharp whenever they landed on anything that wasn’t Alex.
Jack tried to imagine how he would have reacted if his Nelly had been the one to suffer what Alex had endured, and it filled him with a sense of understanding and solidarity towards Laurens so overwhelming, it stalled his breath.
Laurens released Alex’s hand with a last squeeze and made to get up, but thought better of it just a second later. He turned back to Alex, and Alex moved with him as if he had only been waiting for this. They met in a soft and yet desperate kiss, tinged with the fading adrenaline of the night’s events, fingers clinging to clothing and caressing skin, reluctant to let go.
It took another few moments–Jack was mildly surprised his father didn’t hurry them along, didn’t show any reaction at all to the display–before they parted with mumbled words exchanged, too low for him to make out; and then Laurens stood, back straight and shoulders squared. A soldier.
Father and Laurens contrasted sickeningly with Alex. Alex who looked so small and frail, all crumpled in on himself, orange candlelight casting stark shadows over an unusually pale face, hands trembling faintly now that he no longer had anyone to hold on to.
And yet… he was just as much of a soldier as they were. He had proven it tonight, not that he had needed to.
They were two sides of the same coin. The strength and the weakness, the war and the consequence.
The victory and its price.
Jack thought back to his childhood. Pa, freshly arrived home after months of deployment, wandering the dark halls of Mount Vernon at night when Jack should have been asleep. How he had flinched when startled, how there’d been days when Ma had forbidden them from making any noise at all, and how sometimes the earliest they’d seen their father was at their bedtime, after he’d spent the day locked away in his study and only come out to tuck them into bed at night.
Jack had been a child, then. His father’s behaviour had never seemed- odd. Adults had been so peculiar to him, and Jack had never dwelled on his parents’ actions much, because why would he have?
Somehow, the pieces only clicked together now, in the face of his brother’s distress that was so different from their father’s, and yet the same.
Pa reached out for Laurens and clasped his shoulder, squeezed firmly.
“I’ll rejoin the others and do what I can in terms of damage control. You just stay here and don’t let anyone past you. I’ll send one of the boys once the search has concluded and we’re sure there’s no more danger.” He paused, his lips pressed into that uncertain line that told Jack there was something else he wanted to say, but wasn’t quite sure if it was the right moment to say it, or if it would be welcomed at all. “I wouldn’t trust my sons’ lives to anyone but you. Be careful. Be smart.” Another squeeze.
Laurens swallowed and nodded, holding his father’s intense gaze. A silent understanding passed between them, and Jack couldn’t help but think that there had been more to those words than was apparent to an outsider. The realisation left an uncomfortable hollow somewhere in his ribcage, but the expected bout of petty jealousy never came.
Laurens’ hand came up to briefly clasp Pa’s wrist, and they remained like that for just another moment before they separated entirely.
Jack stood off to the side and watched Laurens glance back at Alex a last time, all of a sudden wondering what kind of nightmares haunted him, what it was that kept him awake at night.
He wondered if Pa had ever been there to help him through whatever it was. It wasn’t a far fetched assumption to make, the nature of his father considered.
Jack found he didn’t mind the thought.
Pa squeezed Jack’s hand on his way past, and Laurens caught Jack’s eye, gaze flitting from him to Alex, his meaning clear. Jack nodded. Laurens nodded back.
The door closed at their backs with a near deafening click. They were alone.
And Jack didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t let himself hesitate for longer than half a second, afraid he would freeze up and they would get nowhere at all, forcing a tense breath from his lungs and crossing the room to sit down at his brother’s side.
“Alex,” he said, not knowing what else to say, and blinked. The dreamlike haze that had settled over reality back in the office had not dissipated, merely thinned, and now it threatened to cloud his senses entirely once more.
His brother didn’t respond. Didn’t even look at him. Hair spilled dark like ink over his face and obscured his features, and his hands shook where they rested unsteady in his lap, his sleeves rolled up, presumably from when he’d washed the blood off.
His arms laid bare. The scars he’d been hiding- laid bare. The ones he had fumbled to cover a few days prior when his sleeves had ridden up, the ones their father wouldn’t tell him about, the ones Alex didn’t want him to see.
Out in the open, just like that.
His heart cracked violently.
“Alex,” he said again, this time choked. “Alex, I- I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
A deep breath drawn jerked Alex back to life, and he turned to him with dulled eyes, firmly taking one hand into the other. The trembling didn’t cease. His sleeves stayed up.
“It’s, um, it’s not all that uncommon, really. I mean, it’s- it’s still awful every time, but attempts on Pa’s life-”
“No,” he cut in, and Alex’s jaws snapped shut as if he had slapped him silent. “Not that. You. I don’t-”
The rest of his words got stuck in the painful convulsion of his throat, and Jack swallowed in an effort to dislodge them, blinking suddenly wet lashes.
There was a new darkness in his brother’s eyes. A pain, a regret, something that hadn’t been there before, when Alex had been a fresh-faced boy off to college- and it hadn’t even been three full years since then, but nothing of that- that innocence, the meagre rest of it that hadn’t been yanked from that little boy back on Nevis, was left.
He looked tired, and stressed, and hurt.
His breath stalled when the realisation hit him, and he settled a hand over his eyes for fear he would burst into tears.
The boy he had spent long summer days catching frogs with was gone.
And Alex had never looked more like their father.
“What happened to you?” he finally croaked and let his hand fall back to his side.
Alex’s face twisted as if he had stabbed him, and Jack felt that in his gut.
“A lot,” he said. Hesitated. Then, “War, I suppose. Imprisonment… torture.”
Jack stared, left entirely without words.
Imprisonment. Torture.
His gaze dropped automatically down into Alex’s lap, blurry eyes focusing on his little brother’s scarred arms, and the sour taste of bile spread thick over his tongue.
The night after Jack had arrived. Alex, tipsy, all soft and smiley, sprawled over his husband’s lap. Most of it.
The next night in his father’s room, a pained crease to Pa’s brow. It’s Alex’s story to share, not mine.
God.
Jack had to swallow a few times to keep his dinner down.
Alex squirmed as if the thick silence was a physical weight pressing in on his shoulders and unfolded his hands, pulling down bloodstained sleeves to cover his arms again.
The image didn’t leave Jack. Those scars, their origin, were etched into the insides of his eyelids, flashing like lightning on his every blink.
Imprisonment. Torture.
A violent, sickening shame flickered to life beneath his skin, a sensation like thorned vines digging through his flesh when he found himself tongue-tied yet again.
When he realised he- he didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to know.
Jack couldn’t bear the thought of it.
How pathetic he was, sitting next to Alex, Alex who had lived it and bore the remnants of that nightmare on his skin, who, Jack was certain, had had to relive part of it tonight because of Jack’s own incompetence–and it was him who couldn’t even bring himself to ask. It was Jack who was too cowardly to face his brother’s reality.
He swallowed hard. Attempted to claw his way out of the hostile forest sprouted from his shame.
“Do you remember,” he said, small and shaky, and paused to clear his throat. “Do you remember how we used to cling to Pa on the mornings when he left to go back to the military?”
Alex drew a rattling breath next to him and offered up a tiny smile. How he managed to do that after everything done to him was beyond Jack.
“I remember one year when Patsy wouldn’t let go of him at all and he had to pick her up and carry her around with him,” he said, and despite the overall circumstances and the bittersweet hurt that panged to life at the mention of their sister, Jack and Alex laughed together.
It wasn’t as easy as it had been just earlier that same night, but then, that didn’t really matter now.
“Yeah…” Jack sobered, and his smile dimmed into something that felt like pressing on a nearly healed bruise. “Back then- it was because we were going to miss him. Right?”
Alex didn’t respond, and when Jack blinked away the blurry film over his eyes, he found his brother watching him warily, unsure of where he was going with this.
“I- I didn’t really… realise. I mean, of course I knew what he was doing was dangerous. That he could get hurt, that he could die. God, I thought he was so fucking brave. I thought I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.”
Jack broke off, blinking rapidly against the moisture wetting his lashes. Alex stayed silent, his expression unreadable in a way that was both familiar and foreign to him at the same time; probably one of their father’s expressions. He didn’t know if he would ever get used to seeing those on his brother’s face.
“Ma always cried the night he left,” he said, and Alex’s still so far away eyes widened. Jack swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I thought… that she was just going to miss him most.”
“I didn’t know that,” Alex said quietly after a beat of heavy silence.
“No,” he agreed, because Jack had always known his siblings weren’t aware of most of their mother’s pain. She hid it well–always had. “She didn’t want us to know.”
They sat quietly for a little while then, neither of their thoughts straying far. Jack could tell.
Alex flexed his hands where they rested in his lap, slowly spreading his fingers and curling them into fists again and again. Usually Jack would assume he was just fidgeting, as he always was. This time, all he could think of were those same fingers, dripping with blood, digging desperately into Jack’s waistcoat.
He flattened his own palms against his thighs to stop himself from reaching up and tracing his brother’s bloody fingerprints pressed into the fabric at his ribs.
“Where are you going with this, Jack?” he said, not meeting his eye.
Jack bit his tongue and raised a hand, carefully brushing Alex’s hair behind his ear. He smoothed down dark curls and twisted his fingers into the hair at his nape, cupping his palm around the back of his neck just like Pa did sometimes, hoping the touch would feel familiar and safe.
“I was home the day she returned from her last visit with you. Looking after the house, paying the workers. The usual.” He returned Alex’s wide-eyed, unblinking gaze and thumbed gentle circles into the side of his neck. “She cried that night, too.”
Alex pressed his lips into a tight line and averted his gaze, but made no attempt to disengage Jack’s touch.
“Did you… tell her? What happened to you?” he asked quietly, and Alex nodded, mute, his jaw clenched so hard Jack thought he could almost hear his teeth grind. “Would you tell me, too?”
The answering silence stretched, but Jack didn’t mind the wait. He remained still and patient at his brother’s side, thumb tracing patterns into his skin until the tension gradually flowed from his muscles.
“There really isn’t much to tell,” he said, barely above a whisper, and fell silent again. The corners of his mouth twisted into a bizarre echo of his usual subdued but happy smile, and a bitter sound that wasn’t quite a laugh stopped the motion of Jack’s thumb dead in its tracks. He withdrew his hand. Alex's shoulders slumped further. “Or, well- I’ve told it too many times. I’m trying to… not forget. There’s no forgetting. But. I’m trying to put it behind me, I suppose.”
“You don’t have to talk about it, Lexi,” he mumbled and very carefully reached for one of his brother’s hands, all of a sudden terrified of startling him. Alex heaved a long sigh and accepted Jack’s probably overly gentle squeeze with a tiny smile that looked much more like what he was used to from him.
“The man was a lunatic,” he said and sucked in a sharp breath. The rest of his words followed with a wild urgency, one that held no excitement; it had nothing of Alex’s spirited rambling Jack was so familiar with, the many times when he was burning to share his thoughts, and his observations swept any listener up in whatever topic was on his mind. No, this was- hunted, almost. As if someone had a pistol to his head and said talk.
“He- Pa knew him. Doesn’t matter. He… hurt me. My arms, my- my back, it’s-” He froze for a second, gaze far away. “He hurt me,” he repeated, breathless, and his voice cracked much like Jack’s heart did. “And I killed him. I stabbed him. Right through his rotten throat. Until he was dead.”
Ah. Jack squeezed his eyes shut in a desperate effort to rid himself of those lingering, reaching memories from earlier, the last anguished gasps of a man bleeding out through a gash in his throat, the wet smack of a limp body hitting the floor, the dried blood still marring his own clothes.
“I see,” he said simply. “I’m so sorry.” He wasn’t entirely sure what he was apologising for–was he offering his condolences? Expressing his pain and sympathy for his little brother? Or was he apologising for being so fucking useless. For standing there like an idiot and forcing Alex to defend him, to relive something so horrific.
In any case, Alex shook his head with a semi amused snort before he faltered again.
“I. Um. I still have nightmares. Sometimes.”
“So does Pa,” Jack offered quietly, guilt coiling in his gut.
Alex huffed a shaky, hurt laugh. “We all do, I suppose. Comes with the job.”
“And yet.”
Alex was so incredibly bright; perceptive, well-read, and he had already been hurting when he had become a part of their family. As they grew older, their father’s own hurt had only become more apparent, and Jack had no doubts that smart, clever Alex had deduced the why and how of Pa’s pain, his oddities, his nightmares, far quicker than he himself had.
“And yet,” Alex agreed with another shadow of a smile and leaned his head to Jack’s shoulder, just like he used to do when they were teenage boys, awake when the rest of the house was long at rest, tipsy from the sips of whiskey they had nabbed from Pa’s liquor cabinet.
He had known exactly what he was signing up for, and he had still done it.
Jack didn’t think he would ever understand neither his brother’s nor his father’s reasoning, and while that would have been frustrating to him only a few days prior, just another thing the two of them shared that he could never hope to grasp–now, it simply left him with an odd sense of almost peaceful resignation.
“I’m glad you didn’t get hurt tonight, Jacky,” Alex mumbled, shifting until he could rest more of his weight against him. Jack knew that move well; he was making himself comfortable, clearly planning to fall asleep on his shoulder.
He didn’t mind. God, did he not mind even a little bit.
“Thanks to you,” he replied in a low voice and stroked a hand over Alex’s hair, cradling the base of his skull in his palm so his head wouldn’t roll into a weird position and have him wake with an achy neck. “My little brother… the soldier,” he added after a few moments’ pause to no one but himself and the empty room.
Alex was out cold, and Jack couldn’t blame him. He was just glad he still felt safe enough around Jack to fall asleep on him like he’d done when they were children, even after everything.
His own eyes slipped shut as well, and he let himself rest his cheek against the top of Alex’s head.
It wasn’t the same as it had been.
They weren’t exactly who they used to be, neither of them. Those young boys brought together by chance or fate were nothing but memories now, existing only in summers past and long nights and shared mischief–but that was alright.
No, it wasn’t the same, they weren’t the same… but they were still brothers.
And they always would be, no matter what.